The Gospel of Z

by Stephen Graham Jones

  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 Horseman, 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 unimpeachable,” 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. Sermonless. “Now?” Jory asked. “That good enough?”

  Hillford nodded as if admitting defeat, motioned down to the mask, and Jory turn
ed 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 something, 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.

  Jory turned to the doorway, the silhouette of Hillford just standing there, same pose, same serenity. Same satisfaction.

  “You lied,” Jory said in something like wonder—bonefaces can do that?—his voice cracking somewhere in the middle, the rest of him stumbling unaccountably when he tried to take a step. Falling forward. Because of the mask, the mask, that medicinal taste. Sleeping something—gas, fumes, vapor, paste.

  No. No no no.

  Jory pawed at the mask, couldn’t find the edge, his fingers numb, already somebody else’s fingers.

  Hillford cradled him down to the ground, saying through some long tube into Jory’s ear that he’d never had a blade at all, had he? That that particular auditorium, with the blue seats, the rows were an educational exercise for the students, weren’t they? Not letters, but states—J should be the tenth row, Kansas the eleventh. Right in front of Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, all the other places that weren’t places anymore.

  Jory’s eyelashes were raspy against the back of the ceramic mask, the lights in this room in rows now too, for Jory, banks of lights going black, section by section, so that Jory closed his eyes before the darkness could get to him, on the chance it would pass him by, leave him alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The past, the old world. When mannequins roamed the earth, completely unaware that their age was almost over.

  That night the husband drives through all the rain to save his brother.

  He’s in a building now, a reception area, the chairs and lamps from decades before. Everything is miniature, up against his lankiness, his face even more gaunt than usual. His long-fingered hands on the reception counter are pale spiders, the palms not touching the Formica at all.

  He’s begging.

  “I don’t care, okay? You’re not— I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Okay, okay. It’s not you, I know. I want to see whoever’s in charge then. You can’t hold him against his will. I don’t care who—”

  The night receptionist stands up to her full height, has maybe played some ball herself, back when the hoops were orange baskets. Like, for fruit.

  The husband—brother, now—leans up off her counter, still has her by about four inches.

  “Sir,” she says, her tone telling him exactly how interested she is in his case, “if you’ll just sit down, I’m sure we can straighten this misunderstanding—” then she stops, the entry doors behind them swishing open.

  It’s two MPs. Military police, helmets, armbands, posture.

  Their presence ramps the husband up. “No, no, you can’t, I insist on seeing the project coordinator. Don’t make me”—the MPs each taking one of his arms—“Lazarus Complex! Lazarus Complex!” he starts screaming, casting about for a camera to scream it into.

  They’re alone though. It’s after hours.

  He tries to whip an arm free can’t.

  “Listen,” he says, slumping down to their height, “I just…he’s my—”

  “That’ll be enough, gentlemen,” a female voice cuts in. With authority.

  The husband looks up.

  It’s a doctor. White lab coat, sensible shoes, severe bun, or the display-window estimation of a bun. Clipboard. About his age.

  “You’ve got a sister, don’t you?” the husband says to her. “A brother?”

  “‘Lazarus Complex’,” she repeats when he’s done. “This is inflammatory enough that merely shouting it in an abandoned waiting area is supposed to compel us to abandon our research? Am I following correctly, Mr. XXXXX?”

  The husband doesn’t answer.

  “Do you feel compelled, Maddy?” the doctor asks the night receptionist, leaning around the husband to ask it.

  “He’s my brother,” the husband says.

  “Not according to his entry interview,” the doctor says—that’s what’s on the clipboard. She runs her eyes up it, down it. Flips it over like there might be more.

  The husband laughs. Kind of blubbers.

  The MPs let him go, but stay close.

  “You know my name,” the husband tells her.

  “Not that I’m disregarding the family resemblance,” the doctor says, holding the clipboard to her chest now. “The pronounced height. The tendency towards theatrics.”

  The husband closes his eyes. Is not going to lose control here.

  “He didn’t put me on there,” the husband says, nodding to the clipboard, “he didn’t put me on there”—not even slightly in control of his lower lip anymore—“because last time I, because, when he left, I told him, I told him…”

  “I know, I know,” the doctor says. “I do have a sister, Mr. XXXXX. We say things we wish we hadn’t. It’s part of this human race, I’m afraid.”

  “Then you understand?”

  Stare, stare.

  “I just want to see him,” the husband adds, taking a step closer, to implore at close range, but the MPs step in with him.

  “The project coordinator, you mean,” the doctor fills in, deep in her clipboard again.

  “What?” the husband says. “No, no—”

  “Then you were— Is it your habit to always be saying things you don’t in actuality mean, Mr. XXXXX?”

  The husband just studies the floor here. For an answer.

  “Oppenheimer,” he says at last, his eyes coming back up to the doctor. “Sure, okay, whatever.”

  The doctor steps in now, interested. “Robert J. Oppenheimer, Mr. XXXXX?” she asks, trying to catch his eyes. “I’m sorry, but I believe you have us confused with another project. In another decade.”

  The husband looks past her. To the door she must have come through.

  “What are you doing to him, that I can’t see him?” he finally says.

  The doctor smiles, says, “It’s strictly dietary,” then nods the MPs away, one of them slipping her a manila envelope first.

  “Dietary?” the husband asks, watching the MPs make their exit, when what he should have been looking at, using his height to see, is the grainy black-and-white photograph the doctor was keeping angled away from him, slightly—his broken-armed son in the backseat of the car, as seen past the orange-and-white-striped dropbar of a guard booth.

  “This way,” the doctor says then, all business again, nodding once to the night receptionist, then turning on her sensible heel, the manila envelope closed now, tucked at the back of her clipboard.

  The husband swallows, his Adam’s apple more supple than it would appear to be, and follows, ducking his head to get through the door, back into the bowels of this Lazarus project.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The humming was what finally brought Jory up from inside himself. It was like being trapped in a dial tone. If there were still phones.

  Opening his eyes was no better.

  Standing within arm’s reach, miles taller because Jory was lying down, was Hillford. All the novitiates shuffling past glancing at him then away.

  Jory raised his hand to peel the mask off, but it was already gone, was—it was back on Hillford. And Jory’s hand wouldn’t reach h
is face anyway.

  He tracked down to it, from it to the thin white sheet knotted around his wrists. He was tied to a smooth pole in the center of the courtyard. And his back, the skin on his back, it was wrong, too stiff, too painful, like he’d scraped it.

  From dragging him on the ground?

  There was no time though.

  “It’s only fitting,” Hillford was already saying, his voice so even, just stating a fact, “only fitting that you would deliver yourself to us, Jory Gray, to be the messenger. Perhaps for a while you even believed you actually had one of the instruments—”

  “No!” Jory said then, trying to stand—boots still on, pants too, but…wearing one of their stupid white robes over it all? Was that what was wrong with his back?—“I do, I have one!”

  “Of course you do,” Hillford said, turning to address the congregation. “Now, is there anyone here willing to speak on behalf of the messenger?”

  “‘Messenger’?” Jory said, pulling against his tether.

  No response from the novitiates. Just another hum, building. And Hillford, stepping into Jory’s line of sight, his white blade suddenly in his left hand, his right hand…whole?

  Hillford saw him looking, raised that hand for inspection. Moved the fingers against the thumb, as if dislodging wet sand, or rolling a tiny marble.

  “There are many mysteries, Jory Gray, yes,” Hillford said, holding the knife out to Jory, as if offering it. “Of which you are now an intimate part.”

  The humming swelled at that.

  Instead of looking at the knife, Jory turned his head to the rest of the courtyard, and each doorway was still doorless, but there was a boneface in them all now. A real priest, not just a novitiate.

  So, not a door that would keep Jory from passing, not if he really wanted to get through, but one that would—that would keep the dead from coming through?

  Jory studied the novitiates, one by one, only stopping at the one female who turned her face away at the last instant. Just the slightest readjustment of her face, but he couldn’t see her eyes now.

  “Linse?” he said, but Hillford was blocking his sight line again. “Linse!” he screamed then, fighting to see around Hillford’s robes. The pole creaked, the sheet straining.