The Gospel of Z by Stephen Graham Jones

Author:Stephen Graham Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2014-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

“Hit it,” Jory said, his hand finding Glasses’s forearm.

“The—?”

“Now!” Jory hissed.

The flame from Glasses’s torch arced out, stylized in the high, empty space of the auditorium.

Underneath that chemical flame, aisle after aisle of neck stumps. Headless shoulders.

“Holy shit,” Glasses said, his hold wavering, the doors rattling behind him when he backed into them, couldn’t back up anymore.

Two hundred decapitated people, or whatever capacity was here. A congregation of bottleneckers, bottlenecked.

And recently.

The flame sucked back up into the torch, dropping them into a deeper kind of darkness.

“I meant the flashlight,” Jory said, his voice seeming to float away from him.

“Oh yeah,” Glasses said, and found that slider, clicked his headlight on, autocool sucking the burble of flame back in.

The dead people were still there.

And they hadn’t been for long either.

Not long enough.

The smell was an oily wall.

Of course this door had been sealed.

“Heads-up, seven-up…” Glasses said, his voice lilty, falling apart. Every place his headlight found, it was worse. Fingers still digging into armrests. Faces looking up from the aisle. Burger wrappers skidding across the carpet, from the air Jory and Glasses had disturbed.

“Thought they were all gone,” Jory said at last.

“Burgers?”

“Bottleneckers.”

“They are now,” Glasses said, reaching behind them for the push handle of the door. “We should, um, you know.”

But Jory wasn’t. In spite of the thick air, making him blink faster than he wanted.

Moving slow, he took the warm barrel of Glasses’s torch, swept the headlight systematically across the auditorium.

Dull silver collars, snugged up to neck vertebrae. Collars the people had lived with for years. Deaths they’d always known were coming. Some of the heads just folded back like Pez dispensers. Some of the bodies fallen out into the walkway, chickens who’d run blind for a last few steps.

“Why would they…?” Jory said. “They know their signals can be jacked, all together like this.”

“It wasn’t the army, was it?” Glasses said, slinging his beam over to some scuffling.

Rat, probably. This being rat heaven and all.

“The Church,” Jory said.

“Survival of the meanest,” Glasses said, then, his headlight settled on the facedown corpse up behind the podium, “preacher man knows.”

“What were you before?” Jory said, taking an almost involuntary step forward. To that stage. Like he was being called. Like it was a revival, not a necropolis.

“I never knew it was practice,” Glasses said back, following.

“Practice?” Jory asked.

“Video games, man,” Glasses said, “this”—then, when he reached up to pat his naked head—“shit, my helmet!”

Jory stepped around a headless man. One who’d been reaching for his head too, it looked like.

“Why kill this many at once?” Jory said. “They weren’t infected. They wouldn’t have been sitting down if they were…”

“Wrong denomination,” Glasses said, stepping around the reaching man now. His boot catching the man’s head, sending it bowling down the slight incline.

They stood still until the head stopped. Until Glasses found it with the headlight, just to make sure a hand hadn’t stabbed down to stop its roll.

“We weren’t supposed to find this,” Glasses said. “You know that, right? What do

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