The Gospel of Z Read online

  “Angels,” he said. “Fucking zombie moths, I don’t know.”

  “Angels,” Jory repeated.

  Had Linse heard this too? Had he fallen asleep one night and let it play? That why she left?

  “Angels or some bullshit, yeah,” Scanlon said, dismissing it with his craggy hand. “And, know what else your little gift out there means? To us?”

  “The army?”

  “It means we can’t leave you out in the field,” Scanlon said. “Much as you might be asking for it, even if your dumb-ass driver requests it, even if you’re the only torch to live in I don’t know how long, you’re sacred now. Their holy egg giver, I don’t know. Their big black chicken.” Scanlon liked this. “Or red, brown, whatever the hell color you are. It doesn’t matter. We can use you, somewhere down the line.”

  “I’m not a hostage.”

  “You’re whatever the hell we say you are, Gray. We clear on that?”

  “He was only there because you sent me,” Jory said.

  “Excuse me, soldier?”

  “Hillford. Brother Hillford. He said he just came to see why you’d picked me, yourself.”

  “We’ve got the feed, Gray. It’s got audio. And he knew that feed was rolling.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t need to,” Scanlon said. “What you do need to know is that, because of your unauthorized theatrics out there yesterday, I can’t even discipline you properly. I can’t have you looking like a prisoner of war, if we have to trade you or something.”

  “We’re at war with the bonefaces?”

  “They want what we’ve got, Gray. People. Influence. Don’t think for a second they don’t have their eyes on that prize. The future’s either theirs or it’s ours.”

  “But they’re just a—a—” Jory started.

  “We protect the body,” Scanlon said. “They shepherd the soul. A new world’s shaping up all around us. Who’s going to be its beating heart, you think? Keep the monsters at bay?”

  “You,” Jory said, and, then, because he was a walking suicide, “as long as there’s, you know. Monsters.”

  Scanlon shook his head. More in pity than in appreciation now.

  He unholstered his service revolver. It was big, silver, important.

  He rolled the cylinder, looked across it at Jory.

  “I was never in favor of conscripting civilians,” he said. “No discipline, don’t really have that gut-level understanding of the chain of command. But desperate times, desperate saviors of the human race. That doesn’t mean you can’t be part of the disciplinary process, though.”

  Like he’d probably been planning the whole time, he emptied the revolver’s cylinder into his hand, thumbed a cartridge from his shirt pocket back in.

  “You said you can’t kill me,” Jory tried.

  Scanlon held the revolver out to him, butt first.

  “Like I said,” Scanlon started, standing, urging Jory to as well, “we know the handler was malfunctioning. That it needs to be decommissioned.”

  Jory still hadn’t taken the revolver.

  Scanlon pawed his big hand up to Jory’s shoulder, his neck. Pulled him around the side of the table. Led him to the empty part of the room.

  Jory flicked his eyes up, just reflex, and fell back against the wall just as fast.

  A handler was standing there, just out of sight. The handler, with the outsized codpiece. At his leg, on its chain, a zombie.

  Scanlon chuckled, thrust the pistol into Jory’s hand. Said, “Want it now, son?”

  Jory took it, held it out against the zombie, but then—then.

  The zombie wasn’t moving. The handler either.

  A thin line of blood was dripping down the leash chain, link by link. From the handler. From some chip that had been scavenged from its forearm, maybe. The veins there absolutely rigid with effort, the handler doing everything it could to just move one muscle.

  He’d been locked, though. Jory’d seen it in the demonstrations—forced rigor, the last fail-safe.

  And this zombie, it was wrong too, wasn’t pulling against the chain, was—it was under glass. The zombie had had molten glass poured on it while it was alive. Or, while it was dead and walking. This was a trophy, one that couldn’t infect. The sterilized dead.

  “One shot between the eyes,” Scanlon said, patting Jory’s shoulder, and Jory raised the pistol. “We’re going to decommission it anyway,” Scanlon added. “Doesn’t matter if it’s us or you, really, does it?”

  “I—I—”

  “Show me what you’re made of, son. I want to believe in you too, just like Brother Hillford. Pretend—pretend it’s not even a gun. It’s a hammer, Gray. It’s a hammer, and this bitch, she’s, she’s—”

  Jory turned his eyes to Scanlon. As if waking up.

  And then he did what maybe nobody else in the postapocalypse had ever done, yet—took a step to the side and settled the pistol on Scanlon. Between his eyes. To drive a train right through his thick head.

  At the other end of the room, the guard stepped back in, immediately pawed at his belt for something to stop Jory with.

  Scanlon held a hand up that that wouldn’t be necessary, then stepped in so the barrel of Jory’s pistol pressed into his white eyebrow. “That’s the spirit, son. Think I’ve never stared death in the eye, that it? Think I’m afraid here? Not for myself, son. No. The rest of humanity, though, you bet. I was wrong about you, I guess. You’re not a suicide at all. You want to take the whole world with you, don’t you? Is that it, Gray? Come on, then, neither one of us’ll be around to see it, come on—”

  Jory’s hand was shaking now, but it was different.

  Scanlon reached up, guided the barrel down between his own eyes.

  Jory pulled the pistol away so he could do it himself, then felt the trigger going, going, and, at the last instant, he flicked the barrel over. Away.

  His arm was clenched against the recoil, his eyes probably closed—he wasn’t field-rated, wasn’t trained for firearms—but firing Scanlon’s pistol wasn’t at all like the one he’d shot out on Disposal. The bang wasn’t a bang at all. More a muted pop. A whimper, almost.

  Jory turned the pistol to the side, didn’t understand this.

  Scanlon pointed with his eyes at what Jory’d done.

  Missed?

  The glass shell around the zombie he’d been aiming at, it wasn’t even cracked.

  But. There was more blood on the leash now. Coming in rivulets down the chain.

  Jory tracked it up to the handler.

  The blood was coming from his ears, his eyes, his nose and his mouth.

  Jory stepped back, fell into the wall. Tried to paw the cylinder of the pistol open, finally lucked on the release.

  The cartridge, it was a detonator, shaped like a cartridge. The firing pin had just tapped the plunger, sent a radio signal, sent it to—

  To the fail-safe planted in the handler’s brain stem.

  “No,” Jory said, the handler slumping forward, catching itself—himself—on his massive arms somehow, but it was over.

  “That’s two handlers you’ve decommissioned now,” Scanlon said, palming the pistol back to himself. “Might have found your calling, here.”

  “Don’t you just love technology?” the guard hissed right into Jory’s ear, and led him from the room, dragged him up the long corridor, handed him off to the burn-faced guard. The burn-faced guard deposited Jory outside then stepped back through those fairy-tale doors, grinding some big wheel around to clang them shut. To keep the day out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  That mannequin dad, pacing in his basement. Running his fingers through his wispy hair. Sitting on an old weight bench down there now, too short for him so his knees are up like a grasshopper. An old photo album balanced in his lap, the box it was dug out from still open.

  “Dear?” his wife’s voice calls down.

  He looks up to it.

  She doesn’t call again.

  B
ack to the computer monitor. Page after page of kitten pictures. He saves them, saves them.

  “Daddy?” his daughter says, halfway down the stairs, her hand light on the handrail.

  “Yes?” the dad says.

  She doesn’t have the next part of the question though.

  The calendar flips to the next day, a Saturday.

  There’s a new trampoline in the backyard, its boxes and straps and various tools still on top of the grass, like they’re going to get picked up later. Mannequin children bouncing up into the sky, their silky hair following them back down. Screams of delight. The sun beating down. A tall wooden fence as backdrop.

  The dad turns away from it all.

  The cell phone in his hand still has the image his brother texted him. That slip of bulletin-board paper.

  The dad pulls a pen from his shirt pocket, looks to the house to be sure his wife doesn’t have him in her sights, then uses a felt-tip marker to crib the number from that strip of paper onto his forearm. Small, tight letters smearing on beige plastic.

  And then he breathes.

  “Watch me! Watch me!” his daughter screams.

  The dad creases his face into an empty smile. He tracks his daughter up into the air and leaves her there, turns around, cupping his hollow torso around the cell phone so that he’s shaped like a question mark.

  He punches that number into the keypad. Gets a front desk of some kind.

  “Yes, yeah, I’m, um. About the offer on the bulletin board. Six weeks, right?”

  His call’s passed back, up the chain of command. No apology, an efficient feel to it all.

  Government?

  “Yes, I’m just calling about—” he starts, the one time there’s a presence on the other end, but then it’s back to the hold sound.

  Behind him, the kids are staying in the air longer and longer. “Daddy! I’m taller than you! Daddy!”

  He nods, closes his eyes. Can’t turn around yet, because his face would be a giveaway.

  Finally, “Yes?”

  A gruff voice. One with no time for this.

  “Um, yeah,” the dad says, the cell phone held to the side of his head with both hands now, so not even one word will get away. “I just wanted to know. You’re doing a study, right? I just, we have, my family. Certain allergies. A history. I just wanted to be sure—”

  Listening, listening.

  Nodding.

  “No, no, not for me. This is— I think I know somebody in your, for those six weeks. Okay, four left, yeah, four.”

  Behind him now, his son goes rocketing off the trampoline at a bad angle.

  “Daddy!” his daughter shrieks.

  The dad switches the phone to the other ear. Takes a step away from the commotion.

  “But, but. Is there any way I could, you know. See him? Or even just— I understand he can’t take phone calls, is that correct? No, no, of course I haven’t been in contact— It’s just—he’s my… I haven’t—”

  At which point his wife brushes past him, all business.

  He turns, vaguely aware.

  She returns with their son on her hip. His plastic arm flopping against his side, the angle all wrong.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt, dear,” she says.

  The dad holds the phone out like a shield, like proof. “I was just—I was…”

  “Yes?” she says.

  The dad opens his mouth once, can’t trust it, then opens it again, and all that comes out is that long shrill beep. “XXXXX.”

  Then, not looking down to do it, he ends the call.

  A very real unmannequin dog explodes against the backside of their fence, slobbering to get through.

  The rest of the neighborhood dogs hear it, join in.

  The dad’s mouth still open. “XXXXX.”

  The album in the basement is still open too, to a snapshot of two lanky kids at a pool. One of them running for the edge, to jump in, the other already in the air, pulling himself into a cannonball.

  It could have been any one of us.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “How can you not know about kill shots, dude?”

  Timothy. It was Timothy asking. Like everything was starting all over again. Like Scanlon was giving Jory a chance to do it right, maybe.

  Not that Cleanup was any kind of gravy assignment.

  Jory sank his shovel into the ash of this torched house, came up with a trampoline spring.

  “What do they call that?” Timothy went on, leaning on his shovel, his aviator goggles cocked on his head like always, “Like, ‘selective stupidity’, or just the normal kind?”

  “It was just a gun,” Jory said, letting the rusted spring slide back into the ash, one more thing the world wasn’t going to be needing anymore.

  “A gun with invisible bullets,” Timothy said, studying their horizon. “I think I’m kind of offended to even know you, man.”

  “You and me both,” Jory said, and sank his shovel into the ash again.

  This was a safe zone, just recently cleared. Meaning, no dead walking around, complicating things.

  Still, between the four of them on this detail, there was only one pistol. Jory didn’t have it—he was sworn off them now, not that anybody’d asked—and Timothy didn’t have it, and neither did Wallace. Not that Wallace could be trusted with much more than a toothpick. Somewhere on the balding side of fifty, shambling around in a suit, a look on his face like he’d just stepped out of the past, had no idea what kind of bad dream he was in here. ‘Mental zombie’ had been Timothy’s whispered term. Jory didn’t disagree. Wallace had been staring at them the whole time.

  The one of them with the pistol strapped to her leg was Sheryl. Because, individually, maybe Jory and Timothy and Wallace weren’t rapists, but, in a group? All the way out here? No supervision?

  The gun wasn’t to protect Sheryl from zombies, it was to protect her from her own crew.

  At least that’s how Timothy had explained it on the ride off base. Sheryl had been listening to this as well. Shrugging her so-what shrug. Jory kind of liked her for that.

  “They’re still there,” Timothy was saying now.

  Jory didn’t look up. The two priests, just standing down the block. Barely within view, but never not there.

  Timothy pointed to them with his chin, said, “Dalton used to say that if we ever really wanted to know where the plague started, track its spread, find its point of origin, that their data banks could—”

  “Used to?” Jory interrupted. “He used to say?”

  Timothy came back to him. Made a cursory swipe at the dirt with his shovel.

  “Dude, where you been? Dalton’s been dark now for like forty-eight hours. Think we’re the only ones tune in? I think the right wrong people heard what he was saying.”

  “He was the burger dude, right?” Jory said, angling his shovel under a sliver of white, like glass.

  “What you got there?” Timothy asked, peering over.

  Jory choked up on his shovel to pull the white sliver closer. A blade? It was what they were supposed to be looking for. Yesterday this site had been coded. The ash was still warm, the houses to either side spray-painted with big green Xs, for Disposal to take care of.

  Supposedly, a priest had gone down here, along with a novitiate, out on training. More important, that priest, of course, had a knife, to perform the ceremony, start the taste test. Now, the Church, like always, they wanted that knife back. It was one of a set or something, Timothy hadn’t known exactly. Just that they’d have a chaperone for the duration of their dig, to make sure they didn’t mess with the thing. Which he translated at volume for Jory as ‘mess up with their dirty, sinful hands’.

  If they found it, they were under strict orders not to touch it, get it all unblessed.

  Jory just pulled the shovel with the white sliver in it, Timothy nodding a maybe to it, limbering up the scanner dangling from his belt. Directing its invisible beam down.

  Two seconds later, the light on t
he readout went red, nonorganic—the blades were supposed to light up green, from the leather handle’s carbon afterprint or something.

  “Toilet bowl,” Timothy said, packing the scanner back down.

  “Somebody’s wedding china,” Jory tried, picking the shard up now that he could.

  “Saber-tooth tiger,” Timothy said, miming it with his gloved finger.

  “That’d register green,” Jory said, flinging the shard out past the edges of what had been the house. Aiming vaguely for one of those green Xs, like, if he hit it just right he could bring the whole house down, save Disposal a trip.

  “Ewww,” Timothy said then, pulling up a boot with his shovel. The foot was still inside, coated in ants. “Could have been you, right?” he said to Jory.

  Jory watched Timothy walk the booted foot over to the wheelbarrow, tump it in. Use his own boot to kick the lever over, the teeth in the wheelbarrow chewing the bone to dust, sterilizing it with heat. Because infected bone, as of today and counting, was supposed to be able to infect indefinitely. So far, that meant nine years and twenty-nine days out. Not that whoever’s boot that had been had definitely been infected. But still.

  “Break!” Timothy called out then, Sheryl just looking up at him then leaning down on her shovel again. Wallace, watching Timothy stand his own shovel up, walk away from it.

  “It is just—” Jory said, angling his wrist up for the watch he didn’t wear.

  “We call our own breaks out here,” Timothy said, waggling his eyebrows. “So, save any of that menthol?”

  Jory planted his shovel as well. Shook a normal cigarette up for Timothy.

  They sat on what had been the brick edge of a garden-bed, smoked. The priests were still out there, white sentries. The sun not even touching them probably.

  “I find it, I’ll whistle all secret like this”—doing it—“so you can come over, yeah?”

  “The knife?”

  Timothy breathed in, blew it out in a straight line. “It’s a golden ticket, man. You take that up to the doors of the Church, they just might let you see her.”

  “Linse.”

  Timothy ashed onto the toe of his boot.