Order of the Dead (22 page)

56

In the video, the woman’s vital functions had stopped. On the table, the
oatmeal in Alan’s bowl was now cold.

He closed out of the video, having to
hit the touchpad several times before it reacted. What he’d just watched had depressed
him thoroughly, as usual, and yet he kept doing this to himself for some
reason, as if he expected to one day find something different in the videos,
something with meaning to it. Maybe that something would explain what they’d
all done wrong, what acts had earned this, what that poor woman had done to end
up the way she had. He sighed.

Just being alive at the wrong place at
the wrong time, I guess, he thought. Just like everything else in life.

In an apparent effort to cheer him up,
his mind flipped like a pancake and revealed a perfectly crisped circle, which
was made up of recollections of what it had been like to meet Senna for the
first time.

Alan’s rec-crew had merged with
Senna’s three years after the outbreak. By then they were veterans of their
respective crews, having outlived most of the original members.

All the crews throughout the country
had atrophied over time, consistently losing more members than they gained. When
their crews combined to offset the loss of life that each crew had sustained,
the resulting larger group was still smaller than the original size of either.
They were coming together to have a better shot at completing their mission,
but by that point most everyone had turned pessimistic.

Zombie-ridding had proven not to be in
the world’s cards, and that was that. Morale was at an all-time low.

The spotters and cleaners were
becoming careless, and the rate of attrition was growing. And who could blame
them? Why not go off into the woods and die? Or into the skeleton of a human
city…and die?

There was some honor in that, going
off and dying alone, even if it meant abandoning your crew. That was how the
cleaners and spotters all felt by that point. There was no anger, no hatred
directed at those who left. It was what it was, and those who left were often
envied for their courage to go off on their own.

With the mounting fatalities and
desertions, spirits on the crews were plunging into the murky depths. There
were some holdouts, of course, like Senna and Alan, who kept on chugging—Senna
because she was stubborn as an ox and drank the reclamation Kool-Aid, and Alan
because he thought there was nothing left worthwhile to live for.

To him, it was better to die fighting
with the last of the humans, or even to be the last of the fighting humans, than
to go off and starve peacefully to death in an abandoned house where the
memories of strangers would watch you shrivel up until you croaked. That this
scenario was comforting to most, like a desert mirage, should tell you what the
state of things was then.

It wasn’t even remotely realistic.
Most who left the crews died within days, picked off by zombies or outlaws, or
ending their own misery when they were denied entry to a settlement, or if
they’d gone far enough to see what was left of the old cities, when they saw
the remains of what had been called civilization.

The combined crew was two weeks old
before Senna and Alan first said hello to each other. When they did it was
perfunctory and militaristic, even though neither of the two had had formal
military training. People on the crews learned quickly that growing close with
one another was to be avoided. It was easier to lose an acquaintance than a
friend.

But there was something in the air
between Senna and Alan, that unquantifiable thing that they tried to ignore but
couldn’t. They found themselves spending more and more time together, working
side by side, and looking out for each other.

They had few conversations in the
first few months of their romance, opting for their bodies to do all the
talking. The way they looked at each other was enough. When they were close,
whether it was walking or hiding or sleeping side by side, and whether deep in
the forest or in a city overrun by zombies, their eyes were alight with
passion. They’d given each other a purpose once more, had rekindled a dormant
lust for life, even the abbreviated and dangerous kind they were leading.

57

They began to sleep together, and then to talk, and before long they were
trying to learn as much about each other as possible, in spite of the likely emotional
consequences that came with getting too close to someone in the
post-apocalypse.

Senna had surprised herself with how
much she liked Alan. She couldn’t help but be affectionate toward him when he
was around.

She’d never been like that before, but
when he was there, she wanted to be touching him all the time, even if it was
just holding his hand or lying on him. He made her feel happy and warm and
serene and playful all at the same time, and she couldn’t get enough of him.

Alan put on the next video, which
offered a flickering scene of something like two dozen zombies in a room,
engaged in semi-dormant wandering.

He turned it off.

He knew it by heart anyway, their
aimless shambling this way and that in the six hundred square foot cell...until
the induced break, and then they went absolutely fucking wild. But all in the
same exact way.

Their movements were all so similar
and repetitive, like they were all part of the same organism, or copies of the
same thing…no, they were all products of the same program. That was right.

They were at the end of the viral
assembly line. They came in different shapes and sizes, but they were all the
same.

Fractals, he thought. Fucking
fractals.

That’s how Senna described the zombies
sometimes, although she didn’t talk about that much anymore. They were all one
big fractal, or they were fractals, or something like that.

Before the outbreak, in her other
life, she’d been a teacher, and she’d done a class about fractals. The kids had
loved it, especially the part about snowflakes. They’d been fascinated by
snowflakes. That’s how Senna had told it to him a few times, at least.

They were second graders.

And there was that. He pushed it out
of his mind.

No need to relive Senna’s suffering,
she’d done enough of that for several lifetimes. He suddenly felt very sad for
her, and horrible for making her go to bed alone while he stared at these
videos.

This was the last time, he decided. No
more. He closed the laptop, whose joints were now rickety and a third of whose
buttons no longer worked, and took it to a closet off the foyer. There he stuffed
it, along with its power cable, into a duffel, zipped up the bag, and put
another bag on top of it. No more.

Had it been six years earlier, he
would’ve kept the laptop out after watching all the videos, to check the
internet. He would’ve found on that day, as he had, after three years of
successfully logging on after entering New Crozet, that there was nothing left
to log on to.

The green servers, running on solar
power, were offline, or he could no longer connect to them. No one in town
could anymore. The settlements had been using the web to police local trade,
and to give each other updates on the state of the virus throughout the world,
the worst of the updates being grim, in the case of new loss of life or
evidence of another mutation, and the best updates had been no news at all.

Apparently the green servers had
needed some tender love and care after all. Or perhaps they’d been tampered
with.

Perhaps it didn’t matter. The
standards for trader licensing was set, and enough information had been
exchanged so that all the settlements knew where the rest were.

The World Wide Web blew away, and the
communication that went from there was carried by the traders. It was much of
the same, and, fortunately, the ‘no news is good news’ phenomenon had ruled the
day.

People had gone on living, dying off
slowly, and the virus hadn’t made any new inroads, except perhaps with respect
to the outlaws, slavers, and cannibals who lived outside the settlements, and
good riddance if that was the case. There hadn’t been much virtual chit-chat
between the settlements, anyway. There was little left to say, and the word
that came with the traders was plenty.

Brother Mardu had had a hand in taking
down the net, but no one in New Crozet would ever find out about that. Senna
would come close, though she wouldn’t learn of it either.

58

The internet was nowhere near as important as the fence, and power, and the
guns they’d stockpiled. Electricity was still trickling through the grid, for
now, thanks in large part to the work that Senna and Alan had done on the
rec-crews—part of their task was to keep the flow liquid—and the work they’d
done after joining New Crozet to update and improve the lines both inside and
outside the town.

A lot of that had been severing the
grid’s unneeded limbs and cauterizing the wounds. The simpler the grid, the
less could go wrong.

Of course the infrastructure was going
to lapse, sooner or later. The reserves of coal would run out, the few wind
turbines that were still spinning and hooked into live electrical collection
would fall over, the hydroelectric dams would rupture in spectacular breaches
seen by few if any humans, but perhaps attended by a great many zombies. Maybe
the noise would draw the zombie equivalent of a cheer from them—perish the
thought…

Some settlements had their own power
sources, scant though they were. Even New Crozet had some: a residential
windmill and semi-functional rooftop solar panels on top of two houses, one
owned by Chase Ham and the other by Betty Jane Oswalt.

Chase Ham was half a measure too
rotund to climb a ladder to maintain the panels on his roof, and Betty Jane was
too old to see to the upkeep on hers, so Alan and Walter Brickley took turns
washing down the panels and repairing the wires as needed. There was sometimes
talk of expanding the town’s freestanding power facilities, which meant the
construction of another windmill, because New Crozet didn’t have the equipment
or know-how to build solar panels, but no one ever got around to it in an
organized way except Walter Brickley.

Walter was fifty-eight, a corn farmer and
windmill tinkerer in New Crozet, and a landscape architect in his prior life.
The town’s second windmill had been a pet project of his for some years, but no
more progress could be made on it without trips outside the perimeter to
salvage materials, and that was out of the question. The town’s general
attitude about what would be done when the electricity stopped flowing was:
we’ll make do...so long as we keep up with plumbing and drainage, but that was
easier, because it could be managed from inside a settlement.

It wasn’t too cold in the winters, or
too hot in the summers, and electricity wasn’t used for much besides lighting
at night and heating in the winters. If the citizens of New Crozet could live
in a zombie-infested world, applying extra layers of blankets in the winter and
going to bed at sunset would be trivial, like scuff marks on a shoe with no
sole or laces, if you were somehow using it in that state, as a lampshade
perhaps, the scuffs wouldn’t change a thing. In fact, they could give it some
more character.

He went back to the kitchen, put his
hands on the counter next to the stove, and let his body settle down into a
lean. He thought of what he had here, what they’d built, and it was hard not to
think about the future. It was always hard. What was next?

The past was easier, there was no
uncertainty there. Because it was done. After they’d met and gotten to know
each other, but before they decided to run off together, life had suddenly
become precious again, something they actually cared about, and they’d wanted
to extend and preserve what was left of it. Remaining on the crews wasn’t the
right recipe for that. He stood thinking about how they’d gotten away. He felt
like he’d stolen her away for himself, but really they’d stolen each other.

When they left, their crew was losing
several people every week. People died on raids, or disappeared in the middle
of the night without warning. Senna and Alan said a few carefully-chosen
goodbyes, and then made their own disappearance. They had an idea of where they
were going, but neither cared much where they went so long as they were
together.

From the moment he’d lain eyes on
Senna, Alan had wanted to put her over his shoulder and carry her off into the
forest, and when they left the crew, he got his wish.

Senna wouldn’t tell Alan until they’d
been in New Crozet for some months, but ever since she’d met him, there had
been a voice whispering to her in her mind: “Go with him, go with him. He’s the
one to run away with, the one to follow.”

59

They set their course for a small settlement in Virginia, which Alan had passed
during his active time with his crew. It was one of the smallest settlements in
the country, and Senna and Alan both wanted to go somewhere as small as
possible, somewhere quiet.

They wanted to build a life together.
It didn’t matter where, even if they couldn’t gain entrance to any settlement
and had to stay in the forest with the zombies. All that mattered was that they
would live and die together, side by side, taking on all of the world and all
that it threw at them.

Senna and Alan traveled to Virginia,
the journey taking weeks, and found the settlement that Alan remembered. It was
called New Crozet. Looking at it from outside the perimeter, Senna took to it
right away. It was the right size, and appeared to be made largely of farmland.
They could farm a plot of land together, as they had often talked about, and
live a peaceful life, maybe even have a family, if they were lucky.

They were let in after the townspeople
accepted their credentials as genuine. Settlements were typically wary of new
members, but Senna and Alan, experienced as they were from their service on the
reclamation crews, were the kind of new members every settlement wanted.

If the worst happened and the virus
got in, or if the risk of the virus getting in rose to a higher level than
usual, skilled spotters and cleaners could come in useful. They were allowed to
choose from a number of empty houses—the town was nowhere near capacity, but it
was Senna who chose where they would live, and she hadn’t picked a house at
all.

The spot she picked was some distance
from the bulk of the town, uncomfortably close to the perimeter for most of the
other townspeople. It was a great magnolia tree that Senna had fallen in love
with there, and that had made her want to live in that remote spot. There was a
dilapidated farmhouse thrown in with the tree, as well as a barn with most of
its roof fallen in and a shed with no door.

It was a fixer-upper, that was for
sure, and it had given Senna and Alan plenty of physical labor to fill their
days while they worked to make the place livable. It kept them busy for the
greater part of two years, working together and bickering and falling more
deeply in love. The repairs took so long because the couple was meticulously
working the land too, planting and growing crops at Senna’s direction.

That was nine years ago, and their
life together had only grown better, their connection deeper: more passionate
and more soulful at the same time.

Alan went back to the closet where the
laptop was stowed and took a small tin from one of the duffel’s pockets. The
tin was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, its outside dusty and
mottled. He thought it may have once held breath mints, but any markings that
had been on the outside of the little container were worn away by time. He
opened the tin.

Inside was a carefully folded
rectangle of wax paper. Through the overlapping layers of the paper, a muted
orange something stared up at Alan expectantly. The beginning of an elfish grin
elbowed its way onto his face, and then he was smiling down at the treasure in
complete delight. It wasn’t so much what was inside the box, but what he was
going to do with it.

Inside the wax paper was a small mound
of powdered cinnamon. The cinnamon was old and stale and its fragrance was almost
completely gone, but it was a treasure in Alan’s world. He was going to give
the cinnamon to Senna tomorrow, after the market, and he was going to ask her
to be his wife.

Being married meant little now, but he
wanted to make the gesture all the same. Tom Preston could officiate the
ceremony, assuming Senna said yes. And why shouldn’t she? Their life would be
no different, Alan knew, but the idea of posing the question to Senna made him
senselessly joyful.

He closed the tin and put it back in its
hiding place. A smirk remained on his face, and accompanied him to bed, into
which he stole as quietly as he could to avoid disturbing Senna. She didn’t
wake.

Cinnamon on his mind, the corners of Alan’s
lips were still curled upward in an elfish half-grin when he fell asleep.