The Gospel of Z

by Stephen Graham Jones

  When the zombie caught Jory’s scent, started its lunge, the handler set its boots but its boots didn’t set.

  “Oh,” Hillford said, his right arm rising as if to stop this from happening.

  In slow motion, almost, the handler fell on its ass, hard enough to shake the whole house, the whole neighborhood, its thick arms flailing back in a most human way, the zombie getting enough slack to gather its legs under it, really pull, the handler spinning sideways from that tight chain.

  Jory fell back, dropping the helmet, trying to get the torch between himself and this zombie—blind, just following its nose—and almost had it, his finger digging for the trigger when the handler slapped an ogre hand back, clamped it on to the doorframe, the wood and paneling there splintering, but the stud buried in there was enough. It held.

  The zombie came up short, snapping at the air, Jory kicking away from that air. Hillford helped him stand and Jory pushed away from him as well, almost stumbled into the burning couch from the effort.

  “Jory fucking Gray!”

  It was Mayner.

  Jory looked down to the helmet, where his name wasn’t coming from, and then to the stoop, where it was coming from.

  Against every regulation, Mayner was standing in the doorway. When the scene should have been coded minutes ago.

  “Everything cool in here?” Mayner asked, the zombie catching his scent now too, trying to turn, come up its own chain. The handler slammed it to the ground, put a boot to its neck, the zombie squealing, clawing at the handler’s leg, the handler hardly even noticing.

  “No, it pretty much sucks in here,” Jory said, just as a bullet splashed through Mayner’s shoulder at some three thousand feet per second, spinning him half around, pinning him to the wall for a moment.

  “No!” Jory screamed, stepping forward, Hillford taking him by the shoulders now, keeping him from the zombie’s reach.

  “Mayner!” Jory called across the room, fighting his way to the side, trying to edge around the handler, around the zombie’s teeth. Because Hillford wouldn’t let go, Jory was dragging him step by step, the zombie cringing away from Hillford enough that the handler staggered forward, letting itself be dragged onto the carpet proper, its small eyes fixed on something Jory couldn’t worry about right now.

  Scanlon’s men, they were shooting Mayner.

  “You sons of bitches!” Jory screamed through the doorway, and started to step through, the torch already low and deadly against his leg, only to have the wood beside his face explode, slamming splinters into his face.

  “Go, go,” Mayner said from the ground, waving Jory back in. A long smear of his blood down the wall behind him. “I got it, man. It’s cool, it’s cool.”

  Jory set his feet, opened his torch out into the night, the flame reaching all the way across the lawn, and kept pulling the trigger, even after the flame sucked back, the autocool kicking in, saving the barrel.

  And then, with that flame off, it was darker than before. But Mayner was still there, pushed up against the wall now. Trying to shake a cigarette up to his mouth, the cigarette falling again and again, but finally sticking to his lips, to the blood on his lips.

  “What do you think?” Mayner said then, to Jory, holding his face up for a light, from the torch, face-on, and Jory shook his head no, that he wasn’t going to kill him, wasn’t going to put him out of this misery, but he clicked the flame back on anyway, just for a light.

  The flame didn’t come.

  “Perfect,” Jory said, looking down to the torch, still humming with coolant, “trust the military to—” and another bullet slapped into Mayner, through the same exact hole in his shoulder, it looked like. Then, deeper inside the house, scattering pans in some cabinet.

  Mayner kept the cigarette up somehow, pointed it down to the toe of his boot, hot enough from Jory’s last burn to, when he held the cigarette there, trail smoke up.

  He brought the cigarette up, breathed it red. He coughed it back out like a pro, waving Jory back into the house, away from the porch.

  “You know why I’m here?” Jory said then, back to Hillford, Hillford’s dead hand still on Jory’s shoulder, keeping him alive.

  “Of course,” Hillford said, distracted again. “Your general, he thinks that if he can wipe away the last of the original three, then that will unmoor the Church’s hold on the people he considers his.”

  “The three from the Dead Sea,” Jory mumbled.

  “Nothing so grand,” Hillford said, “but yes, I believe that’s what it’s called in the secular tongue. But your general has a poor understanding, a weak grasp, at best, if he thinks this Church of man needs him meddling in our destiny. In the destiny of humankind, what’s left of it.”

  “You sound like him,” Jory said, another bullet drilling into the doorframe, just a friendly reminder.

  Hillford reached around, swung the door closed without looking. His real attention was behind them, again.

  “He can’t code us now,” Jory said, looking at the dead torch in his hands. But then Hillford was pawing back, his hand stiffening on Jory’s shoulder.

  “Jory Gray,” he said.

  It was the first time Jory had heard anything but smugness in Hillford’s voice.

  He looked up, understood—the handler, that great oversized child. It was hovering its massive hand over the two blades sheathed into the arm of the white chair. The zombie was tearing meat from Timothy’s thigh, holding its head back to get its throat straight enough to swallow.

  “So—so I guess he’s not infected then,” Jory said, his voice detached from his thoughts.

  Hillford just stepped forward, as if the world were suddenly made of the most delicate glass.

  The handler looked up, its eyes the eyes of a dog, considering the lasagna that had just dripped from the table. A dog, thinking it can still slurp most of it up, if it tries. If it’s fast enough.

  “No!” Hillford said across to the handler, his voice booming with authority, the rest of him stepping closer, his long white hand reaching closer than that, and the handler understood, got the tone anyway, like a dog will, but then, for an instant, it regained that most essential part of its humanity—it disobeyed. It reached down and plucked the white blade up, studying its length, its curve, touching the tip with its other hand, the sharpness piercing the thick leather of the glove, sliding into flesh.

  Hillford stopped his approach. Drew his hand up to cover where his mouth would have been. Where it was, behind the mask.

  The handler held its cut finger up, so the metal-flaked blood could drop down onto the blade. So it could watch the pretty colors.

  “Henh,” it said, its zombie still tearing into Timothy’s thigh. The zombie’s grate was kicked back somehow, its blinders flapping.

  This is exactly what was supposed to happen, Jory knew. How Scanlon was going to decommission this purposely defective handler. Along with all the other problems in the room. It was efficient. Very military. One stone, all the birds.

  “So…so I guess I should burn him now,” Jory said, pointing with his torch to Timothy.

  “Do you know why I’m here, Jory Gray?” Hillford said over his shoulder, palming his boneface mask away, shrugging out of his robe, letting it pool at his feet. His body was just as rotten as his face. No skin left at all, just pain, the kind you have to clean with maggots, if you clean it at all. Like one of the Pharaoh vultures, stripped of its oily black feathers.

  Except the fingers, and the lower legs.

  They were prosthetics. Like the one Timothy had found. Like the one Timothy had desecrated.

  “You were never burned,” Jory said, that last domino falling. “Jakarta. Leprosy. Armor—armadillos.”

  “I’m here for this,” Hillford said, not looking away from the handler for an instant, his strangely jointed plastic fingers working the leather straps cutting into his leg stumps, then the rest of him stepping down off the ritual mannequin legs, so that he barely came up to Jory’s chest now
.

  He bit his plastic fingers off, one by one, spit them out.

  “This is the hand of man,” he said then, flexing his finger stumps, “not the hand of God. If this, as you call it, your virus, if it goes radioborne, as it will in this unnatural host, because it always finds a way, then, then these monstrosities, they and their kin, they will devour the world, Jory Gray. Keep the next one from happening at all.”

  “Radio?” Jory said. “But, it’s not infected, it can’t get—”

  “Tell your general about this,” Hillford said, standing on his leg stumps now, “tell him how one of us saved his precious world,” and then, more agile than made any sense, he was across the room, within reach of the handler, ducking under its great arms for the black blade and rolling through, the stuffing from the arm of the chair hanging in the air behind him.

  The handler, still fascinated by its own finger blood, tracked all this a moment too late. Only looked to this disturbance when Hillford was already monkeying up its back, pulling that crusted black blade across its throat, deep enough to draw sparks.

  A black line of blood smiled across the room at Jory, the zombie twitching up to this new smell, and then the handler fell, first to one knee, then just forward, the zombie scuttling out of the way at the last instant. Enough slack now to sink its teeth into Timothy’s midsection, tear into the guts proper, its chin strap keeping it from taking too much intestine at once. But enough.

  Jory, like he was drunk, found Hillford again. The piece of blackened jerky that had been Hillford, anyway.

  He was behind the fallen handler, his finger stumps to the handler’s lower back, as if listening. Communing.

  “What do you mean ‘radio’,” Jory said. “The virus can’t, it couldn’t—handlers can’t catch it anyway.”

  “Your torch,” Hillford said, cutting Jory off. “How long does your torch’s reignition sequence take?”

  “My torch?” Jory said, looking down at it like he’d just found it.

  Hillford thinned what he had for lips, said, “One blade for life, Jory Gray. And one for death.”

  Jory tracked down to the white blade on the carpet.

  It was curved like a baculum, like a saber tooth, like a toilet bowl.

  “No,” he said out loud, looking from the white blade to Hillford’s white mask, on the floor beside it, “like a rib.”

  Because bone, it can carry the virus for ten years.

  “Scanlon was right,” he said to Hillford, in awe. “You have been raising them. With—with an infected…you kill them with the, with the black one, then, then you nick their heart with the white one. Not to let the scent circulate, but because the virus won’t circulate in a dead, in a dead…”

  “Your instrument, Jory Gray.”

  Jory looked down to the torch again. “It’s just, you push a button,” he said, his index finger suddenly numb, feeling on the stock, just forward of the trigger guard. Turning the headlight off instead, so that Hillford was only lit by the burning couch now. A demon, scuttling around a fallen giant.

  “The flame, Jory Gray!” Hillford said then, a new urgency to his voice.

  Jory felt forward, finally turned the torch over, held it between his legs, couldn’t see anything.

  “Now!” Hillford said, harsh enough that Jory just pushed all the buttons he could find, until the flame burbled on, sent a fountain of incendiary heat into the ceiling, through the ceiling, up into the night.

  When he lowered it, he understood the urgency in Hillford’s voice.

  The handler was writhing, its head creaking over. A groan building in its throat. And then the sensors lining its arteries detected the virus, sent out the lockdown alert.

  Like it was supposed to, like Jory’d seen in the faith sessions, the handler went into forced rigor.

  It was ugly, and looked painful. If they could feel. If it wasn’t already dead.

  After about ten seconds, though, the handler’s massive arm creaked up, fought through the rigor.

  The next fail-safe was the one Jory’d done himself, once upon a time—the incendiary device in the handler’s skull.

  It went with that same muted pop.

  Black blood seeped from the handler’s eyes, then its ears, and it collapsed.

  “Gotta love the tech,” Jory said to himself.

  But the virus was better. The virus didn’t give up.

  Not this strain anyway. It was straight from the rib of Typhoid Z. From Kitten Man’s lost brother.

  The handler got its arms under itself, started to rise. It was impossible, but so was the handler.

  “What’s meant to be, always happens,” Hillford said, resorting to scripture for strength, and looked importantly across to Jory, then stepped aside, giving the torch room. But his legs were short now, his steps not as wide.

  The handler’s hand slashed back, not slow anymore at all.

  It crunched around Hillford’s stump, pulled him to itself. Then it stood holding Hillford like that, Hillford coming up with the blade, planting it in the handler’s left eye socket, the handler stumbling back, falling to one knee, but then plucking the blade out. Crushing it, the massive veins in its forearm standing out like cables. Veins Jory had sculpted, in a former life.

  “I will,” Jory said to Hillford, “I’ll tell Scanlon,” and then he raised the torch. The handler stepped forward, onto Hillford’s wrist, and pulled straight up on the leg he was clamped on to.

  Hillford ripped in half, had been made of old black taffy, his blood sludge, his heart surely massive to have even pumped it once.

  And then the handler fell again, was pulled sideways, the zombie screeching away from the scent of the ceremonial leprosy Hillford had been cultivating inside himself. That all the armadillos up the Hill probably carried as well, Jory heard part of himself registering. Little guards, their scent the best wall.

  The handler looked along the chain to the zombie, and pulled it into the wall hard enough that the wall didn’t stop it. The zombie crashed through, disappeared. But it was still leashed. It anchored the handler there for the moment.

  Jory stepped forward, shaking his head no, his teeth set, his feet trying to get that way.

  “Hey, you,” he said, and the handler actually turned its block of a head around.

  Jory pulled the trigger, the flame punching hard, driving the handler down, cooking it, the rest of the room baking, melting, drooping into its next shape.

  And then it was over.

  The autocool kicked on again. Jory let the trigger go, stumbled sideways, half into Timothy, came up with his goggles. He held them to his mouth, just as Timothy’s arm jerked back, the bicep contracting.

  Jory stood, shaking his head no, and directed the torch down, right into Timothy’s opened stomach, pulled the trigger.

  Nothing. Autocool.

  “No, no,” Jory said, more of Timothy creaking now. Waking.

  Jory looked around the room for something, anything, and there was only fire, enough that he finally had to pull Timothy’s stupid goggles on to keep the smoke out.

  “Well then,” Jory said, and dragged what was left of Timothy into what was left of the couch, left him crackling there, the flames finding him almost immediately, making him the new bright spot in the room.

  Jory stood, nowhere to sit. Nowhere to be.

  “I’ll tell him,” he said again to Hillford, his upper half discarded beside the chair. Hillford blinked once.

  Jory stepped over him, dug around for the mask, set it back on Hillford’s face, then, the torch still humming by his thigh, he collected the prosthetic leg Timothy had found.

  It was heavy, solid. Would stop maybe one of the hundred bullets spiraling in for him the instant he stepped out onto the porch.

  Unless he stayed here forever.

  He laughed once, picturing it—him, moving through the kitchen, studying the pantry; him, ducking under all the laser sights coming through the windows, trying to balance a can of peas across to
his new favorite chair—and then he heard it through the hiss of the flames, through Timothy’s bones popping, spitting marrow up, and he lost his smile.

  He cocked the goggles up onto his forehead, squinted through the heat.

  The handler was moving. But—but not on its own.

  The zombie on the other side of the wall was pulling on its chain, the welded-shut shackle digging into the handler’s fried wrist. Finally pulling through that wrist, the thick bones there cracking with a thud, the leather and flesh stringing away, the zombie falling back, finally free.

  Jory fell back too. The other way.

  From the zombie’s side of the house now was the sound of breakage, of panic. The zombie was running that domestic labyrinth and doubling back over and over, no system at all.

  Jory raised the torch, directed it down the hall, but the autocool was still humming, the torch too hot to use.

  Jory shook it, slammed the butt on the ground, insisting.

  Nothing.

  Glass was breaking, back in some bedroom, but there were bars on the windows, on all the windows.

  Jory had seconds, less.

  He fell forward a bit, weak, and caught himself on the torch, his other hand groping down into Hillford’s midsection by accident.

  Jory brought that hand up, studied it. Looked down the hall again.

  “Henh,” he said, the handler’s term.

  Breathing in once and promising to hold that breath forever, he pulled the goggles back down and applied Hillford’s gore to his face, to his chest, and dipped down for more, and more, covering himself in the only religion left to man.

  An instant later, the zombie was tearing down the hall on all fours.

  Jory waited, calm, defeated, ready if it had to be like this, and the zombie, graceful as any cat ever was, vaulted through the doorway, caught the scent midair and contorted itself around the source of that scent, sliding close enough by Jory that one of its zipper handles plinked against Jory’s goggles. And then it tumbled into the kitchen.