Order of the Dead (23 page)

60

The air was thick with snowflakes and the odor of decay. There was a man
sitting on an overturned crate, under the cover of a canopy set up on poles in
front of a liquor store. The smell was pressing toward Alan, as if the man were
projecting it at him through the falling snow.

The liquor store’s interior was dark
save for the wild flickering of a thick candle, whose flame was fighting a
losing battle against a deepening pool of molten wax. The light’s erratic
movement was illuminating bottles of various shapes and shades of clarity, not
one of which was full to its top, but apparently all of which were for sale.
The man under the canopy had his legs tucked under him, and he was balancing
himself on the crate with one hand gripping a canopy pole.

Grinning at Alan now, the man was
showing toothless gums that were half-spoiled ground beef, a mixture of brown
and pink and the lovely shades in between. His lips were a patchwork of dark
scabs and blood: exactly what you’d expect to accent that mouth that not even the
most understanding mother could love.

Alan was walking in a half-daze
through the streets,
foreign
streets. He was in Moscow, of all places, and
the Russian one at that.

Moments earlier, he’d left the Red
Square behind him. Though he’d never been to Russia, he’d watched enough
documentaries to recognize the Red Square. Alan had always wanted to travel
more, but work had always come first. Now, he didn’t have to fight any more
work-life balance battles, as the apocalypse had effectively canceled all of
his travel plans, abstract though they’d been.

He now found himself in a narrow back
alley that was lined with small houses and shops on either side. The window
displays were bare and covered with uniform layers of dust that had obviously staked
their claims a long time ago.

What do they sell in these shops? Alan
wondered. He couldn’t see any goods on display anywhere. He began to toy with
the idea of pushing the door of one of the shops open and wandering inside, to,
at the very least, get out of the cold, even if it meant a showdown with a
Russian store keep.

He’d picked out the least intimidating
looking store and had begun to crunch a pattern in the snow toward it when he heard
someone speak in a familiar voice.

“You can’t give that to me. It’s from
a different time. It’s old and faded, and we’re different now. You’re different
now. I’m different now.”

The words were in Russian, and even
though Alan didn’t speak the language, he’d understood it all somehow. He
placed the voice. It was Senna’s.

“No,” Alan said, his voice
uncharacteristically plaintive, “wait. I found it and dug it up, I saved it. If
it’s still here, we’re not different. We’re the same. Please.”

“Maybe you’re the same, but I’m not.
I’m different now.”

He whirled and slipped on the icy
pavement. He fell on his side and took the brunt of the impact with his hip, and
followed up with the point of his elbow. The pain was sharp, an uncomfortable
contrast to the cold numbness of his extremities.

Ignoring the pain, he sat up and searched
the street for Senna. She wasn’t there. No one was, except the man on the
crate, whose grin had broadened, straining his cracked and bloody lips.

Alan wanted to disagree with her. He
did
disagree with her. They weren’t different. The world had certainly changed, but
they hadn’t.

They would go on. They
had
to
go on. That was why the world had put them together in the first place.

His eyes found the storefront that he’d
picked out earlier, before
her
voice was heard on the bony tundra of
Mother Russia’s back. There was a drawing of a samovar on the shop’s sign, and he’d
taken it to mean that he might be able to find something hot to drink inside,
to help him thaw out some, if that was still possible after the length of his
exposure.

After getting his frozen legs moving,
he managed to tuck them under him and take his weight. He stood, and though his
strength was sapped, he felt a deeper exhaustion in his soul.

The snow was growing more daring in
its tumbles, reaching for more, spreading outward, and as Alan watched it, he
felt a twinge of loneliness. There was solitude here, emptiness.

It was an inescapable past into which
he’d ventured, though he knew that no one should dwell in such a place. In
spite of this knowledge, he pressed forward through the cartwheeling snow,
toward the man sitting on the crate, and the nondescript liquor storefront
behind him. The shop with the samovar sign was just past the liquor store, but
it seemed less and less there the closer Alan got, like the samovar and the
façade it was drawn on were trying to vanish into the crowd of shops surrounding
it.

The man on the crate was rotting from
the inside out, a victim of Desomorphine, the street drug Krokodil. This
thought installed itself in Alan’s mind as if he’d put it there himself.

Is he a victim, Alan wondered, or a
disciple? That too, was a thought that just flashed into existence, both its
origin and meaning unclear.

The man’s eyes were a piercing blue,
framed by a scatter of purple hemorrhages. Alan was pulled forward, closer and
closer, until he was standing within a foot of the crate. The stench here was unbearable,
tugging nausea out of hiding in Alan’s gut.

On top of the urge to vomit, he was
hit by an overwhelming desire to kneel, to prostrate himself before the man on
the crate, but he resisted, and remained standing where he was, staring into
eyes that seemed to promise only one thing: a prolonged agony followed by the
swindle of a death without peace.

61

Alan spoke first. “You’re patient zero, aren’t you?”

“No,” the man said. The single,
heavily-accented word echoed through the alley, the force of its message
rattling the snowflakes in their orchestrated somersaults.

Alan took a step backward as the
flicker that had been playing on the liquor bottles stopped, the flame finally drowned
by the rising pool of molten wax. He felt the chill of the charred wick,
cocooned in a cooling mold, never to burn again.

“I am not,” the man said. He untucked
his legs and Alan saw the work of the Krok. The man’s left leg ended above the
knee, and his right leg ended mid-shin.

The terminus of the right leg was
covered by the pinned folds of a pant leg, but the stump of thigh that was the
remains of his left leg was an exposed collection of open sores, red, and blue,
and green, and filled with pus. Two of the sores were framing broken pustules
that were oozing a yellow-green fluid even in the bitter cold.

Alan made his mouth into a thin line,
and, after a failed attempt to will his half-frozen nostrils to close from the
inside, put a hand up to his nose to cover it.

The man grinned, as if pleased by the discomfort
he’d been able to draw out.

The cold was clawing mightily at
Alan’s hand, and in spite of the smell, he decided it would be better to tuck
his hand back into his coat. How had he come here without gloves?

“Who are you?” Alan asked.

The man’s eyes shone with blue fire as
he spoke. “I am you. And you are me. In different places. In different times.” He
paused for a moment. “Do you understand?”

Alan shook his head.

The man let out a disappointed grunt.
“Most people never do.”

Alan had only begun to think about
backing away when the man grabbed his arm, stopping him. Looking down, Alan saw
that he was being gripped by a hand that looked more like a crab’s pincer than
a human hand.

The index, middle, and ring fingers
were gone. Some of the pinky and thumb were left, the nails gone, the fingertips
eaten by decay. The middle three knuckles were gone, too. The man was holding Alan
with what was left of his two fingers, and with the crease of grizzled meat in
the middle of what had once been a hand.

“Most people never do,” the man
repeated, “until they try this.” With his other hand, which was relatively
whole and missing only a thumb, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a
small packet. It was a dirty and worn thing that he offered up to Alan.

Alan tried to shake himself free of
the man’s grip but couldn’t. He took the man’s forearm with his hands and tried
to get away, but the man’s strength didn’t yield.

“Take it,” the man said. “See what it
is like to truly live.”

“No.”

The man snorted. “No?” He opened his
mouth wide and laughed, offering a too-candid glimpse into his decaying oral
cavity. “What makes you think you have a choice?”

The snow grew thicker, the flurries
seeming to be disproportionately attracted to the place where Alan was
standing.

The man’s face became fierce, and he
began to pull Alan in with an improbable Russian strength, as if he were a
being of rusted cast iron, subject to a weakness that couldn’t be exploited.

While he pulled Alan inward, he raised
the hand with the packet to Alan’s face. The packet opened, unwrapping itself,
and within it was the street drug Krokodil, the crocodile, the eater of men,
the flesh-stealer.

The substance rose up from the wax
paper and formed the top half of a miniature crocodile. It had scales that
resembled charred wood and that formed, sank back into flatness, and then
formed themselves again as the thing was reaching upward.

There isn’t enough meat for the
monster to build itself, Alan thought. It needs more. It needs meat.

It was moving closer to his face. Its
jaws opened, parting the dark-scaled snout. Alan’s eyes went wide, more in
confusion than fear.

Inside the mouth was a revolving
helix, each of its strands a different color, showing Alan more colors than he
thought could exist.

The creature was approaching faster
now, and he couldn’t see if the man was still there. His eyes were locked on
the beast’s mouth and he was hurtling toward it, into it. There was a blast of uncontrolled
acceleration, like someone had floored the gas pedal and taken their hands off
the steering wheel at the same time.

And, just as the thing was about to
take him, just before it could, a smell wafted over to him, and at that moment,
repression wasn’t bliss, it wasn’t good for anything then, because he could
smell Allie’s burning flesh, the cooking meat of a woman who’d been dead for
less than an hour…and it smelled
good,
good enough to make his mouth
water.

He hadn’t dared to look around at the
rest of the rec-crew then, for fear of what he might see in their eyes, and for
fear of what they might see in his. He tried to block the sounds out, too, but
as still as they’d been forced to be while the zombies passed by, it had been
quiet enough to hear the rumbling stomachs around him, and his own.

All their reactions, his included, were
a product of hunger, but that didn’t change the fact that it had taken a good
amount of restraint to keep from jumping into the fire pit and pulling strands
of moist, still-cooking flesh—human flesh—and having a medium-well day of it.
He’d understood all the men in the warehouse then, had understood all of it,
and he was no better than any of them, no better than cannibal Chris or his
buddies who’d gone along.

He was just as bad, but probably worse
for passing judgment. He was a fucking animal, and would never be anything
more, just a repulsive, starved animal, like the rest of them.

Alan woke gasping for breath. The
chest and armpits of his shirt were soaked with sweat. He sat up, took the
shirt off like a thing that was contaminated, and glanced guiltily at Senna.

Relieved to see that she was fast
asleep, and no longer remembering what he felt guilty about, he wiped his sweaty
neck and face with the shirt and threw it aside. Then he tried to recall the happiness
the cinnamon had inspired, but he couldn’t find the feeling again.

Instead, he had the distinct sense of
groping for something in the dark, something that he’d lost and couldn’t
reclaim. As badly as he needed to give Senna the cinnamon tomorrow, as much as
he wanted to make the gesture of proposing, to make their life ‘official’ or to
satisfy his own nostalgia or whatever it was, he’d never get the chance.

He sank into a restless sleep, in which
dreams featuring Krokodil—that dancing swindler made of rot and maleficence—continued
to assail him until morning.

62

Thirty-eight hours before the outbreak, somewhere,
someone
had almost published
a news article connecting the two…the two items in question being Krokodil and
the virus that was kind enough to turn people into flesh-hungry zombies, except
that the virus hadn’t quite reached that point yet.

The someone was a reporter named Virginia
Nelda-Ann Lloyd, called Ginny by her high school peers—because they certainly
weren’t her friends—and in the years before the outbreak by no one at all,
because she did freelance work from home and rarely ventured beyond her front
stoop, making sure not to go out there when the mailman or FedEx or UPS guy was
dropping something off.

The somewhere was BFN, also known as
Bum-Fucking-Nowhere, Illinois. The town did have a real name, Balleston, but it
was only on the small maps, the kind you could get at gas stations in and
around Balleston, and only there and only if you were lucky, because people who’d
actually heard of the place were from there, and they had no need of maps of
the slice of BFN in question so there were very few such maps to start with, and
outsiders who were driving through—usually by accident—tried very hard not to
stop, holding it in until a potty break somewhere, anywhere, else, so the maps
weren’t exactly high on the local gas station restocking priorities list.

The term that most accurately
described Ginny Lloyd was mousy. What would’ve been her baby face was interrupted
by a too-pointy nose, hidden behind large, round-framed glasses, and framed by unmanaged,
shoulder-length dark brown hair.

When she ate she nibbled, and when she
drank, the sips she took were so tiny that they appeared to be nibbles too. She
dressed in greys and browns and kept mostly to herself, avoiding people if at
all possible.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like
people—she
loved
them, in fact—but it was that she got so nervous around
strangers that her heart would pound and her hands would get clammy and
sometimes, if the place where she found herself was crowded enough and required
her interaction with the other moving, breathing denizens of the world, the
human ones, she’d have a panic attack.

Drugs were likely to help, she
knew—she’d gotten enough of that from her pharmaceutical-pushing ex-therapists
and from the panic and anxiety chat forums she perused online—but she didn’t
believe in putting chemicals like that into her body. The way she saw it, the
potential side effects of the drugs outweighed their benefits, especially when
the side effects featured death.

Death versus panic attack, Ginny
wondered. I’ll take the panic attack, thank you very much. Then I can go hide
out at home until I feel better, get on my computer and see the world from a
distance, online. Much better than death, she decided.

Ginny tried to stay on top of her
anxiety by avoiding its triggers—chiefly, other people—by meditating, and by
trying some herbal supplements she’d researched: valerian and GABA and
magnesium and calcium. And she’d even tried something more intrusive on her
routine than pill-swallowing:
exercise.

She’d gotten a rowing machine online
and started using the thing every day, just like the Underwoods did on
House
of Cards,
which she binge-watched on Netflix each time a new season came
out, subscribing to the service upon release of the show’s latest installment,
and canceling as soon as she was done watching that and anything else she could
find of worth in the Netflix lineup, which of late was only
House of Cards
and
Trailer Park Boys,
but more on the latter in a moment.

None of it helped a whole lot,
although she had to admit the exercise did have
some
calming effects,
and getting a sweat going and her heart beat up made her feel like she’d
accomplished something—almost as good as it felt to get an article out, and
that really was a great feeling, especially if her piece was breaking new
ground. Had she gone outside in the daytime more often, and farther than her
stoop, she might have made some progress in correcting her vitamin D
deficiency, and that would’ve helped her anxiety some too, but she never did
that.

Traveling somewhere sunny and scenic to
soak up the sun and take in the outdoors was nowhere near her bucket list. As
far as she was concerned, all bucket list items had been fulfilled, mostly
because there were so few. She had a job she loved, lived alone free of the
stressful influence of other people, took care of a cat she loved very, very
much—almost as much as her job—and had food and running water. What more could
an anxiety-ridden, agoraphobic girl want?

The best pastime she could imagine was
staying inside and losing herself in research on her computer, and her job as a
freelance writer was perfect for that. She was at her best—and proudest of the
role she’d carved out for herself in the world—when she managed to earn money
for articles that argued the opposite sides of the same issue.

This was easiest to do in the
financial sector, where she wrote under the pen names Walter Radley and Jimmy Oliver.
Mr. Radley was a permabear, and silly old Jimmy was a permabull. Neither had
any idea where the stock market was going of course, and neither did Ginny, but
that didn’t stop her from making money on the articles.

In fact, other than the income from
the hot air finance gunk she wrote, she had no position in stocks whatsoever,
opting to keep all her money in a low yield savings account. The other personal
finance writers would have blown their tops.

On a more local front and of late,
many of her articles were focused on the encroaching Balleston Haven Trailer
Park. If you’d ever seen any episodes of
Trailer Park Boys—
and Ginny had
watched more than a few as part of her research, she’d watched all the seasons
through in fact, and twice over—you’d have an idea of what Balleston was
becoming, except the real life version was not set in Nova Scotia, and was not
at all quaint or humorous. To Ginny, the reality wasn’t picturesque or amusing
in the least, whether in an ironic sense or otherwise, but quite the opposite.

The trailer park denizens, if a word
with three syllables could even be used to describe the grotesque
things
that lived there, were multiplying like Viagra-crunching, mullet-sporting rabbits,
on meth.

There was some damn good tub shine
coming out of the trailer park, but Ginny didn’t know about that, and she
wouldn’t have tried it if she did. She didn’t partake in such pointless
activities as drinking. And having a drink or two might risk a social
encounter, and she wouldn’t have wanted that.

She was trying to get some more
Balleston citizens on her side to stop the ongoing land grab by the trailer
park developer goons, which would have been much easier for her to do if she’d
actually stepped outside of her house, went to talk to some of her
neighbors—most of which were likeminded on the trailer park issue—and showed up
at a public hearing in more than just spirit.

Still, writing up her thoughts on the
Balleston Independent Chronicle website—owned and operated by Virginia
Nelda-Ann Lloyd, thank you very much—was much better than nothing. Because the
locals did read it, and sometimes not just the locals, and every bit of press
helped.

It was like the trailer park was
consuming the town. And to top it all off, there was suddenly decay floating on
the air, and not in a shy way, either. It was everywhere.

Something was going very, very wrong,
and it seemed to be originating in Balleston Haven Trailer Park. That wasn’t
true, but the Haven—she scoffed each time she thought of it by that name—was a
hotbed of the spreading rot with which Ms. Lloyd was about to concern herself.

And she was right to do so, too. It
would turn out to be a matter of concern for all of humanity, and she’d be one
of the first to try to call attention to it, although no one would remember her
for her valiant efforts.