Order of the Dead by Guy James Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

12
    Rosemary dreamt her usual dream that night. She was sitting in the shade of an
old barn—channeling the past life of the blown-down barn on the way