The Gospel of Z Read online

  The handler stood with his zombie carry-on, looked around for the door.

  And then Jory realized that Mayner had been talking to him for what felt like minutes now.

  “What’s—?” Jory said, looking up through the gone-roof, and saw the three white contrails from the missiles that had been mounted on the roll bar of the jeep. That he’d pretended weren’t right over his head the whole drive here.

  Coded. They’d been coded. Standard procedure if you go this long without talking. If the thermals on the jeep’s dash were dancing like they had to be.

  That whistling sound they made too. Voss had been right. It was just like a cartoon from the old days. Something Jory could just let happen, if he wanted. Something that was going to happen anyway, maybe. That had been in the making for years now.

  But then he flashed on Fishnet, strutting out into the middle of J Barracks, his head moving with the music. He flashed on the wiry dude, leaned down between his own knees to light his cigarette. On Linse, turned into a moth, flitting up to the light at the top of the Hill.

  Her ID card.

  Jory looked down for it, his hand coming up to the mic automatically, his voice coming through with a calmness he didn’t know he had anymore, “We’re good, man. We’re good.”

  In that same instant, almost, the three tiny missiles detonated, maybe two stories above the restroom. Meaning Mayner had already had all but the last number of that kill sequence entered, had been hovering over it, shaking his head no.

  Black feathers drifted down around Jory and the priest, the handler already leaving, undisturbed by all this human drama.

  “We’re good,” Jory said again, and fell to his knees, the torch clattering to the side, falling away. He sifted through the rubble for the ID card but it was lost, probably burned to nothing. Along with the rest of the world.

  At some point after that, Jory wasn’t sure just when, Mayner was standing him up. Hillford was using some sacred little whisk broom to collect the ashes of the peach smuggler, funnel them into an aluminum urn, or amphora. It was about up to Jory’s knee, maybe, and narrow like a churn, ornate like a ceremony.

  Hillford set it down a safe distance from Jory and Mayner.

  “What?” Jory said, looking to Mayner.

  “You can kind of melt the lid shut for them. Makes it better for transport. Keeps the virus contained, so they don’t need an escort from us.”

  “Serious?”

  “It’s nothing,” Mayner said.

  Jory nodded, couldn’t find his ignition button now. Mayner reached down, punched it, the torch starting again.

  “Like this?” Jory said, and opened the line of flame onto the metal jar, only stopped when Mayner pulled him away.

  “Just a burst,” Mayner was saying, trying not to smile where Hillford could see. “It’s aluminum, man.”

  Jory turned back to what he’d just done. The smoke still rising from the ground.

  When it cleared, there was a perfect black egg there.

  Hillford looked from it to Jory. From Jory to it.

  “Your general chose well,” Hillford finally said, and stepped forward, collected that black egg, Mayner reaching out to stop him—

  “It’s hot!” But apparently not. Or, not to Brother Hillford.

  Hillford cradled the egg against his robe, looked up to Jory again, and nodded a sincere thank you.

  Jory nodded back. you’re welcome. And then he collapsed against Mayner.

  “You’re alive,” Mayner said to Jory, hugging Jory’s head to his chest. “You made it, man.”

  Jory laughed into Mayner’s shirt, then cried, and held on, wouldn’t let go, even when Mayner’s radio started asking for them.

  Mayner stroked Jory’s hair down.

  “Biology teacher,” Jory said, at last.

  “You should know better than to smoke, then,” Mayner said.

  “I killed it,” Jory said back. “I killed her, I mean. My own, my—I, with my hammer, I—I…”

  “I know,” Mayner said. “I know. We all did.”

  Day Five

  Chapter Sixteen

  The names, they wouldn’t stop. They’d been going for two hours already, since well after midnight.

  It was Commando, in his bunk right by the wall, his wide back turned to Jory so that he was cupping the green light from his radio. Like he was nursing it.

  It was one of those broadcasts where volunteers would just read through names of the found, those lists passed from operator to operator across thousands of miles, the names by now garbled and half made up. Fairy tales.

  Jory was standing in the doorway to the bathroom. Maybe the sixth time he’d risen to splash water on his face. His right hand trembling again.

  Over the sinks, just above the tin mirror, scratched with names from before the plague, was an eleven-watt bulb. It was just enough to see the shadow your eyes were. Just enough, if you held it close enough, to study a face in a snapshot.

  “So what’s her name?” he said to Commando, his voice hushed because everybody else was sleeping.

  “Present tense,” somebody said—the reprobate?

  “Good, good.”

  One of the sleepers rolled over, winding himself tighter in his standard-issue blanket.

  “Juliet,” Commando said.

  “No, really,” Jory said, trying to get some fake smile into his voice.

  Commando heard it. “That’s really,” he said.

  “Burger Dude’s on in twenty,” Jory said.

  No response. Just the names.

  On the bulletin board was the pink slip, Jory’s summons. Going to the principal’s office again first thing. First he’d killed a handler, now a zombie. What next, right? The world?

  Three bunks were empty now.

  Jory sat on one of them, Fishnet’s maybe, and lowered his head, woke in that position, he didn’t know how long later. An hour, two, more. No pink in the sky yet. Nobody else stirring.

  But something.

  Someone.

  Jory stood, not sure what was wrong. He crossed to Commando’s radio to turn it off, Commando sleeping, but then stopped. Because of the names—Jennifer Winkleman, Jennifer George, Jessica Turner.

  “Juliet,” Jory said to himself, his hand to the volume dial.

  Julianne Watkins, the volunteer read on, July, like the month, July Jones, Katy Matheson to start the K’s, Katrina—

  Jory rolled the broadcast off.

  “Quiet, yeah?” somebody whispered.

  Jory spun to the voice. To the shape sitting on his bed.

  “Who—?” he said, still whispering.

  The shape on the bed flipped its flashlight on, beamed it across the room at Jory’s summons on the bulletin board.

  “I believe it said first thing,” the shape said, reangling the light under his own chin.

  A guard, a soldier. Another glorified hall monitor of the postapocalypse.

  “You can sleep sitting up like that?” he asked. “That some special thing you learn, teaching high school?”

  “Can I at least get dressed?” Jory said, and the shape on the bed lumbered up, didn’t say no, just turned his high beam on Glasses, wide awake in his bunk. Watching.

  Glasses shut his eyes, kept them that way.

  Jory understood.

  Ten minutes later, still no sun to speak of, they were at the snake’s mouth.

  At night, evidently, they left the doors cracked open.

  The stench was nearly visible.

  Jory covered his nose and mouth with the back of his right hand.

  His escort smiled, had already been holding his breath.

  “What is this place?” Jory said, stepping down.

  “End of the line,” the escort said, the jeep already starting to move.

  “And the beginning,” a guard standing in the shadows said.

  Jory tried to make the guard out, couldn’t quite do it. Just the blunt suggestion of his gun. Not pointing anywhere in particu
lar, for now.

  “I know where to go,” Jory said, stepping away from the smell, trying to duck around to Scanlon’s portable office, but then another guard was standing in front of him. This one grim, humorless, his face melted, where it wasn’t plain scorched.

  Jory had heard about this. If you lived through a code somehow, or a torch malfunction, or any of the other hundred fire hazards available these days, you got assigned night duty. To keep you out of the sun.

  But that was supposed to just be a rumor too. A warning.

  “This way,” the other guard said, standing by the cocked-open doors, each maybe thirty feet tall, heavy as a truck.

  His eyes on the burned guard until the last instant, Jory stepped in, the snake’s breath syrupy now, grainy against his throat.

  He coughed, gagged.

  The guard waited for him to come back up.

  “Gonna do it?” he said. “Spew?”

  Jory hadn’t been going to, but that word pushed him over.

  “Done?” the guard said a few splashes later.

  Jory focused on the ground before him. There were hash marks drawn on it Evidently it was something to bet on—how many steps visitors took before losing the contents of their stomach.

  Jory’d made it two.

  He looked past the guard, down the sloping corridor.

  “This the brig?” he said, wiping his mouth and nose.

  “Not for you,” the soldier said back, and led the way, Jory seeing after a few steps that they were supposed to stay within a taped-off walkway.

  After the first switchback, the floor sloping more perilously, he saw why—this was a holding facility. When there weren’t supposed to be holding facilities anymore. When there had been assurances that there would never be holding facilities again.

  The dead, in cell after cell. Reaching through their bars to just short of the taped walkway.

  “Just pick whichever one you want,” the guard called back over his shoulder. “We’ll have it sent up to your room.”

  “We still keep them?” Jory asked.

  “Only the good ones,” the guard said, then, “Whoah, whoah,” making room for the handler juggernauting up their walkway, oblivious to anything in its path.

  Taking the guard’s lead, Jory backed to the edge of the tape, trying to find that middle ground between the monster in front of him and the monster just behind, reaching.

  And then they were moving again. The guard still talking. “Less we feed them, more acute their sense of smell gets.”

  “These are—those ones?” Jory said, trying to clock the zombie’s fingers. “For Preburial?”

  “Where’d you think we get ’em?” the guard laughed. “The zombie fairy?”

  “I don’t want to be here,” Jory said, eyeing a zombie with especially long arms.

  “One step either way, your worries’ll be over,” the guard said, and then Jory staggered forward, into him.

  The guard turned, ready to push back, but it was another handler that had rammed Jory, bearing down on them from behind.

  The guard pulled Jory to the side, let the handler hulk past.

  “Guess you picked a busy morning to see the wizard,” the guard said, then leaned forward hard, away from the long-armed zombie hooking an uncut finger into the guard’s shirt. The shirt ripped away from shoulder to sleeve. “Oh you—” the guard hissed, stepping forward with what looked to Jory like a thick baton, but it had some kind of jolt in it when he slammed it into the zombie.

  The zombie arced back into his cell, lay there twitching, steaming from the eyes.

  “Don’t you just love technology?” the guard said, pulling Jory along.

  How could the plague ever be over if the military was keeping it in pens, right?

  But how could the military burn the infected dead without the infected to sniff them out, Jory knew. And hated. Without some way to test the corpses that were always turning up, the Church would rally support, insist on burying every body. And that had to be worse. Z Day all over again, on its own tenth anniversary.

  No thanks.

  Jory followed the guard around another switchback, and another, down to either the third or fourth level of he-had-no-idea-how-many. All the way to hell probably.

  The guard deposited him in another waiting room, what felt like a recommissioned cell of sorts. A make-do execution chamber.

  At first Jory resisted, but the guard gave him a hard knee, half threw him in.

  Jory stumbled to the table, took one of the two chairs.

  At which point Scanlon leaned up from the wall he’d taken. Where he’d been waiting, tilting a cup of coffee up to his mouth.

  Jory breathed in, out, then let a calmness seep over him. A slackness.

  “Jory Gray,” Scanlon said, taking the opposite chair. Flipping it around to straddle it, lean across its back.

  “Don’t you sleep?” Jory said, no real eye contact.

  For maybe twenty seconds, Scanlon studied Jory. Then, finally, he nodded to himself. Finished his coffee off. Reached back into a corner for the gun that wasn’t a gun, but a torch, a flamethrower.

  He rattled it down onto the table between himself and Jory, Jory trying not to flinch, trying so hard not to look at this instrument. Of his own death probably. You don’t go this far underground to do things you could do just the same up top.

  “You know what this is, right?” Scanlon asked.

  “It’s a torch,” Jory said, swallowing.

  “Good, good,” Scanlon said. “Torch, torch. Say it to yourself. Torch, torch. Hammer? No, no, not a hammer, Gray. Torch.”

  Jory had no defense, no excuse.

  “But no worries, son,” Scanlon said, sliding the torch away. Holding his hand out to the corridor behind Jory. The holding cells. “These we’ve got more of, right? More than we ever asked for. And, your instinct, I’m not faulting that. Some people hesitate. You didn’t, Gray. I give you that.”

  Jory didn’t know whether to apologize or say thank you.

  “But your handler, it was malfunctioning,” Scanlon added, leaning back what little he could, backwards in the chair. “We’ve got the feed from the incident, so you’re in the clear there.”

  “Then…this is about the peach smuggler?” Jory said, lost.

  “He’s not exactly the one we’re interested in here.”

  Jory looked up to try to gauge Scanlon’s face.

  “I told him to call off the code,” Jory said. “The driver. He was following proto—protocol.”

  “Grant Mayner,” Scanlon said, like the name left a bad taste. “But he’s not of concern here either.”

  Jory counted heads, his eyes unfocusing.

  “The priest?” he said at last.

  Scanlon chuckled.

  “More like their patron saint,” he spat, both his meaty hands gripping the backrest of the chair now.

  “…Hillford,” Jory dredged up.

  “As near as we can tell,” Scanlon said, “and, trust me, that’s pretty damn near, Brother Hillford has never been on even one of these pissant calls. They just send the expendables, right? Midlevel management. Shit, I would, with this kind of rate.” He shrugged an insincere shrug then. “No offense.”

  “Saint?” Jory said, his eyes flicking to the back corner of the room, where he thought he’d seen a twitch, a flicker. Something.

  Scanlon set his hands on the table, pulling Jory back.

  “That little trespass a few years back, in the old pens?” Scanlon asked. “Home movie heard ’round the world?”

  “Parting the Dead Sea,” Jory recited. That recording of the three priests walking through the ocean of zombies.

  Scanlon grudged a nod.

  “That was him?” Jory said.

  “Officially, no,” Scanlon said. “Their order, or whatever—they can’t take credit for individual shit. Unofficially, though, yeah, it was Hillford. Big boss man, in the flesh.”

  “You, over there,” Jory said.

&nb
sp; “He wishes.”

  “I mean—”

  Scanlon slammed his palm down onto the table.

  “And if Hillford’s out in the field,” Scanlon said. “Then—then I don’t fucking know, Gray. End of Days? Something to do with this ten-year anniversary coming up? But, do you know what I do know? Do you know what I’m absolutely certain of, what I know as well as that I have two balls? That, when their holiest-of-holy boneface waltzes out into the restricted zone, that you don’t—can you guess this last part? Help me now.”

  Jory shook his head no.

  Scanlon slid three stills from the jeep’s feed down into the part of the tabletop Jory was fixed on.

  It was Hillford, cradling a black egg the size of a football. Infected ash swirling in it like yolk, its shell as smooth and shiny as obsidian.

  Scanlon pushed the slick prints into Jory’s chest.

  “I know that you don’t give him any more artifacts for his damn reliquary,” he said. “They’re up there jacking off on this right now. Fucking circle-jerk on the mount.”

  Jory swallowed, the sound crashing in his ears.

  Then Scanlon laughed. It was an evil sound. “And, just so you know, our best reports are that this, this whatever-the-hell religion they claim to be, they think that the plague—that the desiccants out there eating their way through the world?—that they’re larvae. That that’s why they’re so hungry. You following, son? Biology, right?”

  “Instars,” Jory said. Licking his lips just after.

  He’d heard this before, on late-night.

  “In-what?” Scanlon said.

  “Stages of…molting,” Jory said, flashing his eyes up to Scanlon. “Insect life cycle. Egg, larva, pupa, adult.”

  “And, so what do you give them, Gray? What do you give their fucking hero? A black egg. A sign from above. Now we don’t have even part of a clue what they’re going to—”

  “What’s the adult stage supposed to be, then?” Jory asked. “After the chrysalis?”Scanlon steepled his fingers burrowed his eyes into Jory’s.