Order of the Dead (21 page)

52

The virus was out there, beyond the town’s borders,
living
out there in
its own perverse way. It hadn’t even come close to being stamped out, before it
was no longer practical to keep going trading human lives for a few less of the
replicating…things.

It was still there, lurking, and its
numbers were far stronger than those of people. People had learned to go quiet,
and to hide, but that didn’t change the fact that the virus had proved itself
far stronger. It lurked only because it couldn’t see them, and couldn’t get
through their barriers, for now.

Alan often wondered at the survivors
who talked and acted as if the virus actually was gone, and the threat over. Would
he be able to sleep better if he could convince himself the way that they did?

But he could never lie to himself like
that and learn to believe it, and that was probably because he’d been a
cleaner, and they hadn’t. They’d seen plenty, as all of the survivors had, but
they hadn’t seen everything.

They hadn’t seen the way the virus can
make its victims seem harmless to ensnare the uninfected, the increasingly intelligent
deviousness that had sent Alan an unequivocal message: the virus will not be
overcome, and will complete its mission with the passage of time, so long as it
has hosts whom it can move through the world like pawns. People will be forced
to leave their quarantine zones at some point, the law of entropy seemed to
dictate that, and the virus will be there, outside, ready to take what’s left
of its prize.

He focused on the screen just as the camera
was zooming out. The woman and the metal chair she was sitting in were now
fully in the frame.

There were restraints clamped around
her bare wrists and ankles, keeping her in place. If she’d struggled against the
restraints before, she wasn’t doing so now.

Her nose was running, and mucus was
dripping a dark amoeboid shape onto the front of the light blue patient’s gown
they’d put her in. The camera zoomed out farther, and more of the isolation
room came into view. It was lit by two large and bright overhead fluorescents
that were hanging behind wire mesh cages on the ceiling. The glare had given a silver
sheen to the mucus amoeba on the woman’s gown. Then her mouth lolled open, and
a saliva string began to trail from her lips, its sights set on the growing
spot on the gown.

A heart monitor was beeping in the
background at intervals that should’ve been more regular. To Alan’s
sensibilities, it was disgusting that something like this had been done to
someone.

Of course, it was true that zombies
were almost impossible to capture, but what had been done to this woman, that
was one of the worst kinds of torture. She wasn’t a zombie yet, she was still
human, a woman, and a suffering, dying one.

On many prior occasions of video
watching, this was the moment when Alan’s feeling of disgust would become an
unfocused loathing. Today, he was far less dialed-in, and felt little.

Meep said the heart monitor.

Meep.

Without looking away from the screen,
Alan stuck his spoon in the oatmeal, piercing the cover of brown sugar. He dug
the spoon around and raised it to his mouth. He blew on it, still without
looking away from the screen, then put the spoon in his mouth.

The feel of the oat flakes was
unpleasant, as always, so he focused on the coarse particles of sugar, their
sweetness, and the video. After two perfunctory chews, he swallowed the
mouthful.

Meep.

He was counting her movements now,
keeping a separate tally for each of the behaviors he could see. There were her
slight movements against the clinical plastic of the restraints, the drip of
mucus from her nose, the progress of the saliva strings, the irregular gasps
for air, lackluster and sedative-muted sobs, and, of course, the sharp, high
pitched bleats of the heart monitor. He didn’t have to count them anymore, know
as he did the video by heart, but he did anyway.

Meep.

It was about to happen. Alan worked
one more spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth and stared, unblinking, at the
screen.

The woman tensed.

Blood vessels were constricting.
Pallor was rising to the skin’s surface.

The last shallow breath was drawn in.

A stiffening.

Then limpness and sagging into the
metal chair.

Alan took another mouthful of oatmeal.
It was tasting worse with each bite.

Meep.

The woman in the chair remained
motionless for exactly six of Alan’s heartbeats. Then she began to raise her
head, except it wasn’t just her raising it anymore. Mostly, it was the
puppeteer of the outbreak, of the deadheads, and soon, of the free world.

Pallor was becoming something much
worse: a drying out and turning grey. Her face looked like it was in the
beginning stages of becoming a jerky that no reasonable person would eat, and
not any dog that had its sense of smell intact, either.

The spaces between the meeps were growing
longer.

Meep said her dwindling vitals.

Meep?

Her eyes sank backward into her head and
seemed as if they were retreating from the world, and that was because they
were. The better to not see you with, my dear.

53

Meep.

Of course the virus didn’t need eyes
to see, so there was that, too. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.

Meep.

Alan kept staring though, as he always
did, straining his eyes, and his mind, to see those damned signs.

Meep.

The woman—well, she wasn’t a woman
anymore, she was in the turn and was in between us and …
them
—kept her
gaze trained on her lap. The beats of the heart monitor were becoming erratic
now, fewer and farther between.

Sometimes when you expected a beat to
come, it just wouldn’t. You’d still hear it in your head, because you were
anticipating it, but it wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere but in your mind.

Meep.

Then she stopped breathing, and the
heart monitor redlined, emitting its familiar bleat of death. It was familiar
to Alan, anyway, because he’d watched the video so many times, and because he’d
seen enough TV shows and movies before the outbreak to know what a heart
monitor was and what noises it made. Now the device was a thing of the past,
like most human-made contraptions that were still sitting in the world, or
lying, more likely, strewn about and gathering dust.

Were the uninfected humans a thing of
the past, too? Was Alan himself a relic? Was he a vestige of an extinct
civilization? Probably.

No, more than probably, almost
certainly. But what was the good in thinking like that?

So what if he was an artifact, then
what? How would that affect the way he lived his life in New Crozet? In the
only appropriate way, he decided whenever his thoughts went down this
depressing route, which was no way at all. Life was for living and making the
best of your few moments, no matter what.

On the screen, the woman who was now a
zombie began to slip into a state of dormancy. That was because she was sitting
in a silent room, with no noise to attract her.

She gazed directly ahead of her for a
moment, but she didn’t really look, she just seemed
to gaze, and had you
been in her line of sight you would have realized, very quickly, that those
shriveled eyes saw nothing, and that, in fact, they weren’t eyes at all, but
portholes into the boiling depths of hell.

Then her shoulders shrugged, cranking
her neck lower in its droop. There was more cranking, and more, until her eyes
were pointed at her lap, not staring or looking at anything, just pointed that
way. She sat still, adding a staccato of twitches to the background noise of
the redlining heart monitor.

Finally, after what seemed like too
long a time, the heart monitor was turned off, though the echo of its scream
continued to hang in the air of the kitchen. Alan sat in silence, waiting for
the lingering sound to fade.

He was watching her, trying to focus
with an untapped part of his perception, scanning the screen for subtle
movements. He knew how Senna and the other spotters did it, having had the
honor of working with some of the best in the country, and possibly in the
world, and they all explained the skill in a similar way.

It was a way of seeing subtlety
without concentrating on it directly. Direct application of focus, the spotters
insisted, made one miss the real hints of the coming break.

It was as if they were trying to sense
a change in mood, or to hear a faint rustling of leaves that was too far away
to be heard by most people. Alan had always felt that spotters took a
quasi-metaphysical, Zen-like approach to their work, and he understood that it wasn’t
really his eyesight that was the limiting factor, even though that was what had
technically kept him from the training.

What Alan lacked, he knew, was the
gift the spotters had, and even though he’d gotten marginally better at
spotting since the outbreak, he couldn’t do anything near what Senna did.

What he did well was tread lightly, and
he’d done so from the start. That was a skill all the survivors had by
necessity, because if they hadn’t had it to begin with, or learned it as soon
as the outbreak hit, they’d be gone. Most people could move quietly if they
tried, and be still for a long time while the zombies passed by, but you had to
be one of the ones who realized, in the early days of the outbreak, that
keeping quiet and staying still actually made a difference.

In the chaos, it had been near
impossible to figure out what was what.

54

Now, in New Crozet, Alan was happy to do his part, no, more than happy, he was
thrilled.
He worked hard, harder than most, although he always thought he could work
more, in the hope of…something.

At first it had been the notion of setting
up what was left of the survivors to one day retake what the virus had stolen.
It had been a fleeting hope, and he found that his faith in the restoration of
the world waned with each passing day, and with each passing market when fewer
and fewer traders showed up, and with less diversity of produce every time.

Yet, in spite of that, he still worked
to feed and fortify the town, to educate its few children, and above all else,
to defend it and his fellow townspeople from all manner of threats, whether
from the zombies, the living, or otherwise. The town and its dwindling
population and diminishing resources were all he had left.

As far as he was concerned, the town
was the last living body in the world, and they were all fighting to keep it
hovering out of hellfire’s reach, like something being roasted on a spit that
was too high, smoked and perhaps a bit charred by the lapping flames but not consumed
by them. The hope he’d had of any of New Crozet’s number retaking the world was
still there, buried somewhere not quite too deep yet, but working toward the
survival of New Crozet was more than good enough, whether or not they’d ever be
able to take back the world.

To Alan, life mattered, and so long as
he could make life better in New Crozet, even if no one would ever be able to
leave the town and if the townspeople died out there, that full shelf life was
worth toiling for.

You could try to convince him, as his
mood sometimes tried when it took dips in the pools of his memories, that it
was all pointless, that he was stupid not to go outside and give himself to the
virus, but he wouldn’t listen. He would say that he could never give up, and
never would, and that so long as his body could work, that’s what he’d do.

It wasn’t just the New Crozet
Kool-Aid, either. He had Senna, remember? So he had reason to be optimistic.
They were childless, but he wasn’t alone.

And they weren’t really childless,
either. The town had kids, and he found that, surprise, surprise, he liked
them. He liked talking to them and getting a sense of how they looked at the
world, and teaching them what he knew, which he considered to be little, but
from a survival perspective, was much.

If, God forbid, something happened to
Senna, he’d still have them to watch over, and the town, and over the years that
had all become his calling, and he felt honored to have that as his life’s
work, even though the circumstances were what they were. Ya gotta make the most
of it, right?

55

The fact was, the virus had spread so quickly that noting its progress in the
people around you had been irrelevant. The rising waters of the infected sea
had drowned the world in a matter of days. A flood of zombies and no ark. That
was the outbreak. That was the reality of zero day.

All that there had been left to do at
that point was run and hide, assuming you were still capable of either. There
was no fighting it, not then, and as it turned out, not later.

After some semblance of stability had
been found, the survivors began to work at understanding the virus and the
zombies, how they ticked, and how they might be destroyed. You had to know your
enemy if you were ever to overcome it, right? Love your enemy and all that junk.

In the case of the virus and its zombies,
that approach hadn’t worked at all.

The crews’ efforts had resulted in great
losses of life, and what had it all been for? The virus still had the run of the
world outside the…refuges, and the chances of the human population’s rebound
had been cut almost entirely out of the world by the crews’ self-imposed
culling. Rather than trying to fight, what the rec-crews should’ve been doing
was building more settlements, and keeping people in them. But hindsight was
always twenty-twenty.

New Crozet was a nice cage for the
survivors to be squirreled away in waiting for death, one of the better ones as
far as post-apocalyptic life went, that was for sure, and the company wasn’t
too bad, either.

Heck, as far as Alan was concerned,
the people were some of the best he’d known in his life, but then he’d spent
most of his time before the outbreak interacting with other lawyers, so, if you
asked him, the bar had been set low. Too low for even the most limber to limbo
under, in point of fact.

As he stared at the screen, he found
that his mind was again pushing up against the idea of a zombie, revolting
against it. He’d spent years running from them, killing them, and now living in
a settlement designed to keep them out, but the idea that one could exist still
seemed to have a foot firmly within unreality.

It wasn’t just a disease, but something
that took your soul. If it could keep using your body after you died, it had to
be more than a virus. How could something born of nature do that, unless it was
the earth’s malice itself, or an evil engineered by man, or a toxic mixture of
the two?

No, he thought, not malice, but
balance: the righting of wrongs and the putting back of order. As far-reaching
as the annihilation of God’s creatures had been, it was hard not to look at the
virus as a punishment sent down by a higher power, perhaps even by God. Whether
or not it was didn’t matter. It might as well have been.