The Gospel of Z (21 page)

Jory flipped the menthol around, passed it over.

Mayner coughed, coughed some more, his eyes full of water, getting fuller.

Jory looked away, understood. It wasn’t about the menthol. It was about who had hidden them.

You can honor a dead person in so many secret little ways.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow,” Mayner said, coughing some more, hooking his head back to the idea of base. “J Barracks.”

“I’m not a torch anymore,” Jory told him, blowing a clean line of smoke out.

Mayner chuckled, let it turn into a smile. Said, “Shit. You might be the
only
torch,” then dropped the jeep into reverse but kept it clutched.

Jory stepped away, the camera safe in its pack, and Mayner coughed his way back.

The Weeping Pole beside him was already blowing with left-behind marriage licenses, with song lyrics scavenged from liner notes, with a fast food receipt, its date circled with a heart. An old, curled address sticker peeled from a magazine, two names above that street number, printed side-by-side once upon a time. Somebody’s only proof, all they had left.

Behind him, the jeep crunched away.

Jory stared down at the cherry of his menthol.

It was his firing-line smoke.

He studied the cherry, brought it to his lips, breathed in so deep it hurt, wonderfully.

Z minus 33 days

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m still here. Really me. Here’s another kitten picture, if that proves it. Or, for those here since the early posts, my brother’s name, it’s got the same number of letters as the word ‘brain,’ okay? Or ‘bingo.’ ‘Baste.’

Apologies.

Nothing new, either. Well. I did sit in the car in the garage until I got dizzy, but the air doesn’t get grey and hazy like a bar, and you can’t see anybody through it, or explain anything to them.

How old I am is 37.
γγγ
was a senior the year I was a freshman. I spilled so many glasses of tea on my brother, on purpose, because he asked. So he could act mad enough to blast off into the night. So many times.

γγγ
. I’ve had a glass of tea on the table all day. Waiting.

I’m sorry.

Or something like that, all the way down to
Z minus 1 Day
. Nothing posted after that. Just a blank, white page. The pitted surface of an eggshell, each one of us inside, the plague yolking around us, a dab of blood in there already.

Jory blinked all of it back, held it in.

“I’m sorry too,” he said aloud, to the Kitten Man, and breathed the menthol hotter, deeper, then leaned up the Hill, his cigarette wedged under the staple behind him, not even catching the fast food receipt—two double-meats with cheese—until he’d knocked on those tall doors, ducked inside.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Coming across the main courtyard of the Church was completely different than being led along the winding passage from the landing pad. It was expansive, huge, designed to make the sky feel like an upturned bowl.

At the lip of that bowl, on the ramparts of the walls, were novitiates. Looking down on the city. Not sentries, just watchers. Students. All of us ants down there to them, throwing bottles, shooting flames. Being so human.

Did they miss it?

Or maybe the novitiates were looking down on the poles, wisping smoke up by now, days before the next scheduled burn.

Jory lowered his head to hide his grin and pushed on, his upper arm in the firm grip of his new escort. He looked just like the last escort.

In his boot, still hidden, was the white blade.

It was curved like a human rib, he thought.

Like the outer edge of a toilet bowl.

A walrus tooth. Penis bone from a juvenile whale—
baculum
.

Jory nodded to himself, thought that word would have been long gone by now.

He was ready.

The line they were taking—a path of packed dirt—would spit them up at the same door he’d been through last time. Door
way
, Jory corrected, giving the rest of them a casual eye, all of them the same—rounded at the top, doorless—except one off in the corner. It was shackled in iron, a real-true railroad-tie-looking crossbar cocked up beside it that would take three priests to engage.

So, there were
some
secrets. Some places the rest couldn’t go. Holiest of the holies, the best prayer chamber, the secret library. Where they kept the apples, maybe, or the ketchup.

Jory swallowed his grin, hated this world.

All along the walls, just like last time, were the deep gouges, just slightly higher than a person could scratch. About exactly as high as an infected person could reach, especially with a city on the other side.

Maybe the plague
had
passed through here, but they’d—they’d starved it down, given it holy water. Stood in their open doorways and told the children to behave, to “settle down now”.

Or maybe it didn’t matter.

Standing in the only doorway that mattered to Jory was Brother Hillford, his hands holding each other over his stomach, the perfect groomsman.

No, Jory told himself. Not groomsman. More like the Fourth
Horse
man, dismounted. The whole world before him, his for the taking.

“Jory Gray,” Hillford said, nodding to the escort, that grip fading from Jory’s arm, but the escort hovering close.

“Decided I want to look in on her myself,” Jory said.

“Again you surprise us all,” Hillford said. “I trust you’ve received no lasting injury?”

“Physical or psychological?”

Hillford chuckled behind his mask. Said, “The
instrument
, Jory Gray.”

“You mean did I cut myself with it?”

“You didn’t,” Hillford said, playing some eye-footsie with the escort. The escort bowed away, taking a long, scraping step back.

“I already told them at the gate,” Jory said up to Hillford. “I’ll tell you where it is. I don’t even want it. Just let me see her.”

“Don’t even want it…” Hillford said, as if to himself. “Do you know how many there were originally?”

“How many
zombies
?” Jory answered, squinting around for the escort. Creeped out again about how they could just be so gone, so fast. “One, right?” he said, coming back to Hillford now. “Typhoid Z, Suspect Zero, the Lone Zebra Hypothes—”

“How many
instruments
,” Hillford said, pointing his words now, like the knives he was talking about. “What you claim to have in your possession?”

“They already checked my pockets,” Jory said, holding his arms out for another search.

“Of course you wouldn’t have it with you,” Hillford said, like he was having to work to keep his voice civil here. Priestly. “The
story
of it is what you have to offer, not the artifact itself. I regret to tell you that this isn’t the first such…
offer
we’ve been presented with.”

“I’m guessing it’s the first one you’ve dealt with personally, though,” Jory said back.

Hillford looked down to him, his scarred-up eyelids blinking slowly.

“You’ve already given us one artifact,” Hillford said, drawing his long knife from his sleeve, studying the graceful sweep of its blade. “Perhaps I wanted to see what you might have brought this time. Unknowingly, of course.”

“And?”

“Yourself, it would seem. On this not unmomentous day. The end of a brief but intense epoch, as it were. The beginning of another, not so brief. A new world being born from the ruins of the old.”

“Myself?”

“Twenty-four,” Hillford said, looking past the blade to Jory now. “In the beginning, to use an exhausted phrase, there were two dozen of the first class, like this one. Do you know how many remain, for us to do our work with? Do you know the sacrifice we’ve made, in our—what you would I suppose call ‘midwife’ capacity?”

“You’re the ones who wanted to start coming on the calls,” Jory said. “Things were going great until you made us invent handlers.”

“Four,”
Hillford said, cradling the sharpened edge of the white blade in his right palm. He made a fist around it, pulled the knife out hard.

“What?” Jory asked, turning half away, unable not to watch as Hillford let his right hand bloom open, trailing fingers like petals. No blood.

Jory stepped back, into the white wall.

Hillford laughed behind his white mask.

All the novitiates on the ramparts were staring down at this.

They’re gathered for a ritual
, Jory registered.

“Now,” Hillford said, his stump-fingered hand fatherly and kind on Jory’s shoulder, the blade already up that sleeve, “I believe you intended a trade, yes?”

Jory looked up to Hillford, and then to where Hillford was indicating, through the doorway.

A female novitiate sat at the table, her feet not touching the floor either, the chair making her into a child again.

Her face was hidden in the hood, mostly. The white blindfold on tight.

“As you know,” Hillford said, “names are left behind, in the other world. But—you said she was the one with the…one blue eye, one brown, correct?”

“Linse,” Jory called through, leaning in, not wanting to scare her.

Hillford kept his stump-fingered hand tight on Jory’s shoulder.

“At the stage of development she’s at,” Hillford said, “it’s strictly prohibited for her to look on any faces from the past, especially ones she might have…lingering emotional ties with, or seeming obligations to. You understand.”

“But I can talk to her,” Jory said.

“Two chairs are at the table,” Hillford finally said, “yes. Though, you know of her vows, do you not?”

“No speaking.”

“Exactly. But, to show our undying gratitude, Jory Gray, she won’t have to wear the scarf—not across those wondrous eyes.”

Jory looked up at Hillford.

“Of course, in recompense, you’ll need to present a face she’s accustomed to, that won’t jar her from her current state of enlightenment,” Hillford added, bringing the fingertips of his left hand up to his own face, his own mask, and dislodging it, the sound wet, sucking.

When he pulled it away, down, Jory understood—Hillford’s face, his whole head, it was raw, a festering wound. Down to the cheekbones almost, his eyes so naked in there, his nose just two slits in a skull.

Jory dry-heaved as politely as he could.

And now Hillford was holding the mask out to Jory. Like a plate. Like a saucer of maggots.

Jory tracked up to that wasted face, what was left of it, and past, to the novitiates, all of them kneeling now as best they could on their ramparts. Faces averted, lips mumbling prayers.

Evidently a priest taking his mask off was an event.

“What happened to you?” Jory managed to get out.

Hillford just stared back at him, then, looking down to the mask, produced a rag with his stump-fingered hand, began to scoop out the rot, let it plop to the packed dirt, an armadillo already there to nibble it up, its hairy ears laid back in pleasure.

“You call it a ‘code’, I believe,” Hillford said at last, the backside of the mask cleaner now. An oversized ChapStick tube—
glue
stick—in his good hand, coating the area he’d just wiped down.

“You mean—you lived
through
a code?” Jory said. “Nobody lives through a code.”

“The flesh matters not,” Hillford said, offering the mask again. “Does it matter yet to you?”

“But Scanlon said you’d never been in the field.”

“And his information is of course unim
peach
able,” Hillford said.

Jory took the mask, his own fingertips hooking through the eyeholes, his heart pounding in his throat.

A saint, Scanlon had called him.

More like a living martyr.

Jory looked through the doorway again. To Linse.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” Hillford told him.

Jory still couldn’t look at that face.

“It’s—that knife you want. The white one, the one I found. It’s where you killed all those bottleneckers,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on Linse, like she might just blip away. Get dragged headfirst into an armadillo hole. “Seat 13J. It’s on the left, kind of the middle.”

“Bottleneckers?” Hillford asked, the shadow of his head on the white wall cocking over.

“I pushed it into the fabric of the seat,” Jory said—
Linse Linse Linse
. His PIN for the gate at the plant coming to him so easily now—
54673. 54673.
“School auditorium,” he recited, with the leftover parts of his attention. “Blue fabric. Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Jory looked up to Hillford now, Hillford for once speechless.
Sermon
less. “Now?” Jory asked. “That good enough?”

Hillford nodded as if admitting defeat, motioned down to the mask, and Jory turned it over, looked at the expressionless face.

“She’ll still know it’s me,” he said, and pressed it up, the medicinal-smelling smears of adhesive keeping it there. His world reduced now to two eyeholes.

Linse was in both of them.

He pushed past Hillford, crossed the room in three desperate steps, not sitting down at all, just grabbing for her hands, taking them in his own, pulling her face to his chest and holding it there, his breath coming in hitches, in sobs. Saying her name over and over, patting the back of her head. Apologizing, saying, “I’ll never, I’ll never,” not even sure what it was he wouldn’t do, just that he was promising not to, that he had to make that promise, had to promise her
some
thing, had to make everything better.

Then he held her out at arm’s length, pushing the hood off the back of her shaved head, and reached around to undo the blindfold, see her eyes, both of them narrowed, afraid.

And brown.
Matching
brown.