Order of the Dead (28 page)

73

Jack crept to the window on his tiptoes and peered out. As he looked at the
faint lights that were still glowing in New Crozet, he thought of the drawing
that Sasha had picked out for her tracing work. It was a bridge that you
couldn’t see all of, and what did that mean, and what did it have to do with
lights?

Did bridges have lights so that people
walking across them could see in the dark, or did people bring their own
lights? How did lights work, anyway? He wanted to learn more about electricity,
and fire, and the world, but mostly about gadgets.

Alan appeased this need of his to some
degree by telling him about these things, by describing them in detail, but Jack
wanted to see the old technology himself. There wasn’t much of it in New
Crozet. What there was actually was more than enough for Jack, but it didn’t
seem that way to him.

He wanted a limitless supply, great
factories with production lines and power stations with tall electrical towers
like the ones that Alan told him about. He wanted to see those places and walk
around in them and understand everything about how they worked. He wanted the
whole enchilada of technical knowledge, to have it and eat it and wash it down
with juice. Maybe he was too young to understand it all, but maybe he wasn’t.

There were some books in the New
Crozet library—it wasn’t Crozet’s original library, which was outside New
Crozet’s perimeter, but a small house that no one lived in that was used as a
book dump instead—but most of the books were fiction and not the sort that Jack
wanted to read, anyway. The repository was full to the brim with paperbacks
whose covers featured muscle-bound men who were strange looking—their faces
were all hard edges and their hair was long and for some reason they’d all lost
their shirts somewhere, and some of them had apparently experienced the same
problem with their pants.

The women on the covers were usually dressed
in lace that strained to contain their large breasts, and they had looks of
wanton need on their faces. The pictures made Jack feel weird and he didn’t
want to read anything unless it had engineering specs in it anyway.

There were better things to do in town
than read those books—not as good as looking at books about electronics or
automobile engines or planes or rockets would be, but much better than reading
or looking at the… What were those books called? Jack tried to remember and
after a few moments did—Nell Rodgers had named them when she was there in the
book depot house with him—
romance
novels.

There really was a lot to do and see
in the town, whether you were into big, strong, hunky romantic fiction or not.
There was plenty of culture in New Crozet, and, if you’d seen it, you might
even have said that the little corner of humanity was overflowing with the
stuff, like the townspeople at their core had a need to express themselves that
was as wanton as the desire drawn on the faces of the women on the romance
novel covers.

The people of New Crozet effused art
like they were sweating it out on a hot Virginia summer day on a picnic chair a
quart deep into hot peppermint or ginger tea—please pick your perspiration aid
of choice—and couldn’t get the liquid in their mouths and out through their
skin fast enough.

Faith Crabtree painted landscapes,
most of which featured the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her strokes were long and
wide, and looking at her artwork made one want for something that was hard to
put into words. It was like being made to want the passage of time, a
faraway-ness not measured in feet but in years.

Sally Rushing, Phil Owens, Dale and
Kathie Mounsey, and Walter Brickley played bluegrock—a mix of bluegrass and
rock—together, and they were pretty darn good at it, playing in the basement of
the church where they’d soundproofed the walls so that no zombies would be
unnecessarily attracted to the town fence.

Travis Perry made garbage
sculptures—rats and flamingos and suns and clouds along with some other
critters—from broken cans and bottles and ruined or used-up paper. The kids
loved the little refuse figurines, and so did everyone, really.

Rad Rodgers worked metal, into the
shapes of bugs and insects, usually, which was to be expected given his
occupation as second in command bugger, which, as used among the townspeople of
New Crozet, was a term of endearment. Nell was chief, head honcho Bugger, but
more on that later.

The Klefekers, Ned and Irene, in
addition to being New Crozet’s preeminent peanut farmers—oh, if only you could
have a taste of their peanut pie…it was to die for—recrafted old shoes. You
might not call recrafting an art form, but if you’d seen what the Klefekers
did, you’d agree that what they did was, in fact, art verging on fine. They
could take old strips of leather and refashion them into new soles and uppers,
and the way they worked them into the existing shoe made the final product much
more than the sum of its parts, like a cyborg of footwear in the post-apoc
post-modern style, if you would.

The Klefekers’ peanut farming was vital
to New Crozet, with peanuts accounting for more than half of the caloric intake
of some of the townspeople, and the Chinese nuts were the second largest
attraction that drew traders to the town, after the various products of Nell’s
buggery. Practical considerations like those aside, when it came to nuts and
insects, too, there was plenty of skill and imagination to be flexed in preparing
them.

From peanut pies fortified with
cricket protein and topped with expired carbohydrate supplements from some
fallout shelter of yesteryear, to June bugs with crisp cornmeal coatings that
could be flipped into your mouth like the delicious popcorn-esque snack that
they were, there was no end to the ingenuity with which foods were combined and
shaped into meals and dishes that would’ve been unthinkable to any
pre-apocalypse mind. Food, after all, could be great art, too.

There were other would-be artists here
and there in the houses and streets of New Crozet, and the would-be’s really
were, because they were all who were left. Jack’s town was a hipster mecca of
sorts, except that it was a humanity mecca, and that won out in the grand,
viral scheme of things.

The other settlements had their own
artists, but not nearly as many as New Crozet, if the word of the traders could
be relied on as more than just flattery aimed at selling more wares. And they
were being truthful. For some reason, or for no reason at all more likely, New
Crozet was home to a disproportionate share of the creatives left in the world.

Now, the more Jack thought about all
the art in town, the happier he became. Along with the idea of growing up to be
like Alan, having the chance to see more art and maybe one day make something
too—he wasn’t sure what it would be yet—seemed to him like the best things in
the world. Focusing on these things, his mind moved away from Larry and the
wooden croc, and when his thoughts had moved far enough along, he went back to
bed, and was able to sleep.

74

Downstairs, Larry Knapp woke and looked confusedly at the table until a
poorly-drawn light bulb went off in his head.

The cup! his tosspot mind exclaimed.

He rolled gracelessly from the chair
to the floor and got on his hands and knees, from which position he began to
crawl with equal absence of refinement. He scanned under the table, whipping
his head a little too violently in each direction—he’d wake up with a crick in
his neck in the morning—until he spotted the cup.

“’Ere you be,” he said, and crawled
over, losing his footing—which in this case was his hand slipping—only once. He
retrieved the cup and the struggle to remount the chair began.

After some protracted flailing and
bodily expressions that were best left for Knapp to do in private, he made it
back into the seat of his chair, hanging off to one side almost too far, but he
righted himself with two not-so-mighty heaves, banging the cup against the
chair four times in the process, adding to its dings and reaffirming the great
worth of a tin cup to a slosh-bucket of his impressive caliber and depth.

His, indeed, was a thirsty soul. And a
timid one, too.

Liquid courage, he thought, liquid
steel for the soul. That was what he needed.

The drink loosened the tongue and made
it quicker, he knew that much if he knew anything at all.

“I’m a liberation-alist, a
librat-ator, a…a—” he almost sneezed, “—a courage drinker.” He nodded. “It
encourages the courage it does.”

The lines ‘I think I can, I think I
can,’ from The Little Engine That Could came bubbling up and popped in his mind
over and over, but he didn’t dare utter them, because he was suddenly
afraid—all the courage that had been there just a moment ago was gone—that if
he did he’d be transported backward in time to a point when the children’s
story about the cute little train was being read to him because he was still
years away from mastering the skill of reading for himself, and if that
happened…oh God help him if it did, then he’d have to live through the outbreak
all over again, and have to feel everything, all of this, a second time, and he
knew that he couldn’t take that, because he was weak, and the morsels of
bravery the beer lent him were only short-lived highs like those the Krok dealt
out, and if he had to try it a second time he’d give up, he’d walk into the fields
of stumbling zombies and scream at the top of his lungs, until all that
remained of him was a shell incapable of tossing back the pot, or of anything
else but blind subservience to the viral master, for that matter.

The fear left his mind as suddenly as
it had come, and that was good, because he was losing patience with it. There
was a task at hand—almost within his grasp, and that was precisely the problem.
He reached, stretching himself flat across the table, and wiggled his fingers
thirstily at the object of his fancy, that blessed cask, which contained within
it the curer of all ills.

It held the panacea that could banish
all of life’s evils as quickly as it could summon them forth. It was
brimming—not really, it was at most half-full, but he was suddenly an
optimist—with that yeasty nectar of the gods, filtered by no hand. It was real
beer, and it was almost within his grasp, almost.

“Almost there,” he slurred, the
spittle flying low and admirably under the radar. If you were a lighthouse your
sweeping beam would have given only the merest of glimmer-hints of touching
Knapp’s mouthy emissions. ‘Stealth spittle,’ he would’ve called it if more,
much more, of his mind were on the wagon, which it wasn’t. No one in town would
waste breath arguing that any part of his mind was on the wagon, except maybe,
maybe,
for the small fraction of it that made him rant about the bunkers, but that was
all.

The wagon had gone down the unpaved
driveway, taken on a flat, and kept going over the slat bridge and off the
side, into the creek. That’s where it had decided its final resting place ought
to be, in the running water, and who was Larry Knapp to argue with a wagon’s
final wishes?

That, most assuredly, he thought, was
not his place.

And anyway, his mind wasn’t all bad on
the delicious solvent. Sometimes liquefying the synapses was the only way he
could
think without being clouded by all sorts of bad stuff, which he didn’t want to
think about right now, thanks but no thanks, even though it was always,
always,
creeping in from the unsettled parts of his brain, and that wasn’t good.

He hadn’t drunk enough to pass out
yet, and there was far too much time for the bad crap to get through, but no
sense thinking about that now, not yet, except that when he focused on what not
to think about, that was all he could think of, and now he was doing just that,
and it was happening, and—

“Stop, you idiot,” he scolded, except
it sounded more like ‘shop, jot.’

With his reaching hand he finally managed
to upend the cask at an angle that spilled some beer into the cup, and a lot
more sopped into the carpet after running across the table and drenching the
front of his pants, mostly at the crotch. Some of it sloshed directly through
the pee-flap of his boxers, which were peeking out from his pants’ open zipper,
to land on his pubic hair and creep lower as the night’s festivities progressed.

That was the most action he’d see that
night, but it was better than nothing. His fly was usually undone, and now was
no exception. Consistency was key, and, besides the flapping nether hair by way
of unbuttoned fly, there’d be more elements of the evening that were telltale
Larry Knapp.

Case in point, his mood took another
sudden nosedive and he began to think about how the survivors always told themselves
that it got better. His mind really was all over the place tonight, working
overtime but forgetting to clock the hours.

All work and no play…I think I can, I
think I can. Maybe if he drank less he’d stop getting so damned depressed, but
cutting back wasn’t really an option.

“Time makes everything better,” they’d
say, or, “Time dulls the pain,” or, “Time heals, really, it does, you’ll see.”

It was a crock of shit. The pain
didn’t go away.

It
never
went away. When you’re
in a cage eking out a meager existence, the anguish is your only constant.
Thank God for the work—if only he’d done more of it he would’ve felt better—and
there was much of that to be done, at least that could take a man’s mind off
all the faces, all the imagined agonies of loved ones lost without any sort of
closure. Now the healing power of time, that was complete bullshit if you asked
him, no bloody help at all.

It was best to forget, and not to know
better. This was the good life now.

Forget the rotten past. It’s for the
worms.

And this life…this life’s for the
drinking, so don’t worry, chug-a-lug and be happy, or however the song went.

He decided to complete the abrupt
U-turn and now he loved all of New Crozet. They were so kind to him just not to
kick him out on his bony ass. Speaking of, the beer in his pants was trying to
creep into his ass crack now. It wasn’t his favorite feeling, but like he’d
thought earlier, better than nothing.

New Crozet was a good place for a man
such as he. It was…it was…what was the word?
Tolerant.
No, no, that
wasn’t it. It was a
haven.
There it was: haven. New Crozet was a haven
for solvent worship, and Bacchus be praised therefor.