The Gospel of Z (16 page)

Tapping the cheek of his mask to show.

“I want to see her,” Jory said.

Hillford processed this, came back with, “The one you had the, um, identification card for.”

“Linse. She has one brown eye, one blue. Real easy to spot.”

“They leave their old names behind, of course,” Hillford said, producing an apple from some pocket. A crusted-black blade from his left sleeve.

“Hunh,” Jory said, seeing that second blade.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s—that’s a real apple,” Jory lied.

Hillford began cutting the skin from it. One long spiral, around and around, so careful, the red skin partially transparent.

“You’ve got a mature tree up here,” Jory went on, pushing it too far, he knew.

“We’re blessed in many ways, yes,” Hillford said, offering a slice to Jory, balanced on the edge of that blade. “The fruit you get on your base is in sauce form, is it not?”

Jory watched that apple slice.

“I just want to talk to her,” he went on. “Make sure she’s—that she’s all right. Happy with her decision, all that. And, and I understand if she can’t speak yet or whatever. Her vows.”

Hillford cut another slice.

“I want to say goodbye,” Jory added, quieter.

Hillford nodded, let the slice fall over, rock back and forth.

“What’s meant to be always happens, Jory Gray,” he finally said. “Whether we intend it to or not. Once we learn to submit, to ‘let slip the mortal coil’, as the poets say, then the road to perfection, to grace… This means nothing to you, does it?”

“I’m sure it’s good stuff,” Jory said.

“No, no, no apologies, please,” Hillford said, “please. This, it’s—it’s so fascinating. The basic principles and tenets, they elude you. No, not
elude
. You’re not so much as looking for them, even. Yet, of all of us, Jory Gray, of all our centuries of combined perseverance, it’s you who intuited the truth, and presented it in the least encumbered manner.”

To show what he was talking about, Hillford produced the black egg Jory had made.

“Whether you were aware or not,” Hillford said, his voice taking on a reverent tone now. “Your
hands
, they knew. Your flame that day, it was divine. Your spirit, pure.”

“I just wanted to live,” Jory said.

“Exactly. Yes, perfect, Jory Gray. That we could all winnow our desires down to such basic concerns. Glean that focus.”

“And now I just want to see her. That’s my focus.”

Hillford moved his head back and forth, unsurprised, maybe a little regret mixed in.

“The one you rescued from her basement sixteen months ago,” he said.

“It wasn’t the basement.”

“Where she’d been living for…for how long?”

“‘This world asks much of each of us’,” Jory cited.

“‘And what it takes away it gives back, sevenfold’,” Hillford cited back. “Her years of darkness are over, Jory Gray. Now let her years in the light commence. Be satisfied that you were instrumental to her—”

Jory shuffled his feet, an armadillo squealing away from that contact. Had it been licking his
boot
? The
side
of his boot? Hillford lowered a hand to console the animal.

“Listen,” Jory said, reaching down to touch where the armadillo tongue had been. Feeling the foreign object in there now. The white blade. “I mean,” he stumbled on, pretending now that he had an itch, making a production of scratching it, “I know it’s better for her up here and all, and I’m happy for her, really, I just—I need to
see
, can you understand that? I’m not like you, with faith. I wish I was, that I could, but if I could just… I don’t even know for sure she made it all the way
up
here. She might have gotten jumped between here and the gate, for all I know.”

Hillford processed this too. Choosing his words now. “However, you are sure that she made it as far as the Weeping Poles, yes?” he asked. So polite, so casual.

It was a trap.

If Jory, technically a soldier, had burned the poles, then the Church could have legitimate grievance with the military. More than just all the first-time torches coding themselves out, taking the Church’s newly minted clergy with them.

“I woke up and she was—she was gone,” Jory said, pretty sure Hillford was grinning under that mask now.

What Jory really wanted was to watch him navigate an apple slice past that mask.

Hillford accepted Jory’s version. He didn’t press it anyway. Just shifted gears.

“For nearly a decade now we’ve believed that the—the
plague
, as you call it, that if there was a purpose for it all, the violence, the bloodshed, then it was to punish us, to cleanse us. But there rose within us a faction, no, a minority, a group of doubters, of long-seers, who suspected there might be more to it than that. Much more. And, this, Jory Gray”—the egg—“it’s all clear now. The message we’ve been praying for, that can heal what threatens to become a schism. The reason I went into the field that day, as it turned out.”

“It was an accident. I didn’t know to turn the flame off sooner.”

“To those without eyes to see,” Hillford said, “everything is accident and coincidence. But—what this represents, Jory Gray. The changing sleep is coming, after the feast. We know that now, can share it. That decades-long slumber wherein these quickened dead, as you call them, dream of the men they once were, and never will be again, only to rise as angels, of which our former selves will have been only the inconsequential shell, and then will begin the true afterlife…”

Jory breathed in, breathed out. Watched an armadillo watch him.

“If all that’s so,” he said at last, “then why don’t you infect yourself, be part of it?”

Hillford nodded, his knife at the apple again. Quartering, eighth-ing.

“Your education serves you well, Jory Gray,” he said, a mournful slant to his words now. “But some are shepherds, some are the chosen flock. I could no more change that than I could—”

“You stepped around that place in the floor the other day,” Jory said, looking as deep into Hillford’s eyes as he could. “Out there with the peach smuggler.”

“‘Peach smuggler’?” Hillford repeated, still cutting, his eyes not giving anything away.

“How could you have known to step around it?”

“You’re looking for an article of faith, just as I was that day, aren’t you?” Hillford said—cut, cut. As punctuation, he swept the minced apple over the side of the table, golden armor flashing to it from all around. More than Jory would have guessed. “And it was your first time in the field as well, I believe?” Hillford added.

“I saw what I saw.”

“And interpreted it as you will, yes. Maybe next time—”

“It was my
last
call too.”

“Just as well, just as well,” Hillford said, watching the armadillos eat. “We only needed the one…
call
, yes? More would only mean we were blind to the first, undeserving of it, not ready.”

Jory pushed back from the table, reached for the floor with his boots.

“You needed me to verify something?” he said.

“And you have,” Hillford said, standing as well, opening his fingers to show that Jory was here, being Jory.

When he did, though, the tip of the ring finger of his left glove—did it flap? Like he’d
cut
it when destroying the apple? And not even noticed?

Not just the fabric of the glove either. There was enough fingertip in it that it swung a bit.

“Wha—?” Jory said, but Hillford swept his hands behind himself and leaned forward, so that there was only that face. That mask.

One armadillo darted around behind those floor-sweeping white robes.

To nibble up a fingertip?

“What did I verify?” Jory corrected.

“That the most holy can come from the most base,” Hillford said, stepping around the table as if he hadn’t just insulted Jory. “From the least devout, the most divine. A lesson we should keep in mind.”

Hillford guided Jory to the doorway. His cold hand on Jory’s shoulder.
Down
on Jory’s shoulder.

“She’s not tall enough to be one of you, you know,” Jory said, half shrugging away from that contact.

“There are many stations in the house of the true Lord,” Hillford said, letting Jory walk on. “But, in recompense for your gift to us, I’ll attempt to look in on her myself, just as you were given special attention by your commanding officer.”

“Is that a threat?” Jory asked, not walking now either. The hungry armadillos were rushing his feet. Jory raised one leg, the one with the knife.

“Don’t mind them,” Hillford said. “They’re just doing what they do, being themselves, as it were. Welcoming you, or attempting to. Carrying all they own on their backs. Surviving unchanged, while the world around them falls away. It’s a trait the Church might envy, if we allowed ourselves to indulge in that kind of behavior.”

“‘If’,” Jory spat back, high-stepping out of the pool of golden scales, reaching for the doorway with his fingertips, for balance.

“Yes, of course,” Hillford went on, so demure. “And, I never answered your question, did I? Sincerest apologies. Excitement. About their current classification? Yes. It’s
Xenarthra
, a term synonymous with
Edentata
in the older textbooks, which you may have seen in your introductory—that’s
without teeth
—but you, of course, should never make that mistake, Jory Gray. They do indeed, as you say,
have teeth
.”

Behind Jory, his escort chuckled.

Jory started to say something, but bit it off, turned around. Walked where he was shown to walk, let the helicopter—different pilot—tilt him up into the sky again, the poles underneath them smoldering now.

“Thought they just burned a couple of days ago?” Jory asked through the racket.

The pilot steadied them up, pushed forward on the yoke, spinning for traction in the sky, some of the smoke from the poles swirling up into their blades like string.

“No one would ever intentionally vandalize Church property,” the pilot said, not looking across to Jory.

Jory nodded, cupped his hands around a cigarette to light it against all this wind, and mumbled an “amen” to that.

Chapter Twenty

The driver kicked back in his jeep didn’t even look around when the helicopter touched down behind him, in the hug-n-go lane. He just cocked an arm up, clamped his nonreg hat down, the hurricane from the blades hard enough that it slapped his windshield frontwards on its hinges, looked from Jory’s angle like a sheet of water that had fallen onto the hood, exploded.

Jory stepped down, just one holy rail touching the ground, his cigarette whipping away from his lips, spiraling into hyperspace.

The Cleanup truck was here already, one tire cocked on the curb like it didn’t really have to be here, and wanted everybody to know that.

“Yep,” Jory said, then turned to wave to the pilot that he was good, that that was definitely his friend’s parking job, but the pilot was already stepping off the broken asphalt with that one rail, pulling his rig back into the sky. Out of the secular, into the blue.

Jory eyeballed the driver of the jeep, pebbled glass cascading down into his lap.

Jory eased up alongside, half studied the flag threads still flapping at the top of the flagpole after all these years, their rustproof grommets slapping aluminum in no particular rhythm. There hadn’t even been time for half masts.

“What room?” he asked the driver, tilting his head at the school.

“Follow the smell, Einstein,” the driver said, sweeping the glass off his thighs. Looking at his hand to see if he’d scraped it or not.

Jory picked his way across to the twin sets of double doors, once bright blue probably, team colors, now faded and gouged, their wire-embedded safety glass crashed through nearly a decade ago.

Everybody thought schools were the safest places. Punk had said that. Real name…what? Blaine? Blake?

Alive now? Not?

Inside maybe. Where there’s a driver, there’s a torch, right?

Jory grabbed the extra shovel leaning up by the door, backed his way through, the curve of his back making him feel like a scuba diver, rolling out of one world, into another.

That was about right.

The entryway was full of all the grinning skulls and trophy rubble and general havoc typical of last-stand places. First wave, probably, going by the naked ribs underfoot, no longer cartilaged to anything.

“I’m ho-ome,” Jory called ahead, again too quiet for anybody to hear. It was his first time back in a school since that last good Thursday. Like he’d taken a ten-year unpaid leave and the place had gone to hell in his absence.

He tried to muster a grin in response to that, but—this place.

The layout, it could be exactly the school from Glasses’s video.

Jory stepped around a line of vertebrae, followed the lights already set up at intervals. Places like these, like this, they still had that film-set feel to him. Some movie about the weeks and months after the nuclear holocaust, the asteroid collision, the gamma burst, the bad solar flare, all the other ways we thought we were going to buy it.

But it wasn’t the leftovers from a soundstage at all, Jory told himself, stepping carefully, to keep those breaths of dry marrow from puffing up. It was more—it was like you’d stood too still by accident, your feet deep in the moment, instead of stepping ahead with the clock, so that now you were stuck in a faded, decaying past.

Stuck here with a lot of dead people who don’t get that they’re dead.

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Jory told himself, in his gruff estimation of Scanlon’s voice, and tried to slit his eyes like he had before, gunslinger-style.

Somewhere there was a basketball bouncing. On a wooden gym floor.

Timothy.

Jory nodded with each bounce.

Everything else in the postapocalypse could change, but, for better or for worse, Timothy never would.

Using his shovel like a staff, Jory pulled forward through the hall, waiting for the stench the driver had promised. Instead, a torch stumbled from a classroom, his hand covering his mouth, vomit spilling through anyway.