The Gospel of Z (13 page)

Glasses shut his eyes, kept them that way.

Jory understood.

Ten minutes later, still no sun to speak of, they were at the snake’s mouth.

At night, evidently, they left the doors cracked open.

The stench was nearly visible.

Jory covered his nose and mouth with the back of his right hand.

His escort smiled, had already been holding his breath.

“What is this place?” Jory said, stepping down.

“End of the line,” the escort said, the jeep already starting to move.

“And the beginning,” a guard standing in the shadows said.

Jory tried to make the guard out, couldn’t quite do it. Just the blunt suggestion of his gun. Not pointing anywhere in particular, for now.

“I know where to go,” Jory said, stepping away from the smell, trying to duck around to Scanlon’s portable office, but then another guard was standing in front of him. This one grim, humorless, his face melted, where it wasn’t plain scorched.

Jory had heard about this. If you lived through a code somehow, or a torch malfunction, or any of the other hundred fire hazards available these days, you got assigned night duty. To keep you out of the sun.

But that was supposed to just be a rumor too. A warning.

“This way,” the other guard said, standing by the cocked-open doors, each maybe thirty feet tall, heavy as a truck.

His eyes on the burned guard until the last instant, Jory stepped in, the snake’s breath syrupy now, grainy against his throat.

He coughed, gagged.

The guard waited for him to come back up.

“Gonna do it?” he said. “Spew?”

Jory hadn’t been going to, but that word pushed him over.

“Done?” the guard said a few splashes later.

Jory focused on the ground before him. There were hash marks drawn on it Evidently it was something to bet on—how many steps visitors took before losing the contents of their stomach.

Jory’d made it two.

He looked past the guard, down the sloping corridor.

“This the brig?” he said, wiping his mouth and nose.

“Not for you,” the soldier said back, and led the way, Jory seeing after a few steps that they were supposed to stay within a taped-off walkway.

After the first switchback, the floor sloping more perilously, he saw why—this was a holding facility. When there weren’t supposed to be holding facilities anymore. When there had been assurances that there would never be holding facilities again.

The dead, in cell after cell. Reaching through their bars to just short of the taped walkway.

“Just pick whichever one you want,” the guard called back over his shoulder. “We’ll have it sent up to your room.”

“We still
keep
them?” Jory asked.

“Only the good ones,” the guard said, then, “Whoah, whoah,” making room for the handler juggernauting up their walkway, oblivious to anything in its path.

Taking the guard’s lead, Jory backed to the edge of the tape, trying to find that middle ground between the monster in front of him and the monster just behind, reaching.

And then they were moving again. The guard still talking. “Less we feed them, more acute their sense of smell gets.”

“These are—
those
ones?” Jory said, trying to clock the zombie’s fingers. “For Preburial?”

“Where’d you think we get ’em?” the guard laughed. “The zombie fairy?”

“I don’t want to be here,” Jory said, eyeing a zombie with especially long arms.

“One step either way, your worries’ll be over,” the guard said, and then Jory staggered forward, into him.

The guard turned, ready to push back, but it was another handler that had rammed Jory, bearing down on them from behind.

The guard pulled Jory to the side, let the handler hulk past.

“Guess you picked a busy morning to see the wizard,” the guard said, then leaned forward hard, away from the long-armed zombie hooking an uncut finger into the guard’s shirt. The shirt ripped away from shoulder to sleeve. “Oh you—” the guard hissed, stepping forward with what looked to Jory like a thick baton, but it had some kind of jolt in it when he slammed it into the zombie.

The zombie arced back into his cell, lay there twitching, steaming from the eyes.

“Don’t you just love technology?” the guard said, pulling Jory along.

How could the plague ever be over if the military was keeping it in pens, right?

But how could the military burn the infected dead without the infected to sniff them out, Jory knew. And hated. Without some way to test the corpses that were always turning up, the Church would rally support, insist on burying
every
body. And that had to be worse. Z Day all over again, on its own tenth anniversary.

No thanks.

Jory followed the guard around another switchback, and another, down to either the third or fourth level of he-had-no-idea-how-many. All the way to hell probably.

The guard deposited him in another waiting room, what felt like a recommissioned cell of sorts. A make-do execution chamber.

At first Jory resisted, but the guard gave him a hard knee, half threw him in.

Jory stumbled to the table, took one of the two chairs.

At which point Scanlon leaned up from the wall he’d taken. Where he’d been waiting, tilting a cup of coffee up to his mouth.

Jory breathed in, out, then let a calmness seep over him. A slackness.

“Jory Gray,” Scanlon said, taking the opposite chair. Flipping it around to straddle it, lean across its back.

“Don’t you sleep?” Jory said, no real eye contact.

For maybe twenty seconds, Scanlon studied Jory. Then, finally, he nodded to himself. Finished his coffee off. Reached back into a corner for the gun that wasn’t a gun, but a torch, a flamethrower.

He rattled it down onto the table between himself and Jory, Jory trying not to flinch, trying so hard not to look at this instrument. Of his own death probably. You don’t go this far underground to do things you could do just the same up top.

“You know what this is, right?” Scanlon asked.

“It’s a torch,” Jory said, swallowing.

“Good, good,” Scanlon said. “Torch, torch. Say it to yourself. Torch, torch. Hammer? No, no, not a hammer, Gray.
Torch.
”

Jory had no defense, no excuse.

“But no worries, son,” Scanlon said, sliding the torch away. Holding his hand out to the corridor behind Jory. The holding cells. “
These
we’ve got more of, right? More than we ever asked for. And, your instinct, I’m not faulting that. Some people hesitate. You didn’t, Gray. I give you that.”

Jory didn’t know whether to apologize or say thank you.

“But your handler, it
was
malfunctioning,” Scanlon added, leaning back what little he could, backwards in the chair. “We’ve got the feed from the incident, so you’re in the clear there.”

“Then…this is about the peach smuggler?” Jory said, lost.

“He’s not exactly the one we’re interested in here.”

Jory looked up to try to gauge Scanlon’s face.

“I
told
him to call off the code,” Jory said. “The driver. He was following proto—protocol.”

“Grant Mayner,” Scanlon said, like the name left a bad taste. “But he’s not of concern here either.”

Jory counted heads, his eyes unfocusing.

“The priest?” he said at last.

Scanlon chuckled.

“More like their patron saint,” he spat, both his meaty hands gripping the backrest of the chair now.

“…Hillford,” Jory dredged up.

“As near as we can tell,” Scanlon said, “and, trust me, that’s pretty damn near, Brother Hillford has never been on even
one
of these pissant calls. They just send the expendables, right? Midlevel management. Shit, I would, with this kind of rate.” He shrugged an insincere shrug then. “No offense.”

“Saint?” Jory said, his eyes flicking to the back corner of the room, where he thought he’d seen a twitch, a flicker. Something.

Scanlon set his hands on the table, pulling Jory back.

“That little trespass a few years back, in the old pens?” Scanlon asked. “Home movie heard ’round the world?”

“Parting the Dead Sea,” Jory recited. That recording of the three priests walking through the ocean of zombies.

Scanlon grudged a nod.

“That was
him
?” Jory said.

“Officially, no,” Scanlon said. “Their order, or whatever—they can’t take credit for individual shit.
Un
officially, though, yeah, it was Hillford. Big boss man, in the flesh.”

“You, over there,” Jory said.

“He wishes.”

“I mean—”

Scanlon slammed his palm down onto the table.

“And if Hillford’s out in the field,” Scanlon said. “Then—then I don’t fucking know, Gray. End of Days? Something to do with this ten-year anniversary coming up? But, do you know what I
do
know? Do you know what I’m absolutely certain of, what I know as well as that I have two balls? That, when their holiest-of-holy boneface waltzes out into the restricted zone, that you don’t—can you guess this last part? Help me now.”

Jory shook his head no.

Scanlon slid three stills from the jeep’s feed down into the part of the tabletop Jory was fixed on.

It was Hillford, cradling a black egg the size of a football. Infected ash swirling in it like yolk, its shell as smooth and shiny as obsidian.

Scanlon pushed the slick prints into Jory’s chest.

“I know that you don’t give him any more artifacts for his damn reliquary,” he said. “They’re up there jacking off on this right now. Fucking circle-jerk on the mount.”

Jory swallowed, the sound crashing in his ears.

Then Scanlon laughed. It was an evil sound. “And, just so you know, our best reports are that this, this whatever-the-hell religion they claim to be, they think that the plague—that the desiccants out there eating their way through the world?—that they’re
larvae
. That that’s why they’re so hungry. You following, son? Biology, right?”

“Instars,” Jory said. Licking his lips just after.

He’d heard this before, on late-night.

“In-
what
?” Scanlon said.

“Stages of…molting,” Jory said, flashing his eyes up to Scanlon. “Insect life cycle. Egg, larva, pupa, adult.”

“And, so what do you give them, Gray? What do you give their fucking
he
ro? A black egg. A sign from above. Now we don’t have even part of a clue what they’re going to—”

“What’s the adult stage supposed to be, then?” Jory asked. “After the chrysalis?”Scanlon steepled his fingers burrowed his eyes into Jory’s.

“Angels,” he said. “Fucking zombie moths, I don’t know.”

“Angels,” Jory repeated.

Had Linse heard this too? Had he fallen asleep one night and let it play?
That
why she left?

“Angels or some bullshit, yeah,” Scanlon said, dismissing it with his craggy hand. “And, know what else your little gift out there means? To us?”

“The army?”

“It means we can’t leave you out in the
field
,” Scanlon said. “Much as you might be asking for it, even if your dumb-ass driver
requests
it, even if you’re the only torch to live in I don’t know how long, you’re sacred now. Their holy egg giver, I don’t know. Their big black chicken.” Scanlon liked this. “Or red, brown, whatever the hell color you are. It doesn’t matter. We can use you, somewhere down the line.”

“I’m not a hostage.”

“You’re whatever the hell we say you are, Gray. We clear on that?”

“He was only there because you sent me,” Jory said.

“Excuse me, soldier?”

“Hillford. Brother Hillford. He said he just came to see why you’d picked me, yourself.”

“We’ve got the feed, Gray. It’s got audio. And he knew that feed was rolling.”

“I didn’t.”

“You didn’t need to,” Scanlon said. “What you
do
need to know is that, because of your unauthorized theatrics out there yesterday, I can’t even discipline you properly. I can’t have you looking like a prisoner of war, if we have to trade you or something.”

“We’re at war with the bonefaces?”

“They want what we’ve got, Gray. People. Influence. Don’t think for a second they don’t have their eyes on that prize. The future’s either theirs or it’s ours.”

“But they’re just a—a—” Jory started.

“We protect the body,” Scanlon said. “They shepherd the soul. A new world’s shaping up all around us. Who’s going to be its beating heart, you think? Keep the monsters at bay?”

“You,” Jory said, and, then, because he was a walking suicide, “as long as there’s, you know. Monsters.”

Scanlon shook his head. More in pity than in appreciation now.

He unholstered his service revolver. It was big, silver, important.

He rolled the cylinder, looked across it at Jory.

“I was never in favor of conscripting civilians,” he said. “No discipline, don’t really have that gut-level understanding of the chain of command. But desperate times, desperate saviors of the human race. That doesn’t mean you can’t be part of the disciplinary
pro
cess, though.”

Like he’d probably been planning the whole time, he emptied the revolver’s cylinder into his hand, thumbed a cartridge from his shirt pocket back in.

“You said you can’t kill me,” Jory tried.

Scanlon held the revolver out to him, butt first.

“Like I said,” Scanlon started, standing, urging Jory to as well, “we know the handler was malfunctioning. That it needs to be decommissioned.”

Jory still hadn’t taken the revolver.

Scanlon pawed his big hand up to Jory’s shoulder, his neck. Pulled him around the side of the table. Led him to the empty part of the room.

Jory flicked his eyes up, just reflex, and fell back against the wall just as fast.

A handler was standing there, just out of sight.
The
handler, with the outsized codpiece. At his leg, on its chain, a zombie.

Scanlon chuckled, thrust the pistol into Jory’s hand. Said, “Want it now, son?”

Jory took it, held it out against the zombie, but then—then.