The Gospel of Z Read online

  “In or out, man,” Mayner called up.

  Jory didn’t answer.

  One of the soldiers had a gaff, it looked like. This far inland. He was hooking it into the zombie’s stomach, already oozing who knew what.

  “No,” Jory said, but the soldier got a loop of black intestine all the same, started working it out until it spilled at the zombie’s feet.

  When she tried to come up the gaff and grab him, her feet tangled in the guts and she fell, as much as she could on the chains. She slashed ahead with her hands. Snarling, snapping, screaming.

  Jory sat back down, closed his eyes. Mayner started to let the clutch out, but Jory shook his head, held his hand out for the brake again.

  “What?” Mayner asked.

  Jory stood back up. With the torch, the one he’d gotten from Glasses.

  “Gimme a sec here,” he said, stepping down, his first footfall into the street thunderous, at least to him. What he was doing here was deciding to be one person, not another. It wasn’t an easy thing. And there was no going back.

  He wanted to be human though.

  Not a monster, like the world wanted him to be.

  The crowd parted for his bubbling flame, and then he was ringside.

  “Good, good,” Voss said, his arms crossed, and Jory nodded, looked over to the punk, his face rabid with this fun. And then he studied this zombie.

  Her black intestines were still spilling. She didn’t even know, not in any real way.

  “Cauterize that wound for her, son?” Voss said.

  “Yes, sir,” Jory said, and opened the throat of his torch as wide as it would go, the soldiers all cheering at first, the ones in the back shielding their eyes from the heat. The cheering trailed down to nothing. Just the pop and the sizzle of dry meat burning.

  Jory held the trigger until the soldiers holding the chains had to drop them.

  Towards the end of it, before autocool, Voss was just staring through that wavering air at Jory. Jory just stared back.

  “Shit, man…” the punk whined, letting the tip of his barrel fall.

  The crowd was murmuring. Looking around. Blinking from the oily residue in the air.

  “Feel better?” Voss said into that new silence.

  “Not even a little,” Jory said, and shrugged out of his torch, left it there. Didn’t look back.

  One day short of ten years was how long it had been since Black Friday then.

  Every hour of that had been a miracle.

  Maybe two blocks from the Hill, the crowds thin enough to chug along at twenty. Mayner stood on the jeep’s brakes, slid them to a stop.

  Jory caught himself on the dash, rocked back in his seat.

  “Dude, I can just, you know, walk,” he cobbled together, from awkwardness and apology, then tracked over to what had Mayner’s fascination—the green X spray-painted on the side of a burned-out apartment building. One of Scanlon’s crematoriums probably. A historic battlefield.

  Jory’d walked by it on the way to the parking garage, twice in the last five days.

  “You used to work Disposal, right?” Mayner said, still not looking away.

  Jory shrugged sure. It was what the green X meant—this building was ready, was going to fall on some other, still-good building if something wasn’t done. “They never get to these though,” he said. “Heavy equipment, squatters, collateral damage.”

  “They’re going to tear it down,” Mayner said in something like wonder, making his fist into a tube to breathe through.

  “You know this place?” Jory said, looking up to the building again.

  Mayner straightened his right leg against the floorboard, pushed hard enough to work his wallet out. Thumb his license up onto the dash.

  —3315 Delany.

  Exactly what the big brass letters by the bright green X read.

  “Shit,” Jory said. “Sorry, man.”

  Mayner nodded like it was no big thing, but then said, “You really anxious to get up there?”—the Hill.

  Jory leaned back farther, cocking his knees against the dash. “Go,” he said.

  He didn’t have to say it twice.

  Mayner slid a sidearm out from under the dash and set it on the console for Jory, then climbed down and crossed in front of the jeep, running his hand along the grill guard, like still holding on to now. But when he stepped up onto the sidewalk, looking both ways before moving on, Jory knew he was gone. Into the past.

  And, this pistol.

  Jory took it up. Sighted along its spine.

  Another reason Disposal had been created was population control. Not the old kind, trying to get people to quit birthing more mouths to feed, but the new kind, where you kept people from killing themselves. Kept them from, once a zone was cleared, sneaking back into their old bedroom, hanging themselves.

  Jory understood, kind of.

  His old neighborhood had burned, but still. He’d gone back and stood there, let the old days rise around him.

  He slid the pistol under the seat, and, when it would only go halfway, reached under to make room. He came up from that with his small pack.

  Jory poured the video camera out, had to study it from every angle to find the Power button. Even then, holding it the right way in his hands, he just looked through it, autofocusing in on a narrow strip of white between two buildings. The Church.

  He lowered the camera, fiddled with the buttons. Hit Playback. Had to pop the small screen out, then look around, see if there was anybody to eavesdrop.

  Nobody.

  He raised the screen, angled it away from the glare.

  The recording was hip level, from training. Voss in black and white, the veins in his neck tight with anger. The wiry dude, Williamson, a close-up of his Z tats, recorded during a break probably. Before they all got a turn with their first real torch.

  Jory lowered the camera, looked up to Mayner’s building.

  When he came back to the camera, he advanced past that first day, hit Play at Commando out by the parking lot of J Barracks. His armor right there at the curb already. Feet unable to stop pacing.

  Jory tilted his head back, jabbed the Fast-Forward, stopped at some overexposed frames, all flashed white.

  But—no—it was those papers. From the auditorium. Whatever Burger Dude had recovered from some old server. The papers that had gotten him killed.

  “Hunh,” Jory said, and figured the Zoom Out—it was the tracking slider—came in close enough to read the blurry letters, having to hold the screen sideways to make the lines be straight across.

  It was in sections, and was formatted like an old—blog? Was that the word?

  Jory smiled, hadn’t even thought of one of those for years. People alone in their houses, making their diaries public. Sculpting the version of themselves they wanted to be true, then going back, editing some more.

  Now, everybody packed together over small fires in the middle of what used to be lobbies and restaurants, you didn’t show yourself to anybody. It would be like scratching a wound open.

  But it was definitely that format—entry, entry, entry.

  No—post. Jory smiled, to be remembering all this.

  And the headings for each post, they were all—he paged through fast to be sure—Z MINUS 53 DAYS, Z MINUS 48 DAYS, and closer and closer. Meaning Glasses had been right—this wasn’t first generation, but compiled, because how could that original blogger have known what was coming, turned his blog upside down, so it read first to last, not last to first? That wasn’t how they’d worked, was it?

  This had been cribbed from a series of screencaps, though, reentered, character by character, so it would never be lost. Because the Play button was the same as the Pause button, Jory could page through with just the tip of his index finger, each freeze-frame taking him one day closer to where he already was. Where everybody was.

  Z minus 44 days

  ‘Telemorse.’

  He typed it in wrong, probably couldn’t look at the keypad of his cell ex
cept in stolen glances, taking mental pictures of the clusters of letters, then having to type by feel, with one thumb. And he was never a spelling champion.

  Telomerase is an enzyme that steadies chromosomes, aids in their continual repair. Age researchers believe in telomerase. The geneti-chemical key to eternal youth.

  Three of the top telomerase researchers are currently stationed at γγγ.

  Today I bought masking software for my home computer. Both of them. There’s freeware all over, but I wanted to pay cash.

  If they search his first name now, ‘γγγ,’ he won’t be one of the 179,000,000 million hits anymore.

  I can’t change my cell, though. It’s the only number he has. So now, this, what I’m doing to all instances of his name, it’s my shield, the beep I say instead of γγγ.

  If there are ever two days of me not posting, then my absence here will be proof of my suspicions.

  And apologies for all the sudden kitten photos. If this were the jungle, I’d wear camouflage. If it were the arctic, I’d duck into a white blanket.

  Not that I have anything against cats.

  Jory looked up again, was still alone. No Mayner, no Punk, no Voss, no bonefaces.

  Just him. And this.

  He leaned back farther, his knees ratcheting closer to his face, and pulled the screen in tight, started at the beginning instead of the middle. Opened on a cell phone ringing during dinner, then went post by post, finally stopping on another kind of table altogether, the same man sitting at it, his face in one of his large hands, the old world crumbling away around him.

  Jory’s scalp was crawling, his breath deeper than he meant.

  This was it. How it started. The beginning of the postapocalypse, in seed form.

  And the last scroll had burned up with Glasses. Under Jory’s flame.

  “What?” Mayner said, leaning in to see.

  Jory snapped the screen shut.

  Mayner had an improvised bag of mementos. Keepsakes. In spite of all the public service posters to the contrary. All the propaganda about not holding on to the past, but looking to the future.

  “I’m ready,” Jory said, sitting back up, leaning over to tuck the camera under the seat, get Mayner his pistol back.

  Mayner cranked the jeep over, nodded down to the idea of the camera, said, like he’d never believe it, “You mean that’s still got juice?”

  Yes, Jory nodded.

  Juice.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Because it was custom—feet, not tires—Mayner killed the jeep just this side of the Weeping Poles.

  “So’s this goodbye?” he said, both of them just watching those white walls of the Church.

  “If it’s airborne,” Jory said, “then that means we’ve all already got it, right?” He looked over to Mayner for confirmation. “That means the only way to finally, really kill it, it’s to kill ourselves.”

  “It wins, then,” Mayner said. “Thirty-seven seconds later.”

  “I just want to see her one last time,” Jory said.

  “And you’re, like, sure about that?” Mayner said. “I mean—I mean, shit, man. Is she asking to see you?”

  “What were you, before?” Jory asked.

  “Tell you when you get back,” Mayner said. Then, like he was just remembering, “Hey.”

  He rolled the top of his keepsake bag back. Inside it was all menthols. Pack after pack, green stripes forever.

  Jory stared at them, his mind swirling.

  “How?” he said, picking a sacred pack up, threading a single menthol out.

  Mayner pushed the jeep’s lighter in and they stared at the Church some more.

  “She used to quit every week,” Mayner finally said, swallowing hard after saying it. “But, they were all over the apartment, man. It was like it was made of cigarettes she’d hidden. Like it was made of promises she knew she’d never be able to keep.”

  “They didn’t even burn,” Jory said, studying the one he had. “How long’ve they been there?” he asked then.

  “You worried they’re stale?”

  “Them, I mean,” Jory said, pointing with his chin up the Hill. “The Church. Was it ever even a holding facility?”

  “Those were all west of town,” Mayner said. “The wind. Think this was a, like a military museum or something. Yeah. Since Korea or so anyway.”

  “Military?”

  “Used to be the army base, or station, fort, mission, garrison, I don’t know. But they needed places for the planes to land, places to blow stuff up for fun, room to salute, all that. Maybe it was before my dad, even…Why?”

  “Guess I’m getting interested in history,” Jory said, laughing at himself. “You don’t need to wait, cool?” he said then, holding a single pack of menthols up in thanks, then setting them down on the passenger seat. “If they make me do confession… Man, hope they can stay awake that long.”

  “You wish,” Mayner said, holding his hand out for a drag.

  It caught Jory off guard, but Mayner snapped, was committed to this gesture.

  Jory flipped the menthol around, passed it over.

  Mayner coughed, coughed some more, his eyes full of water, getting fuller.

  Jory looked away, understood. It wasn’t about the menthol. It was about who had hidden them.

  You can honor a dead person in so many secret little ways.

  “I’ll pick you up tomorrow,” Mayner said, coughing some more, hooking his head back to the idea of base. “J Barracks.”

  “I’m not a torch anymore,” Jory told him, blowing a clean line of smoke out.

  Mayner chuckled, let it turn into a smile. Said, “Shit. You might be the only torch,” then dropped the jeep into reverse but kept it clutched.

  Jory stepped away, the camera safe in its pack, and Mayner coughed his way back.

  The Weeping Pole beside him was already blowing with left-behind marriage licenses, with song lyrics scavenged from liner notes, with a fast food receipt, its date circled with a heart. An old, curled address sticker peeled from a magazine, two names above that street number, printed side-by-side once upon a time. Somebody’s only proof, all they had left.

  Behind him, the jeep crunched away.

  Jory stared down at the cherry of his menthol.

  It was his firing-line smoke.

  He studied the cherry, brought it to his lips, breathed in so deep it hurt, wonderfully.

  Z minus 33 days

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m still here. Really me. Here’s another kitten picture, if that proves it. Or, for those here since the early posts, my brother’s name, it’s got the same number of letters as the word ‘brain,’ okay? Or ‘bingo.’ ‘Baste.’

  Apologies.

  Nothing new, either. Well. I did sit in the car in the garage until I got dizzy, but the air doesn’t get grey and hazy like a bar, and you can’t see anybody through it, or explain anything to them.

  How old I am is 37. γγγ was a senior the year I was a freshman. I spilled so many glasses of tea on my brother, on purpose, because he asked. So he could act mad enough to blast off into the night. So many times.

  γγγ. I’ve had a glass of tea on the table all day. Waiting.

  I’m sorry.

  Or something like that, all the way down to Z minus 1 Day. Nothing posted after that. Just a blank, white page. The pitted surface of an eggshell, each one of us inside, the plague yolking around us, a dab of blood in there already.

  Jory blinked all of it back, held it in.

  “I’m sorry too,” he said aloud, to the Kitten Man, and breathed the menthol hotter, deeper, then leaned up the Hill, his cigarette wedged under the staple behind him, not even catching the fast food receipt—two double-meats with cheese—until he’d knocked on those tall doors, ducked inside.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Coming across the main courtyard of the Church was completely different than being led along the winding passage from the landing pad. It was expansive, huge, designed to m
ake the sky feel like an upturned bowl.

  At the lip of that bowl, on the ramparts of the walls, were novitiates. Looking down on the city. Not sentries, just watchers. Students. All of us ants down there to them, throwing bottles, shooting flames. Being so human.

  Did they miss it?

  Or maybe the novitiates were looking down on the poles, wisping smoke up by now, days before the next scheduled burn.

  Jory lowered his head to hide his grin and pushed on, his upper arm in the firm grip of his new escort. He looked just like the last escort.

  In his boot, still hidden, was the white blade.

  It was curved like a human rib, he thought.

  Like the outer edge of a toilet bowl.

  A walrus tooth. Penis bone from a juvenile whale—baculum.

  Jory nodded to himself, thought that word would have been long gone by now.

  He was ready.

  The line they were taking—a path of packed dirt—would spit them up at the same door he’d been through last time. Doorway, Jory corrected, giving the rest of them a casual eye, all of them the same—rounded at the top, doorless—except one off in the corner. It was shackled in iron, a real-true railroad-tie-looking crossbar cocked up beside it that would take three priests to engage.

  So, there were some secrets. Some places the rest couldn’t go. Holiest of the holies, the best prayer chamber, the secret library. Where they kept the apples, maybe, or the ketchup.

  Jory swallowed his grin, hated this world.

  All along the walls, just like last time, were the deep gouges, just slightly higher than a person could scratch. About exactly as high as an infected person could reach, especially with a city on the other side.

  Maybe the plague had passed through here, but they’d—they’d starved it down, given it holy water. Stood in their open doorways and told the children to behave, to “settle down now”.