The Gospel of Z (11 page)

So as not to attract attention, right?

Let the birds do that, once the smell came.

Jory sucked deeper on the menthol. He kind of wanted to live now, just to get the chance to smoke another.

Outside, Mayner looked up from the video feed—Jory’s helmet—to the armored transport rumbling up the road. Shaking the ground. Shaking the whole world.

The handler.

“What’s it smell like?” Jory asked, his voice breaking up. “You know, when you burn them?”

Mayner grinned like he had the perfect answer here, then swallowed it when a tall white figure swept past.

“Look busy,” he said into the mic, covering it with his hand. “This party’s about to heat up.”

Though the video from the old holding pens was the conversion point for most of the people who sleepwalked up the Hill, the Church’s real power was that, in uncertain times, it was providing certainty.

The
illusion
of certainty, Jory would have told Linse if she’d asked, but still. The illusion, it’s got to be better than its opposite, right?

For the first six or seven years of the plague, it had been the military in control. Because people needed fires against the night. Because society needed some fences. Tall, sharp fences.

But now—it wasn’t like the old world, and it never would be again, not after the dead had gotten up and walked one especially black Friday. That Friday was gone though. It was Sunday now. Sunday, and people were going to Church in what passed for droves in the postapocalypse. Maybe for some version of the same reason Jory was pretty sure Linse had made that walk—guilt. For what they’d had to do, in order to survive. What they knew they had inside them, now, and were afraid of. What they wanted cleansed, wiped away, forgotten. Mostly forgotten.

Where the military was just an extension of themselves, what everybody would do and do happily if they had guns and tanks and organization, the Church, it was a bridge to somewhere else. Not the past, but a place not this, not here. A place not so tooth and nail.

Which isn’t to say the Church’s walls weren’t at least as tall as the military’s. The big difference was that the military used see-through chain-link, with electricity coursing through, when it could be had. The Church, its walls were solid, so you could pretend the world was only this big, this clean. And they didn’t need electricity, they had the priests, right? The dead couldn’t come in if they wanted. This was a place of life.

As for where the Church had come from, Jory had no idea. He’d never been close enough to a priest to hear any accent or intonation. What it felt like was that they’d grown up
with
the dead, almost. Like the dead had created some void in the world, for the priests to step calmly into. Like the priests had been waiting centuries to do just that.

And of course they weren’t the only religions to get kick-started by the plague. There had been the Church of Z in the early days. Graduated snake-handlers, pretty much, except their holy animal, the animal that sent them into a spiritual frenzy, it was the zombie. To be infected was to have the spirit course through you, take away all semblance of human speech, human thought, replace it with something so much more pure, like you’d been unburdened by greed and envy and the rest, could exist now as perfect desire, as a hunger more pure than the world had ever known.

Those congregations fell as soon as they all met in one place. But for a while there’d always been another group of believers willing to meet. Less a church than mass suicide. Which was maybe how they dealt with their own survivor’s guilt.

The Bottleneckers had been next, and, of all the upstart religions, they had seemed the one most likely to keep their foothold, just because their articles of faith—they
wore
them. The reason they were called Bottleneckers was the collars the military had issued the third year. To everybody who wouldn’t come onto the make-do bases. And you had no choice. If a patrol saw you out in Restricted, you were put facedown in the dirt, a silver band strapped around your neck, its sensor in lockstep with your jugular pulse, so that, when it stopped—when you got infected, like you
would
, out here without the military to watch over you—then the collar would contract all the way down to your spine, decap you. Eliminate the threat you were about to become, and thus contain the plague that much better. It was supposed to be the humane solution.

So these Bottleneckers, the Collared, as they were called at first, they started meeting once, twice a week, just to talk about it. More a resistance than a religion, really.

But they all fell down too, when somebody figured out how to jack into the collar’s radio signal—they were also tracking devices, surprise—and fool the sensors into registering death. Two hundred people sitting in rows, losing their heads all at once. Maybe two or three of them still sitting there, a live mouse thrust up between their neck and the sensor, the mouse clawing and scratching, its heartbeat so alive, too undeniable for the jacked signal to override.

So, into that space left by the Church of Z, by the Bottleneckers—Christianity was tame now that the dead were walking, and if any of the other religions had made it through, they didn’t have temples around here, anyway—into that void, stepped these priests. Quiet, demure. Tall. Their long fingers crossed over their navels like saints. If they even had navels. Their faces covered by ceramic masks, those masks so serene, so patient. Three crosses or plus marks or sideways
X
s on their lapels.

All of which Jory knew, but just secondhand.

“‘Heat up’?” he said back to Mayner, holding the mic close to his mouth, eyes focusing down on nothing, and then the light from the doorway blotted out and he got it—God was in the house. His representative anyway. “Oh,” Jory said, a not-completely-voluntary response.

The cigarette went slack in his lips.

Where Jory had ducked through the doorway because he was still too aware of his helmet, his torch, the priest had to gather his white robes and bend over just so his head would clear.

And then he stood up, and up, turned his alien white face down on Jory so that Jory felt he was being studied by a praying mantis.

“Soldier,” the priest said, then uncurled his white-gloved fingers, touched his own sternum. “Brother Hillford,” he said slowly, deeply, properly. No accent of any kind coming through.

“
Hill
ford?” Mayner whispered into Jory’s helmet.

Jory was registering this in some place he couldn’t quite speak from.

This priest was every bit as tall as any handler.

And, his robe, it was so white it was glowing.

Breathe, breathe,
Jory told himself.

“No, not a soldier,” he said, about himself. “Jory. Jory Gray.”

The priest just kept on with that stare, took a step forward, time speeding up all at once, Jory reaching forward to stop the priest from falling into the septic caverns below them, but the priest’s foot, it had already directed itself around the weak spot in the floor. Was putting its gossamer weight near the wall instead.

Jory nodded about this, waiting for it to register as well. But it wouldn’t.

How could this priest have known where to step? Did they have some extra sense? Were the soles of his sandals that thin? Was there a shadow, giving that slight concavity away, or had he been watching Jory through the doorway, taking note? Or were his steps just divine?

“You’re the special one,” Hillford said then, cocking his head over, the mask so blank.

“Special?” Jory said.

“The one your general hand-picked.”

“More like hand-punished,” Jory said.

Outside, the handler’s transport was making the earth quake. Jory studied his menthol—not even half-gone. A travesty.

Or not.

Jory stepped forward, flipped the menthol backwards, offered it to Hillford.

“You don’t find these ones every day anymore,” he said, keeping his face tilted down like he felt respectful.

The priest kept his hands up his sleeves.

“The world outside of us is so polluted already, Jory Gray. Would you have me pollute the inside as well?”

Jory took the menthol back, drew deep on it.

“Are you taking care of her?” Jory said then, looking at the priest’s long, seemingly exaggerated shins. His shin
area
, anyway. The shin
part
of his robes.

“Her?” Hillford asked.

“My…her name, it’s Linse,” Jory said. “She went up the Hill, up to
you
about three days ago. Four. Here, she’s—”

Jory fumbled up Linse’s ID card.

Hillford leaned forward, as if studying it, especially the earring hole, top center. But he wouldn’t take it.

“What are you being punished for, if I might ask?” he said instead, the ghost of a grin in his voice. “Starting unauthorized fires, perhaps?”

Jory pulled more smoke in, studied the menthol again—how could Hillford possibly know about the Weeping Poles?—and then Mayner coughed into Jory’s helmet, made him flinch, fumble through the air after the menthol.

He had to go to his knees to catch it. He never saw the ID card, fluttering down beside his leg.

Another drag.

“I just want to talk to her,” he said up to the priest, Hillford looking down to Jory like a child, and before Jory could hear the excuse, whatever it was going to be, he rolled the menthol around to the nail of his middle finger, cocked it over his shoulder, and flicked it doorwards.

A direct miss. Not even close.

The sparks popped like a firework on a still night, hung in a burst of orange, and by that time Jory was diving for the butt. He caught it on the way down, the cherry hot against his palm so that he just shook it through the door, let it fall on what passed for a stoop in this broken world.

The instant it hit, a gigantic insulated boot crushed it out—with or without the signal, the handler had been coming—and in that same instant, the zombie was in the doorway, its gimp-masked face right up against Jory, close enough that, in spite of the iron grate over the zombie’s snapping mouth, in spite of the field there supposed to sterilize the virus, still, Jory thought he could taste that rancid breath.

He fell back onto his elbows, trying to kick deeper into the restroom, then came back with his torch, the flame bobbing right at the zombie’s mouth grate, his finger already—with or without Jory’s okay—pulling.

At the last possible moment, a cold hand came down on Jory’s left shoulder, pulled him slightly around. Just enough that when his torch opened, it opened onto the wall, the flames flattening out, curling at the ceiling and floor, rushing across the doorway, leaving the zombie’s leather singed.

Jory turned around, was face to mask with the priest, close enough to see the skin around Hillford’s eyes. It was wrinkled, black. Scarred? That why they wore masks, some kind of nightmare initiation?

“Gray, Gray!”
Mayner was yelling, both into Jory’s helmet and outside, from the jeep.

Jory backed off the trigger. The priest pulled him a step or two deeper into the restroom, as if Jory weighed nothing. Jory shook away, clambered to an unsteady stand.

“Cool, cool,” Jory said into the mic. A complete lie.

This is why so many torches never came back from their first call, he knew now—panic. Being in the same room with a zombie, with a freakadillo priest. Having a weapon that can make all that go away. Your driver having a weapon that can make
you
go away.

Jory’s breath caught up with him. It was raspy, shallow, not enough.

“Confronting your own sins made manifest is never a simple matter, is it?” Hillford said, tucking his hand back up his sleeve.

An instant later, the zombie was all the way through the door, the massive form of the handler leashed to it, the zombie pulling on all fours for Jory, the most obvious food, the handler not seeming to even notice.

Like the zombie, the handler was in leather. And zippers. Circuitry, wires. Blue electricity coursing up and down the chain, from dog to master, and back again.

The zombie had been bad, but this, the handler, it was—Jory’d never seen one suited up for the field. In action.

He didn’t believe in them, but he could tell that didn’t make a shred of difference, either.

One step farther, and the zombie’s front leg—arm, whatever—reached through that weak part of the floor. It came up with a squealing black rat, one almost able to squirm through the stumps of the zombie’s fingers.

It pressed it against its mouth grate before it could wriggle away. The rat kicked, sizzled, died in clumps that the zombie reached for with its dry black tongue.

The handler looked down to this, made a
henh
sound somewhere in its throat, and jerked once on the chain, a casual flick, really. It was enough to slam the zombie bodily into the wall Jory had just torched.

For a moment the zombie stuck, its leather cooking, the flesh under it smoking, and then it arched away, was pulling for Jory again.

“Elegant, no?” Hillford said to Jory, studying this zombie.

“No,” Jory said, taking a careful step to the side.

“Don’t look at it,” Mayner was saying to Jory through the helmet.

Jory couldn’t help it though.

It had been nearly ten years since he had been this close to one.

He thought it would be easier. That he was prepared. That working the assembly line, it had prepared him for this.

He was wrong.

He couldn’t get his breathing right. Couldn’t get his head right.

“So it begins,” Hillford said then, brushing past Jory. For the peach smuggler. “Inform your escort,” he said, taking a knee by the urinal. By the body.

“We’re a go,” Jory said into the headset. Not looking away from Hillford for an instant, Hillford’s head back in some kind of silent ritual, a glistening white blade suddenly in his left hand, from up his right sleeve.

“No,” Jory said, though he knew what was going to happen.

His prayer over, Hillford slid the blade easily between the lower ribs on the left side of the peach smuggler, Hillford not looking down, like he was going by feel.