The Gospel of Z

by Stephen Graham Jones

  The occupants were long gone, of course.

  Like some houses you’d find on Disposal, this one had been sealed up since Black Friday, it looked like to Jory. Like the family had left early for a three-day weekend. Or had all been at work, at school.

  Inside places like that, the refrigerator wouldn’t even smell anymore. There’d be a mummified dog by the couch sometimes, maybe squirrels nesting in the closet, a hole chewed in the ceiling.

  And sometimes it would just be quiet. The delicate sound of photographs in kitchen drawers, losing their color. The slick paint on the doorframes peeling up, fluttering down in flakes if you pulled your hand across, like you’d stepped into a snow globe.

  A good place to die, if you had to.

  Jory took it all in, in a glance, Mayner slamming them up onto the lawn, knocking the antique lightpost over about halfway, its smoked-glass cupola drifting up into the air after all this time, shattering across the driveway.

  “Was thinking you could, you know, do something dramatic,” Jory said, finally letting go of the dash. “Let me know how you feel about all this, maybe.”

  Mayner craned around to the three missiles mounted on the roll bar. Drawing an obvious dotted line with his eyes from the missiles to the house. That dotted line arced over the house by twenty feet at least, the yard that steep here, where it met the road.

  “What?” Jory said, trying to figure out what Mayner was so satisfied about.

  “Nothing,” Mayner told him, looking around the windshield at this low, wide house from the past. “Just, it’s standard procedure to, to ‘position the transport such that no in-flight correction is required’.”

  This was humorous to him. Not quite worthy of a smile.

  “You mean they’ll miss?” Jory said, looking up to the missiles now.

  “They don’t know how to miss,” Mayner said. “But, if I were going to code you, then, bam, they’d overshoot, have to circle back, loop down.”

  “So there’d be a delay,” Jory said, getting it.

  Mayner shrugged. “Hadn’t thought of it that way, I don’t guess.”

  Jory shook his head, hauled the shiny new torch up from the back. He stood by the jeep to get the strap adjusted.

  “And you know we’re not alone, don’t you?” Mayner said, just real casual.

  Jory scratched his chin on his shoulder, allowing him to recheck the front door—still shut.

  “No,” Mayner said, wheeling only his eyes to the rest of the houses in the neighborhood, and Jory, adjusting his strap more than it needed, caught on—unsteady red dots in each window.

  Scanlon’s men. Backup. Insurance.

  Mayner pulled up a water bottle.

  “Never done it with somebody watching,” he said, spiraling the bottle across to Jory.

  Jory cracked it open, drank deep.

  “Done what?” Jory said, water coating his chin, the front of his shirt.

  “Disobeyed direct orders.”

  Jory capped the bottle, wiped his mouth. He set the helmet down on his head, rotating it to get it right.

  “Think I’ll get to talk to him first?” he said, nodding inside.

  “Dead guy?”

  “Tall guy.”

  “Your friend in white,” Mayner translated, dialing something on the dash. “Far as I’m concerned, the two of you can throw a revival in there. What did they used to call it? Filibuster? Yeah. Filibuster your asses off. I’ll stand guard.”

  Jory looked across the jeep to Mayner.

  “I’ve coded out seventeen of you,” Mayner explained, flashing his eyes to a not-empty window across the street, then back to Jory. “Today’s not going to be eighteen, I promise you that.” Then he turned, holding his arms out, speaking to the red dots. “You hear that? I’m not doing it! You’re going to have to shoot me too, okay?”

  No response.

  Yet.

  “‘Too’?” Jory said, finally.

  “I told you,” Mayner said back. “No Viking funeral today.”

  “You know they’re going to air-strike this after tonight,” Jory said, “right? Claim an old point of infection, that pure strain, fence it off. Hide all the evidence for ten, twenty years.”

  “Hell’s own half acre,” Mayner added, not disagreeing.

  “Right there in their handbook,” Jory said. “Just saying.”

  “Say it all you want,” Mayner cut back. “You’re not number eighteen. Not today.”

  Jory watched Mayner fumble with the equipment for some twenty seconds, Mayner’s fingers trying to move too fast, doing a lot of nothing. Jory pulled the headset close to his mouth, said, “Got me?”

  Mayner opened the channel on the dash, just a hiss coming through at first, then Jory again, standing right there. “Your wife spare one more?”

  Mayner reached behind his seat, emptied the cigarette bag onto the seat.

  Jory picked the already open pack, pulled one out. He was measuring his life in cigarettes now. And friends.

  One of each, he guessed.

  “Well,” he said, holding the menthol up in farewell, and Mayner held one up himself, put it in his mouth. The wrong end.

  Jory left him spitting, walked up the sidewalk like sidewalks still mattered, the ground already shaking with the handler’s rust-colored behemoth of a transport grinding up New Haven Street, its headlights on to cut through the dusk.

  On the porch, aware of how many crosshairs he was probably standing in, Jory got his torch to spit its flame out, then pulled it back as far on its strap as he could and lit the menthol, his face right in the way if his finger slipped.

  Downtown, the fires were still burning. There were probably novitiates up on the ramparts, even, holding buckets of water. Waiting their turn at the pole. One of them with pupils that, because their puddles of iris soaked up different amounts of light, dilated at slightly different rates.

  Jory nodded across town to her and stepped inside, careful his torch didn’t catch anything dry enough to go up.

  Like that wasn’t the plan though.

  Inside, the air was stale.

  Jory clicked his headlight on—same slider button as it had been on Glasses’s torch—and the yellow beam swam with dust motes, all of them already adjusting themselves to the door Jory hadn’t shut behind him.

  Hillford was really going to show up here, after dark like this? On Z Day?

  Jory swept the light over the room, keeping the beam at stomach level, his teeth already set for the body he knew was going to be standing there, waiting for him. Hungry, ragged, already launching, leading with its teeth.

  Wrong.

  This was a grave-robber call after all. Staged, maybe, but still. The corpse had fallen across an oversized white chair, using it like a couch—head on one arm, left leg draped across the other. Chest black with blood, just like the peach smuggler, and—

  And tucked in beside the corpse—male, now, and that kind of tall that was really just skinny—was a simple prosthetic leg, from the knee down. But it wasn’t simple at all.

  Jory let out a sound that had to be a bleat, that told him in a flash what the goats were all saying—no and please. Both at once.

  It was Timothy.

  Jory started to step closer, pulled back like this was a trap, shining his light all around, and then did it, cocked his torch back and knelt, one hand to Timothy’s leather goggles, his other hand coming up red from Timothy’s chest. It was hardly tacky at all. Still slick.

  “What the hell?” Jory said, and fell sideways before his body told him why—a ghost was coming up the hall. White, floating.

  Jory’s finger convulsed on the trigger, the torch sighing its flame out, leaving the carpet at a smolder.

  Hillford.

  “You,” Jory said, pushing away some more, not completely on purpose.

  Hillford lowered his head in acknowledgment—yes, me—ducked under the arched doorway and into the living room, and Jory’s face went cold—the only reason you duck
under like that, it’s if you know. If you’ve had to do it before. If you came in the front door, not the back.

  The same way you step around a weak spot in a tile floor—if you’ve stepped there before.

  And Timothy’s wound, it was the peach smuggler’s wound all over again. Clean and fast, no joy in it. Just what had to be done.

  Dominoes were tipping into each other in Jory’s head. Racing to the inevitable conclusion. Falling down into a big picture. After he thought he already knew the big picture.

  “You, you,” Jory said, and stood, the smoldering carpet lighting each of them from below. Like standing on lava crust, a new planet forming under their feet. “Let me see your knives,” Jory said.

  Hillford cocked his head over, not following.

  “I said let me see your damn knives!” Jory said again, angling the torch up now.

  Hillford considered, considered, then slid his hands up his sleeves, came up with the black blade, the white blade.

  “One of the originals,” Hillford said, about the white one.

  “Put them here,” Jory said, pointing with the torch to the arm of Timothy’s chair.

  “Would this be a request from the military establishment,” Hillford said, “or a personal favor?”

  “Do it!” Jory screamed, stepping closer, almost nudging Hillford with the flame, a dime-sized circle of the fabric of his white robe glossing up, about to do whatever magic thing it’s supposed to in an explosion.

  Moving slowly, the blades just between his thumb and palm, Hillford held them both down to the rough white cloth, then, instead of laying them down, flipped them expertly over, pushed them into the fabric, using the arm of the chair like a pincushion.

  The white one went in clean, fast. The black one too. But around the black one now, like the chair had been a living thing, was a ring of blood. Pushed up from the blade.

  Timothy’s blood.

  “How’d you get him to meet you here?” Jory said.

  Hillford stepped back to get enough distance to see Jory. “He somehow became enamored with the idea you might be here, Jory Gray,” Hillford said. “And, as it turns out, he wasn’t wrong.”

  Jory closed his eyes. “But Scanlon, he said, he said that you—”

  “The military’s fiefdom is not nearly so expansive as it would like to think,” Hillford said, his voice so level, so controlled.

  “Why him?” Jory asked, not controlled at all, and getting worse. “Because he knew me? Because of”—turning Timothy over, stripping the shirt from his back, showing his tic-tac-toe tat—“because you wanted to be the only one to blackmail the army?”

  “Certain rumors were circulating,” Hillford said, “that your friend here had been an actual runner, not just one who chose to remember them in ink. It was a mantle he seemed comfortable under, you might say. There being no known runners yet alive.”

  “You were jealous. He was getting attention.”

  “A dangerous game to try to play.”

  “He was my age, he couldn’t have been a runner. And they all died anyway.”

  “Better that they did, yes.”

  “For them or for you?”

  No answer from Hillford.

  “You killed the peach smuggler too, didn’t you?” Jory said. “Was he a runner too, or supposed to be? It wasn’t enough that Scanlon killed them, was it? Now you have to kill them again?”

  “Peaches?” Hillford said, leaning down as if to see Timothy better.

  Jory stepped back, aimed at the couch on the other side of the room, and blasted it for a fed-up two count.

  The furniture was their candle now. Their campfire to tell scary stories over. Mayner was a steady hum in Jory’s ear, reading the thermals on his dash—seeing the light through the window, this call going straight to hell, and fast.

  Jory peeled the helmet off, let it drop.

  “He said you were doing this, bringing the dead back,” Jory said, the torch back on Hillford.

  “He’s infected?” Hillford said, about Timothy.

  “He just, he can’t figure out how,” Jory said. “But he knows you don’t want it to be over. That you like all this.”

  “‘He’?”

  “Scanlon.”

  Hillford nodded, as if this explained everything.

  “Fitting,” he said. “Fitting that he of all people would deign to judge me, is it not, Jory Gray?”

  Jory looked over to Timothy, still dead, then came back to Hillford. “I know you know about the Lazarus Complex,” he said. “The gospel.”

  “The Church is denied very little when it comes to the sordid truths of man, yes.”

  “But it denies everybody else, right? Dalton never had a chance.”

  “We all make choices, Jory Gray.”

  Hillford found reason to look around the room. Jory followed. There was nothing, just flickering light, dancing shadows.

  Outside, the handler’s heavy door slammed shut, cutting the night in two.

  “Heroic General Scanlon,” Hillford finally said, like it was already leaving a bad taste behind his mask. “He should know better than to think he can kill me, here. You can’t kill an idea. It only gets bigger. But, we should all be thankful to him, should we not? Without him…none of this. Without his trials, his double-blind research, the world would still be—well. Your daughter, Jory Gray. Your daughter would still be with you, would she not?”

  And now Hillford’s right hand was coming up with something. Not a third blade, but…the ID card? Her ID card?

  Hillford flipped it across to Jory, but, being a card, it nose-dived, hit the carpet.

  Jory grubbed down into the heat for it, came up with it, the plastic melting into his hand, his fingernails steaming.

  Linse’s face. The ID he’d lost on that first call.

  “Can it be any coincidence, Jory Gray,” Hillford led off, “can it be any accident that the arbitrary birth date you listed for her, that it matched so perfectly with your own daughter’s?”

  Jory closed his eyes.

  Hillford went on. “Was this one’s name even Linsey, or is that just what you chose to call her?”

  Jory couldn’t look away from the ID.

  “Your daughter’s birthday was a matter of public record, of course,” Hillford said. “And the Church’s data banks are, well, extensive.”

  Drone, drone, like Hillford was far away.

  Mayner too, his voice small at Jory’s feet.

  “But it must have felt like providence, yes?” Hillford ramped up, sidling closer, onto the lava carpet. Onto the bed of coals their floor was now. “It must have, reaching down into the rubble for another victim, another survivor, and, and seeing those eyes? The chances of an individual encountering heterochromia twice, even in a span of eight years, and in our reduced circumstances, it’s, it’s—but add to that the natural associations you must have made, Jory Gray. The miracles you, who claim to be faithless, believed in, instinctually. Those kinds of, of leaps, Jory Gray, they’re reserved for the true prophets, for the…”

  Jory looked over to Hillford now.

  “You were saving her,” Hillford was saying now, sympathizing, pinching the forgotten menthol from Jory’s mouth, flicking it towards the door expertly, better than a priest should know to. “You were saving your little girl. Every father’s deepest, most primal fantasy, is it not?”

  Jory pressed the heel of his left hand between his eyes. His chin was trembling, his breathing too deep, packing too much oxygen into his blood, so that his head was swimming.

  “She could have, she could have just stayed,” he said, his voice cracking.

  “I know, I know,” Hillford said, his hand to Jory’s torch shoulder now, “but she’s in a better place now, you have to understand. Both of them are, Jory Gray. The way of the chosen is seldom peaceful. No, the elect, such as you, you must endure tragedy after tragedy, as if the world has gambled it can break you, as if—”

  Jory lowered his hand. Back to t
he torch.

  “Both of them?” he said. “You mean she’s—?”

  “Different better places, Jory Gray,” Hillford said, amused by Jory’s interpretation.

  Jory wasn’t amused.

  “I’m not your damn angel,” he said, the flame bubbling out against the front of Hillford’s robe now.

  “Not yet, no,” Hillford said, stepping slightly to the side, his robe unscorched, just shinier there. Hardened.

  “I wasn’t hurting her at all,” Jory said.

  “Yes, I know. You were saving her. Of course.”

  “Shut up!” Jory yelled, pushing a gout of flame past Hillford, down the long hall. Family portraits showed all along one wall, then sucked back into blackness. “If you’ve really never been coded,” Jory said, trying to reel his voice in, “then this should be fun, think? A new experience. What’s meant to be always happens, right?”

  “Whether we intend it or not,” Hillford added, his head repositioning to see behind Jory. To study that darkness, it seemed.

  Jory didn’t take that bait though. He kept the torch on Hillford. “I didn’t know if I was going to do this, at first,” he said.

  “It may not be as simple as you were led to believe,” Hillford said, nodding behind Jory now. “It would appear we have company.”

  This time Jory did turn around, his hand coming up on reflex for the menthol, so the smoke wouldn’t hide whatever was or wasn’t there, but then he backtracked to Hillford, pinching it away. Flicking it at the door, the cigarette tumbling so slow through the air.

  Those sparks scattering on the stoop.

  It was the sign.

  Jory pawed down for the helmet—hot—brought the mic up to his mouth. “Not yet! Abort, abort—”

  It was too late.

  The handler stopped in the doorway, the zombie by its leather-clad tree trunk of a leg, pulling, its head cased in leather—mouth grate, side blinders, strap to its chin, keeping its head tethered.

  “Hmm,” the handler said, announcing itself maybe, or passing judgment on this dead room, and took another step in, to duck through the doorway, and all its conditioning, its grafts and juice and tech, its fire-retardant armor, none of it mattered at all when what was underfoot was a small entryway rug, dead center in a patch of slick tile, waiting ten years for this very day.