The Gospel of Z

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Jory tracked it, brought the torch’s headlight up. Found the zombie on all fours in the narrow passage between the granite countertop and the pantry door.

  Its chain was hooked on some wreckage back in the darkness, but it was pulling through, dragging whatever it was into the light.

  Until Jory was standing there.

  The zombie recoiled from the smell, hissed, lowered its chest to the tile, its legs cocked under it.

  “There, girl,” Jory said—it was female, had been—“this’ll only,” and he settled the torch onto the zombie’s face. Its leather headgear was all burned off, its shaved scalp crawling with heat, with fireworms.

  Before, in another world, Jory had told his daughter that when you stared at the sun, the fireworms would crawl in your eyelids, and you had to look away, rub them out, or they’d stay forever.

  But—this was no place to think of her.

  Except it was.

  Heterochromia. One blue eye from her mom, one brown from Jory, each pupil contracting from the torch’s headlight.

  This was Scanlon’s insurance, to make sure the call fell apart. To make sure Jory did, that he had nothing left to live for.

  But Hillford would have to have killed her first. Pushed her through, given her over. Sent her into the tunnel after Jory, to close the circle.

  “Linse,” Jory said, his hand reaching across for her, the hand he’d painted himself with. “Linsey.”

  Linse snarled, cowered down farther.

  “Baby doll,” Jory said, and dropped down to his knees before her. Closed his eyes.

  She cringed back, the chain getting enough slack to tink onto the tile floor. Whatever it was hooked on was about to let go.

  “I’m sorry, girl,” Jory said, his headlight tracking up the length of the chain, to the chrome bar stool, tangled in with an unlikely pile of chrome bar stools. The whole pile giving.

  And he pulled the trigger.

  Still nothing.

  Jory shook his head no, but reached behind him anyway, for whatever there was—the prosthetic leg. Holding it by the cupped upper calf, his hands looped in the straps, he brought the heel down on the back of his daughter’s head, on the back of Linse’s head, on the back of Linsey’s head, into the zipper pull burned into her scalp like a chrome barrette. Again and again and again, until she stopped trying to rise, until the lenses of his goggles were splattered. The chrome stools in the darkness avalanched down at last, the chain letting them go.

  Jory reeled the chain in, stood with Linse in his arms.

  He made his way to Hillford’s robe and used it like a sheet, wound her in it, covering her face last. Kissing her cloth forehead.

  It was over.

  “Linse,” he said again, and heard his own name back.

  Mayner.

  In the helmet.

  “Hey,” Jory said, raising the goggles again, to scan the wreckage for the helmet. “You’re, you’re at the jeep?”

  “Old drivers never die, ” Mayner said, then couldn’t find the other end of it. Lost it in some bloody coughing, it sounded like. And laughter.

  Jory smiled, smoothed Linse’s sheet over her face. Pressed his forehead to hers—this is what he should have done ten years ago—and only looked up when the light in the room changed. The flames crackling in a different way, like somebody else was here.

  “No,” Jory said, looking up. “No no no…”

  Rising from the other side of the room, against all logic, against all biology, was the handler. It’s skin caking away, ash. Metal underneath. Miles of cable, years of technology, months of effort. An undead juggernaut, finding its feet again.

  Jory shook his head no, pulled Linse closer, and then lunged forward for the torch, the commotion bringing the handler’s head around.

  No eyes. Hillford had gored one out. Jory had burned the other. Black tears spilled down into the handler’s mouth, the handler tasting them, angling its head up to catch them, try to bite into them. Getting its own lip instead, and tearing it away. Swallowing, the unholy jolt of its own flesh throwing it back for a moment. Expanding its chest. Lighting fire to its hunger. The kind that can burn the world down.

  Jory climbed his hand down the torch, clicked the ignite button—nothing.

  Again, again. Just the sound, pulling the handler’s massive head around.

  Jory lowered the torch slowly, Linse still hugged to his chest, and sat there, the handler moving on all fours now, like a gorilla, feeling through the rubble, trying to locate them.

  “Shh, shh,” Jory said to Linse, to Linsey, rocking her, and the handler ambled over, was right to them now, trying to smell but its nose was burned shut.

  Then another shot outside, and another, whipping into metal.

  The jeep.

  Its windshield went next, a very distinct sound, the shattered glass taking forever to settle on the hood.

  And now Mayner’s voice was coming through the helmet. He was breathing hard, laughing into the mic. Dying, and loving it.

  Jory narrowed his eyes, couldn’t say anything back.

  The handler pawed away a smoldering cushion, uncovered the helmet, that sound. It lowered its face to it but then took a couple of fast, grunting steps to the doorway, more shots out there, drawing it to where it could never go. To where it would never stop. If viruses can have hope, Jory said in his head, to a class that wasn’t there, if they can dream, then this is the host it’s been waiting all these years for. The perfect killing machine. The one that can never be put down. That doesn’t know how to die.

  Jory jabbed his hand out, whispered the helmet to him, cupped the headset in his hand.

  “Hey, driver,” he said.

  “Check,” Mayner croaked.

  “I ever, I ever tell you I’m, that I’m really a Viking?” Jory said.

  “Thought you, thought you were Indian or something,” Mayner coughed back. From a firing-line cigarette probably. And being shot twice. Maybe three or four times by now.

  “No, Viking, definitely. All the way through. Until the end, I mean. The very end.”

  The handler craned its head back to Jory’s whisper.

  Mayner grunted something that meant he understood. And, “I said I’m not doing that.”

  “You have to, man,” Jory said, rolling over to lie alongside the torch, spin the canister off, into his hand. The jelly sloshing in there, cold, pressurized to the moon. “Just count to ten, man, count to ten, and then punch it, I’ll be gone before the code ever gets here. There’s the delay.”

  “I told you.”

  “You have to.”

  Beat, beat, the world hanging in the balance here.

  “You’ll be gone?” Mayner said finally.

  “Already am. Promise.”

  “Can I count to seventeen instead?” Mayner croaked out.

  Jory settled the canister into the helmet, patted it twice. “Just keep talking,” he said, “keep this channel—” but then the handler was there, walking on his knuckles, on his wrist stump, blotting out the hole burned in the roof. Lowering its face to Jory, finding Linse instead. Flinching back from her scent, Jory closing his eyes. And not going anywhere, like he’d promised.

  Mayner out there in the floorboard of the jeep, counting into the mic for everybody to hear, “Sixteen, fifteen.” Shots drilling through his seats, splintering his dash.

  “Fourteen,” he said, reaching a bloody arm up to the keypad, a red dot centering on it, blasting that keypad away.

  “Fuckers,” Mayner said, “ten,” then, digging the wiring harness out from under the steering column, touching this one to that one, no hesitation at all, he finally answered Jory, what he’d been, before—“Electrician.”

  Ten counts later, Jory saw it, we all could have seen it, if we’d known to watch—three tiny missiles, whistling up into the sky over New Haven Street, twisting through each other’s white exhaust, then reaching an apex, hanging there a moment, before slamming back down like judgment, the handl
er’s wide back directly below, its face held down to the small voice in the helmet, to Mayner saying “run” over and over. “Now now now. You promised. Where are you, you goddamn, red ass—”

  Jory heard, but just held Linse closer, snuggled the aviator goggles down into place one last time, and twisted an eyebolt deeper into the four-by-four of his backyard fence, deep enough to hold him this time, he thought. Him and her both.

  After

  The movies got one thing right, though, the pirate DJ says, his chin still stubbly against that metal screen.

  The part about nothing ever being the same again.

  The part about how people, we always find a way to live.

  None of them ever mentioned the sky though.

  That, with the dead crawling over the face of the earth, the skies would be empty again. Just a quiet place to look, always there if you needed to lose yourself for a moment. For a day.

  It matters.

  And below that sky, all of us.

  A hulking young man, say. He’s not so complicated. His hair hasn’t been shaved down to whitewalls yet. He’s standing over his mother’s bed, the one she’s had since she was a girl herself, Juliet woodburned in flourishes into the headboard. Her wrists and ankles tied with shoestrings and thick rope, and they need to be tied. The knots are knotted over and over. An axe is in that young man’s hand, and his eyes are red, and the door’s closing behind him, because he needs his privacy for this.

  Another guy, short and wiry, ragged from days of fighting to live, he’s bursting into a church, a zombie priest looking up from its bloody meal, that wiry dude not even hesitating, just tearing a giant cross from the wall, running at the priest with it, the priest’s mouth and chin and chest bloody, strings of meat matted in, the wiry dude yelling so that that’s all there is to hear anymore.

  And more.

  A congregation of dusty, headless parishioners, waiting for mass.

  A young guy with angry pink hair, shooting flames up a hill, a young girl up there on the wall, touching her own scalp, in memory.

  A wife sitting in her living room, the house’s windows boarded up, the news on like always, but she can see her husband’s reflection in it too. Can see him approaching from the kitchen, soup in one hand, a pistol unsure in the other, but he loves her, she knows he loves her, so she doesn’t turn around, doesn’t want this to be hard for him.

  And there’s a hammer, rusting in the tall yellow grass at the foot of a tall silver water tower, the seedheads swaying above it, rustling.

  A glass coffin in a dark bar, a drink set on top of it, a slow, desiccated hand reaching up as if to hold that glass, keep it from falling through.

  Three tall white priests at night, walking through the tall door of a reinforced fence, a writhing sea of bodies waiting for them on the other side.

  There’s a mom rushing through school, finding her daughter—it’s a Friday, so she’s in uniform—a terror rolling up the hall behind them, the mom at the last instant opening a locker, standing her daughter up inside. Kissing that locker after it’s closed and then looking up into a sea of death, already splashing at her ankles.

  She could have been any of us. She’s all of us.

  And, and. A tall man in a deep cell, hugging a grimy arm cast to his face, never letting it go, and—and on the seventh day, in the upper world, after lights out, a new recruit is rolling through the AM band, the veteran calling down from the top bunk to give it up, that there’s nothing tolerable on anymore, this new recruit looking back to the dial anyway, sure he heard something the other night, something good.

  It was about before. The past.

  And then he pulls it down from the atmosphere, the veteran swinging his legs off the top bunk, his hands clamped to the side of that thin mattress, his shirt tied around his head like a turban.

  “No, no, there,” the veteran says, and the new recruit turns it up, looks out the open door of their bunkhouse for anybody who might be walking by, a habit that used to get him in trouble at school, and then the pirate DJ who doesn’t know the mic that well, he’s on again.

  The story tonight’s a continuation of last time.

  A faceless father from the past, impossibly tall, and thin, frail almost, answering the door.

  It’s two military police, and, between them, a military man, a certain faceless hero of a general, and his neck, it’s been torn open in the most crude way, like with a shiv made from a plastic spoon or something, so this general’s had to pack it with gauze, then tape that gauze down. But still it’s bleeding through.

  “He’s got long arms, right?” this father says to the general, about his wound. “Can reach farther than you’d think?”

  The general’s too exhausted for this.

  The father leans sideways, eyeing all the olive drab machinery at his curb.

  “You brought the army,” he says.

  “I am the army,” the general says back, his face grim in the sunlight, the plastic skin around his eyes drawn tight.

  The father nods, kind of knew this.

  “I don’t know where he is,” he says, his voice so fake.

  “We know he had a, a girlfriend,” the general says.

  “Heard he might have a special someone,” this father says, like offering condolences, then shrugs one thin shoulder. “Beijing?” he asks. “London, Cameroon, St. Petersburg? Edmonton? New York?”

  “Son,” the general says.

  “Sir,” this father says back, and, after a standoff that’s never going to go anywhere, the general turns, walks back to his convoy, the father’s son stepping into the doorway now, to stand in front of the dad, the cast on his arm still new, except one signature—B R I A N.

  “Is he there yet, Dad?” the son asks, and the father looks at his watch, out to the east, and says, “Right about now,” and goddamn if he isn’t right. Halfway around the world, a ridiculously tall, white door is opening for a man just as tall, a dark woman running through, into his arms, one of that place’s priests stepping out to chaperone this reunion, his skin mummied in gauze so that there’s only his black-rimmed eyes, looking up into the sky. Into the future.

  And then the rest.

  The planes falling into buildings, the cities burning, a child running into the night for his mother, his back flayed open to the night.

  It’s the story we all know, except this time, this time it ends with a crater up in Residential, a crater that used to be a wide, low house, the soldiers walking away from it, their red dots scratching the surface of the ground all around them.

  This is where the world almost ended again.

  And where it begins.

  There’s a huge white egg buried in those warm ashes, see, its shell shiny, once fabric, a miracle of technology.

  A damaged man, a father himself, tears his way up from that shell, stands into the night and peels his antique goggles off, looks around at a world made new, then walks off into it, to spread the gospel, to whisper it into the airwaves, infect mankind with something new—the truth. That’s what’s going radioborne tonight, this DJ says.

  “Shit,” the new recruit says, looking up to the veteran, this reprobate, who’s smiling now, biting his lower lip.

  He shakes his head no to this baby torch, says, “He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t want you to talk like that, man.”

  “What are you saying?” the new recruit says, looking to the door again. Out into the world. “You mean, is he—is that—?”

  The veteran laughs, folding his shoulders around it, and slides down from his bunk, stands at the door, his bare back scarred deep and regular, a game he was never supposed to have lived through, a game that makes the young recruit lick his lips, look away.

  “Give em hell, Teach,” this veteran says out into the night. “Give em hell, man.”

  Thanks thanks thanks

  To Bobby Knight in Lubbock, Texas. You were a model. To Brenda Mills, for telling me this was too broken. You were right. To my agent Kate Garrick,
for targeting the one broken place that could fix the rest. To Pablo D’Stair and Sarah D’Stair, for navigating some David Bowie/legal stuff. To Robert Gatewood, for working with me on draft after draft of this. To Jesse Lawrence and Christopher O’Riley, for early reads. To Max Brooks and Robert Kirkman and George Romero, for making the world a better place to not be dead in. To Karl Fischer, for relaying something he learned in Paul Youngquist’s class, that made me finally understand this story I was trying to tell here. To Paul Tremblay. To Adam Cesare. To Cain Marko, for being Cain Marko. To my colleague Charles Evered, for episode 5.10 of Monk. That could be where this whole thing started. But it could have been Bowie, or it could have been Metallica. To Joe Lansdale, for showing me how to be a writer. To Jerry Reed, for getting me through the hard parts of this, and to the Drive-By Truckers, for “Sinkhole,” and to Benjamin Whitmer, for introducing me to it. But Bob Seger’s “Beautiful Loser” helped as well, as it does with everything. And, without Don D’Auria talking to me in a lobby in New York once, saying I should send him something, then this wouldn’t exist, like this. And to Jory, for letting me write about him. I hope I got Linsey right, man. She can live forever now. And thanks to my kids, Rane and Kinsey, for tolerating me talking about zombies over dinner every night, and to my wife, Nancy, for getting up at so many three in the mornings, to walk them back to their beds, because they’d somehow got scared.

  Me too, guys. Always and forever.

  stephengrahamjones

  boulder, co 2008 – 2013

  About the Author

  Stephen Graham Jones is the author of thirteen novels and four collections. Most recent are The Least of My Scars, Flushboy, and Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth. Jones has been a Stoker Award finalist, a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, a Colorado Book Award finalist, and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and an NEA Fellowship in Fiction. Jones has some hundred and fifty stories published. He teaches in the MFA programs at CU Boulder and UCR-Palm Desert. He’s from West Texas but lives now in Boulder, Colorado. More at www.demontheory.com or @SGJ72.