Zone One (12 page)

The stragglers posed for a picture and never moved again, trapped in a snapshot of their lives. In their paralysis, they invited a more perplexing variety of abuse. One might draw a Hitler mustache
on one, or jab a sponsor cigarette between a straggler’s lips. Administer a wedgie. They didn’t flinch. They took it. And then they were deactivated—beheaded or got their brains blown out. Although the subject was not mentioned in the PASD seminars Herkimer held with the camp shrinks, it was generally assumed that this behavior was a healthy outlet. Occupational therapy.

Mark Spitz had noticed on numerous occasions that while the regular skels got referred to as
it
, the stragglers were awarded male and female pronouns, and he wondered what that meant. “What’s his name?” he said.

“What do you mean, what’s his name?” Gary said.

“It has to be something.”

“Buffalo don’t want the names.”

“Still.”

“His name is Ned the Copy Boy.”

“What if we let him stay?” Mark Spitz didn’t know why he said it. “He’s not hurting anyone. Look at this room. We’re standing in the most depressing room in the entire city.”

His comrades looked at each other but did not comment. “Let’s wrap this puppy up,” Kaitlyn said, and popped him in the head.

If they had played Name That Bloodstain!, Mark Spitz would have said, North America. They would need a lot of new windows in the days to come, he thought. And plenty of bleach. These would be thriving industries, full of opportunities. Perhaps Gary should hang up his Lasso and get into the blood-scrubbing industry. Get in on the ground floor. Erase the stains.

The copy boy was the final straggler in the building. Kaitlyn recorded his details in the notebook. They dragged the body out into the twilight and punched out for the day as Disposal’s bell jingled in the distance. Mark Spitz listened to it fade. It was the sound of the god of death from one of the forgotten religions, the one that got it right, upstaging the pretenders with their billions of duped faithful. Every god ever manufactured by the light of cave fires to explain the thunder or calling forth the fashionable
supplications in far-flung temples was the wrong one. He had come around after all this time, preening as he toured the necropolis, his kingdom risen at last.

•   •   •

His unit had slept the last four nights in a former textile warehouse that had been converted into spectacular lofts, alcoves of glamour notched into the cliff face of the city. The apartment they chose belonged to the drummer of a minor rock outfit whose one big charter was a muscular anthem that tried to identify, verse by verse, the meaning of stamina. It was a stadium staple, a real rouser, the royalties evidently providing ample down-payment money. In the blown-up magazine covers on the walls, the owner was perpetually on the verge of being elbowed from the frame by the rest of the band, who were of a more rarefied attractiveness. Such was the drummer’s lot. An orgy tub squatted in the center in the master bath, roomy and guardrailed.

Omega slept in the living room, taking turns on the white sectional. It was pleasant in the loft; one night they even made a fire. Kaitlyn discovered a tube of her favorite moisturizer in the medicine cabinet and Gary caught her taking a dab. He tsk-tsked and pulled out his No-No Cards, brandishing the one depicting a red slash across an open fridge door. The massive, oversize windows didn’t have shades or blinds, but there were no neighbors gathering gossip in the beyond, no ambient street light to keep them awake, no light at all.

They spent their last night on this grid, however, on the eighteenth floor of number 135, at Mark Spitz’s request. In general, they bivouacked on the lower floors, for obvious reasons. In normal circumstances, Kaitlyn and Gary would have vetoed this choice of camp, but they relented without protest. Mark Spitz had been unusually quiet ever since the attack, save for his strange intercession on behalf of the copy boy. If he sought something in
this place, something he needed, they were willing to climb all those flights and help him out. This time. He’d used up his chits for a while.

They unrolled their sleeping bags in the conference room of a consulting firm, shoving the gargantuan desk up against the wall and laying their packs across it. They consumed their MREs and eased into their nocturnal rituals after activating a motion detector in the hallway: Gary smoked and skipped through sections of his foreign-language audiobook, Kaitlyn speed-read one of her biographies of dead celebrities, and Mark Spitz paced. After so long in the wild, it still took Mark Spitz a long time to power down his myriad subsystems. There are pills, Gary told him, but he didn’t want to be dulled. He was wired at night, bucking on a vector of PASD, but it had kept him alive.

The sleeping bag was comfortable enough on the teal carpet squares, but he missed sleeping in the trees, entwined in the branches like a kite. In the woods bordering the dead subdivision, in a public park going native according to primeval inclination, levitating over koi in the acupuncturist’s backyard garden. In those early days, he roved from empty house to empty house like the other isolates, making it up as he went along. He cased the abode in advance of night, selected his entry point, and then swept the ranch house or split-level or other locally popular construction room by room. He checked the basements, the closets, the dryer (you never know), made test noises to draw out any skels inside, but not loud enough to alert a pack cruising outside. He discovered plague-stricken unfortunates who had been locked away in attics like the photo albums of bad weddings, and came upon leaking wretches handcuffed to bedposts by fluffy erotic handcuffs. He put down any skel or skels who emerged from the den or romper room and he made a hasty retreat if it got too hot, taking the pile-covered stairs two at a time or vaulting out the window, the inevitable window, landing messily on the patio set. He knew when it was time to split. It clicked in his brain, the same way he’d known
which desk to choose in a new classroom on the first day of a fresh school year, the one that would place him in a zone that reduced the chances of being called on, amid a high concentration of smart kids and inveterate hand-raisers but at a distinct and quirky angle to the teacher’s vision that enabled Mark Spitz to pop in and out of his or her attention. The same way he knew exactly how late he could roll into work without it becoming “an issue,” how often he could pull off this feat, and how busy he had to appear at different times of the day according to his boss’s scofflaw-seeking trawls through the cubicles. He’d always known when to say “I love you” to keep the girlfriends cool and purring, how much to push a deadline without repercussion, how to smile at the representatives of the service industry so that he got a decent table or extra whip. In his mind, the business of existence was about minimizing consequences. The plague had raised the stakes, but he had been in training for this his whole life.

Gary said, “Day ha-may in poz. Day ha-may in poz.”

He went into a tree cycle for months at a time, weather permitting (that quaint picnic language), because he hated bunking in an empty house knowing that its occupants were most likely some variety of dead. Perhaps this was the start of his aversion to ID detail, all those times he pushed a bureau up against the door of a bedroom and watched the crap on top tumble to the floor, boxes of gaudy jewelry, cologne in turquoise glass, the family pictures in the fragile plastic frames. It was worse when he came across a straggler, although he didn’t know the word then. A woman in a bathrobe measured out coffee into the Swedish machine, frozen there. A teenager wielded a lacrosse stick in his funky bedroom, and in the next town over the pigtailed little princess arranged chewed-up unicorns on the cardboard top of an old board game that had never made it into her family’s regular rotation, a fad game with too many or too few instructions. He bashed their heads in with a baseball bat of course; he’d quickly cottoned on to their harmlessness, but didn’t know back then if they’d suddenly
awaken at some inner cuckoo chime and start the chase. The plague didn’t let you in on its rules; they weren’t printed on the inside of the box. You had to learn them one by one. The majority of skels were rabid, and then there was this subset. It was early enough in the unpleasantness that they hadn’t begun to waste away yet, earn the name skeleton. Which made it worse. In the half-light, before he could see their wounds, he was a harmless cat burglar who accidentally broke into the wrong house, the one next door to his target. The occupants were home. He wanted to apologize, and did on a few occasions. They didn’t respond. They looked like regular people, until he saw the missing parts or the make-shift, suppurating bandages. Cemetery statuary, weeping angels and sooted cherubs, standing over their own graves. Stick to the trees, he told himself.

Gary said, “Kwan-to kwesta? Kwan-to kwesta? Kwan-to, kwan-to.”

He learned to keep still, ease into a sleep shallow enough to still perceive and react to peril, practicing a quick jungle swing/running/landing combo in case one or more of them looked up and saw him, which they never did. They never came when you were vigilant; they came for you when you had one foot in the past, recollecting a dead notion of safety. Way he saw it, if you were going to get surrounded, you were going to get surrounded—if your luck went that way, it didn’t matter if you were up an oak or in a colonial revival.

The first time he’d shared his tree affinity with another survivor, she said, “So what? Everybody sleeps in the trees from time to time.” They’d all done the same things during the miseries. Manhattan was a template for other feral cities and Mark Spitz was a sort of template, too, he’d figured out. The stories were the same, whether Last Night enveloped them on Long Island or in Lancaster or Louisville. The close calls, the blind foraging, the accretion of loss. Half starved on the roof of the local real estate office, crouching so they wouldn’t be seen from the street and have the
ravenous dead clot around the only exit. Contorted in a stainless-steel restaurant cabinet and waiting for morning to break, when it was time to split for the next evanescent refuge. Listening, ever listening for footsteps. The insomniac’s brutal scenario had become the encompassing reality across the planet. There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth, and it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all. Even if they didn’t know it.

Kaitlyn said, “Can you not do that in here? Hello—secondhand smoke kills.”

Mark Spitz wondered how Gary would handle changing these common Spanish phrases for use with his dependable “we.” “Gary, you gonna catch a ride on that sub to get to your island?”

Gary removed his headset. “If we have to. We can get assigned no problem, all the stuff we’ve done out here for them.”

“You probably have to be in the navy,” Kaitlyn said.

“Half the navy’s been eaten. We’re not worried. We’ll swab the decks, whatever.” He replaced his headphones and loudly added, “Soon as we get to the island, we’re done climbing stairs.”

Gary wouldn’t spill which island he had in mind: “You’ll tell everybody and then it will be ruined.” Mark Spitz caught him reaching for Spain guidebooks on two occasions, Gary about to furtively pluck them off bookcases in silent apartments before aborting the mission, so he had discounted the landmasses and archipelagoes of the lower hemisphere. The Mediterranean, then. It was hard to argue with the logic of the Island die-hards and their sun-drenched dreams of carefree living once every meter inside the beach line had been swept. The ocean was a beautiful wall, that most majestic barricade. Living would be easy. They’d make furniture out of coconuts, forget technology, have litters of untamed children who said adorable things like, “Daddy, what’s ‘on demand’?”

In practice, something always went wrong. The Carolinas, for example. Someone snuck back to the mainland for penicillin or
scotch, or a boatful of aspirants rowed ashore bearing a stricken member of their party they refused to leave behind, sad orange life vests encircling their heaving chests. The new micro-societies inevitably imploded, on the island getaways, in reclaimed prisons, at the mountaintop ski lodge accessible only by sabotaged funicular, in the underground survivalist hideouts finally summoned to utility. The rules broke down. The leaders exposed mental deficits through a series of misguided edicts and whims. “To be totally fair to both parties, we should cut this baby in half,” the chief declared, clad in insipid handmade regalia, and then it actually happened, the henchman cut the baby in half. Sex, the new codes of fucking left them confused. Miscreants pilfered a bean or two above their allotted five beans when no one was looking and the sentence at the trial left everyone more than a tad disillusioned. Bad luck came to call in the guise of a river of the dead or human raiders rumbling up the lone access road despite the strategically arranged camouflage brush. He’d seen this firsthand during the long months. People are people.

Now the big groups were in again: the elite antsy to drop their pawns, and the pawns hungry for purpose after so long without instructions. One day Mark Spitz looked around and found he no longer knew each person in camp, how they had arrived, who they’d lost—suddenly this settlement had become a community. Buffalo implemented food-distribution networks, specialized scavenger teams, work details keyed to antediluvian skill sets, and the survivors had something to hold in their hands besides the make-shift weapons they had nicknamed and pathetically conversed with in the small hours. The leaders toiled over the details of the paradigm-shifting enterprises like Zone One. So tentative bureaucracy rose from the amino-acid pools of madness, per its custom.

Mark Spitz had to admit that he preferred things now that Buffalo was in charge, replicating the old governmental structures. He liked the regular meals, for one thing: beef jerky and room-temperature high-fructose colas had devastated his insides.
Others resisted the transition back. Sometimes the soldiers had to convince a well-armed doomsday cult that it was safe to come out from behind the fortified hatch, or rough up some hippies to get them to come off the farm, hydroponic breakthrough or no hydroponic breakthrough, but it seemed to work, the return of the old laws. In reconstruction, you knew where you stood.