The Gospel of Z Read online

  Twelve hours later, three of them would be dead.

  Chapter Eleven

  Picture this. It’s important.

  A house deep in suburbia, before the plague.

  No, no, the approximation of a house, lost in Residential. Just one of many, like the huge mother-house ambled this way a few years ago, dropping model after model in these curving, maternal lines that keep branching out into the horizon. The kind of neighborhood where you can slip up, walk through the wrong front door. And where it might not even matter that much, because everybody’s already trying to be like each other anyway.

  How long would dinner go before the mistake was apparent? Before the kid smiled, mumbled an “oops” and slipped out, to his own house. How long before the husband really looked at this woman who wasn’t quite his wife. How long, not before the wife noticed this wasn’t the man she married, but how long before she said something about it?

  That kind of place.

  And names aren’t important here. Faces either.

  Mannequins. This is the mannequin family. Bland, featureless, right off the showroom floor. Fresh from the window display, in their street clothes, their creaky everyday wear.

  The four of them sitting around the dinner table—mom, brother, sister, the tall, tall, awkward dad.

  By the dad’s plate is his cell phone, a device both slender and bulky, so his molded plastic fingers can handle it.

  The dad’s got his mouth open, is about to relay some interesting story from work, or the drive home, when that phone burrs, becomes a bug flipped over on its back for him to stare down at. For him to not be sure if he wants to touch it or not.

  And if he hadn’t?

  The mom’s smiling pleasantly, expectantly. Like it’s painted on.

  “Just a—” the dad says, holding up the smooth index finger of his left hand, so he can open the phone with his right. He cocks his head theatrically at who could be calling at this hour, then licks his lips to answer, only catches the Caller ID as the phone’s rising to the side of his head.

  He doesn’t complete the motion. Locks eyes with his wife instead, across the table.

  “It’s XXXXX,” he says, a high-pitched whine where the name’s censored out. Not because it’s important—it is, or would be—but because it’s lost, because it’s been redacted.

  Brother and sister look to Mom for the answer to the obvious question here, and she smooths her napkin across her lap, comes through like always. “It’s your Uncle XXXXX.” So chipper.

  The dad completes the motion, pulling the phone to his ear and standing in one motion, turning away, motioning behind him for his family to eat, eat, don’t wait.

  XXXXX.

  “That really you?” he says, instead of hello.

  “Dude,” the voice comes back, maybe even stoned right now, “you know I was in Jakarta? Rocked. I mean—I might be technically married now, right? Anyway, I don’t have… I’m coming back stateside for a few here, get some paperwork ironed out, figured I might, you know, that my niece and nephew haven’t—”

  The rest is cut off by the dad’s plastic thumb on the End button.

  His wife comes in behind him, hugs him from behind, her posture somehow getting across that she understands how hard this was for him. Putting his family first. Not getting involved.

  Her face here, it’s completely expressionless. Absolutely real.

  “XXXXX,” the dad mouths to himself, and, because the name’s been lost to history, it’s just a long, flat tone, whining out. An apologetic tone.

  This is the Bible, yes. The Genesis of the new world, buried in the last few weeks of the old one. A phone ringing by a Pfaltzgraff blue plate on meatloaf night, a hand reaching down to cover it.

  It’s where Jory Gray was going.

  For all of us.

  Day Four

  Chapter Twelve

  By seven the next morning, the radio in J Barracks had died.

  “So you were really a teacher?” the wiry dude was saying to Jory. The two of them sitting outside, squinting against the sun, a pile of butts crushed out beside them.

  Jory licked his lips. “Science,” he said. “Biology.”

  “That’s how you knew all that stuff.”

  “Or I don’t sleep so well.”

  “Then you should have known about the hamburgers then, shouldn’t you have?”

  Just then a jeep pulled up, the driver grim, right hand casual over the wheel.

  “Who’s up?” the wiry dude called into the bunkhouse.

  “Williamson, T.K.” came back.

  Wiry shook his head, his stare more blank now. His breath more measured.

  “That’s you?” Jory said.

  The wiry dude stood up as if he were older than he was, and studied the jeep. The driver fiddling with something by his leg.

  “What do I need?” the wiry dude said, barely out loud.

  From inside the bunkhouse, a twine-wrapped cube of the heat-resistant body armor tumbled out, rolled to a stop. They were stacked under the bulletin board like bricks.

  “I’m playing hockey against them?” the wiry dude said, hooking a finger under the twine, working his footlocker key up from his front pocket, slapping it into Jory’s hand.

  “You’ll be fine,” Jory told him, and licked his lips again.

  The wiry dude walked backwards for a few steps, launching a salute from his forehead, and then his driver for the day was ferrying him out to the field, to the restricted zones, to whatever corpse had been detected, still fresh enough to be a threat. Still fresh enough to kill the world, if left to rise.

  They found the dead by snapping anklets on scavenger birds, Jory knew. When three of the anklets congregated for a certain amount of time, it rang the bells on base, fed them coordinates, got a driver to J Barracks in under two hours.

  There was supposed to be a coyote version too, Jory had heard.

  He faked a salute back to the wiry dude, though they were already a plume of dust.

  From inside, spilling out the door, “Dude, no they don’t! They carry two knives, man.”

  It was Fishnet. Arguing with the punk, the punk’s mohawk drooping to the left like a rooster comb. The rest of the crew was pushing through, out into the morning.

  “They’re priests,” the punk said, lighting up. Registering the receding jeep. “They’re priests, not ninjas, cool?”

  “They really cut into them?” Jory asked. “The corpses or whatever?”

  “They’re dead already,” the punk said, charading his idea of a knife in, giving it a sneery twist.

  “It’s one blade,” Glasses said, leaned in the doorway. “One’s ceremonial. Two would be for defense.”

  “Dude!” Fishnet said. “You think I’d make this shit up just for laughs? Like they’re not freaky enough already, without a knife in each hand?”

  “And they don’t need defense,” Glasses went on, sucking on a cigarette, coughing all the smoke back out. “They’re immune, can’t catch it.”

  “They’re not immune to being stepped on,” Jory said.

  “Handlers,” the punk offered.

  “So you’re saying they have a knife especially for dispatching handlers?” Glasses said, just considering it out loud.

  “Man, what if one of them went hot, yeah?” Fishnet said, casting around for support, somebody to share this doomsday with.

  “Handlers can’t reanimate,” Glasses said. “They’ve already died and come back once, kind of.”

  “Oh, there’s rules?” the punk said.

  “But they’re immune to themselves anyway, right?” Fishnet said.

  “Zombies?” Jory said back.

  Fishnet shrugged sure, yeah. Like this one had to be a slam dunk.

  Glasses laughed through his nose at this. At them.

  “What?” the punk said.

  “You haven’t seen the videos, have you?” Glasses said.

  “Which one?” the reprobate said, there all along somehow.
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  Glasses looked up to the approaching jeep.

  “Who’s up?” Fishnet asked, holding his fist in front of his mouth, to breathe into it.

  Reprobate leaned back into the bunkhouse, holding on to the doorframe with his fingertips, then came back with no eye contact, just a name, said as flatly as a name can be said, “Hernandez.”

  Fishnet looked back to the jeep. Swallowed.

  “Just burn ’em all, right?” he said, the corners of his mouth ghosting up into a smile.

  Nods all around. A clap or two on the shoulder.

  Fishnet leaned down for his cube of armor, stood with it, and didn’t look back.

  “Feels like a funeral already,” the punk said.

  Jory licked his lips again, hated himself for it. It was an old habit, from some late-night movie twenty years ago, that he wasn’t supposed to have snuck back into the living room for. Friday Night Chiller, Saturday Scare Fest, something like that. This group of refugees trekking across the Himalayas, it slowly becoming obvious that one of them isn’t like the others, the rest of them finally figuring it out when one of their group, his lips aren’t raw like theirs. Because he—it—had some other way to keep them wet, evidently.

  They’d driven it off a cliff, kept on with their very important trek, the movie going to commercial on a ragged hand coming back over the cliff’s edge.

  Ever since then, just to show how human he was, Jory had been a lip licker, until he hardly even thought about it anymore.

  Except for some times. Some days.

  And it did feel like a funeral, Fishnet easing away, holding on to the fold-down windshield with his left hand, his face still not turning back.

  The video Glasses finally hauled up from under his bed—ancient laptop, cobbled from three or four other laptops—it was surprisingly clear.

  Definitely not first wave. More like from the last couple of years.

  It was a zombie strapped to a dolly, its lower legs broken, to the side because the dolly wasn’t tall enough. Strapped enough that the only skin left visible was its midsection.

  “How’d they catch it?” the punk asked, but Glasses shushed him.

  Another zombie was in the background, strapped to a concrete picnic table. This was an old rest stop. Jory reoriented his head, like, if he looked more from a few inches over, he could get a different angle on the scene.

  It had been maybe six years since he’d seen anything on a screen. The brain forgets.

  “Oh yeah,” the reprobate said, nodding like he was remembering this show—two men in full camo and elbow-high lineman’s gloves were cutting up the picnic-tabled zombie. Like a turkey. Slice, slice, pull.

  When they had maybe a pound or two of the rancid meat, they swept it down to the concrete pad under the table, ground it to mush under their boots, their fingertips to the tabletop so they wouldn’t slip.

  Meanwhile, in the foreground, the dolly zombie’s eyes were wheeling, but it was strapped in tight enough it couldn’t even push a shoulder forward.

  “Here it comes,” Glasses said, angling the laptop screen back slightly, to cut the glare.

  “I don’t—” Jory said, but then he did—the two camo men were scooping the mushed-up zombie meat into the top of a metal funnel, the kind with the articulated tube at the bottom. This one was rusted, two feet long.

  “I heard about this,” the punk said, ten years old again.

  After a camera reposition, for close-up, the camo men wrenched the zombie’s mouth open enough for the funnel tube and jammed that tube down into its throat, the zombie’s throat engorging with it.

  “They won’t eat of their own kind,” Glasses said, adjusting his glasses. “Not willingly, at least.”

  The reprobate laughed a sick little laugh, and, on cue, one of the camo men held the tube in place, the other started jamming the pestle end of a wooden bat into the top of the funnel, forcing the meat down.

  It clumped down the tube, oozing out some of the spaces between the segments, something black coming up around the corners of the zombie’s mouth, the zombie in a panic now, fighting so hard it tipped the dolly backwards.

  The camo men just followed. Better this way.

  More meat, more meat.

  One of the camo men held the zombie’s mouth shut with a pipe under the chin, his boot on the top of the zombie’s head, but he didn’t have to. The zombie wasn’t going to puke, probably didn’t even have that reflex anymore.

  And, besides, the meat had hit its stomach, its insides, its blood.

  It shrieked, bucked—the zombie on the picnic table too—and, with this meat inside it, the dolly zombie was able to lift a shoulder now. Get some space under itself.

  “It makes them stronger, right?” the punk said, definitely not looking away. “Faster?”

  “Like an eight-ball for the walking dead,” Glasses answered, not looking away either.

  “Eight ball?” the reprobate asked, the whole room looking over to him.

  “How old were you when New York fell?” Jory asked.

  “Ten,” Reprobate said back like a challenge.

  “Too young to know,” Glasses said, directing them all back to the screen, to this coked-up zombie.

  First one strap popped, uncoiling the two below it, and then another.

  The camo men looked to each other theatrically—all for the camera—then one brought a machete down, de-legged the zombie. De-armed it.

  And still it bucked, great black gouts of its tar-like blood slinging around, spattering the camera lens.

  “Now,” Glasses said.

  The camo men were dragging a killed woman into the scene, somebody they’d found in a ditch, probably. They got to slicing filets off her as well, holding them up for the zombie to snap at, gulp down.

  “What?” Jory said, almost pushing away.

  “Everything gets accelerated,” Glasses explained. “Metabolism, activity, strength. But appetite too.”

  “They don’t know when to say when,” the punk said.

  Glasses nodded.

  Ten cued-through minutes later, most of the dead woman’s right leg was down to the bone, and the left was disappearing fast.

  “Three, two—” Glasses led off, and on what would have been “one”, the first contusion showed on the zombie’s unstrapped middle section. The only place it could bulge.

  The camo men laughed, fed it more, more, until the bulge split, started spilling, one of them evidently chanting, “Push, push!”, and still the zombie kept eating more, snapping the air for it, the two men completely unaware of the zombie behind them, rising from the concrete table, trailing the straps it had been able to pull its now-meatless self through.

  “This is the last in the series, right?” somebody said, and was answered an instant later by the rush on-screen—teeth, a forearm—the camera tilting at the sky now, just blue, slipping past.

  “Holy shit,” the punk said.

  “Why don’t we just feed them like that to kill them?” Commando said, back from the bathroom, or prayer, wherever he’d been.

  “Because they’d only kill themselves by eating all of us,” Jory said, looking up to Commando to see if this was taking.

  It was.

  With a keystroke, Glasses closed the player, had his hand on the top of the laptop screen to pull it closed, but the punk stopped him.

  “What’s that one?” he said, pointing lower down the menu.

  Filename: gymboreenauseum.

  Glasses smiled, clicked, said, “Classic first wave, man.”

  While the player organized itself around the file type, the image locked on-screen was a hallway. With lockers. Lockers with combinations. A ceiling like inverted terraces, the bottom side of staircases all meeting in the middle, at these blunt sky lights. Artwork on the walls, probably by class.

  “That’s a school,” Jory said.

  “Nobody’s seen this one either?” Glasses said, looking around. “This one even played on the news.”

&n
bsp; “When there was news,” the punk added, leaning in, his hand on Jory’s shoulder, and then the video came on. A bright gymnasium. The cameraman up high, so the whole floor’s in the shot, slat after slat of laminated board. Parents and teachers on one side, making a wall in front of the few classes of kids they’ve been able to get this far.

  “That you?” the punk said back to the reprobate, about the kids.

  “Shut it,” Glasses said, holding his hand up as, on-screen, from the other side of the gym, the locker room doors, the dead came, some of them running on all fours. They were falling over each other to be first to this magic feast.

  The moms’ fists are curled around pens and brushes and high heels, and the dads are looking up to the banners on the walls, like they’re supposed to be ladders, or ropes. Or like the dads’ names are up there. And then, the zombies spreading across the shiny floor like a black stain, purses and basketballs raining down on them, one of the dads in back of this last stand, he picks up the kid closest to him, the child dearest to him, and he hurls her as far as he can up into the stands, and then the other dads start doing this too, even as the zombies are crashing into them, and what the camera can barely see is that there’s a teacher up there, a coach in the blue chairs, and he’s catching every kid he can, and slinging them higher, up to this old man of a janitor, at the announcer’s booth.

  It’s made of cinder block, but with glass windows.

  Jory reached forward, pulled the screen down. He kept his hand there.

  Nobody tried to open the laptop again.

  “Everybody thought schools were the safest places,” the punk said.

  Jory was still seeing it. Breathing harder than he wanted to be breathing.

  A horn honked outside, just once.

  “That’d be me,” Jory said, standing as if in a trance, hooking his finger under the twine cord of an armor block. Not even licking his lips once.

  “Gray, Jordan, right?” the reprobate said, just because somebody had to. Because Jory was already through the door, out into the sunlight. Just a shadow, receding, losing his edges.

  “I think so, yeah,” the punk said. “Jory. Biology teacher. Mr. Gray.”