Order of the Dead (2 page)

3

Rosemary, Senna, and Alan were in the narrow alley that began in the westernmost
corner of the outer gate and extended away from the town, like a peninsula of fence
reaching for the forest. At the farthest point in the alley, at a height of
five feet, was a semi-circular window made of multiple panes of transparent,
bulletproof plastic.

Like a porthole into the territory of
the zombies, this window gave the townspeople a complete view of New Crozet’s
entrance.

The alley had in it another, smaller
window, rectangular and made for communicating with the drivers of visiting
vehicles, which were few and far between, and, normally, restricted to market
days. The window was small and high enough that, even when opened, no zombies
could get through.

The plastic pane of this window was
removable, unlike the curved pane of the viewing window at the alley’s edge and
now, the pane was gone, because Alan had removed it earlier, and Senna and
Rosemary were positioned in front of the opening. The air in the frame seemed
to be threatening, as if it had the power to suck them all through and out of
New Crozet’s safety, and was simply waiting for the right moment to do so.

Senna stiffened, and Alan, noting her change
in manner, gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on the Voltaire II.

The break.

There came the first snap, and then
the second, and then more in rapid succession that sounded like cannon fire in
the night, and, suddenly, the zombie was moving at a blinding clip, its rotten
body hurtling toward the fence, heading for the curved window at the end of the
alley, not the open one.

They always do this, Alan thought
dismally. There was a cold logic in their behaviors, hardwired in them by the
virus, and they never deviated from the program. Even the mistakes they made,
if they could be called that, were all the same.

It slammed headfirst into the plastic
pane, further breaking the bones of its face and head, adding to the
disfigurement given to it by years of injury and rot.

Rosemary jumped backward and failed to
stifle a gasp. The children were taught from a young age to be quiet, and to
stay away from the fence to begin with, but to risk no more than a whisper if
the fence was in sight. Now that didn’t matter so much, seeing as how they’d
called this zombie here themselves.

The girl’s gun hitched upward, remaining
precariously in her grip, and for a moment it looked like she might lose her
balance and fall, but Senna caught her by the shoulders and got her steady.

Alan exhaled. He wasn’t worried for
his own safety, he’d been in far too many encounters with the zombies for that,
and closer ones than this, but Rosemary had never done anything like this
before, and though Senna was more experienced than he was, seeing her so close
to a zombie again unnerved him.

It was a safe exercise, at least to
the extent they could make it one, but it was still dangerous because if
nothing else, the virus had proven that, under its influence, the state of the
world could be entirely unpredictable.

The zombie staggered backward from the
semi-circle of plastic, reversed course, and slammed its head into the plastic again.
Then it stumbled back once more, its gait more bent now, more damaged.

Backing away from the perimeter, it
threw its head about wildly, as if trying to pick up a scent not with the stump
that was left of its nose but with the sides of its face. The virus, it seemed,
was looking for another way in.

Alan took this opportunity to move in
and crept to the viewing window, ducked, and looked through it, scanning the
forest.

His eyes searched for the tree line,
and after a few moments of gazing at the darkness past the ground lit up by the
spotlights, fixed on it. There, at the tree line, tendrils of shadow were
creeping toward the town, venturing toward the spotlights and struggling to
find a way into the illuminated clearing.

He stared, and as he did, a puzzled
expression bloomed on his face. Something wasn’t right.

A new movement caught his eye and he looked
away from the trees to face the zombie directly. It was turning, the wild
tossing of its head slowing, as it edged in the direction of the other window,
the one that Alan had opened earlier, then it took off in a shambling run.

“It’s coming,” Alan whispered, turning
toward Senna and Rosemary and positioning himself closer to them. “Get ready.”

Behind Alan , a piece of sparsely-haired
zombie flesh left stuck to the window’s rounded plastic seemed to glare at his
back, as if daring him to return. Within the spectrum of viral gore, it was
unremarkable, a souvenir of the zombie’s collision with the window, and a minor
one at that. It would dry in the sun and fall off eventually, a poisonous
jerky.

He moved so that he was behind Senna
and Rosemary, who were standing in front of the window, waiting. He adjusted
his hands under the Voltaire II and studied Rosemary, who appeared calmer now,
more attuned to Senna’s wavelength, which was good.

Then the putrid odor that belonged so
completely to the zombies reached them and hugged them tight with its foulness,
entering their nostrils and nipping at their skin, coming uninvited and as it
pleased, passing over welcome mats and dirtying the rug.

Rosemary’s breath caught, and she
began to feel a spell of lightheadedness coming on as the good air was being
pushed away from her, displaced by floating particles of rot, and the far
reaches of her lungs began to close up in protest again.

The virus very much wanted those lungs
for itself, faulty though they were, and the girl in whom they resided, and, if
it got its way, it would have them, and her, and the rest of the holdouts who’d
squirreled themselves away in the self-imposed captivity of places like New
Crozet.

4

Above New Crozet’s outer gate, Corks clicked off his rifle safety and then
scratched absently at a frayed spot on his pant leg. Like Alan, Senna, and
Rosemary below him, he was wearing old and practical clothing that was
threadbare in places and worn with no eye to matching pieces or catching the
latest fashion trends, although the tattered and ill-fitting look was certainly
in these days, and they all had that down to a T.

His full name was Corbet X. Noire, but
he preferred not be reminded of his former life. The name his parents had given
him would get him to thinking about his father, who, even though the ‘X’ in
Corks’s name stood for Xavier, had liked to joke that it was pronounced
‘Javier.’ And that would only serve to remind him of his father, who’d died
long before his time—thank God he isn’t alive to see any of this—and of the
short-lived father-son relationships in the Noire line. The fathers in his
ancestry always seemed to die too young, leaving their sons as children in the
world, but he’d broken with that tradition, or rather, the virus had done it,
by taking Corks’s son from him.

When his father had died, Corks had
been left a boy with too many questions, questions that he’d wanted to ask his
father, but no longer could, and didn’t have the heart to bring up with his mother.
The outbreak had made him realize that he’d also had things to say to his son
that he hadn’t raised in time, and now never would. There was a lesson in that,
he knew—ask it while you can, say it while you can, ask them what they think
and tell them you love them…while you can.

Corbet Xavier-pronounced-Javier Noire looked
down at Senna, Alan, and Rosemary, and at the approaching zombie, whose stench
of death was being carried to him on the shifting breeze.

It was trying to get in and give that
smell to New Crozet, and fulfill Corks’s worst nightmare, which he thought on
much and now, there it was again, right on time, that familiar scene coalescing
in his mind from the circling vapors of memory and dread, which always found
him in moments such as this, and he’d learned with time, resistance was futile.

Superimposed on his vision, he saw the
townspeople as pictures of decay, going about their business of aimless, walking
death, trapped inside the New Crozet perimeter, dormant in an enclosure that
lacked prey. Moments later, his son, Remy, stumbled out from behind the little
church where the town meetings were held and with painful slowness he joined
the New Crozet zombie horde, and together, they advanced on the town center,
drawing closer to the market.

Remy’s full name was Remy Y. Noire,
and the middle initial stood for Yoren, the name of Remy’s grandfather on his
mother’s side. Corks had joked with him that he had a family duty to give his
own son a middle name that began with ‘z,’ to keep the family tradition of
alphabetically progressing middle names alive. It could’ve been Zane or Zed or
Zarul or Zanuda or Zax or countless others, the possibilities had been happily
endless, and it had been for Remy to decide, anyway.

Joking with Remy about middle names
had made Corks feel like he was somehow connecting with his own father,
understanding the man more and getting to know him in a way he’d never had the
chance to do in life.

Remy never had a son, and, though
Corks suspected there was something left of Remy somewhere, it wasn’t really
him anymore, no, it was…just the virus.

The scene in his head kept developing,
like a strip of photographic film taking a chilling, chemical bath, and Corks
saw that in the tangle of zombie limbs, Remy wasn’t a man in the prime of his
life as he’d been before the outbreak, but a mindless, physical ruin showing break
upon break…upon break.

New Crozet is purgatory, Corks’s mind
sang to him in the mocking lilt that it had perfected over the last decade.
It’s the ultimate punishment for those unworthy even of hell.

That means you, Corks.
You.
You
must’ve done some seriously rank shit to earn your comeuppance, and you’re
livin’ it up now, oh yes you are.

Focus, he told himself. Focus on the
present, on your job. You have a duty to New Crozet, to your people, to the
people who are left.

Shutting his eyes he managed to pull
the curtain shut on the vision of an undead New Crozet, and the torturous performance
of his synapses was forced into an intermission.

There was a mental sigh of relief…which
was cut short when a dragging foot poked out from under the curtain, and then a
human shape pressed into the corded burgundy fabric above the foot, and he knew
it was only a matter of time until the zombies fought their clumsy way past the
shutter for Act Two.

He opened his eyes and looked down.
These were his people, and he was charged with taking care of them, and he’d be
damned—more so,
completely
so—if he failed now. Straightening to his
full height, just shy of six feet, he thrust his chest forward and sucked in
his nonexistent gut, catching a stronger whiff of the rot in the air.

In the days soon after the outbreak,
he’d been unable to keep from gagging when the stench that was wafting up to
the tower was around him, but now, his stomach held its ground easily.

He aimed, knowing that this was where
it could get dicey, and centered the zombie’s head in his rifle sight. He’d
been out in the field with Senna and Alan many times in the past, and in spite
of this exercise’s relative safety…well, that was just it, it was only
relative. And if something went wrong, well…

Corks glanced at the two locked gates
behind the people at the fence, catching a glimpse of the town, where a scatter
of dim lights was emanating from the shadowy silhouettes of houses. Even with
the zombie closing in, the town looked peaceful, unworried, in a quiet and
well-earned repose.

Separating Alan, Senna, and Rosemary
from New Crozet’s interior and faint, hopeful illumination, were two inner
gates, which were locked, and if the approaching zombie or any of its kind found
a way through the outer gate, then Senna, Rosemary, and Alan would have nowhere
to flee.

The inner gates wouldn’t be opened for
them, and if not for them, certainly not for any other New Crozet citizen in
their place. They’d be forced to deal with the threat themselves, walled in by
gates on a narrow strip of ground, with only the help of Corks from his
watchtower.

The three gates could only be opened
in sequence, and no two could ever be opened at the same time. Well,
technically they could be, but that wasn’t allowed under any circumstances, and
this rule, that only one gate be opened at any given time, was the strictest one
New Crozet had, and anyone discovered breaking it would be expelled, a
punishment that meant certain death.

You could survive outside the
perimeter for some length of time, especially if you were skilled at spotting,
but, even then, the virus’s progress could only be delayed.

The zombies, even while dormant, always
crept closer to you. They were blind and drawn only to noise, but the virus
sharpened their sense of hearing so that even the faintest sound was enough to
attract them, and the noise you’d make, as an uninfected human, was the best of
all, a sensory delicacy that the virus needed to stuff into its hungrily gaping
mouth and suck all the juices from.

Of course, the sounds made by your
helpless movements were just an appetizer, and the main course was your flesh,
and, if the virus was lucky enough for you to be a
child,
a little boy
or girl who’d made it for so long after the outbreak; the special
du jour
would be your fear, your anguish, your suffering, as it dawned on you that you’d
been bitten and were turning, graduating from the zombie boot camp with flying
colors.

That…
that fear, that knowing anguish, was the
most delectable of spices on the virus’s tongue, and of increasing rarity these
days, what with so few people left.

The real clincher was that even if you
were good enough to spot the zombies, the virus’s legions of feelers, coming, your
instinct—that built-in,
human
instinct—was to run, and if you did, you’d
make noise, and the faster you tried to get away, the louder you’d get, and the
faster the zombies would come, slipping by degrees out of dormancy until…

The break.

And after that, after they were broken,
there was little hope left.

If you were like most people, you’d run
when you saw the diseased viciousness closing in behind you, and if you hadn’t
been a sprinter before the outbreak, you’d learn quick, or not, and that would
take care of itself, because the zombies were blazing fast after they broke,
like flashes of death running after you while your lungs burned and your
muscles cried out for air and your heart for mercy. But the virus’s kind, they
didn’t need air, ’cause they don’t need no stinking fuel, no, they want only
one thing, and it’s the same thing they run on, too, a mastery of perpetual
motion if there ever was one.

All they want, all they
need,
and wantonly at that, is to put the virus in you, so it can eat you alive.