The Gospel of Z (27 page)

“Second period,” Jory said.

“Mark Davies,” the recruit said, and held his hand out.

Jory pulled him to him, hugged him for too long, too hard.

“Mr. Gray,” the recruit said somewhere in there, embarrassed—he was taller than Jory now—and Jory closed his eyes, felt tears on his face but didn’t care.

“I just wanted to say, to say thanks,” the recruit said when Jory finally let him go.

“Thanks?” Jory said, his fingers nervous, peeling the crackly plastic from another pack. Letting the gold string drift away.

“You gave me a B on the midterm,” the recruit said, shrugging. “I couldn’t have played in District if you hadn’t.”

It took Jory two tries to get the cigarette between his lips. “Did you win?” he asked.

The recruit nodded that he had, yeah, and Jory lit up, breathed deep.

“Mind?” the recruit said, his hand out for the pack.

Jory shook a cigarette up, just reflex, even started to angle the pack over for the recruit, but then folded it back into his hand.

“Just one,” the recruit said, not quite following.

Jory was laughing to himself now though. Shuddering with it.

“Teachers can’t, we can’t,” he said. “It’s against policy to share tobacco with students.”

The recruit smiled, reached in again, the joke surely over, but Jory pulled the pack in deeper, tamped the cigarette back.

“Sorry,” he said, not looking at the recruit anymore, the recruit staring at him for maybe twenty seconds—Jory could feel it—then backing away. Gone.

One more person, gone.

Jory swallowed and it was loud in his ears. At what felt like a cellular level, he became aware that each time he shoulder-pushed away from the cinder block wall, each time he touched his eyebrow where it hurt, it was the last time for that too.

He was saying goodbye.

Three and a half cigarettes later, Jory’s loop around J deposited him at the front edge of the parking lot, like, if he stood there, insisted, then Mayner would have no choice but to show up, get this over with already.

Instead, it was another jeep, coming in fast, braking hard, sliding to a stop right up against Jory, the driver wowing his eyes across the hood, stepping down to cadge a smoke.

Jory shook one up from his backup pack, passed it over.

“No offense,” the driver said, antsy, “but this is all bullshit, right?”

Jory looked to the doorway, where the driver’s torch was going to appear.

“The plague?” Jory said back.

“Dead patrol,” the driver said, leaning back into the jeep for something. “Preburial. Burning their asses.”

Jory looked to the road behind them. When he came back to this driver, the driver had ducked into a nonreg hat. For the sun. Because cancer’s such a killer.

Glasses’s
driver.

Jory dropped his cigarette to the gravel, stepped on it.

“Bullshit?” he asked.

“Collars,” the driver said, his cigarette pinched in his fingers to make his point. “Just, each corpse turns up, clip a collar onto it, yeah? Just set it to clamp down on motion, this time. Then let the bonefaces bury them all night and all day. More power to them. Shit. I should write a letter to my congressman.”

Jory was studying the doorway again. Studying the doorway and doing the mental Rolodex thing, suddenly sure that nobody who’d gone through torch training with him had been a soldier, just misbehaving civilians. Expendables. Dead weight.

“But there wouldn’t be any—there are no accidents like that,” Jory said. “With collars.”

“What?” the driver said, stepping off, almost insulted. “You mean the brass, they
want
accidents? What are they doing, thinning the herd?”

“No,” Jory said, just now seeing it like he should have all along, “not ours,” and it was all spread out for him, for a moment—Scanlon wanted the Church gone. And the way to do that was to kill the priests—cut the head off the snake, no matter how many heads it had—and to do that in a way that they’d asked for: Preburial.

Every call, it was
supposed
to go wrong.

It meant one less reject like him, like Glasses, like all of them, sure. But it meant one less priest too, and that was what was important. Scanlon was trading pawns for bishops.

And the board he was trying to control, it was the world. It was the future.

Jory shook his head at the simplicity of it all.

And, because of the document the Church had, and whatever video they probably had of Scanlon playing tic-tac-toe, it had to be like this.

He was calling the Church’s bluff. Seeing if they’d keep feeding their priests to the fire, just to get to bury one or two bodies a month.

So far, nobody’d blinked.

Except all the torches. Right before they died.

How many times had J Barracks been filled and emptied already? Were the handlers ever even
supposed
to function properly?

“Fucking Oppenheimer,” Jory said, and before the driver could ask him about that, his torch was in the doorway.

Mark Davies. His cube of armor hooked under the middle finger of his right hand. His boots tied up tight.

“Fresh meat,” the driver said under his breath, grinding his cigarette down now. Kind of laughing.

“Like hell,” Jory said, pulling deep on his cigarette, watching Mark Davies cross the packed dirt like a fighter pilot. Everybody watching him, nobody saying anything.

Except the driver.

“Care to make it interesting?” he said across to Jory, about Mark Davies. “Even money, he doesn’t make it five minutes in the old
casa
of the dead.”

Jory blew a tight line of smoke out, and watched it drift.

“What’s his name again?” he asked with all innocence, lifting his chin across the yard to Mark Davies, from second period Biology. Mark Davies, who scored twenty-two points that District game, half of them in the fourth.

Jory had listened to it on the radio, on his back porch, and had had to bite his finger with happiness, when that last buzzer went on and on.

“Shit…” the driver said, grinning the question away, and then Jory was on him, had him by the shirtfront, was slamming him into the gravel, trying to punch, screaming through his teeth, words he didn’t even know the shape of. Just that they were from deeper inside him than he knew he had. Mark Davies just standing there. A couple of the other recruits finally loped over, pulled Jory off, Jory still trying to fight through, back to the driver. He only stopped when different hands hauled him back. Guided him away.

Mayner. His jeep was maybe five steps over. Jory was still trying to pull his shoulders back to himself, his breath coming in deep hitches, his hands already touching his chest, for a cigarette.

In all the versions of this, what Mayner says to Jory here is just a growled
“shut up”
, and then he straps him in, tears away from J Barracks, Jory’s hand wrapped around the frame of that fold-down windshield, his knuckles bloody.

Everybody remembers.

Sunset that day, exactly ten years after the plague, it went down chain-link by chain-link for Mayner and Jory.

The jeep was nosed up against the tall fence of one of the restricted zones, Mayner’s rigged-together, little CD player spinning out that same teenaged girl’s voice for them. It was less about the music, more about that there had once been music.

“We supposed to be there yet?” Jory said.

“They’re going to start without us?” Mayner said back, grinding the starter. “You don’t have to,” he added. “I can, you know. Drop you wherever. People disappear all the time these days. That’s one good thing about the postapocalypse.”

Jory rocked back and forth slowly.

“It’s for the best,” he said. “Somebody’s got to put a stop to all this.”

“I’m not going to code you,” Mayner said, backing up all at once, so Jory had to push his hands against the dash.

Jory looked across to Mayner.

“Serious,” Mayner added, like it was just a fact, and dropped them into first gear.

Jory studied the city, sliding by.

“You ever hear that Lazarus Complex story?” Jory said.

Mayner caught third, skirted a sinkhole.

“That a Bible thing?” Mayner said.

“You ever wonder how it all started, I mean?” Jory said. “All this?”

Mayner shrugged, concentrating on the road. It was coming up under them so fast.

“You mean was it aliens and all that?” he said.

“All that,” Jory said, “yeah.”

“It matter?” Mayner asked, hauling the wheel over hard, Jory’s hand still clamped to the windshield frame.

“I don’t—” Jory started, but then the jeep was sliding. Not out of control, just needing to brake,
now
.

For the giraffes.

They were crossing the road, the father impossibly tall, looking down at Mayner and Jory, the mother giraffe just moving straight across behind him, a young one crossing last, its legs spindly and knobbed.

The jeep was stalled, so Jory could hear the massive hooves thumping delicately onto the ground. The battery was still pushing that teenaged girl’s voice up.

“He was right,” Mayner said, about Glasses.

Jory smiled a child’s smile, took a mental snapshot—the last giraffes he would ever see, definitely—and in his head, told them to live forever. To never die.

It was his first prayer in years.

Chapter Thirty-Four

—1920 New Haven.

This is where it all went down.

Before the plague, it had been a house built for entertaining, a one-story ranch affair, updated through the decades, sitting at kind of a cant from the curb, like the street was accommodating it, not the other way around. The sculpted hedges had gone feral years ago, but the iron-barred windows were all intact. The lightpost at the front edge of the yard looked antique, like it was part of some older place, transported here for sentimental reasons.

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.”