Zone One (16 page)

As usual, Gary had history with those they encountered. He served with all three while cleaning out maddening Connecticut before assignment to the Zone. Connecticut with its pustulant hordes sans limit and notorious talent for coining new faces of bad luck, degenerate Connecticut with its starless nights and famished
mornings, Bad News Connecticut birthed ragged crews that stuck together. In comparison, Mark Spitz and the few sweepers from elsewhere were green recruits perpetually repeating their first day of duty. He had a particular dislike for No Mas, who bragged around Wonton about his scrapbook of straggler humiliation. “Who’d you see this week?” a sweeper might goad during Sunday-night R & R, whereupon No Mas dutifully chronicled his latest shenanigans. He carried a big red marker in his utility vest and liked to draw clumsy clown grins on the slack faces of the stragglers, christening each with a name appropriate to that profession. Then he pressed the muzzle of his assault rifle to the temple of Mr. Chuckles or Her Most Exalted Highness the Lady Griselda, smiled for the birdie, and had Angela take a picture before he splattered their craniums. Sunday nights at HQ No Mas shared a cot with a young clerk who printed out his souvenirs on glossy paper. “If you find Captain Giggles, give me a call—I hate that guy,” one of his audience offered in return, extending an I Heart New York mug full of whiskey. Just having a little fun.

Angela and Carl were more discreet about their transgressions, at least in mixed company, but Mark Spitz had heard them reminisce about their time together in a bandit crew, ripping off weaker survivors for aspirin and thermal underwear and who knows what other bad acts. He effortlessly pictured their carefree promotion up the American Phoenix to stations of venal authority. Investigating individuals who had been narced on for illicit salvage—“I don’t know how all those shoes got in my closet, officer, but aren’t they divine?”—and then bartering the confiscated goods on the black market. Or working as a New York City landlord, say, assigning apartments to the newcomers according to appetite and mealy whim, accepting the odd bribe or sexual favor for a better building, better block, southern exposure. Two bathrooms, park views, and basement storage would resume their currency in the new order, and insalubrious bureaucracy create its avatars. They came from Connecticut, repugnant Connecticut.

The rain redoubled. The two units huddled under the purple-and-orange awning of a popular doughnut-and-coffee concern and debriefed each other on the week. Bravo related how they lost half a day and filled two packs of body bags clearing out a den of decomposing suicides from the pews of a Ukrainian church. The usual: Gather ’round and grab a cup everybody, it’ll be quick. Halfway through, Bravo stopped trying to pry the crucifixes out of their hands and simply zipped them up with the corpses.

It had been a slow couple of grids for Omega, apart from Mark Spitz’s takedown, and Kaitlyn, in her circumspection, did not mention that episode. She wound up telling them about the secret Chinese nightclub. Omega decided it had been a gangster hangout, up two flights of rickety stairs above a store that sold shriveled herbs that looked like the fingers of the dead. The back room was filled with electronic gambling machines, pistols with taped-up grips, and jail-bait pinups. A high-tech safe crouched in a wall cavity, full of who knew what, opium and sundry incriminations. It was a mobster den out of some movie, she told them. She forgot they’d actually found the place two weeks ago and had already told the story. No one stopped her. It was raining. They were taking a coffee break.

Mark Spitz rubbed his eyes. He would have told Bravo about the sad straggler in the repair shop, but he had a hard time articulating why it fascinated him. They’d found the tinkerer huddled at his majestically cluttered worktable, poised over the guts of a VCR. Around his hands the metal housings of machines abutted, a thin metal skyline. The old man was surrounded by obsolete technology, the ungainly array of devices that had been a previous generation’s top of the line for listening to music or crisping toast. What brand of idiot loved these broken machines enough to search the internet for this joint, take time out of their lives to bring them here for removal of the dust bunnies perched on the motherboards? The kind of idiot that knows that idiots exist who sign a lease for this kind of thing. They nourished each other’s
delusions. The piles of pieces reminded Mark Spitz of when they’d swept through the prosthetics distributor’s and they were surrounded by pink half arms and feet, dangling from the ceiling, climbing out of boxes. These incomplete people. All the dead parts.

No Mas and Gary lit cigarettes, prompting Kaitlyn to glower and commence to cough theatrically. Angela thanked Christ it was Saturday and they’d head back to Wonton for a night of R & R tomorrow. She asked if they’d seen anyone else around.

Kaitlyn shook her head. “Pretty dead.”

“Ran into Teddy and them on West Broadway,” Carl said. He grinned. “Saw the smoke first. They were having a cookout.”

Gary chuckled. Kaitlyn requested coordinates.

“Can’t remember,” Carl said. He reeked of urine. “They dragged out a portable grill and set it up under the big glass canopy of some fancy condo. Red tablecloth on the sidewalk and everything.”

“What were they cooking?” Kaitlyn asked, no doubt envisioning burgers molded from contraband processed meat. Stolen grill, pilfered tablecloth. Two infractions right there.

They grew cagey. Connecticut style. “Maybe it was MREs, you have to ask them.”

“All I know is that it smelled good,” No Mas said.

“Could get written up for that,” Kaitlyn muttered. Gary shrugged. Angela changed the subject by asking where they were headed.

Gary stepped out, checked the street sign. “Here.”

“You’re incorrect,” Carl said. His face tightened. “This is our spot.”

Their grid assignments were identical. Fulton x Gold. They moved into the intersection to double-check they weren’t bickering over adjacent blocks, and all of them couldn’t help but notice that the east side of Gold had received the benediction of three- and four-story town houses, and that a huge open-air parking lot
dominated the north side of Fulton. A bonanza. A four-day job max, but in the right hands it could be stretched out over a leisurely six or seven with Wonton being none the wiser. This would be a quarrel.

“We got here first,” No Mas said.

“First’s got nothing to do with it,” Mark Spitz said. The parking lot was mostly empty. Not even the stray corpse slumped over a steering wheel to bag up. They didn’t have orders to check the trunks.

“It’s ours.”

“Not like the Lieutenant to make a mistake,” Kaitlyn said. “Call him on your comm. Ours is on the fritz.”

“Comm?” No Mas said. “Haven’t got shit on that all week.”

“They got these pheenie grandmas making this crap, what do you expect,” Carl said.

Gary loosed a series of expletives. “Ee-ho de puta. Fabio. Remember that time he gave Marcy a grid and it turned out it was on the other side of the wall? Up on Spring Street. That dude is off his meds.” Gary looked at No Mas and Mark Spitz caught the other man swiftly glance down to examine the sidewalk.

Fabio had distributed their grid assignments the previous Sunday. The Lieutenant had been summoned to Buffalo and now his second was in charge. With the big man out of town, Fabio informed them there was no need for them to come up. He instructed them to skip their usual R & R and stay out in the Zone, Disposal would drop some rations on their rounds. He sent the grids out over the comm and wished them luck. “We better get that R & R back,” Gary informed his unit, “or people will be sorry.”

“Lieutenant’s gonna have his ass when we tell him how he fucked up,” Angela said.

They returned to the awning, waiting for the rain to let up, like in the old days, average citizens save for the assault rifles. And the rest of the gear. A fat drop landed on the back of Mark Spitz’s
hand; he wasn’t wearing his gloves. Gray particulate described its outline on his skin. The rain captured ash on the way down, and looking out into the street he imagined the drops as long, gray, plummeting streaks. Giants wrung dirty dishrags over his head. “Look at this,” he said to Gary. He pointed at his skin.

Gary frowned. “We don’t see anything.”

When Mark Spitz was a child, his father had shared his favorite nuclear-war movies with him. Father-son bonding on overcast afternoons. Fresh-faced rising stars who never made it big and crag-faced character actors marched through the acid-rain narratives and ash-smeared landscapes, soldiering on, slapping hysterical comrades across the face—get a grip on yourself, we’re going to make it—dropping one by one as they chased the rumors of sanctuary. He asked, “What does ‘apocalypse’ mean, Daddy?” and his father pressed pause and told him, “It means that in the future, things will be even worse than they are now.”

In college Mark Spitz coasted in his customary way through a history requirement about the cold war. They’d pegged their doomsday to split atoms. They were blind to the plague’s blueprint of destruction, but they’d seen the ash. The pervasive, inexorable gray was a local atmospheric anomaly, and not what Buffalo had been thinking of when they devised their American Phoenix, but it suited. Up out of the ash, reborn.

Carl paused. The others turned. One of the dead came down the avenue. It was a strange sight after all this time, out there in the open. On their streets. Mark Spitz had only seen one other free-range skel since his arrival. This one had escaped the marines’ sweep somehow, finally freeing itself from some crummy cell, the room in the bowling alley where they stored the past-prime shoes or the basement of the souvlaki joint. The skel had spotted them, awakened at their bickering, and it veered from the middle of the asphalt, crept between two foreign-made compacts, and slowly gained the sidewalk. It walked in the rain in the way no
one walked in the rain, in a downpour like this, without shiver or frown, the water popping off its head and shoulders into a spray like a swarm of gnats. It approached them, implacable and sure, at the familiar grim pace.

The skel wore a morose and deeply stained pinstripe suit, with a solid crimson tie and dark brown tasseled loafers. A casualty, Mark Spitz thought. It was no longer a skel, but a version of something that predated the anguishes. Now it was one of those laid-off or ruined businessmen who pretend to go to the office for the family’s sake, spending all day on a park bench with missing slats to feed the pigeons bagel bits, his briefcase full of empty potato-chip bags and flyers for massage parlors. The city had long carried its own plague. Its infection had converted this creature into a member of its bygone loser cadre, into another one of the broke and the deluded, the mis-fitting, the inveterate unlucky. They tottered out of single-room occupancies or peeled themselves off the depleted relative’s pullout couch and stumbled into the sunlight for miserable adventures. He had seen them slowly make their way up the sidewalks in their woe, nurse an over-creamed cup of coffee at the corner greasy spoon in between health department crackdowns. This creature before them was the man on the bus no one sat next to, the haggard mystic screeching verdicts on the crowded subway car, the thing the new arrivals swore they’d never become but of course some of them did. It was a matter of percentages.

Carl took the shot and they resumed their negotiations.

“This isn’t going to un-fuck itself,” Kaitlyn said. “Mark Spitz, go up and see what the situation is.”

“Why does he get to go?” Carl said. Mark Spitz had never seen a hard case pout before.

“Because he knows how to walk in a straight line.”

Angela, Bravo’s leader, did not protest. She looked resigned to losing the grid, steeling herself for the next inconvenience, whatever it may be.

Kaitlyn unslung her assault rifle and dropped her pack. She sat cross-legged on the concrete. “Now who’s gonna go over there and zip up that skel?”

•   •   •

He met Mim in a toy store. The convenience marts, box outlets, pharmacies, and other likely suspects had been thoroughly excavated so Mark Spitz started hitting toy stores. The plague had reacquainted him with primal disappointments and in younger days he had been tormented by the fine print
BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED
often enough for it to leave a permanent dent. He thought this tactic ingenious—indeed, more than a few toy stores still had batteries behind the counter, even in loathsome Connecticut, where he encountered Mim during a noon raid. A handful of skels drifted down Main Street out front, the compasses in their veins quivering at no true north save the next square in front of them. He went around back to employee parking and spent a hairy ten minutes fretting the back door with a crowbar, scratching away, until he heard the muffled “Who is it?”

He said, “I’m alive,” and she let him in.

Her name was Miriam Cohen Levy and she was the last person to give him a full name for a long time. She’d been hitting toy stores since the start. “I have three kids,” she told him later.

They chatted in the robot aisle. Her gear sat at their feet in perky, neatly organized nylon packs. Her weapon of choice was a red-bladed fire ax, snatched from the wall of an elementary school or municipal building, and it was sparkling clean, even in the weak light trickling past the window display. “Germs,” she said. “But I prefer running whenever possible. The cardio.”

Mark Spitz noted that there were only two points of entry to the building. He pointed to the spiral staircase. “More toys upstairs. You can drop your pack there,” she said, like a good host. “You heading to Buffalo?”

“What’s there?”

“That’s where the government is now. They got a big compound organized.”

He hadn’t heard that one, but it was in accord with his theory that every rumored sanctuary was located in a place he’d never had the slightest intention of visiting. “Last I heard people were going to Cleveland.”

“That was awhile ago.”

“Buffalo is the new Cleveland.”

That’s what people were saying, she told him. Mim had hooked up with some Buffalo-bound pilgrims for a week, but then she got some kind of stomach thing and had to lie on her side all day, the only thing that helped. They apologized, but they had to leave her behind, nothing personal. She didn’t take offense. “Them’s the rules,” she told Mark Spitz, shoulders popping up in a brief shrug.