The Gospel of Z (2 page)

Another day in paradise.

“Hey hey hey,” Timothy sang from the other side of the stalled belt, his scalpel following the guide line drawn on the handler’s massive bicep, “thought I was going to have to save the world all by myself.”

“Gonna need more than me for that,” Jory said, their usual call and response. But his voice was creaky from not talking to anybody today. From the half pack of cigarettes he’d sucked down before he even stood from the chair in his kitchen.

“What?” Timothy went on, angling his head down to see through his plastic goggles. “You catch the virus, man? It make you sleep late? I mean, in addition to, like, eating people, running around on all fours. Having kick-ass bad breath, all that.”

“Sorry.”

Timothy shrugged, angled his scalpel deeper into the muscle, the handler’s oversized middle finger twitching. “Hunh,” Timothy said, and did it again, a line of the handler’s metal-flaked blood seeping down its massive forearm.

“Don’t,” Jory said, hooking his eyebrows up to the camera in the corner.

“Player piano,” Timothy went on, digging deeper with the blade, then pressing it to the side, the middle finger going up-down, up-down. “C’mon, get the other side, we can do chopsticks.”

Jory looked away.

“Like they have time to watch every room,” Timothy said, letting the nerve go. “So?”

“So what?”

“So you.”

Jory rubbed his nose with the side of his hand. “Had to sneak into H for some smokes,” he said. “Machine on my road’s jammed.”

“Dirty habit,” Timothy said. “Lying, I mean.”

Jory looked up to Timothy. Timothy didn’t look away.

“Other people’s business,” Jory said. “That’s another bad habit.”

“So don’t tell anybody else,” Timothy said. “But I’m not exactly anybody, am I?”

“More like nobody.”

“Just wait, man. Working on my demo tape, yeah?”

“You don’t even play anything.”

“Working on that too. And on there being a radio for me to play it on.”

Jory pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbed them up into his hair, then held his hair back, like trying to stay awake.

“It’s Linse,” he said. Out loud. Finally.

Timothy eeked his mouth to the side, cocked his safety goggles up onto the leather aviator ones he’d always worn on his forehead, like he was about to fly away to some better place.

Jory nodded, telling Timothy he’d heard right—Linse.

“As in no more?”

“As in gone, yeah.”

“Shit, man,” Timothy said. “Sorry? Would say there’s other fish in the sea or something, but—what’s our population these days, do you know? Was she the last woman on earth, or just the last hot one?”

“C’mon, T. Don’t, not today.”

“I’m just saying. You leave a couch on the curb, it’s not outside the realm of courtesy to give your good friend a call. And by
couch
here, I don’t mean couch, yeah?”

Jory took his apron off the hook, shrugged into it, his lips tight, his hand falling to the scalpel in the apron’s pocket.

“What does
couch
sound like though…?” Timothy went on. “I know there’s something, it’s right on the tip of my—no, I just
wish
it was right on the—”

“She went up the Hill,” Jory said, almost not loud enough.

But it carried.

The Hill.

“No
way
,” Timothy said, leaning back from the half-built handler in mock shock. “Only guy I know with a steady…the last piece of tail on base, practically, and you make her feel dirty enough she has to go to
church
now? For the rest of her
life
? Congrats, dude. Serious”—fake-licking his middle finger, smearing it on an imaginary chalkboard—“score one for the perverts.”

“I never should have told you.”

“I’m just saying, man. We’ve got limited resources these days, right? Forget about yourself for once. Think about maintaining the species, yeah? Give the rest of us a heads-up, let us play a little Adam and Eve with them perky little apples…”

“Don’t.”

This
is how much you can regret coming in to work.

Timothy smiled, the wheels turning in his thick head now. Cutting and talking, talking and cutting, guidelines be damned. “I mean, even if she’s bad in bed, does she shave her legs? Because, I’ve gotta say, here in the twilight of humanity and all, that’s about all I really—no, no, this is A-material time. Yeah”—his voice going water-cooler casual—“so you say you lost your basement girl, that one you pulled from her hiding place whenever-ago? Oh-oh, I’m sorry, not basement girl, excuse me. I didn’t realize. Back
door
girl, of course, I forgot who I was—”

If this were one of the old-time movies, the close-up here would be the floor by Jory’s boots. His scalpel
tink
ing off that hard surface, the handle and blade starting to seesaw away from each other, but that process taking such a torturously long time.

Timothy looked up, to be sure this was happening, and it was: Jory coming across the table for him. Across the handler. The three of them spilling down onto the floor on Timothy’s side.

“Dude! You—” Timothy tried to get up, holding his scalpel high, out of the way. Jory’s hands were already at his throat, driving Timothy’s head back, Timothy’s work goggles snapping off. Spittle, grunts, teeth. Jory’s eyes too wet, too full, too much.

This was another reason why the long cigarette break by J Barracks. Because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to ignore everybody.

“Don’t—say—that—about—her!”
he grunted, slamming Timothy’s head back with each word, his thumbs on Timothy’s skinny-man Adam’s apple. Then Jory raised his right hand high, to start the punching. Timothy peeked, not wanting to see it come.

It didn’t.

Jory let go, leaned back. Pressed his hands into his eyes again and held them there, trying to will time backwards. Start this scene all over.

But why stop there, right?

Why not go back to this morning. To the front door closing with him in bed, a note waiting for him at the kitchen table.

Or even farther, to Z Day, Jory in the backyard of what had been his house. A perfectly normal day. One he didn’t appreciate nearly enough. One he should have been documenting with his camera, every single moment.

Maybe if he held his hands on his eyes long enough, he could go back, start over.

Please
.

“Dude, dude,
dude
,” Timothy was saying under him, at a whisper almost, except five hundred times more urgent.

The cameras weren’t miked though. Why whisper?

Jory pulled his hands away, the room swimming with what looked like paramecium. Angel paramecium, made from light. Fireworms.

He smiled.

“She went up the Hill…” he said again, trying to laugh about how stupid it was.

“
Dude!
” Timothy said then, wriggling, trying to buck Jory off in the softest way possible.

Jory focused on Timothy’s work goggles in the corner before zeroing back in on Timothy’s face.

It was washed pale, unable to make words anymore.

“What?” Jory said, craning his head around on instinct, to follow where Timothy was looking.

The handler.

Standing.
And then standing some more.

It was terrible. It was majestic.

Jory slumped away, not so much out of fear as out of reverence, and Timothy pulled him the rest of the way down then kicked the two of them back under the belt, into the places where life could keep happening.

“No, no,” Timothy was saying, reaching up on the wall, Jory following his hand with dream eyes, the kind where everything makes sense, where you don’t have to stop to make connections, just accept, accept.

The button.

Timothy wanted the button. And now he had it, was slapping his hand onto it, the room flashing emergency red, the vents sucking closed, the bulkhead on the other side of the room creaking down.

And then the handler angled its head, saw the two of them in its dim way.

“Eight,” Jory said to himself, “eight ways to die,” and this
was
funny, but then Timothy was dragging him all the way under the belt, through the wires and cables. Where nobody would have thought two people could fit. But nobody thought a handler could ever wake on the belt, either.

Jory only looked back when the huge hand clamped down on his foot. His boot.

Timothy could tell, pulled harder. “Help, help!” he yelled to Jory, setting his feet and jerking Jory forward by the armpits, Jory looking up at Timothy, at how hard he was pulling, like all of this mattered, and, just because it would be rude not to, he pointed his foot.

His boot slipped off, the handler falling against the back wall.

The bulkhead was almost down now, its huge gears or cables or whatever grinding in the ceiling, dust shrouding its descent.

Jory’d always wondered what it would be like, this safety measure.

Loud. It was loud.

And big. Shaking the whole building.

He smiled again, and then Timothy’s hand hooked under the bulkhead so he could pull himself under, live.

Not Jory.

You can see him here even better than when he was smoking by J Barracks, probably. The way he gets up from the floor of the clean room. The way he studies this handler, just standing itself. Its all-black eyes registering Jory in an instant, its weight rolling up to the balls of its great bare feet. The ghost of a grin starts on Jory’s face, and then he’s sinking, falling, Timothy’s hands on his ankles, dragging him through, under, an instant before the door—

Before it
should
have slammed shut anyway.

But the handler was already there, its fingers hooked under the door, three or four tons of pressure trying to close it, finish that process. The handler’s muscles rippled all along its frame, its extra veins surfacing, even the incomplete ones, its lips drawn back from its teeth in impossible effort.

Jory and Timothy were at the opposite wall in the control room by now, their backs to that wall, Timothy holding Jory down, Jory just watching through the foot-thick plastiglass window in the bulkhead—why a window?—the handler’s face there.

“He—he can’t—” Jory said, watching the door inch back up.

“He doesn’t know he can’t,” Timothy said, his hand absolutely clamped on Jory’s wrist.

And whether Jory would have tried to stand again, to help that handler, loose it on the world in its raw state, none of the fail-safes wired in yet, it doesn’t matter.

Two guards crashed through the door, assessing the situation in a flash, sliding on their knees to the bulkhead, to spray bullets underneath for what felt like minutes, finally cutting the handler off at the knees, its face sinking from the window, even when the window jerked lower, the bulkhead locking into the floor at last.

The guards fell back, breathing hard.

The first one turned around, raised his visor.

“So,” he said, “which one of you’s the—” he started, then flinched back.

The handler was at the window again. Slamming its hands—the fingers just meat under the door now—into the glass so thick it was almost a cube.

“No,” the second guard said, reaching to his belt for another magazine, “no, he can’t, he can’t…”

“How long you think he can go on like that?” the first guard said, kind of amazed now too.

“Until we’re all dead,” Timothy said, when the first impossible crack shot through the glass.

“No!”
the second guard said, angling his barrel at that glass, about to spray it, except Jory was close enough to guide that gun down.

“He doesn’t understand,” Jory said. At which point the guard ripped his gun back, settled it instead between Jory’s eyes.

“Whoah, whoah,” Timothy said, standing, holding his spidery hands out, the rest of him shaped like a question mark.

It’s all recorded.

The way Jory smiled, that barrel leaving a crescent burn against his left eyebrow. His right hand, rising slowly and not threatening, to his side, to a spot on the wall just over Timothy’s shoulder.

The second red button.

Because he couldn’t see, couldn’t turn his head
to
see, Jory found the wall with his fingertips, pressed the button with his thumb, the room going jet-engine hot, instant crematorium.

It’s all there if you want to see it.

All except that, on the red of that plastic button, now, there’s a faint happy face, from the ink on Jory Gray’s thumb.

And then the rest of it happened.

Chapter Two

As for how the plague started, there were nearly as many theories then as there are zombies.

No, correction—there were nearly as many theories as there are people left.

At the height of the plague, the best estimates had six or seven walking dead for every uninfected man, woman and child. That sounds kind of positive when you run the numbers, do the math to figure how many people that meant were left to fight the good fight, have more babies, start things over. Except you can’t do the math like that. It wasn’t a case of a sixth or seventh of humanity still hiding somewhere, waiting this out, it was a case of each zombie taking down twelve or fifteen citizens, leaving them cracked open in the street, steaming. Moving on to the next one.

And, though these numbers are more of a guess, of those twelve or fifteen victims, usually one would have been an incomplete meal, would rise to join the horde, to get
its
twelve or fifteen meals, and infect one
more
person, bring him or her over to the dead side. The worst game of Red Rover ever, pretty much.

So, taking all that into account, maybe five percent of the North American population was making it through that first decade. Probably way less.

And of that less than five percent, isolated in clumps all over the map, there was maybe one kid for every fifteen adults. Not because they couldn’t run faster, couldn’t hide better—they could, they definitely can—but because they get scared of the dark, out there alone. Because they call out for other people, for just another voice. Because they go back for pets, and dolls. Because they don’t know how to drive cars, use guns, open cans without a can opener.