The Gospel of Z (30 page)

“Hey, you,” he said, and the handler actually turned its block of a head around.

Jory pulled the trigger, the flame punching hard, driving the handler down, cooking it, the rest of the room baking, melting, drooping into its next shape.

And then it was over.

The autocool kicked on again. Jory let the trigger go, stumbled sideways, half into Timothy, came up with his goggles. He held them to his mouth, just as Timothy’s arm jerked back, the bicep contracting.

Jory stood, shaking his head
no
, and directed the torch down, right into Timothy’s opened stomach, pulled the trigger.

Nothing. Autocool.

“No, no,” Jory said, more of Timothy creaking now. Waking.

Jory looked around the room for something, anything, and there was only fire, enough that he finally had to pull Timothy’s stupid goggles on to keep the smoke out.

“Well then,” Jory said, and dragged what was left of Timothy into what was left of the couch, left him crackling there, the flames finding him almost immediately, making him the new bright spot in the room.

Jory stood, nowhere to sit. Nowhere to be.

“I’ll tell him,” he said again to Hillford, his upper half discarded beside the chair. Hillford blinked once.

Jory stepped over him, dug around for the mask, set it back on Hillford’s face, then, the torch still humming by his thigh, he collected the prosthetic leg Timothy had found.

It was heavy, solid. Would stop maybe one of the hundred bullets spiraling in for him the instant he stepped out onto the porch.

Unless he stayed here forever.

He laughed once, picturing it—him, moving through the kitchen, studying the pantry; him, ducking under all the laser sights coming through the windows, trying to balance a can of peas across to his new favorite chair—and then he heard it through the hiss of the flames, through Timothy’s bones popping, spitting marrow up, and he lost his smile.

He cocked the goggles up onto his forehead, squinted through the heat.

The handler was moving. But—but not on its own.

The zombie on the other side of the wall was pulling on its chain, the welded-shut shackle digging into the handler’s fried wrist. Finally pulling
through
that wrist, the thick bones there cracking with a
thud
, the leather and flesh stringing away, the zombie falling back, finally free.

Jory fell back too. The other way.

From the zombie’s side of the house now was the sound of breakage, of panic. The zombie was running that domestic labyrinth and doubling back over and over, no system at all.

Jory raised the torch, directed it down the hall, but the autocool was still humming, the torch too hot to use.

Jory shook it, slammed the butt on the ground, insisting.

Nothing.

Glass was breaking, back in some bedroom, but there were bars on the windows, on all the windows.

Jory had seconds, less.

He fell forward a bit, weak, and caught himself on the torch, his other hand groping down into Hillford’s midsection by accident.

Jory brought that hand up, studied it. Looked down the hall again.

“Henh,” he said, the handler’s term.

Breathing in once and promising to hold that breath forever, he pulled the goggles back down and applied Hillford’s gore to his face, to his chest, and dipped down for more, and more, covering himself in the only religion left to man.

An instant later, the zombie was tearing down the hall on all fours.

Jory waited, calm, defeated, ready if it had to be like this, and the zombie, graceful as any cat ever was, vaulted through the doorway, caught the scent midair and contorted itself around the source of that scent, sliding close enough by Jory that one of its zipper handles
plink
ed against Jory’s goggles. And then it tumbled into the kitchen.

Jory tracked it, brought the torch’s headlight up. Found the zombie on all fours in the narrow passage between the granite countertop and the pantry door.

Its chain was hooked on some wreckage back in the darkness, but it was pulling through, dragging whatever it was into the light.

Until Jory was standing there.

The zombie recoiled from the smell, hissed, lowered its chest to the tile, its legs cocked under it.

“There, girl,” Jory said—it was female, had been—“this’ll only,” and he settled the torch onto the zombie’s face. Its leather headgear was all burned off, its shaved scalp crawling with heat, with fireworms.

Before, in another world, Jory had told his daughter that when you stared at the sun, the fireworms would crawl in your eyelids, and you had to look away, rub them out, or they’d stay forever.

But—this was no place to think of her.

Except it was.

Heterochromia. One blue eye from her mom, one brown from Jory, each pupil contracting from the torch’s headlight.

This was Scanlon’s insurance, to make sure the call fell apart. To make sure Jory did, that he had nothing left to live for.

But Hillford would have to have killed her first. Pushed her through, given her over. Sent her into the tunnel after Jory, to close the circle.

“Linse,” Jory said, his hand reaching across for her, the hand he’d painted himself with. “Linsey.”

Linse snarled, cowered down farther.

“Baby doll,” Jory said, and dropped down to his knees before her. Closed his eyes.

She cringed back, the chain getting enough slack to
tink
onto the tile floor. Whatever it was hooked on was about to let go.

“I’m sorry, girl,” Jory said, his headlight tracking up the length of the chain, to the chrome bar stool, tangled in with an unlikely pile of chrome bar stools. The whole pile giving.

And he pulled the trigger.

Still nothing.

Jory shook his head
no
, but reached behind him anyway, for whatever there was—the prosthetic leg. Holding it by the cupped upper calf, his hands looped in the straps, he brought the heel down on the back of his daughter’s head, on the back of Linse’s head, on the back of
Linsey’s
head, into the zipper pull burned into her scalp like a chrome barrette. Again and again and again, until she stopped trying to rise, until the lenses of his goggles were splattered. The chrome stools in the darkness avalanched down at last, the chain letting them go.

Jory reeled the chain in, stood with Linse in his arms.

He made his way to Hillford’s robe and used it like a sheet, wound her in it, covering her face last. Kissing her cloth forehead.

It was over.

“Linse,” he said again, and heard his own name back.

Mayner.

In the helmet.

“Hey,” Jory said, raising the goggles again, to scan the wreckage for the helmet. “You’re, you’re at the
jeep
?”

“Old drivers never die, ” Mayner said, then couldn’t find the other end of it. Lost it in some bloody coughing, it sounded like. And laughter.

Jory smiled, smoothed Linse’s sheet over her face. Pressed his forehead to hers—this is what he should have done ten years ago—and only looked up when the light in the room changed. The flames crackling in a different way, like somebody else was here.

“No,” Jory said, looking up. “No no no…”

Rising from the other side of the room, against all logic, against all biology, was the handler. It’s skin caking away, ash. Metal underneath. Miles of cable, years of technology, months of effort. An undead juggernaut, finding its feet again.

Jory shook his head
no
, pulled Linse closer, and then lunged forward for the torch, the commotion bringing the handler’s head around.

No eyes. Hillford had gored one out. Jory had burned the other. Black tears spilled down into the handler’s mouth, the handler tasting them, angling its head up to catch them, try to bite into them. Getting its own lip instead, and tearing it away. Swallowing, the unholy jolt of its own flesh throwing it back for a moment. Expanding its chest. Lighting fire to its hunger. The kind that can burn the world down.

Jory climbed his hand down the torch, clicked the ignite button—nothing.

Again, again. Just the sound, pulling the handler’s massive head around.

Jory lowered the torch slowly, Linse still hugged to his chest, and sat there, the handler moving on all fours now, like a gorilla, feeling through the rubble, trying to locate them.

“Shh, shh,” Jory said to Linse, to Linsey, rocking her, and the handler ambled over, was right to them now, trying to smell but its nose was burned shut.

Then another shot outside, and another, whipping into metal.

The jeep.

Its windshield went next, a very distinct sound, the shattered glass taking forever to settle on the hood.

And now Mayner’s voice was coming through the helmet. He was breathing hard, laughing into the mic. Dying, and loving it.

Jory narrowed his eyes, couldn’t say anything back.

The handler pawed away a smoldering cushion, uncovered the helmet, that sound. It lowered its face to it but then took a couple of fast, grunting steps to the doorway, more shots out there, drawing it to where it could never go. To where it would never stop. If viruses can have hope, Jory said in his head, to a class that wasn’t there, if they can dream, then this is the host it’s been waiting all these years for. The perfect killing machine. The one that can never be put down. That doesn’t know how to die.

Jory jabbed his hand out, whispered the helmet to him, cupped the headset in his hand.

“Hey, driver,” he said.

“Check,” Mayner croaked.

“I ever, I ever tell you I’m, that I’m really a Viking?” Jory said.

“Thought you, thought you were Indian or something,” Mayner coughed back. From a firing-line cigarette probably. And being shot twice. Maybe three or four times by now.

“No, Viking, definitely. All the way through. Until the end, I mean. The
very
end.”

The handler craned its head back to Jory’s whisper.

Mayner grunted something that meant he understood. And,
“I said I’m not doing that.”

“You have to, man,” Jory said, rolling over to lie alongside the torch, spin the canister off, into his hand. The jelly sloshing in there, cold, pressurized to the moon. “Just count to ten, man, count to ten, and then punch it, I’ll be gone before the code ever gets here. There’s the delay.”

“I told you.”

“You have to.”

Beat, beat, the world hanging in the balance here.

“You’ll be gone?” Mayner said finally.

“Already am. Promise.”

“Can I count to seventeen instead?” Mayner croaked out.

Jory settled the canister into the helmet, patted it twice. “Just keep talking,” he said, “keep this channel—” but then the handler was there, walking on his knuckles, on his wrist stump, blotting out the hole burned in the roof. Lowering its face to Jory, finding Linse instead. Flinching back from her scent, Jory closing his eyes. And not going anywhere, like he’d promised.

Mayner out there in the floorboard of the jeep, counting into the mic for everybody to hear, “Sixteen, fifteen.” Shots drilling through his seats, splintering his dash.

“Fourteen,” he said, reaching a bloody arm up to the keypad, a red dot centering on it, blasting that keypad away.

“Fuckers,” Mayner said, “
ten
,” then, digging the wiring harness out from under the steering column, touching this one to that one, no hesitation at all, he finally answered Jory, what he’d been, before—“Electrician.”

Ten counts later, Jory saw it, we
all
could have seen it, if we’d known to watch—three tiny missiles, whistling up into the sky over New Haven Street, twisting through each other’s white exhaust, then reaching an apex, hanging there a moment, before slamming back down like judgment, the handler’s wide back directly below, its face held down to the small voice in the helmet, to Mayner saying “
run
” over and over. “
Now
now
now
. You promised. Where are you, you goddamn, red ass—”

Jory heard, but just held Linse closer, snuggled the aviator goggles down into place one last time, and twisted an eyebolt deeper into the four-by-four of his backyard fence, deep enough to hold him this time, he thought. Him and her both.

After

The movies got one thing right, though, the pirate DJ says, his chin still stubbly against that metal screen.

The part about nothing ever being the same again.

The part about how people, we always find a way to live.

None of them ever mentioned the sky though.

That, with the dead crawling over the face of the earth, the skies would be empty again. Just a quiet place to look, always there if you needed to lose yourself for a moment. For a day.

It matters.

And below that sky, all of us.

A hulking young man, say. He’s not so complicated. His hair hasn’t been shaved down to whitewalls yet. He’s standing over his mother’s bed, the one she’s had since she was a girl herself,
Juliet
woodburned in flourishes into the headboard. Her wrists and ankles tied with shoestrings and thick rope, and they need to be tied. The knots are knotted over and over. An axe is in that young man’s hand, and his eyes are red, and the door’s closing behind him, because he needs his privacy for this.

Another guy, short and wiry, ragged from days of fighting to live, he’s bursting into a church, a zombie priest looking up from its bloody meal, that wiry dude not even hesitating, just tearing a giant cross from the wall, running at the priest with it, the priest’s mouth and chin and chest bloody, strings of meat matted in, the wiry dude yelling so that that’s all there is to hear anymore.

And more.

A congregation of dusty, headless parishioners, waiting for mass.

A young guy with angry pink hair, shooting flames up a hill, a young girl up there on the wall, touching her own scalp, in memory.

A wife sitting in her living room, the house’s windows boarded up, the news on like always, but she can see her husband’s reflection in it too. Can see him approaching from the kitchen, soup in one hand, a pistol unsure in the other, but he loves her, she knows he loves her, so she doesn’t turn around, doesn’t want this to be hard for him.