“Mr. Gray…” the reprobate said, letting his eyes linger through the doorway a bit more, in something like appreciation, then turning away from it.
“He wasn’t up for three more calls,” somebody said.
“Right after me,” Glasses added, pinching his glasses at the bridge, taking them off, his face so naked now. His eyes so small.
“How—how old would those kids be now?” Commando asked then. “On the movie. If they’d lived.”
“They didn’t,” Glasses said, and pulled a trembling, unlit cigarette to his lips. Tried to draw smoke from it.
Tried again.
Chapter Thirteen
Verse two, the mannequin household. Where it all started.
Where it keeps starting.
The dad’s down in his corner of the basement, the columns of teetering junk so generic, so poorly suited for surviving horde after horde, wave after wave.
Lamps, skateboards, hat racks?
But maybe it would be comforting to dawdle your last week away down there. Shuffle through your memories, shake the flashlight for more battery juice. The house above you inhabited, slobbering.
None of that yet though.
None of that without this, without the dad squinting into his vintage computer monitor, the light from the letters bleeding out onto his plastic face, no real sweat there.
His search term in the default engine is Jakarta. All the usual, useless data reeling past—economy, climate, social customs. History, geography, exports. Relative size. Livestock. Malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy. Agriculture, art. Photo galleries, sightseeing suggestions, airfare.
The husband clicked deeper, deeper, was getting nowhere.
“Where are you?” he said into the screen, coming even closer so the screen’s right there, caught in his work glasses.
Then his wife’s voice, calling down, “Hon? What are you doing down there?”
The husband looks up as if through a pool of murky water. Blinks, blinks. Remembers he can speak too. “Nothing, nothing. Just, you know. Work. Busy bee, beaver…”
Upstairs the wife angles her head to the side—she’s cutting carrots, has an apron on—then looks across to their son at the table, with his homework. She smiles pleasantly.
“Dinner in twenty, ’kay?” she calls down, cutting the carrot into coins again.
“Great, yeah,” the dad says back.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” the son says, his pencil stalled in the middle of some algebra.
Cut, cut, the carrot slices leaning over against each other like dominoes. One of them the exact shade of her skin.
“Nothing, dear. Just—nothing. Your Uncle XXXXX, remember him?”
“Dad says he’s maybe married now.”
The mom smiles, sweeps the carrots onto a plate. “I’m sure he’s maybe something,” she says. “He’s always maybe something…”
The dad is quiet at his post now. Maybe hearing this transaction upstairs, so close. His hand hovering over the mouse.
But then footsteps. Heels. His wife walking across the living room, it doesn’t matter why.
The dad nods to himself, fumbles his cell phone up from his pocket, has to stand to do it, the basement too short for his circus self. The sound his head makes hitting the two-by-twelve joist is the sound a good cantaloupe used to make. The sound a child’s toy bowling ball could make against a coffee table.
The dad sits back down rubbing his head. He scooches his chair in closer, for privacy.
“Okay, okay,” he says to himself, his nerves obviously why he hasn’t been promoted at whatever fake job he has.
That’s lost too, though.
What isn’t—or, wasn’t, early on, before anybody knew what it was—is the image that resolves on-screen when he plugs his phone into the port.
It’s a fortune-cookie strip of paper, but not. Hand-torn, tiny, tiny little rips, like you get when pulling something from a bulletin board.
Sideways on the strip of paper, Volunteers Needed—Six Weeks—All Bills Paid.
The husband rotates the image, zooms in on the mimeographed font. Says it again, to his brother, “Where are you?”
Chapter Fourteen
Fifteen feet from the jeep that wasn’t really for him, Jory stopped. The driver. It was the same guy from the training session. The guy who’d been cocked up against the back wall, punctuating Voss’s walk-through with sneers. The distant chuckler, up close now.
“You,” Jory said.
“Me,” the driver said back, burning the clutch a bit to show they needed to be gone.
Jory kept his eyes on the ground in front of him, then on the side of the jeep, then on the dashboard.
“Mayner,” the driver said, offering his hand.
“Jory Gray,” Jory said, not taking the hand. “No need to commit it to memory, right?”
“Think I picked this job?” Mayner said back.
“Said the ferryman.”
“This is your first call, right?” Mayner said, and backed them up, jerked them forward, onto the road that led to the gate
“Don’t give up, do you?” Jory said, holding on to the dash.
“Yeah, I’m the stubborn one,” Mayner said back, taking the first curve too fast.
“Everybody’s new in there,” Jory said. “J Barracks. Attack of the rookies.”
“That a question or an answer?”
“Observation.”
“J is for ghost…” Mayner nodded, anticipating Jory’s next line. “Last week’s been”—his signature chuckle—“unfortunate.”
“For torches.”
“For humanity.”
“Humanity?”
“Reason you had your pick of the beds in there’s that everybody got coded, the last few days. The dead aren’t staying dead anymore. Even less than usual, I mean. Like a whole ’nother wave.” Another turn, another near-death experience. “Bonefaces are even making some special robe to protect themselves, I hear.”
“From the dead?”
“From us. From you. From getting coded.”
Mayner rested his forearms on the top of the steering wheel, mimed a small explosion over his instrument cluster.
“Have to believe in a robe pretty hard for it to protect you in a firestorm,” Jory said, turning to watch base slip past.
“Got to have faith, faith, faith.”
“I don’t even have a key.”
“Key?”
“For a footlocker. They never issued me one.”
“You bring something valuable? What?”
Jory touched the small pocket Linse’s ID was stashed in.
“What were you?” Mayner said, braking hard for the gate. “Before?”
“Does it matter?” Jory said, his hand on the fold-down windshield now. He turned, studied Mayner. “What were you?” he asked.
Mayner saluted their way through the gate, said, “So you know how to use the torch, right?”
“Feels like a funeral, doesn’t it?” Jory said back.
“Funerals have this?” Mayner said, and popped the glove compartment, a tangle of wires and circuits, a chrome disc spinning in there, its skeletonized player resting on a bag of sand. Some kind of pop music lilting out at them. A girl, maybe sixteen, trying to reach into her soul, pull out a hit.
Jory couldn’t help but smile.
It was his first call.
Like Jory had been told to expect, their destination was deep in one of the restricted zones. The places that hadn’t been cleared yet. Nowhere you’d want to be after dark.
A derelict public restroom, the landscape around it so reduced that Jory couldn’t tell if this had been a park, a rest stop, or what. The only reason the restroom was still standing was that it had been built like a bomb shelter. Even so, it was creaky, tilting, had a year left, two at the outside.
Lined all along its roof, and high-stepping it on the ground like old men with delicate feet, were the Pharaoh vultures that had shown up again not long after the plag
ue. Before, there’d been rumors of maybe three breeding pairs. With the feast the postapocalypse had been for them, these rumors were like pigeons now. Just with wingspans of eleven to fourteen feet, the grandfathers reaching out nearly to twenty. Black feathers oily to the touch. A digestive system able to process whatever fell down into it, evidently. The best survivors.
The two on the ground raised their wings in warning, but Mayner pulled right up to them anyway, leaning forward for the jeep’s dust to drift past, Jory only clueing into this at the last moment, the last gritty breath.
“Thanks,” he said a few moments later, coughing.
Mayner smiled, his face right up against the steering wheel.
“Helmet’s behind you,” he said to Jory, then sat on the hood while Jory strapped the armor on, fitted the helmet down, adjusted the strap on the torch and moved his arm on that side, to be sure he still could. Then his fingers. Then the tips of his fingers.
Stall, stall.
Finally Jory stepped in beside Mayner, and the two of them studied the broken-down restroom. Its shifting black wainscoting watched them back.
“They can’t get in,” Mayner said, about the vultures. “They can smell it, but they can’t get to it. They don’t want to be anywhere without the sky above them.”
Jory didn’t say anything. Four of the vultures had metal bracelets on their right ankles, those tiny lights blipping green with radio signals.
“Just one?” Jory said, about what he was apt to find inside.
“Probably,” Mayner said, shrugging one shoulder. “Out here, it’s—why be out here, right? Unless you’re smuggling.”
“Black market,” Jory filled in.
“Probably a grocery store buried out here somewhere. Find that storeroom, grab as many cans as you can, and”—with his sideways hand Mayner zipped a fast path back to the fence.
“You’ve seen that one they have in the glass box in old downtown?” Jory said, pawing his pocket for his pack, hitting armor instead.
“The mime?” Mayner asked, looking over, then playacting he was lying down in an invisible box, testing its limits gingerly.
“More like a coffin,” Jory said.
“You’ve seen it, like with your own two eyes?”
Jory shrugged.
“It’s not real,” Mayner said. “Control’d never let the virus circulate like that.”
“They’re pretty good at keeping expired canned goods off the streets too?” Jory said, trying to unstrap his chest plate, to get at his cigarettes.
Mayner stopped him, threaded a red-striped straw up from his shirt pocket, the straw tied at both ends.
“Menthol,” he said, at important-whisper level.
Jory took the straw reverently. It was one of those milkshake ones, from back when milkshakes were real. Just, with a menthol preserved inside now. He ran it under his nose, trying to smell that green taste.
“Serious?” he said. “Where?”
“Just don’t tell Voss.”
“Because I’m definitely seeing him again.”
“Toss the butt out when you and his holiness are ready for the big boy. I’ll be watching for it. Won’t give him the signal until then. Not that they always listen so well.”
“‘Big boy’?” Jory said.
“And his pet dog,” Mayner answered.
Jory got it—the handler. Throw the menthol butt out when he was ready for the handler. When the priest was ready for the handler and his walking, slobbering bad idea of a laboratory rat.
“What if I’m not done with it yet?” Jory asked, holding the straw out before him.
“You can save the world or you can smoke a cigarette, right?” Mayner said.
Jory studied the straw again, considering. Inside was maybe the only menthol left in the postapocalypse. Maybe his last smoke ever.
“It’ll help with the smell,” Mayner said, nodding inside.
“So we’re the first ones here?” Jory said.
“Except Señor Deadalo in there,” Mayner said back.
“And whoever made him dead.”
“Unless he died of happiness,” Mayner said.
“Lot of that going around these days,” Jory said, then pushed off with his butt from the jeep.
Mayner chin-pointed down to Jory’s torch. “You know what to do with that, right?”
“Pull the trigger. Point. Spray.”
“Maybe in a slightly different order, but, yeah. Okay. And”—keying his own headset on—“you can hear me, right?”
Jory flinched from Mayner’s voice in his helmet, dialed it down.
Then, leaning away, into his own unlit funeral pyre, Mayner’s hand on Jory’s shoulder kept him there for one more moment.
“Don’t make me code you,” he said. “Be the one that lives, this week.”
Jory looked around at the ravaged sky one last time. The jagged horizon. Then he clapped his hand down on top of Mayner’s.
“Thanks for the—” he said, lifting the red-striped straw, walking backwards into his story, his torch at port arms, the Pharaoh vultures lumbering up into the air behind him, fifteen birds at once, so that for a few moments Jory was in shadow.
And then he ducked through the door.
Chapter Fifteen
A spark, a burble of light, and Jory’s torch lit, the flame bobbing against the darkness.
“Hunh,” Jory said into the decrepit restroom, then recoiled from the stench, covering his nose with the back of his left hand.
“Cool?” Mayner said through the helmet.
“Very uncool,” Jory said back, coughing hard enough that he took an involuntary step forward, the tile floor giving under his weight, suggesting a cavity under there. A cavern.
Jory held the lit end of his torch up, stepped to the side, skirted whatever septic labyrinth was waiting under that part of the floor.
But the smell.
He gagged some more, managed to unknot one end of his straw, shake the sacred menthol out.
Again, he pawed his chest for his lighter, and, again, he was wearing plate armor.
“Got a light?” he coughed into his mouthpiece.
“Serious?” Mayner said, and Jory got it, looked down to his torch. He pulled it as far back along his waist as the strap would let him, leaned down, and when he strained, could just reach that precious flame.
He held the first drag in, held it, blew it out in a long grey line of relief.
Across the room, facedown in a pool of his own dried gore, was the smuggler. Fallen into the urinal and, alongside him, his contraband—cans of peaches, their labels hardly even faded.
“It’s peaches,” Jory said into the headset.
“Still good?” Mayner said back.
Jory didn’t answer.
The rest of the restroom was the typical rusted stalls, torn-off doors—they can be shields—and animal droppings. Years of guano sloping up one of the back corners.
“What were you doing in here?” Jory said to the peach smuggler.
Though the wound that had been fatal for him was obviously on the front, like he’d fallen onto it to try to stanch the bleeding, still, there was a palm-sized circle of black blood between his shoulder blades. Meaning knife, probably, not gun. All the way through. Up close and personal.
So as not to attract attention, right?
Let the birds do that, once the smell came.
Jory sucked deeper on the menthol. He kind of wanted to live now, just to get the chance to smoke another.
Outside, Mayner looked up from the video feed—Jory’s helmet—to the armored transport rumbling up the road. Shaking the ground. Shaking the whole world.
The handler.
“What’s it smell like?” Jory asked, his voice breaking up. “You know, when you burn them?”
Mayner grinned like he had the perfect answer here, then swallowed it when a tall white figure swept past.
“Look busy,” he said into the mic, covering it with his hand. “This party�
�s about to heat up.”
Though the video from the old holding pens was the conversion point for most of the people who sleepwalked up the Hill, the Church’s real power was that, in uncertain times, it was providing certainty.
The illusion of certainty, Jory would have told Linse if she’d asked, but still. The illusion, it’s got to be better than its opposite, right?
For the first six or seven years of the plague, it had been the military in control. Because people needed fires against the night. Because society needed some fences. Tall, sharp fences.
But now—it wasn’t like the old world, and it never would be again, not after the dead had gotten up and walked one especially black Friday. That Friday was gone though. It was Sunday now. Sunday, and people were going to Church in what passed for droves in the postapocalypse. Maybe for some version of the same reason Jory was pretty sure Linse had made that walk—guilt. For what they’d had to do, in order to survive. What they knew they had inside them, now, and were afraid of. What they wanted cleansed, wiped away, forgotten. Mostly forgotten.
Where the military was just an extension of themselves, what everybody would do and do happily if they had guns and tanks and organization, the Church, it was a bridge to somewhere else. Not the past, but a place not this, not here. A place not so tooth and nail.
Which isn’t to say the Church’s walls weren’t at least as tall as the military’s. The big difference was that the military used see-through chain-link, with electricity coursing through, when it could be had. The Church, its walls were solid, so you could pretend the world was only this big, this clean. And they didn’t need electricity, they had the priests, right? The dead couldn’t come in if they wanted. This was a place of life.
As for where the Church had come from, Jory had no idea. He’d never been close enough to a priest to hear any accent or intonation. What it felt like was that they’d grown up with the dead, almost. Like the dead had created some void in the world, for the priests to step calmly into. Like the priests had been waiting centuries to do just that.
And of course they weren’t the only religions to get kick-started by the plague. There had been the Church of Z in the early days. Graduated snake-handlers, pretty much, except their holy animal, the animal that sent them into a spiritual frenzy, it was the zombie. To be infected was to have the spirit course through you, take away all semblance of human speech, human thought, replace it with something so much more pure, like you’d been unburdened by greed and envy and the rest, could exist now as perfect desire, as a hunger more pure than the world had ever known.
The Gospel of Z Page 8