The Gospel of Z Read online

It was a trap.

  If Jory, technically a soldier, had burned the poles, then the Church could have legitimate grievance with the military. More than just all the first-time torches coding themselves out, taking the Church’s newly minted clergy with them.

  “I woke up and she was—she was gone,” Jory said, pretty sure Hillford was grinning under that mask now.

  What Jory really wanted was to watch him navigate an apple slice past that mask.

  Hillford accepted Jory’s version. He didn’t press it anyway. Just shifted gears.

  “For nearly a decade now we’ve believed that the—the plague, as you call it, that if there was a purpose for it all, the violence, the bloodshed, then it was to punish us, to cleanse us. But there rose within us a faction, no, a minority, a group of doubters, of long-seers, who suspected there might be more to it than that. Much more. And, this, Jory Gray”—the egg—“it’s all clear now. The message we’ve been praying for, that can heal what threatens to become a schism. The reason I went into the field that day, as it turned out.”

  “It was an accident. I didn’t know to turn the flame off sooner.”

  “To those without eyes to see,” Hillford said, “everything is accident and coincidence. But—what this represents, Jory Gray. The changing sleep is coming, after the feast. We know that now, can share it. That decades-long slumber wherein these quickened dead, as you call them, dream of the men they once were, and never will be again, only to rise as angels, of which our former selves will have been only the inconsequential shell, and then will begin the true afterlife…”

  Jory breathed in, breathed out. Watched an armadillo watch him.

  “If all that’s so,” he said at last, “then why don’t you infect yourself, be part of it?”

  Hillford nodded, his knife at the apple again. Quartering, eighth-ing.

  “Your education serves you well, Jory Gray,” he said, a mournful slant to his words now. “But some are shepherds, some are the chosen flock. I could no more change that than I could—”

  “You stepped around that place in the floor the other day,” Jory said, looking as deep into Hillford’s eyes as he could. “Out there with the peach smuggler.”

  “‘Peach smuggler’?” Hillford repeated, still cutting, his eyes not giving anything away.

  “How could you have known to step around it?”

  “You’re looking for an article of faith, just as I was that day, aren’t you?” Hillford said—cut, cut. As punctuation, he swept the minced apple over the side of the table, golden armor flashing to it from all around. More than Jory would have guessed. “And it was your first time in the field as well, I believe?” Hillford added.

  “I saw what I saw.”

  “And interpreted it as you will, yes. Maybe next time—”

  “It was my last call too.”

  “Just as well, just as well,” Hillford said, watching the armadillos eat. “We only needed the one…call, yes? More would only mean we were blind to the first, undeserving of it, not ready.”

  Jory pushed back from the table, reached for the floor with his boots.

  “You needed me to verify something?” he said.

  “And you have,” Hillford said, standing as well, opening his fingers to show that Jory was here, being Jory.

  When he did, though, the tip of the ring finger of his left glove—did it flap? Like he’d cut it when destroying the apple? And not even noticed?

  Not just the fabric of the glove either. There was enough fingertip in it that it swung a bit.

  “Wha—?” Jory said, but Hillford swept his hands behind himself and leaned forward, so that there was only that face. That mask.

  One armadillo darted around behind those floor-sweeping white robes.

  To nibble up a fingertip?

  “What did I verify?” Jory corrected.

  “That the most holy can come from the most base,” Hillford said, stepping around the table as if he hadn’t just insulted Jory. “From the least devout, the most divine. A lesson we should keep in mind.”

  Hillford guided Jory to the doorway. His cold hand on Jory’s shoulder. Down on Jory’s shoulder.

  “She’s not tall enough to be one of you, you know,” Jory said, half shrugging away from that contact.

  “There are many stations in the house of the true Lord,” Hillford said, letting Jory walk on. “But, in recompense for your gift to us, I’ll attempt to look in on her myself, just as you were given special attention by your commanding officer.”

  “Is that a threat?” Jory asked, not walking now either. The hungry armadillos were rushing his feet. Jory raised one leg, the one with the knife.

  “Don’t mind them,” Hillford said. “They’re just doing what they do, being themselves, as it were. Welcoming you, or attempting to. Carrying all they own on their backs. Surviving unchanged, while the world around them falls away. It’s a trait the Church might envy, if we allowed ourselves to indulge in that kind of behavior.”

  “‘If’,” Jory spat back, high-stepping out of the pool of golden scales, reaching for the doorway with his fingertips, for balance.

  “Yes, of course,” Hillford went on, so demure. “And, I never answered your question, did I? Sincerest apologies. Excitement. About their current classification? Yes. It’s Xenarthra, a term synonymous with Edentata in the older textbooks, which you may have seen in your introductory—that’s without teeth—but you, of course, should never make that mistake, Jory Gray. They do indeed, as you say, have teeth.”

  Behind Jory, his escort chuckled.

  Jory started to say something, but bit it off, turned around. Walked where he was shown to walk, let the helicopter—different pilot—tilt him up into the sky again, the poles underneath them smoldering now.

  “Thought they just burned a couple of days ago?” Jory asked through the racket.

  The pilot steadied them up, pushed forward on the yoke, spinning for traction in the sky, some of the smoke from the poles swirling up into their blades like string.

  “No one would ever intentionally vandalize Church property,” the pilot said, not looking across to Jory.

  Jory nodded, cupped his hands around a cigarette to light it against all this wind, and mumbled an “amen” to that.

  Chapter Twenty

  The driver kicked back in his jeep didn’t even look around when the helicopter touched down behind him, in the hug-n-go lane. He just cocked an arm up, clamped his nonreg hat down, the hurricane from the blades hard enough that it slapped his windshield frontwards on its hinges, looked from Jory’s angle like a sheet of water that had fallen onto the hood, exploded.

  Jory stepped down, just one holy rail touching the ground, his cigarette whipping away from his lips, spiraling into hyperspace.

  The Cleanup truck was here already, one tire cocked on the curb like it didn’t really have to be here, and wanted everybody to know that.

  “Yep,” Jory said, then turned to wave to the pilot that he was good, that that was definitely his friend’s parking job, but the pilot was already stepping off the broken asphalt with that one rail, pulling his rig back into the sky. Out of the secular, into the blue.

  Jory eyeballed the driver of the jeep, pebbled glass cascading down into his lap.

  Jory eased up alongside, half studied the flag threads still flapping at the top of the flagpole after all these years, their rustproof grommets slapping aluminum in no particular rhythm. There hadn’t even been time for half masts.

  “What room?” he asked the driver, tilting his head at the school.

  “Follow the smell, Einstein,” the driver said, sweeping the glass off his thighs. Looking at his hand to see if he’d scraped it or not.

  Jory picked his way across to the twin sets of double doors, once bright blue probably, team colors, now faded and gouged, their wire-embedded safety glass crashed through nearly a decade ago.

  Everybody thought schools were the safest places. Punk had said that. Real name…what? Blain
e? Blake?

  Alive now? Not?

  Inside maybe. Where there’s a driver, there’s a torch, right?

  Jory grabbed the extra shovel leaning up by the door, backed his way through, the curve of his back making him feel like a scuba diver, rolling out of one world, into another.

  That was about right.

  The entryway was full of all the grinning skulls and trophy rubble and general havoc typical of last-stand places. First wave, probably, going by the naked ribs underfoot, no longer cartilaged to anything.

  “I’m ho-ome,” Jory called ahead, again too quiet for anybody to hear. It was his first time back in a school since that last good Thursday. Like he’d taken a ten-year unpaid leave and the place had gone to hell in his absence.

  He tried to muster a grin in response to that, but—this place.

  The layout, it could be exactly the school from Glasses’s video.

  Jory stepped around a line of vertebrae, followed the lights already set up at intervals. Places like these, like this, they still had that film-set feel to him. Some movie about the weeks and months after the nuclear holocaust, the asteroid collision, the gamma burst, the bad solar flare, all the other ways we thought we were going to buy it.

  But it wasn’t the leftovers from a soundstage at all, Jory told himself, stepping carefully, to keep those breaths of dry marrow from puffing up. It was more—it was like you’d stood too still by accident, your feet deep in the moment, instead of stepping ahead with the clock, so that now you were stuck in a faded, decaying past.

  Stuck here with a lot of dead people who don’t get that they’re dead.

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” Jory told himself, in his gruff estimation of Scanlon’s voice, and tried to slit his eyes like he had before, gunslinger-style.

  Somewhere there was a basketball bouncing. On a wooden gym floor.

  Timothy.

  Jory nodded with each bounce.

  Everything else in the postapocalypse could change, but, for better or for worse, Timothy never would.

  Using his shovel like a staff, Jory pulled forward through the hall, waiting for the stench the driver had promised. Instead, a torch stumbled from a classroom, his hand covering his mouth, vomit spilling through anyway.

  Glasses.

  Jory stood there until he was done.

  “Hey,” Glasses said when he could, hitching his torch around. Cleaning his glasses with the tail of his shirt. “Thought you were, you know. Empty bed.”

  “They call them bunks,” Jory said, in his recruiter voice. “This is the army, son.”

  Glasses laughed, vomit still spattered on his chin and chest.

  “In there?” Jory asked, leaning to the side to see into the room Glasses had just left.

  Glasses shook his head no, no no no.

  “It’s their—their, what do you call it?” Glasses said. “Latrine, yeah.”

  “You followed the smell,” Jory said.

  “Don’t—don’t say it—” Glasses said back, coughing some more.

  Down the hall, Sheryl stepped out of a room. She lifted her chin to Jory. Jory lifted a hand back.

  “Got some pears down here,” she called.

  “Shhh,” Glasses laughed, trying to palm his headset’s mic.

  “Here,” Jory said, and reached to the dial under the right ear of Glasses’s helmet. Twisted it off.

  Glasses was impressed. He stood taller, now that he was more alone.

  “Your driver show you that?” he asked.

  “I used to have a Walkman,” Jory said back, distracted—one of the lights behind them was flickering, looking like it might be going to fail. Leave a dark part to walk through, on faith.

  “You used to work in a place like this, right?” Glasses said, swinging his torch around so they could walk down to the black-market pears.

  Jory looked behind them again.

  “Priest coming or what?” he said.

  “False alarm,” Glasses shrugged, the strap on his torch still not right enough for him. “A can house, somebody left the door open. Coyotes were sniffing around.”

  Jory nodded. Using wild animals as detectors, there would have to be false alarms.

  “So no handler either,” he said.

  “No zombie,” Glasses finished.

  “Good,” Jory said, leaning to the side to try to see deeper down the hall ahead of them. Where Sheryl might have gone.

  Nowhere.

  Just the sound of that basketball, slapping the hardwood.

  “So your crew’s cued on torch units?” Glasses said. “Wherever we go, you show up?”

  “Ghoul crew,” Jory nodded. “We follow the grave robbers, yeah. What you still here for, though?”

  Glasses shrugged, didn’t answer.

  Step, step.

  “They do carry two knives,” Jory said then.

  “Bonefaces?”

  “One black,” Jory said, miming pulling it from his left sleeve, “one white,” drawing the other. Angling them to catch the light.

  “You saw?”

  “I think the black one’s, like, utility.”

  “White for ceremonial,” Glasses added, liking the neatness of it, then looked behind them as well, finally answered Jory’s question with a question. “Know what he calls me?”

  Jory stole a glance over, saw Glasses was kind of serious here.

  “Your driver?”

  “Nothing,” Glasses answered. “Says it’s not worth learning my name.”

  Jory had no answer for this.

  The next room they passed was some sort of central office. Converted now, to—?

  “Pirate radio booth,” Glasses decided out loud, angling his head over to study the equipment. “Don’t need that much, really.” And then he walked on, leaving Jory to catalog—microphone, car battery. Some wires bundling towards some kind of make-do transmitter, maybe, or desktop CB. Wires trailing from that, up into the tile ceiling, to the idea of an antenna.

  “Pears,” Glasses called back. “Maybe even in syrup….”

  Jory nodded, moved on.

  “Here?” Glasses asked back, stepping into the approximate classroom Sheryl had been at.

  Jory looked behind them one more time and eased in, very aware that all he had was a shovel.

  He didn’t need more.

  At each desk was a child. The body of a child, its grey skin paper thin. Heads down on folded arm bones.

  Glasses just standing there, his helmet in his hand, slipping away.

  Jory stepped forward to catch it, but was too late.

  The crash of metal on the desiccated carpet was thunder. Followed by static, that On dial jogged over.

  Glasses was past words.

  The teacher, she was still at her desk, the instrument she’d opened her own wrists with still in her hands—a compass. For geometry.

  But what she’d done with it—the story was all there.

  And on the chalkboard, undisturbed for all this time.

  HEADS-UP 7-UP!

  Her handwriting, it had been so good.

  And then, her class all hiding their faces, she’d circulated through the room one last time, up one row, down another, pushing that sharp point up under the base of the skull, into the brain stem, and angling it sharply one way or the other, to be sure.

  The backs of the children’s shirts were still black with it.

  Jory felt something collapse in him. Felt himself holding on to Glasses’s shoulder, Glasses holding on to Jory’s arm.

  They gulped their way back into the hall, their eyes hot, lungs, both empty and full at the same time.

  “You have any kids?” Glasses asked, and Jory closed his eyes.

  “Hey,” Sheryl said, stepping out into the hall from the door just eight inches down from this one, an opened can of pears tilted up to her mouth like a coke, her face a question now. “What?”

  Jory shook his head no, nothing, and shut the door on the dead children. None of their parents would be com
ing.

  He still couldn’t talk, quite. Was back in the upstairs hallway of his own house again, not completely aware yet of the hammer in his hand. Just the small shape lunging for him.

  “No,” he creaked out.

  “You all right?” Sheryl asked, wiping pear syrup from her lips, her free hand dropping instinctively for the butt of her pistol.

  “It’s nothing,” Glasses said, and limped Jory past her. “We’ll walk it off, cool?”

  Jory nodded, tried to, and when he looked back, Sheryl was just watching them. Then looking back to the classroom with the closed door.

  “Sorry, man,” Jory said, Glasses still propping him up.

  “Know why I’m really still in here?” Glasses said, kind of laughing through his nose. At himself.

  Jory looked over.

  “This,” Glasses said, and angled his torch up. “Fucking can’t get it going. I mean, I can hear the shit sloshing around in there, I think the nozzle’s just clogged, or the igniter, and, and it’s not the autocool, I haven’t even…”

  Jory stood on his own, took the torch. Studied it.

  “Ignition,” he said, clicking the button just forward of the trigger guard, the two of them still walking deeper into the school, then, when it didn’t light, he pushed it harder, faster, like trying to surprise it. “Ignition,” he said again, the magic word.

  “See?”

  “Maybe you just have to—” Jory said, and stepped over, tapped the butt on a locker, once, twice, holding the ignition button the whole time.

  On the third tap, Glasses already shying away, the flame bobbled on.

  Jory passed the torch back.

  “A natural,” Glasses said to him.

  “Yeah,” Jory said, looking up to wherever they were—the double doors of the auditorium. Two old lines of white tape forming a cross in front of it. A sideways X, the vertical line sealing the crack between the doors like a biohazard.

  “They can do that?” Jory said. “The Church?”

  “I’m guessing there’s more than pears in there,” Glasses said, looking to Jory for confirmation.

  “They can’t mark stuff off…” Jory was still saying. Trying to figure it out. “Can they?”

  “Exactly,” Glasses said back, and nudged the white tape with his flame, the tape flaring up and dying in an instant. Just a column of ash, falling.