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

your right mind,
but then again, if you were thinking that, you’d be living after the outbreak,
and being of sound mind wasn’t exactly high on the priorities list any longer.
    Some people had left in search of those
refuges. Six since Alan and Senna had moved into New Crozet. They’d never
returned, and probably hadn’t gotten very far, either.
    It’d be crazy to leave here, Alan
thought, to go back out there, in search of clean animals, or to see what was
wrong if something was—thinking of the oddity they’d noticed at the fence
tonight—or to search for the answers that had eluded everyone when they were
still trying to win the world back.
    And though neither of them knew it,
Senna echoed the same thought in her mind some moments later. That was how
attuned they were to each other.
    Unbeknownst to either of them, they’d
have to do just that: leave the perimeter very soon, and for the worst reasons imaginable,
but, thankfully, that was a thing outside their realities at the moment.
    For now they were lovers, elegant in
the simplicity of their happiness, and shouldn’t they be allowed that? Hadn’t
they earned at least that much?
    Their breathing had settled some since
their last bout, but not completely. Alan was spooning Senna, and the couch was
just deep enough so that he had to hug her tightly to keep her from rolling off.
His face was resting against the nape of her neck, and he was breathing in her
wildly delicious scent.
    “I want you to hold me like this
forever,” she said.
    He smiled and gently bit the back of her
neck.
    “I will,” he said, meaning it.
    He watched her, lying there in his
arms, feeling her warmth and her resilient heartbeat, fully aware that he wasn’t
sure what she looked like anymore. What he did know was that she was perfect in
every way, made so by the interplay of her beauty and her even more beautiful
imperfections.
    She drew closer to him, adjusting her
hair too keep it out of his face, and sighing contentedly.
    In the fireplace, the frantic leaps of
the flames had died down to steady hops and caresses. Embers were lighting up
in places and glowing like tiny furnaces, smoldering defiantly in the places
from which the fire had retreated, saying they were now the lords of their
domains.
    Alan watched the flames, trying to
reinvigorate them with his will, to push them back into the places where they’d
feasted hungrily moments earlier, and, apparently, grown sated. There was so
much nuance in fire, in its movements and chatter, that he’d become
increasingly fascinated with it over the years. It was the only tool they had
with which to force the virus from the world, and for that he sometimes thought
it was mankind’s only remaining ally in nature.
    Cold had begun to enter the room,
displacing the fire’s fading heat, and Alan squeezed Senna’s body even more
tightly, wanting to keep her warm. In this moment, he knew she was his, and he
was hers, and that was all that mattered.
    When they were together like this, the
reality of the world and the horrors that went on unchecked outside the fence shrank
away almost to nothing until it was just the two of them, living out an
effortless joy.
    “You’re friskier than usual,” Alan
said, thinking of her spirited mood of late.
    She turned to look at him and gave him
a challenging stare.
    He grinned. “I’m not complaining. Not
at all.”
    “That’s right,” she said.
    He laughed. “Were you always this
feisty?”
    “Ha, I go easy on you. Way easy.
You’re an old man, after all.”
    He laughed again. There was an age gap
between them, it was true: he was forty-one and Senna was thirty-three, but you
could hardly tell by looking at them. Even with the wear of the extreme stress
of outlasting the outbreak, and their sun-cured skin, they each looked the
better part of a decade younger than they were, and they were in the best shape
of their lives.
    What the outbreak had done was give each
of them a choice between achieving