The Gospel of Z (12 page)

What Voss had told the group was that the clergy would puncture the heart, when possible, because, if there was any virus, it would necessarily have cycled through there, and lodged.

Under his heavy robes, Hillford’s shoulder and arm movements were so precise, so clinical, so devout.

When he finally must have pushed through the dense cardiac muscle—Jory had seen one in lab, in grad school—he stopped, angled his head back to Jory, to the handler and the zombie, and, just like in the demonstration, except fifty thousand times louder, he wrenched the blade sideways, wedging the ribs apart. Letting the air from the heart circulate into the air in the room.

Jory coughed, nearly gagged. Not from the smell but from the
idea
. The zombie was absolutely screaming. The handler even had to lean back to counter the pull.

“Henh,” the handler said, and Jory cued into the handler’s tiny eyes, up there behind its leather mask.

They were watching this white blade go in. The handler’s left hand, the nonleash hand, it was at the handler’s codpiece of a catheter. Just rubbing in a dull, frenetic way, this handler ceasing to be an
it
, becoming a
him
.

“No,” Jory said.

“No?” Mayner hissed back.

The zombie jerked forward again, pulling for the peach smuggler, and the handler was pulled forward, and then—

“The mouth unit,” Hillford said across to Jory. No panic at all.

Slowly, Jory swam back to the surface of this moment.

The mouth. The zombie’s mouth.

The grate was still on.

“What?” Jory said to Hillford.

“Open it,” Hillford said. Just that.

Jory looked to the zombie again.

“Open it. The grate.”

“No.”

He dragged his eyes up to the handler, to the handler’s busy left hand. The grate release was sewed into the back of that glove. Such a simple mechanism. One pull, and done.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

“He’s going to code us,” Jory said to Hillford.

“Jory?” Mayner asked in the helmet. “Gray?”

“Open it,” Hillford said again, nodding to the zombie. “Let the process complete itself, come full circle, encompass each of us.”

The world came down to this, for Jory—that catch on the side of the zombie’s mouth grate. That monstrous, hateful catch.

“I—I can’t,” Jory said.

“You must,” Hillford said back, wrenching back farther on the rib. Letting more scent out.

The handler was still rubbing himself with the ball of his thumb. Deeper now, with Hillford putting his weight against that blade in the peach smuggler’s dead heart.

Jory laughed to himself, a sick little laugh, and stepped forward, turned his torch around, and slammed the butt of it into the zombie’s face, a bright gout of flame slashing up beside his head, lighting what was left of the ceiling.

“Jory, Jory!”
Mayner was yelling in response to this, but that was in a place far removed from here. Another lifetime.

When the grate didn’t come loose, Jory stepped in, did it again, the flame shooting up through the ceiling now, into the sky, a fountain of metallic orange and red and blue.

And, just when Jory thought it wasn’t going to, the grate flopped away, altering the blue current coursing up the chain. Waking the handler up. Reminding him where he was. That he wasn’t a
he
at all anymore.

The handler stepped forward, letting the zombie at the peach smuggler.

The zombie pulled to within inches of the peach smuggler’s open side, tasting the wound from all angles, Hillford right there beside it, not at all concerned.

And then it turned away. Wasn’t straining forward for that first bite. It turned instead to get a fix on Jory, the next-best meal in the room.

“What—what’s this, what’s it mean?” Jory heard himself saying.

“Another victim,” Hillford said, taking a clean step back. Positioning himself between two urinals. “Another child of God.”

This, more than anything, told Jory what his next move was.

He stepped back, set his feet, angled the torch down, and pulled the trigger.

On nothing.

That last blast through the ceiling, the impact on the butt—the torch thought it had been dropped. It had cycled down.

Hillford angled his face down to the peach smuggler.

“Jory Gray,” he said, Jory’s eyes following the priest’s down to the peach smuggler. To the fingers, spasming now, unsticking themselves from the tile floor one by one, probably in response to the tremors in the ground the virus had detected. The tremors that meant food. “This would be an honor for me,” Hillford said, calmly. “You, however, have yet to be anoint—”

“Shut up!”
Jory screamed, the stock against his thigh, his index finger feeling in the dark for the ignition button, just forward of the trigger guard.

There.

The flame caught, held.

In it, the peach smuggler was sitting up, his eyes milky, mouth open, leaking blackness.

Jory opened up the torch, went for more like a twenty count, until the back side of the restroom caved out, what was left of the roof creaking down a foot or two farther.

“Enough, enough!”
Mayner was yelling in Jory’s ears, and it was only then that Jory realized he’d been screaming the whole time.

The torch cycled down. Pure silence now. Just the zombie, cowered back from the heat, but pulling against its chain again now. For Jory.

“Don’t do it,” Mayner whispered into Jory’s helmet. Because, through the helmet’s feed, he could see what Jory was looking at.

But it was already happening.

Jory stepped forward, his flame bubbling right on the zombie’s mouth grate. Trying to lift it back into place.

But it wouldn’t go.

Again, Jory tried, and again the zombie wouldn’t stay still. And then the handler took a step forward, leaning over to see where the peach smuggler had gone, maybe. What kind of magic this was. It gave the zombie enough slack in the chain to surge ahead, for Jory, and that zombie jumping like that—Jory was back in the hallway of his house again. Nearly ten years ago.

He brought the butt of the torch down on the zombie’s head. Right on the crown, driving it straight down into the concrete floor, his flame blasting up beside him again and then cutting itself off.

And Jory kept going, couldn’t stop, until the zombie’s head was black paste, its legs and arms twitching, Jory’s left sleeve smoking from the barrel of the torch.

Hillford reached in, guided the torch away from the mess the zombie was. Watching Jory’s eyes the whole time. His hands not flinching away from the heat of the barrel even once.

“Henh,” the handler said, tugging on the chain, suddenly lifeless. Propping the zombie up on all fours only for the zombie to fall back down on itself.

“Ehhh,” it said then, some alternate programming kicking in, and lowered itself to the zombie’s side. The handler pulled the straps built into the zombie’s leathers and zipped the zippers that he could, making the zombie into a body-shaped duffel bag, the head—what was left of it—pulled down, chin to chest.

The handler stood with his zombie carry-on, looked around for the door.

And then Jory realized that Mayner had been talking to him for what felt like minutes now.

“What’s—?” Jory said, looking up through the gone-roof, and saw the three white contrails from the missiles that had been mounted on the roll bar of the jeep. That he’d pretended weren’t right over his head the whole drive here.

Coded. They’d been coded. Standard procedure if you go this long without talking. If the thermals on the jeep’s dash were dancing like they had to be.

That whistling sound they made too. Voss had been right. It was just like a cartoon from the old days. Something Jory could just let happen, if he wanted. Something that was going to happen anyway, maybe. That had been in the making for years now.

But then he flashed on Fishnet, strutting out into the middle of J Barracks, his head moving with the music. He flashed on the wiry dude, leaned down between his own knees to light his cigarette. On Linse, turned into a moth, flitting up to the light at the top of the Hill.

Her ID card.

Jory looked down for it, his hand coming up to the mic automatically, his voice coming through with a calmness he didn’t know he had anymore, “We’re good, man. We’re good.”

In that same instant, almost, the three tiny missiles detonated, maybe two stories above the restroom. Meaning Mayner had already had all but the last number of that kill sequence entered, had been hovering over it, shaking his head no.

Black feathers drifted down around Jory and the priest, the handler already leaving, undisturbed by all this human drama.

“We’re good,” Jory said again, and fell to his knees, the torch clattering to the side, falling away. He sifted through the rubble for the ID card but it was lost, probably burned to nothing. Along with the rest of the world.

At some point after that, Jory wasn’t sure just when, Mayner was standing him up. Hillford was using some sacred little whisk broom to collect the ashes of the peach smuggler, funnel them into an aluminum urn, or amphora. It was about up to Jory’s knee, maybe, and narrow like a churn, ornate like a ceremony.

Hillford set it down a safe distance from Jory and Mayner.

“What?” Jory said, looking to Mayner.

“You can kind of melt the lid shut for them. Makes it better for transport. Keeps the virus contained, so they don’t need an escort from us.”

“Serious?”

“It’s nothing,” Mayner said.

Jory nodded, couldn’t find his ignition button now. Mayner reached down, punched it, the torch starting again.

“Like this?” Jory said, and opened the line of flame onto the metal jar, only stopped when Mayner pulled him away.

“Just a burst,” Mayner was saying, trying not to smile where Hillford could see. “It’s
aluminum
, man.”

Jory turned back to what he’d just done. The smoke still rising from the ground.

When it cleared, there was a perfect black egg there.

Hillford looked from it to Jory. From Jory to it.

“Your general chose well,” Hillford finally said, and stepped forward, collected that black egg, Mayner reaching out to stop him—

“
It’s hot!
” But apparently not. Or, not to Brother Hillford.

Hillford cradled the egg against his robe, looked up to Jory again, and nodded a sincere
thank you
.

Jory nodded back.
you’re welcome.
And then he collapsed against Mayner.

“You’re alive,” Mayner said to Jory, hugging Jory’s head to his chest. “You made it, man.”

Jory laughed into Mayner’s shirt, then cried, and held on, wouldn’t let go, even when Mayner’s radio started asking for them.

Mayner stroked Jory’s hair down.

“Biology teacher,” Jory said, at last.

“You should know better than to smoke, then,” Mayner said.

“I killed it,” Jory said back. “I killed her, I mean. My own, my—I, with my hammer, I—I…”

“I know,” Mayner said. “I know. We all did.”

Day Five

Chapter Sixteen

The names, they wouldn’t stop. They’d been going for two hours already, since well after midnight.

It was Commando, in his bunk right by the wall, his wide back turned to Jory so that he was cupping the green light from his radio. Like he was nursing it.

It was one of those broadcasts where volunteers would just read through names of the found, those lists passed from operator to operator across thousands of miles, the names by now garbled and half made up. Fairy tales.

Jory was standing in the doorway to the bathroom. Maybe the sixth time he’d risen to splash water on his face. His right hand trembling again.

Over the sinks, just above the tin mirror, scratched with names from before the plague, was an eleven-watt bulb. It was just enough to see the shadow your eyes were. Just enough, if you held it close enough, to study a face in a snapshot.

“So what’s her name?” he said to Commando, his voice hushed because everybody else was sleeping.

“Present tense,” somebody said—the reprobate?

“Good, good.”

One of the sleepers rolled over, winding himself tighter in his standard-issue blanket.

“Juliet,” Commando said.

“No, really,” Jory said, trying to get some fake smile into his voice.

Commando heard it. “That’s really,” he said.

“Burger Dude’s on in twenty,” Jory said.

No response. Just the names.

On the bulletin board was the pink slip, Jory’s summons. Going to the principal’s office again first thing. First he’d killed a handler, now a zombie. What next, right? The world?

Three bunks were empty now.

Jory sat on one of them, Fishnet’s maybe, and lowered his head, woke in that position, he didn’t know how long later. An hour, two, more. No pink in the sky yet. Nobody else stirring.

But something.

Some
one
.

Jory stood, not sure what was wrong. He crossed to Commando’s radio to turn it off, Commando sleeping, but then stopped. Because of the names—
Jennifer Winkleman, Jennifer George, Jessica Turner.

“Juliet,” Jory said to himself, his hand to the volume dial.

Julianne Watkins,
the volunteer read on,
July, like the month, July Jones, Katy Matheson to start the K’s, Katrina—

Jory rolled the broadcast off.

“Quiet, yeah?” somebody whispered.

Jory spun to the voice. To the shape sitting on his bed.

“Who—?” he said, still whispering.

The shape on the bed flipped its flashlight on, beamed it across the room at Jory’s summons on the bulletin board.

“I believe it said first thing,” the shape said, reangling the light under his own chin.

A guard, a soldier. Another glorified hall monitor of the postapocalypse.

“You can sleep sitting up like that?” he asked. “That some special thing you learn, teaching high school?”

“Can I at least get dressed?” Jory said, and the shape on the bed lumbered up, didn’t say no, just turned his high beam on Glasses, wide awake in his bunk. Watching.