The Gospel of Z Read online

  If this were one of the old-time movies, the close-up here would be the floor by Jory’s boots. His scalpel tinking off that hard surface, the handle and blade starting to seesaw away from each other, but that process taking such a torturously long time.

  Timothy looked up, to be sure this was happening, and it was: Jory coming across the table for him. Across the handler. The three of them spilling down onto the floor on Timothy’s side.

  “Dude! You—” Timothy tried to get up, holding his scalpel high, out of the way. Jory’s hands were already at his throat, driving Timothy’s head back, Timothy’s work goggles snapping off. Spittle, grunts, teeth. Jory’s eyes too wet, too full, too much.

  This was another reason why the long cigarette break by J Barracks. Because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to ignore everybody.

  “Don’t—say—that—about—her!” he grunted, slamming Timothy’s head back with each word, his thumbs on Timothy’s skinny-man Adam’s apple. Then Jory raised his right hand high, to start the punching. Timothy peeked, not wanting to see it come.

  It didn’t.

  Jory let go, leaned back. Pressed his hands into his eyes again and held them there, trying to will time backwards. Start this scene all over.

  But why stop there, right?

  Why not go back to this morning. To the front door closing with him in bed, a note waiting for him at the kitchen table.

  Or even farther, to Z Day, Jory in the backyard of what had been his house. A perfectly normal day. One he didn’t appreciate nearly enough. One he should have been documenting with his camera, every single moment.

  Maybe if he held his hands on his eyes long enough, he could go back, start over.

  Please.

  “Dude, dude, dude,” Timothy was saying under him, at a whisper almost, except five hundred times more urgent.

  The cameras weren’t miked though. Why whisper?

  Jory pulled his hands away, the room swimming with what looked like paramecium. Angel paramecium, made from light. Fireworms.

  He smiled.

  “She went up the Hill…” he said again, trying to laugh about how stupid it was.

  “Dude!” Timothy said then, wriggling, trying to buck Jory off in the softest way possible.

  Jory focused on Timothy’s work goggles in the corner before zeroing back in on Timothy’s face.

  It was washed pale, unable to make words anymore.

  “What?” Jory said, craning his head around on instinct, to follow where Timothy was looking.

  The handler.

  Standing. And then standing some more.

  It was terrible. It was majestic.

  Jory slumped away, not so much out of fear as out of reverence, and Timothy pulled him the rest of the way down then kicked the two of them back under the belt, into the places where life could keep happening.

  “No, no,” Timothy was saying, reaching up on the wall, Jory following his hand with dream eyes, the kind where everything makes sense, where you don’t have to stop to make connections, just accept, accept.

  The button.

  Timothy wanted the button. And now he had it, was slapping his hand onto it, the room flashing emergency red, the vents sucking closed, the bulkhead on the other side of the room creaking down.

  And then the handler angled its head, saw the two of them in its dim way.

  “Eight,” Jory said to himself, “eight ways to die,” and this was funny, but then Timothy was dragging him all the way under the belt, through the wires and cables. Where nobody would have thought two people could fit. But nobody thought a handler could ever wake on the belt, either.

  Jory only looked back when the huge hand clamped down on his foot. His boot.

  Timothy could tell, pulled harder. “Help, help!” he yelled to Jory, setting his feet and jerking Jory forward by the armpits, Jory looking up at Timothy, at how hard he was pulling, like all of this mattered, and, just because it would be rude not to, he pointed his foot.

  His boot slipped off, the handler falling against the back wall.

  The bulkhead was almost down now, its huge gears or cables or whatever grinding in the ceiling, dust shrouding its descent.

  Jory’d always wondered what it would be like, this safety measure.

  Loud. It was loud.

  And big. Shaking the whole building.

  He smiled again, and then Timothy’s hand hooked under the bulkhead so he could pull himself under, live.

  Not Jory.

  You can see him here even better than when he was smoking by J Barracks, probably. The way he gets up from the floor of the clean room. The way he studies this handler, just standing itself. Its all-black eyes registering Jory in an instant, its weight rolling up to the balls of its great bare feet. The ghost of a grin starts on Jory’s face, and then he’s sinking, falling, Timothy’s hands on his ankles, dragging him through, under, an instant before the door—

  Before it should have slammed shut anyway.

  But the handler was already there, its fingers hooked under the door, three or four tons of pressure trying to close it, finish that process. The handler’s muscles rippled all along its frame, its extra veins surfacing, even the incomplete ones, its lips drawn back from its teeth in impossible effort.

  Jory and Timothy were at the opposite wall in the control room by now, their backs to that wall, Timothy holding Jory down, Jory just watching through the foot-thick plastiglass window in the bulkhead—why a window?—the handler’s face there.

  “He—he can’t—” Jory said, watching the door inch back up.

  “He doesn’t know he can’t,” Timothy said, his hand absolutely clamped on Jory’s wrist.

  And whether Jory would have tried to stand again, to help that handler, loose it on the world in its raw state, none of the fail-safes wired in yet, it doesn’t matter.

  Two guards crashed through the door, assessing the situation in a flash, sliding on their knees to the bulkhead, to spray bullets underneath for what felt like minutes, finally cutting the handler off at the knees, its face sinking from the window, even when the window jerked lower, the bulkhead locking into the floor at last.

  The guards fell back, breathing hard.

  The first one turned around, raised his visor.

  “So,” he said, “which one of you’s the—” he started, then flinched back.

  The handler was at the window again. Slamming its hands—the fingers just meat under the door now—into the glass so thick it was almost a cube.

  “No,” the second guard said, reaching to his belt for another magazine, “no, he can’t, he can’t…”

  “How long you think he can go on like that?” the first guard said, kind of amazed now too.

  “Until we’re all dead,” Timothy said, when the first impossible crack shot through the glass.

  “No!” the second guard said, angling his barrel at that glass, about to spray it, except Jory was close enough to guide that gun down.

  “He doesn’t understand,” Jory said. At which point the guard ripped his gun back, settled it instead between Jory’s eyes.

  “Whoah, whoah,” Timothy said, standing, holding his spidery hands out, the rest of him shaped like a question mark.

  It’s all recorded.

  The way Jory smiled, that barrel leaving a crescent burn against his left eyebrow. His right hand, rising slowly and not threatening, to his side, to a spot on the wall just over Timothy’s shoulder.

  The second red button.

  Because he couldn’t see, couldn’t turn his head to see, Jory found the wall with his fingertips, pressed the button with his thumb, the room going jet-engine hot, instant crematorium.

  It’s all there if you want to see it.

  All except that, on the red of that plastic button, now, there’s a faint happy face, from the ink on Jory Gray’s thumb.

  And then the rest of it happened.

  Chapter Two

  As for how the plague started, there were nearly as ma
ny theories then as there are zombies.

  No, correction—there were nearly as many theories as there are people left.

  At the height of the plague, the best estimates had six or seven walking dead for every uninfected man, woman and child. That sounds kind of positive when you run the numbers, do the math to figure how many people that meant were left to fight the good fight, have more babies, start things over. Except you can’t do the math like that. It wasn’t a case of a sixth or seventh of humanity still hiding somewhere, waiting this out, it was a case of each zombie taking down twelve or fifteen citizens, leaving them cracked open in the street, steaming. Moving on to the next one.

  And, though these numbers are more of a guess, of those twelve or fifteen victims, usually one would have been an incomplete meal, would rise to join the horde, to get its twelve or fifteen meals, and infect one more person, bring him or her over to the dead side. The worst game of Red Rover ever, pretty much.

  So, taking all that into account, maybe five percent of the North American population was making it through that first decade. Probably way less.

  And of that less than five percent, isolated in clumps all over the map, there was maybe one kid for every fifteen adults. Not because they couldn’t run faster, couldn’t hide better—they could, they definitely can—but because they get scared of the dark, out there alone. Because they call out for other people, for just another voice. Because they go back for pets, and dolls. Because they don’t know how to drive cars, use guns, open cans without a can opener.

  Maybe it’s better that they went first though. They didn’t have to grow up thinking this world was the real world. They didn’t have to see the things their moms and dads were having to do to survive.

  Not that there were that many moms.

  Like Timothy was telling Jory, there was maybe one woman for every five men. It’s not that the women were slower or weaker, any of that, but that the majority of women tended to work in places thicker with people. The malls and schools and high-rises that the dead just slit down the side, ate from until their sides burst. Literally.

  The men who tended to live were the linemen, out on a call alone, watching a curious plume of smoke thread its way up through the horizon fifty miles away. The truckers, taking a shortcut on some back road they hoped didn’t have any scales. The poachers out in their boats, sitting on a bench of stacked alligators. If there were any hang gliders up in the clouds somewhere, they probably lasted a while too, could land out where nobody was, then take off again, and again, until they starved up there, never came down.

  You’d think the men-to-women numbers would have all been balanced out by the imbalance in the military, how male it was, and how the dead just swallowed line after line of troops, overran tanks and transports and everything else we could throw at them, but no. At least as far as base was concerned, Timothy was right—Linse had been the only woman in Jory’s housing unit, and each housing unit was eight apartments back to back.

  So, yes, Jory had extra locks on the door, a chair under the knob most nights, and a looted pistol by his bed. He’d had to ask a neighbor how to pull the slide back, and then, out on Disposal, he’d tested the gun against a wall, to make sure the neighbor hadn’t been lying.

  It had kicked in his hand so hard he nearly dropped it.

  This is Jory Gray, yes.

  He even laughed at himself that day, so don’t feel bad. From the least can come the most, right?

  And, like everybody, he tuned in to the late-night radio broadcasts as well, to listen to the out-there theories of zombie genesis—okay, at least as many theories as there were pirate DJs—but it was just entertainment. Because there was no television anymore, and not enough servers to make a network, and no way to plug into a network anyway.

  So you laughed where you could. Jory and Linse would sit in the living room, in chairs that didn’t quite touch, their scavenged little radio throwing out theories so outlandish it made them feel like maybe this world was the good one after all. It was better than that other one the DJs were talking about, anyway.

  Jory would always be watching Linse too. And he never knew she was looking up the Hill the whole time.

  Chapter Three

  When the flames died down in the clean room, anything remotely biological burned away, those toxic ashes flushed down the drain, the guards stood, delivered Jory and Timothy to the guards in the hall. They hooked their arms under Jory’s arms, their faces stone, and dragged him and Timothy to the showers, for scrubdown.

  “Three hundred eighty-eight days without an accident…” Jory heard Timothy singsonging from somewhere behind him, and Jory wanted to smile, wanted to be like that, to just be able to take the next thing in stride.

  In his former life, Timothy had been an elementary school custodian. Maybe that had conditioned him to deal with messes.

  Jory had taught high school biology. There, life was messy, sure, but there were organizing principles. Textbooks with the answers in back, at least.

  That was all over. Now you made it up as you went.

  But that handler—Jory closed his eyes.

  The way the handler had wanted to get out. To get off this assembly line.

  Jory’d never asked where they came from, but always imagined some max-security lockdown kind of prison way out in the Midwest, or down in Louisiana, or Arkansas, one of those places where the inmates would be especially brutal, hard to kill.

  The prison would be tall and grey, Jory knew. A medieval castle, the walls slick-poured concrete, the tops dripping barbed wire. Guard towers, the trees all buzzed down for a half mile all around it, no major highway even close to close.

  That kind of place. Where the guards in the breakroom—a hairsbreadth from being inmates themselves—would have seen the first reports of people eating people, of the dead walking the streets, and would have gotten on their internal radio system, shut that mother of a place down. Because it was a prison, one for the worst offenders, locking it down wouldn’t take much. Just cutting the phone lines, the shortwave. Pulling the drawbridge up and keeping it up for the next eight, nine years, until the military came knocking, asking for some men who knew how to use their hands, and maybe weren’t afraid to.

  The line of volunteers—especially considering what they had to have been eating for years now—would have wrapped all the way around the yard. Not a single one of them expecting that part of this big escape they thought they were making, it was getting a chrome spike to the brain stem. Living for months in a vat. Forgetting your name. Laying down on a wide black belt as a man, getting up a monster, not even able to think for itself.

  Once or twice, Jory had seen crude tattoos on the arms of a handler, the ink faded and, now that the arm was juiced to twice its size, the anchor or woman or name all stretched out, smeared.

  They were children, though, the handlers. Enormous infants.

  In the public demonstrations, the faith sessions—mandatory on base—Jory had seen the soldiers handling the handlers. Showing how they could drop them to their massive knees with the touch of a button. How they could slap them back and forth, get no response. How they didn’t even feel it when a blade cut into the thick meat of their shoulder. The handlers just kneeling there, head down, built to please.

  Built by Jory to please.

  It had been a step up from Disposal though. From trolling the restricted zones, knocking down any building that looked like it was falling down anyway.

  It was good, Disposal, most of the time spent on the truck, really, but there was always the chance of flushing a leftover zombie too. Of not coming home to Linse. Of Linse just sitting there waiting for him to come home.

  So he’d taken the promotion to the shiny new factory, learned the procedures. Met Timothy. Probably not even by accident, both of them being from the school system.

  The military took everything into account, when it came to handlers.

  Everything except pushing one off the belt.

&nb
sp; Jory shook his head, half in wonder. What had he been thinking?

  In the shower with him and Timothy now were the two guards who’d slid into the clean room on their knees, saved the day.

  Jory squinted, went rag doll so his clothes could be peeled off. So the brushes-on-poles could be scraped across his skin.

  Beside him, his showerhead already on, already steaming, was Timothy, some amateur inkwork on his back Jory’d never have suspected—tic-tac-toe lines. A grid of blue from scapula to scapula, then a crude handprint on his shoulder, like he’d just been pushed.

  The tattoo wasn’t about resistance, Jory knew. It was about solidarity. A we-will-never-forget kind of thing, for all the children sacrificed to the plague.

  Jory closed his eyes.

  “Dudes!” Timothy was saying beside him, to the two guards scrubbing them down. “It’s not like—he wasn’t even infected, right?”

  “It,” Timothy’s scrubber corrected, his voice a dial tone.

  “Handlers are inoculated with a nonvirulent strain of the virus,” Jory’s scrubber recited. The handle of his brush was six feet long.

  “Exactly,” Timothy said, wincing from the water, ducking the wire brush.

  “It’s supposed to make them taste bad,” Jory’s scrubber went on, Jory submitting to the brush. Hoping it would hurt worse, even.

  “And you weren’t inoculated,” Timothy’s scrubber said to Timothy. “Now turn around.”

  “But I was, we were, we were holding our breaths the whole time, see? We were—”

  “Just shut up,” one of the naked guards said, getting the scrubdown as well.

  Timothy flashed his eyes up, started to step across to that guard, but Jory stopped this naked fight from happening, turned Timothy around like the scrubber wanted.

  “Let it go,” he said to Timothy. Both of them leaned against the wall now, legs spread, forearms pillowed between the tile and their foreheads.

  “He better hope I don’t see him on the street,” Timothy mumbled.

  “Guy who saved your life, you mean?” the guard said.