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  Order of the Dead

  Copyright © 2015 by Guy James.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Survivors

  Part Two: Market

  Part Three: Spotting

  Part Four: Prophecy

  PART ONE

  Survivors

  “The virus runs its fingers over us, grinning at the bloody trail it leaves behind. It speaks through our mouths, pushing pointless gusts of air through a leather bellows with torn lips. Yearning, it delights in the movements of our flesh and bone as it breaks us, over and again, in its relentless push through the world, toward the Equilibrium.”

  Brother Mardu, Order of the Dead.

  1

  It crossed the tree line, trampling a cluster of fairy ring mushrooms and leaving the branches of a holly bush shuddering in its wake. When it was just barely inside the clearing, it stopped, still out of reach of the spotlights. There it tilted its head skyward, seeming at the same time to lean into the night, as if it were drawing the power of the moon’s sallow gaze into itself by drinking of the ashen glow.

  It did this the way you might put a hand against a wall to regain your strength or find courage, and this was when it would have taken a breath to steel itself, were it still a breathing thing, which, of course, it no longer was.

  Instead, what the prideful moonbeams lit up was a creature foul and sagging, not alive but still moving in spite of the laws of nature—well, the old laws, anyway. The night was brave and just-hatched, and it knew better than to take account of the past or its rules. The dark had its own way of doing things, and it was keeping score now.

  The spell of stillness broke, and the zombie set off on a clumsy lope toward New Crozet.

  Senna Phillips, Rosemary Preston, and Alan Rice were inside the perimeter, watching. They were standing on a well-flattened patch of ground that Senna and Alan’s boots knew well, but which Rosemary had never visited before.

  Alan’s face was sun-swept, rugged, and, at the present moment, emotionless. The Voltaire II was heavy in his hands, its shoulder strap, which should have borne most of the weight, hanging slack at his side. The weapon was the revamped model of the Voltaire I, the great numero uno of Voltaires, which had been state-of-the-art nine years ago, back when the fine artists had all turned in their trowels for good.

  A gust of wind caught Senna’s hair, shifting the long strands about her face, but she gave no sign of noticing. She appeared to be entirely within her element, so self-possessed and calm that even the metallic luster the moon gave her hair seemed like something she’d arranged. Poised inches from her sidearm, her right hand was starting to feel that familiar, tugging itch.

  Senna was New Crozet’s best spotter, a master at predicting the break, the critical point when a zombie moved from a state of dormancy to rampage. Few others in the world, and no one in town, could match her skill. She had a gift, and that was why she, and some of those fortunate enough to have been around her, had survived.

  Breathing slowly through her nose, she regarded the thing outside the perimeter coolly. It was getting closer to New Crozet’s fence, and nearer to breaking.

  And that’s what we’re here for, she thought.

  Alan was a cleaner, a former foot soldier of the reclamation efforts that had come after the zombie apocalypse, and some thought that he was the best at what he did, but he believed that ‘longest-lived’ was the more fitting term for it.

  He didn’t think there was that much to killing and burning zombies other than being careful about your routine, and, above all else, having the benefit of a talented spotter like Senna. What he did, he knew, was nothing like spotting.

  If you asked him, he’d tell you that he’d been lucky more times than any man deserved.

  You take what you get, he thought, and you keep on fighting.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Alan saw Rosemary’s ponytail trembling, and, as he firmed up his resolve—they were doing the right thing by having the girl here…it had to be done—he briefly took one hand out from under the Voltaire II’s chassis and pushed his black-framed glasses back up to the top of his nose.

  The tension in Alan’s body was growing by the moment: his stomach muscles were starting to contract, and his mouth was becoming uncomfortably dry. Though he’d been with the reclamation crews, the rec-crews, for years, the fear had never gone away, and, he was sure, it never would.

  2

  Rosemary was nine years old, and, unlike the adults at either side of her, she was visibly nervous, chewing on her lip, shifting from foot to foot, and pulling at the loose strings of her jacket sleeve with the fingers of her left hand.

  The girl looked up at the night sky, where thick, wispy clouds were floating dreamily, as out of place on the world’s rim as she felt now, trying to stand with purpose so close to the fence.

  The moon yellowed at her as she stared at it, offering up a jaundiced grin, as if it knew the punch line to it all, and thought the joke to be not only funny, but maddeningly so. Having found no comfort in the sky, Rosemary lowered her gaze and looked through the window in the fence.

  Following her eyes with its wan, smirking stare, the moon watched the creature stumble closer, stirring up dust and rocks and clods of dirt, uncovering damp soil and setting the worms that had been crawling there to search for shelter deeper in the earth.

  Rosemary looked over at Alan, and in his face she saw none of what she herself was feeling. All she could see was the light of an intense focus, what looked to her like an almost-otherworldly determination.

  But, under the surface, the pit of Alan’s belly was filled with concern for Senna and Rosemary. The feeling was a gnawing discomfort that lived in the background of his being, like a tunneling animal, and now it was popping its anxious head out of its hole, and in its dirt-clotted paws it was holding a bow-tied gift of dread.

  Senna wasn’t Alan’s wife, and Rosemary wasn’t his daughter, but they might as well have been. They were like his family now—no, they were his family now because they were all he had left, and he was all they had left. He would die for either; would endure the cruelest torture to spare their lives.

  As he looked at Senna, a familiar longing passed through him, a need to never be apart from her, to touch her and hold her and kiss her scars and listen to her talk about anything in that high, melodious voice of hers. Lust colored the feeling a light shade of red, like a crayon dabbing its essence in between shapely lines and want reached him even now, folding the depth of feeling he had for her into it, and then the physical desire was overturned and subsumed in the fullness of his affection for his everything, his world, his Senna.

  She turned and looked at him, appearing to have read his mind, and she probably had, because she was good at that, or at least at seeming to do so. Her eyes accepted his love and want, and returned her own, and her gaze glimmered with a stubborn will to live and love and keep on living, even in a world they didn’t control anymore, a world that was limited to an area inside a fence.

  Not a cage, she thought, a home.

  The corners of her lips twitched upward, the movement nearly imperceptible, but Alan saw it, or felt it, or something, he wasn’t sure. She turned back to the gate.

  Behind the townspeople, the Blue Ridge Mountains stood looming over all of New Crozet, framing the town within great, undulating c
urves of the muted shades of autumn. Opposite the mountains, the clearing of dirt beyond the gate was glowing under the spotlights, and a twenty yard stretch of road could be seen leading into the forest until it disappeared, swallowed by the tree line and the shadows of wooded limbs that minded the toll there. The forest interior was obscured fully in night, the moon’s forays out from cloud cover unable to reach past the darkled canopies of turning leaves.

  An orchestra of unseen insects was now in the third act of its musical backdrop, and Alan wasn’t sure whether complete silence would have been more or less unnerving than the melody, whose eeriness the critters had perfected over millennia. Practice makes perfect, and when you have ages for it, the practice doesn’t have to be perfect, just ongoing.

  The drone, a mélange made up of the scrapes of insect limbs and punctuated by staccato wing beats, had fallen off noticeably in the moments before the zombie materialized out of the forest’s gloom, and since then, the insect song had recovered most, though not all, of its previous volume, and was now playing on in muted fashion.

  Rosemary’s eyes ran over the pockmarked surface of the concrete slab in front of her. It was one of many blocks that made up the bottom third of the eighteen foot high fence encircling New Crozet. The concrete was there to keep out the smallest zombie animals, which would have been able to squeeze through the chain link that protruded from the concrete’s top like an overgrown hedge, lousy with rust.

  The girl’s asthma said a greeting to her then, as she was staring at the fence and trying to grapple with what she was about to do. She drew the air in, but it wouldn’t connect properly, and when she tried again, it still didn’t get to where it was supposed to go.

  It was probably fear squeezing her chest, and she knew that, so she tried to calm herself by focusing on the imperfections in the cement seal between the concrete blocks in front of her, on the cracks and rough spots and flecks of dirt. She found a large crack, gazed at it, then shut her eyes tight, watching the image’s afterglow burn in her mind’s eye.

  It was closing in on a minute since her last breath had connected, and she could feel the choking, panic tears building behind her eyes, but she couldn’t let them out, wouldn’t, because that would just make it worse.

  With her eyes still closed, trying to apply all of her focus to the image of the crack, a jagged, stretched-out, not-quite rectangle, she tried to breathe in again. This time, thankfully, the air filled the far reaches of her lungs with relief, and the tension that had been building up in her slowly-suffocating body loosened its hold.

  She opened her eyes, being careful to look only at the fence, and not at Senna or Alan, not wanting to look at them, or more precisely, not wanting them to see her looking, because they might see the horror written on her face.

  The noises coming from the clearing grew louder, and she realized that in her terror-fueled asthmatic gasps, the sounds of dirt being scraped and kicked up, the hollow, lung-rattling moans, the feral bleats, they’d all been drowned out, but even so, the relative quiet hadn’t been enough to pretend that this was a bad dream that would unravel upon waking.

  She balled up her left hand, the one that wasn’t holding the gun, the one that had been fidgeting and crawling about her body like a spider, looking for loose strings to pick at, into a fist, and that helped her get some control over her shaking.

  Alan glanced at Rosemary and saw that she was staring at the concrete. She looked anxious, but she was holding the pistol, identical to Senna’s though out of its holster, in a determined grip, the barrel pointing downward.

  Before the concrete, the whole fence had been made of chain link, and that had proven to be bad for business. Mice, rats, voles, squirrels, chipmunks, and small birds, all of the zombie persuasion, as luck had it, had wriggled into New Crozet on occasion, and, because not all of these could be found and killed in time, some had made their way into New Crozet homes, ensuring the town population’s steady decline.

  It was fortunate—thank goodness for small miracles—that the virus made its victims into automatons, brainless robots, which staggered and crawled, putrefying as they went, with most of their prior coordination gone. Had the birds held onto their ability to fly after infection, the concrete would have been useless, and all but the underground settlements would have been lost.

  After the concrete was finished, the population stabilized, and the people who’d been guarding the fence were freed up for other tasks, and then New Crozet had prospered, in a post-apocalyptic, trapped-in-a-confined-space-until-you-die sort of way.

  Locked up for all these years, Alan thought. If that’s prosperity…

  He looked at Rosemary again, and this time he frowned because she looked extremely tense, more so than the other children usually did at this point, and on seeing that, a weight of sadness alighted on his shoulders, making the Voltaire II feel instantly heavier. He turned away from the girl, straightened, and tried to force the guilt from his mind.

  A fear nagged at him then, as he stared blankly at the ground between Senna and Rosemary’s feet and the fence: what if a zombie burrowed under and got in?

  The concrete was buried to a depth of three feet, but that didn’t seem enough when he obsessed over it—no depth did—and although he’d never seen any zombies burrow, the virus could mutate again, and who knew what the next viral iteration would bring? A digging trait, or some return of dexterity, weren’t out of the question.

  Alan was sure that if there was another mutation, it would be the last, the end, regardless of what changes it brought.

  Though he never spoke about this with the other townspeople, he suspected that they shared his feelings on the subject. The virus had grown stronger with time, and it was poised to take everything, to take all of them. It was simply a matter of when.

  He shook his head.

  It’s no good to think this way, he thought. Least of all now.

  3

  Rosemary, Senna, and Alan were in the narrow alley that began in the westernmost corner of the outer gate and extended away from the town, like a peninsula of fence reaching for the forest. At the farthest point in the alley, at a height of five feet, was a semi-circular window made of multiple panes of transparent, bulletproof plastic.

  Like a porthole into the territory of the zombies, this window gave the townspeople a complete view of New Crozet’s entrance.

  The alley had in it another, smaller window, rectangular and made for communicating with the drivers of visiting vehicles, which were few and far between, and, normally, restricted to market days. The window was small and high enough that, even when opened, no zombies could get through.

  The plastic pane of this window was removable, unlike the curved pane of the viewing window at the alley’s edge and now, the pane was gone, because Alan had removed it earlier, and Senna and Rosemary were positioned in front of the opening. The air in the frame seemed to be threatening, as if it had the power to suck them all through and out of New Crozet’s safety, and was simply waiting for the right moment to do so.

  Senna stiffened, and Alan, noting her change in manner, gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on the Voltaire II.

  The break.

  There came the first snap, and then the second, and then more in rapid succession that sounded like cannon fire in the night, and, suddenly, the zombie was moving at a blinding clip, its rotten body hurtling toward the fence, heading for the curved window at the end of the alley, not the open one.

  They always do this, Alan thought dismally. There was a cold logic in their behaviors, hardwired in them by the virus, and they never deviated from the program. Even the mistakes they made, if they could be called that, were all the same.

  It slammed headfirst into the plastic pane, further breaking the bones of its face and head, adding to the disfigurement given to it by years of injury and rot.

  Rosemary jumped backward and failed to stifle a gasp. The children were taught from a young age to be quiet, and to stay away from t
he fence to begin with, but to risk no more than a whisper if the fence was in sight. Now that didn’t matter so much, seeing as how they’d called this zombie here themselves.

  The girl’s gun hitched upward, remaining precariously in her grip, and for a moment it looked like she might lose her balance and fall, but Senna caught her by the shoulders and got her steady.

  Alan exhaled. He wasn’t worried for his own safety, he’d been in far too many encounters with the zombies for that, and closer ones than this, but Rosemary had never done anything like this before, and though Senna was more experienced than he was, seeing her so close to a zombie again unnerved him.

  It was a safe exercise, at least to the extent they could make it one, but it was still dangerous because if nothing else, the virus had proven that, under its influence, the state of the world could be entirely unpredictable.

  The zombie staggered backward from the semi-circle of plastic, reversed course, and slammed its head into the plastic again. Then it stumbled back once more, its gait more bent now, more damaged.

  Backing away from the perimeter, it threw its head about wildly, as if trying to pick up a scent not with the stump that was left of its nose but with the sides of its face. The virus, it seemed, was looking for another way in.

  Alan took this opportunity to move in and crept to the viewing window, ducked, and looked through it, scanning the forest.

  His eyes searched for the tree line, and after a few moments of gazing at the darkness past the ground lit up by the spotlights, fixed on it. There, at the tree line, tendrils of shadow were creeping toward the town, venturing toward the spotlights and struggling to find a way into the illuminated clearing.

  He stared, and as he did, a puzzled expression bloomed on his face. Something wasn’t right.