The Gospel of Z Read online

  Way down the hall—that basketball, still dribbling.

  A sound they were walking away from now. Into the auditorium.

  It was so black, and still. The air stale.

  “I don’t think—” Jory said, and then the door slammed shut behind them, and it was too late for thinking.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Hit it,” Jory said, his hand finding Glasses’s forearm.

  “The—?”

  “Now!” Jory hissed.

  The flame from Glasses’s torch arced out, stylized in the high, empty space of the auditorium.

  Underneath that chemical flame, aisle after aisle of neck stumps. Headless shoulders.

  “Holy shit,” Glasses said, his hold wavering, the doors rattling behind him when he backed into them, couldn’t back up anymore.

  Two hundred decapitated people, or whatever capacity was here. A congregation of bottleneckers, bottlenecked.

  And recently.

  The flame sucked back up into the torch, dropping them into a deeper kind of darkness.

  “I meant the flashlight,” Jory said, his voice seeming to float away from him.

  “Oh yeah,” Glasses said, and found that slider, clicked his headlight on, autocool sucking the burble of flame back in.

  The dead people were still there.

  And they hadn’t been for long either.

  Not long enough.

  The smell was an oily wall.

  Of course this door had been sealed.

  “Heads-up, seven-up…” Glasses said, his voice lilty, falling apart. Every place his headlight found, it was worse. Fingers still digging into armrests. Faces looking up from the aisle. Burger wrappers skidding across the carpet, from the air Jory and Glasses had disturbed.

  “Thought they were all gone,” Jory said at last.

  “Burgers?”

  “Bottleneckers.”

  “They are now,” Glasses said, reaching behind them for the push handle of the door. “We should, um, you know.”

  But Jory wasn’t. In spite of the thick air, making him blink faster than he wanted.

  Moving slow, he took the warm barrel of Glasses’s torch, swept the headlight systematically across the auditorium.

  Dull silver collars, snugged up to neck vertebrae. Collars the people had lived with for years. Deaths they’d always known were coming. Some of the heads just folded back like Pez dispensers. Some of the bodies fallen out into the walkway, chickens who’d run blind for a last few steps.

  “Why would they…?” Jory said. “They know their signals can be jacked, all together like this.”

  “It wasn’t the army, was it?” Glasses said, slinging his beam over to some scuffling.

  Rat, probably. This being rat heaven and all.

  “The Church,” Jory said.

  “Survival of the meanest,” Glasses said, then, his headlight settled on the facedown corpse up behind the podium, “preacher man knows.”

  “What were you before?” Jory said, taking an almost involuntary step forward. To that stage. Like he was being called. Like it was a revival, not a necropolis.

  “I never knew it was practice,” Glasses said back, following.

  “Practice?” Jory asked.

  “Video games, man,” Glasses said, “this”—then, when he reached up to pat his naked head—“shit, my helmet!”

  Jory stepped around a headless man. One who’d been reaching for his head too, it looked like.

  “Why kill this many at once?” Jory said. “They weren’t infected. They wouldn’t have been sitting down if they were…”

  “Wrong denomination,” Glasses said, stepping around the reaching man now. His boot catching the man’s head, sending it bowling down the slight incline.

  They stood still until the head stopped. Until Glasses found it with the headlight, just to make sure a hand hadn’t stabbed down to stop its roll.

  “We weren’t supposed to find this,” Glasses said. “You know that, right? What do you think happened to the smugglers, I mean? They just moved on to the next perfect warehouse?” Step, step. “You know how many of these places there could be, then?”

  “Disposal’d find them,” Jory said, almost to the stage now, his arms up and ready, like when he was a kid, in the neighborhood haunted house.

  “Did you?” Glasses asked.

  Jory shook his head no.

  “We’re not supposed to,” Glasses said again, more sure now.

  Jory reached forward for the leading edge of the stage. He clambered up easily, Glasses passing the torch up, Jory lighting his way, then spilling the beam out across the congregation, still in their seats. Waiting for the Word.

  “Dude,” Glasses said, calling for the light.

  Jory aimed it down to the preacher.

  “Not a bottlenecker, anyway,” Glasses said, half-impressed—the head still attached, the neck bare—and, using his hands like he wished he had gloves, he rolled the body faceup, the chest matted with blood.

  “Knife or gun?” Jory asked.

  “What do I look like?” Glasses said back, angling his face to be on the same plane with the corpse’s, then jerking away. Coming back to be sure. “No,” he said, and looked up at Jory for confirmation.

  Jory shrugged, had no clue.

  “It’s Dalton,” Glasses said.

  Jory wasn’t looking down, was holding on the shadow shapes of all the headless people, watching them up here.

  “They weren’t even infected,” he said again, trying to crack the code of this room.

  “Maybe they were,” Glasses said, finding something long and cylindrical on Dalton’s inner thigh and slitting the sweatpants over it, praying out loud for it not to be a dead man’s distended penis. It was a scroll. A sheaf of papers tied together, rolled into a tube, a condom pulled over them at each end, tied off with twine at the middle.

  “What?” Jory said, shining the light better.

  “They were getting infected with this,” Glasses went on, completely forgetting what kind of room he was in. Sitting like a child with his blocks. Shuffling through these papers. “Can’t be,” he said. “No no no.”

  “This is why he went off the air?” Jory said, still playing catch-up.

  “Shit shit shit shit!” Glasses said, looking up to Jory, his eyes brimming over now.

  Jory turned to the door, held his light there.

  “Shhh,” he said at last. “Timothy’ll hear, bring everybody.”

  “They need to… Do you know what this is?” Glasses said, a real actual tear rolling down his face now. “I never—never thought it was really real,” Glasses loud-whispered. “The…the Lazarus Complex, man. The whole story right here. The one that ends with us, get it? The one that starts with who we used to be.”

  Jory looked from the papers to Glasses, then back to the papers.

  “Lab wars?” he asked.

  “Genesis,” Glasses said.

  “Like all the rest?” Jory said. “President’s up in space, waiting all this out. If you go to a port, the old Disney ships’ll come pick you up. All you have to do to cure the plague is shoot up for three days straight.”

  “No, no, there’s pieces of it, I’ve heard of them, but—this is the real, true, actual thing. Before the Net went down, this, it was just starting to leak out, people were just…shit! Did you know that the servers all went down three days before the power did? A week before the last of the phones? Think that was any accident? So, so, this one guy on battery backup, he, he screencapped it from his history, page after page, or transcribed it, I don’t know—”

  “And then he’s dead,” Jory finished, still not buying it.

  “King Tut’s curse,” Glasses said. “Just spelled with a Z. But—but nobody thought that any copies had survived, but Dalton, he was the fucking Buddha, man. He found it. And they, they killed him for it. And”—nodding out to the congregation—“everybody else too. Everybody who heard it. Or might have.”

  They were de
ad, Glasses was right about that anyway.

  “So?” Jory said, Glasses laying all thirty-odd pages out like tiles.

  “This is where it starts,” Glasses was saying, rolling his standard-issue backpack around to the front, reaching in for a—a video camera? With batteries?

  “Over here, here,” Glasses said, directing the torch’s headlight, and Jory did as he was told, showing each page in order, Glasses’s camera in sync, its red light blinking.

  “This is where what starts?” Jory said.

  “There being more than one copy,” Glasses mumbled. “That’s what Dalton was doing. They took the one he was reading from. But they didn’t pat him down for another, and would have—would have just thought—”

  “Rigor priapism,” Jory completed.

  “Exactly, mandrake kind of bullshit,” Glasses said, making sure the recording had taken. “But this was, it was too close, man. We can’t have it—it can’t be all in one place again, get it? Like, with Dalton? Everybody has to know. This is going to change the world. It’s going to give it back to us.”

  “It’s not magic.”

  “Information is magic.”

  “You haven’t even read it.”

  “I’ve heard, man.”

  “What is it?”

  Glasses looked up at Jory. Not like Jory was being difficult, but like it was too much to explain. “Read it later,” Glasses said. “You’ll see. This is a house of cards we’re living in right now. This, this can knock the whole thing down though.”

  “And that’s good?”

  “If you don’t know your own history…” Glasses led off.

  “You’re doomed to have somebody tell it to you?” Jory finished, still studying the congregation, then coming back to Glasses, tubing the papers up again, sliding them into his inside chest pocket. The camera was already in his pack. Jory smiled. “Oh, not have them all in one place again like that, you mean?” he said.

  “You’re right,” Glasses said, and took the tube and the camera out as if weighing them, finally handed the camera across to Jory. It was the less sacred version. The furthest from the original.

  “Hey, I don’t—” Jory said, trying not to take it, but not wanting to drop it either. Not for what was on it, but because of what it was. A camera. With batteries.

  “Just until we get back to base,” Glasses said, hurried now. Looking all around. “C’mon, let’s—We don’t want to,” Glasses went on, climbing down off the stage, walking backwards, waiting for Jory to follow.

  Jory looked down to the torch, still burbling its flame, and slid the camera into his pack, lit their way back to the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Back in the main hallway of the school, Glasses was leading, Jory following, the torch held across his hips like Voss had taught them.

  A couple of classrooms ahead was Wallace, at the right-side locker bank. Just opening each one, looking in, then closing it.

  “He for real?” Glasses said.

  “Wallace!” Jory called down, smiling just to be seeing another person, one with their Pez-dispenser head in the proper position, and Wallace looked up, fixed them in his sights. Lifted his unsteady hand in greeting, that light behind him flickering again, going dark now.

  Jory’s hand kind of froze midwave.

  It was the moment he would remember, later.

  Wallace smiled a little, maybe, his old-man version of a secret grin, and shut the locker he was looking in, opened the next, shut it too, and by the time he got to the next one, Glasses and Jory were almost to him.

  “What you looking—?” Jory started to ask, but then Glasses’s spread hand was in Jory’s stomach, stopping him.

  “The camera, the camera,” Glasses was saying, snapping for. “This is classic, man.”

  It took Jory a moment to process—Sheryl stepped out of the pear room—and then that was all that was left: moments, frames.

  The first was in the locker—a ragged, dead cheerleader, hair forever long, skin sick, teeth broken.

  The next was her lips, thinning.

  Then it was her springing from the locker all at once, tearing into Glasses, Glasses falling back, her nails and teeth all into his face, his glasses skidding away into Wallace’s right shoe. Wallace pinching his suit slacks up in order to bend down, lift the glasses up by their bridge, so as not to print the lenses.

  Sheryl was screaming important words. They were just sounds to Jory.

  Her hand motions, though. She was waving him out of the way with her pistol. Trying to get Jory out of her line of fire.

  Jory’s mind, though, his thoughts, they were syrup, wouldn’t process.

  All he knew was that he had a torch in his hands. A lit torch.

  Slowly, he raised it, Sheryl’s eyes going wide, the rest of her falling away, scrambling back a classroom, diving into that door.

  This meant Jory was doing the right thing.

  By now, the cheerleader had most of Glasses’s cheek pulled away with her teeth, was into his throat with her fingers.

  “No,” Jory said, and then did it anyway. Opened the torch. Stood on it for a ten count, a twenty count, until the autocool shut the flame off.

  Finally it was Wallace, the mental zombie, who guided his arm down.

  “There, there,” Wallace said, patting Jory’s forearm.

  His voice was grandfatherly. It was a voice he’d had all along, apparently.

  Together they edged around the scorched crater in the floor. The bubbling meat, the smoldering bone.

  “She wasn’t infected, was she?” Jory said. “Just scared, right?”

  Wallace didn’t say anything.

  In the doorway of dead-children classroom, Sheryl was just standing there, the pistol slack by her leg.

  “Sh-Sheryl?” Wallace said after her, but he and Jory didn’t stop. They might never move again if they did.

  Crossing the pool of darkness thirty seconds later, Jory closed his eyes fast when he heard the shot. Just one.

  Sheryl.

  All the children’s names, they were written on the board, first name and last name, in five even columns, for the five rows of desks.

  In case anybody wanted to know. In case anybody wanted to count.

  It’s not that the world had never had heroes, it’s just, these ten years later, we needed another.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Outside, the jeep was still there, but at a different angle now. The windshield whole.

  Mayner?

  “I know him,” Jory said to Wallace, and Wallace shuffled off, to the truck.

  Jory watched him to make sure he made it. Before the plague he’d been an executive of some sort. Now he was like a toy—push him in the right direction, wait for him to eventually get there.

  The grommets were still slamming into the flagpole in their random, meaningful way.

  “Thought you retired,” Mayner said when Jory got there, hauled himself up into the passenger seat. Jory ditched the torch and his pack behind the seat, then sat there studying Glasses’s glasses. He polished a lens where he’d smudged it.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked Mayner.

  “Till death do us part,” Mayner said, “right?”

  Jory cracked a smile, his eyes tearing up at the same time.

  “Live one in there?” Mayner asked.

  Jory shut his eyes.

  Should he torch Sheryl as well? Would that be saving her? If it was airborne now, then he owed it to her. Because he should have warned her. He should have melted that door shut, sealed that classroom shut forever.

  “She was—sixteen?” Jory said, trying to answer better. “She’d been living in the walls or something. Since the first wave probably. Stealing peaches and pears. Opening them with her teeth. Going fe—going feral…”

  Jory made a fist that crushed Glasses’s glasses.

  Mayner reached over, extracted the breakage from Jory’s hand.

  “Your buddy’s helmet’s still l
ive,” Mayner said then, tapping the fold-up display on the console.

  Jory peered down, looked through the helmet’s camera. Upside down, black-and-white children’s feet were in the background, Sheryl’s legs in the foreground, a pool of blood spreading. Then, close to the camera, the sound of a basketball dribbling, and the helmet, obviously picked up, put on. Walking down the hall now, stopping to tap the dead light, get a flicker but nothing else. A hummed tune coming through the speakers.

  Jory stood in the jeep, waited for that tune to sashay out the blue doors, restore his faith in the world, and living, and life.

  Maybe twenty seconds later, the jeep appeared on the viewscreen.

  Jory looked up to…not Timothy.

  “What?” Jory said, looking to Mayner for an answer, but Mayner didn’t even know what was wrong here, much less how it had happened.

  Jory intercepted the dribbler, who held the ball in both hands, unsure of Jory.

  “Who are you?” Jory demanded.

  “You the torch?” the dribbler said back. “Thought he had”—and did his upside-down okay fingers to mean glasses.

  “No, where’s—where’s the other guy?” Jory said, looking behind this imposter, like this was a joke, a big misunderstanding.

  The dribbler shrugged, studied the jeep, the helmet exaggerating his movement.

  “I saw that chick Sheryl,” he said, holding his pistoled hand up under his own jaw.

  “Timothy, his name was Timothy,” Jory said, stepping into the dribbler’s face.

  The dribbler shook his head like he’d had enough here, pushed the ball into Jory’s gut, for some distance.

  “All I want to know is what happened to the guy you replaced!” Jory said, turning around, slinging the ball a disappointing distance away.

  The dribbler just stared at Jory. He peeled the helmet off, set it down very properly. Nudged it away with his boot.

  “Listen,” he said, “my orders were that this crew was a man short, I should catch a ride—”

  “That was me who made the crew a minus-one,” Jory said, stepping in, taking as much of the dribbler’s shirt in his fists as he could. “I’m asking about the other guy—tall, wore these old-timey flying goggles—”