Order of the Dead (49 page)

5

Mardu went on. “Everything has to grow up, to evolve. Just like children.” He
gazed at her. “The cheap drug you talk about, it was like fuel to the fire. The
virus was already out there, and Krok gave it bodies to work with, human labs,
playgrounds. The virus liked the way Krok changed people, the landscape it
created in them, and so the virus played with these people,
in them,
and
it figured out how to grow, and so it did.”

In fact, this was very close to the
truth, and Mardu sensed it the same way he intuited meaning in what the virus
did. It was this same talent of perception that was at the root of his great
spotting ability, and the reason he’d never dared to try Krok himself when he
was peddling it, though he’d never had a qualm about sampling a drug before.

The germ in question, the great
ancestor of the outbreak’s architect, had been engineered, its modified
workings made such that it targeted the same people that drug dealers did,
those whose DNA was twisted up just right to make them perfect slaves to
addiction. The mutations that followed after Krok and the genetically-altered
virus met, however, were not in anyone’s plans. And so, from randomness and
destructive acts of science, the outbreak had been born.

Now, within the mobile kingdom that
he’d built out of thin air from the viral whisperings he heard there and the sheer
force of his will, Mardu’s eyes gave one brilliant sparkle, and, for a moment,
he felt like his old self again. The velvety roll of his voice was back. He
went deeper into his old spiel, virus as god, Equilibrium Day, and so on, and
he was starting to feel the belief in it coming back, even stronger than he had
when he was explaining the Order to Senna and Rosemary earlier that day.

Though he felt things were still too fragile
to turn Rosemary in front of everyone and deny them her meat right to their
faces—he was intending to parade the zombie version of her around later, going
around to each brother and sister one by one, with Saul, who would be armed,
and who would weed out the unbelievers, to be eaten, and the blood of the weak
would fuel the strong, and the order of the Order would be restored.

He talked for a little while longer,
his speech gaining speed and the persuasive notes deepening, until he thought
the practice enough. He’d thought on the Krokodil theory long and hard in the
past, and in this case he really did believe and always had believed that the
drug had somehow cultivated the zombie disease in people, as if creating
fertile ground from which the virus could sprout.

When he’d said it all, he proceeded,
and Rosemary felt the pressure of the knife’s blade against her skin again. The
knife twisted sharply, opening up a flap of skin, and Mardu had done this as if
he were turning a key in a lock, forcing the door open with unnecessary
roughness.

Rosemary screamed and tears began a
renewed assault down her cheeks. Then Acrisius’s face drew closer to hers,
almost touching it, and she could smell his foul breath on her face, the odor
of rotting teeth constantly poking its head out of the generalized stench. He
was moving in to finish the job.

Brother Mardu moved backward, like he
was trying to recede into the shadows. In fact, he was. He’d done his part and
he didn’t want to be there anymore.

He’d felt the world shift with the
cutting of Rosemary’s skin. One minute he’d been on top of the highest mountain
again, and now the globe had turned and left him amiss, with no ground to stand
on and plummeting downward lower and lower and...

If spotting could be compared to
having a Spidey Sense, then Mardu’s Spidey Sense was tingling out of control
right now, the shifting pins and needles somersaulting through his flesh and
making it difficult to move, difficult to think, difficult to…to anything at
all. It was practically all he could do not to start shooting web from his
wrists. Something big was about to go down, but what?

He now had a very bad feeling about
all of this, and wished that he’d run off yesterday. They should’ve moved off
then and gone to the next settlement.

There wasn’t anything wrong with that.
Fuck power. Survival came first. He’d had the power long enough, and now he
realized that he’d held onto it too long, and there was no way he could let go
of it gracefully anymore. Thinking on this, feeling the epic hurt and confusion
welling up in him, he pulled the cowl of his robe over his head, then tugged
its sides forward to cover the sides of his face.

“Do it already,” Brother Mardu blurted.
He could now feel the panic sweat springing up on his cheeks and brow, on his
neck, and at his armpits and the small of his back. Nausea came, and not of the
regular kind. This was the sort that came when something real fucking big was
about to happen. And big meant life-changing, and life-changing meant life-
threatening.

The girl shrieked.

“Now!” Mardu yelled, almost choking on
the word. “Now!”

Brother Acrisius advanced the gloved
snarl of his hand toward the girl. In it was a piece of the Embodiment, tightly
curled in the tangle of bony, barely controllable fingers.

Rosemary strained with all her remaining
might against the ropes that bound her arms and legs. She screamed and tried to
kick and snap at Acrisius’s disgusting face with her teeth. It had come to
that. She wasn’t one to succumb without a fight, but she didn’t stand a chance,
tied up as she was.

Brother Acrisius slapped her face with
his good hand. The force of the blow turned her head sideways and stars of pain
lit up a bright, nauseating green in her head. She slumped against her bonds.

“Hold still,” he said. “We’re almost
done here.”

Clumsily, he pressed the morsel of
zombie flesh against Rosemary’s open wound. He pushed again and again until the
fingers unfurled and the Embodiment’s legacy was kissing the blood of the girl
from New Crozet—born and raised.

The piece of flesh being pressed into
her was like a crayon filling the outlines in the coloring books that she
owned, the ones that Alan had given her. But that wasn’t right, because there
were no more lines to be filled, and this crayon was rotten and full of the
worst poison the world had ever seen. The semi-conscious Rosemary whimpered. Then
the brave child didn’t so much surrender as she was taken, the stuffing pulled
out of her and replaced with filler of the virus’s own making.

6

Senna woke. She was back in the cell, lying face down on the floor. The pain
came alive, like a computer booting up, and it was hot, stinging, and everywhere.

She pushed herself up into a sitting
position, moving slowly, then tested each of her limbs in turn, feeling out the
extent of the damage the brothers had inflicted. The pain was chewing at her,
but as far as she could tell, nothing was broken. And she was no longer tied up,
which she thought odd.

Maybe they thought what they’d done
was enough to immobilize her. Maybe they thought she was theirs now.

They’d beaten her to within twelve
inches of her life, and that’s a whole foot away. And that was a right good distance
for their sakes, because Brother Mardu had told them that if they killed her,
they should do themselves next, and quickly, because if he got to them, he’d
make the pain last.

He’d even suggested, in an off-color
remark that had become rare for him of late, that they could take each other’s
lives while in the throes of a final coitus of certainly not Old Testament
variety, and that still assumed that one of them convincingly played the
female. He’d even thought it necessary to add that Brother Saul could try putting
on some women’s clothing for foreplay purposes, if they could find anything so
large in the camp.

Coitus interruptus by death, not that
they needed birth control, of course. What they needed, if you asked Brother
Mardu at least, what the Order needed, was the exact opposite. They needed to
grow, get larger, not self-select out of the gene pool like they were doing.

What the hell was in the post-outbreak
water, Brother Mardu often wondered, or in the food, that was making everyone,
at least his followers, voluntarily take themselves out of the breeding pool?
If you asked Acrisius and Saul on the other hand, the last thing Acrisius
wanted was another woman in their ranks, especially an outsider like Senna,
who, it was clear to him, would be a troublemaker from the start.

Saul didn’t share Acrisius’s basic
dislike for women, and he would’ve been okay with Senna coming on board, though
he was always nervous about a possible new distraction for his master. Who knew
when Acrisius’s tastes might turn, assuming they could, and Senna was just
pretty enough to tempt someone into trying new things, though Saul suspected
that Acrisius was—at least probably—beyond such fair-skinned lures.

What neither of them, nor, for that
matter, anyone else in the Order could have expected, was that rather than
weaken her resolve, the beating would strengthen it.  Alan might have suspected
such a thing, but that was because he knew what was in her soul.

She looked around, the turning of her
head sending fresh starbursts of pain shooting through her neck, and that was a
motivation, too, because she could keep this pain from the children. There was
a way. It was just a matter of taking all the right forks in the road, in the
correct sequence. The path was there, and now she had to choose it, and wisely.

Sasha and Jenny were there, sitting in
the corner of the cell. Jenny, the fourteen year old, had Sasha’s head in her
lap.

Senna bit back her rage.

They would be next to be turned. Or,
how had Mardu put it?
Given.

Sasha was whimpering while Jenny cried
quietly and stroked the younger girl’s hair. They had scratches on them and
their clothes were dirty and torn, but they appeared to be relatively unharmed.
Jenny’s eyes met Senna’s, and shame colored the girl’s face.

I must look like hell, Senna thought.

There was an untouched bowl of gruel
sitting by the cell entrance. In the mixture was a spot of something that
looked like phlegm, and Senna didn’t doubt that was what it was. They were surrounded
by demented sadists, who she didn’t doubt would get off from a gesture such as
spitting into their prisoners’ food.

“Where’s Rosemary?” Senna asked.

Sasha shook her head.

“I don’t know,” Jenny said.

“When did you last see her?” Senna asked,
her despair growing.

“When you were here,” Jenny said.

“We have to go,” Senna said, “now. How
do you feel? Are you okay? Are you awake enough to move?”

The children nodded and got up. They
did it as if there actually was a way out, as if they weren’t locked up in a
cell.

They were blurry-eyed and drowsy, but
the Sultan was starting to wear off. The Order was all out of his highness’s
good graces for now.

Maybe that was only to get us out of
town, Senna thought, suspecting the drugs were scarce and hard to come by.

She went to the bars of the cell and
peered down the hall. There was no one there.

Then she examined the padlock that
kept the door in place and turned back to the children.

“Do you have anything metal or
plastic?” she asked. “Bobby pins, clips, clasps, bracelets, anything?”

She ran her fingers through her own
hair and checked her own pockets as the children took stock of what they had on
them. After finding that she had nothing, she walked around the cell, quickly
scanning the floor. There was nothing useful.

The brothers had cleaned her out when
they’d captured her. God how she wished she’d been quicker to the draw when
they grabbed her; at the very least she could’ve sounded the alarm sooner.

Now Jack was dead—no, not even dead,
but turned into a zombie, which was much worse—and Senna knew what was being
done to Molly and Rad—the same thing that the
normal
cannibals did with
their prisoners. Soon she and the children would meet equally grim fates. The notion
of defeat was creeping into her, as much as she was trying to keep it out in
the chill air beyond the threshold.

Their belts and shoes had been taken
from them, and their pockets emptied, but Acrisius and Saul hadn’t done nearly
as good a job of it as they should have. That’s not to say the New Crozet prisoners
should’ve been turned upside down and shaken, but something just short of that.

Their clothes should’ve been searched
more carefully, had the Order been doing it right, but Acrisius and Saul—who
were the only ones Brother Mardu still trusted with tasks like this—had been in
a hurry to commence a lovemaking session. Brother Acrisius, as it turned out,
had needed some serious soothing after his experience in the town, and Saul was
more than happy to rush the search if it meant he’d get to submit to his master
sooner.

With a gleam that wasn’t quite hope in
her eyes, Sasha offered up two bobby pins and a butterfly clip, all of which
had been in one of her pockets. Senna looked them over, trying to hide her
disappointment.

“Okay,” Senna said as she turned to
Jenny, “what about you?”

Jenny produced a lone, bronze-colored
bangle. It was open in the middle, and made for a child’s wrist. Senna guessed
that Rad had made it—he sometimes tried his hand at metalwork with the tools he’d
gathered over the years. He loved making things for the children.

“Thank you Rad,” she mouthed. “God,
Rad.
”

She took the bangle and pulled at its
ends, opening up the metal band as wide as she could, until it was stretched almost
straight. She crept back to the door of the cell, and, with the undone piece of
metal in her hand, reached through the bars.

She was positioning her lock pick in
front of the padlock’s keyhole when there came a noise, and someone, one of the
Order’s number, was entering the truck.