The Gospel of Z (31 page)

And there’s a hammer, rusting in the tall yellow grass at the foot of a tall silver water tower, the seedheads swaying above it, rustling.

A glass coffin in a dark bar, a drink set on top of it, a slow, desiccated hand reaching up as if to hold that glass, keep it from falling through.

Three tall white priests at night, walking through the tall door of a reinforced fence, a writhing sea of bodies waiting for them on the other side.

There’s a mom rushing through school, finding her daughter—it’s a Friday, so she’s in uniform—a terror rolling up the hall behind them, the mom at the last instant opening a locker, standing her daughter up inside. Kissing that locker after it’s closed and then looking up into a sea of death, already splashing at her ankles.

She could have been any of us. She’s all of us.

And, and. A tall man in a deep cell, hugging a grimy arm cast to his face, never letting it go, and—and on the
seventh
day, in the upper world, after lights out, a new recruit is rolling through the AM band, the veteran calling down from the top bunk to give it up, that there’s nothing tolerable on anymore, this new recruit looking back to the dial anyway, sure he heard something the other night, something good.

It was about before. The past.

And then he pulls it down from the atmosphere, the veteran swinging his legs off the top bunk, his hands clamped to the side of that thin mattress, his shirt tied around his head like a turban.

“No, no, there,” the veteran says, and the new recruit turns it up, looks out the open door of their bunkhouse for anybody who might be walking by, a habit that used to get him in trouble at school, and then the pirate DJ who doesn’t know the mic that well, he’s on again.

The story tonight’s a continuation of last time.

A faceless father from the past, impossibly tall, and thin, frail almost, answering the door.

It’s two military police, and, between them, a military man, a certain faceless hero of a general, and his neck, it’s been torn open in the most crude way, like with a shiv made from a plastic spoon or something, so this general’s had to pack it with gauze, then tape that gauze down. But still it’s bleeding through.

“He’s got long arms, right?” this father says to the general, about his wound. “Can reach farther than you’d think?”

The general’s too exhausted for this.

The father leans sideways, eyeing all the olive drab machinery at his curb.

“You brought the army,” he says.

“I
am
the army,” the general says back, his face grim in the sunlight, the plastic skin around his eyes drawn tight.

The father nods, kind of knew this.

“I don’t know where he is,” he says, his voice so fake.

“We know he had a, a girlfriend,” the general says.

“Heard he might have a special someone,” this father says, like offering condolences, then shrugs one thin shoulder. “Beijing?” he asks. “London, Cameroon, St. Petersburg? Edmonton? New York?”

“Son,” the general says.

“Sir,” this father says back, and, after a standoff that’s never going to go anywhere, the general turns, walks back to his convoy, the father’s son stepping into the doorway now, to stand in front of the dad, the cast on his arm still new, except one signature—B R I A N.

“Is he there yet, Dad?” the son asks, and the father looks at his watch, out to the east, and says, “Right about now,” and goddamn if he isn’t right. Halfway around the world, a ridiculously tall, white door is opening for a man just as tall, a dark woman running through, into his arms, one of that place’s priests stepping out to chaperone this reunion, his skin mummied in gauze so that there’s only his black-rimmed eyes, looking up into the sky. Into the future.

And then the rest.

The planes falling into buildings, the cities burning, a child running into the night for his mother, his back flayed open to the night.

It’s the story we all know, except this time, this time it ends with a crater up in Residential, a crater that used to be a wide, low house, the soldiers walking away from it, their red dots scratching the surface of the ground all around them.

This is where the world almost ended again.

And where it begins.

There’s a huge white egg buried in those warm ashes, see, its shell shiny, once fabric, a miracle of technology.

A damaged man, a father himself, tears his way up from that shell, stands into the night and peels his antique goggles off, looks around at a world made new, then walks off into it, to spread the gospel, to whisper it into the airwaves, infect mankind with something new—the truth.
That’s
what’s going radioborne tonight, this DJ says.

“Shit,” the new recruit says, looking up to the veteran, this reprobate, who’s smiling now, biting his lower lip.

He shakes his head
no
to this baby torch, says, “He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t want you to talk like that, man.”

“What are you saying?” the new recruit says, looking to the door again. Out into the world. “You mean, is he—is that—?”

The veteran laughs, folding his shoulders around it, and slides down from his bunk, stands at the door, his bare back scarred deep and regular, a game he was never supposed to have lived through, a game that makes the young recruit lick his lips, look away.

“Give em hell, Teach,” this veteran says out into the night. “Give em hell, man.”

Thanks thanks thanks

To Bobby Knight in Lubbock, Texas. You were a model. To Brenda Mills, for telling me this was too broken. You were right. To my agent Kate Garrick, for targeting the one broken place that could fix the rest. To Pablo D’Stair and Sarah D’Stair, for navigating some David Bowie/legal stuff. To Robert Gatewood, for working with me on draft after draft of this. To Jesse Lawrence and Christopher O’Riley, for early reads. To Max Brooks and Robert Kirkman and George Romero, for making the world a better place to not be dead in. To Karl Fischer, for relaying something he learned in Paul Youngquist’s class, that made me finally understand this story I was trying to tell here. To Paul Tremblay. To Adam Cesare. To Cain Marko, for being Cain Marko. To my colleague Charles Evered, for episode 5.10 of
Monk
. That could be where this whole thing started. But it could have been Bowie, or it could have been Metallica. To Joe Lansdale, for showing me how to be a writer. To Jerry Reed, for getting me through the hard parts of this, and to the Drive-By Truckers, for “Sinkhole,” and to Benjamin Whitmer, for introducing me to it. But Bob Seger’s “Beautiful Loser” helped as well, as it does with everything. And, without Don D’Auria talking to me in a lobby in New York once, saying I should send him something, then this wouldn’t exist, like this. And to Jory, for letting me write about him. I hope I got Linsey right, man. She can live forever now. And thanks to my kids, Rane and Kinsey, for tolerating me talking about zombies over dinner every night, and to my wife, Nancy, for getting up at so many three in the mornings, to walk them back to their beds, because they’d somehow got scared.

Me too, guys. Always and forever.

stephengrahamjones

boulder, co 2008 – 2013

About the Author

Stephen Graham Jones
is the author of thirteen novels and four collections. Most recent are
The Least of My Scars
,
Flushboy
, and
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth
. Jones has been a Stoker Award finalist, a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, a Colorado Book Award finalist, and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and an NEA Fellowship in Fiction. Jones has some hundred and fifty stories published. He teaches in the MFA programs at CU Boulder and UCR-Palm Desert. He’s from West Texas but lives now in Boulder, Colorado. More at
www.demontheory.com
or @SGJ72. 

Welcome to Mission, Massachusetts. Praying won’t save you, but it couldn’t hurt. 

The Summer Job

© 2014 Adam Cesare

Claire is an alternative girl looking for an alternative. Her post-college prospects have fizzled and she’s looking for a new job, a new town, a whole new life. A summer position at a remote hotel may be just what she needs. 

Very soon, though, she begins to suspect the hotel may have decidedly sinister motives. At the same time she falls back into her old wild ways with the young people of the town, a radical group totally at odds with the sinister leaders of a local cult. Caught between two worlds, Claire has to plot her escape while spiraling deeper into a nightmare of ritual sacrifice and killer parties. 

Enjoy the following excerpt for
The Summer Job:

Hugh led Hannah through the woods, following the music and the glow of the fire until they reached the camp.

The site was lived-in. Not the impromptu clutter laid down by a group of weekend warriors, the kind of folks that pitch a tent, warm a can of baked beans over the fire and declare themselves campers.

No, this was more like a modernist
Swiss Family Robinson
.

There was music as they approached, under which Hugh could detect the steady hum of a generator. The music was rock, but not overly aggressive. The kind of thing that you might have heard pouring out of East End clubs a few decades ago, back when even the punks only wanted to get high and sleep together.

These campers were kids, but not the kind that had ruined Boston for Hugh. These were country folk and even their in-party mode was softened by the laconic, well-intentioned mood of the countryside.

At least that was what Hugh projected on them in the first few moments of watching. For a time Hugh and Hannah went unnoticed, observing a few candid moments of young people at play.

They were young, but not teens, not all of them. Most were well into their twenties, unwinding after a hard day’s work, no doubt.

Their clothes were nondescript: no designer names, no vulgar images. The guys wore jeans and T-shirts, skirts and monochromatic tops for the girls.

Hugh and Hannah watched the group talk, joke, and drink. The two smokers among them were discreet, segregating themselves to the outskirts of the congregation.

Towering above the party, jacked up as high as it could get off the ground, was a caravan.

Or a trailer as the Yanks called them.

It hadn’t moved in a while. If the bald tires weren’t a dead giveaway, the old Airstream was surrounded on all sides by saplings and full-grown trees.

“Hey there,” a voice came from the left of the small rabble.

They’d been spotted.

“Don’t look like that,” the same voice called. “You got this look like we caught you peeking over the fence at our orgy.” The owner of the voice parted the crowd, older than the other partygoers by at least a decade. He was tall and heroin-skinny with a scraggly beard, a length and style right at the border between homeless and chic.

“We saw the fire,” Hugh said, stammering.

“Are you British? Is Smokey the Bear outsourcing now?” The kids laughed around the bearded stranger. His voice bounced around the forest around them, the music had been turned down. When did that happen?

For the first time since they’d been in the States, Hugh was aware of the difference in accent.

“We didn’t mean to intrude,” Hannah spoke up. There was an apparent embarrassment in her voice and a hint of something else that Hugh picked up on. Fear?

“I’m just kidding, ya’ll, meant no offense,” the tall man said. “My name’s Davey. I’m the den mother around here.” The kids offered this a light chuckle. “Join us. Please.”

And they did.

The Londoners had drinks in their hands so fast that Hugh could barely process the movement. Hannah lifted her cup to her mouth but didn’t drink. She pitched an eyebrow at Hugh, who offered her a slight shrug and drank deeply from his own red Solo cup.

Citrus and berry and vodka and apple and turpentine with an undercurrent of something licorice-y that didn’t fit at all. Gin? It was terrible. It was the kind of drink that a high school student would mix if they were given free rein to raid the liquor cabinet and refrigerator.

The music was back. Hugh couldn’t tell if it was louder than before, or just seemed so because they were at the heart of the party now, not off at the outskirts. It was louder and meaner, but something about that pleased Hugh.

Hannah took a draught of her own cup, leaning against Hugh for support, backing her ass into his hand. He gave it a quick pinch.

Hugh looked around. This wasn’t the stilted cocktail party the couple was used to attending. Davey was nowhere to be seen, but the young people seemed to double up, filling in the negative space and intensifying their dancing, carousing and joking. The kids weren’t mushing Hugh and Hannah together uncomfortably, but they didn’t keep their distance either.

Every so often a large kid with a beard would hoot and the crowd would part. He would then throw another armful of kindling on the fire. The flames flared up, sending a gush of smoke into the air and washing the citrus-hooch taste out of Hugh’s mouth.

They hadn’t learned anyone’s name, and Hugh didn’t particularly mind. Hannah was knocking her empty plastic cup against her lower teeth, a sophomoric clacking that Hugh couldn’t help but smile at. A mousey girl cut through the party and filled it from a plastic milk jug.

“Thank you,” Hannah said, but the girl just bowed and shot off in another direction, ready to refill someone else’s drink.

“I like it here,” Hannah said, laughing. Around them the chitchat and joking had discreetly morphed into dancing, a dance that pointed out the lone inequity of the party: the guys outnumbered the girls.

As the bonfire flared, the bearded kid dusted off his hands on his overalls and plucked the mousey drink girl from the crowd. He gently took the jug from her, returning the cap and placing it at the base of the tree. Then he took her tiny hands in his massive ones and twirled her around, the way a groomsman might dance with the flower girl at a wedding reception.