Free The Gospel of Z by Stephen Graham Jones

smiling.
    “Wrong channel for God,” somebody said.
    “Wrong crowd,” the reprobate added, barely loud enough to hear.
    “A comet passes a thousand years ago,” Jory said then, feeling his way through it, “and we—we’re just now drifting through its tail, and it’s all sparkly with frozen organic matter that only thaws with the heat of passing through an atmosphere.”
    “Nice, nice,” Glasses said. Then, “Our Pacific fishing trawlers had to start casting their nets wider and wider, deeper and deeper, and finally dredged up something from the sedimentary layer associated with the Bikini Atoll experiments. Clay, sludge. It glows at night, is hot enough to cook shrimp over. Three weeks later that trawler drifts into port. Infection Point Z.”
    “No, no, I heard that one,” the punk said. “That’s the way it really happened in—”
    “What would those people in space eat for ten years?” Commando said, mostly to himself.
    “Each other,” the reprobate said back anyway.
    “Shut up! Shut up!” the wiry dude was saying, trying to wave the theories away.
    But Jory wasn’t done. He was smiling now, finally, not looking away from Glasses. “The earth finally reaches a tipping point, spits up the virus as antibody, to cleanse itself of the infection we’ve become. The biological nuisance. Or—or, two kids nobody likes, they find an old book in the library, make the proper sacrifices, intone the right incantations—”
    “But zombies are evil, right?” Commando was saying. “God wouldn’t have done that to—”
    “Not two kids, two hikers ,” Glasses went on, over the wiry dude’s cease-and-desist gesticulations. “They’re up on some glacier, fall into a crevasse, see this leathery hand coming up from the ice. They carry that body back to civilization, and the radiation from the scans the university does, it kick-starts something unholy in its bloodstream, and nobody even knows they need to lock the door behind them yet…”
    “No mixing science and religion,” Fishnet said, halfway sullen from not making it to what’s sounding like the final round—Jory and Glasses.
    Glasses pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose, said, “It doesn’t mix—”
    “ Unholy ,” the reprobate told him. “You said ‘unholy’. About a lab experiment.”
    “Wait, wait!” the wiry dude begged, pawing for the volume.
    “Why can’t you mix them?” Jory said to the punk. “You can believe in penicillin, you can believe in—in evolution, right?”
    “That mean they’re not true?” Fishnet said.
    Jory didn’t answer. He was back on task, back in the game. “So—so this one kid with cancer, he survives it, it’s a miracle, only he’s addicted to medicine, to the idea of medication, so gets hooked on meth, which these guys are making with water from a pond that truckers have been dumping waste in for—”
    “No, the cooks, they’ve been using runoff formaldehyde as a stabilizing agent,” Glasses said, liking it. “From the hazardous waste drum behind the mortuary.”
    “So when the kid’s teeth and skin start falling out, off, whatever,” Jory said, in the rhythm of the theory, “at first nobody notices, because they’re all like that.”
    “But then,” Glasses fell in, “if you look at the booking logs down at the station—this is Arizona, some place dry—you see this kid showing up month after month, looking worse and worse—”
    “Guys, guys!” the wiry dude was saying.
    “Until he finally gets killed, something undeniably fatal, like a bullet to the chest,” Jory said, “only that tweaker with the gun, part of his mania that week was werewolves, so the bullets were cast from silver, only this batch of silver was impure, he’d melted it down from his mom’s jewelry she got from her grandma, the silent-screen scream queen, and it’s a mix of, of platinum and costume paste, and that unholy chemical, pharmaceutical, radiological time bomb, it