Jory slipped the ID into his pocket, looked up the Hill.
“You did it,” he said to her. “You really did it.” Then, quieter, sucking his cigarette bright, “Good for you.”
When he finally turned his back and shuffled off, twin lungfuls of smoke trailing around his head, his cigarette was clamped under a rusted staple, the cherry pointed down but smoldering, climbing, catching, the whole pole flaring up minutes later, a candle in the night, novitiates spilling down from the Church with buckets of water, but it was already too late.
This is Jory Gray.
Day Three
Chapter Eight
Because he hadn’t had the nerve to use the looted pistol on himself, and because the cigarettes were taking forever—before the plague, he’d been down to a pack a month during the semester—Jory made it to training at 0900, in some Quonset-hut hangar kind of building way out by the fence.
He was one of fifteen burnouts milling around, flicking their eyes to all the dark places in the warehouse.
Jory, his hands working on automatic, pinched a cigarette up to his lips.
Before he could light it, a hand came around, pulled it from his mouth. Crumbled it.
The other fourteen burnouts were watching now. Half smiling.
Jory turned, beheld their drill sergeant. Their Scanlon-in-waiting.
“What?” Jory said, licking his lips where the paper had been.
The drill sergeant—Voss above his pocket, in handsewn thread—stepped around, moving at all right angles, like this was a dance, and squared off in front of Jory.
“What, what?” he bellowed, somehow in a speaking voice.
“What, sir,” Jory mumbled.
Voss laughed to himself, the sound roiling up from his barrel chest, his lantern jaw. His polished boots. Then he looked around at the sorry state of this batch of recruits and lost his chuckle.
Cueing in, eight of the nine who were already smoking dropped their butts to the slick concrete, ground them out. The ninth, the youngest reprobate of them all, just stashed his.
“Well,” Voss said, turning so that it was for everybody, “one or two of you might live to the end of the week yet, taking into account this is Thursday, of course. You”—singling out a wiry dude—“what do you think happens when a spark from one of these bad habits drops down between the frame and the compression tank of your torch?”
“Sir?”
“Just take a flyer. An educated guess. Insofar as that might apply to you.”
“Boom.”
“Boom, yes.” To all again, “The torches each of you will be issued, their reservoirs, when full, have enough jelly in them for sixteen hours at full throttle. Sixteen hours wide open, not counting the autocool. Let me say that again now. Sixteen hours. In a can the size of your hand. Now tell me”—in Jory’s face again—“your nicotine fix, is it worth turning the building you’re in into a mushroom cloud?”
Before Jory could answer, Voss was spinning on his heel to face the rest of the class. “And it’s not you I’m worried about here, don’t get me wrong. And it’s not the torch either. What—what is it that you think I’m worried about here? And don’t say the dezzie.”
This last part to the reprobate who hadn’t crushed his cigarette, but had rubbed the heat out instead, threaded it behind his ear.
Voss was very aware of that cigarette.
The reprobate smiled with half his mouth, looked to the class, and shrugged. “You coming into the field with us, then, sir?”
Silence. Dead, dead silence.
Voss reached up, gingerly plucked the cigarette from behind the reprobate’s ear, then crushed it into the reprobate’s forehead, the tobacco flakes catching in the reprobate’s eyelashes so he finally had no choice but to blink, lose their important little staring contest.
“You’re in the right place, son,” Voss said to him, just to him, then turned, targeted another burnout. “You, Glasses. If you blow your torch up, take the whole room out, who are we going to miss?”
“The handler. Sir. Even if the explosion doesn’t kill it, we can’t use it again, because some of its safeties might have been compromised in the concussion wave.”
“Good, good. Yes. Did we all hear that now? The handler is who we’ll miss. Now, do any of you know how much work goes into building these insults to nature?”
Voss was speaking right to Jory again. Close enough for little flecks of cold alien spit to be on Jory’s lips now.
“Four months,” Jory answered.
The reprobate snickered. Looked away.
Voss nodded, kept nodding. “Four months and more dollars than any of us would ever see, if dollars still existed. Which isn’t to say you can’t be charged for one of them, am I right?”
Again, he was speaking to Jory.
Jory just stared back at him.
Voss nodded, liked it. He turned, surveyed the group again. “Now, I’m going to need somebody to be dead here. Wait, I know, I know, you.”
The reprobate.
“Not a short-finger, boss,” he said, waggling his fingers to show.
Half the fingers snipped away was how you could tell an enlisted zombie from a regular infected. Not that they knew the difference.
“We can fix that right here,” Voss said, unsheathing a short utility blade from his belt.
He slashed forward with it, angled it against the back of the reprobate’s neck, guided him down to the concrete none too gently.
“Yeah, that’s about perfect,” he said, placing his boot between the reprobate’s shoulder blades, flipping his knife back into his own belt. “Consider it practice for the show, why don’t you?” With his knife hand, then, he pulled a black silk hood from his rear pocket. “Now, I know most of you haven’t seen one yet, except maybe in your nightmares, but do we have a handler in the house?”
A commando-looking farm boy took one official step out, his right eye swelled shut from whatever had gotten him on this detail. Voss had to look up to see that shiner though. And then look up some more.
He smiled, threw the hood into this commando’s chest.
“Good, good. You’ll do fine, son. All we need now’s a dezzie to—”
“That’d be me, sir.”
Everyone craned around to the wiry dude, waggling his arm in the air, a coil of homemade Zs tattooed up from his wrist, and coming out the collar of his shirt, a ward against the plague maybe. Or camo.
Before Voss could say yes or no, the wiry dude was on all fours by Commando’s leg. Panting like a dog. Lunging in place. Snarling.
Hesitantly, Commando lowered his hand to the wiry dude’s shirt collar. The make-do handler and his eager zombie dog.
Voss shook his head in wonder. Maybe disgust. Then he turned around to address the rest again, “Now, since, as you all know, the Church has asserted what it takes to be its God-given—”
“We need one of those too, don’t we?” a punk said, casting his eyes around for support. Finding none.
“A god?” a bald recruit with a fishnet on his head said, smiling around it.
“A priest, yes,” Voss said, staring Fishnet down. “I was just getting to that.”
Jory laughed in his mouth, keeping his lips as slack as he could.
Voss turned to him, stepped in. He licked his thumb, an especially slimy, string-hanging lick, and pressed that wetness into Jory’s forehead.
“A volunteer, good,” Voss said. “There, you’re ordained. Now stand there and be condescending, think you can handle that?” Spinning back around, pacing. “As I was saying, since the Church has asserted itself into what should be military operations for the good of all mankind, since they put their noses into it last year, we can no longer just cremate any dead we find, contain the potential infection the obvious-ass way that’s been saving our asses for ten years now. No. They’re pansies, gentlemen. They want to bury them now, if they’re dead. ‘Honor their remains’, ‘Get back to the normal cycle of life’, all that. But, of cour
se, how can we know which stiffs are going to come climbing back out of that grave, right?”
Glasses: “Send a tissue sample to the lab. Sir.”
“Sure,” Voss came back, “if you want to wait two weeks. In which time PFC Ass Hat here has reanimated and bitten thirteen people on the face. Let me ask this another way, geniuses. Why have the dead been such a thorn in our side these last ten years?”
“More like a rhinoceros in our side,” the reprobate said, from the ground. Not hiding his smile very well at all.
“Nine years, eleven months,” Jory said to himself.
Voss pretended not to be hearing any of this. But it was definitely taking some effort.
“You, Glasses. Go.”
“Because their species has no built-in mechanism for population control. Sir. They’re locusts. They ravage their environment down to a nub. Actually, there are theories that we all carry the Z gene, that when there gets to be too many—”
“Okay, okay, this is fill-in-the-blank, not essay.”
“The dead don’t eat their own kind,” Jory said, before Glasses could continue. “If they did, that would be their population control mechanism.”
“Cannibalism,” Glasses chimed in.
“Yes, the first taboo,” Voss said, making his point. “Cannibalism. So I’m not the only one here who read the training manuals. Or lives in this world.”
“Second, really,” Jory said, to Voss’s back. Which then became his front.
“Excuse me, Father Smartass?”
“The second taboo is cannibalism. Sir. The first, it’s incest. With zombies it’s the same thing though, eating and sex. They do both with their mouth.”
“He’s right, sir,” Glasses said.
“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Voss said, punctuating it with his feet. “Well, can a six thousand degree plasma firestorm still kill them, you think, and not leave anything infectious for somebody to step on?”
Feeble nods all around.
“Good, good,” Voss said, exasperated. “So glad it’s all right with you. Thank you. Now, if we’re all through showing off our big brains, is everybody simpatico with learning what it is that you’re supposed to do here to keep your brains from getting eaten?”
“‘Simpatico’?” the punk mouthed to himself, squinting to try to track the word down, Fishnet mumbling about how they don’t just eat brains, Jory looking past all this for a moment, to the far wall. A guy there, just real casual. Making a pistol of his hand, putting it into his own mouth—his answer to how to keep your brains from getting eaten, maybe?
“Well?” Voss said, cueing in himself to Jory’s inattention.
“Yes,” Jory said, coming back. “Yes, fire can still kill them.”
“Well, with our Father’s blessing here, then,” Voss said, and walked them through the demonstration—the commando leading the zombie-on-a-leash to the ‘dead’ reprobate on the floor, the zombie sniffing, and, if he starts to take a bite, meaning the corpse is clean, uninfected, then the handler jerking the zombie back, denying him that one bite that would infect the corpse.
“And,” Voss went on, “if dezzie here isn’t interested—happens more than you’d expect lately—then that’s when it gets fun, right? When you get to earn your bed and board, ladies.”
Jory looked up to the guy standing against the far wall. Still just watching.
Voss hauled an old leaf blower up, crenellated red paper taped to its nozzle.
“This is where you do what you do,” he said, and yanked the pull cord, fired the leaf blower up. Voss directed the paper flames down onto the reprobate, sweeping them back and forth three times, slowly. “Ten count plus two. Eight’s supposed to be plenty, according to specs, but we aren’t taking any chances, right?”
“Why not just muzzle them then?” the punk asked, more just out loud than to Voss. But Voss spun on him anyway, clamped the punk’s neck in one hand and pinched his nose shut with the other.
“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 bonefa
ce, 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.
The Gospel of Z Page 5