Chapter Twenty-Five

Downtown was ready to explode. There were more people in the streets than Jory’d seen since the last wave. And not all of them had been people then.

“Z Day,” Mayner tour-guided needlessly, tiptoeing the jeep through the rubble.

Jory watched the clumps of bodies smear by, some of them wearing dug-up Halloween masks. Skeletons, ghouls. The hungry dead.

“Ten years,” he said at last, then turned to Mayner. “Ever think we’d make it this far?”

“We haven’t yet,” Mayner said, braking hard for a kid in a cape, scuttling from curb to curb. He was running from a ghoul-faced reaper, the reaper the kid’s mom or dad, just trying to catch the kid. But when that mom or dad leaned down to pick the kid up, they had to lean down on their scythe. The kid ran screaming away again.

There were soldiers too, AWOL from base, bottles in one hand, guns in the other.

By tomorrow, it would be a parade. Fires, drinking, accidental deaths.

We’d made it, yeah. We were back.

Jory shook his head, kept his hand clamped to the fold-down windshield frame.

The Church was just coming into view, still these holy flashes of white through the broken buildings. But they had to slow for more soldiers first. Ones who had started earlier, come farther. A mass of civilians was circling them, cheering them on. Flames gouting up into the sky.

“That’s a torch,” Jory said, holding his hand out for Mayner to stop. Both of them stood in their seats to see, but didn’t really want to see.

It was a female zombie. She was chained at the neck, the last ten feet of the four chains running through pipe, to maintain a no-bite zone. Four soldiers were manning those chains, keeping her in the middle for the other soldiers, darting in with heated-up crowbars and crackling Hot Shots. Going by the chant seeping in, they were trying to get her to dance, to take it off.

“Friends of yours?” Mayner said.

“She’s not even alive,” Jory said back.

“‘She’,” Mayner repeated, then sat back down, harder than he needed to.

A soldier with a liberated shovel came down hard on the zombie’s right knee, folding it in. The crowd screamed with joy when she tried to stand up on it again, and again.

A few steps farther back, with the torch, was the punk, his mohawk pink now, and straight up. No—erect.

“Blaine,” Jory remembered, seeing him now.

A few steps over from him, watching all this, proctoring it, was Voss.

He looked up, past all this, to the antibody Jory was, and touched his own forehead, anointing it, telling Jory he remembered. That he wasn’t going to forget. Then he nodded to the zombie, for Jory to join the festivities.

“In or out, man,” Mayner called up.

Jory didn’t answer.

One of the soldiers had a gaff, it looked like. This far inland. He was hooking it into the zombie’s stomach, already oozing who knew what.

“No,” Jory said, but the soldier got a loop of black intestine all the same, started working it out until it spilled at the zombie’s feet.

When she tried to come up the gaff and grab him, her feet tangled in the guts and she fell, as much as she could on the chains. She slashed ahead with her hands. Snarling, snapping, screaming.

Jory sat back down, closed his eyes. Mayner started to let the clutch out, but Jory shook his head, held his hand out for the brake again.

“What?” Mayner asked.

Jory stood back up. With the torch, the one he’d gotten from Glasses.

“Gimme a sec here,” he said, stepping down, his first footfall into the street thunderous, at least to him. What he was doing here was deciding to be one person, not another. It wasn’t an easy thing. And there was no going back.

He wanted to be human though.

Not a monster, like the world wanted him to be.

The crowd parted for his bubbling flame, and then he was ringside.

“Good, good,” Voss said, his arms crossed, and Jory nodded, looked over to the punk, his face rabid with this fun. And then he studied this zombie.

Her black intestines were still spilling. She didn’t even know, not in any real way.

“Cauterize that wound for her, son?” Voss said.

“Yes, sir,” Jory said, and opened the throat of his torch as wide as it would go, the soldiers all cheering at first, the ones in the back shielding their eyes from the heat. The cheering trailed down to nothing. Just the pop and the sizzle of dry meat burning.

Jory held the trigger until the soldiers holding the chains had to drop them.

Towards the end of it, before autocool, Voss was just staring through that wavering air at Jory. Jory just stared back.

“Shit, man…” the punk whined, letting the tip of his barrel fall.

The crowd was murmuring. Looking around. Blinking from the oily residue in the air.

“Feel better?” Voss said into that new silence.

“Not even a little,” Jory said, and shrugged out of his torch, left it there. Didn’t look back.

One day short of ten years was how long it had been since Black Friday then.

Every hour of that had been a miracle.

 

 

Maybe two blocks from the Hill, the crowds thin enough to chug along at twenty. Mayner stood on the jeep’s brakes, slid them to a stop.

Jory caught himself on the dash, rocked back in his seat.

“Dude, I can just, you know, walk,” he cobbled together, from awkwardness and apology, then tracked over to what had Mayner’s fascination—the green X spray-painted on the side of a burned-out apartment building. One of Scanlon’s crematoriums probably. A historic battlefield.

Jory’d walked by it on the way to the parking garage, twice in the last five days.

“You used to work Disposal, right?” Mayner said, still not looking away.

Jory shrugged sure. It was what the green X meant—this building was ready, was going to fall on some other, still-good building if something wasn’t done. “They never get to these though,” he said. “Heavy equipment, squatters, collateral damage.”

“They’re going to tear it down,” Mayner said in something like wonder, making his fist into a tube to breathe through.

“You know this place?” Jory said, looking up to the building again.

Mayner straightened his right leg against the floorboard, pushed hard enough to work his wallet out. Thumb his license up onto the dash.

—3315 Delany.

Exactly what the big brass letters by the bright green X read.

“Shit,” Jory said. “Sorry, man.”

Mayner nodded like it was no big thing, but then said, “You really anxious to get up there?”—the Hill.

Jory leaned back farther, cocking his knees against the dash. “Go,” he said.

He didn’t have to say it twice.

Mayner slid a sidearm out from under the dash and set it on the console for Jory, then climbed down and crossed in front of the jeep, running his hand along the grill guard, like still holding on to now. But when he stepped up onto the sidewalk, looking both ways before moving on, Jory knew he was gone. Into the past.

And, this pistol.

Jory took it up. Sighted along its spine.

Another reason Disposal had been created was population control. Not the old kind, trying to get people to quit birthing more mouths to feed, but the new kind, where you kept people from killing themselves. Kept them from, once a zone was cleared, sneaking back into their old bedroom, hanging themselves.

Jory understood, kind of.

His old neighborhood had burned, but still. He’d gone back and stood there, let the old days rise around him.

He slid the pistol under the seat, and, when it would only go halfway, reached under to make room. He came up from that with his small pack.

Jory poured the video camera out, had to study it from every angle to find the Power button. Even then, holding it the right way in his hands, he just looked through it, autofocusing in on a narrow strip of white between two buildings. The Church.

He lowered the camera, fiddled with the buttons. Hit Playback. Had to pop the small screen out, then look around, see if there was anybody to eavesdrop.

Nobody.

He raised the screen, angled it away from the glare.

The recording was hip level, from training. Voss in black and white, the veins in his neck tight with anger. The wiry dude, Williamson, a close-up of his Z tats, recorded during a break probably. Before they all got a turn with their first real torch.

Jory lowered the camera, looked up to Mayner’s building.

When he came back to the camera, he advanced past that first day, hit Play at Commando out by the parking lot of J Barracks. His armor right there at the curb already. Feet unable to stop pacing.

Jory tilted his head back, jabbed the Fast-Forward, stopped at some overexposed frames, all flashed white.

But—no—it was those papers. From the auditorium. Whatever Burger Dude had recovered from some old server. The papers that had gotten him killed.

“Hunh,” Jory said, and figured the Zoom Out—it was the tracking slider—came in close enough to read the blurry letters, having to hold the screen sideways to make the lines be straight across.

It was in sections, and was formatted like an old—blog? Was that the word?

Jory smiled, hadn’t even thought of one of those for years. People alone in their houses, making their diaries public. Sculpting the version of themselves they wanted to be true, then going back, editing some more.

Now, everybody packed together over small fires in the middle of what used to be lobbies and restaurants, you didn’t show yourself to anybody. It would be like scratching a wound open.

But it was definitely that format—entry, entry, entry.

No—post. Jory smiled, to be remembering all this.

And the headings for each post, they were all—he paged through fast to be sure—Z MINUS 53 DAYS, Z MINUS 48 DAYS, and closer and closer. Meaning Glasses had been right—this wasn’t first generation, but compiled, because how could that original blogger have known what was coming, turned his blog upside down, so it read first to last, not last to first? That wasn’t how they’d worked, was it?

This had been cribbed from a series of screencaps, though, reentered, character by character, so it would never be lost. Because the Play button was the same as the Pause button, Jory could page through with just the tip of his index finger, each freeze-frame taking him one day closer to where he already was. Where everybody was.

 

Z minus 44 days

‘Telemorse.’

 

He typed it in wrong, probably couldn’t look at the keypad of his cell except in stolen glances, taking mental pictures of the clusters of letters, then having to type by feel, with one thumb. And he was never a spelling champion.

 

Telomerase is an enzyme that steadies chromosomes, aids in their continual repair. Age researchers believe in telomerase. The geneti-chemical key to eternal youth.

 

Three of the top telomerase researchers are currently stationed at γγγ.

 

Today I bought masking software for my home computer. Both of them. There’s freeware all over, but I wanted to pay cash.

 

If they search his first name now, ‘γγγ,’ he won’t be one of the 179,000,000 million hits anymore.

 

I can’t change my cell, though. It’s the only number he has. So now, this, what I’m doing to all instances of his name, it’s my shield, the beep I say instead of γγγ.

 

If there are ever two days of me not posting, then my absence here will be proof of my suspicions.

 

And apologies for all the sudden kitten photos. If this were the jungle, I’d wear camouflage. If it were the arctic, I’d duck into a white blanket.

 

Not that I have anything against cats.

 

Jory looked up again, was still alone. No Mayner, no Punk, no Voss, no bonefaces.

Just him. And this.

He leaned back farther, his knees ratcheting closer to his face, and pulled the screen in tight, started at the beginning instead of the middle. Opened on a cell phone ringing during dinner, then went post by post, finally stopping on another kind of table altogether, the same man sitting at it, his face in one of his large hands, the old world crumbling away around him.

Jory’s scalp was crawling, his breath deeper than he meant.

This was it. How it started. The beginning of the postapocalypse, in seed form.

And the last scroll had burned up with Glasses. Under Jory’s flame.

“What?” Mayner said, leaning in to see.

Jory snapped the screen shut.

Mayner had an improvised bag of mementos. Keepsakes. In spite of all the public service posters to the contrary. All the propaganda about not holding on to the past, but looking to the future.

“I’m ready,” Jory said, sitting back up, leaning over to tuck the camera under the seat, get Mayner his pistol back.

Mayner cranked the jeep over, nodded down to the idea of the camera, said, like he’d never believe it, “You mean that’s still got juice?”

Yes, Jory nodded.

Juice.