The Gospel of Z (8 page)

“And I’m the tuner,” the wiry dude cut in. “Cool? Totally random, man. First signal that dials up.”

“For real?” Jory said.

“Got a TV, a video game, a blow-up doll?” Fishnet asked.

Jory shrugged his bag off, had nowhere to sit.

“I think it’s locusts, like he said,” Commando started, nodding to Glasses.

“Oh, bullshit on
that
,” Fishnet said, standing to make his point. “It’s fucking eggheads up in geosynchronous orbit, waiting all this out. Their cure for the population boom. I heard it the other night on 1190. Conservation of resources by way of—”

“You even know what ‘geo-whatever’ means?” the punk asked, the wiry dude pressing his ear to the radio, dialing for the first voice, the tip of his tongue ghosting in and out.

The reprobate shook his head, held the knife away from himself so as to look down along the edge. “What time is it anyway?”

“Three?” Jory said to the reprobate. “Two forty when I left my place.”

“What time do they come for us?” somebody got the nerve to ask, his tone not nearly so light as he was obviously trying for.

“Drivers don’t get here till seven,” Fishnet called back to whoever was worried.

Reprobate finally looked away from Jory, blew dust from his blade and narrowed his eyes like digging for a memory, like leaning on luck. “It’s
hamburgesas
, losers,” he said. “Double-meat with cheese, times six billion.” Then he pointed to the wiry dude with his knife, made a circle with the point for him to dial deeper.

Glasses cleared his throat, breathed deeply, serioused up his eyes, and took a stab. “We—we finally developed the cure for AIDS and weight gain and loneliness and aging and sadness, only it had this one kind of negative side effect…”

Jory grinned that weak-sister effort away, turned around as punctuation, giving this idea his back. When he came back around, everybody was waiting. “Bubonic plague plus rabies,” he finally spat out, “hiding down in some monastery cellar in Haiti for two hundred years.”

“Wait, wait, shh…” the wiry dude said, finding a voice in the static.

“Hamburgers…” the reprobate called out, not even looking up.

“Divine retribution,” Fishnet tried, smiling.

“Wrong channel for God,” somebody said.

“Wrong crowd,” the reprobate added, barely loud enough to hear.

“A comet passes a thousand years ago,” Jory said then, feeling his way through it, “and we—we’re just now drifting through its tail, and it’s all sparkly with frozen organic matter that only thaws with the heat of passing through an atmosphere.”

“Nice, nice,” Glasses said. Then, “Our Pacific fishing trawlers had to start casting their nets wider and wider, deeper and deeper, and finally dredged up something from the sedimentary layer associated with the Bikini Atoll experiments. Clay, sludge. It glows at night, is hot enough to cook shrimp over. Three weeks later that trawler drifts into port. Infection Point Z.”

“No, no, I heard that one,” the punk said. “That’s the way it really happened in—”

“What would those people in space eat for ten years?” Commando said, mostly to himself.

“Each other,” the reprobate said back anyway.

“Shut up! Shut up!” the wiry dude was saying, trying to wave the theories away.

But Jory wasn’t done. He was smiling now, finally, not looking away from Glasses. “The earth finally reaches a tipping point, spits up the virus as antibody, to cleanse itself of the infection we’ve become. The biological nuisance. Or—or, two kids nobody likes, they find an old book in the library, make the proper sacrifices, intone the right incantations—”

“But zombies are evil, right?” Commando was saying. “God wouldn’t have done that to—”

“Not two kids, two
hikers
,” Glasses went on, over the wiry dude’s cease-and-desist gesticulations. “They’re up on some glacier, fall into a crevasse, see this leathery hand coming up from the ice. They carry that body back to civilization, and the radiation from the scans the university does, it kick-starts something unholy in its bloodstream, and nobody even knows they need to lock the door behind them yet…”

“No mixing science and religion,” Fishnet said, halfway sullen from not making it to what’s sounding like the final round—Jory and Glasses.

Glasses pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose, said, “It doesn’t mix—”

“
Unholy
,” the reprobate told him. “You said ‘unholy’. About a lab experiment.”

“Wait, wait!” the wiry dude begged, pawing for the volume.

“Why can’t you mix them?” Jory said to the punk. “You can believe in penicillin, you can believe in—in evolution, right?”

“That mean they’re not true?” Fishnet said.

Jory didn’t answer. He was back on task, back in the game. “So—so this one kid with cancer, he survives it, it’s a miracle, only he’s addicted to medicine, to the idea of medication, so gets hooked on meth, which these guys are making with water from a pond that truckers have been dumping waste in for—”

“No, the cooks, they’ve been using runoff formaldehyde as a stabilizing agent,” Glasses said, liking it. “From the hazardous waste drum behind the mortuary.”

“So when the kid’s teeth and skin start falling out, off, whatever,” Jory said, in the rhythm of the theory, “at first nobody notices, because they’re all like that.”

“But then,” Glasses fell in, “if you look at the booking logs down at the station—this is Arizona, some place dry—you see this kid showing up month after month, looking worse and worse—”

“Guys, guys!” the wiry dude was saying.

“Until he finally gets killed, something undeniably fatal, like a bullet to the chest,” Jory said, “only that tweaker with the gun, part of his mania that week was werewolves, so the bullets were cast from silver, only this batch of silver was impure, he’d melted it down from his mom’s jewelry she got from her grandma, the silent-screen scream queen, and it’s a mix of, of platinum and costume paste, and that
unholy
chemical, pharmaceutical, radiological time bomb, it lodges—”

“Festers,” Glasses corrected.

“
Mixes
with what’s left of the brewery his spinal fluid already is. So then, six months later, there’s another booking photo, only, in this one, you can like see the kid’s cheekbone through his skin, you can like look into his sinus cavity and see maybe like a spider living in—”

“Over!”
the wiry dudefinally insisted, stepping between Jory and Glasses, pushing them apart, then crossing the room to the reprobate, pulling the reprobate’s hand up in victory. “We have a winner, gentlemen!”

“What?” Fishnet said, rolling to the edge of his bunk to see better.

In answer, the wiry dude held the already halfway-through-it radio out.

…
and can it be any kind of coincidence that at the exact same moment the plague first started being reported, there were also reports that the fast food industry was failing, was collapsing, not due to lack of customers, but lack of product, lack of converted South American jungle to sustain their precious cows? What does that tell you, people? Picture this. Obese American pulls up into the fast food lane, already dying on the inside, just trying to pack dead cows around his mortality, dead cows if he was
lucky
, and then
—

“Preach it, brother,” Fishnet interrupted, taking the radio from the wiry dude, to hold it higher, but rolling the tuner instead, losing the sermon.

The reprobate laughed through his nose. “Double-meat with cheese, ladies,” he said, coming up to a sitting position on his bunk, his legs hanging down now, the knife easy in his hand, then gone. “Now you know the rest of the story.”

“His name is Dalton,” Glasses said, sickened. Nodding down to the radio to show who he’s talking about. “Self-styled Buddha of the apocalypse. Ex-dungeon master, one-time big-name hacker, back when there were servers. This is one of his better ones. They run it every night at—”

“—just after three…” the reprobate cut in.

“You cheated,” the punk said.

“I won,” the reprobate corrected, then jumped down, his biker boots heavy against the concrete floor.

“Won what?” Jory asked, squinting with his whole face.

The reprobate crossed to the bulletin board, the stack of names in a line from top to bottom, first to last. “This,” he said, and took his name out of the third slot, tacked it back on at the very bottom.

“I up there?” Jory asked. “Gray, Jory.”

“We all are,” the reprobate said, scanning the room.

Then everybody was at the board, looking for their places in line.

Except Jory. And Glasses.

“Circus animals,” Jory said, at a conversational level. Just talking. “Circus animals. There’s a guy comes on at four who says it’s circus animals, all doped up six ways from Sunday. That they were getting loose, mixing genes that never should have been mixed.”

“There’s really some out there, I’ve heard,” Glasses said, watching the mob at the bulletin board.

“Some what?”

“Giraffes, lions, whatever there used to be. Monkeys.”

“Popcorn.”

Glasses smiled, said, “Music.”

Jory nodded. Looked down to his hand. Shaking.

He held it tighter to his leg.

“Zebras,” Glasses said then. “Remember when
Z
was for
zebra
?”

Jory nodded, did remember, then the punk was holding two fingers to his lips, asking around.

Jory hooked his head for the punk to follow him to his bag on the floor.

Inside, carton after carton.

“Shit,” the punk hissed. “Think I can kill myself on these before seven o’clock rolls around?”

In answer, Jory lobbed cartons out to the rest of the room and then the radio was up again, music this time, Fishnet strutting out with some serious Eastside swagger, the whole bunkhouse whooping and catcalling, trying to prove how alive they still were, like they could stave off the morning if they laughed enough, if they smoked enough cigarettes.

Twelve hours later, three of them would be dead.

Chapter Eleven

Picture this. It’s important.

A house deep in suburbia, before the plague.

No, no, the
approximation
of a house, lost in Residential. Just one of many, like the huge mother-house ambled this way a few years ago, dropping model after model in these curving, maternal lines that keep branching out into the horizon. The kind of neighborhood where you can slip up, walk through the wrong front door. And where it might not even matter that much, because everybody’s already trying to be like each other anyway.

How long would dinner go before the mistake was apparent? Before the kid smiled, mumbled an “oops” and slipped out, to his own house. How long before the husband really looked at this woman who wasn’t quite his wife. How long, not before the wife noticed this wasn’t the man she married, but how long before she said something about it?

That kind of place.

And names aren’t important here. Faces either.

Mannequins. This is the mannequin family. Bland, featureless, right off the showroom floor. Fresh from the window display, in their street clothes, their creaky everyday wear.

The four of them sitting around the dinner table—mom, brother, sister, the tall, tall, awkward dad.

By the dad’s plate is his cell phone, a device both slender and bulky, so his molded plastic fingers can handle it.

The dad’s got his mouth open, is about to relay some interesting story from work, or the drive home, when that phone burrs, becomes a bug flipped over on its back for him to stare down at. For him to not be sure if he wants to touch it or not.

And if he hadn’t?

The mom’s smiling pleasantly, expectantly. Like it’s painted on.

“Just a—” the dad says, holding up the smooth index finger of his left hand, so he can open the phone with his right. He cocks his head theatrically at who could be calling at this hour, then licks his lips to answer, only catches the Caller ID as the phone’s rising to the side of his head.

He doesn’t complete the motion. Locks eyes with his wife instead, across the table.

“It’s XXXXX,” he says, a high-pitched whine where the name’s censored out. Not because it’s important—it is, or would be—but because it’s lost, because it’s been redacted.

Brother and sister look to Mom for the answer to the obvious question here, and she smooths her napkin across her lap, comes through like always. “It’s your Uncle XXXXX.” So chipper.

The dad completes the motion, pulling the phone to his ear and standing in one motion, turning away, motioning behind him for his family to eat, eat, don’t wait.

XXXXX.

“That really you?” he says, instead of hello.

“Dude,” the voice comes back, maybe even stoned right now, “you know I was in Jakarta? Rocked. I mean—I might be technically married now, right? Anyway, I don’t have… I’m coming back stateside for a few here, get some paperwork ironed out, figured I might, you know, that my niece and nephew haven’t—”

The rest is cut off by the dad’s plastic thumb on the End button.

His wife comes in behind him, hugs him from behind, her posture somehow getting across that she understands how hard this was for him. Putting his family first. Not getting involved.

Her face here, it’s completely expressionless. Absolutely real.

“XXXXX,” the dad mouths to himself, and, because the name’s been lost to history, it’s just a long, flat tone, whining out. An apologetic tone.

This is the Bible, yes. The Genesis of the new world, buried in the last few weeks of the old one. A phone ringing by a Pfaltzgraff blue plate on meatloaf night, a hand reaching down to cover it.

It’s where Jory Gray was going.

For all of us.

Day Four

Chapter Twelve

By seven the next morning, the radio in J Barracks had died.

“So you were really a teacher?” the wiry dude was saying to Jory. The two of them sitting outside, squinting against the sun, a pile of butts crushed out beside them.

Jory licked his lips. “Science,” he said. “Biology.”