The Gospel of Z by Stephen Graham Jones Read Free Book Online

it a test run until now—and then something clicked in your mind. In his.
    The mail.
    The whole day, he’d been sad in a stupid kind of way that there would be no mail. But it wasn’t a federal holiday. It was just another Friday. Only, for his district, a snow day they still had to burn.
    The mail was coming. And, because his wife was at work, he’d get to get it himself. Could even let it sit in the box a while before getting it, if he wanted.
    Jory smiled, twisted the eyehole screw one more time, waiting for the dry wood of either his or his neighbor’s fence to split. He’d been using the screwdriver, its shaft ran up through the eyehole, but then the wood had started creaking, he’d squinted in response, held his breath, turned a smidge more—the usual home-repair story.
    The hammer, it was just hanging by its claw on the top of the fence. It hadn’t been necessary at all.
    And the mail—why was Jory thinking of the mail?
    Of course.
    At some level he’d registered that faded post-office blue, flashing between the houses up the street. Danny, the same as it had been Danny for the last two years.
    Except, you always heard Danny first, right? His rattletrap little postal van thing.
    It was sunny, though, the first hot day.
    Maybe Danny was taking advantage too.
    Neither snow nor sleet nor rain, right? Nor a perfect day either.
    The last perfect day, as it turned out.
    Jory gave the eyehole screw another last twist, just for good measure, and that was when he heard the first scream.
    At first it could have been the dry wood, complaining, but then, when he wasn’t twisting, the scream came again, got cut off.
    “Hunh,” Jory said, and looked over his shoulder, across into his other neighbor’s yard, to see if there was anybody to visually confer with about this.
    Nope.
    It was a Friday, a workday.
    Jory shrugged, hooked his index finger into the hook and pulled, giving it gradually more and more weight, trying to keep half an eye on the fence line, to see if it was swaying in.
    And then he saw it again—that flash of postal blue, just one house over.
    A siren blaring across town now.
    Jory unhooked his finger. He studied his house for any movement—any small face behind the glass, asking him if everything was okay.
    He didn’t know if it was. Not yet.
    And she’d go to the front door anyway, wouldn’t she? Hadn’t he said he was going to work on the flowerbeds, then found the hammock there with the garden tools, decided it was fate, that this day had actually been designed for him to hang it in the backyard?
    “Danny?” he said. Mostly to himself.
    On cue, that postal blue darted across the front end of the fence line. Moving from next door to Jory’s. Running on all fours from next door to Jory’s, its movements so slick, so graceful, so focused.
    Human, but not. Not even close.
    Jory fell back into the new red mulch spread in a circle around the tree that was going to have been the foot tie for his hammock, if the fence held.
    “Danny?” he said again, much quieter. Much louder in his head.
    And then a scream from his own front yard and Jory was scrambling up, falling uphill, a new hollowness in his chest. Not even aware of the hammer in his hand until, in the upstairs hall ten minutes later, he needed it.

Chapter Seven
    Because he didn’t know where else to go, that night Jory went back to the parking garage. His plans were unspecific. Just to be close to her maybe. In case she walked along the balustrade up there, or rampart, whatever it’s called when the fort’s a church.
    To be close to her and to smoke a lot of cigarettes. To look at each one as if it were a new thing. Study its silhouette, taste its roundness.
    J Barracks.
    “I’m going to be a torch,” he told Linse, across all that distance.
    A torch.
    It was a joke.
    He might as well just step off the parking garage, four levels up. See if he could land on a mattress two guys happened to be carrying from one doorway to another.