The Gospel of Z (6 page)

Five minutes later and four stories down, the cherry of that cigarette still glowing, Jory ground it out under his boot, was still studying the high Church walls. Like gauging them.

In his belt was the pistol he’d looted, the pistol he’d taken from a living room where one skull had a hole in each temple, where the other, slightly smaller skull had a small hole directly in back, a larger one where the eyes had once been.

Again his plans were unspecific.

But he was already dead, right?

Jory shook another cigarette up, not sure if it was a firing-line smoke or not.

It lit on the second roll of the wheel, and in its wavy nimbus of light was one of the Weeping Poles.

Jory breathed in again, brighter, and looked behind him.

This was the pole you passed if you were coming from base, most likely. If you’d started walking just before dawn, no duffel over your shoulder, no shoes on your feet, no carton of cigarettes to catch a ride through the gate because, if you’re wearing white all over, the guards know where you’re going. That they’re not going to have to let you back in.

Jory’d seen the penitent walk through base before, seen them drift out of one life, into another, the guards averting their eyes, the trucks idling behind, waiting too.

Everybody waiting. This holy walk.

Jory blew smoke at the pole.

When it cleared, there was just the usual torn-out pieces of maps—hometowns, probably—the curled-at-the-edges photographs, the medals and the earrings and the pages of books, the car keys people had held on to for nearly a decade. The dog tags.

Mostly dog tags. At least on this pole.

Not for pets, but for soldiers who never came back. Or who came back dead. Who came back hungry.

Jory rubbed the heel of his hand into the exact center of his forehead. Closed his eyes. Said her name into his chest. Told himself he wasn’t blubbering. That his lips were steady. That his voice wasn’t breaking, wasn’t broken.

When he could see through the blear again, he checked over both shoulders, ran his eyes along the skyline, along the silhouette of the Church walls.

He was alone.

Jory found Linse almost immediately. What she’d left was still close to the surface—her ID card, tacked up with an earring stud. The one you had to have to live on base.

Jory slipped the ID into his pocket, looked up the Hill.

“You did it,” he said to her. “You really did it.” Then, quieter, sucking his cigarette bright, “Good for you.”

When he finally turned his back and shuffled off, twin lungfuls of smoke trailing around his head, his cigarette was clamped under a rusted staple, the cherry pointed down but smoldering, climbing, catching, the whole pole flaring up minutes later, a candle in the night, novitiates spilling down from the Church with buckets of water, but it was already too late.

This is Jory Gray.

Day Three

Chapter Eight

Because he hadn’t had the nerve to use the looted pistol on himself, and because the cigarettes were taking forever—before the plague, he’d been down to a pack a month during the semester—Jory made it to training at 0900, in some Quonset-hut hangar kind of building way out by the fence.

He was one of fifteen burnouts milling around, flicking their eyes to all the dark places in the warehouse.

Jory, his hands working on automatic, pinched a cigarette up to his lips.

Before he could light it, a hand came around, pulled it from his mouth. Crumbled it.

The other fourteen burnouts were watching now. Half smiling.

Jory turned, beheld their drill sergeant. Their Scanlon-in-waiting.

“What?” Jory said, licking his lips where the paper had been.

The drill sergeant—
Voss
above his pocket, in handsewn thread—stepped around, moving at all right angles, like this was a dance, and squared off in front of Jory.

“What,
what
?” he bellowed, somehow in a speaking voice.

“What, sir,” Jory mumbled.

Voss laughed to himself, the sound roiling up from his barrel chest, his lantern jaw. His polished boots. Then he looked around at the sorry state of this batch of recruits and lost his chuckle.

Cueing in, eight of the nine who were already smoking dropped their butts to the slick concrete, ground them out. The ninth, the youngest reprobate of them all, just stashed his.

“Well,” Voss said, turning so that it was for everybody, “one or two of you might live to the end of the week yet, taking into account this is Thursday, of course. You”—singling out a wiry dude—“what do you think happens when a spark from one of these bad habits drops down between the frame and the compression tank of your torch?”

“Sir?”

“Just take a flyer. An educated guess. Insofar as that might apply to you.”

“Boom.”

“Boom, yes.” To all again, “The torches each of you will be issued, their reservoirs, when full, have enough jelly in them for sixteen hours at full throttle. Sixteen hours wide open, not counting the autocool. Let me say that again now. Sixteen
hours
. In a can the size of your hand. Now tell me”—in Jory’s face again—“your nicotine fix, is it worth turning the building you’re in into a mushroom cloud?”

Before Jory could answer, Voss was spinning on his heel to face the rest of the class. “And it’s not you I’m worried about here, don’t get me wrong. And it’s not the torch either. What—what is it that you think I’m worried about here? And don’t say the dezzie.”

This last part to the reprobate who hadn’t crushed his cigarette, but had rubbed the heat out instead, threaded it behind his ear.

Voss was very aware of that cigarette.

The reprobate smiled with half his mouth, looked to the class, and shrugged. “You coming into the field with us, then, sir?”

Silence. Dead, dead silence.

Voss reached up, gingerly plucked the cigarette from behind the reprobate’s ear, then crushed it into the reprobate’s forehead, the tobacco flakes catching in the reprobate’s eyelashes so he finally had no choice but to blink, lose their important little staring contest.

“You’re in the right place, son,” Voss said to him,
just
to him, then turned, targeted another burnout. “You, Glasses. If you blow your torch up, take the whole room out, who are we going to miss?”

“The handler. Sir. Even if the explosion doesn’t kill it, we can’t use it again, because some of its safeties might have been compromised in the concussion wave.”

“Good, good. Yes. Did we all hear that now? The
handler
is who we’ll miss. Now, do any of you know how much work goes into building these insults to nature?”

Voss was speaking right to Jory again. Close enough for little flecks of cold alien spit to be on Jory’s lips now.

“Four months,” Jory answered.

The reprobate snickered. Looked away.

Voss nodded, kept nodding. “Four months and more dollars than any of us would ever see, if dollars still existed. Which isn’t to say you can’t be charged for one of them, am I right?”

Again, he was speaking to Jory.

Jory just stared back at him.

Voss nodded, liked it. He turned, surveyed the group again. “Now, I’m going to need somebody to be dead here. Wait, I know, I know,
you
.”

The reprobate.

“Not a short-finger, boss,” he said, waggling his fingers to show.

Half the fingers snipped away was how you could tell an enlisted zombie from a regular infected. Not that they knew the difference.

“We can fix that right here,” Voss said, unsheathing a short utility blade from his belt.

He slashed forward with it, angled it against the back of the reprobate’s neck, guided him down to the concrete none too gently.

“Yeah, that’s about perfect,” he said, placing his boot between the reprobate’s shoulder blades, flipping his knife back into his own belt. “Consider it practice for the show, why don’t you?” With his knife hand, then, he pulled a black silk hood from his rear pocket. “Now, I know most of you haven’t seen one yet, except maybe in your nightmares, but do we have a handler in the house?”

A commando-looking farm boy took one official step out, his right eye swelled shut from whatever had gotten him on this detail. Voss had to look up to see that shiner though. And then look up some more.

He smiled, threw the hood into this commando’s chest.

“Good, good. You’ll do fine, son. All we need now’s a dezzie to—”

“That’d be me, sir.”

Everyone craned around to the wiry dude, waggling his arm in the air, a coil of homemade
Z
s tattooed up from his wrist, and coming out the collar of his shirt, a ward against the plague maybe. Or camo.

Before Voss could say yes or no, the wiry dude was on all fours by Commando’s leg. Panting like a dog. Lunging in place. Snarling.

Hesitantly, Commando lowered his hand to the wiry dude’s shirt collar. The make-do handler and his eager zombie dog.

Voss shook his head in wonder. Maybe disgust. Then he turned around to address the rest again, “Now, since, as you all know, the Church has asserted what it takes to be its God-given—”

“We need one of those too, don’t we?” a punk said, casting his eyes around for support. Finding none.

“A god?” a bald recruit with a fishnet on his head said, smiling around it.

“A priest, yes,” Voss said, staring Fishnet down. “I was just getting to that.”

Jory laughed in his mouth, keeping his lips as slack as he could.

Voss turned to him, stepped in. He licked his thumb, an especially slimy, string-hanging lick, and pressed that wetness into Jory’s forehead.

“A volunteer, good,” Voss said. “There, you’re ordained. Now stand there and be condescending, think you can handle that?” Spinning back around, pacing. “As I was
saying
, since the Church has asserted itself into what should be military operations for the good of all mankind, since they put their noses into it last year, we can no longer just cremate any dead we find, contain the potential infection the obvious-ass way that’s been saving our asses for ten years now. No. They’re pansies, gentlemen. They want to
bury
them now, if they’re dead. ‘Honor their remains’, ‘Get back to the normal cycle of life’, all that. But, of course, how can we know which stiffs are going to come climbing back
out
of that grave, right?”

Glasses: “Send a tissue sample to the lab. Sir.”

“Sure,” Voss came back, “if you want to wait two weeks. In which time PFC Ass Hat here has reanimated and bitten thirteen people on the face. Let me ask this another way, geniuses. Why have the dead been such a thorn in our side these last ten years?”

“More like a rhinoceros in our side,” the reprobate said, from the ground. Not hiding his smile very well at all.

“Nine years, eleven months,” Jory said to himself.

Voss pretended not to be hearing any of this. But it was definitely taking some effort.

“You, Glasses. Go.”

“Because their species has no built-in mechanism for population control. Sir. They’re locusts. They ravage their environment down to a nub. Actually, there are theories that we all carry the
Z
gene, that when there gets to be too many—”

“Okay, okay, this is fill-in-the-blank, not essay.”

“The dead don’t eat their own kind,” Jory said, before Glasses could continue. “If they did, that would be their population control mechanism.”

“Cannibalism,” Glasses chimed in.

“Yes, the first taboo,” Voss said, making his point. “Cannibalism. So I’m not the only one here who read the training manuals. Or lives in this world.”

“Second, really,” Jory said, to Voss’s back. Which then became his front.

“Excuse me, Father Smartass?”

“The second taboo is cannibalism. Sir. The first, it’s incest. With zombies it’s the same thing though, eating and sex. They do both with their mouth.”

“He’s right, sir,” Glasses said.

“Jesus Mary and
Joseph
,” Voss said, punctuating it with his feet. “Well, can a six thousand degree plasma firestorm still
kill
them, you think, and not leave anything infectious for somebody to step on?”

Feeble nods all around.

“Good, good,” Voss said, exasperated. “So glad it’s all right with you. Thank you. Now, if we’re all through showing off our big brains, is everybody
simpatico
with learning what it is that you’re supposed to do here to
keep
your brains from getting eaten?”

“‘Simpatico’?” the punk mouthed to himself, squinting to try to track the word down, Fishnet mumbling about how they don’t just eat brains, Jory looking past all this for a moment, to the far wall. A guy there, just real casual. Making a pistol of his hand, putting it into his own mouth—his answer to how to keep your brains from getting eaten, maybe?

“Well?” Voss said, cueing in himself to Jory’s inattention.

“Yes,” Jory said, coming back. “Yes, fire can still kill them.”

“Well, with our Father’s blessing here, then,” Voss said, and walked them through the demonstration—the commando leading the zombie-on-a-leash to the ‘dead’ reprobate on the floor, the zombie sniffing, and, if he starts to take a bite, meaning the corpse is clean, uninfected, then the handler jerking the zombie back, denying him that one bite that
would
infect the corpse.

“And,” Voss went on, “if dezzie here
isn’t
interested—happens more than you’d expect lately—then that’s when it gets fun, right? When you get to earn your bed and board, ladies.”

Jory looked up to the guy standing against the far wall. Still just watching.

Voss hauled an old leaf blower up, crenellated red paper taped to its nozzle.

“This is where you do what you do,” he said, and yanked the pull cord, fired the leaf blower up. Voss directed the paper flames down onto the reprobate, sweeping them back and forth three times, slowly. “Ten count plus two. Eight’s supposed to be plenty, according to specs, but we aren’t taking any chances, right?”

“Why not just muzzle them then?” the punk asked, more just out loud than
to
Voss. But Voss spun on him anyway, clamped the punk’s neck in one hand and pinched his nose shut with the other.