The Gospel of Z (17 page)

Glasses.

Jory stood there until he was done.

“Hey,” Glasses said when he could, hitching his torch around. Cleaning his glasses with the tail of his shirt. “Thought you were, you know. Empty bed.”

“They call them bunks,” Jory said, in his recruiter voice. “This is the army, son.”

Glasses laughed, vomit still spattered on his chin and chest.

“In there?” Jory asked, leaning to the side to see into the room Glasses had just left.

Glasses shook his head
no, no no no
.

“It’s their—their, what do you call it?” Glasses said. “
Latrine
, yeah.”

“You followed the smell,” Jory said.

“Don’t—don’t say it—” Glasses said back, coughing some more.

Down the hall, Sheryl stepped out of a room. She lifted her chin to Jory. Jory lifted a hand back.

“Got some pears down here,” she called.

“Shhh,” Glasses laughed, trying to palm his headset’s mic.

“Here,” Jory said, and reached to the dial under the right ear of Glasses’s helmet. Twisted it off.

Glasses was impressed. He stood taller, now that he was more alone.

“Your driver show you that?” he asked.

“I used to have a Walkman,” Jory said back, distracted—one of the lights behind them was flickering, looking like it might be going to fail. Leave a dark part to walk through, on faith.

“You used to work in a place like this, right?” Glasses said, swinging his torch around so they could walk down to the black-market pears.

Jory looked behind them again.

“Priest coming or what?” he said.

“False alarm,” Glasses shrugged, the strap on his torch still not right enough for him. “A can house, somebody left the door open. Coyotes were sniffing around.”

Jory nodded. Using wild animals as detectors, there would have to be false alarms.

“So no handler either,” he said.

“No zombie,” Glasses finished.

“Good,” Jory said, leaning to the side to try to see deeper down the hall ahead of them. Where Sheryl might have gone.

Nowhere.

Just the sound of that basketball, slapping the hardwood.

“So your crew’s cued on torch units?” Glasses said. “Wherever we go, you show up?”

“Ghoul crew,” Jory nodded. “We follow the grave robbers, yeah. What you still here for, though?”

Glasses shrugged, didn’t answer.

Step, step.

“They do carry two knives,” Jory said then.

“Bonefaces?”

“One black,” Jory said, miming pulling it from his left sleeve, “one white,” drawing the other. Angling them to catch the light.

“You saw?”

“I think the black one’s, like, utility.”

“White for ceremonial,” Glasses added, liking the neatness of it, then looked behind them as well, finally answered Jory’s question with a question. “Know what he calls me?”

Jory stole a glance over, saw Glasses was kind of serious here.

“Your driver?”

“Nothing,” Glasses answered. “Says it’s not worth learning my name.”

Jory had no answer for this.

The next room they passed was some sort of central office. Converted now, to—?

“Pirate radio booth,” Glasses decided out loud, angling his head over to study the equipment. “Don’t need that much, really.” And then he walked on, leaving Jory to catalog—microphone, car battery. Some wires bundling towards some kind of make-do transmitter, maybe, or desktop CB. Wires trailing from that, up into the tile ceiling, to the idea of an antenna.

“Pears,” Glasses called back. “Maybe even in syrup….”

Jory nodded, moved on.

“Here?” Glasses asked back, stepping into the approximate classroom Sheryl had been at.

Jory looked behind them one more time and eased in, very aware that all he had was a shovel.

He didn’t need more.

At each desk was a child. The body of a child, its grey skin paper thin. Heads down on folded arm bones.

Glasses just standing there, his helmet in his hand, slipping away.

Jory stepped forward to catch it, but was too late.

The crash of metal on the desiccated carpet was thunder. Followed by static, that On dial jogged over.

Glasses was past words.

The teacher, she was still at her desk, the instrument she’d opened her own wrists with still in her hands—a compass. For geometry.

But what she’d done with it—the story was all there.

And on the chalkboard, undisturbed for all this time.

HEADS-UP 7-UP!

Her handwriting, it had been so good.

And then, her class all hiding their faces, she’d circulated through the room one last time, up one row, down another, pushing that sharp point up under the base of the skull, into the brain stem, and angling it sharply one way or the other, to be sure.

The backs of the children’s shirts were still black with it.

Jory felt something collapse in him. Felt himself holding on to Glasses’s shoulder, Glasses holding on to Jory’s arm.

They gulped their way back into the hall, their eyes hot, lungs, both empty and full at the same time.

“You have any kids?” Glasses asked, and Jory closed his eyes.

“Hey,” Sheryl said, stepping out into the hall from the door just eight inches down from this one, an opened can of pears tilted up to her mouth like a coke, her face a question now. “What?”

Jory shook his head
no, nothing
, and shut the door on the dead children. None of their parents would be coming.

He still couldn’t talk, quite. Was back in the upstairs hallway of his own house again, not completely aware yet of the hammer in his hand. Just the small shape lunging for him.

“No,”
he creaked out.

“You all right?” Sheryl asked, wiping pear syrup from her lips, her free hand dropping instinctively for the butt of her pistol.

“It’s nothing,” Glasses said, and limped Jory past her. “We’ll walk it off, cool?”

Jory nodded, tried to, and when he looked back, Sheryl was just watching them. Then looking back to the classroom with the closed door.

“Sorry, man,” Jory said, Glasses still propping him up.

“Know why I’m really still in here?” Glasses said, kind of laughing through his nose. At himself.

Jory looked over.

“This,” Glasses said, and angled his torch up. “Fucking can’t get it going. I mean, I can hear the shit sloshing around in there, I think the nozzle’s just clogged, or the igniter, and, and it’s not the autocool, I haven’t even…”

Jory stood on his own, took the torch. Studied it.

“Ignition,” he said, clicking the button just forward of the trigger guard, the two of them still walking deeper into the school, then, when it didn’t light, he pushed it harder, faster, like trying to surprise it.
“Ignition,”
he said again, the magic word.

“See?”

“Maybe you just have to—” Jory said, and stepped over, tapped the butt on a locker, once, twice, holding the ignition button the whole time.

On the third tap, Glasses already shying away, the flame bobbled on.

Jory passed the torch back.

“A natural,” Glasses said to him.

“Yeah,” Jory said, looking up to wherever they were—the double doors of the auditorium. Two old lines of white tape forming a cross in front of it. A sideways
X
, the vertical line sealing the crack between the doors like a biohazard.

“They can do that?” Jory said. “The Church?”

“I’m guessing there’s more than pears in there,” Glasses said, looking to Jory for confirmation.

“They can’t mark stuff off…” Jory was still saying. Trying to figure it out. “Can they?”

“Exactly,” Glasses said back, and nudged the white tape with his flame, the tape flaring up and dying in an instant. Just a column of ash, falling.

Way down the hall—that basketball, still dribbling.

A sound they were walking away from now. Into the auditorium.

It was so black, and still. The air stale.

“I don’t think—” Jory said, and then the door slammed shut behind them, and it was too late for thinking.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Hit it,” Jory said, his hand finding Glasses’s forearm.

“The—?”

“Now!” Jory hissed.

The flame from Glasses’s torch arced out, stylized in the high, empty space of the auditorium.

Underneath that chemical flame, aisle after aisle of neck stumps. Headless shoulders.

“Holy shit,” Glasses said, his hold wavering, the doors rattling behind him when he backed into them, couldn’t back up anymore.

Two hundred decapitated people, or whatever capacity was here. A congregation of bottleneckers, bottlenecked.

And recently.

The flame sucked back up into the torch, dropping them into a deeper kind of darkness.

“I meant the
flash
light,” Jory said, his voice seeming to float away from him.

“Oh yeah,” Glasses said, and found that slider, clicked his headlight on, autocool sucking the burble of flame back in.

The dead people were still there.

And they hadn’t been for long either.

Not long enough.

The smell was an oily wall.

Of course this door had been sealed.

“Heads-up, seven-up…” Glasses said, his voice lilty, falling apart. Every place his headlight found, it was worse. Fingers still digging into armrests. Faces looking up from the aisle. Burger wrappers skidding across the carpet, from the air Jory and Glasses had disturbed.

“Thought they were all gone,” Jory said at last.

“Burgers?”

“Bottleneckers.”

“They are now,” Glasses said, reaching behind them for the push handle of the door. “We should, um, you know.”

But Jory wasn’t. In spite of the thick air, making him blink faster than he wanted.

Moving slow, he took the warm barrel of Glasses’s torch, swept the headlight systematically across the auditorium.

Dull silver collars, snugged up to neck vertebrae. Collars the people had lived with for years. Deaths they’d always known were coming. Some of the heads just folded back like Pez dispensers. Some of the bodies fallen out into the walkway, chickens who’d run blind for a last few steps.

“Why would they…?” Jory said. “They know their signals can be jacked, all together like this.”

“It wasn’t the army, was it?” Glasses said, slinging his beam over to some scuffling.

Rat, probably. This being rat heaven and all.

“The Church,” Jory said.

“Survival of the meanest,” Glasses said, then, his headlight settled on the facedown corpse up behind the podium, “preacher man knows.”

“What were you before?” Jory said, taking an almost involuntary step forward. To that stage. Like he was being called. Like it was a revival, not a necropolis.

“I never knew it was practice,” Glasses said back, following.

“Practice?” Jory asked.

“Video games, man,” Glasses said, “this”—then, when he reached up to pat his naked head—“shit, my helmet!”

Jory stepped around a headless man. One who’d been reaching for his head too, it looked like.

“Why kill this many at once?” Jory said. “They weren’t infected. They wouldn’t have been sitting down if they were…”

“Wrong denomination,” Glasses said, stepping around the reaching man now. His boot catching the man’s head, sending it bowling down the slight incline.

They stood still until the head stopped. Until Glasses found it with the headlight, just to make sure a hand hadn’t stabbed down to stop its roll.

“We weren’t supposed to find this,” Glasses said. “You know that, right? What do you think happened to the smugglers, I mean? They just moved on to the next perfect warehouse?” Step, step. “You know how many of these places there could
be
, then?”

“Disposal’d find them,” Jory said, almost to the stage now, his arms up and ready, like when he was a kid, in the neighborhood haunted house.

“Did you?” Glasses asked.

Jory shook his head no.

“We’re not supposed to,” Glasses said again, more sure now.

Jory reached forward for the leading edge of the stage. He clambered up easily, Glasses passing the torch up, Jory lighting his way, then spilling the beam out across the congregation, still in their seats. Waiting for the Word.

“Dude,” Glasses said, calling for the light.

Jory aimed it down to the preacher.

“Not a bottlenecker, anyway,” Glasses said, half-impressed—the head
still
attached, the neck bare—and, using his hands like he wished he had gloves, he rolled the body faceup, the chest matted with blood.

“Knife or gun?” Jory asked.

“What do I look like?” Glasses said back, angling his face to be on the same plane with the corpse’s, then jerking away. Coming back to be sure.
“No,”
he said, and looked up at Jory for confirmation.

Jory shrugged, had no clue.

“It’s Dalton,” Glasses said.

Jory wasn’t looking down, was holding on the shadow shapes of all the headless people, watching them up here.

“They weren’t even infected,” he said again, trying to crack the code of this room.

“Maybe they were,” Glasses said, finding something long and cylindrical on Dalton’s inner thigh and slitting the sweatpants over it, praying out loud for it not to be a dead man’s distended penis. It was a scroll. A sheaf of papers tied together, rolled into a tube, a condom pulled over them at each end, tied off with twine at the middle.

“What?” Jory said, shining the light better.

“They were getting infected with
this
,” Glasses went on, completely forgetting what kind of room he was in. Sitting like a child with his blocks. Shuffling through these papers. “Can’t be,” he said. “No no no.”

“This is why he went off the air?” Jory said, still playing catch-up.

“Shit shit shit
shit
!” Glasses said, looking up to Jory, his eyes brimming over now.

Jory turned to the door, held his light there.

“Shhh,” he said at last. “Timothy’ll hear, bring everybody.”

“They need to… Do you know what this is?” Glasses said, a real actual tear rolling down his face now. “I never—never thought it was really real,” Glasses loud-whispered. “The…the Lazarus Complex, man. The whole story right here. The one that ends with us, get it? The one that starts with who we used to be.”