Jory mumbled that he understood.
Scanlon lifted his chin to let this prime humor back in. Savor it. “I don’t think you do, son. Because of your little mishap yesterday, we may very well end up with a whole new plague. All it takes is one, right? Just one hot case out there in general population.”
“This one wasn’t hot, sir.”
“I’m not talking about the handler, Gray. They can’t get infected. I’m talking about the desiccant that’s going to slip his leash now because we’re short staffed, are having to push the handlers we have left harder than they can take. If you’d pulled your little stunt a year into the program, well then, we might have some reserves. Some back stock, something in cold storage. As it is, though, we can’t roll them off the line fast enough to keep up. Unlike the desiccates. Their manufacture is…significantly more efficient, you could say. Like fucking wildfire.”
Scanlon stopped, studied Jory again. “Know how old the oldest handler in the field is now?” he said.
Jory did, but didn’t think he should say.
“Two months,” Scanlon filled in, holding his old-man fingers up again. “And that’s just the showroom model we had to recommission. Which is what makes what happened yesterday in your clean room especially…what’s the word?”
Scanlon stepped away, his hands together behind his back.
“Tragic?” Jory said.
“Unforgivable,” Scanlon corrected, and chuckled in his chest, shook his head. “Now,” he went on, “infractions at your level aren’t something I bother to step on, even when they’re on the way to the can. Except when they’re this egregious. That a biology word?” Scanlon laughed at his own joke. “You’re my special case of the day though. Getting the personal touch, as it were. God reaching down to Adam, all that. Reaching down and asking why the hell didn’t he crawl under that door faster, at least pretend he wanted to live?”
It was the second time he’d asked—the real reason for the face-to-face, Jory was pretty sure, so Scanlon could understand what he’d seen on the recording—but there still weren’t any good words for why he hadn’t left when he should have. It had to do with the way a dad or mom will stand by a lost kid at the mall, waiting for the kid’s parents to show back up.
Except, here, the kid was an unholy killing machine, born and built.
Maybe “death wish” really was the best way to say it.
“I know, I know,” Scanlon answered for Jory when it was obvious Jory wasn’t going to come up with anything, “you hate this place, miss your whoever, can’t take it anymore.” He shook his head as if disappointed. “And here I thought you might be interesting, have some steel to you, some David against Goliath. Just another civilian though, right? Another ant. Worker bee. Drone.”
Jory lifted his right shoulder in response, completed Scanlon’s list with, “Zombie.”
Scanlon chuckled, had to look far, far away.
“So,” he said, bored with this now, “what do you think might be adequate discipline for your mistake? Aside from the world dying all over again, I mean.”
“Sir?”
“It’s easy, son. Your live-in charity case chose eternal salvation over you, so you decided to come to work with a broken heart, destroy four months of concentrated effort. Every action has an equal and suck-ass reaction, Gray. You ever teach your students that?”
“That’s physics. Sir.”
“Well let me put this in biology terms then. Big fish, they eat the shit out of the little fish. Day in, day out. And you’re square in my pond now, son. So what kind of hell do you think I should rain down on you?”
“Other than the hell of the past ten years?”
“Yeah. Other than the last nine years, eleven months and twenty-seven days, Gray. If you want to split hairs.”
“Banishment,” Jory said. “Exile. Drop me off in a hot zone.”
“So you can get infected, take advantage of some weakness in the fences part of your brain somehow remembers? No thanks. Think a little less melodramatic, if you can.”
“Demotion then. Sir.” Jory said then, “Just for me. Timothy, he had nothing to—”
“Demotion to what? There something lower than making the same cut in the same damn strip of meat day after day, for the rest of your life?”
Jory bit his lip now, on the inside. To keep it there. And then said it the hell anyway. “Runner, sir. Bait. You are still doing that, right? Out there somewhere?”
Jory pictured the waiting-room soldier, listening. Holding his breath, his eyes wide, impressed.
Scanlon’s other name, the one nobody else would ever call him to his face, was Triple Threat. It stood for the three Ts of tic-tac-toe, like Timothy’s homemade tattoo. It’s what Scanlon was supposed to have played, with a razor, on the backs of hundreds of runners, in order to get the scent of blood up into the air. Turn the dead on to them.
Hundreds of runners who never got to confirm or deny these Xs and Os. How deep they were or weren’t cut.
Children, if the stories were true.
Scanlon leaned back in his chair, his hands a steeple again, and something like a laugh shuddered through his frame. Mostly his shoulders. Not at all in his eyes.
“What do you think you know about any of that?” he said to Jory.
“Guess I’m not young enough anyway, am I?” Jory said. Just loud enough. For three, maybe four hundred dead kids to hear. To stop what they were doing and look around, wait for Scanlon’s response.
The whole world was waiting, really.
Not even one muscle in Scanlon’s face gave him away. What he had or hadn’t done.
“Were their mothers really up there, at the tops of those buildings?” Jory said then. “Sir?”
Scanlon leaned back, had no choice but to shake his head in wonder, it looked like.
“You may turn up interesting after all,” he said. “If they had been up there, would that make it all right with you, son?”
Jory assumed he was about to die. And he assumed that would be a good thing.
“Roberson had it right the first time, didn’t he?” Scanlon said then, leaning down to Jory’s file again. “You are a walking suicide. It’s what you’re asking for right now, isn’t it? Not to be here anymore? World not living up to your expectations, that it?”
“Sir.”
“Know what? You want to throw your life away so bad, I’ve got just the ticket.”
“Sir?”
“Poetic, even,” writing with flourish on Jory’s file. “You can gain an intimate understanding of how important one of these new handlers is to our cause. To our survival. How important each one is to the creation and maintenance of this grand social experiment. A tour through the real world, such as it is. And then come here, question my actions. Does that work for you? The ones that allow you to be standing here in the first place, I mean. This all acceptable to you, Gray?”
“I’m not field rated, sir.”
“You are now. Class four, graverobber.”
“Preburial?” Jory said, maybe grinning just a little. “I’ve lived all this time to—to end up in J Barracks?”
“We’re all getting processed down to J sooner or later, son,” Scanlon said. “Like it or not.”
Jory nodded, kept nodding. Just to keep the vomit down, his voice steady, or close enough. “I a driver, a torch, or the dead guy?” he said, though he already knew the life cycle of J Barracks.
“Humor, yes,” Scanlon said, huffing air out his nose. “Make it through twelve calls holding a torch, and you graduate to driver, how’s that?”
“Otherwise I’m the dead guy.”
“You already are the dead guy, Gray. Now get the hell out of my office. I’m trying to save the world here.”
Jory dipped his forehead to this, a gesture he didn’t remember ever having made before. But it felt right—you bow to the person who’s just killed you, don’t you? Does that get you your soul back?
The air was syrup. The carpet, ta
r.
“A father,” he said at last, somewhere in the twenty minutes it felt like it was taking him to get to the door.
“Son?”
“You asked what I used to be. Before. A father, sir. Just so you know who you’re sending out there. A father, for eleven years.”
“Good, good. Take that, use it in the field. Think of this assignment, think of it like when you started to jump off that building—”
“Water tower.”
“Think of it like, when you jumped, we caught you. Held you by the hand for nearly ten years. But now it’s time to let go, son. See if you can fly or not.”
“And what if I do?”
“I honestly hope you do, Gray. Lord knows we need something.”
How far Jory made it before he collapsed was through the waiting room, down the ramp, and around the corner of the portable, under the window unit.
Not throwing up like he wanted to, like he needed to, but leaned over, just in case. Leaned over on one hand, his left. Because his right—
With his right hand, he fumbled up the snap of Linse, to anchor him, but instead—no no no—instead it was the hammer. Matted with hair, matted with blood.
And then his stomach did empty itself.
It didn’t help.
Chapter Six
So.
Jory had used a hammer, those ten years ago.
Like all of us. Like every single one of us.
This is important.
Nobody lived through the plague by just running away. At some point in the chase you got backed into a corner, got sniffed out hiding in the cooler at the grocery store, got heard knocking wrenches down in the pit at the lube shop around the corner.
Or, like Jory, you were trying to get an oversized eyehole screw into the fence in the backyard, not even sure if this was your fence or your neighbor’s—the screw was supposed to go deep enough into the post to hang the hammock he’d gotten for Christmas, but it had been too cold to give it a test run until now—and then something clicked in your mind. In his.
The mail.
The whole day, he’d been sad in a stupid kind of way that there would be no mail. But it wasn’t a federal holiday. It was just another Friday. Only, for his district, a snow day they still had to burn.
The mail was coming. And, because his wife was at work, he’d get to get it himself. Could even let it sit in the box a while before getting it, if he wanted.
Jory smiled, twisted the eyehole screw one more time, waiting for the dry wood of either his or his neighbor’s fence to split. He’d been using the screwdriver, its shaft ran up through the eyehole, but then the wood had started creaking, he’d squinted in response, held his breath, turned a smidge more—the usual home-repair story.
The hammer, it was just hanging by its claw on the top of the fence. It hadn’t been necessary at all.
And the mail—why was Jory thinking of the mail?
Of course.
At some level he’d registered that faded post-office blue, flashing between the houses up the street. Danny, the same as it had been Danny for the last two years.
Except, you always heard Danny first, right? His rattletrap little postal van thing.
It was sunny, though, the first hot day.
Maybe Danny was taking advantage too.
Neither snow nor sleet nor rain, right? Nor a perfect day either.
The last perfect day, as it turned out.
Jory gave the eyehole screw another last twist, just for good measure, and that was when he heard the first scream.
At first it could have been the dry wood, complaining, but then, when he wasn’t twisting, the scream came again, got cut off.
“Hunh,” Jory said, and looked over his shoulder, across into his other neighbor’s yard, to see if there was anybody to visually confer with about this.
Nope.
It was a Friday, a workday.
Jory shrugged, hooked his index finger into the hook and pulled, giving it gradually more and more weight, trying to keep half an eye on the fence line, to see if it was swaying in.
And then he saw it again—that flash of postal blue, just one house over.
A siren blaring across town now.
Jory unhooked his finger. He studied his house for any movement—any small face behind the glass, asking him if everything was okay.
He didn’t know if it was. Not yet.
And she’d go to the front door anyway, wouldn’t she? Hadn’t he said he was going to work on the flowerbeds, then found the hammock there with the garden tools, decided it was fate, that this day had actually been designed for him to hang it in the backyard?
“Danny?” he said. Mostly to himself.
On cue, that postal blue darted across the front end of the fence line. Moving from next door to Jory’s. Running on all fours from next door to Jory’s, its movements so slick, so graceful, so focused.
Human, but not. Not even close.
Jory fell back into the new red mulch spread in a circle around the tree that was going to have been the foot tie for his hammock, if the fence held.
“Danny?” he said again, much quieter. Much louder in his head.
And then a scream from his own front yard and Jory was scrambling up, falling uphill, a new hollowness in his chest. Not even aware of the hammer in his hand until, in the upstairs hall ten minutes later, he needed it.
Chapter Seven
Because he didn’t know where else to go, that night Jory went back to the parking garage. His plans were unspecific. Just to be close to her maybe. In case she walked along the balustrade up there, or rampart, whatever it’s called when the fort’s a church.
To be close to her and to smoke a lot of cigarettes. To look at each one as if it were a new thing. Study its silhouette, taste its roundness.
J Barracks.
“I’m going to be a torch,” he told Linse, across all that distance.
A torch.
It was a joke.
He might as well just step off the parking garage, four levels up. See if he could land on a mattress two guys happened to be carrying from one doorway to another. His chances in the field were just about as good. Preburial was the absolute right name for this assignment, yes.
At least it would be fast. That was something. In the postapocalypse, Jory guessed, you take what you can get. The toilet paper still in its crumbly plastic, that you hide for two weeks, ration out. That tube of face moisturizer you smuggle back onto base, leave behind the medicine cabinet mirror to make somebody’s day. The wine cellar you fall into, don’t tell anybody about.
The fact that your death is going to be a fireball, not a feast.
Jory tossed another butt over the edge and tracked its descent, the orange sparks crumbling into the night.
“Very melodramatic,” Jory said to Scanlon. To the idea of Scanlon, standing behind him.
There were worse things you found out in the field though.
Mummy families sealed into a room so well you have to break in, and then spend the rest of the day caught between a running apology in your head and a guilty sense of jealousy.
At least the radios up on the parking garage were all off tonight, for whatever reason. DJ holiday, Jory told himself. Big DJ party across town. DJ wake, DJ funeral, DJ wedding.
More likely there’d been a raid, or a battery had failed. Or there was nothing left to say.
Jory cupped a new cigarette close, sparked it alive. Stared through the smoke, very dramatically, at the Church. Flicked his cigarette over the edge long before it was a butt.
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.
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.
The Gospel of Z Page 4
