“You can chew through it,” Hillford said quietly to Jory then, like it was a kindness he was offering here, and held the knife out again, for Jory to take it. But the only part Jory could touch would be the blade, and then he’d be a short-finger in everything but virus.
“No, no no no,” Jory said, looking up to Hillford.
Hillford stepped in closer, with the knife.
“It’s not—you can’t,” Jory said, cringing back, looking up again to the deep gouges in the wall. The scratch marks.
Chew through it.
It’s why the soldiers in the street had been using chain and pipe. Because the dead used their mouths like dogs did—the first tool.
And then Jory’s face went cold. His head shaking no.
“You’re going to infect me,” Jory said. “That’s what this is all about.”
“Anoint you,” Hillford corrected, so calm, and now Jory was pulling the other way, his feet against the pole, the sheet a guitar string.
Those gouges were from the dead. But from one at a time. All the novitiates would be up on the ramparts by the time it had chewed through its bindings. Allowing them to see the dead’s true nature, up close, and accept it.
But who would make a zombie? If you needed one, if you were the military and you needed one, you’d just go out into a restricted zone, set a trap.
“I’m not your messenger,” Jory said, up to Hillford. “Just let me—they’re already, my friends, my unit, my driver, they know where I am, they’re coming to look for me.”
“Yes, the soldiers on their violent parade,” Hillford said, keeping his distance. “I expect them to come asking after you at any moment now. But—there’s a shortcut, as it were. As it is, I should say.”
Jory pulled harder, his left boot slipping off the pole, his right still there, all his attention on it, on pushing, straining.
“Yes, yes,” Hillford said, watching, impressed. “Maybe you’ll be the one, Jory Gray. Maybe you’ll—”
Hillford was still talking, but Jory couldn’t hear anymore.
The knife, the stupid fucking white blade.
It was still in his right boot.
Jory faked a slip, collapsed, his new robes billowing all over him. Giving him room.
He stood with the white blade, cut through the knotted sheet like nothing.
All the novitiates stepped back, eyes large.
But not the priests. Not Hillford.
“Jory Gray,” Hillford said, impressed again, not intimidated at all.
Jory edged around. Keeping the pole between himself and Hillford, he crabbed over to the novitiates, pulling their hoods off as he went. Bald head after bald head. All with eyes that matched each other.
“What did you do with her?” Jory said then, coming around to face Hillford again.
“Her place is with us, Jory Gray,” Hillford said back, his hands holding each other again. Not even close to slipping up his sleeve. “As, I would offer, is yours. As you reestablish so elegantly each time we meet. A truly amazing specimen, yes. Let your anointing take place, Jory Gray, and you can be the first of a race of angels. In your pupa dreams, you can be with her again, as before, and never have to, have to use a-a…what was it?” he asked, knowing full well. “A hammer?”
Jory looked down to his hand, the curved white blade flickering into something more blunt. Something more matted with blood and hair. Jory’s fingers started to let it slip, but then, his mind accelerating enough to slow the courtyard down, he came back up to Hillford’s satisfied mask of a face. His patience.
And he tried to cut it away.
He came up fast with the knife, slashing across, trying to go from hip to opposite shoulder, spill Hillford out of himself like a piñata, but Hillford’s arm was already in the way, the blade burying itself there, Jory’s hand continuing the motion without it, the rest of him backing away, falling down, using the smooth pole to stand again.
“Ah, yes,” Hillford said, rotating his arm around to study the blade, “one of the originals,” then centering his rotting eyes back on Jory. “Have you suffered any injury?” he asked then, nodding down to Jory’s hands, but Jory was coming at his midsection now.
Hillford sidestepped easily, guided Jory past, into the dirt.
Three times this happened, Hillford careful with his left arm. Careful for the blade, not the flesh.
“Children,” another of the priests intoned somewhere in there, the novitiates hearing, lowering their heads. They lined up for the unfurling rampart ladders and climbed up into the sky, then rolled those ladders up behind them, tying them off, their eyes on Jory the whole time.
They were waiting for it to happen, Jory knew. Waiting for Hillford to cut him, for Jory to bleed out, die his first death, breathe his last breath, then rise again after they poured the infection in.
“If you knew only the singularity of purpose that awaits,” Hillford said, “if you only knew, then you wouldn’t insist upon this charade, Jory Gray. This flailing after a thing already gone.”
“What’d you do to my back?” Jory said.
“You’re the messenger.”
“No, no I’m… Why me, then?” Jory said, standing now, gasping for breath, his face streaked with dirt.
“Because you don’t want it, Jory Gray,” Hillford said, no hesitation at all. “Only those without the desire to live actually get to live forever, yes?”
“Amen to that,” Jory said, casting around now. Seeing only doorways with priests, doorways with priests.
Except for one.
The wooden door they usually kept shut, it was yawning open now, forgotten.
Jory looked back to Hillford.
“That passage is not for the meek,” Hillford said, no levity in his voice now.
“Tell me where she is,” Jory said back.
“Look inside yourself,” Hillford said.
“Bullshit,” Jory said, and backed over to the black doorway, only stopping to study the ramparts again. The novitiates.
And then, as if it had been foretold, he stepped through, pulled the door shut behind him as hard as he could.
Hillford stared at it until Jory was gone, then calmly removed the blade lodged in his arm, turning to scan the ramparts as well. Turning to zero in on the female novitiate with her hood still up, her different-colored eyes wet, terrified, the smoke from the Weeping Poles rolling over the walls in waves now. The whole city burning, maybe.
Z Day.
Chapter Thirty
A match flares in a dark room, doesn’t light anything.
Another.
What the mannequin dad can see in the flare, in the glow, is another plastic face, another approximation of a human. He’s military, of course, a corporal, a major, some kind of decorated war horse or another, though without Scanlon’s scarred-up neck. Almost old enough to be the mannequin dad’s father, though not nearly tall enough. Just another upper-level grunt.
“‘Lazarus’, you say,” this corporal says, shaking the match gone.
“Oppenheimer,” the mannequin dad says back, like an indictment.
The corporal laughs this away. A very fake, congratulatory laugh. “And here we thought communications had been tamped down.”
“I don’t mean—”
“I know what you mean, Mr. XXXXX. But—do you even know who Lazarus was?”
“John,” the mannequin dad says, like he doesn’t want to. “Eleven-ten, I think.”
“A religious man, good, good. Then you know Lazarus, that he rose from the dead after three days in the tomb. Nary an ill effect.”
The mannequin dad shuffles his feet. Swallows. “I just want to see my brother,” he says. “Please?”
The corporal leans back, cradling the back of his head in his laced fingers. Studying the ceiling maybe. Not even acknowledging what the mannequin dad is pretty sure is a two-way mirror beside them. Their only light’s coming from it, side glow from what looks to be a dashboard pressed up against the glass.
<
br /> Nobody’s behind that dashboard.
The corporal doesn’t even look down to explain, just says it straight up, already bored by it. “We turn the overheads on, the cameras start rolling, the tapes start reeling, and then, then we can’t have a private chat like this, now, can we? Man to man, I mean. Just the two of us.”
Chuckle chuckle.
A lone bead of sweat rolls down the mannequin dad’s plastic face, from temple to jawline.
“Crops all over the world are dying, you know that?” the corporal says then. “Rain forest’s going all belly up. Too many mouths, not enough wars. But what if—what if we could dream up, say, a revolutionary strain of cattle. Just spitballing out loud here, if that’s okay. But, a breed of cattle that you could carve steaks from all week? Nary an ill effect.”
“You said that already,” the mannequin dad says. “And we don’t have that kind of technology.”
“You don’t know what we have,” the corporal snaps back.
“My brother, for one.”
The corporal shakes his head. “If you’re so worried about him, he’s fine. Trust me. Little cabin fever, nothing else. Part of an FDA approval. Eating hamburgers three times a—”
“He didn’t tell you everything,” the mannequin dad says. Just loud enough.
“About you, for one.”
“No, his, our—”
“Little genetic peculiarity, yeah, yeah. So? Think we don’t screen blood six ways from Sunday, an approval like this? Your brother, Mr. XXXXX, your pain-in-the-ass brother, he’s the future. Maybe of the whole damn species.”
“I think he’s got something else too. Not the Creutzfeldt.” Eyes closed, words in order, in order, please. “I think he might have caught something. I called his…the girl he was with. His wife. And she was at a—”
“Wife?”
“I don’t know. But she’s sick now. Sir.”
“‘Sir’.”
“I called the number he gave me before. For her.”
“Of course.”
“I found her. And they told me she’d been, um, what do you say? Committed?”
“Head case,” the corporal shrugs. “More like she caught it from him. I know I almost have.”
“No, she’s in a—”
“Hospital for the relationship challenged, I get it.”
“Leper colony. Sir.”
The corporal looks over to the glass wall.
“So, let me keep this straight,” he says, “you think we can test for mad cow disease—”
“He doesn’t have that.”
“We can test for the propensity for bovine spongiform encephalopathy then. You think we can test for that and miss something from the Middle Ages?”
The ,annequin dad looks to the glass wall as well. Each of their reflections are transparent. Like they’re not even really here. “I’m just saying,” he says. “Variants like that, you can’t— He’ll mess up your study.”
“No, I think what you’re failing to understand here, Mr., Mr. XXXXX, is that those variants, they’re like, they’re manna from heaven, you get it? Your brother, he just walked right off the street, see? Right into history. Without him, I don’t know where we’d be.”
“This can’t be legal.”
“I say what’s legal, son. Get it? What was that? Oh, oh. I’ll do it”—tilting his face up to the dead microphones, the dead cameras—“Lazarus Complex! Lazarus Complex!”
It ends with him laughing. Rubbing his chin with his thick fingers.
“Why are you telling me all this?” the mannequin dad says then. “Unless—unless you’re not letting me go.” His big hands contract into balls. “I’ve got a family, sir.”
“Kind of thought so, yeah,” the corporal says, hauling something up from the floor, setting it on the tabletop between them. “But what I really want to know, see, it’s…do you have a brother?”
The mannequin dad doesn’t follow, narrows his eyes down to the object on the table.
The cast. His son’s arm cast.
“Well?” the corporal says then, leaning back, flicking another match off his thumbnail. Watching that wavering flame. Speaking through it. “You, your kind. You don’t have any idea what it’s like, trying to save the world, do you? Caring about it enough that you’d pay whatever cost?”
“No,” the mannequin dad says, hugging the cast to him.
“No what?” the corporal says, holding the flame up to his eye, to study the mannequin dad through it like a microscope.
“No, I don’t have a brother,” the mannequin dad says, covering his eyes with one of his hands, his shoulders hitching up, once, twice.
Chapter Thirty-One
Jory felt more than heard the crossbar slam down, once and forever.
He was sitting knees-up, his back to the thick door.
Blackness all around. Dank, cloying.
Except?
The robe.
He lowered his hands, ran his hands along the fabric.
It did glow. It glowed more wherever he touched it. Light by friction, amplified body heat, reclaimed static, magnetism, the power of prayer—he didn’t know which. But it worked.
“Hunh,” he said, and stood, found he could see in a dim, sepia-toned way. Maybe three feet in each direction. Like he was in an old, old movie, where the frame was a blurry circle, not a neat rectangle.
To his left, beside the door, was a cinder block wall, sloping up to a rounded ceiling. To his right, another cinder block wall, coming up to the same ceiling, the wood there spongy, ancient, part of the earth now. The ground under his feet had been the same wood once, but it had seen more traffic, more contact, was mostly dirt now.
An old bomb shelter? Some kind of bunker?
Jory wished he had the knife back. Or his torch. Even just a stick.
He rubbed the right arm of his robe brighter, studied the backside of this door.
Same as the front, except no ring to pull it open.
It made sense, kind of.
And the gouges clawed into the wood, they were the same gouges on the inner walls of the courtyard.
It meant this was where he was supposed to have gone. After Hillford cut his fingers off or whatever, let him bleed out for however many hours, then tipped some ceremonial black vial into his open mouth. Thirty-seven seconds after that, Jory was supposed to have woken up all at once, chewed through the sheet at his wrists, then shambled to each doorway—priest, priest—then tried the walls, the novitiates probably trained not to flinch, then, at last, gone the only place left—here.
Only he wasn’t dead. He didn’t have the virus.
For all the good it would do him.
And—if the zombies were supposed to finally settle on this room, if this room was where they were supposed to end up, then wouldn’t they still be here?
Jory made himself breathe, breathe.
No, he told himself. If they’d already been here, then he wouldn’t be. If they’d already been in here, then the door wouldn’t have been open. The novitiates wouldn’t have been idling around the courtyard, anyway.
Unless it took X amount of time for the dead to find the door again.
Maybe that was how Jory was supposed to have gotten the virus. Not a black vial of infection at all, but one of the dead flashing through the door, catching his unclerical scent. Passing all the priests by, going straight for the new meat.
That would mean this wasn’t a room at all, but a hall. A tunnel.
Keeping his right hand to the cinder block, Jory felt along it, away from the door. Deeper, deeper, the floor grading down under him, making each step so easy, like falling.
There was no corner, no back wall. At least not yet. Not this far.
Jory rushed back to the door he knew, slammed the side of his fist into it. Finally collapsed in front of it, sobbing.
“You have to let me see her!” he screamed into the wood. “I brought you the knife!”
No response.
The door w
ouldn’t so much as shake, no matter how hard he rammed into it. His voice just slipped away behind him, echoing down the walls. Calling up whatever was down there, surely.
“Okay, okay,” he said, his hands in his hair.
Okay.
If—if this was the pit or tunnel or cell or whatever where they kept their pet zombies, their dead altar boys, then that meant the next time the crossbar came up, that he’d have company, right? Dead company. Hungry company.
Jory bounced up and down with nerves.
That was the only answer though.
The next time that door opened, he was food.
“Breathe, breathe,” he said out loud, trying to use his nose for in, his mouth for out.
After a few cycles of that he could stand.
Moving slow, he found the right wall with his whole hand, then just with the fingertips of his index and middle fingers.
“Linse,” he said, looking down the slope he could only feel with his feet, “I’m coming, baby,” and started walking. Slow at first, then faster, until the ground leveled out under him and he could run without jamming his knees, his fingertips crumbling old cinder block from the wall. At least until he tripped on a root or something, went spinning into the middle space, what he’d been thinking of as the dead space.
Totally lost now. No direction whatsoever.
He kept to his knees and hands, unsure if the ceiling was even tall enough here.
What he’d tripped on, it was a pelvis. Human. Gnaw marks on the thicker parts, where the muscle had tried to hold on.
Jory pushed it away, stood to run, ran flat into the wall, spun back to the ground again.
This time he stayed there.
More breathing. In, out; in, out.
Finally he stood again, found the wall with his raw fingertips again, and started walking, walking for what felt like hours, until the ground sloped up like it was taking him somewhere, delivering him from this cursed place.
He stepped faster, faster, running now, and it was pure luck his free arm felt the wood door, giving him just enough time and space to roll into it with his shoulder, the fabric there spiking brighter, so that, from the ground, he could see the same gouges, the same iron shackles. The same door he’d shut on himself.
The Gospel of Z Page 18