The Gospel of Z Read online

  At which point the dribbler broke Jory’s weak hold, slammed his own hands into Jory’s chest, driving him to his knees.

  “Exactly,” Jory said, launching from there, only stopping because Mayner had him by the scruff. And about thirty pounds.

  “Sorry,” Mayner grunted to the dribbler. “Probably best if you, you know—”

  The dribbler stood there a breath or two more, then waved this whole stupid scene away. He walked to the truck, climbed in with Wallace.

  “Ten years tomorrow, you know that?” Mayner said to Jory, letting him go now.

  Jory shook the rest of the way out of Mayner’s hold. He stepped off, breathing hard, then just squatted down, his back to the jeep, his face in his hands, his shoulders shuddering.

  “Happy birthday, world,” Jory said, laughing a nonlaugh, and stood. “I just want to see her, you know?” he said then, picking up Glasses’s helmet delicately, on both sides, like Glasses was still in there. “That’s all. Just—I just want to see her one last time.”

  “See who?”

  “She went up the Hill,” Jory said, lifting his hand in that general direction.

  Mayner looked that way.

  “Listen, man,” he said. “Something I want to show you, yeah?”

  “No thanks. Seen enough today.”

  Mayner shrugged one shoulder, said, “Could be worth another menthol, I suppose.”

  Jory looked over to be sure Mayner wasn’t lying.

  On the way up the hug-n-go lane, Mayner leaned down, slowed the jeep enough to scoop up the basketball.

  Where Mayner took them was a barren place way at the edge of a safe zone, almost right up against the chain-link fence.

  “There, yeah,” he said, Jory’s menthol down to a nub. “Told you.”

  Jory studied his menthol butt, looked up, his eyes guarded.

  A malformed goat was hobbling up to the jeep, its radio collar heavy.

  “Hey, a goat,” Jory said, unimpressed.

  “No, look at it,” Mayner said, draping himself over the steering wheel.

  “So it’s messed up,” Jory said. “Welcome to paradise, right?”

  Mayner popped the cooler between them, ferreted a candy bar out. “They like chocolate,” he explained, handing the icy bar to Jory.

  Jory peeled it, looked at it from all angles, then to Mayner.

  “Like this?” he said, holding the chocolate out the doorless door.

  The goat edged in, shy like a dog that’s been beat, and took it. It chewed, and chewed.

  “Its eyes,” Jory said. They were watching him. And they were wrong in some way. “What is this?”

  Mayner chewed his cheek, satisfied.

  “You know about General Scanlon, right?” he said.

  “War hero, crimes against humanity, saved us all. Breath smells like pimento.”

  “Serious?”

  “What does he have to do with this?”

  “When he wants to clear a zone like this,” Mayner said, shrugging like it was common knowledge, “this is how he does it.”

  “With radioactive mutant goats?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. But, he does make them in the lab, yeah. Or has them made, I don’t know.” Mayner breathed in, started over. “You know how he’s supposed to have used kids for the first wave? Because they smelled the best, were the best bait?” Mayner did the tic-tac-toe in the air. “Yeah, well, these guys—you know baby goats are named ‘kids’?—he figured out how to cross genes, I guess. Or something. How to get that same sweet smell. Something about the glands.”

  Jory looked back to the goat, still chewing. Licking its lips clean.

  “You mean,” he said, “you mean these are…that they’re part human?”

  “They can understand words some, I think,” Mayner added.

  “So, so, what? If their collars are still blinking green or whatever—?”

  “Then the zone’s clean,” Mayner completed. “Bad thing is, it works. The dead can’t resist these guys. They’re the ice cream truck to the zombie’s inner child, like. They’ll come in from miles around.”

  Jory was studying the goat again. Those eyes that weren’t looking away. Like the goat was confirming Mayner’s story.

  It made Jory’s skin feel cold.

  “All the lucky people died early on, didn’t they?” he finally said. “Why are you showing me this?”

  “That girl you torched back there,” Mayner said, sliding Glasses’s helmet into Jory’s lap. “We can make up for it here.”

  “Make up for the cheerleader?”

  “Far as brass knows, this helmet, it went up back at that school, right?”

  “So?”

  “So. Put it on that goat. Make the world right.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Jory said. “I don’t want to—“

  “I think he’d see your torch coming,” Mayner said. “But this”—his keypad on the dash—“it’s more humane. Has to be, right?”

  Jory processed this. Watched the goat.

  “You’re saying the code missiles,” Jory said, looking up to them, bracketed just above his head, “they key on the helmet?”

  “Kill the head and the body will die,” Mayner said.

  “A little torch humor,” Jory said.

  “Get it where you can.”

  Jory considered, considered, then, “Got another candy bar?”

  Three minutes later, the goat was wobbling around, lips chocolatey, the helmet strapped over its head. Jory was petting it, then pressing the side of his face to the side of its face—it was human, in there somewhere. He finally had to push away from it.

  “It won’t hurt,” he told it. Then, to Mayner, “Will it?”

  Instead of starting the jeep, Mayner let the goat wander off on its own, front-heavy and stumbling now, sugar racing through its veins.

  “It’s happy,” Jory said.

  “It’s a he,” Mayner answered back, the goat maybe thirty yards off now, like it was waiting, the sun sinking behind it so that it was just a bulbous-headed, wobbly silhouette of a goat. “Cover your ears if you want. It won’t matter.”

  Jory did, Mayner’s fingertips natural on the keypad, and, like that, the missiles were whistling off the roll bar. They dove into the sky as three then came plunging back down as one, furious, nipping at each other to be first.

  “All the lucky people died,” Jory said, just before. “Left the rest of us here in hell.”

  Then the sound, the slam, the wave of pressure rocking the jeep. Slabs of charred goat slapped down on the hood.

  “It doesn’t have to be hell,” Mayner said, and backed the jeep up, turned them around.

  “Think I want to go to church now,” Jory said, looking over to Mayner. “Catch a ride?”

  Mayner stopped the jeep, stared straight ahead, his arms folded over the thin steering wheel.

  “They’re not going to let you see her, man.”

  Jory leaned down to his boot, came up with the slick white blade.

  “Never know,” he said, his voice slack in a way that made Mayner look over.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Late night in the mannequin household. The wife at her side of the double–sink vanity, a night-cap keeping her hair up, her nightgown floor-length, very proper.

  The husband is sitting on the bed in rumpled slacks, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his smooth elbows. His elbows that will never callous, would just rub away into powder and dust, if it came to that.

  The wife sneaks glances at him in the mirror.

  What he’s doing is holding his tiny phone in his basketball-player hands. Reading the last text over and over, then looking away, out their second-story window. Maybe trying to pretend he hasn’t seen whatever the message is.

  But he keeps coming back to it.

  On the computer, in its fold-out armoire across the room, is a black page with grey words. And kitten pictures.

  The husband breathes in, breathes out.

 
“Mommy?” the son says from the door, his voice weak in a fake way. The wife rolls her eyes, but by the time she’s turned around, her face is pleasant.

  “Yes?” she says.

  “It itches,” the son says, holding his cast up.

  The husband rises, reaches for the straightened coat hanger already on the nightstand, and goes to one knee before his son.

  “There?” he says, manipulating the hanger in, then bending it, turning it like a slim jim, like he knows this car door well.

  The son moves his shoulder, changing the angle of the hanger, then nods.

  “Not too much,” the wife says from her mirror.

  “Your mom’s right,” the husband says, reeling the hanger in. “Now, think you can sleep, big guy?”

  The son shrugs, looks to the mom for help, but her plastic back is turned.

  “Can’t find X-Ray,” he says into his own chest.

  “His action figure,” the wife calls, her voice even more pleasant now than her face. “With the glasses, dear?”

  “X-Ray,” the husband says, like it’s the pressure release valve for the night. For this week. “We’ll find him tomorrow, will that work? We’ll look everywhere, promise. Then go fight crime.”

  “He’s an explorer,” the son says.

  “Probably in the car,” the wife slips in.

  “Then we’ll explore,” the husband says to his son, the cheer in his voice less sincere now.

  The son shrugs, but isn’t committing to anything. He slumps back down the hall.

  “It didn’t itch,” the husband says, putting the hanger back in its place.

  “He’s scared,” the wife says, not needing to explain why.

  The husband sits down on the very edge of the bed again. Like sitting too fully would be a betrayal.

  “Simmons at work checked it out,” the husband says into the floor. “It’s legit this time.”

  The wife is tending to her eyebrows.

  “It’s always legitimate,” she says, closing her eyes now. “It was legitimate last time, remember? Fifteen hundred dollars of legitimate? Surefire, was that the word he used? What word is it this time?”

  “This is different,” the husband says, looking up to her back. “He’s not even asking for anything. That’s why I’m scared, see?”

  The wife sighs. “I’m not going to be the bad guy here,” she says.

  “It’s just,” the husband says, leaning back like he’s going to stand, but staying on the bed, his mouth too full of words, “he’s in some study, I mean. For cash. An experiment. Taking who knows what, mixing it with whatever else he’s already taken.”

  “Or caught.”

  “He was in Jakarta. Do you know what they’ve still got in Jakarta?”

  “Monkeys?”

  “Everything. God. You know him as well as I do.”

  “Well.”

  “I mean, he wouldn’t have told them about our medical history. I know he wouldn’t. Do you think he would have? They don’t even let us donate blood. It’s, it’s—”

  “If he messes their study up, so what, right? If they’ve got money to run a hush-hush experiment like this, don’t you think they’ve got enough to run it again? And, maybe he’s in the control group anyway, right?”

  “He’s not even supposed to have his cell phone though. What does that tell you? Does that sound aboveboard? Like people who aren’t going to get seriously pissed when his blood, when they—?”

  “Rodge looked it up, this study?”

  The husband finally stands. Pacing now.

  “Not directly. Watchdog groups, whatever they’re called. They were protesting at first, I guess. Trying to get it in the media. The people involved, the doctors, but then it all went dark. One of them was working on a project called the… It was the Lazarus Complex. Does that sound good?”

  “Was that that movie?” the wife asks, angling her head over to take an earring out.

  “You don’t,” the husband says, “XXXXX. They’ve got him locked up, he signed away his—and he doesn’t even know what it’s going to do…and, and he’s in there and I’m—”

  “Still the brother,” the wife finishes for him. Sweeping in from behind, hugging him around the middle, her face sideways to his back again, accentuating their height difference again. “Go,” she says, just loud enough. Maybe just moving her injection-molded lips in that very particular shape against his back.

  Two feet above her, the husband’s face changes, as much as it can. His hands come down to cover hers, on his stomach.

  “I’ll tell them it’s a family emergency,” he says.

  “Emergency?” their daughter says, suddenly in the doorway.

  “No, no, dear,” the wife says, then, to her husband. “Do you know where it is? Where you’re going?”

  “Listen,” the husband says, already moving, “this won’t be like, I won’t let it”—leaning down to kiss his wife’s forehead, then, on the way out, cupping his daughter’s head in his hand to keep her standing so he can swivel around, his long fingers the last thing to whip around the edge of the doorway, disappear.

  He’s been leaving for two weeks already. Since that first call. It’s all right there on the wife’s face.

  “Hurry back,” she says, a hopeful smile ghosting up at the corners of her mouth.

  “Where’s Daddy going?” the daughter asks, going to sit on the edge of the bed too, the mom settling at the computer now. Shaking her head at the endless kittens. She clicks them away, one by one. Behind them are pages and pages about Jakarta. Instead of x’ing them all, she powers the monitor down. Leans over so she and her daughter can see each other in a surprise angle of the bathroom mirror.

  “You know how sometimes you help Trey when it’s his own fault, but he’s your brother, so you do it anyway?” she says.

  The daughter lifts a maybe shoulder.

  “Well, your Uncle XXXXX is Daddy’s brother, see?”

  “Is he really maybe married now?” the daughter asks, hopeful.

  “He’s really maybe something.” The wife smiles back. “We’ll ask your father when he gets back, how about that?”

  The daughter nods a prim nod, then her hand comes up with something.

  “Shouldn’t Daddy have his phone?” she says, holding it out across the bed, instead of towards the mirror.

  The wife takes the cell phone, trying not to ring any alarms in the girl’s head.

  “I’m sure he—” She starts navigating his screen with her thumb. Scrolling to the last text message, the one her husband’s been coming back to all night, that kept him from dinner—Ima kill Oppnhimer.

  She clicks it away from the daughter, brings up the attached image—a plastic utensil handle, rubbed to a sharp point.

  “Who’s Oppen—Openhammer?” the daughter asks.

  “Oppenheimer,” the wife corrects, and presses the phone to her chest. Blinks away tears. She looks to the window, out into the night.

  The husband already driving through it, his windshield wipers slashing the rain away, a phone book on the passenger seat, open. Both his hands are tight on the wheel, his face hovering just over them, trying to see through wall after wall of water.

  Because this mission’s taking all his attention, he doesn’t notice the small body curled sideways around an action figure in the backseat, asleep.

  All around them, the world is starting to end.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Downtown was ready to explode. There were more people in the streets than Jory’d seen since the last wave. And not all of them had been people then.

  “Z Day,” Mayner tour-guided needlessly, tiptoeing the jeep through the rubble.

  Jory watched the clumps of bodies smear by, some of them wearing dug-up Halloween masks. Skeletons, ghouls. The hungry dead.

  “Ten years,” he said at last, then turned to Mayner. “Ever think we’d make it this far?”

  “We haven’t yet,” Mayner said, braking hard for a kid in a cap
e, scuttling from curb to curb. He was running from a ghoul-faced reaper, the reaper the kid’s mom or dad, just trying to catch the kid. But when that mom or dad leaned down to pick the kid up, they had to lean down on their scythe. The kid ran screaming away again.

  There were soldiers too, AWOL from base, bottles in one hand, guns in the other.

  By tomorrow, it would be a parade. Fires, drinking, accidental deaths.

  We’d made it, yeah. We were back.

  Jory shook his head, kept his hand clamped to the fold-down windshield frame.

  The Church was just coming into view, still these holy flashes of white through the broken buildings. But they had to slow for more soldiers first. Ones who had started earlier, come farther. A mass of civilians was circling them, cheering them on. Flames gouting up into the sky.

  “That’s a torch,” Jory said, holding his hand out for Mayner to stop. Both of them stood in their seats to see, but didn’t really want to see.

  It was a female zombie. She was chained at the neck, the last ten feet of the four chains running through pipe, to maintain a no-bite zone. Four soldiers were manning those chains, keeping her in the middle for the other soldiers, darting in with heated-up crowbars and crackling Hot Shots. Going by the chant seeping in, they were trying to get her to dance, to take it off.

  “Friends of yours?” Mayner said.

  “She’s not even alive,” Jory said back.

  “‘She’,” Mayner repeated, then sat back down, harder than he needed to.

  A soldier with a liberated shovel came down hard on the zombie’s right knee, folding it in. The crowd screamed with joy when she tried to stand up on it again, and again.

  A few steps farther back, with the torch, was the punk, his mohawk pink now, and straight up. No—erect.

  “Blaine,” Jory remembered, seeing him now.

  A few steps over from him, watching all this, proctoring it, was Voss.

  He looked up, past all this, to the antibody Jory was, and touched his own forehead, anointing it, telling Jory he remembered. That he wasn’t going to forget. Then he nodded to the zombie, for Jory to join the festivities.