The Gospel of Z (18 page)

Jory looked from the papers to Glasses, then back to the papers.

“Lab wars?” he asked.

“Genesis,” Glasses said.

“Like all the rest?” Jory said. “President’s up in space, waiting all this out. If you go to a port, the old Disney ships’ll come pick you up. All you have to do to cure the plague is shoot up for three days straight.”

“No, no, there’s pieces of it, I’ve heard of
them
, but—this is the real, true, actual thing. Before the Net went down, this, it was just starting to leak out, people were just…
shit!
Did you know that the servers all went down three days before the power did? A
week
before the last of the phones? Think that was any accident? So, so, this one guy on battery backup, he, he screencapped it from his history, page after page, or transcribed it, I don’t know—”

“And then he’s dead,” Jory finished, still not buying it.

“King Tut’s curse,” Glasses said. “Just spelled with a
Z
. But—but nobody thought that any copies had survived, but Dalton, he
was
the fucking Buddha, man. He
found
it. And they, they killed him for it. And”—nodding out to the congregation—“everybody else too. Everybody who heard it. Or might have.”

They were dead, Glasses was right about that anyway.

“So?” Jory said, Glasses laying all thirty-odd pages out like tiles.

“This is where it starts,” Glasses was saying, rolling his standard-issue backpack around to the front, reaching in for a—a
video
camera? With
batteries
?

“Over here, here,” Glasses said, directing the torch’s headlight, and Jory did as he was told, showing each page in order, Glasses’s camera in sync, its red light blinking.

“This is where what starts?” Jory said.

“There being more than one copy,” Glasses mumbled. “That’s what Dalton was doing. They took the one he was reading from. But they didn’t pat him down for another, and would have—would have just thought—”

“Rigor priapism,” Jory completed.

“Exactly, mandrake kind of bullshit,” Glasses said, making sure the recording had taken. “But this was, it was too
close
, man. We can’t have it—it can’t be all in one place again, get it? Like, with Dalton? Everybody has to know. This is going to change the world. It’s going to give it back to us.”

“It’s not magic.”

“Information
is
magic.”

“You haven’t even read it.”

“I’ve
heard
, man.”

“What is it?”

Glasses looked up at Jory. Not like Jory was being difficult, but like it was too much to explain. “Read it later,” Glasses said. “You’ll see. This is a house of cards we’re living in right now. This, this can knock the whole thing down though.”

“And that’s good?”

“If you don’t know your own history…” Glasses led off.

“You’re doomed to have somebody tell it to you?” Jory finished, still studying the congregation, then coming back to Glasses, tubing the papers up again, sliding them into his inside chest pocket. The camera was already in his pack. Jory smiled. “Oh, not have them all in one place again like
that
, you mean?” he said.

“You’re right,” Glasses said, and took the tube and the camera out as if weighing them, finally handed the camera across to Jory. It was the less sacred version. The furthest from the original.

“Hey, I don’t—” Jory said, trying not to take it, but not wanting to drop it either. Not for what was on it, but because of what it was. A
camera
. With
batteries
.

“Just until we get back to base,” Glasses said, hurried now. Looking all around. “C’mon, let’s—We don’t want to,” Glasses went on, climbing down off the stage, walking backwards, waiting for Jory to follow.

Jory looked down to the torch, still burbling its flame, and slid the camera into his pack, lit their way back to the door.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Back in the main hallway of the school, Glasses was leading, Jory following, the torch held across his hips like Voss had taught them.

A couple of classrooms ahead was Wallace, at the right-side locker bank. Just opening each one, looking in, then closing it.

“He for real?” Glasses said.

“Wallace!” Jory called down, smiling just to be seeing another person, one with their Pez-dispenser head in the proper position, and Wallace looked up, fixed them in his sights. Lifted his unsteady hand in greeting, that light behind him flickering again, going dark now.

Jory’s hand kind of froze midwave.

It was the moment he would remember, later.

Wallace smiled a little, maybe, his old-man version of a secret grin, and shut the locker he was looking in, opened the next, shut it too, and by the time he got to the next one, Glasses and Jory were almost to him.

“What you looking—?” Jory started to ask, but then Glasses’s spread hand was in Jory’s stomach, stopping him.

“The camera, the camera,” Glasses was saying, snapping for. “This is classic, man.”

It took Jory a moment to process—Sheryl stepped out of the pear room—and then that was all that was left: moments, frames.

The first was in the locker—a ragged, dead cheerleader, hair forever long, skin sick, teeth broken.

The next was her lips, thinning.

Then it was her springing from the locker all at once, tearing into Glasses, Glasses falling back, her nails and teeth all into his face, his glasses skidding away into Wallace’s right shoe. Wallace pinching his suit slacks up in order to bend down, lift the glasses up by their bridge, so as not to print the lenses.

Sheryl was screaming important words. They were just sounds to Jory.

Her hand motions, though. She was waving him out of the way with her pistol. Trying to get Jory out of her line of fire.

Jory’s mind, though, his thoughts, they were syrup, wouldn’t process.

All he knew was that he had a torch in his hands. A lit torch.

Slowly, he raised it, Sheryl’s eyes going wide, the rest of her falling away, scrambling back a classroom, diving into that door.

This meant Jory was doing the right thing.

By now, the cheerleader had most of Glasses’s cheek pulled away with her teeth, was into his throat with her fingers.

“No,” Jory said, and then did it anyway. Opened the torch. Stood on it for a ten count, a twenty count, until the autocool shut the flame off.

Finally it was Wallace, the mental zombie, who guided his arm down.

“There, there,” Wallace said, patting Jory’s forearm.

His voice was grandfatherly. It was a voice he’d had all along, apparently.

Together they edged around the scorched crater in the floor. The bubbling meat, the smoldering bone.

“She wasn’t infected, was she?” Jory said. “Just scared, right?”

Wallace didn’t say anything.

In the doorway of dead-children classroom, Sheryl was just standing there, the pistol slack by her leg.

“Sh-Sheryl?” Wallace said after her, but he and Jory didn’t stop. They might never move again if they did.

Crossing the pool of darkness thirty seconds later, Jory closed his eyes fast when he heard the shot. Just one.

Sheryl.

All the children’s names, they were written on the board, first name and last name, in five even columns, for the five rows of desks.

In case anybody wanted to know. In case anybody wanted to count.

It’s not that the world had never had heroes, it’s just, these ten years later, we needed another.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Outside, the jeep was still there, but at a different angle now. The windshield whole.

Mayner?

“I know him,” Jory said to Wallace, and Wallace shuffled off, to the truck.

Jory watched him to make sure he made it. Before the plague he’d been an executive of some sort. Now he was like a toy—push him in the right direction, wait for him to eventually get there.

The grommets were still slamming into the flagpole in their random, meaningful way.

“Thought you retired,” Mayner said when Jory got there, hauled himself up into the passenger seat. Jory ditched the torch and his pack behind the seat, then sat there studying Glasses’s glasses. He polished a lens where he’d smudged it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked Mayner.

“Till death do us part,” Mayner said, “right?”

Jory cracked a smile, his eyes tearing up at the same time.

“Live one in there?” Mayner asked.

Jory shut his eyes.

Should he torch Sheryl as well? Would that be saving her? If it was airborne now, then he owed it to her. Because he should have warned her. He should have melted that door shut, sealed that classroom shut forever.

“She was—sixteen?” Jory said, trying to answer better. “She’d been living in the walls or something. Since the first wave probably. Stealing peaches and pears. Opening them with her teeth. Going fe—going feral…”

Jory made a fist that crushed Glasses’s glasses.

Mayner reached over, extracted the breakage from Jory’s hand.

“Your buddy’s helmet’s still live,” Mayner said then, tapping the fold-up display on the console.

Jory peered down, looked through the helmet’s camera. Upside down, black-and-white children’s feet were in the background, Sheryl’s legs in the foreground, a pool of blood spreading. Then, close to the camera, the sound of a basketball dribbling, and the helmet, obviously picked up, put on. Walking down the hall now, stopping to tap the dead light, get a flicker but nothing else. A hummed tune coming through the speakers.

Jory stood in the jeep, waited for that tune to sashay out the blue doors, restore his faith in the world, and living, and life.

Maybe twenty seconds later, the jeep appeared on the viewscreen.

Jory looked up to…not Timothy.

“What?” Jory said, looking to Mayner for an answer, but Mayner didn’t even know what was wrong here, much less how it had happened.

Jory intercepted the dribbler, who held the ball in both hands, unsure of Jory.

“Who are you?” Jory demanded.

“You the torch?” the dribbler said back. “Thought he had”—and did his upside-down
okay
fingers to mean
glasses
.

“No, where’s—where’s the other guy?” Jory said, looking behind this imposter, like this was a joke, a big misunderstanding.

The dribbler shrugged, studied the jeep, the helmet exaggerating his movement.

“I saw that chick Sheryl,” he said, holding his pistoled hand up under his own jaw.

“
Timothy
, his name was Timothy,” Jory said, stepping into the dribbler’s face.

The dribbler shook his head like he’d had enough here, pushed the ball into Jory’s gut, for some distance.

“All I want to know is what happened to the guy you replaced!” Jory said, turning around, slinging the ball a disappointing distance away.

The dribbler just stared at Jory. He peeled the helmet off, set it down very properly. Nudged it away with his boot.

“Listen,” he said, “my orders were that this crew was a man short, I should catch a ride—”

“That was me who made the crew a minus-one,” Jory said, stepping in, taking as much of the dribbler’s shirt in his fists as he could. “I’m asking about the
other
guy—tall, wore these old-timey flying goggles—”

At which point the dribbler broke Jory’s weak hold, slammed his own hands into Jory’s chest, driving him to his knees.

“Exactly,” Jory said, launching from there, only stopping because Mayner had him by the scruff. And about thirty pounds.

“Sorry,” Mayner grunted to the dribbler. “Probably best if you, you know—”

The dribbler stood there a breath or two more, then waved this whole stupid scene away. He walked to the truck, climbed in with Wallace.

“Ten years tomorrow, you know that?” Mayner said to Jory, letting him go now.

Jory shook the rest of the way out of Mayner’s hold. He stepped off, breathing hard, then just squatted down, his back to the jeep, his face in his hands, his shoulders shuddering.

“Happy birthday, world,” Jory said, laughing a nonlaugh, and stood. “I just want to see her, you know?” he said then, picking up Glasses’s helmet delicately, on both sides, like Glasses was still in there. “That’s all. Just—I just want to see her one last time.”

“See who?”

“She went up the Hill,” Jory said, lifting his hand in that general direction.

Mayner looked that way.

“Listen, man,” he said. “Something I want to show you, yeah?”

“No thanks. Seen enough today.”

Mayner shrugged one shoulder, said, “Could be worth another menthol, I suppose.”

Jory looked over to be sure Mayner wasn’t lying.

On the way up the hug-n-go lane, Mayner leaned down, slowed the jeep enough to scoop up the basketball.

Where Mayner took them was a barren place way at the edge of a safe zone, almost right up against the chain-link fence.

“There, yeah,” he said, Jory’s menthol down to a nub. “Told you.”

Jory studied his menthol butt, looked up, his eyes guarded.

A malformed goat was hobbling up to the jeep, its radio collar heavy.

“Hey, a goat,” Jory said, unimpressed.

“No, look at it,” Mayner said, draping himself over the steering wheel.

“So it’s messed up,” Jory said. “Welcome to paradise, right?”

Mayner popped the cooler between them, ferreted a candy bar out. “They like chocolate,” he explained, handing the icy bar to Jory.

Jory peeled it, looked at it from all angles, then to Mayner.

“Like this?” he said, holding the chocolate out the doorless door.

The goat edged in, shy like a dog that’s been beat, and took it. It chewed, and chewed.

“Its eyes,” Jory said. They were watching him. And they were wrong in some way. “What is this?”

Mayner chewed his cheek, satisfied.

“You know about General Scanlon, right?” he said.

“War hero, crimes against humanity, saved us all. Breath smells like pimento.”

“Serious?”

“What does he have to do with this?”