The Gospel of Z

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Dedication

  for Rane and Kinsey

  All the nightmares came today

  And it looks as though they’re here to stay.

  ~David Bowie

  Before

  Thing is, she could have been any one of us.

  And was.

  All of us, really.

  The pirate DJ waits a breath or two before delivering that last part, so that you can just about see his stubbly chin down there in his dark bunker, his lips close enough to the mic that there’s some definite scratch there. Because he doesn’t know radio so well yet.

  It’s that kind of voice, that kind of broadcast.

  And this woman he’s remembering out loud, what she’s doing, what he’s telling us she’s doing, it’s just driving her mom-car through some residential place like there used to be. A completely innocent day in heaven—that’s what the past is, now, to us: the good place. Where we all want to be.

  And, because this is heaven, there are children.

  One of them chases a red ball out into the street in front of this mom. She could be changing the station, she could be digging through her purse in the passenger seat, she could be looking in the rearview mirror, she could just be spaced out, bulleting through some mental to-do list. But no. This mom, because she’s a mom, she knows to pay the right kind of attention on these kinds of streets.

  She stops, her tires chirping, coffee sloshing into the floorboard, her purse spilling on top of it, a pen lid rattling into the defroster again, but no matter.

  The young boy—what is he, four? must be: not in school on a Tuesday—he’s oblivious to anything but that wonderful red ball. He’s just leaning down for it, now trying to stand with it. It’s nearly as big as his torso, so he has to hug it to his chest.

  This mom in the car, she does check her rearview mirror now, maybe just for somebody to share this picturesque scene unfolding here, on this Rockwell afternoon. Because it’s almost too much for one woman to try to contain, yes?

  She covers her mouth so the boy won’t think she’s laughing at him, her foot still on the brake, and in that moment, from behind the same brick mailbox, something else darts.

  No, it flits.

  A man, but not.

  He’s dead, but not, his chin and chest black with blood, one shoe gone, half that foot gone as well, his eyes not so much vacant as just more focused than anything else this mom’s ever seen.

  There’s not even time for her to scream. Not even time to breathe in to scream.

  This is how fast they are.

  The dead man, the undead man, the zombie—you have to say it—he flashes across the road, scoops the boy up, and is gone, all in a heartbeat, that red ball still bouncing there. On an otherwise normal day in human history.

  The last one ever.

  We didn’t know what they were then, either, these zombies. Not really, not like we would.

  The movies, the DJ says, his voice still too close to that mic, the movies had been trying to tell us for years, but we didn’t take them seriously. We didn’t cue in fast enough, to that first shuffling form at the stadium on game day. To the panic at the airports, on the interstates, on the airwaves. When we could have contained it, sacrificed this city, that state, we didn’t.

  And so it became a flood, washing across the land. Locusts consuming the crop we were, had always been. Night falling, body by body. Couples shuttered into their houses to wait it out, the husband always coming back from the kitchen with a cup of soup the wife isn’t sure she asked for, the wife watching his reflection approach in the television screen. The map over the newscaster’s shoulder going red. Airplane pilots circling until their tanks dry up, teenagers wrapping their bodies around each other, big sisters standing over little brothers, telling them to run, run. Last stands at burger huts and shoe stores, tollways blocked for miles, a ferry afraid to come back to shore, afraid to get too far from it too. Survivors crashing through blockaded church doors, only to find the priests in there hungry.

  We were in those movies now.

  Every one of us was that mom, racing through Residential, crashing across the manicured lawn of her daughter’s elementary school, parking across the hug-n-go lane, leaving her car running behind her, the door open.

  Rushing across the field now is a horde of zombies, their faces slick with gore, mouths open for more.

  The mom makes it to the wide blue doors, is the last one, gets pulled in by the other parents.

  “What—what’s happening?” she says, but it’s still too early for any of that.

  And then you can see it in her eyes, that where’s-my-baby-girl look.

  The DJ lets that hang for a bit, like he doesn’t want to have to be the one telling this, what everybody out there already knows—that those movies, they all got it wrong, didn’t they? They were only worried about people trying to make it through this one night. When what they should have been teaching us, showing us, is how to live like that for nearly ten years.

  And counting.

  Day One

  Chapter One

  So, nearly a full decade after the plague, there was this guy, Jory Gray, early thirties, more or less white, maybe a little more complected than most, the usual scars and burns and hollowed-out eyes we all had, and he could have also been any of us as well, any single one of us. But he wasn’t.

  He was Jory Gray.

  There were no prophecies about him—society was still too scattered for that, hiding in pockets, going cannibal—no songs announcing his arrival in this new world, but isn’t that the way history works? Our heroes, they don’t come onto the scene with trumpets blasting, with handbills fluttering down from the sky. They just kind of ease in, not making a lot of eye contact, because they don’t know what they are yet either. What they can be.

  But you can see it in him a little, if you try. The way he stood against the outer wall of J Barracks that day, right at the heart of the base, his legs crossed at the ankle like a guitar player on an album cover from the past. The cigarette in his hand a complete afterthought. One he nursed for ten minutes. One last smoke before his shift, his eyes steady on the cinder block plant before him, the factory. Staring right at it but not really seeing it at all.

  His problem was he couldn’t get this one girl’s name out of his head.

  Or out of his hands.

  At the outer gate of the plant minutes later, trying to scan his notched ID through the reader, he dropped the stupid useless card, stabbed his hand down after it. Ended up knocking the card through the gate, so he had to suffer the guards, just ten feet away—inside—licking their lips to try to keep from smiling. Jory knelt at first, then squatted, and finally had to lie down to make his arm long enough.

  This is how legends are born, yes.

  At the next gate, this one tangles of barbed wire, current sparking from razor strand to razor strand, he just stood there, daring the guards to not confirm his face, not hit that lift button.

  They looked away, the grin still there in their eyes, and the wire creaked up.

  Jory ducked under, his shadow crisp below him.

  At the tall, windowless door to the factory, almost there, almost in—he flubbed his passcode three times (her name, her name), until a disgusted guard did have to come over, process Jory through the roundabout.

  The joke was over, done with. Another morning trashed by a puke. Jory could read it in their glares.

  He lifted his arms for their scans, their prods. Offered his scalp for their fingers and luxuriated under it so that they pushed him away, through the last door, into the silence of the long hall.

  Jory closed his eyes, breathed in the sterile air.

  Because he’d stood across the road for so long, deci
ding whether to do this again or not, he was a quarter hour late for his shift now. Not counting the locker room.

  It didn’t make him walk up the long hall any faster. Fifteen minutes could become twenty-five, if he played it right. Maybe a whole half hour.

  Not like he was getting paid anyway, right?

  Jory zeroed in on the locker room door a full city block down—every building on base was a cavern—and didn’t look to either side. Not because he didn’t want to see, but because he didn’t need to, not anymore.

  To his left, like always, would be the same endless wall, obviously military. Spaced regularly down it at an unimaginative height was a line of upright rectangles of pale green. Where pictures of push-broom-mustached generals had once glowered down. When he first started here, his eyelashes still balled into nubs from Disposal, Jory’s knee-jerk call was that the sun had faded around those pictures, that those generals had won this important battle with the sun, saved their little parts of the wall. Except those parts were lighter, not darker. Meaning some soldier in the before had painted darker green all around the frames, instead of lifting them off. Probably because he didn’t want to have to remember whatever stupid order they were in.

  Good for him, Jory thought.

  The other wall, to his right, would be mostly glass, the bulletproof kind. A series of windows opening onto the assembly line that, if it worked like the labcoats said, was supposed to save the world.

  Maybe the view through that glass was why those wall generals had been taken down. Not so they couldn’t see the world being saved by somebody other than them, but so they couldn’t get all judgmental about how it was being saved. Because no way could anybody from the old world agree with what was being assembled here now. Giants. Atrocities. The first new creature to walk the earth for thousands of years.

  Handlers.

  It still made Jory kind of sick, thinking about them, about what the posters said they were able to do, the punishment they were built for. They were tanks on two legs. But the razor wire outside would stop them, if they ever clambered off the assembly line before they were supposed to. It had to.

  He told himself this every day.

  Not that any of them had sat up on the wide belt so far, looked around with their dead eyes.

  But still.

  Seven and a half feet of seriously augmented killing machine? It was the stuff of nightmares. Like that wasn’t enough, add in their regiment of hormones and chemicals like Jory had to do every shift, and take into consideration their grafts and fiber optics, their implants and nuclear fibers, their circuit-driven consciences and steel-shanked bones, then put a zippered gimp mask over their heads, case the rest of them in double-plated leather, and what you’ve got is what you never would have wanted to get, if the world didn’t need it so bad: handlers. For the dead. Giants strong enough to keep a zombie on a leash, walk it through a room, then drive to the next place, do it again.

  This is the future.

  One Jory never asked to be a part of.

  Just on the hunch-shouldered shuffle from his housing unit to here, he’d seen six ways to end it all. Six casual methods of suicide. The big reset button. Game over, erase all memories, please. All he’d have to do would be to climb this fence, step into that road, hide behind that one dumpster for the rest of the morning.

  Except her name had still been in his mouth then. And he didn’t want to risk taking her with him.

  Meaning, even gone, she was still saving him.

  Stupid, stupid.

  He might as well just walk into J Barracks, sign up to be a torch. That was the seventh way to die that he’d seen. And it was probably the quickest, all told. The most sure anyway.

  In the ten minutes Jory had stood there with his cigarette, two jeeps had pulled up, and two baby torches had walked out to them, their flamethrowers loose and jaunty under their arms, like they thought they were going to live forever. Like they fully expected to come back. Like they hadn’t already left the key to their footlocker on top of that footlocker.

  Jory’d ground his cigarette out under his boot, saluted those torches away.

  The idea of J Barracks had been to feel better, to at least not be on that track.

  But he was still himself too.

  So far, the postapocalypse was pretty much sucking.

  Jory straight-armed his way through the door at the turn in the hall, into the locker room, his eyes narrowing to adjust to the light from the few bulbs left. It was empty for once. He was twenty minutes late. Everybody else was already out there on the line, building tomorrow.

  On Jory’s locker, courtesy of some joker—Timothy probably, Jory’s shift mate—was a black-marker happy face. Tiny like a whispered secret, no more than a half-inch from round crown to rounder chin.

  Jory stared at it, stared at it, and finally licked the pad of his thumb, pressed it into the face. He studied the face grinning up at him now through the whorls and vortices of his print then pressed it back into his locker door beside the other face. It was the same, but paler. He pressed it again, and again, until the ink was dry.

  Ten minutes later, most of it spent sitting on the bench, watching his hand shake or not shake, Jory pushed into his assigned clean room, his scrubs pungent with disinfectant, so that his eyes kept trying to water.

  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. Backdoor girl, of course, I forgot who I was—”