Not everyone, but the majority of those "brave men" did make it out of town and stopped for the winter at a military hospital (whose walls must have reminded them of the painfully familiar prison atmosphere). Alex dubbed their little squat The Hospitallers' Order, due to the nature of their shelter. It was in fact only a couple miles away from Alex's old home if you cut it across the woods — a fact that filled Alex and his team with some unhealthy forebodings.
Once settled properly down, the Hospitallers chose to return to their habitual lifestyle, with one difference: there was no one around any more to prevent them from flexing their criminal muscles. They burgled abandoned houses and looted shops and warehouses, and you can hardly blame them: everyone did it, me included.
Apart from burgling, they indulged in all sort of entertainment available to them. Which weren't many, but they could make an unaccustomed person shudder. The realization of the fact that civilization was gone, complete with its courts, police and prisons, excited them no end. Actually, they hadn't lost that much, but they had gained their freedom and the opportunity to do what the hell they wanted. Even under these new conditions they still had access to drugs — God knows how and where from, and even without them, they were constantly intoxicated, having looted alcohol stocks at their complete disposal. I think that alcohol and drug abuse can, to a degree, explain all the depth of the carnage they brought about.
You could probably call the society model they chose to recreate so far as their modest human resources allowed, a mind-altered sado fascist slave ownership. The community followed a strict caste structure with Cholera as Emperor of the Universe. One rung below on the pyramid were his closest accomplices, then professional gangsters, followed by the rest of the inmates. The foundation of the pyramid was made of outsiders, either captured or lured into joining. The latter were slaves to their masters: objects of constant bullying and torture, and ultimately, their food. Yes, you heard it right: food. It had probably started in prison when the leaders decided, rat-like, on the least useful, in their opinion, individuals who could be sacrificed for their own urgent nutritional needs.
By the time they could finally lay their hands on food stocks, cannibalism had turned into a habit. According to Alex, it became part of their rituals and also festivals that the Hospitallers had nearly every week. When the gang had run low on its own weakest members, they turned their hungry attention outside. They captured everyone who crossed their path, be it surviving refugees or small teams like Alex's. Men were tortured to death before being consumed, as were women and children apart from those unlucky enough to attract Cholera's eye with their looks. They briefly added to his and his accomplices' harem until their masters got fed up with them and sent them to the kitchen knife.
Alex gave me the details of blood-curdling tortures which I won't site here; let me just say that a typical execution ordered throwing the unfortunates into cages with zombies who tore them to pieces while the spectators made obscene comments and struck bets.
I found it interesting — if one could apply this word — that the Hospitallers didn't differentiate between healthy captives and infected ones. By infected I mean the very early stages, that I undergo now myself: when a person hasn't mutated yet and remains, to all intents and purposes, human. He doesn't attack yet, but he is already contagious and can infect others through his blood, food, etcetera. You don't need to be injured to be infected: I witnessed cases when a zombie's saliva or blood caused infection by getting into the victim's eyes. Any food that has come into contact with infected blood becomes infected, as well.
Well, these creatures couldn't care less whether their victims were infected or not. The Hospitallers used their services for their own needs, and once the captives crossed the threshold and lost their human shape, they culled and ate them. According to Alex, they simply followed their leader's example: eyewitnesses swore that he was immune to the infection. The fact had become obvious when the gang was fighting its way out of town: like others, Cholera had suffered numerous bites but unlike them, he didn't mutate and turn into a walking dead. His wounds healed, allowing him to enjoy his sinful but flamboyant existence.
The fact surrounded him with the aura of magic, securing his authority. The other Hospitallers copied his every whim, even when they raped infected victims with no regard for common sense and their own safety which led to their own gruesome end. Others considered the new victims unlucky and treated them with disdain, but they didn't have to suffer long at the very bottom of the social pyramid.
That's why the circles closest to Cholera boasted an impressive turnover, which didn't diminish the insane numbers of those seeking to take vacated places. Cholera himself only seemed to be getting healthier. The terrible thing was that he must have been a virus carrier and as such, infected everyone he slept or otherwise came into close contact with. Everyone he turned his favor to was doomed. Based on witnesses' accounts, Alex claimed that the number of infected women in his harem counted dozens — that's only the confirmed cases, and naturally, all the women were killed soon afterwards.
I'd love to limit the extent of the horrors I'm forced to describe with the above, but I'll ask you to bear with me for a bit. Despite all the gory details, the main evidence of their perverted fantasies is yet to come. This fact has no documented witnesses but after all you've just heard it doesn't sound that improbable. Apparently, the Hospitallers used the contaminated meat of infected people as their main food source. This idea, too, is ascribed to Cholera: the guy apparently enjoyed exercising his sick sense of humor.
He drew the attention of his subjects to the fact that their food supply was too meager to ignore the thousands of zombies rambling around. It seemed logical to use their flesh as a nutrition source. Although no one had any idea of their life expectancy (if you excuse the pun), their sheer quantities promised the Hospitallers a final solution to their food problem.
No sooner said than done: the enthusiastic researchers caught a few zombies and started their experiments. Apparently, they made their slaves try the dead flesh first, which contaminated the victims and either zombified or, in some cases, simply killed them. The experimenters turned on whatever logical skills they had left and decided to cook the meat first. Roasted or boiled, zombie meat didn't cause immediate death and contamination, although inevitable, wasn't as serious and took much longer to develop. Details like those didn't worry them much. It's possible that, permanently stoned or intoxicated, the ex convicts were unable to deduce the consequences of their actions. At least that's the only explanation I can muster.
Finally, the last fact, equally undocumented. In their zeal to ensure uninterrupted food supplies, the Hospitallers built some sort of machine that processed zombie meat into something that looked like dry cat food but stank even fouler. Community members received handfuls of those granules in the way of daily rations.
When Alex told me about them I remembered an old Western film, banned in the Soviet Union where I'd lived at the time. I managed to see it at one of those underground VCR viewings at a friends' place. The film — Soylent Green — described a society of the future where resources were so exhausted that they produced food in very much the same way, only for the lack of zombies they had to make do with opposition protesters. The stuff they made human cakes with was called soylent. I wonder if the Hospitallers had a name for their own soylent? Luckily, this is something we'll never know.
Whether the soylent rumors were true or just an insinuation by the opposing camp, is not really clear. According to Alex, all the woods in the area were almost completely freed from zombies. The convicts — that's something Alex saw with his own eyes — organized raids to filter-search the woods. They killed the walking dead and took the bodies back with them: nobody else does it as normally people either burn zombies' bodies or bury them or, more often, just let them rot where they'd fallen. Besides, the chimney of the old boiler room they used to produce their version of soylent never stopped emitting greasy black smok
e, even in summer. Of course, rumors can't be used as evidence, but they add a few details that support the overall gruesome picture.
When Alex finally offered to stop for a break, I couldn't say a word. He took my silence for a yes, rummaged through his wares and came up with a weird-looking wooden box. Out of it, he produced things I hadn't seen for ages: two cigars in metal cases, a cigar cutter, some birch bark and a few long thick matches.
He got busy working his magic with them. He cut the ends off the cigars, kindled the bark and lit up, inviting me to follow suit, while I watched him, hypnotized, mulling over the news.
His stories sounded bad enough, but some details concerning Cholera, this Genghis Khan of our time, fascinated me. His supposed immunity to the virus opened some avenues for speculation. The source of the infection remains unknown, at least to me and everyone I've come into contact with. It belongs in the mystery's domain, overflowing with legends gradually becoming myths — which is why any real-life accounts able to throw some light on it are priceless. There, I'd just heard that we couldn't rule out immunity, albeit theoretically. Of course, even in a well-off warless society this kind of research demanded enormous resources, medical as well as scientific, and now they were well out of our grip. Talking about medical, I don't think I've ever met a single doctor among the meager groups of survivors that crossed my path. I've met all sorts of people from all walks of life, including a piano tuner, but not a single medical professional. That's fate for you with its usual irony. But despite our inability to study the virus and search for the ways to defeat it, the very news of some immune bloodsucker gives us all hope for relief from this nightmare.
I lit up the cigar, inhaled the bitter sweet smoke and let it out into the night sky. The taste and aroma left nothing to be desired. Judging by Alex's happy but cheeky face he knew how much it meant to me and enjoyed playing Santa. The two of us were like kids playing pretend with proper grown-up stuff: a real dinner with wine and cigars followed by a respectable conversation of two grown-up gentlemen. The stuff no one does in our world any more. Everybody's on the run, shooting, sleeping and eating on the sly to start running again in the morning: this is the norm, and what we did that night on the rooftop was a kids' game. And God, did it feel good to play it. Two human kids by the fire lit by cold indifferent stars, alone in the endless black world, equally cold and heartless.
It was getting cold but Alex was full of surprises. He rummaged in one of the crates and produced two rough blue blankets like those used in barracks. But even if they had turned out to be made of the finest Scottish tartan, it wouldn't have surprised me. We wrapped ourselves in our respective blankets and I felt the fabric's blessed warmth communicated to my body.
But surprises didn't end there. The next rabbit out of Alex's hat was a bottle of Ballantine's, opened with a hearty pop. Alex apologized for having no ice while I watched him like a faithful dog. He poured out the whiskey and told me he was ready to go on with his story. The news caught me unawares but I was dying to find out how it was about to end. The Emperor of the Universe's fate especially interested me, so Alex went on, speaking slowly and choosing his words as he went.
VI
The other community looked better by comparison.
It was some sort of new-age sect whose moniker remained undefined. Alex, formally a Russian Orthodox Christian whose relationship with the church was limited to the initial baptism plus a few appearances shadowing his boss, had a very vague idea of the differences between the various esoteric schools. But he immediately nicknamed them the White Brotherhood for their tendency to wear white, so impractical in our days. Their cumbersome robes attracted dirt and quickly became filthy but the hard-headed disciples clung to the habit, if you'll excuse the pun. Apparently, their religion had some sort of dress code.
They had arrived from the city in the very first days of the disaster and surreptitiously took over a posh spa while no one was looking. The place stood empty as the guests and the staff had panicked and left. The sect was rather well-organized and had enough food supplies and other necessities to survive the hardships of isolation. They lived in expectation of the oncoming Apocalypse: its inevitability made for an important part of their teaching, conveyed to them in some mysterious revelation or other. In this sense they didn't differ from other destructive religious groups that every now and again proclaimed the end of the world: once it ceased to transpire, they simply rescheduled it.
They'd lingered in suspended animation since the early 1990s, until their leader — an Indian-style guru with a perfectly Russian mug — told them that this time, it was going to be for real. He named the date which ironically coincided with the real one: or at least that's what Alex had heard from ecstatic sect members.
Apparently, the Russian-faced leader received the date telepathically from some popular Indian holy man. The two seemed to enjoy this kind of communication often. The Russian had also a direct telepathic line to God and he kept confusing the two sources assuring his audience that the difference didn't amount to much.
This Russian guru was quite a colorful character. No one but the oldest of sect members remembered his real name which by then he didn't tell anyone preferring a fancy Indian stage name that Alex wouldn't have remembered even if he could. He only mentioned that he couldn't figure out how to say it, let alone memorize. Alex tagged the sect leader "Chief".
Chief was a regular Russian guy from somewhere near the Caucasus who'd relocated to Moscow from his native highlands long before they turned into a war zone. Here, he rode the New Age wave, mixed in the relevant circles and gradually became known as a speaker at various "spiritual" seminars and training sessions. A small group of followers accumulated around him which formed the backbone of the future sect. That's all we know about him: the guy boasted no achievements, no accomplishments, just this coincidental end-of-the-world prophecy. If he did predict anything at all, we could surely consider Chief some sort of phenomenon, but Alex tended to believe that the whole prophecy story was just a lot of hot air and a ego trip.
By the time Alex discovered them, the sect boasted a complex structure almost two thousand strong. Formally headed by Chief, it never really offered him any real power as he had no interest in power games, anyway. When Alex met him in person, he had the impression that real life scared Chief witless, to the point where he tried not to have contact with it at all if he could. The sect's inexhaustible stashes of grass and hash aided him in his inner struggle.
Chief chose to while away the time in his harem, made both of his old-guard female members and of the fresh disciples, mainly young girls who'd joined the sect attempting to survive the epidemic and surrounding chaos. Young men he didn't exclude, either.
The true movers and shakers were his old aides and counselors who'd helped him create the sect all those years ago. They worshipped Chief with Godlike ceremony, and treated everyone below them worse than their personal slaves.
The main body of sect members were considered "disciples", or rather rightless novices. The only right they had was to obey their elders and forfeit their own lives on their orders, if need be.
It looked like the leaders of this White Brotherhood hoped to develop their motley formation into a proper assassins order. They failed simply because they hadn't considered the laidback Russian mentality, unsuitable for their purposes — as Russians made up the bulk of their society. But in any case, the leaders enjoyed almost absolute control over their disciples, who'd mainly joined the sect after the disaster and solely in order to survive: they had no other choice but to do so.
It did seem though that the White Brotherhood boasted considerable moral superiority over the Hospitallers: their score was, so to say, higher as, for one, they did not practice cannibalism in any shape or form. But this marginable superiority verged on zero when you considered the sect's everyday life based on submission and slavery where the majority was exploited by the inferior minority which didn't deserve its place in the pecking order
due to its low moral, intellectual and human qualities.
Alex visited them several times, meeting the leaders — including Chief himself — and some of the ordinary members. Whatever illusions he'd had at first about their community disappeared quickly. The cages containing captured zombies became the last straw: Alex saw them installed at the abandoned tennis courts of the once-spa. The White Brothers used them for public executions in which they threw defectors and offenders into the cages, then watched them being torn into pieces and eaten alive. The same kind of cages he'd seen at the Hospitallers' place. Realizing that he'd found himself between the devil and the deep blue sea, Alex decided to stay away from both if he could help it.
The hospital and the spa were less than five miles from each other, separated by a forest and two main roads that ran through it. By the time Alex discovered the two communities, they were already at war with each other. If you attempted to separate fact from fiction in their stories (bar the generous slander in the opponent's address), you could probably restore the image of what had caused it. When they'd discovered each other first, both Hospitallers and White Brothers experienced almost friendly feelings, considering the hardships they'd been through and the fact of how few people had survived at all. They visited each other, swapping clothes, stocks and whatever else they had available. They lived in and out of each other's camps and after just a couple of months, once they'd sussed out their adversary, the first disagreements started.
Call Me Human: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel Page 5
