The Gospel of Z (26 page)

“And this,” Jory went on, “the cell, the pens, the goats—it’ll all stop if Hillford dies?”

“That’s all I want, son. Long night’s over. Time for the sun to show its big red ass to the world again.”

Jory hauled himself up. Hated himself.

“He survived,” he said.

Scanlon, wiping his fingers clean on his lower pant leg, stopped, looked up. “‘He’?” he asked.

“Hillford,” Jory said. “His face is—from fire. He was coded. Like that other guard.”

“That what he told you?” Scanlon said, curling his now-clean fingers to somebody waiting in the dark, up the passage, telling them to come on. “I told you, son. Other day with you, that was his first call,
ever
. And his next, thanks to you, it’s going to be his last. I know why they didn’t like him though.”

“‘They’ who?”

Scanlon studied Jory again, like he was mishearing. “They, the
dead
, son. The desiccates. Why he was able to walk through them like he did. What did you call it?”

“Parting the Dead Sea.”

“Yeah. I like that. Kind of what I do, too.”

“Why didn’t they attack him?”

“Because he’s just like them,” Scanlon said, then nodded once to the handler, just suddenly there, hulking in place. His short-fingered zombie pulling at its leash. Neither of them with enough brain to be the Church’s mole.

Jory fell back, splatted into the straw floor of his cell.

Scanlon shrugged, said, “You understand, of course, that I can’t take your word here.”

“My what?”

“About not being infected. Maybe they’ve found a way to delay re-an, think? Sent you over here like a time bomb? Solar activated, or elevation, air pressure.”

“They didn’t—”

“Yeah, well,” Scanlon said, unlocking the cell, “some things you take on faith, and some things you find out yourself.” He swung the door in, directed the handler in. And the zombie.

Jory pushed back into the corner, the zombie straining, pulling against the ground, standing up from it.

“No, no!”
Jory was saying.

“I’d recommend playing it cool here,” Scanlon said. “Don’t want any accidents now, do we?”

Jory tried, but his chest was heaving, his feet still trying to cram him deeper into the corner, and then the zombie was there, its rancid breath blasting into his face, the handler letting it stay, smell, taste.

And then the dog pulled harder.

“It wants me, it wants me, I’m clean!”
Jory yelled up to Scanlon.

“Turn around,” Scanlon said back, through the din, and Jory did, flattening himself against the wall, hearing the last sound he wanted to hear—the zombie’s mouth grate, clacking open.

Jory’s tic-tac-toe was crawling on his back now, alive, the blood trying to get back inside, the zombie’s mouth right there, inches away, its breath hot and fast, its forelegs pulling at the concrete, spraying straw all up into the handler.

And, finally, though he didn’t have any left, Jory peed himself, felt it coat his right leg with warmth, maybe the last warmth. He had his mouth open to the wall now, his teeth to the stone like he could chew through, get flatter.

“Guess you are alive,” Scanlon said, and called it off.

The handler yanked the zombie back, let it feed on the cooked goat instead.

“Waste not, want not,” Scanlon said, holding his arm out for Jory to cross the cell, step through the door. Jory’s legs were hardly even his own anymore. “You still know how to use a torch, right?” Scanlon said when Jory was finally out, trying to get his lungs back under his own control.

Scanlon clanged the door shut, but didn’t lock it.

“I want, I want, I want the same driver,” Jory told him, the tears coming now. Too much oxygen in his blood. Adrenaline sloshing around in his throat.

“Same driver, check,” Scanlon said, turning for Jory to follow, Jory falling in, then flinching back, the dead man in the opposite cell at the bars now. His forever fingers wrapped around the bars three times, it looked like. Because—because he was six-nine, six-ten, it looked like. His chest was caved in, his nipples just craters of burn, his ankles festering in an ancient set of shackles not connected to anything anymore.

But he could still speak.

“I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds,”
he hissed, his voice grand and broken, saved up for years, it sounded like, and Jory, directly behind Scanlon, saw Scanlon stiffen, palm his neck, like a rotten fleck of spit had landed there, and in that moment, Scanlon’s skin shifted for Jory. It went smooth, plastic, generic.

Shiva,
Jory repeated in his head, trying to place it.
Shiva Shiva Shiva,
and then—

Oppenheimer.

J. Robert Oppenheimer.

I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

Scanlon.

Jory turned to the walking dead man, looked all the way up to him, and then knew him, recognized him, had read about him.
God.
Had read what he
wrote
, had read his fucking
blog
. He was the Kitten Man. It was why he was here, having to listen to these new zombies get birthed into the world. Because he’d helped birth the first. Because this world, it was his, he’d made it.

The opposite of a priest, he’d said.

And all because he’d loved his brother. Because he’d loved his son.

“You,” Jory said up to him, but the dead man was trying to track Scanlon, was just clutching the bars now, sliding down from the effort of having crossed the cell, and Jory broke away from Scanlon, pulled himself up onto those same bars, his face right to the Kitten Man’s, so the Kitten Man would have to hear when Jory said it over and over, as fast as he could, “
Bingo!
Bingo brain baste, bingo brain
baste
, bingo brain”—the Kitten Man angling his dead stare over to Jory now. To those five redacted letters of his brother’s name.

“No, Brian,” he said simply, pulling his lips away from his broken teeth, a smile maybe, his shattered fingers rolling over to cover Jory’s, in thanks, which is when Jory felt it in his back—forty thousand volts.

Because he was just the middle of the circuit, the current hit the Kitten Man as well, arced him across his cell, left him openmouthed against the wall, grey wisps trailing up from his throat, a grimy arm cast there beside him, tied together with string, or hair, or spit.

Jory nodded, remembered that too, and then, the end of the circuit gone, felt the rest of the jolt himself.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Behind his eyelids, asleep, but not, Jory was where he wanted to be—at a car wash from the past. Chasing his daughter with the soapy wand, no car at all, just a pocketful of surprise quarters, this stall whispering to them as they’d walked by.

But then, stepping across the rusted grate of the drain, Jory saw decomposed fingers wrapping up, folding over the toe of his daughter’s shoe, and he lowered the wand to the hungry face down there—

And sat up, grabbing at the blankets. Breathing hard.

Not waking really, he’d been awake for a few minutes, but finally opening his eyes. Coming back to here. Falling back to the present.

“Welcome,” a face across from him said. It was just one of many.

He was in the bunkhouse. J Barracks. Scanlon had had him delivered back here as…what? An example?

It was all new faces too, except the reprobate, his name still at the bottom of the call list, evidently. He was on his top bunk, dealing himself through a deck of cards, sweating through his shirt.

“Continue,” the reprobate said to all, waving an ace of hearts, as if releasing this roomful of baby torches, each of them older than him.

They fell back to whatever they were doing.

“Mr. Biology, right?” the reprobate said, laying down another card.

Jory swung his legs over the side of his bunk, rubbed his eyes and swayed his back in, knew it was blue and green from the electric prongs, and scabbed into a grid from Hillford’s black knife. His face was sore on one side, probably from where he’d spasmed into the Kitten Man’s cell bars.

Scanlon wouldn’t have shouldered him up to daylight himself either. He would have pulled the handler over for that.

Jory could see no sign of that on his arms though. Or his hands. His right palm was still raw, from that long cinder block wall.

“Everything in place there?” the reprobate asked.

Jory didn’t answer.

Against the far wall, all the bunks pushed away, the new recruits were making a music video. Make-do scarves doo-ragged over their heads. Their one real guitar was stringless, the lead singer using a large-bore revolver for a microphone. Holding it right up against his top teeth to wail.

Each of them were hamming it up for their devoted cameraman.

“Remember?” the reprobate said about them, what they were trying to do, and Jory did, yes—Fishnet, strutting out onto the floor, trying to dance perfectly enough that it would hold the day back. That it would keep morning from coming. That it would keep all of them alive.

Now the band was huddling around the cameraman, to see the playback. Collapsing with laughter.

Jory almost smiled, watching them, but then it hit him—if they were watching, laughing about their fake instruments, then that camera they were using, it wasn’t dead, wasn’t just a prop, like the pistol, like the guitar.

Jory looked down, between his feet. At his pack, the flap opened.

“Mayner,” Jory said. Mayner had ditched the pack here for him, like that would close the circle, make it where Jory
had
to come back. There had probably even been a pack of the sacred menthols in there, smoked down to nothing long before one of Scanlon’s guards walked in, feed-sacked Jory down onto an empty bunk.

Jory stood up fast enough that the room swam. He fought his way through it, over to the playback huddle, parting the recruits harder than he needed to. He ripped the camera away, tried to hunch over it to see the viewscreen, but hands were grabbing at him. Pushing, pulling.

“Who the hell do you think—” the lead singer said, stepping in, leading with the revolver, the reprobate suddenly standing in front of Jory, his knife just casual by his thigh, and not flashing in the light. But just because the reprobate’s eyes had that covered.

“Teach?” the reprobate said back to Jory, calling him by name.

The large-sized recruit didn’t give ground, but he didn’t come any closer to that knife either.

“They—they—” Jory said, cueing through the tape or disc or chip or card or hard drive or
whatever
was in the damn camera.

It was all faces and action. From the bunkhouse. The music video. Zoomy, smeary, loud.

“They recorded over it,” he said, looking up at each of them in turn. “It was
here
…”

“What?” the reprobate asked.

Jory could only shake his head.

“It was here,” he said again, and let the camera slip from his hand, shatter by his feet, that one large recruit pulling lips away from his teeth about that.

“It was there,” he said. “The last copy.”

“Everybody’s a critic,” the lead singer said, cocking that revolver to his head, pulling the trigger on nothing.

“Like he could do better?” the guitar player said, Jory crossing in front of them, the bathroom the only thing in that direction.

“Pay attention,” the reprobate said, still standing between the recruits and Jory. “This guy, he’s not careful, he’s gonna be a legend, you just wait.” To Jory, for all, “How many calls you been on?”

The whole room was hanging on his answer. Ready to riot or applaud, depending.

“Sometimes,” Jory said, finding his voice, dodging all eye contact, “sometimes you have to, like, kick their mouth grate open.”

He mimed it.

Silence. More silence.

“Than what?” one of the baby torches said.

“Never stop talking to your driver,” Jory said. “Sing him a song through the, the headset, if you want. If you remember any.” The lead singer smiled one side of his mouth about this. “And the smell,” Jory added. “Be ready for the smell.”

“Because they’re dead?”

“Because they’re zombies,” Jory said, and turned, felt his way into the head.

“Fucking
old
-timer,” he heard one of the recruits saying about him.

“Lifer,” another added.

Jory held both sides of the sink, leaned over.

In the tin mirror, scratched deep, was a new
Z
.

Jory’s face was in the middle of it.

“I’m coming,” he said to the girl running around the car wash, and closed his eyes.

Instead of lunch, Jory smoked cigarettes.

He paced around and around J Barracks, looking up at each jeep. None of them was Mayner. All the radio chatter was about the fires downtown. The ten-year blowout. This next End of Days.

It was a joke. We were the punch line.

On his fiftieth or two-hundredth loop around the bunkhouse, Jory stopped, leaned against the wall in the exact same spot he’d watched from six days before, deciding whether to go in to work or not.

The factory was still there, squat and grey, the same exact cinder block as the long tunnel from the Church. He should have known all along. He should have seen it from the very first.

“What is it?” a recruit said, close enough for Jory to look over, but Jory didn’t.

“Nothing,” he said.

“You’re Gray, right?” the recruit said then. “Almost made it through a whole week?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jory said, dropping his cigarette before it was done. Grinding it out with his boot.

This recruit kept watching him.

“Like I said, just stay in communication,” Jory finally said to him, touching the side of his head, “they won’t code you if you’re still talking.”

“Gray,” the recruit said then, again. “
Mr.
Gray, right?”

Jory turned, studied this recruit.

Something about the way he’d said that
Mr.

Like it wasn’t the first time.

“I know you?” Jory asked.

The recruit smiled a shy smile, looked back to some commotion going down in front of the bunkhouse—some baby torches had to be dragged out, Jory had heard a few weeks ago, dragged out and strapped into the jeep—then came back to Jory, and the way he came back, moving his head to allow for the bangs he didn’t have anymore, the bangs the postapocalypse wouldn’t allow, Jory remembered—he’d sat in the back of the class, was always watching the halls, for who might be walking by. Always watching the halls, then looking back like he’d been “paying attention, sir, really”.