The Gospel of Z Read online

  “I’m sorry,” Jory said then. To Timothy. For all this.

  Timothy just smiled his jangly smile.

  “She’s not coming back, man,” he said. “Not from there, not from them. Nobody does. But that doesn’t mean you have to kill yourself either. Now, just—” but for a moment he couldn’t talk, could only grind his teeth, sway his back in. From the brush. “Yeah, yeah,” he called back to his scrubber, “definitely, you’re right. I probably did get some virus there in the crack of my ass, let me just spread a little, like, yeah, yeah, you mind if I call you Sheila? That work for you?”

  Ten more minutes of that, and then the locker room again. Jory and Timothy each shave-headed now, their skin raw and angry.

  On each of their locker doors were reassignment slips. Just blank, not filled out.

  Timothy crumpled his. “Man,” he said, looking sidelong at Jory. “Guess I’ll see you in the next life, yeah?”

  “Think I want to come back?” Jory said, letting his slip fall. Not saying anything about the razor cut on Timothy’s head. A mole or something gone. One thin line of blood, stopping no time soon.

  “What say we skip a few, then?” Timothy said. “Get ahead of all this?”

  Jory opened his locker door one last time, and by the time he looked up he was in the back seat of a topless jeep, crawling across base.

  Is there a pit to throw defective survivors in, he wondered, or do they just get escorted over the fence?

  He smiled, covered it with his hand, then forgot he was smiling.

  They were in Housing. At the front of Jory’s block.

  “Five, four, three…” the soldier at the wheel was counting. Staring at Jory in the rearview.

  “What?” Jory said.

  “Oh-seven-hundred,” the soldier recited. “Right here.”

  “Thought I was being reassigned?”

  “Oh-seven-hundred,” the soldier said again, enunciating very clearly, then let the clutch out so Jory had to plant a hand on the spare tire behind him, vault over the side. Run for a couple of steps, then lose it, the unmaintained asphalt tearing into his knee. But good asphalt would have done just the same.

  So.

  Home again, home again.

  It had to be a trick of some kind.

  You don’t screw up like Jory did and get a ride home, right?

  Oh-seven-hundred, though.

  Maybe this was part of the punishment, having to spend the night not knowing what kind of hammer was going to fall.

  Definitely that. Jory could already feel it. Like the evil jailer in that old story, telling his prisoner he’s going to be executed in the morning of one day next week, he’ll know when, when it happens, ha-ha.

  Jory was the guy in the cell here. His own living room.

  He sat there until dark, smoking cigarettes, no radio, no Linse, no nothing.

  At midnight, not able to sleep, coughing up tar, he shouldered a pack—an unopened carton of cigarettes in it—and took a place under the second-to-last light before the gate.

  Soon enough, a transport rumbled to a stop. Jory swung his pack around, held the carton up to window level.

  Like always, the door opened.

  It didn’t make base feel any less like a prison.

  Chapter Four

  The rest of night for Jory Gray—it’s him, walking out past the edges of the history books. No feeds, no secondhand sightings.

  What he would tell the jeep driver—not in the least interested—when he dragged ass back to base at 0900 the next morning was that he’d started out just at the canteen. One last night before judgment, all that. But then that canteen turned into another, and another, and finally he was off base, in old downtown, that one lobby-turned-bar with that glass casket on wheels. Inside, a zombie, supposed to be not just first wave, but Typhoid Z itself, Patient Zero. Without labs to run the virus, though, there was no telling.

  And the glass around it was shatterproof, of course, and doubled up, and the zombie was shackled, its arms, legs, and the rest of its bones obviously broken, its face burned down to the white, but, like all of them, it wouldn’t die. It didn’t know how.

  For four quarters, if you could find them—galvanized washers worked too, and were worth more—you could grind the steam-paddle-looking wheel around by the wooden handle, send that blue spark into the zombie’s shackles. Make him dance.

  Jory’s story to the driver would be that he’d fed every round piece of metal he had to that zombie, and then gone looking for old pay phones to loot, just to turn that wheel some more.

  The driver would just stare ahead, maybe tongue his lower lip out.

  Where Jory more likely spent his night—backtracking from later events—was on top of a parking garage Disposal hadn’t got to, for lack of big enough equipment.

  The parking garage was the kind where you could take the ramp, spiral right angle by right angle up into the sky. Finally get deposited up into those stars. Four stories closer, anyway. Large portions of the concrete retaining wall were crashed through. Maybe this was one of the places people bunched up. Another mall, another elementary school, another bad-idea church.

  It never mattered.

  This particular parking garage, it was within the new city limits, so was supposed to be virus-free.

  That’s not why Jory Gray might have been drawn there though.

  The parking garage was at the edge of downtown, where the land started to slope up. Where it started to turn into the Hill.

  It was as close as he could get to Linse without actually stepping into the light.

  For three hundreds yards all around the Church—tall white walls, no windows—the ground was razed. The only things standing were seven thick pillars, holding nothing up. The Weeping Poles. Where, when you were passing by, giving your life to God or whoever, you would pin your most prized possession. The best marker of your former life. What you were leaving behind, forever.

  Then, on a schedule—every eight days, like a grace period?—the poles would burn, severing your most important tie to who you’d been.

  No matter how hard Jory tried to tunnel his eyes through the night, though, he couldn’t make out any detail on the poles. Couldn’t zero in on whatever Linse had left.

  Maybe just him, sitting up here.

  If he could, he’d walk in, trade something for her. Trade everything for her.

  But nobody went in there, not even the military. Especially not reassigned assembly line workers, their hands still bloody with the abominations the priests hardly approved of.

  Bloody with that, and worse.

  That had been the only good thing about the line, really. That, cutting here, inserting this, it existed in the now, didn’t bring the past with it like Disposal had. On the line, you could just pretend you were a goldfish, moving from moment to moment. You never had to think about the rest.

  At least not until one day you wake up alone in your housing unit.

  Jory stared at the Church. Trying to make sense of it all.

  Even before the plague, it had been some kind of religious place, Jory had heard.

  As long as he could remember, though, it had always just been the priests up there. He’d never even seen one up close. But everybody knew about them. That question of how the plague had happened? They’d changed it just a little. The how was immaterial, as far as they were concerned. All that mattered to humanity now, it was why.

  This, they could answer.

  Man was being punished for his own appetites, his many overindulgences. It was that easy, and that poetic, at least to the God they pushed. Man’s stuffing himself full of material things? So, so what if he had to see, and live with, his own worst sin—ceaseless, all-consuming appetite—would he maybe learn his lesson then?

  So the plague was punishment, pure and simple. A divine judgment being visited upon the world, a flood to wash away the sinners, open the eyes of the elect.

  And, that elect—they all lived at the top of the Hill, b
ehind those tall white walls.

  Up there it didn’t matter what you’d had to do in your own kitchen on Z Day, the Day of the Dead, the Bloodbath, whatever you called it. It didn’t matter if you were trapped in a nursing home when the first wave crashed, and had to cut your way out with a chain saw, and it didn’t matter if you were in a day care. The Church could wash all that away.

  For a price: the rest of your life.

  What Jory had told himself nearly twenty-four hours ago at the kitchen table, smoking half a pack down to the butts and grinding them out on the Formica, was that that had to be why Linse had gone up the Hill.

  She was guilty.

  Where he’d found her was in the ruins of her own house, trying to dig down into the basement. Back then she was mute, nearly catatonic. Had been living on who-knows-what for who-knows-how-long—Jory never asked. Her eyes were shot a very specific red, that got Disposal’s military escort for the day antsy. But Jory had shielded her, taken her hand, brought her back to base. Towards the end she’d even smiled a time or two, he was pretty sure.

  The second time it had happened, her maybe-smile, Jory’d had to fake his way into the bathroom, so he wouldn’t scare her by crying.

  When you smoke enough cigarettes, though, when you sit up in the night and trainsmoke yourself into something not quite bliss, not even close, then you can pretend that your eyes are like this from the smoke.

  And nobody’s close enough to ask, either.

  From a lower level, three tinny radios were on the same station but somehow not in sync. More like a chain of echoes. It was a pirate broadcast, this particular DJ talking about—whispering about how what nobody wants you to know is that it was hamburgers that started the plague. Cheeseburgers. Double-meats.

  Jory—if he was up on that parking garage at all—studied the cherry of his cigarette, blew it redder. Looked past it to the Weeping Poles. To the Church. He flicked his cigarette out as far as he could. It was a promise he would keep.

  Day Two

  Chapter Five

  Where the driver dropped Jory off was a long, low bunker, one Jory had never even considered. Like the mouth of some huge metal snake, its body underground for eons.

  The front doors were thick, deep, tall. Built for cargo.

  No, not for cargo. Built for a holocaust. For an apocalypse. For this.

  “So…so I work here now?” Jory said to the driver.

  The driver laughed in spite of himself, shook his head in something like thanks to Jory, then chirped his tires, was gone.

  “You’re the one?” a guard squatting by the door said, studying the curious specimen Jory must be.

  Jory didn’t answer. It smelled terrible here. Snake breath.

  Instead of cranking the huge doors open, the guard shuttled Jory around the side, delivered him to a portable building tacked on to the main structure like an afterthought, the miniblinds a dead giveaway of the office inside. The office work.

  “I’m not very good at keeping files,” Jory said to the guard.

  The guard just heaved his arm ahead of them to pull the door open, then didn’t say goodbye, good day, good luck, any of the things Jory was wanting to hear.

  So.

  A waiting room. A real one, from out of the past. Completely out of keeping with the bunker it was tied to.

  Jory took a seat, the soldier behind the desk just staring at him.

  “Magazines are all kind of out of date,” the soldier said.

  “I’ll be sure not to fill out the subscription card then,” Jory said back.

  The soldier appreciated this, and the minutes ticked by, Jory trying not to construct a story from the address labels on the magazines—dentists, a woman named Molly, her last name discreetly markered over—finally thumbing up a snapshot of Linse. He’d gone back to her house for it, months ago. Sifted through the ash and ruin, the white leather album it was in mostly gone.

  “You can’t cut up the magazines,” the soldier said in his bored voice, about the snapshot.

  Jory pocketed it, one smooth motion, like he’d never been holding anything.

  A red light buzzed on the soldier’s desk.

  “That for me?” Jory said.

  “It means you’re done,” the soldier said. “It means dinner’s served.”

  Jory stood, his heart hammering.

  “Any advice?” he asked, moving for the door on the far side of the soldier.

  “Say ‘sir’ every chance you get,” the soldier said, and then Jory’s hand was at the knob, pausing for a flash too long, the nameplate on the door finally registering: Scanlon.

  Shit.

  Without General Warren Scanlon, humanity might have just gone under with the first wave, never thrashed back to the surface.

  Everybody knew that the only thing that finally killed the dead was fire, but Scanlon was the first to start baiting them into the high-rises, then burning them from the ground up. Five hundred and a thousand at a time, falling like torches thrown from a cliff. Scanlon counting them as they fell, his eyes crinkling into a grin.

  Tallish, white mustache, jagged scar on his neck, skin leathery from standing in the heat of so many bodies burning, that kind of warhorse.

  All he needed was a stubby brown cigar, really.

  Jory knew he had captain’s quarters on base somewhere, but he’d always just been a rumor. Somebody you say you might have seen, pulling his cover off as he stepped into a building. Somebody who never smiled, because there was nothing to smile about. Because this was war.

  Or maybe he never smiled because of the other rumors, about how exactly he’d baited those hordes into those high-rises.

  He needed his own church, really, Jory thought. A legion of priests praying for him around the clock, then more priests praying for those first priests, and maybe even a third ring, just to contain the sin.

  If Jory had known his oh-seven-hundred was with Scanlon, he might have been on time. Or just never come back to base at all.

  For maybe half a minute after Jory walked in, Scanlon kept reading from whatever folder was on his desk. The only sound the door’s piston hissing closed. Jory didn’t dare sit down, not without explicit permission.

  “Suicide, right?” Scanlon finally said, leaning back now. Angling his head over so Jory’s answer could funnel in. “You’re the one with the death wish?”

  Jory swallowed.

  Scanlon cracked his face into a grim semblance of a smile, leaned forward, his elbows on the table so he could steeple his hands under his chin.

  “Let me explain. My colonel…Roberson. Colonel Roberson here”—the file—“who I don’t even think is alive anymore, who probably died saving citizens like you from themselves, he tells me he found you up on a, on a water tower, is that right? Nearly ten years ago? He was on recon, I believe. Helicopter? Any of this coming back? Said you’d climbed all the way up just to jump off. That the only way he knew you weren’t one of them was the hammer in your hand.”

  Jory was just staring at a place beside and behind Scanlon.

  “Because they don’t use tools, Gray,” Scanlon finished. “How he knew you weren’t a desiccate.”

  Jory tried to breathe out, couldn’t get it done.

  That hammer. Spinning down into space.

  His heart writhed in his chest. Threatened to come up his throat. Leave him altogether.

  But it already had. Ten years ago.

  “Sir,” Jory managed to get out. Just that.

  “But”—Scanlon fake-reading the file open on his desk—“you weren’t a carpenter before, were you? What were you, son? Just asking, because you damn sure aren’t any kind of soldier. Not two and half hours late like this. Not in my army.”

  “What was I?”

  “You didn’t always fuck up other people’s medical assembly lines, did you? Was that even a job, back before the Flood, or was it more like a hobby?”

  “Flood?”

  “The dam broke, Gray, damn near drowned us all.�
�

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “Teacher, sir. Biology. High school.”

  Scanlon stared at Jory. “Good,” he finally said. “We might need some of that again someday.”

  “Biology?”

  Scanlon chuckled. It wasn’t pretty. “No, no, son. I believe we’ve got about all the biology we can handle out in the restricted zones, don’t you? High school though? Don’t have any of that.”

  “Or kids,” Jory added, inflecting it just like an indictment. Half on accident, half not.

  Scanlon cocked his head the other way now. As if confirming he’d heard Jory right. That Jory would talk like this, to him. On purpose.

  “My colonel make a mistake, plucking you off that water tower, Gray? Because we can fix that right now, if you want. Put you on that table, on that belt. Make you into something useful, something productive. That what you’re looking for here, that how you’re going to help the cause? You still a suicide, Gray? That why you didn’t crawl ass under that bulkhead like a sane human being yesterday? I’ve seen the tapes.”

  “I’m not—I don’t think I’m tall enough, am I? Sir. To be a handler.”

  “Don’t you worry about that.”

  “That’s not what it was anyway.”

  “That’s not what it was, what?”

  Scanlon stood, to better hear this answer.

  “That’s not what it was, sir. It wasn’t suicide, yesterday.”

  “You saying you can’t even do that right? That you’re that much of a fuckup?”

  There was no good answer. Jory just sucked his cheeks in, his eyes a cool thousand yards off.

  “Say we did put you on that belt, Gray,” Scanlon went on, “you know how long until you’re useful? Four months, son.” Holding his old-man fingers out to show. “Four months for each one of those bad boys. And”—coming around the desk—“do you know what it all depends on? On people not bringing their petty little lives to work. Did you know that by the time a handler’s ready for service there’s more than half a mile of circuitry running through it? And that’s aside from the hormones and drugs and chemicals and radiation and grafts and implants and boosters and vaccines and fail-safes and kill switches. None of which are easy to come by these days, I might add. All of which you”—chest tap, chest tap, his index finger blunt—“incinerated. Poof, up in smoke, gone. Goodbye.”