Order of the Dead by Guy James Read Free Book Online

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