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

to Senna
and Alan’s house, perhaps—listening to a fenced-in herd of cows low.
    They were lowing and chewing on grass
and swatting at flies with their tails and tromping about and lowing some more.
    They were nice cows, pretty and
colorful, with wonderful brown and black and white spots, and quite happy in
their sun-drenched chewing and lowing, in spite of the tail-flicking that was
required. But maybe that didn’t faze cows. It probably didn’t, her dream-self
decided.
    It wasn’t like she’d ever heard a cow
moo in real life, but this was how she imagined cows lived and breathed based
on what she’d heard from the adults. There were some movies lying around New
Crozet that she could’ve watched for a more realistic portrayal, but neither
her parents nor Senna and Alan had watched them with her yet. They were holding
off until she got older, so that the stark differences between pre-outbreak and
post-outbreak life would be easier for her to process.
    She was just sitting there in her
dream, watching them and listening to their cow jibber-jabber. They were
hemming and hawing, she could tell, that much was obvious. Maybe this and maybe
that. She liked that kind of talk, the sort that went in circles around and
around and around the answer without touching it.
    That way the cows could talk for much
longer than if they just spat the answer right out along with their happily
green cud. But what would be the point of that? Cud was only digested partway,
and therefore required further chewing, and the hem and haw tactic was
conducive to just that. There was plenty of time and nothing to rush for,
anyway.
    The world was perfectly at ease with it,
and her and the cows in it.
    A precise and swift breeze made its
way through the bovine enclosure, perking up the ears of one cow and disturbing
the hair of a cow tail that was just recoiling from a well-timed horsefly whip.
The horsefly was falling, dazed but still alive, and would resume its flight in
just a moment.
    The breath of wind dipped under the
lowest rail of fence and rippled through the grass until it found its target: a
dandelion whose florets were aching to be set free. The wind inhaled and blew
to lend a refresher of strength to its fighter jets, and the feathery dandelion
parts were let loose to fly and parachute down somewhere, hopefully far, far
away, somewhere that, should they find luck in the wind, would become home.
    A feathery parachute reached Rosemary,
landing softly on the back of her hand.
    She was home here, in this dream
unreality with the cows. This was a place where animals lived and breathed and
had homes to go back to and when they did there was no virus to greet them at
their doorsteps.
    If she’d been aware that she was
sitting in a dream, she’d have wished not to wake.
    She heard a new sound then: the
singing of birds—there was often a smattering of feathered friends in her
dreams too, also imagined when it came to their proper sounds and movements—but
she hadn’t noticed them until that moment.
    They’d been sitting in the branches of
the two tall oaks beside the barn the entire time, and the dream’s magic let
her know that. Now they took flight from their posts, and croaked and warbled
all the way home.

13
    “Do you think we should find Tom and talk to him about it now?” Senna asked.
     “No,” Alan said, knowing what she
meant, “it can wait. He’ll want to know what there is to do about it, what action he should take, and I’m not sure there’s anything to do about it.”
    “You’re right. Not a whole lot to do when you’re locked inside.”
    “They won’t cancel the market for something
like this, an undefined threat, if it even is a threat.”
    “Call off the market?” Senna almost
laughed. “No chance.”
    They were walking back to their house,
which was the farthest dwelling from the center of town. It was the house past
the blown-down barn, the one with a good many traces of it left, like grave
markers