The Gospel of Z Read online

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jory said.

  Timothy turned, waited for the explanation of that.

  “They’re changing,” Jory said. “The dead. They’re— I don’t know. Used to, you had to get bit to get infected, right? Like, chewed on but not quite enough? Now. That peach smuggler. He was just killed by some other peach smuggler. It’s airborne, or dirtborne. Or, I don’t know. A curse. Humanity’s expiration date.”

  “The end of our alphabet.”

  “The beginning of theirs.”

  Timothy held his cigarette sideways, scried into his cherry like he did each time. Like he was reading the tendrils.

  “Wish he’d been a black-eyed pea smuggler,” he said. “I didn’t used to like them. Now I’d cut my pinky off for half a spoonful. Just to smell them cooking in my grandma’s kitchen.”

  “With bacon,” Jory added, “or ham, whatever.”

  “Use my pinky,” Timothy said, leaning over to nudge Jory off-balance.

  “I—I saw him, man,” Jory said, moving his fingers on their brick’s edge, in echo of the peach smuggler’s. Drawing Timothy to look there, watch. “He sat up. Alive, but, you know. Not.”

  “Maybe it’s like the Venus radiation from the old movies. Just soaking through everything. So that anything that dies, it comes back meaner. Hungry.”

  “Or it’s second generation,” Jory said, pinching his cigarette to his lips. It was stale and brown, in comparison to the menthol. “It used to transmit by contact. Now that there’s less of us, though, less contact, it’s found some other way.”

  “You saying that as a survivor, or as a biology teacher?”

  Jory squinted at the priests in what he thought of as a gunfighter way. A particularly western way.

  “You heard that bullshit on the radio, didn’t you?” Timothy said, like finally getting a punch line.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jory said back. “They’re changing, man, serious. It’s probably best she went up the Hill. They’ll last longer, with the bonefaces to…to keep them out. Away. And this—this torch bullshit, with the handlers. It’s not going to last. We don’t have enough bodies to make it last. They don’t have enough knives.”

  “You hear they carry two?” Timothy added, eyeballing the priests now as well.

  “Urban legend,” Jory said.

  “You never kept the good tequila back when your in-laws were over?” Timothy said. “Just showed them the cheap stuff?”

  Jory smiled, almost even laughed. “Least we’re out in the sun,” he said, holding a hand out to the beautiful day.

  “You’re right,” Timothy said, standing, his arms out while he spun, soaking it all in. “This is grade A great, man. Good honest work in the honest-to-goodness outdoors? Hell yeah. Hey, you want to camp here tonight, with me? We can steal a couple of smokes from my dad’s emergency pack, he’ll never know. Then, man, then just listen to the zombies at the fence moan. Yeah. Hey, your brother still got that magazine…?”

  Jory tossed his cigarette at Timothy. Timothy recoiled like it was more, stumbled back, over some exposed rebar from the driveway. He came up from that holding…the other leg? From the knee down. Part of a leg.

  He pushed it away, backed off from it.

  Then he cocked his head, came back. Jory edged over.

  “Hunh,” Timothy said. Then, about the priests neither of them were looking back to, “They still there?”

  Jory faked a cough, sneaked a look.

  Timothy squatted down anyway, poked the leg.

  It rolled over, the toes pointing at the sky now. Fused together, not from heat, but from the factory.

  A prosthetic. For a giant.

  “Hey hey,” Timothy said, coming up with it like a prize. Wallace looked over. Sheryl shook her head, wasn’t amused. “It’s not real!” Timothy called across to them, then, “Screw ’em,” rolling the leg over in his hands. Two nubs of leather strap were still at the top, like garters. “What do you think they’d give me for this?” he said, hooking his head to the idea of the priests.

  “Ten Hail Marys,” Jory said, stepping back to his shovel.

  “Isn’t it Holy Marys or something?” Timothy said, following at a half hop, trying to hook the prosthetic leg’s leather strap to his belt. “Whoah, whoah, incoming,” he hissed to Jory.

  They each claimed their shovels.

  “Boneface?” Jory said, not looking yet.

  Timothy was.

  “Where you think they recruit from?” he asked, fingers laced on top of his shovel, a pad for his chin.

  “What?”

  “I mean, see any basketball players around these days?”

  “Shut up,” Jory said, sinking his shovel deep. Praying not to thunk into whatever the priests were looking for.

  Except he knew already it was going to be him.

  “Jory Gray?” the first one called ahead, his voice not at all muffled by the mask. It didn’t make any sense.

  They should be cooking out here too. Boiling in those robes.

  “What’d I do this time?” Timothy said, pushing his shovel to the side, holding his arms to the side, offering himself. “I forget to say grace before breakfast this morning? Shit, you seen what they’re feeding us over there? Don’t think you’d be praying eith—”

  “Jory Gray,” the second priest said again. Right to Jory Gray.

  Jory swallowed. Looked up, and up, to that bone-white face.

  “We need you to verify something for us,” the priest said. “Your commanding officers have already released you from duty, and asked that we deliver you back to your next site.”

  “I always graduate last,” Timothy said, picking his shovel up again just to lean on it some more.

  “I just got here,” Jory said, trailing off, a white helicopter—they have that kind of fuel on the Hill?—thumping down in what used to be the street. Everybody turned to watch it, except Jory, scratching the tip of his shovel through the ash. What he was uncovering was a flash of skin, the wind from the blades dusting the rest off—a forearm. A series of Z tattoos snaking up it.

  Jory covered it back up.

  “This new world asks much of each of us, yes,” the priest said back to Jory.

  “That’ll take me?” Jory said, nodding to the copter.

  “Up the Hill,” Timothy added. “Who knows who you might run in to up there, right?”

  Jory got it already.

  “Let me pee,” he said, and leaned his shovel against a shower pipe, caught it when it fell, tried to balance it again—his hand shaking, shaking, Timothy finally grabbing the shovel for him.

  “Of course, urinate,” the first priest said. “Deny the body and the spirit—”

  “It turns yellow, right?” Timothy said, stepping in as if to block Jory from view, giving him some privacy. Leaving Jory to ease into what had been the backyard, a plague or two ago.

  “So, you guys hoop it up, up there?” he heard Timothy asking, and let go, splashing down into some more ash. Cleaning that ash off something…white? Glistening?

  “More toilet bowl,” Jory mumbled, zipping shut, but pulled a cigarette out anyway, still hadn’t turned around. “Fuck it,” he finally said, and opened his fingers, let that cigarette fall. Had no choice but to go down after it. Thread that white shard—definitely the blade of one of their knives—into his boot, then lace that boot tighter. Peer around by his arm to see Timothy, his right leg folded up to his butt so he could gimp around on the prosthetic, holding it in place by the two strap nubs.

  Both priests were watching, disgusted. They turned as one with Jory’s scuffling approach.

  “Jory Gray,” the first one said, stepping aside for Jory to have the straightest line to the helicopter.

  “See you never,” Jory said to Timothy, and Timothy nodded back, his teeth too set with effort for him to say anything. Just crutch-hop, crutch-hop, crash.

  Jory didn’t look back, even from the air.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jory h
ad been expecting any numbers of things inside the walls of the Church—the compound, really—human sacrifice, ritual cannibalism, gory statues, bodies on display, hymns gone wild, something strange and disturbing with the three crosses, but what he hadn’t even considered was armadillos.

  Walking from the landing pad to the main courtyard, he thought at first that the helicopter ride—being airborne for the first time since being plucked from that water tower—that that kind of altitude had left inky spots in his peripheral vision. Spots that scurried away, into oversized mouseholes in the interiors walls. Spots that scurried in, then pulled a flip turn, kept their hairy noses just there at the edge of that line of darkness.

  Armadillos.

  When there were no dogs anymore, hardly any cats. Just undulating lines of coyotes (too fast), Pharaoh vultures with their mossy shadows (too high). The occasional black rat, fat with corpse meat (too deep).

  And armadillos.

  Jory licked his lips, followed his assigned priest, the pilot who’d taken a vow of not-talking-to-Jory, evidently. The priest he was handed off to, though, he walked beside Jory, instead of in front.

  “So what’d this place used to be?” Jory asked, unable not to see the deep scratch marks in the tall white wall. The inside of the tall white wall. “One of the old holding facilities?”

  “The Church has always been here, Jory Gray,” the priest answered, his voice not betraying even a tinge of insult. “Perhaps it’s simply that you haven’t recognized its relevance until these pressing times.”

  “You talking church in the big sense, or this particular…” Jory trailed off, zeroing in on a slight female novitiate, crossing in front of them. Looking up, then back down to the ground just as fast. “Linse,” Jory said to himself, and jogged forward, his eyes already hot with this dream coming so true, so fast. “Linse, Linse, hey,” but, then, when he got there, pulled her to face him, combed the hood back off her bald head…not her.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Jory said, still holding the novitiate by the shoulders. “Have you seen her, though, like at mass or whatever? One blue eye, one brown, pretty, real—yeah, probably bald. Like all of you…”

  “Please don’t mistake her silence for unwillingness to help, Jory Gray,” Jory’s escort said, standing there. Not trying to stop this at all. “Novitiates don’t have the Word yet. It’s nothing personal.”

  “She can’t speak,” Jory said, letting go. Still staring at this girl, her eyes so kind, so apologetic.

  She scurried on, out of his hands.

  “Just in here, if you will,” Jory’s escort said, holding his arm out as if opening the door beside them, but it was just a doorway. Maybe that was part of their religion—everything open, no secrets, all places connected.

  A tall doorway of course.

  Jory nodded thanks, stepped through, into a room completely bare, save the one simple table a few steps in. A chair on either side.

  “Not again,” Jory said, flashing back to Scanlon’s recommissioned cell, then he flinched to the side, away from the white shape stepping out from the far wall.

  Brother Hillford. Perfectly camouflaged, except for his eyes. Like he was taking shape, stepping through from some holier plane.

  Saint indeed.

  “Jory Gray,” Hillford said, indicating the table.

  Jory took a seat, the chair tall enough that the soles of his boots just brushed the floor.

  Hillford took the chair opposite him. He just watched Jory, until Jory had to look away. To the giant mouseholes all along the wall. That one golden, scaled face watching him.

  “Ah, yes,” Hillford said, about the fascinating, fascinating armadillo. Jory came back to him. “They were never on your dissection tray in lab, were they?” Hillford asked. “Because what would your classes have learned from them, right? All the lessons about them apply only to the order Cingulata. As in singular, Jory Gray. Dasypodidae, as the order used to be called, they’re like the Church, you could say. A singular survivor.”

  “Nine—nine-banded, right?” Jory asked, having to cock his head to shake the old information down into his throat.

  “Of course, yes. This is, or used to be, North America, after all. Do you know what it means in Spanish, I wonder? Armadillo? Little armored one.”

  “It help them?” Jory said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Against the conquistadors. Who named them.”

  “Oh, well,” Hillford said, looking to no spot in particular. “I suppose their armor was no real defense against halberds and pikes and shod horses, no. Though of course your Western culture’s predilection for conflating little and cute might have been…interesting. As I’m sure you know, aside from their shell, Dasypopidea, as they used to be classed, are known to be carriers of certain diseases, easily contractable were any of these explorers, their armor allowing, to have reached down, attempted to cuddle, pet, or transport any of these little ones home.”

  To show what he was talking about, Hillford lowered a hand to the armadillo nuzzled up against his leg now. Jory looked around his own chair, to make sure he wasn’t surrounded.

  “Good thing you aren’t a conquistador then, right?” Jory said. “Nothing imperialistic about religion, of course.”

  Hillford laughed a tolerant laugh.

  “Don’t be alarmed, Jory Gray,” Hillford said. “The only way one of these little ones could hurt us would be to itself die, thus denying us the reassurance of its timid company.”

  “So, you said ‘used to be’ dasypopidea,” Jory said, scooching his chair in closer to the table, no mean feat when you can’t touch the ground so well.

  “Yes, yes, good. It rather fills the modern mouth, no? Blame Linnaeus for that. He thought the original Aztec term for them, that it wasn’t descriptive enough. So he fell back on his Greek. Dasypopidae is the compound term he came up with. It means turtle rabbit. Colorful, yes? Remember, in his time there were no photographs, only words and crude sketches drawn from memory. But of course a biologist needs neither history nor taxonomy lessons from me. I apologize. Nerves, I suppose. Does that surprise you, Jory Gray? That we can be just as weak as you under these?”

  Tapping the cheek of his mask to show.

  “I want to see her,” Jory said.

  Hillford processed this, came back with, “The one you had the, um, identification card for.”

  “Linse. She has one brown eye, one blue. Real easy to spot.”

  “They leave their old names behind, of course,” Hillford said, producing an apple from some pocket. A crusted-black blade from his left sleeve.

  “Hunh,” Jory said, seeing that second blade.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s—that’s a real apple,” Jory lied.

  Hillford began cutting the skin from it. One long spiral, around and around, so careful, the red skin partially transparent.

  “You’ve got a mature tree up here,” Jory went on, pushing it too far, he knew.

  “We’re blessed in many ways, yes,” Hillford said, offering a slice to Jory, balanced on the edge of that blade. “The fruit you get on your base is in sauce form, is it not?”

  Jory watched that apple slice.

  “I just want to talk to her,” he went on. “Make sure she’s—that she’s all right. Happy with her decision, all that. And, and I understand if she can’t speak yet or whatever. Her vows.”

  Hillford cut another slice.

  “I want to say goodbye,” Jory added, quieter.

  Hillford nodded, let the slice fall over, rock back and forth.

  “What’s meant to be always happens, Jory Gray,” he finally said. “Whether we intend it to or not. Once we learn to submit, to ‘let slip the mortal coil’, as the poets say, then the road to perfection, to grace… This means nothing to you, does it?”

  “I’m sure it’s good stuff,” Jory said.

  “No, no, no apologies, please,” Hillford said, “please. This, it’s—it’s so fascinating. The basic principles and
tenets, they elude you. No, not elude. You’re not so much as looking for them, even. Yet, of all of us, Jory Gray, of all our centuries of combined perseverance, it’s you who intuited the truth, and presented it in the least encumbered manner.”

  To show what he was talking about, Hillford produced the black egg Jory had made.

  “Whether you were aware or not,” Hillford said, his voice taking on a reverent tone now. “Your hands, they knew. Your flame that day, it was divine. Your spirit, pure.”

  “I just wanted to live,” Jory said.

  “Exactly. Yes, perfect, Jory Gray. That we could all winnow our desires down to such basic concerns. Glean that focus.”

  “And now I just want to see her. That’s my focus.”

  Hillford moved his head back and forth, unsurprised, maybe a little regret mixed in.

  “The one you rescued from her basement sixteen months ago,” he said.

  “It wasn’t the basement.”

  “Where she’d been living for…for how long?”

  “‘This world asks much of each of us’,” Jory cited.

  “‘And what it takes away it gives back, sevenfold’,” Hillford cited back. “Her years of darkness are over, Jory Gray. Now let her years in the light commence. Be satisfied that you were instrumental to her—”

  Jory shuffled his feet, an armadillo squealing away from that contact. Had it been licking his boot? The side of his boot? Hillford lowered a hand to console the animal.

  “Listen,” Jory said, reaching down to touch where the armadillo tongue had been. Feeling the foreign object in there now. The white blade. “I mean,” he stumbled on, pretending now that he had an itch, making a production of scratching it, “I know it’s better for her up here and all, and I’m happy for her, really, I just—I need to see, can you understand that? I’m not like you, with faith. I wish I was, that I could, but if I could just… I don’t even know for sure she made it all the way up here. She might have gotten jumped between here and the gate, for all I know.”

  Hillford processed this too. Choosing his words now. “However, you are sure that she made it as far as the Weeping Poles, yes?” he asked. So polite, so casual.