Welcome and Order of the Dead: After the Zombie War, Part One, Chapters 1-10

Welcome!

My latest book, Order of the Dead: After the Zombie War, is out! Below and in subsequent posts is a good portion of the text for your enjoyment! The formatting didn’t keep, but the substance is there. You can download the full version on Amazon, and you can check out my Amazon author page here. I am working on uploading more of my writing, and on getting this site back up and running after an extended hiatus.

Best,
Guy


Order of the Dead: After the Zombie War

Description: We were the strongest, the bravest, the luckiest. You had to be all three to be among the few who remained. But even after surviving for all these years after the zombie apocalypse, the fight still wasn't over. Maybe it would never be over. The zombies were still there, out there, but not just the zombies now. Now there were worse enemies. And it was our time to make the final stand, to fight for what little was left of the world, and to leave to our children a world free of an evil more terrible than the zombies. We were going to win, had to win, or die trying.

 

Order of the Dead: After the Zombie War

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.



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 curves 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 the 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.

A new movement caught his eye and he looked away from the trees to face the zombie directly. It was turning, the wild tossing of its head slowing, as it edged in the direction of the other window, the one that Alan had opened earlier, then it took off in a shambling run.

“It’s coming,” Alan whispered, turning toward Senna and Rosemary and positioning himself closer to them. “Get ready.”

Behind Alan , a piece of sparsely-haired zombie flesh left stuck to the window’s rounded plastic seemed to glare at his back, as if daring him to return. Within the spectrum of viral gore, it was unremarkable, a souvenir of the zombie’s collision with the window, and a minor one at that. It would dry in the sun and fall off eventually, a poisonous jerky.

He moved so that he was behind Senna and Rosemary, who were standing in front of the window, waiting. He adjusted his hands under the Voltaire II and studied Rosemary, who appeared calmer now, more attuned to Senna’s wavelength, which was good.

Then the putrid odor that belonged so completely to the zombies reached them and hugged them tight with its foulness, entering their nostrils and nipping at their skin, coming uninvited and as it pleased, passing over welcome mats and dirtying the rug.

Rosemary’s breath caught, and she began to feel a spell of lightheadedness coming on as the good air was being pushed away from her, displaced by floating particles of rot, and the far reaches of her lungs began to close up in protest again.

The virus very much wanted those lungs for itself, faulty though they were, and the girl in whom they resided, and, if it got its way, it would have them, and her, and the rest of the holdouts who’d squirreled themselves away in the self-imposed captivity of places like New Crozet.


4
Above New Crozet’s outer gate, Corks clicked off his rifle safety and then scratched absently at a frayed spot on his pant leg. Like Alan, Senna, and Rosemary below him, he was wearing old and practical clothing that was threadbare in places and worn with no eye to matching pieces or catching the latest fashion trends, although the tattered and ill-fitting look was certainly in these days, and they all had that down to a T.

His full name was Corbet X. Noire, but he preferred not be reminded of his former life. The name his parents had given him would get him to thinking about his father, who, even though the ‘X’ in Corks’s name stood for Xavier, had liked to joke that it was pronounced ‘Javier.’ And that would only serve to remind him of his father, who’d died long before his time—thank God he isn’t alive to see any of this—and of the short-lived father-son relationships in the Noire line. The fathers in his ancestry always seemed to die too young, leaving their sons as children in the world, but he’d broken with that tradition, or rather, the virus had done it, by taking Corks’s son from him.

When his father had died, Corks had been left a boy with too many questions, questions that he’d wanted to ask his father, but no longer could, and didn’t have the heart to bring up with his mother. The outbreak had made him realize that he’d also had things to say to his son that he hadn’t raised in time, and now never would. There was a lesson in that, he knew—ask it while you can, say it while you can, ask them what they think and tell them you love them…while you can.

Corbet Xavier-pronounced-Javier Noire looked down at Senna, Alan, and Rosemary, and at the approaching zombie, whose stench of death was being carried to him on the shifting breeze.

It was trying to get in and give that smell to New Crozet, and fulfill Corks’s worst nightmare, which he thought on much and now, there it was again, right on time, that familiar scene coalescing in his mind from the circling vapors of memory and dread, which always found him in moments such as this, and he’d learned with time, resistance was futile.

Superimposed on his vision, he saw the townspeople as pictures of decay, going about their business of aimless, walking death, trapped inside the New Crozet perimeter, dormant in an enclosure that lacked prey. Moments later, his son, Remy, stumbled out from behind the little church where the town meetings were held and with painful slowness he joined the New Crozet zombie horde, and together, they advanced on the town center, drawing closer to the market.

Remy’s full name was Remy Y. Noire, and the middle initial stood for Yoren, the name of Remy’s grandfather on his mother’s side. Corks had joked with him that he had a family duty to give his own son a middle name that began with ‘z,’ to keep the family tradition of alphabetically progressing middle names alive. It could’ve been Zane or Zed or Zarul or Zanuda or Zax or countless others, the possibilities had been happily endless, and it had been for Remy to decide, anyway.

Joking with Remy about middle names had made Corks feel like he was somehow connecting with his own father, understanding the man more and getting to know him in a way he’d never had the chance to do in life.

Remy never had a son, and, though Corks suspected there was something left of Remy somewhere, it wasn’t really him anymore, no, it was…just the virus.

The scene in his head kept developing, like a strip of photographic film taking a chilling, chemical bath, and Corks saw that in the tangle of zombie limbs, Remy wasn’t a man in the prime of his life as he’d been before the outbreak, but a mindless, physical ruin showing break upon break…upon break.

New Crozet is purgatory, Corks’s mind sang to him in the mocking lilt that it had perfected over the last decade. It’s the ultimate punishment for those unworthy even of hell.

That means you, Corks. You. You must’ve done some seriously rank shit to earn your comeuppance, and you’re livin’ it up now, oh yes you are.

Focus, he told himself. Focus on the present, on your job. You have a duty to New Crozet, to your people, to the people who are left.

Shutting his eyes he managed to pull the curtain shut on the vision of an undead New Crozet, and the torturous performance of his synapses was forced into an intermission.

There was a mental sigh of relief…which was cut short when a dragging foot poked out from under the curtain, and then a human shape pressed into the corded burgundy fabric above the foot, and he knew it was only a matter of time until the zombies fought their clumsy way past the shutter for Act Two.

He opened his eyes and looked down. These were his people, and he was charged with taking care of them, and he’d be damned—more so, completely so—if he failed now. Straightening to his full height, just shy of six feet, he thrust his chest forward and sucked in his nonexistent gut, catching a stronger whiff of the rot in the air.

In the days soon after the outbreak, he’d been unable to keep from gagging when the stench that was wafting up to the tower was around him, but now, his stomach held its ground easily.

He aimed, knowing that this was where it could get dicey, and centered the zombie’s head in his rifle sight. He’d been out in the field with Senna and Alan many times in the past, and in spite of this exercise’s relative safety…well, that was just it, it was only relative. And if something went wrong, well…

Corks glanced at the two locked gates behind the people at the fence, catching a glimpse of the town, where a scatter of dim lights was emanating from the shadowy silhouettes of houses. Even with the zombie closing in, the town looked peaceful, unworried, in a quiet and well-earned repose.

Separating Alan, Senna, and Rosemary from New Crozet’s interior and faint, hopeful illumination, were two inner gates, which were locked, and if the approaching zombie or any of its kind found a way through the outer gate, then Senna, Rosemary, and Alan would have nowhere to flee.

The inner gates wouldn’t be opened for them, and if not for them, certainly not for any other New Crozet citizen in their place. They’d be forced to deal with the threat themselves, walled in by gates on a narrow strip of ground, with only the help of Corks from his watchtower.

The three gates could only be opened in sequence, and no two could ever be opened at the same time. Well, technically they could be, but that wasn’t allowed under any circumstances, and this rule, that only one gate be opened at any given time, was the strictest one New Crozet had, and anyone discovered breaking it would be expelled, a punishment that meant certain death.

You could survive outside the perimeter for some length of time, especially if you were skilled at spotting, but, even then, the virus’s progress could only be delayed.

The zombies, even while dormant, always crept closer to you. They were blind and drawn only to noise, but the virus sharpened their sense of hearing so that even the faintest sound was enough to attract them, and the noise you’d make, as an uninfected human, was the best of all, a sensory delicacy that the virus needed to stuff into its hungrily gaping mouth and suck all the juices from.

Of course, the sounds made by your helpless movements were just an appetizer, and the main course was your flesh, and, if the virus was lucky enough for you to be a child, a little boy or girl who’d made it for so long after the outbreak; the special du jour would be your fear, your anguish, your suffering, as it dawned on you that you’d been bitten and were turning, graduating from the zombie boot camp with flying colors.

That…that fear, that knowing anguish, was the most delectable of spices on the virus’s tongue, and of increasing rarity these days, what with so few people left.

The real clincher was that even if you were good enough to spot the zombies, the virus’s legions of feelers, coming, your instinct—that built-in, human instinct—was to run, and if you did, you’d make noise, and the faster you tried to get away, the louder you’d get, and the faster the zombies would come, slipping by degrees out of dormancy until…

The break.

And after that, after they were broken, there was little hope left.

If you were like most people, you’d run when you saw the diseased viciousness closing in behind you, and if you hadn’t been a sprinter before the outbreak, you’d learn quick, or not, and that would take care of itself, because the zombies were blazing fast after they broke, like flashes of death running after you while your lungs burned and your muscles cried out for air and your heart for mercy. But the virus’s kind, they didn’t need air, ’cause they don’t need no stinking fuel, no, they want only one thing, and it’s the same thing they run on, too, a mastery of perpetual motion if there ever was one.

All they want, all they need, and wantonly at that, is to put the virus in you, so it can eat you alive.


5
Senna allowed herself a backward glance, reassuring herself that Alan was still behind her, and, had she needed it, that would’ve helped brace her for what was about to happen, but she didn’t need it, because this was routine and safe, for the most part. They were inside the perimeter, and though something could always go wrong, the elements that could be controlled here, were.

Past Alan, she could see that the town was quiet, encapsulated in a semi-darkness made of night, moonlight, moonlit reflections, and the dim, wandering emissions of lamps from a few of the houses.

The lights were low because it was late, but also because electricity was carefully rationed to avoid overloading the transmission lines. An overload might require Senna, Alan, and some of the other experienced townspeople to risk their lives traveling outside the perimeter for repairs.

A person could be kicked out for wasting power, but it had never been done, even with drunks like Larry Knapp who frequently passed out with their lights on. He was the town’s expert imbiber, after all, and New Crozet looked after its own, such as they were.

People didn’t use that much power anymore anyway, hardly running ACs in the summer or using appliances, as if electricity had gone out of style over the years. Maybe it was because turning the machines on brought the past to life, reminding them all of what was lost for good and it was better not to stir up those feelings, better to sweat it out in the heat of summer without the latest soap opera on the tube than to dredge up idle sharp things.

The zombie had now closed most of the distance to the open window, in front of which the three townspeople were standing. Given the state of its body, its bones, it was a wonder the thing didn’t fall over—you had to give it to the virus sometimes.

Rosemary edged closer to Senna, and Alan took in the movement with his peripheral vision, but his gaze remained fixed on the open frame.

Up in the tower, Corks said, “Here it comes,” letting the words spill out just under his breath. “Hell on earth.” He set his jaw, firmed up his grip on the rifle, and braced himself.

Opting to skip any further introductions, the zombie thrust its misshapen head through the open window, scraping off a scraggly, decay-chewed ear in the frame. The loss of the ear was like a small dead Lego popping off of a larger Lego structure, said larger structure being just as lifeless as the earpiece—no bleeding, hardly any wound, no harm no foul.

Its mouth was working furiously, snapping at the air with the four teeth it had managed to keep unclaimed by the elements, chipped and blackened though they were, each separated from the others by pockets of gum so decayed that the collapsed tooth sockets weren’t visible.

An eye was missing, its empty socket fringed with tattered eyelid remains, and the eye that was left was bulging out of its hole, looking like it had been caught on something and pulled out partway.

Then the zombie opened its mouth wide enough to unhinge its deformed jaws, and its rot-blackened nub of tongue lolled out to the limit, reaching for the girl with the virus’s desperation.

“Now,” Senna said. “Squeeze the trigger, just like we practiced.”

Raising the gun, Rosemary tried to keep the weapon upright and aimed at the intruding, rotten head, which now appeared to be stuck in the window, but her fingers were rubbery and numb and she felt as if the gun might tumble out of her hands.

She’d known what she was going to have to do at the fence before they’d come there, had been preparing herself for it mentally, practicing each step in her mind, but now, in spite of all that, she found that she was more afraid than she’d ever been in her life. Children were kept away from the perimeter so she’d never seen a zombie up close and the sight was more horrible than she’d imagined.

She wanted to turn and run, wanted to get away more than anything else in the world, but she wouldn’t because Senna and Alan were there, and she wasn’t going to be weak in front of them, and as much as the tears wanted to come—they were already there, ready and waiting behind her eyes—she wouldn’t allow it, she wouldn’t surrender to fear.

Senna stepped forward and steadied Rosemary’s hands just as the girl’s own resolve was strengthening, as if she’d known what was going through Rosemary’s head and when to step in for that final push. Probably, she did know, in the same way she knew when a dormant zombie was about to break.

“Do it now,” Senna said firmly.

Rosemary obeyed. Holding the gun steady with both hands, she squeezed the trigger, and the gun coughed, emitting a pathetic noise from its sound suppressor. Though it would have preferred more fanfare, the bullet flew regardless.


6
The first silenced shot put a hole in the zombie’s nose, to the right of center, the bullet forging a dark pathway into putrefying flesh.

There was a short pause, like a stutter, as the zombie’s head jerked backward, and then it was straining to get through the window once more.

Choking back a whimper, Rosemary squeezed the trigger again.

The second bullet found the empty eye socket and there was another pause in the zombie’s movements, but this time, there was no restart.

The zombie went limp, its head sagging over the window frame, which kept it hanging in place like an accidental gallows.

The girl took a breath, and it felt like the first one she’d had in a long while. Eyes wide and realizing her entire body was shaking, she looked at the gun in her hands with wonder, and then turned and stared up at Senna, whose hand touched down on her shoulder and gave a brief squeeze.

Then Rosemary turned and looked at Alan, who nodded, trying to make the gesture supportive.

After failing to force a smile onto her face, Rosemary looked away, her gaze drawn uncomfortably to the corpse that was hanging partway through the fence. Senna took the gun from her and put it away, and Rosemary was glad to be rid of the thing.

Alan was pleased, and he was so pleased in fact, that he almost smiled, and if the circumstances had been rosier, he might have, because he was happy that Rosemary had fired again after the first shot hadn’t worked, and that she’d done so on her own. Getting the children used to the zombies enough so they could do more than freeze up, so they could take action and fight and get out of harm’s way, was the first step. As Alan and Senna knew well, being frozen by fear did not a survivor make.

Alan went to the limply hanging head, and its stench reached for him, the familiar notes it played on his olfactory nerves recalling scenes from his past, images that he normally suppressed.

Now it was the Voltaire II flamethrower’s turn to work. He hefted it, swung it backward and then swiftly forward, connecting its muzzle with the sagging and disfigured jaws that had sought them all so doggedly moments earlier.

The strike with the thrower was a trained behavior, engrained in him through years of service on the rec-crews, with Senna, and with many others, most of whom were now gone, and not to settlements like New Crozet. Hitting a zombie corpse with a different part of the Voltaire II, one that wouldn’t later be cleaned by the fire’s heat, risked contaminating the weapon and returning to town with a piece of poisoned flesh hanging stuck to the Voltaire II’s chassis.

He hit it again, and one more time, and knocked the grotesque beast back through the fence and out of the town, where it fell on the bare dirt and kicked up a meager cloud of dust around its lifeless body.

From his post in the watchtower, Corks thought the corpse, lit up as it was in the spotlights, made an image that was infernal enough to decorate the cavernous hallways of hell. He hadn’t been religious before the apocalypse, but now that demons had crawled rotten from the nether and occupied the space of the living, faith seemed an appropriate response. And better late than never.

Alan climbed a ladder to the platform that had been sitting, parked in its space against the outer gate, waiting for them to be done with the first part of their work. He went to the edge, aimed the Voltaire II, and fired.

Flames leapt from the flamethrower’s muzzle and spilled eagerly through the chain link, engulfing the corpse and window as Alan swept the Voltaire II from side to side, the stringy muscles of his arms and upper back drawing taut under the strain.

Beads of sweat grew on his face and glimmered in the firelight, which illuminated his brown hair, giving it a reddish tinge. When he was satisfied that enough of the zombie had caught, he let go of the trigger and gestured for Rosemary to join him up on the platform, though it made him near sick to do it.

Was there shame in making a child look at this? Maybe, but what choice did they have?

She had to see it, to be desensitized, gradually, and that was why he’d climbed the ladder and ignited the zombie without her, because she didn’t need to see the full extent of it, not yet.

She’d probably seen more than enough through the fence tonight, but maybe not, and if she saw all of it before the fire could drown it out, there could be questions that were better left for another time.

Why did they look like that? What did the virus do to their bodies, to their bones, to make them look that way?

Yes, it was better to talk about all of that later, after she’d had a chance to digest this fine morsel of experience. It was a wonder there were children at all, and ones who’d grown up in settlements without ever seeing…without ever knowing…

There would be questions either way, he knew, about what she’d heard, what she’d smelled, what she’d done and why. But that would come in the future, when she was no longer too scared to ask them, and that would buy them all some time, for a while, anyway.

Rosemary climbed the ladder and got up on the platform next to Alan. Without being prompted to look, she craned her neck toward the flames while keeping her feet away from the platform’s edge.

The corpse let out a series of pops, spitting embers at the fence, like a poorly-timed salute of moldered fireworks.

Frowning, Alan looked at the tree line once more. There was no movement there other than that of the shadows, which were creeping back and forth as their conductor, the moon, floated in and out of cloud cover.

He looked behind him, making sure Senna was still there, then up at the watchtower, where Corks was, glancing between them and the forest. Something wasn’t right. But that was a matter to bring up later.

Alan turned back to Rosemary.

“You did fine tonight,” he said.

He wanted to ask her if she was alright, and tell her that she’d been brave, but it was better not to weaken the girl’s resolve with talk like that. She could do better than she had tonight, and she should. She would need to be far better if, God-forbid, she was ever outside, or if the perimeter was breached.

7
“The virus is in the soft matter,” Alan said, “in the skin, meat, organs, and bone marrow and it doesn’t go away when we kill them. It stays there and if we eat the meat or if we have an open wound that comes in contact with the meat, the virus gets in us, and we become like them. That’s why we burn them, and we keep burning them until we can see that the bones are charred and all the soft matter, everything that can have blood or liquid in it, is gone.”

Rosemary was looking from Alan’s face to the burning corpse, doing an admirable job of keeping her trembling down to a minimum and entranced by the image that his glasses were reflecting, that of a burning carcass shooting sparks from its grizzled remains.

“Do you understand, Rosemary?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Good.”

He noticed movement in the periphery, turned to track it, and his eyes found the tree line, but he could still see only the shifting of the shadows there. Apparently, musical chairs in the autumn moonlight was a game they didn’t tire of. He turned around and watched as Senna moved to the window at the far end of the alley and looked through it. After a moment she turned to him and gave a brief, puzzled expression, and he nodded. She’d seen it too.

“All the meat has to be burned away,” he said, turning back to Rosemary and reiterating the point.

The creature’s hide, now a burning patchwork of matted fur and ulcerated flesh, was beginning to show the sinew and bone beneath it. The fire was working its way into the muscle meat, and thin smoke trails rose up into the night air when the flames pressed into a moist spot.

He wondered how there could be any moisture left in the zombies after all these years, but it was no more unlikely than a virus that killed its hosts and animated their bodies after death.

Probably from soaking up the rain, he thought.

A gust of wind snatched up the smoke, lifting it to the platform, and the heavy odor of rotten meat burning made him grimace.

Trying to avoid the smoke with no eye to what was behind her, Rosemary stepped backward and though the ball of her foot was met by the wood of the platform, her heel found only air. She screamed as she began to fall and immediately clapped her hands over her mouth, so much stronger was her training to stay quiet at the fence than her instinct to grab hold of something to stop her fall.

His jaw clenched, Corks saw Alan catch hold of Rosemary’s elbow with one hand, and pull her back onto the platform effortlessly as smoke from the corpse billowed around them.

Alan was only slightly taller than average and wiry, but years of carrying the Voltaire II and his survival gear had made him stronger than his size suggested. Even if Rosemary had been a full grown man, he would have had no trouble.

“Be careful,” he whispered. “No matter how bad the smell may get, no matter how unpleasant the situation you find yourself in, you always have to stay focused. It’s better to hide in the most disgusting hole than to show yourself to the virus because you’re uncomfortable.”

“I understand,” Rosemary said, stammering. “I’m sorry.”

“Now look,” he said, pointing through the chain link at the zombie. “Do you see how the bones are turning brown and opening up in places?”

Rosemary nodded, stifling a cough. Unabated, the smoke was continuing to surround them.

Senna looked on, her face wearing an expression of familiar distaste. She and Alan both knew the girl had asthma, and they were trying to be as quick about it as possible, but these points were vital, and had to be made crystal clear.

“That’s a good sign,” Alan said. “It means that the fire is getting in them and purging the virus from the deepest parts of the body.”

Rosemary wheezed, and Alan knew he had to cut it short.

“It’s hot enough now to burn all the way through without us watching,” he said. “Alright. That’s enough for tonight. You can climb down now.”

The wind shifted, directing the acrid smoke to the tree line and then westward along it.

Rosemary began to climb down from the platform on unsteady legs. Senna stood behind her in case she stumbled, but she managed to climb all the way down without help. Alan descended the ladder after her.

Senna put an arm around the girl and they backed away from the gate. When they were aligned with the sentry’s tower, Senna signaled to Corks, who nodded and began to open the gates gladly, relieved that the exercise was over.

Alan stayed behind for a few moments, looking through the window while the middle gate was opened, watching the flames eat away the zombie’s carcass. The putrid meat had disintegrated quickly, and with it now gone, the bones were winking at him, seeming to want to discuss something. That was all in his head, he knew, but he sometimes got that way when he watched them burn.

The bones, he thought. God, the bones. What the virus did to them, seeing it could drill madness straight into your brain.

The break. The fucking break, over and over and over until they looked like this.

8
Alan turned away from the flames, and, after closing the window in the fence, caught up with Rosemary and Senna, who were already through the middle gate and waiting for him to catch up. Senna still had her arm around Rosemary’s shoulders, and the girl was trembling. When Alan was beside them, the middle gate closed and the next one opened, allowing them all to slip into New Crozet proper, where they belonged.

Rosemary was walking warily, taking small, hesitant steps, as if she suspected the ground might give way under her feet. There was a wheeze here and there, but her breathing was under control.

“What was that?” she asked, with only a slight tremor in her voice. “What animal?”

“A deer,” Senna said.

“A deer,” Rosemary repeated thoughtfully. She was trying to drown the strain of what she’d just done in rational thought, understand and have everything explained so it wasn’t so frightening anymore, and perhaps less ugly.

She’d been too scared to look very closely at the zombie, or rather, to really see what was there, and that was for the best, at least for now.

She asked, “Did you ever eat a deer, a healthy one I mean, before the virus?” The children had heard of meat-eating from the adults, and knew it was something from the past.

Senna nodded. “Yes.”

Rosemary considered this. “Did you eat all of it, all the parts?”

Senna thought she understood the question, because children born during or after the apocalypse, who’d never eaten meat, didn’t have much of a concept of what parts of an animal were eaten. “Only some of the meat,” Senna said, then shrugged, thought about telling Rosemary that pretty much all animal parts had been eaten or put to some commercial use, but said nothing.

“Was it good?” Rosemary asked.

Alan was walking behind them, curious about what Senna was going to say because he thought she was a lot better with children; he always seemed to say the wrong thing.

Raising his right shoulder as he listened, he tried without success to work the crick out of his upper back.

The Voltaire II flamethrower he was carrying was a light model as far as throwers went, but he felt the strain in between his shoulder blades all the same, and the muscle pain always came with a sharp, poking feeling at the base of his spine. Now, as always, it was the inside of his right shoulder blade that was giving him the most trouble, reminding him of the toll the Voltaire II had taken on his body in the three years he’d carried it after the outbreak.

Ignore the ache was the name of the game, and he played it a lot. He certainly didn’t feel young anymore, not in any sense of the word.

Senna frowned and shook her head. “Not at all. Bitter and tough. Not a bit of fat on it, barely worth the effort of hunting and eating. I don’t miss it.”

Pursing her lips, she glanced back at Alan, and he nodded, understanding that answering with a lie was the right thing to do, and he knew he would’ve screwed that up. She had an empathy that he couldn’t manage, and which he wasn’t sure he understood in the first place.

That’s the problem, Alan thought, I’m too honest. But shouldn’t they know? Maybe not yet. Digestible bits, here and there, one at a time. There had been more than enough to chew on tonight.

Alan remembered meat well, and dreamt of it often. Apple smoked bacon shone through as the one he missed the most, but he’d take anything these days: burnt and stringy chicken, an old egg, blue mold-infested cheese, anything with some animal protein.

Some survivors lost their minds over it, killing and eating the zombie animals and knowing full well that the tainted meat would infect them with the virus. It hadn’t happened in New Crozet for almost five years, but before then, one to two meat-eaters a year had been the name of the game.

We’re due for another one, Alan thought grimly. Past due.

The Voltaire II was radiating a good deal of heat outward, still purring, baby, rolling waves of hot air out through the slits in her heatproof chassis. This feeling of warmth was familiar to Alan, who was holding the Voltaire II at a practiced distance from his body by her insulated bits.

The heat had once been uncomfortable, but not anymore. He’d burned thousands of zombie corpses, and the cooling flamethrower recalled the feeling of walking away from the infernos, intact, more or less unscathed—though far from untouched mentally—and, most importantly, uninfected.

“What about when the others say they miss meat?” Rosemary asked. “Were the other meats better?”

“No,” Senna said, wishing the adults would stop bringing it up with the kids. What the hell was the point of that anyway? “They just say that because they miss the option of eating it.”

Rosemary frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Sometimes, when something isn’t around anymore, we miss the possibility of having it, even if we don’t like it that much. Grass is greener sort of thing.”

Rosemary looked thoughtful. “Oh.” She had the ability, usually reserved to children, to switch gears rapidly, and now that she was focused on the meat eating question, the traumatic experience she’d just gone through felt dulled. Being easily distracted could be a real asset at times.

“Come on,” Senna said, putting an encouraging hand on Rosemary’s shoulder, “let’s get you inside where it’s warm.”

It was past ten, and a fresh autumn chill had entered the air.

“Okay,” Rosemary said, looking somber, but no longer distraught. She’d done what she was supposed to do, and it had been horrible, but, with Senna and Alan’s help, she’d been able to will herself through it. Rosemary hoped that she would never have to do it again, but if she did, she would be more prepared for it than she’d been an hour earlier.

From his post in the sentry’s tower, Corks had nervously watched the trio of townspeople pass through the middle gate, then he’d closed the gate behind them and opened the last one in the sequence, and after that he felt a brief upsurge of calm because Rosemary and Senna and Alan would return to their homes unharmed.

There were holly bushes at either side of the innermost gate, planted there by Amanda Fortelberry and Betty Jane Oswalt, two of New Crozet’s founding stalwarts, with the aid of some of the younger folk, of course. The bushes’ glossy, pointy leaves were drawing luminescence from the moonlight, giving the bushes a faint aura of silver, and when Rosemary, Senna, and Alan had passed through this last gate, Corks saw Rosemary and Alan, who were walking to either side of Senna, pick up some of the holly luster.

Corks rubbed his eyes, and now that Senna, Alan, and Rosemary were well inside, he shut the inner gate and watched them walk away until their forms began to merge with the shadows cast by New Crozet’s dimly-glowing lights. Then he turned back to the town’s entrance and flipped the heavy switch that controlled the spotlights.

The big lights blinked off their beams with only a flicker or two of delay, seeming to say to the seasoned watchman: there’s still a long shift ahead of you and we’re sorry about that, but we’re done so goodnight. He nodded, used to it as he was, and watched the afterglow of the spotlights hang in the air like a wicked half-grin until it was vacuumed up by the advancing dark.

9
The deer’s burning corpse was casting a shallow, shifting light on the path into the woods. As the fire receded, the darkening skeleton winked up at New Crozet’s gate and elevated watchman, the bones sizzling and gasping almost invitingly when untapped treasure troves of marrow or gristle, or likely both, were licked up by the fire’s diminishing tongue.

The flames wanted more, were asking for more, but there was hardly anything left. The bones that were now being crisped had formed the framework of a living animal once, with ample meat and not an indecent amount of fat for burning, but that was more than a decade ago, before the end of the world.

Corks watched the changing pattern of light play in the clearing, his trained eyes searching the ground for other zombies, but none appeared. He’d expected them to come a while ago, and now, as they kept on not showing themselves, his agitation grew. Squinting at the fire, he knew that Alan’s flare and the charging deer’s noise should have been more than enough to attract others, and the fire’s crackling should have been enough, too.

What did it mean? Where were the other zombies? Market day was still two days away, so it was too early for the traders’ caravans to be attracting the forest zombies.

Corks thought that Alan and Senna had been surprised by the lack of zombies too, but he was too far up in the watchtower to tell for sure. He’d been the night sentry on many nights when children were brought to the outer gate for this exercise, and he couldn’t remember a single time when Alan’s flare had brought only one zombie from the forest.

Definitely too early for the traders to be getting close, Corks thought. Where are the animals? The zombies, he corrected himself.

The more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. Why hadn’t Alan and Senna made more of a fuss? He hadn’t seen any discussion take place, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, either, because Alan and Senna had been focused on Rosemary.

It wasn’t that he wanted more to come, of course. It was bad enough that Rosemary had to deal with any at all. At her age, she should have been excited about Halloween coming up in just a few days, putting up ghoulish decorations with her family and thinking about the costume she’d wear and all the candy she’d get to eat.

Did she even know that it was October, or what year it was? For that matter, did Senna and Alan know? Sometimes Corks thought he was the only one who still tracked time on a calendar. And was that a strange thing to do now, rather than just live by the sun and seasons?

Shaking his head, he wished that Rosemary wouldn’t have to see any more than what she’d just seen, or to do any more than what she’d just done. But it was necessary, and she would likely be required to kill again in order to survive, in an uncontrolled environment much more dangerous than the practice field to which she’d been brought tonight. Childhood had to be cut short for her to survive, or at least to stand a better chance.

It was something the children had to experience, something they had to see with their own eyes and do with their own hands. Their small fingers had to be the ones pulling the triggers, because that was what it took to really understand the world beyond the fence, and that it and the zombies living there were real, and always trying to get in. If his own son had had such training, Corks knew, he might still have been alive.

His thoughts turned back to the scant response to Alan’s flare, and he decided he might bring it up at the town hall meeting the next day. He told himself that it was nothing, a meaningless coincidence, but trying to dismiss it, unusual as it was, made him even more uncomfortable.

Might as well get settled into unease now, he thought. There was a long shift ahead of him to dwell on what he hadn’t seen. The thermos of chicory coffee caught his eye and he picked it up. Unscrewing the top to let the earthy smell of the fake coffee reach him, he began to pace.

10
Aside from the crackling of the zombie deer, the night was sounding only with the rhythmic chirp and wing beats of insects. The watchtower’s dim light was attracting moths, mosquitoes, and their many winged friends, some of whom were unsettlingly large. But Corks was used to that, for the most part.

A moth flitted and fluttered around the glow of the light as he watched. Would the insects be next? The virus had already taken all the other animals, and if it jumped to insects, how could the town be protected then?

Even if insects lost their ability to fly following infection, as the birds had, they’d likely keep their ability to climb. And even though their climbing would become clumsy, they’d probably make it up the concrete and through the chain link after a few practice go’s, and then that would be all she wrote.

The coffee’s smell was wafting up at him, but it gave him no comfort.

That won’t happen, he told himself. It’s been too long since the last mutation already, so there won’t be any more. The insects can’t get it, because they’re too different. They can’t.

It was difficult to rely on that sort of logic, because a great variety of animals had succumbed to infection. After humans, the virus had jumped to other mammals, and then to birds, and then to fish. Corks couldn’t be sure that insects and fish were more different than mammals and birds. Maybe insects were just as different from mammals as fish were.

Perhaps all that was worth knowing was that the virus was smarter than the world and all of its creatures, and where it had found ways of entering new species, it would do so once more.

Briefly, he felt gripped by a panic-fueled urge to exterminate all the damned bugs and insects in the world. His breathing became more rapid and uneven. This was when it always became hard to control.

“I’m watching over the town, over New Crozet, my town,” Corks said as calmly as he could between gasps for air. “I have to keep it together. I can keep it together. I do keep it together. Everything’s under control. Everything’s okay. It’ll be another uneventful night, and New Crozet will go on another day. We’ll go on.”

Hardening his resolve, he stood up straighter and reminded himself of the job he had to do, and that he was going to do it extremely well. He wouldn’t allow himself anything less.

As the wings beat frantically around him, he took a tepid sip from his thermos, and then another, before screwing it up again and putting it back in its place under his chair. He often fell victim to anxiety attacks when he was in the watchtower, but rarely this early in the night. They usually began just before his shift ended, when his time at his post was running out.

The anxiety came to him on most of his shifts at that time, just before first light. The attacks were characterized by an overwhelming feeling that the world was out of control, and that he couldn’t control anything, not even the smallest of details around him, but that he had to try. As the end of his shift drew nearer, this mania would metastasize progressively, causing him to close his eyes for set intervals, reopen them briefly and then close them again, the sight of the reality that surrounded him too much to bear.

On this night, the anxiety took a different turn. Rather than shutting his eyes for counts of five or ten or fifteen as he was prone to do, he found himself staring at the dirt road toward the forest, unblinking and unable to shift his attention away. He felt that the image of the road was burning itself into his mind, carving its dust and gravel into the soft matter of his brain to create an indelible impression there, crisscrossing the folds.

Corks tried to look away but couldn’t even turn his neck.

Beads of sweat formed at the fringes of his receding hairline and ran down his brow, collecting over his eyebrows in preparation for the next leap. Moments later he was hyperventilating, and a sheen of sweat was draping his forehead, then sweat was soaking through his shirt at the armpits and lower back. Although the pressure to wipe his face was great, his arm seemed to be made of lead.

The unmistakable buzz of a mosquito nestled in his ears, and then another, and another, until the movement of the bloodsuckers’ wings was all he could hear. A swarm was surrounding him, attracted by the delicious scent of his sweat, which was seeping out of him in profuse fashion. There was bug spray in the tower with him, just a foot away, and he should have reapplied it, except he couldn’t reach for it, or, for that matter, move at all.

The winged party-crashers closed in and landed and sunk anchors in his skin where the blood was closest to the surface. These were the best tethering points, if you asked them.

They couldn’t get at his ankles, which were covered with socks and pants, and there were some darned good spots there, but they had easy access to his face and neck and wrists, with which they’d have to make do. There was more than enough hitching space, so they docked to him and slaked their thirst while their winged bodies were caressed by the gentle stirring of the unseasonably chill night air.


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