The Gospel of Z (7 page)

“Open, open,” he said, and finally the punk parted his lips. At which point Voss hawked something vile up, spit it into the punk’s mouth, pushed up on his chin. “What’d I have for lunch, private?” he said then. For everybody.

Instead of answering, the punk threw up through Voss’s fingers.

Voss hauled him up by the hair.
“What did I eat?”
he said.

“Something with…pepper,” the punk got out.

“Exactly,” Voss said, and pushed the punk away. “Smell
and
taste, pukes. Cut off the dezzies’ airflow, their olfactory system’s compromised. What, you don’t think we thought of this? Pulling their teeth, sewing their lips shut, anything instead of building these, these handlers, they’re calling them, these—”

“Abominations,” Commando said, having to concentrate to recite this complicated word, and lift his hood to get it out.

Voss nodded
yes, that—abomination
.

“But what if he does bite me anyway?” the reprobate said, the paper flames in his face. “In spite of all these, um, these heroics?”

“As far as we know, the virus needs a beating heart to circulate it,” Voss said. “So you should be okay, so long as you don’t get bit
in
the heart. But, like I said, we’re not taking any chances, are we? Assume infection, burn it off the face of the earth. Good question. Now, heaven forbid, but if the dezzie”—guiding Jory-the-priest’s hand across to the wiry dude’s undead mouth—“happens to infect somebody
living
, then how long until that person dies and reanimates?”

“But they can’t get it, they can’t turn,” Fishnet said, like a question.

“Excuse me?” Voss said back, his voice dripping with insult.

“The priests, they—”

“They’re human, son. Don’t believe the hype.”

“But the video,” Fishnet said, his eyes all imploring at Glasses, “in the video—”

“This is the army, everybody got that? We don’t have Sundays here, when we can believe whatever we want. Until we know otherwise, if you walk on two feet, you can be turned.”

“Like…monkeys?” somebody said, his dimples giving him away.

“Kangaroos,” somebody else whispered.

“Ostriches,” the reprobate tossed in.

“People!”
Voss yelled, throwing his leaf blower away hard enough that, at the end of its long, shardy skid, there was silence again. Just Voss’s own exasperated breathing. Then he came down, came down some more. “Okay. Okay. Now. If Father Smartass gets his ass bit, how long until he reanimates?”

Commando shrugged a guilty shrug, said, “Took my—took her four days.”

“You
waited
?” the punk said, still wiping at his mouth.

“I thought she was—that she could—”

Voss interrupted, “Re-an’s been clocked at thirty-seven seconds, private. And, yes, that includes the dying. So, torches, if somebody gets bitten, does that mean you have time to inspect the wound, call back to base for a decision?”

“Ten count,” Glasses said. “Plus two.” Pulling his hand away from the wiry dude, snapping at him.

“Good point,” Voss said, stepping into this near miss. “Should you yourself become infected, and not have the balls to torch yourself—and you won’t, nobody ever does—then your driver, stationed outside, he’ll have no choice but to code the scene. Handler, priest, fancy gun and all.” Voss mimed a missile whistling in over his shoulder, exploding at his feet. Another mushroom cloud. Then he smiled. “Even if he just
suspects
something irregular’s going down, I mean, then”—tapping his fingers on some imaginary keypad, launching another missile. “Constant contact, ladies”—touching his own ear. “Your voice, it’s how your driver knows you’re not infected, right? How he knows you’re still human. Otherwise, he’s all that’s standing between you and another plague. Easy decision there.”

The guy against the wall across the warehouse seemed amused by this.

“Shouldn’t I have a knife?” Jory said.

Voss turned to him. “Yes, if you were a real boneface, you’d have one of their Church-issue KA-BARs. To”—taking a knee beside the reprobate, guiding him down to prone again, none too delicately—“to open the body up, let the decomp really waft out. Dezzie loves that shit.”

Commando cut his eyes back and forth, from the wiry dude to Voss. “But, but what if it gets away, sir? Gets free.”

“The handlers never let them go,” Fishnet answered, looking to Voss for confirmation.

“Handlers don’t know
how
to let go, son,” Voss said to Commando.

“And they’re really immune to the virus?” Glasses asked.

“Don’t believe that,” Voss said, not turning around to Glasses this time. “Like I was saying,
no one’s
immune to the virus. Handler’s systems are intentionally polluted though. Hormones, chemicals, radiation, juice, AC, DC. There’s not enough room for the virus to take hold. Everything in them’s already spoken for. Their dance card’s full.”

The reprobate, sitting up again, his arms looped over his bent knees, chuckled, no real mirth there at all. “Hell yes,” he said. “What could be safer than walking into a room out in a hot zone, a room with a, a probably infected dead guy, some Halloween priest with a crazy knife, a zombie that hasn’t been fed in weeks, and a pro-wrestler on hallucinogenic steroids?”

“Said the dead guy,” Voss added.

“He’s got a point, sir,” Glasses said.

Voss looked up to the ceiling. For patience, tolerance, serenity. “And none of you have a
choice
. Show of hands. Who volunteered here?” No one. “Thought so. But, yes, consider this assignment your death sentence, kiddos. It’s why we invest such a rigorous afternoon-training session in you. Because you’re worth it, each and every one of you. Because you’re all going to be back to teach this class with me someday. Now, any questions?”

Punk: “So—so what’s the third taboo, then?”

Voss: “Class dismissed.”

“Suicide,” Jory answered. Watching the place on the wall where the smiley guy had been standing.

Chapter Nine

The video Fishnet had been talking about—you wouldn’t say it had gone viral. Not just because that word had a whole different charge after the plague, but because when the grid went down in the first wave, got propped up again just to get swatted down again the next year, and the next, it took the Net with it.

Communications blackout. Ham radio operators, these unexpected heroes, the only ones able to whisper into the void, maybe get a voice back.

Always the same questions though:

Where are you?

How many of you are there?

Is the army coming?

Do you have food? Water?

Have they found a cure yet?

Is this really happening?

Have you seen a boy, about fourteen, kind of carries himself like a second-string weakside tackle—

The real literature of humanity, it wasn’t in the sixteenth century, it didn’t happen in the twentieth. It was nearly ten years ago. It was these radio operators blockaded in their attics, knowing full well they were about to starve, about to be eaten. It was these radio operators, delirious with life, halfway dead, telling stories about cruise ships moving from port to port to pick up the uninfected. Telling people the stories the people needed worse than air.

But the army was never coming, and nobody had food, and there was no cure, and there weren’t going to be any more football games. This was really happening. All over the world.

And into the middle of all that came one grainy recording, passed hand to hand on whatever media there was, and finally just going oral, becoming a story everybody knew had to be true, because they’d heard it nearly the same so many times.

It goes like this:

Used to—this would have been about two years in—we had holding pens. These epic corrals that went for acres and acres.

Packed behind those tall walls—the dead.

Because they were our mothers, our brothers, our wives and our husbands. Because it wasn’t their fault.

That was the propaganda anyway. That there were labcoats toiling away at a vaccine somewhere. That that vaccine could be grandfathered into the horde.

Wrong.

There
were
labcoats toiling away with the virus, but not to cure it. The idea was to engineer some retro affair that could hitch a ride on the
Z
bug, end the whole plague, and all its carriers.

And, according to the pirate DJs—and they make sense—good old planet Earth wasn’t going to be taking too many more nuclear strikes before it would just huddle into a long winter, wait this infection out. The last resort in the first wave—it had been to nuke Manhattan, to make a crater out of LA, to sink Miami and San Francisco into the sea, to burn Houston down over and over, until it wouldn’t
stop
burning.

It was never enough though.

What was needed, what was finally
done
, was to herd and bait as many of the dead as possible into the most parched pieces of land they could find, and then sacrifice that land with a serious missile.

It’s what finally ended the first wave. For about six months.

But, of course, if even
one
crawls away from that radiation, if even one didn’t get herded up in the first place, then—isn’t that how the plague started in the first place? With just one Typhoid Z? As far as the pirate DJs were concerned, after the first wave, each wave after that’s been the direct result of the labcoats doing Nazi experiments on the dead, and then some clean room getting compromised, some tech forgetting to strap a wrist down tight enough.

It’s got to be a lie though.

If it’s not, then the Church is right, and we deserve all this.

And, as for that famous recording Fishnet was talking about, like most of us, Jory had never even seen it. The story he’d heard was enough though. A version of what we all knew—what, when we told it, we didn’t use our whole voice for. Just the reverent part.

It’s those sprawling zombie pens from the second year.

It’s these three tall priests on a security camera.

They’re standing at one of the gates in the wall, the ones that fry anything that touches it. Twice-dead corpses stacked waist-deep around it, because they don’t learn.

Wading through this, let in by some true believer of a guard, come these three spindly priests, walking in what looks like a ritual triangle, an arrowhead pointed into the writhing mass of the dead. It’s like they’re going to sacrifice themselves, like they’ve chosen to trade their lives for the rest of ours. They’ve got that kind of serenity, that kind of purpose, that kind of resolve, their eyes set not on this world, but the next.

Except—except when they walk into that snarling darkness, another security camera picking them up, the dead are
parting
for them.

The three priests here, they’re so tall, so thin, so white, their ceramic masks giving nothing away. Their long fingers extending to each side, to brush the heads of these zombies, these—to them—children.

And then, with maybe a mile left to cross, the security camera loses them.

But you know they made it to the other gate.

No doubt at all.

After Jory had the story whispered to him during break, out on Disposal one day, he carried it with him for nearly a week, checking it from all the angles, replaying it, and then, one radio-free night, just Linse on the couch, him in his chair, the door locked, he told it to her, a grin in his eyes the whole time because only a fool would believe this, right?

At first he didn’t even think she was tuned in.

The same way he’d once looked up, thought the mail was coming.

Behind the medicine cabinet mirror in their bathroom were the tubes of moisturizer and face cream and makeup he’d been spiriting home for days.

None of it had been touched.

Chapter Ten

For too long after training that day, Voss’s bellow still ringing behind his eyes, those paper flames roaring, Jory stood in the doorway of his housing unit. Waiting for that fabric scrape of slippers, coming up the worn-flat carpet in the hall.

It was just him though.

He touched his fingertips to the wall just above the light switch and balanced there, the night pressing in behind him.

He still couldn’t get her name out of his head.

He tried to laugh at himself. At how stupid he was being.

It didn’t help.

In the kitchen minutes later—pure willpower—he held the back of his fingers to the coffeepot, then unplugged it, went around the apartment unplugging everything, ended up breathing hard behind the couch. The front door just yawning there at the end of the hall.

Had it really only been three days? Seventy-two hours.

But still.

Jory felt around in his head again for that reset button, was standing in the open doorway of J Barracks twenty minutes later, a bag over his shoulder.

Inside was radio chatter, card games, the edge of a knife being drawn across a whetstone.

The punk—it was the grown-out blue mohawk, black at the roots now, but it was the sneer too—was the first to look up.

“Thought you had housing, kimo?” he said.

“It’s haunted,” Jory told him.

“Whoa, whoa,” the wiry dude said, coming up all at once from his bunk, holding his hands out for silence. The reprobate’s knife scraped to a stop. Fishnet reached for the volume knob on the radio but The wiry shook his head no-no, then an evil grin spread across his face. “
Lab wars
,” he said, the idea sounding better, now that it was out loud. “Everybody in? New guy?”

Commando looked from his hand of cards to Jory, like Jory had brought this in with him.

“Battle of the AM bands…” Glasses explained, not so much folding his hand as laying it down, faceup.

The reprobate chuckled, drew his edge along the stone again, wiped the grey dust on his shirt front. “It’s educational,” he said, pulling his lips away from the word.

“It’s where you weigh the merits of disparate theories of zombie genesis,” Glasses went on, “and whoever can tune in to their theory first wins.”