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

lungfuls of smoke trailing around his head, his cigarette was clamped under a rusted staple, the cherry pointed down but smoldering, climbing, catching, the whole pole flaring up minutes later, a candle in the night, novitiates spilling down from the Church with buckets of water, but it was already too late.
    This is Jory Gray.

Day Three

Chapter Eight
    Because he hadn’t had the nerve to use the looted pistol on himself, and because the cigarettes were taking forever—before the plague, he’d been down to a pack a month during the semester—Jory made it to training at 0900, in some Quonset-hut hangar kind of building way out by the fence.
    He was one of fifteen burnouts milling around, flicking their eyes to all the dark places in the warehouse.
    Jory, his hands working on automatic, pinched a cigarette up to his lips.
    Before he could light it, a hand came around, pulled it from his mouth. Crumbled it.
    The other fourteen burnouts were watching now. Half smiling.
    Jory turned, beheld their drill sergeant. Their Scanlon-in-waiting.
    “What?” Jory said, licking his lips where the paper had been.
    The drill sergeant— Voss above his pocket, in handsewn thread—stepped around, moving at all right angles, like this was a dance, and squared off in front of Jory.
    “What, what ?” he bellowed, somehow in a speaking voice.
    “What, sir,” Jory mumbled.
    Voss laughed to himself, the sound roiling up from his barrel chest, his lantern jaw. His polished boots. Then he looked around at the sorry state of this batch of recruits and lost his chuckle.
    Cueing in, eight of the nine who were already smoking dropped their butts to the slick concrete, ground them out. The ninth, the youngest reprobate of them all, just stashed his.
    “Well,” Voss said, turning so that it was for everybody, “one or two of you might live to the end of the week yet, taking into account this is Thursday, of course. You”—singling out a wiry dude—“what do you think happens when a spark from one of these bad habits drops down between the frame and the compression tank of your torch?”
    “Sir?”
    “Just take a flyer. An educated guess. Insofar as that might apply to you.”
    “Boom.”
    “Boom, yes.” To all again, “The torches each of you will be issued, their reservoirs, when full, have enough jelly in them for sixteen hours at full throttle. Sixteen hours wide open, not counting the autocool. Let me say that again now. Sixteen hours . In a can the size of your hand. Now tell me”—in Jory’s face again—“your nicotine fix, is it worth turning the building you’re in into a mushroom cloud?”
    Before Jory could answer, Voss was spinning on his heel to face the rest of the class. “And it’s not you I’m worried about here, don’t get me wrong. And it’s not the torch either. What—what is it that you think I’m worried about here? And don’t say the dezzie.”
    This last part to the reprobate who hadn’t crushed his cigarette, but had rubbed the heat out instead, threaded it behind his ear.
    Voss was very aware of that cigarette.
    The reprobate smiled with half his mouth, looked to the class, and shrugged. “You coming into the field with us, then, sir?”
    Silence. Dead, dead silence.
    Voss reached up, gingerly plucked the cigarette from behind the reprobate’s ear, then crushed it into the reprobate’s forehead, the tobacco flakes catching in the reprobate’s eyelashes so he finally had no choice but to blink, lose their important little staring contest.
    “You’re in the right place, son,” Voss said to him, just to him, then turned, targeted another burnout. “You, Glasses. If you blow your torch up, take the whole room out, who are we going to miss?”
    “The handler. Sir. Even if the explosion doesn’t kill it, we can’t use it again, because some of its safeties might have been compromised in the concussion wave.”
    “Good, good. Yes. Did we all hear that now? The handler is who we’ll miss.