Order of the Dead: After the Zombie War, Part One, Chapter 11

11
While something in Corks’s mind, some protective wall that had enabled him to function in spite of what the virus had done, got yet closer to breaking for good, Senna and Alan walked Rosemary back to her house and said their goodbyes.

The girl opened her front door, spilling light from the house onto New Crozet’s carpet of semi-dark, then went in and pulled the door shut behind her, leaving the spilt light stranded on the porch. It could’ve fled to Senna and Alan for comfort, but instead resigned itself to its fate and floated upward, finding a place for itself on the border of one of the moon’s ashier cheese holes, where it would toil until daybreak.

Rosemary said a perfunctory hello to her mother, Elizabeth Clark, who’d stayed up waiting for her daughter. In New Crozet, parents or those serving in that role usually didn’t go with their children when Senna and Alan took them to the fence for training. If there was trouble, the parents would likely only get in the way.

Elizabeth had much on her mind and much to do, responsible as she was for organizing the market, but she’d been unable to focus on any of her tasks while Rosemary was away at the fence, so she’d spent the evening worrying. It would have been easier for her to keep distracted if Tom Preston, Rosemary’s father, had been home, but he was out on a routine perimeter patrol, so there had been no one to fuss over while she waited. Elizabeth tried to engage her daughter in conversation, interested to know how the night had gone, but Rosemary made little attempt at a response.

Dazed and nauseated, and having fended off her mother’s questions, she slunk up the stairs, went to her room, and closed the door.

The Preston house was two stories and spacious, and having her own room was a welcome extravagance for a girl like Rosemary, who valued her privacy and spent much of her time alone. She had a place to escape to, as well as some disused rooms on the second story, and the attic to stow herself in when she really needed to vanish without a trace.

When she was by herself, she liked to think about the world, and about solitude. She wanted to believe that there was a reason for what had happened, and that there was some meaning in it. She always tried to believe that.

The fact that the animals had been taken away from people in particular struck a chord with her. She’d seen pictures in the magazines and books in the library of people with cats and dogs and horses and other animals, sometimes even lizards.

She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen a picture of a deer before, but it wouldn’t have surprised her if she had. The pictures of animals she saw in books didn’t stick in her mind. They were abstractions, unreal constructs whose images failed to bear them out into flesh and blood concepts for Rosemary.

The creature that she’d killed tonight likely bore only a basic, structural resemblance to its living predecessor. The virus changed animals and people so much, made them so ugly, that they were hardly recognizable for what they’d been before.

It was the breaking. It was all that horrible breaking. Thankfully, she’d been too preoccupied with her fear and focusing on shooting the thing to let her eyes really sink into the details and see all the...

She’d been taught these things early on, had been shown pictures of what people looked like when the virus had taken them. She hadn’t spoken for a week after looking at the first set of pictures. But, with time, she’d grown used to the images, which returned to her throughout her waking life, and when she dreamed.

Seeing a zombie in real life, however, had shaken her in a way she hadn’t been prepared for, and she’d barely even seen it. Why was everything so much worse when it was off the page and moving?

Until tonight, Rosemary had wanted a dog. She’d been in love with the fantasy of having one. According to the books, dogs seemed to be the most fun of the animals to play with.

Cats seemed good, too, but Rosemary had wanted a dog more. She’d known that she would never have one, and she thought the closest she would get to that daydream would be an encounter with a zombie dog, and she would have to kill it, and, if she didn’t, it would kill her.

Now, her recollection of that fantasy was sickening. It seemed somehow disgusting that she’d ever entertained the idea in the first place. There were no dogs, not anymore. It was wrong to keep thinking about it, unhealthy.

The room was sparsely furnished. It was lit by the light of a lamp that was too small to do much good, whose shade had gone missing long ago and rotted away in an unknown somewhere. The wire mesh on which the shade had once sat was tarnished and bent out of shape, and had been that way for a long time.

It was more bent out of shape than it had been when Rosemary got it, however, because she’d dropped it twice. She knew that it had made her mother cross with her, because she could tell those things, but her mother hadn’t yelled or punished her.

A coloring book was on the bedside table at the base of the lamp. The outlines in the book were scenes from fairy tales, most of which no one had read to her, and she hadn’t read herself. She did know about the one with the sleeping princess, but that was the only one, and she wasn’t sure if her version of the story was correct. All the pictures had been colored in by the time Rosemary received the book. It had been a present from Alan for her sixth birthday.

Rosemary sometimes wondered if there was any unfilled picture left in any coloring book in the world, or if the pictures remained unfilled only in the memories of some of the older people, and, when they died, there would be no unfilled pictures left anywhere, in people’s memories or otherwise.

She sometimes wished that she could live in the world before the virus. It seemed so wonderful: the people, the animals, no perimeter fence, buying food at stores. Stores. Can you believe that?

She could hardly imagine a world so perfect. She’d never seen the world that way, and it made her wonder if there was a way to travel inside another person’s memory, so that she could live in some older person’s recollections.

If only there were a way to make the leaves fall upward and turn green again, and to repeat the cycle until she was in a place where the progression of the seasons hadn’t known the apocalypse’s bitter austerity. She would stay there in that place, indefinitely, if she could.

The concept of memory had begun to fascinate her soon after she’d received the coloring book from Alan, but she wasn’t aware of the connection. Did people and animals and events continue to live in memories? Or were they gone forever? Had they ever existed at all if the memories were the only evidence that remained? Were the memories embellished or inadequate or was it different for each memory? If the pre-apocalyptic world did live on in people’s minds, was there a way to restore what was remembered?

They were odd, precocious thoughts, stirred in her by a world that made its children grow up far too quickly.

She spent a few minutes standing by the bedside table and trying to imagine what it would be like to have this night in her distant past. She was moving her perception of her life forward in time, until what she’d done tonight was so far away that she could no longer feel the gun’s weight in her hand, or its recoil, or hear the muffled shots or the sounds made by the thing that had once been alive, or feel the sting of the burning rot in her nostrils and taste its sour and acrid flavor in her mouth, or its stabs deep in her seizing lungs.

She wanted to forget, and realized that she probably never would. She sat down on the floor and leaned her right side against the bedside table and her back against the bed. Her clothes smelled like the burning corpse, and she could still taste the hot air that had risen up to her from the fire. She knew that she should shower, but she didn’t have the strength, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to, either.

Maybe if she drew the feelings in even closer, if there was any nearer for them to get, this evening would more quickly become a distant memory, grey and faded and odorless, like pulling back a string on a bow and letting your arrow fly.

Familiar noises were filtering up through the floor, the sounds of her mother tidying up. Elizabeth cleaned when she was nervous, and that was a lot of the time, so the house was immaculate. On a normal night, she would have been able to sleep with Tom out on patrol, but worrying about both him and Rosemary had wound her up too much to go to bed.

Feeling slightly comforted by her mother’s movements downstairs, Rosemary got up, pushed the curtain aside, and looked out the window. Seeming to be keeping their distance from the moon, there were patches of velvet in the sky where the stars’ glimmers couldn’t reach.

She frowned as she squinted into the darkness. The clouds looked stupidly happy—that was the only way she could think of to describe it—they were fat, fluffy, and unhurried, as if they were strolling leisurely across the sky, without a care in the world. Rosemary pressed her lips into a thin line, and thought of Senna and Alan.

A cloud, the happiest looking of all, was on a course to collide with one of the velvet spots in the night, the darkest Rosemary could see. She stared at it for a moment, unable to imagine a blacker dark, then looked away and closed the curtain.

What would happen when they met? Would the cloud be sucked into the darkness, caught by an unseen vortex and absorbed, spinning, into nothingness? She didn’t want to see it.

She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, bit her lip, took one more deep breath, and got in bed with her clothes on. After pulling the comforter, which was a lesson in patchwork and tatter, over her, she turned out the lamp.

Her asthma wasn’t too bad right now, just a bit of trouble catching her breath, which was normal for her. It was a lot better than it had been at the fence, and even that was nothing compared to how it sometimes got in the spring when the air was thick with pollen. Closing her eyes and pushing her face into the worn pillow’s rough surface, she began to cry silently. What passed for a pillow on her bed was a flattened relic, more like a drab towel. As she wept quietly into it, the feelings and smells that had come home with her from the fence gathered in around her, seeing how close they could get, knowing that she didn’t understand what they were, and knowing that she knew that, too.


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