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.

Those congregations fell as soon as they all met in one place. But for a while there’d always been another group of believers willing to meet. Less a church than mass suicide. Which was maybe how they dealt with their own survivor’s guilt.

The Bottleneckers had been next, and, of all the upstart religions, they had seemed the one most likely to keep their foothold, just because their articles of faith—they wore them. The reason they were called Bottleneckers was the collars the military had issued the third year. To everybody who wouldn’t come onto the make-do bases. And you had no choice. If a patrol saw you out in Restricted, you were put facedown in the dirt, a silver band strapped around your neck, its sensor in lockstep with your jugular pulse, so that, when it stopped—when you got infected, like you would, out here without the military to watch over you—then the collar would contract all the way down to your spine, decap you. Eliminate the threat you were about to become, and thus contain the plague that much better. It was supposed to be the humane solution.

So these Bottleneckers, the Collared, as they were called at first, they started meeting once, twice a week, just to talk about it. More a resistance than a religion, really.

But they all fell down too, when somebody figured out how to jack into the collar’s radio signal—they were also tracking devices, surprise—and fool the sensors into registering death. Two hundred people sitting in rows, losing their heads all at once. Maybe two or three of them still sitting there, a live mouse thrust up between their neck and the sensor, the mouse clawing and scratching, its heartbeat so alive, too undeniable for the jacked signal to override.

So, into that space left by the Church of Z, by the Bottleneckers—Christianity was tame now that the dead were walking, and if any of the other religions had made it through, they didn’t have temples around here, anyway—into that void, stepped these priests. Quiet, demure. Tall. Their long fingers crossed over their navels like saints. If they even had navels. Their faces covered by ceramic masks, those masks so serene, so patient. Three crosses or plus marks or sideways Xs on their lapels.

All of which Jory knew, but just secondhand.

“‘Heat up’?” he said back to Mayner, holding the mic close to his mouth, eyes focusing down on nothing, and then the light from the doorway blotted out and he got it—God was in the house. His representative anyway. “Oh,” Jory said, a not-completely-voluntary response.

The cigarette went slack in his lips.

Where Jory had ducked through the doorway because he was still too aware of his helmet, his torch, the priest had to gather his white robes and bend over just so his head would clear.

And then he stood up, and up, turned his alien white face down on Jory so that Jory felt he was being studied by a praying mantis.

“Soldier,” the priest said, then uncurled his white-gloved fingers, touched his own sternum. “Brother Hillford,” he said slowly, deeply, properly. No accent of any kind coming through.

“Hillford?” Mayner whispered into Jory’s helmet.

Jory was registering this in some place he couldn’t quite speak from.

This priest was every bit as tall as any handler.

And, his robe, it was so white it was glowing.

Breathe, breathe, Jory told himself.

“No, not a soldier,” he said, about himself. “Jory. Jory Gray.”

The priest just kept on with that stare, took a step forward, time speeding up all at once, Jory reaching forward to stop the priest from falling into the septic caverns below them, but the priest’s foot, it had already directed itself around the weak spot in the floor. Was putting its gossamer weight near the wall instead.

Jory nodded about this, waiting for it to register as well. But it wouldn’t.

How could this priest have known where to step? Did they have some extra sense? Were the soles of his sandals that thin? Was there a shadow, giving that slight concavity away, or had he been watching Jory through the doorway, taking note? Or were his steps just divine?

“You’re the special one,” Hillford said then, cocking his head over, the mask so blank.

“Special?” Jory said.

“The one your general hand-picked.”

“More like hand-punished,” Jory said.

Outside, the handler’s transport was making the earth quake. Jory studied his menthol—not even half-gone. A travesty.

Or not.

Jory stepped forward, flipped the menthol backwards, offered it to Hillford.

“You don’t find these ones every day anymore,” he said, keeping his face tilted down like he felt respectful.

The priest kept his hands up his sleeves.

“The world outside of us is so polluted already, Jory Gray. Would you have me pollute the inside as well?”

Jory took the menthol back, drew deep on it.

“Are you taking care of her?” Jory said then, looking at the priest’s long, seemingly exaggerated shins. His shin area, anyway. The shin part of his robes.

“Her?” Hillford asked.

“My…her name, it’s Linse,” Jory said. “She went up the Hill, up to you about three days ago. Four. Here, she’s—”

Jory fumbled up Linse’s ID card.

Hillford leaned forward, as if studying it, especially the earring hole, top center. But he wouldn’t take it.

“What are you being punished for, if I might ask?” he said instead, the ghost of a grin in his voice. “Starting unauthorized fires, perhaps?”

Jory pulled more smoke in, studied the menthol again—how could Hillford possibly know about the Weeping Poles?—and then Mayner coughed into Jory’s helmet, made him flinch, fumble through the air after the menthol.

He had to go to his knees to catch it. He never saw the ID card, fluttering down beside his leg.

Another drag.

“I just want to talk to her,” he said up to the priest, Hillford looking down to Jory like a child, and before Jory could hear the excuse, whatever it was going to be, he rolled the menthol around to the nail of his middle finger, cocked it over his shoulder, and flicked it doorwards.

A direct miss. Not even close.

The sparks popped like a firework on a still night, hung in a burst of orange, and by that time Jory was diving for the butt. He caught it on the way down, the cherry hot against his palm so that he just shook it through the door, let it fall on what passed for a stoop in this broken world.

The instant it hit, a gigantic insulated boot crushed it out—with or without the signal, the handler had been coming—and in that same instant, the zombie was in the doorway, its gimp-masked face right up against Jory, close enough that, in spite of the iron grate over the zombie’s snapping mouth, in spite of the field there supposed to sterilize the virus, still, Jory thought he could taste that rancid breath.

He fell back onto his elbows, trying to kick deeper into the restroom, then came back with his torch, the flame bobbing right at the zombie’s mouth grate, his finger already—with or without Jory’s okay—pulling.

At the last possible moment, a cold hand came down on Jory’s left shoulder, pulled him slightly around. Just enough that when his torch opened, it opened onto the wall, the flames flattening out, curling at the ceiling and floor, rushing across the doorway, leaving the zombie’s leather singed.

Jory turned around, was face to mask with the priest, close enough to see the skin around Hillford’s eyes. It was wrinkled, black. Scarred? That why they wore masks, some kind of nightmare initiation?

“Gray, Gray!” Mayner was yelling, both into Jory’s helmet and outside, from the jeep.

Jory backed off the trigger. The priest pulled him a step or two deeper into the restroom, as if Jory weighed nothing. Jory shook away, clambered to an unsteady stand.

“Cool, cool,” Jory said into the mic. A complete lie.

This is why so many torches never came back from their first call, he knew now—panic. Being in the same room with a zombie, with a freakadillo priest. Having a weapon that can make all that go away. Your driver having a weapon that can make you go away.

Jory’s breath caught up with him. It was raspy, shallow, not enough.

“Confronting your own sins made manifest is never a simple matter, is it?” Hillford said, tucking his hand back up his sleeve.

An instant later, the zombie was all the way through the door, the massive form of the handler leashed to it, the zombie pulling on all fours for Jory, the most obvious food, the handler not seeming to even notice.

Like the zombie, the handler was in leather. And zippers. Circuitry, wires. Blue electricity coursing up and down the chain, from dog to master, and back again.

The zombie had been bad, but this, the handler, it was—Jory’d never seen one suited up for the field. In action.

He didn’t believe in them, but he could tell that didn’t make a shred of difference, either.

One step farther, and the zombie’s front leg—arm, whatever—reached through that weak part of the floor. It came up with a squealing black rat, one almost able to squirm through the stumps of the zombie’s fingers.

It pressed it against its mouth grate before it could wriggle away. The rat kicked, sizzled, died in clumps that the zombie reached for with its dry black tongue.

The handler looked down to this, made a henh sound somewhere in its throat, and jerked once on the chain, a casual flick, really. It was enough to slam the zombie bodily into the wall Jory had just torched.

For a moment the zombie stuck, its leather cooking, the flesh under it smoking, and then it arched away, was pulling for Jory again.

“Elegant, no?” Hillford said to Jory, studying this zombie.

“No,” Jory said, taking a careful step to the side.

“Don’t look at it,” Mayner was saying to Jory through the helmet.

Jory couldn’t help it though.

It had been nearly ten years since he had been this close to one.

He thought it would be easier. That he was prepared. That working the assembly line, it had prepared him for this.

He was wrong.

He couldn’t get his breathing right. Couldn’t get his head right.

“So it begins,” Hillford said then, brushing past Jory. For the peach smuggler. “Inform your escort,” he said, taking a knee by the urinal. By the body.

“We’re a go,” Jory said into the headset. Not looking away from Hillford for an instant, Hillford’s head back in some kind of silent ritual, a glistening white blade suddenly in his left hand, from up his right sleeve.

“No,” Jory said, though he knew what was going to happen.

His prayer over, Hillford slid the blade easily between the lower ribs on the left side of the peach smuggler, Hillford not looking down, like he was going by feel.

What Voss had told the group was that the clergy would puncture the heart, when possible, because, if there was any virus, it would necessarily have cycled through there, and lodged.

Under his heavy robes, Hillford’s shoulder and arm movements were so precise, so clinical, so devout.

When he finally must have pushed through the dense cardiac muscle—Jory had seen one in lab, in grad school—he stopped, angled his head back to Jory, to the handler and the zombie, and, just like in the demonstration, except fifty thousand times louder, he wrenched the blade sideways, wedging the ribs apart. Letting the air from the heart circulate into the air in the room.

Jory coughed, nearly gagged. Not from the smell but from the idea. The zombie was absolutely screaming. The handler even had to lean back to counter the pull.

“Henh,” the handler said, and Jory cued into the handler’s tiny eyes, up there behind its leather mask.

They were watching this white blade go in. The handler’s left hand, the nonleash hand, it was at the handler’s codpiece of a catheter. Just rubbing in a dull, frenetic way, this handler ceasing to be an it, becoming a him.

“No,” Jory said.

“No?” Mayner hissed back.

The zombie jerked forward again, pulling for the peach smuggler, and the handler was pulled forward, and then—

“The mouth unit,” Hillford said across to Jory. No panic at all.

Slowly, Jory swam back to the surface of this moment.

The mouth. The zombie’s mouth.

The grate was still on.

“What?” Jory said to Hillford.

“Open it,” Hillford said. Just that.

Jory looked to the zombie again.

“Open it. The grate.”

“No.”

He dragged his eyes up to the handler, to the handler’s busy left hand. The grate release was sewed into the back of that glove. Such a simple mechanism. One pull, and done.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

“He’s going to code us,” Jory said to Hillford.

“Jory?” Mayner asked in the helmet. “Gray?”

“Open it,” Hillford said again, nodding to the zombie. “Let the process complete itself, come full circle, encompass each of us.”

The world came down to this, for Jory—that catch on the side of the zombie’s mouth grate. That monstrous, hateful catch.

“I—I can’t,” Jory said.

“You must,” Hillford said back, wrenching back farther on the rib. Letting more scent out.

The handler was still rubbing himself with the ball of his thumb. Deeper now, with Hillford putting his weight against that blade in the peach smuggler’s dead heart.

Jory laughed to himself, a sick little laugh, and stepped forward, turned his torch around, and slammed the butt of it into the zombie’s face, a bright gout of flame slashing up beside his head, lighting what was left of the ceiling.

“Jory, Jory!” Mayner was yelling in response to this, but that was in a place far removed from here. Another lifetime.

When the grate didn’t come loose, Jory stepped in, did it again, the flame shooting up through the ceiling now, into the sky, a fountain of metallic orange and red and blue.

And, just when Jory thought it wasn’t going to, the grate flopped away, altering the blue current coursing up the chain. Waking the handler up. Reminding him where he was. That he wasn’t a he at all anymore.

The handler stepped forward, letting the zombie at the peach smuggler.

The zombie pulled to within inches of the peach smuggler’s open side, tasting the wound from all angles, Hillford right there beside it, not at all concerned.

And then it turned away. Wasn’t straining forward for that first bite. It turned instead to get a fix on Jory, the next-best meal in the room.

“What—what’s this, what’s it mean?” Jory heard himself saying.

“Another victim,” Hillford said, taking a clean step back. Positioning himself between two urinals. “Another child of God.”

This, more than anything, told Jory what his next move was.

He stepped back, set his feet, angled the torch down, and pulled the trigger.

On nothing.

That last blast through the ceiling, the impact on the butt—the torch thought it had been dropped. It had cycled down.

Hillford angled his face down to the peach smuggler.

“Jory Gray,” he said, Jory’s eyes following the priest’s down to the peach smuggler. To the fingers, spasming now, unsticking themselves from the tile floor one by one, probably in response to the tremors in the ground the virus had detected. The tremors that meant food. “This would be an honor for me,” Hillford said, calmly. “You, however, have yet to be anoint—”

“Shut up!” Jory screamed, the stock against his thigh, his index finger feeling in the dark for the ignition button, just forward of the trigger guard.

There.

The flame caught, held.

In it, the peach smuggler was sitting up, his eyes milky, mouth open, leaking blackness.

Jory opened up the torch, went for more like a twenty count, until the back side of the restroom caved out, what was left of the roof creaking down a foot or two farther.

“Enough, enough!” Mayner was yelling in Jory’s ears, and it was only then that Jory realized he’d been screaming the whole time.

The torch cycled down. Pure silence now. Just the zombie, cowered back from the heat, but pulling against its chain again now. For Jory.

“Don’t do it,” Mayner whispered into Jory’s helmet. Because, through the helmet’s feed, he could see what Jory was looking at.

But it was already happening.

Jory stepped forward, his flame bubbling right on the zombie’s mouth grate. Trying to lift it back into place.

But it wouldn’t go.

Again, Jory tried, and again the zombie wouldn’t stay still. And then the handler took a step forward, leaning over to see where the peach smuggler had gone, maybe. What kind of magic this was. It gave the zombie enough slack in the chain to surge ahead, for Jory, and that zombie jumping like that—Jory was back in the hallway of his house again. Nearly ten years ago.

He brought the butt of the torch down on the zombie’s head. Right on the crown, driving it straight down into the concrete floor, his flame blasting up beside him again and then cutting itself off.

And Jory kept going, couldn’t stop, until the zombie’s head was black paste, its legs and arms twitching, Jory’s left sleeve smoking from the barrel of the torch.

Hillford reached in, guided the torch away from the mess the zombie was. Watching Jory’s eyes the whole time. His hands not flinching away from the heat of the barrel even once.

“Henh,” the handler said, tugging on the chain, suddenly lifeless. Propping the zombie up on all fours only for the zombie to fall back down on itself.

“Ehhh,” it said then, some alternate programming kicking in, and lowered itself to the zombie’s side. The handler pulled the straps built into the zombie’s leathers and zipped the zippers that he could, making the zombie into a body-shaped duffel bag, the head—what was left of it—pulled down, chin to chest.

The handler stood with his zombie carry-on, looked around for the door.

And then Jory realized that Mayner had been talking to him for what felt like minutes now.

“What’s—?” Jory said, looking up through the gone-roof, and saw the three white contrails from the missiles that had been mounted on the roll bar of the jeep. That he’d pretended weren’t right over his head the whole drive here.

Coded. They’d been coded. Standard procedure if you go this long without talking. If the thermals on the jeep’s dash were dancing like they had to be.

That whistling sound they made too. Voss had been right. It was just like a cartoon from the old days. Something Jory could just let happen, if he wanted. Something that was going to happen anyway, maybe. That had been in the making for years now.

But then he flashed on Fishnet, strutting out into the middle of J Barracks, his head moving with the music. He flashed on the wiry dude, leaned down between his own knees to light his cigarette. On Linse, turned into a moth, flitting up to the light at the top of the Hill.

Her ID card.

Jory looked down for it, his hand coming up to the mic automatically, his voice coming through with a calmness he didn’t know he had anymore, “We’re good, man. We’re good.”

In that same instant, almost, the three tiny missiles detonated, maybe two stories above the restroom. Meaning Mayner had already had all but the last number of that kill sequence entered, had been hovering over it, shaking his head no.

Black feathers drifted down around Jory and the priest, the handler already leaving, undisturbed by all this human drama.

“We’re good,” Jory said again, and fell to his knees, the torch clattering to the side, falling away. He sifted through the rubble for the ID card but it was lost, probably burned to nothing. Along with the rest of the world.

At some point after that, Jory wasn’t sure just when, Mayner was standing him up. Hillford was using some sacred little whisk broom to collect the ashes of the peach smuggler, funnel them into an aluminum urn, or amphora. It was about up to Jory’s knee, maybe, and narrow like a churn, ornate like a ceremony.

Hillford set it down a safe distance from Jory and Mayner.

“What?” Jory said, looking to Mayner.

“You can kind of melt the lid shut for them. Makes it better for transport. Keeps the virus contained, so they don’t need an escort from us.”

“Serious?”

“It’s nothing,” Mayner said.

Jory nodded, couldn’t find his ignition button now. Mayner reached down, punched it, the torch starting again.

“Like this?” Jory said, and opened the line of flame onto the metal jar, only stopped when Mayner pulled him away.

“Just a burst,” Mayner was saying, trying not to smile where Hillford could see. “It’s aluminum, man.”

Jory turned back to what he’d just done. The smoke still rising from the ground.

When it cleared, there was a perfect black egg there.

Hillford looked from it to Jory. From Jory to it.

“Your general chose well,” Hillford finally said, and stepped forward, collected that black egg, Mayner reaching out to stop him—

“It’s hot!” But apparently not. Or, not to Brother Hillford.

Hillford cradled the egg against his robe, looked up to Jory again, and nodded a sincere thank you.

Jory nodded back. you’re welcome. And then he collapsed against Mayner.

“You’re alive,” Mayner said to Jory, hugging Jory’s head to his chest. “You made it, man.”

Jory laughed into Mayner’s shirt, then cried, and held on, wouldn’t let go, even when Mayner’s radio started asking for them.

Mayner stroked Jory’s hair down.

“Biology teacher,” Jory said, at last.

“You should know better than to smoke, then,” Mayner said.

“I killed it,” Jory said back. “I killed her, I mean. My own, my—I, with my hammer, I—I…”

“I know,” Mayner said. “I know. We all did.”