Chapter Thirty-Three
Behind his eyelids, asleep, but not, Jory was where he wanted to be—at a car wash from the past. Chasing his daughter with the soapy wand, no car at all, just a pocketful of surprise quarters, this stall whispering to them as they’d walked by.
But then, stepping across the rusted grate of the drain, Jory saw decomposed fingers wrapping up, folding over the toe of his daughter’s shoe, and he lowered the wand to the hungry face down there—
And sat up, grabbing at the blankets. Breathing hard.
Not waking really, he’d been awake for a few minutes, but finally opening his eyes. Coming back to here. Falling back to the present.
“Welcome,” a face across from him said. It was just one of many.
He was in the bunkhouse. J Barracks. Scanlon had had him delivered back here as…what? An example?
It was all new faces too, except the reprobate, his name still at the bottom of the call list, evidently. He was on his top bunk, dealing himself through a deck of cards, sweating through his shirt.
“Continue,” the reprobate said to all, waving an ace of hearts, as if releasing this roomful of baby torches, each of them older than him.
They fell back to whatever they were doing.
“Mr. Biology, right?” the reprobate said, laying down another card.
Jory swung his legs over the side of his bunk, rubbed his eyes and swayed his back in, knew it was blue and green from the electric prongs, and scabbed into a grid from Hillford’s black knife. His face was sore on one side, probably from where he’d spasmed into the Kitten Man’s cell bars.
Scanlon wouldn’t have shouldered him up to daylight himself either. He would have pulled the handler over for that.
Jory could see no sign of that on his arms though. Or his hands. His right palm was still raw, from that long cinder block wall.
“Everything in place there?” the reprobate asked.
Jory didn’t answer.
Against the far wall, all the bunks pushed away, the new recruits were making a music video. Make-do scarves doo-ragged over their heads. Their one real guitar was stringless, the lead singer using a large-bore revolver for a microphone. Holding it right up against his top teeth to wail.
Each of them were hamming it up for their devoted cameraman.
“Remember?” the reprobate said about them, what they were trying to do, and Jory did, yes—Fishnet, strutting out onto the floor, trying to dance perfectly enough that it would hold the day back. That it would keep morning from coming. That it would keep all of them alive.
Now the band was huddling around the cameraman, to see the playback. Collapsing with laughter.
Jory almost smiled, watching them, but then it hit him—if they were watching, laughing about their fake instruments, then that camera they were using, it wasn’t dead, wasn’t just a prop, like the pistol, like the guitar.
Jory looked down, between his feet. At his pack, the flap opened.
“Mayner,” Jory said. Mayner had ditched the pack here for him, like that would close the circle, make it where Jory had to come back. There had probably even been a pack of the sacred menthols in there, smoked down to nothing long before one of Scanlon’s guards walked in, feed-sacked Jory down onto an empty bunk.
Jory stood up fast enough that the room swam. He fought his way through it, over to the playback huddle, parting the recruits harder than he needed to. He ripped the camera away, tried to hunch over it to see the viewscreen, but hands were grabbing at him. Pushing, pulling.
“Who the hell do you think—” the lead singer said, stepping in, leading with the revolver, the reprobate suddenly standing in front of Jory, his knife just casual by his thigh, and not flashing in the light. But just because the reprobate’s eyes had that covered.
“Teach?” the reprobate said back to Jory, calling him by name.
The large-sized recruit didn’t give ground, but he didn’t come any closer to that knife either.
“They—they—” Jory said, cueing through the tape or disc or chip or card or hard drive or whatever was in the damn camera.
It was all faces and action. From the bunkhouse. The music video. Zoomy, smeary, loud.
“They recorded over it,” he said, looking up at each of them in turn. “It was here…”
“What?” the reprobate asked.
Jory could only shake his head.
“It was here,” he said again, and let the camera slip from his hand, shatter by his feet, that one large recruit pulling lips away from his teeth about that.
“It was there,” he said. “The last copy.”
“Everybody’s a critic,” the lead singer said, cocking that revolver to his head, pulling the trigger on nothing.
“Like he could do better?” the guitar player said, Jory crossing in front of them, the bathroom the only thing in that direction.
“Pay attention,” the reprobate said, still standing between the recruits and Jory. “This guy, he’s not careful, he’s gonna be a legend, you just wait.” To Jory, for all, “How many calls you been on?”
The whole room was hanging on his answer. Ready to riot or applaud, depending.
“Sometimes,” Jory said, finding his voice, dodging all eye contact, “sometimes you have to, like, kick their mouth grate open.”
He mimed it.
Silence. More silence.
“Than what?” one of the baby torches said.
“Never stop talking to your driver,” Jory said. “Sing him a song through the, the headset, if you want. If you remember any.” The lead singer smiled one side of his mouth about this. “And the smell,” Jory added. “Be ready for the smell.”
“Because they’re dead?”
“Because they’re zombies,” Jory said, and turned, felt his way into the head.
“Fucking old-timer,” he heard one of the recruits saying about him.
“Lifer,” another added.
Jory held both sides of the sink, leaned over.
In the tin mirror, scratched deep, was a new Z.
Jory’s face was in the middle of it.
“I’m coming,” he said to the girl running around the car wash, and closed his eyes.
Instead of lunch, Jory smoked cigarettes.
He paced around and around J Barracks, looking up at each jeep. None of them was Mayner. All the radio chatter was about the fires downtown. The ten-year blowout. This next End of Days.
It was a joke. We were the punch line.
On his fiftieth or two-hundredth loop around the bunkhouse, Jory stopped, leaned against the wall in the exact same spot he’d watched from six days before, deciding whether to go in to work or not.
The factory was still there, squat and grey, the same exact cinder block as the long tunnel from the Church. He should have known all along. He should have seen it from the very first.
“What is it?” a recruit said, close enough for Jory to look over, but Jory didn’t.
“Nothing,” he said.
“You’re Gray, right?” the recruit said then. “Almost made it through a whole week?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Jory said, dropping his cigarette before it was done. Grinding it out with his boot.
This recruit kept watching him.
“Like I said, just stay in communication,” Jory finally said to him, touching the side of his head, “they won’t code you if you’re still talking.”
“Gray,” the recruit said then, again. “Mr. Gray, right?”
Jory turned, studied this recruit.
Something about the way he’d said that Mr.
Like it wasn’t the first time.
“I know you?” Jory asked.
The recruit smiled a shy smile, looked back to some commotion going down in front of the bunkhouse—some baby torches had to be dragged out, Jory had heard a few weeks ago, dragged out and strapped into the jeep—then came back to Jory, and the way he came back, moving his head to allow for the bangs he didn’t have anymore, the
bangs the postapocalypse wouldn’t allow, Jory remembered—he’d sat in the back of the class, was always watching the halls, for who might be walking by. Always watching the halls, then looking back like he’d been “paying attention, sir, really”.
“Second period,” Jory said.
“Mark Davies,” the recruit said, and held his hand out.
Jory pulled him to him, hugged him for too long, too hard.
“Mr. Gray,” the recruit said somewhere in there, embarrassed—he was taller than Jory now—and Jory closed his eyes, felt tears on his face but didn’t care.
“I just wanted to say, to say thanks,” the recruit said when Jory finally let him go.
“Thanks?” Jory said, his fingers nervous, peeling the crackly plastic from another pack. Letting the gold string drift away.
“You gave me a B on the midterm,” the recruit said, shrugging. “I couldn’t have played in District if you hadn’t.”
It took Jory two tries to get the cigarette between his lips. “Did you win?” he asked.
The recruit nodded that he had, yeah, and Jory lit up, breathed deep.
“Mind?” the recruit said, his hand out for the pack.
Jory shook a cigarette up, just reflex, even started to angle the pack over for the recruit, but then folded it back into his hand.
“Just one,” the recruit said, not quite following.
Jory was laughing to himself now though. Shuddering with it.
“Teachers can’t, we can’t,” he said. “It’s against policy to share tobacco with students.”
The recruit smiled, reached in again, the joke surely over, but Jory pulled the pack in deeper, tamped the cigarette back.
“Sorry,” he said, not looking at the recruit anymore, the recruit staring at him for maybe twenty seconds—Jory could feel it—then backing away. Gone.
One more person, gone.
Jory swallowed and it was loud in his ears. At what felt like a cellular level, he became aware that each time he shoulder-pushed away from the cinder block wall, each time he touched his eyebrow where it hurt, it was the last time for that too.
He was saying goodbye.
Three and a half cigarettes later, Jory’s loop around J deposited him at the front edge of the parking lot, like, if he stood there, insisted, then Mayner would have no choice but to show up, get this over with already.
Instead, it was another jeep, coming in fast, braking hard, sliding to a stop right up against Jory, the driver wowing his eyes across the hood, stepping down to cadge a smoke.
Jory shook one up from his backup pack, passed it over.
“No offense,” the driver said, antsy, “but this is all bullshit, right?”
Jory looked to the doorway, where the driver’s torch was going to appear.
“The plague?” Jory said back.
“Dead patrol,” the driver said, leaning back into the jeep for something. “Preburial. Burning their asses.”
Jory looked to the road behind them. When he came back to this driver, the driver had ducked into a nonreg hat. For the sun. Because cancer’s such a killer.
Glasses’s driver.
Jory dropped his cigarette to the gravel, stepped on it.
“Bullshit?” he asked.
“Collars,” the driver said, his cigarette pinched in his fingers to make his point. “Just, each corpse turns up, clip a collar onto it, yeah? Just set it to clamp down on motion, this time. Then let the bonefaces bury them all night and all day. More power to them. Shit. I should write a letter to my congressman.”
Jory was studying the doorway again. Studying the doorway and doing the mental Rolodex thing, suddenly sure that nobody who’d gone through torch training with him had been a soldier, just misbehaving civilians. Expendables. Dead weight.
“But there wouldn’t be any—there are no accidents like that,” Jory said. “With collars.”
“What?” the driver said, stepping off, almost insulted. “You mean the brass, they want accidents? What are they doing, thinning the herd?”
“No,” Jory said, just now seeing it like he should have all along, “not ours,” and it was all spread out for him, for a moment—Scanlon wanted the Church gone. And the way to do that was to kill the priests—cut the head off the snake, no matter how many heads it had—and to do that in a way that they’d asked for: Preburial.
Every call, it was supposed to go wrong.
It meant one less reject like him, like Glasses, like all of them, sure. But it meant one less priest too, and that was what was important. Scanlon was trading pawns for bishops.
And the board he was trying to control, it was the world. It was the future.
Jory shook his head at the simplicity of it all.
And, because of the document the Church had, and whatever video they probably had of Scanlon playing tic-tac-toe, it had to be like this.
He was calling the Church’s bluff. Seeing if they’d keep feeding their priests to the fire, just to get to bury one or two bodies a month.
So far, nobody’d blinked.
Except all the torches. Right before they died.
How many times had J Barracks been filled and emptied already? Were the handlers ever even supposed to function properly?
“Fucking Oppenheimer,” Jory said, and before the driver could ask him about that, his torch was in the doorway.
Mark Davies. His cube of armor hooked under the middle finger of his right hand. His boots tied up tight.
“Fresh meat,” the driver said under his breath, grinding his cigarette down now. Kind of laughing.
“Like hell,” Jory said, pulling deep on his cigarette, watching Mark Davies cross the packed dirt like a fighter pilot. Everybody watching him, nobody saying anything.
Except the driver.
“Care to make it interesting?” he said across to Jory, about Mark Davies. “Even money, he doesn’t make it five minutes in the old casa of the dead.”
Jory blew a tight line of smoke out, and watched it drift.
“What’s his name again?” he asked with all innocence, lifting his chin across the yard to Mark Davies, from second period Biology. Mark Davies, who scored twenty-two points that District game, half of them in the fourth.
Jory had listened to it on the radio, on his back porch, and had had to bite his finger with happiness, when that last buzzer went on and on.
“Shit…” the driver said, grinning the question away, and then Jory was on him, had him by the shirtfront, was slamming him into the gravel, trying to punch, screaming through his teeth, words he didn’t even know the shape of. Just that they were from deeper inside him than he knew he had. Mark Davies just standing there. A couple of the other recruits finally loped over, pulled Jory off, Jory still trying to fight through, back to the driver. He only stopped when different hands hauled him back. Guided him away.
Mayner. His jeep was maybe five steps over. Jory was still trying to pull his shoulders back to himself, his breath coming in deep hitches, his hands already touching his chest, for a cigarette.
In all the versions of this, what Mayner says to Jory here is just a growled “shut up”, and then he straps him in, tears away from J Barracks, Jory’s hand wrapped around the frame of that fold-down windshield, his knuckles bloody.
Everybody remembers.
Sunset that day, exactly ten years after the plague, it went down chain-link by chain-link for Mayner and Jory.
The jeep was nosed up against the tall fence of one of the restricted zones, Mayner’s rigged-together, little CD player spinning out that same teenaged girl’s voice for them. It was less about the music, more about that there had once been music.
“We supposed to be there yet?” Jory said.
“They’re going to start without us?” Mayner said back, grinding the starter. “You don’t have to,” he added. “I can, you know. Drop you wherever. People disappear all the time these days. That’s one good thing about the postapocalypse.”
Jory rocked b
ack and forth slowly.
“It’s for the best,” he said. “Somebody’s got to put a stop to all this.”
“I’m not going to code you,” Mayner said, backing up all at once, so Jory had to push his hands against the dash.
Jory looked across to Mayner.
“Serious,” Mayner added, like it was just a fact, and dropped them into first gear.
Jory studied the city, sliding by.
“You ever hear that Lazarus Complex story?” Jory said.
Mayner caught third, skirted a sinkhole.
“That a Bible thing?” Mayner said.
“You ever wonder how it all started, I mean?” Jory said. “All this?”
Mayner shrugged, concentrating on the road. It was coming up under them so fast.
“You mean was it aliens and all that?” he said.
“All that,” Jory said, “yeah.”
“It matter?” Mayner asked, hauling the wheel over hard, Jory’s hand still clamped to the windshield frame.
“I don’t—” Jory started, but then the jeep was sliding. Not out of control, just needing to brake, now.
For the giraffes.
They were crossing the road, the father impossibly tall, looking down at Mayner and Jory, the mother giraffe just moving straight across behind him, a young one crossing last, its legs spindly and knobbed.
The jeep was stalled, so Jory could hear the massive hooves thumping delicately onto the ground. The battery was still pushing that teenaged girl’s voice up.
“He was right,” Mayner said, about Glasses.
Jory smiled a child’s smile, took a mental snapshot—the last giraffes he would ever see, definitely—and in his head, told them to live forever. To never die.
It was his first prayer in years.
Chapter Thirty-Four
—1920 New Haven.
This is where it all went down.
Before the plague, it had been a house built for entertaining, a one-story ranch affair, updated through the decades, sitting at kind of a cant from the curb, like the street was accommodating it, not the other way around. The sculpted hedges had gone feral years ago, but the iron-barred windows were all intact. The lightpost at the front edge of the yard looked antique, like it was part of some older place, transported here for sentimental reasons.
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