The Gospel of Z

by Stephen Graham Jones

  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.”

  “And I’m the tuner,” the wiry dude cut in. “Cool? Totally random, man. First signal that dials up.”

  “For real?” Jory said.

  “Got a TV, a video game, a blow-up doll?” Fishnet asked.

>   Jory shrugged his bag off, had nowhere to sit.

  “I think it’s locusts, like he said,” Commando started, nodding to Glasses.

  “Oh, bullshit on that,” Fishnet said, standing to make his point. “It’s fucking eggheads up in geosynchronous orbit, waiting all this out. Their cure for the population boom. I heard it the other night on 1190. Conservation of resources by way of—”

  “You even know what ‘geo-whatever’ means?” the punk asked, the wiry dude pressing his ear to the radio, dialing for the first voice, the tip of his tongue ghosting in and out.

  The reprobate shook his head, held the knife away from himself so as to look down along the edge. “What time is it anyway?”

  “Three?” Jory said to the reprobate. “Two forty when I left my place.”

  “What time do they come for us?” somebody got the nerve to ask, his tone not nearly so light as he was obviously trying for.

  “Drivers don’t get here till seven,” Fishnet called back to whoever was worried.

  Reprobate finally looked away from Jory, blew dust from his blade and narrowed his eyes like digging for a memory, like leaning on luck. “It’s hamburgesas, losers,” he said. “Double-meat with cheese, times six billion.” Then he pointed to the wiry dude with his knife, made a circle with the point for him to dial deeper.

  Glasses cleared his throat, breathed deeply, serioused up his eyes, and took a stab. “We—we finally developed the cure for AIDS and weight gain and loneliness and aging and sadness, only it had this one kind of negative side effect…”

  Jory grinned that weak-sister effort away, turned around as punctuation, giving this idea his back. When he came back around, everybody was waiting. “Bubonic plague plus rabies,” he finally spat out, “hiding down in some monastery cellar in Haiti for two hundred years.”

  “Wait, wait, shh…” the wiry dude said, finding a voice in the static.

  “Hamburgers…” the reprobate called out, not even looking up.

  “Divine retribution,” Fishnet tried, smiling.

  “Wrong channel for God,” somebody said.

  “Wrong crowd,” the reprobate added, barely loud enough to hear.

  “A comet passes a thousand years ago,” Jory said then, feeling his way through it, “and we—we’re just now drifting through its tail, and it’s all sparkly with frozen organic matter that only thaws with the heat of passing through an atmosphere.”

  “Nice, nice,” Glasses said. Then, “Our Pacific fishing trawlers had to start casting their nets wider and wider, deeper and deeper, and finally dredged up something from the sedimentary layer associated with the Bikini Atoll experiments. Clay, sludge. It glows at night, is hot enough to cook shrimp over. Three weeks later that trawler drifts into port. Infection Point Z.”

  “No, no, I heard that one,” the punk said. “That’s the way it really happened in—”

  “What would those people in space eat for ten years?” Commando said, mostly to himself.

  “Each other,” the reprobate said back anyway.

  “Shut up! Shut up!” the wiry dude was saying, trying to wave the theories away.

  But Jory wasn’t done. He was smiling now, finally, not looking away from Glasses. “The earth finally reaches a tipping point, spits up the virus as antibody, to cleanse itself of the infection we’ve become. The biological nuisance. Or—or, two kids nobody likes, they find an old book in the library, make the proper sacrifices, intone the right incantations—”

  “But zombies are evil, right?” Commando was saying. “God wouldn’t have done that to—”

  “Not two kids, two hikers,” Glasses went on, over the wiry dude’s cease-and-desist gesticulations. “They’re up on some glacier, fall into a crevasse, see this leathery hand coming up from the ice. They carry that body back to civilization, and the radiation from the scans the university does, it kick-starts something unholy in its bloodstream, and nobody even knows they need to lock the door behind them yet…”

  “No mixing science and religion,” Fishnet said, halfway sullen from not making it to what’s sounding like the final round—Jory and Glasses.

  Glasses pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose, said, “It doesn’t mix—”

  “Unholy,” the reprobate told him. “You said ‘unholy’. About a lab experiment.”

  “Wait, wait!” the wiry dude begged, pawing for the volume.

  “Why can’t you mix them?” Jory said to the punk. “You can believe in penicillin, you can believe in—in evolution, right?”

  “That mean they’re not true?” Fishnet said.

  Jory didn’t answer. He was back on task, back in the game. “So—so this one kid with cancer, he survives it, it’s a miracle, only he’s addicted to medicine, to the idea of medication, so gets hooked on meth, which these guys are making with water from a pond that truckers have been dumping waste in for—”

  “No, the cooks, they’ve been using runoff formaldehyde as a stabilizing agent,” Glasses said, liking it. “From the hazardous waste drum behind the mortuary.”

  “So when the kid’s teeth and skin start falling out, off, whatever,” Jory said, in the rhythm of the theory, “at first nobody notices, because they’re all like that.”

  “But then,” Glasses fell in, “if you look at the booking logs down at the station—this is Arizona, some place dry—you see this kid showing up month after month, looking worse and worse—”

  “Guys, guys!” the wiry dude was saying.

  “Until he finally gets killed, something undeniably fatal, like a bullet to the chest,” Jory said, “only that tweaker with the gun, part of his mania that week was werewolves, so the bullets were cast from silver, only this batch of silver was impure, he’d melted it down from his mom’s jewelry she got from her grandma, the silent-screen scream queen, and it’s a mix of, of platinum and costume paste, and that unholy chemical, pharmaceutical, radiological time bomb, it lodges—”

  “Festers,” Glasses corrected.

  “Mixes with what’s left of the brewery his spinal fluid already is. So then, six months later, there’s another booking photo, only, in this one, you can like see the kid’s cheekbone through his skin, you can like look into his sinus cavity and see maybe like a spider living in—”

  “Over!” the wiry dudefinally insisted, stepping between Jory and Glasses, pushing them apart, then crossing the room to the reprobate, pulling the reprobate’s hand up in victory. “We have a winner, gentlemen!”

  “What?” Fishnet said, rolling to the edge of his bunk to see better.

  In answer, the wiry dude held the already halfway-through-it radio out.

  …and can it be any kind of coincidence that at the exact same moment the plague first started being reported, there were also reports that the fast food industry was failing, was collapsing, not due to lack of customers, but lack of product, lack of converted South American jungle to sustain their precious cows? What does that tell you, people? Picture this. Obese American pulls up into the fast food lane, already dying on the inside, just trying to pack dead cows around his mortality, dead cows if he was lucky, and then—

  “Preach it, brother,” Fishnet interrupted, taking the radio from the wiry dude, to hold it higher, but rolling the tuner instead, losing the sermon.

  The reprobate laughed through his nose. “Double-meat with cheese, ladies,” he said, coming up to a sitting position on his bunk, his legs hanging down now, the knife easy in his hand, then gone. “Now you know the rest of the story.”

  “His name is Dalton,” Glasses said, sickened. Nodding down to the radio to show who he’s talking about. “Self-styled Buddha of the apocalypse. Ex-dungeon master, one-time big-name hacker, back when there were servers. This is one of his better ones. They run it every night at—”

  “—just after three…” the reprobate cut in.

  “You cheated,” the punk said.

  “I won,” the reprobate corrected, then jumped down, his biker boots heavy ag
ainst the concrete floor.

  “Won what?” Jory asked, squinting with his whole face.

  The reprobate crossed to the bulletin board, the stack of names in a line from top to bottom, first to last. “This,” he said, and took his name out of the third slot, tacked it back on at the very bottom.

  “I up there?” Jory asked. “Gray, Jory.”

  “We all are,” the reprobate said, scanning the room.

  Then everybody was at the board, looking for their places in line.

  Except Jory. And Glasses.

  “Circus animals,” Jory said, at a conversational level. Just talking. “Circus animals. There’s a guy comes on at four who says it’s circus animals, all doped up six ways from Sunday. That they were getting loose, mixing genes that never should have been mixed.”

  “There’s really some out there, I’ve heard,” Glasses said, watching the mob at the bulletin board.

  “Some what?”

  “Giraffes, lions, whatever there used to be. Monkeys.”

  “Popcorn.”

  Glasses smiled, said, “Music.”

  Jory nodded. Looked down to his hand. Shaking.

  He held it tighter to his leg.

  “Zebras,” Glasses said then. “Remember when Z was for zebra?”

  Jory nodded, did remember, then the punk was holding two fingers to his lips, asking around.

  Jory hooked his head for the punk to follow him to his bag on the floor.

  Inside, carton after carton.

  “Shit,” the punk hissed. “Think I can kill myself on these before seven o’clock rolls around?”

  In answer, Jory lobbed cartons out to the rest of the room and then the radio was up again, music this time, Fishnet strutting out with some serious Eastside swagger, the whole bunkhouse whooping and catcalling, trying to prove how alive they still were, like they could stave off the morning if they laughed enough, if they smoked enough cigarettes.