Order of the Dead (37 page)

24

He threw himself into the throng and ran, barreling through the oblivious people
who were stuffing their faces and spewing columns of words from their mouths.

In seconds he closed three quarters of
the distance to the truck, moving more swiftly, precisely, and with the most clarity
of purpose he’d ever had in his life.

Men and women were falling, had
already fallen, to the ground in his wake. They were lying, toppled and stunned,
liked planted seeds of silence that hatched and grew with the rapidity of weeds,
poking into the din and putting it out like a licked finger to a waning candle
flame. A painful quiet was spreading.

Alan hit a dense spot in the crowd and
heaved himself into it. There he was met with limbs and torsos that remained
stubbornly in place.

The chatter was almost completely gone
now, and in the space of a few more seconds it would be entirely snuffed out.
The townspeople were noticing, and some were reacting, moving toward Alan,
pressing up behind him, moving, reflexively, to help in the unknown task.

The Tackers were faster. It had come
to a head, as they’d been expecting it too. They’d taken more than they’d hoped
for, and it was time to close the fucking candy store for the day.

The shutter on the side of the Tack
Truck rattled shut before Alan could reach it. Locks were thrown, and the sides
of the truck began to dance with the rhythm of the hurried movements within.

Alan pushed onward, roughly shoving
people aside until he reached the truck. There he pounded on the shutter.

“Let them out,” he yelled. “Open!”

He pounded on the truck hard enough to
split his palms open and set them to bleeding. Bloody prints were being left on
the truck with every blow.

“Open!”

Then the truck’s engine roared to life
like a waking dragon. It had been disturbed in its slumber, and now it would
lash out with mythic fury.

“They have Senna!” he yelled over his
shoulder to the crowd. “And the children! They’ve taken the children!” He
repeated the cry again, and again, stoking the growing flames until the
confused protests behind him had become an outpouring of burning, desperate
anger.

War had broken loose in New Crozet.

Alan began to circle around the truck
to get to the cab. There he would get in, and he would rip these fucking
Tackers apart with his bare hands.

If they were stronger, then he’d fight
them until his dying breath was wrenched free of his lungs, and then the other
townspeople would take up the fight and finish them off. They had damn well
better.

The town of New Crozet, he was determined,
would prevail, and Senna and the children would be set free. The truck was
locked inside the perimeter, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

25

The walls of the Tack Truck were shaking. Someone—one of the townspeople,
probably the lanky, Wayfarer-bespectacled man with the crazed look in his eye
who’d made a run at them, and now surely joined by plenty of his good ol’
Podunk townsfolk—was pounding on the truck from the outside. But that was okay,
because, ugly as the truck was, it was impregnable, and near unbreakable at
that.

That was how Brother Mardu was looking
at it, anyway, because he was now in one of his better moods, the depression having
for the moment lifted. He’d begun to hear a faint squeak in his left ear, and
he took that to mean the only thing it could: his mistress, the wonderful queen
of Krok and all that still moved, fragrantly rotting, in the world, was
returning.

Brother Acrisius, on the other hand, thought
that this was it, that they’d been figured out too early and would be taken out
and literally ripped apart by the mob outside. He began to busy himself with
the task of whipping himself into an internal panic, which was threatening to
spill over the rim of his composure and take over his body if he didn’t keep it
together.

He looked at Brother Mardu and couldn’t
keep a curtain of contempt from drawing shut across his face. How was that man
so calm? The words ‘cool as a kid out of school’ came to Brother Acrisius’s
mind, ‘cool as Tom the fool.’

It was some stupid fucking children’s
rhyme from his elementary school days that he couldn’t quite place and kept
misremembering and here it was chiming in without knocking. There were more
words, that was for sure, but he didn’t know them.

If there were a device for lopping out
phrases and memories from his brain, he would’ve given a morsel of child jerky
for it. That was how much he wanted to erase these annoying, idiotic,
ding-dongs from his past.

“Time to get going,” Brother Mardu
said. His voice was casual and easy. He might’ve been getting up from a beach
in the Caymans and announcing that it was time to go in for tea, as he’d gotten
the just right dollop of sun for the late morning, and thank you ever so kindly
for asking.

Staring at Mardu, Acrisius made no
reply but his mind was screaming.

How
are we to get going?
How?

They were trapped in the town, now,
discovered too early, and the explosives hadn’t been set off yet.

Fear and rage were making Acrisius’s
insides boil.

What makes you so fucking sure that
Saul and Beth made it into position? Why are you so damned confident all of a
sudden?

As if in reply to his barrage of
thoughts, Mardu said, “Just give it a few minutes. We worked all of this out,
remember?”

Acrisius shook his head. He wanted to
vomit.

It was true, they’d worked it all out,
and Saul and Beth had gotten into their places, even though there was no way
that Acrisius could know that. The Order had a small collection of two-way radios
and their working battery innards, but they hadn’t wanted to risk tipping the
townspeople off to any unsavory arrangements, so they’d gone in without the
radios, and begun the kidnappings blind, on the assumption that everything was
going as planned outside the fence as well as in.

In fact, at this very moment, Saul was
hearing some of the commotion and looking through his binoculars. From his tree
perch, he could see some of the market, and there was
probably
enough going
on there to confirm the disturbance was worthy of hitting the little red button
that would make things go kaboom.

There was no way to be completely sure
because they weren’t using walkie-talkies—Acrisius said it was so that they
could keep a low profile, and that had made Saul think of grading, and low
profiles were good, but not too low, for a whole host of reasons. Be that as it
was, at the moment all signs—most notably the fact that Brother Mardu and
Brother Acrisius had been inside long enough to get their side of it done—were
pointed to: red button.

“Come on,” Mardu said, “let’s get
moving.” He gestured to the front of the truck and started off. Reluctantly,
Acrisius followed, his dragging movements made even more leaden by fear.

As the two of them were climbing into
the bulletproof glass-adorned and steel-reinforced cab of the truck, which
couldn’t—they were
pretty
sure—be opened or gotten into from the outside,
Saul’s massive thumb covered the red button of the detonator’s remote control and
pressed.

At first, nothing happened, and Saul
pressed the button a few more times—really squeezing it into its hole, but not
too hard, because he was afraid of breaking the toy-like gizmo—and was about to
whip out the other spare remote or even begin to check that the batteries were
in right—he’d brought spares of those too—but there was no need. His persistent
prodding had cajoled the thing into life, and it was now communicating with the
little electronic things attached to the explosives at the fence, saying, ‘Hey.
How are you? Yeah? Me too. Okay, great, let’s get to blowing the fuck up, shall
we?’ In a split second, they would.

26

The cloudy fingers of the skyborne conflagration reached downward, threatening
to leave the confines of their sphere. It was a lurid display, but of what?
Anger? Contempt? Surrender? And who was the show for, anyway?

Larry Knapp certainly didn’t believe
it was for him, though he sometimes played with the idea that it might be, that
everyone around him was just a robot made for his own amusement—or torment, he
wasn’t sure—and he was the only thinking and feeling being in the world. But
no, that was just some too-dark beer and its congeners talking.

Unfortunately, what was now happening
wasn’t the lovechild of his brain and some toxic congener of his
post-apocalyptic brewing operation. This was fucking real.

Using a shirt sleeve, he wiped some of
the bug parts mixed with Twinkie filling from his chin. Then he stepped
backward until he was out of the crowd, distancing himself from the growing
panic. He only tripped twice as he went, staying upright both times, which was
quite the feat because he was trashed.

Impressively sloshed was the right
term for his current state of being. He’d cippled the task, or tippled the
cask, or something, and quite righteously if he did say so himself.

Wait, it was a jug, not a cask. A jug!
That was the trick of it.
That
was the trick of it
all.
Screwing
his lips up and over to one side, Knapp began to think on this real hard, hard
enough that he furrowed his brow up to its limit, like he was trying to push
all the skin off his forehead and show the market his hard skull, the bone
glistening with booze.

But the jug draining was earlier, and
he wasn’t feeling so great at the moment, not at all. But he was drunk, no, not
just drunk, but
damned
drunk, and he was glad of that, because this was
certainly not a time to be sober.

Knapp looked up at the sky and clapped
a hand to his mouth. Beginning to stagger backward, he tripped again, and this
time he did fall. He landed with the grace of a drunk, unhurt and unsurprised
that the ground had lurched toward him as it had.

“This is it,” he whispered through his
fingers, overcome by a mixture of dread and awe that was mixed more evenly than
the bug parts and Twinkie filling on his sleeve, which was now getting on the
front of his shirt because of the way he was holding his hand to his mouth. But
that was okay, because the shirt hadn’t been washed in weeks. It hardly showed
it, as it was a plaid with only dark colors, and that was okay, too…no, it was
better
than okay.

“Hell is boiling over. It’s the ’pocalypse,
plocalypse, aploc ’o piss. That’s the one. The real one. Piss plocking all
around. Fires in the sky. Hell.” He coughed, choking on some of his souring saliva.
“And where the fuck is Jake…Jay…Jacko? Fucking ploc’o piss.” He looked around.
“Jack?”

He put his hand down, leaning on the
ground, and the movement teased out a grasshopper leg from the filling coating
the front of his shirt. The leg that now stood upright like, well, if Knapp
actually saw it, which he didn’t, he would say the Twinkie filling had an
erection, a grasshopper-leg one, bent, but maybe usable for the mating of
Twinkie filling—he wasn’t an expert when it came to such things. And, had he
seen it, he would’ve shot it a toothsome grin and said, “Good for you
grasshopperus. Good for you.”

But he didn’t see the Twinkie filling
grasshopper leg erection because his eyes were directed skyward, at what he was
convinced was the boiling over of hell. Hot fumes of evil had run up the sides
of the sphere and condensed at the roof of the world.

Now it was beginning to drip downward,
like it was a fucking distillery, and he was in exactly the wrong place. He was
gaping at this with his mouth wide open, and an impressive dribble of saliva
passed over his lips, ran down his chin, and began to grow like a precocious
stalactite on his beard stubble.

Summoning his rapidly-sobering eyes to
action, he followed a trail of cloud down to the lowest point he could see.
There was a closing gap between the tendril of cloud and the perimeter at the
outer gate. He watched the cloud float closer to the topmost part of the
perimeter fence within his field of vision. Then Knapp leaned backward,
adjusting his perspective so that the gap between cloud and fence became
smaller and smaller until...

Contact.

“Fuck-all,” he whispered. “Fuck-all be
damned and fucked twice over.”

He thought for a second that he’d done
that—that he’d made the clouds move like that, and a stupid grin began to creep
onto his face, and it had only time to tease up the corners of his lips but not
to draw them back from his teeth, when two explosions obliterated the day.

27

The blasts came one right after the other, and the ground under Knapp shook as a
narrow swath of the perimeter fence next to the outer gate lit up. The flames
danced a wild jig, as if they knew they’d be obscured in a split second and had
to do their thing
now
—their one shot at the bigtime—and then that part
of the fence was engulfed in smoke.

Knapp, drunk as he was, hadn’t made a
move to protect his head or vital organs. He hadn’t made any move at all,
except that the stalactite of spit that had been growing out of the point of
his chin fell off and landed in the Twinkie sauce on his shirt, missing the
sticking grasshopper leg by a narrow margin.

He stood up like the wobbly tosspot he
was and for the first time in a while, the world seemed to be tottering more than
he was. With a bug-eyed stare, he tried to survey the market and the burning
fence beyond it.

The problem with that was his vision
wasn’t right; there were bubbles of beer in it. They were shimmering and
popping and then forming again somewhere else. Just like that: out of thin air
there was beer. Miraculous.

He blinked, and that cast the bubbles
into the depths of wherever such bubbles lived, and when he reopened his eyes
they popped up again, inflating slightly.

It was incredible. It was
wonderful
even, but he hadn’t the time to enjoy it now.

“I can’t grab a cold one with you,” he
said apologetically, “not right now…but…maybe later.”

He tried to blink himself sober, but
that didn’t work, because it couldn’t work and never did, so he narrowed his eyes
and craned his neck forward, moving his head in time with the drunken bobbing
of the world around him, in an effort to compensate.

The world was a barfly too, as it
turned out. Straining his eyes at the undulating pizza sliver of New Crozet
that he was able to make out it in front of him, he didn’t like what he was
seeing. No, not one bit.

Several of the townspeople, most of
them older, had fallen, landing on their hands and knees, then falling flat or
rolling over and putting their hands to their ears. His own ears were ringing,
but he didn’t mind that.

Sometimes the brew did that to him, or
maybe it was just the evenings, because it happened in the evenings, and most
anything that happened to him could be attributed to alcamahol, because he was
always throwing back that poison and barflying to his heart’s utter content,
within the limits of what he could produce, of course, and when he was even
remotely coherent—a rare event, he was either being a pain at the town meetings
or hard at work expanding his operation.

“Grain,” he mumbled, remembering that
was the reason he’d come out here in the first place. He needed more grain, and
he had some old tools in his shed that he could trade, not that they’d be worth
much, but you never knew what the traders might want, odd bunch as they were.

“Grain.”

He bowed slightly, put his hands on
his knees, and squinted at the fires burning in the perimeter. It felt like the
ground was rocking beneath him, like a rolling wave that would carry him to the
fence where…

“Oh shit.
Shit.
” The fence, he
realized,
they
are gonna get in.

“
No.
” It was a drunkard’s
whine, as if he were asking for more drink, and in fact, he was. He did want
more—time travel juice was exactly the order of the moment, because if New
Crozet was exposed, the fucking zombies would get in, and that was a time to
escape from.
This
was a time to run away from. If they did get in, he
realized, there’d never be any more drink again.

And no more spirits to visit with,
either. No more flying shadows of regret. All of that, all of this town, the
zombies would spirit away.

“Spirit of the grain,” spilled out of
his mouth, except it came out, ‘
spit
of ’a cay.’

He repeated it, and focusing on the
word ‘spirit’ made some old thing in his head that had been put away and gathering
dust for years click on and then he was moving into the crowd and toward the
fires in the broken fence.

He was going to put a stop to this,
and damn right no zombies were getting in on his watch.

It wasn’t much of a watch, because he
couldn’t quite see straight right now, and he wouldn’t have been able to pour
himself a drink without missing his cup, but he pushed himself toward the
commotion all the same, having no idea what he’d do when he was in position to
do it, and not knowing where said position was, either.

As Larry Knapp stumbled on, urged
forward by a delirious and sudden inspiration, the town center, illuminated by
the sky’s firelight, was overcome by chaos.