Zone One (29 page)

When the downtown tracks merged, and Omega leaped between the columns to the express, the shooting had stopped. The Lieutenant cursed. One man shrieked and then the man’s cries sputtered to a wet gurgle. They recognized the sound of people
being eaten. Gamma’s flashlights were on now, reflecting from around the bend in the tunnel as if the first train of the reborn metropolis were approaching the station. The Lieutenant tracked ahead. The lights jiggled. The screams sputtered. The Lieutenant motioned for them to slow down as the crouching skels appeared in the lights, pieces of their bodies moving in and out of illumination, so engrimed by the underworld that as they fed, they were gargoyles glistening with blood.

“Heads!” The Lieutenant didn’t need to remind Gamma, as there was little chance of them being hit by friendly fire, prostrate on the tracks, pinned beneath monsters. The bullets detonating in the craniums of the skels interrupted the feast. One looked into Mark Spitz’s eyes, face decorated with gore, and then resumed eating Trevor. Other dead on the edge of the feeding huddle were more interested in the prospect of a deeper menu, and wafted clumsily toward Omega, stumbling between the tracks.

The four survivors intended to continue their march through the dead world, as they had since Last Night. They terminated the skels, draping their disparate masks over the faces of the damned so they could be certain of who and what they were killing.

They each saw something different as they dropped the creatures. Mark Spitz knew Gary’s appraisal of the dead. They were the proper citizens who had stymied and condemned him and his brothers all his life, excluding them from the festivities—the homeroom teachers and assistant principals, the neighbors across the street who called the cops to bitch about the noise and the trash in their yard. Where were their rules now, their judgments, condescending smiles? Gary rid the squares of their heads with gusto, perforated them redundantly to emphasize his contempt.

To Kaitlyn, this scourge came from a different population. She aimed at the rabble who nibbled at the edge of her dream: the weak-willed smokers, deadbeat dads and welfare cheats, single moms incessantly breeding, the flouters of speed laws, and those who only had themselves to blame for their ridiculous credit-card debt.
These empty-headed fiends between Chambers and Park Place did not vote or attend parent-teacher conferences, they ate fast food more than twice a week and required special plus-size stores for clothing to hide their hideous bodies from the healthy. Her assembled underclass who simultaneously undermined and justified her lifestyle choices. They needed to be terminated, and they tumbled into the dirty water beside Gary’s dead without differentiation.

If the beings they destroyed were their own creations, and not the degraded remnants of the people described on the things’ driver’s licenses, so be it. We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them. To Mark Spitz, the dead were his neighbors, the people he saw every day, as he might on a subway car, the fantastic metropolitan array. The subway was the great leveler—underground, the Wall Street titans stood in the shuddering car and clutched the same poles as the junior IT guys to create a totem of fists, the executive vice presidents in charge of new product marketing pressed thighs with the luckless and the dreamers, who got off at their stations when instructed by the computer’s voice and were replaced by devisers of theoretical financial instruments of unreckoned power, who vacated their seats and were replaced in turn by unemployable homunculi clutching yesterday’s tabloids. They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A’s and the C’s tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape. This was the plane where Mark Spitz lived. They were all him. Middling talents who got by, barnacles on humanity’s hull, survivors who had not yet been extinguished. Perhaps it was only a matter of time. Perhaps he would live until he chose not to. Mark Spitz aimed at the place where the spine met the cranium. They fell without a sound. He’d had practice.

They fired until all that needed to be killed had been killed,
and they stood numbly looking into the darkness for more, the next apparitions hiding in the wings, for surely they were not finished. They were human beings, after all, and full of things that needed to be put down.

Mark Spitz didn’t know what monsters the Lieutenant saw, but his system must have worked, for the man dispatched them with brisk proficiency.

From what they could reconstruct, the dead had been trapped inside a transit-authority control booth that the marines had missed in the first sweep of the tunnels. Gamma freed them. Mark Spitz pictured them splashing forth from the room, as if from the burst membranes of a cyst. No, not liquid, something electric—the banks of quiet machines, the neglected, pining keys and blank screens coordinating the subway system were full of frustrated energy and those bottled-up forces finally exploded in recrudescent fury. Released at the first indication that the people might return, the people from above, the riders who gave these tunnels purpose. Trevor, Joshua, and Richard Cowl had made it ten meters back up the tunnel before they were overcome, or one was pinned and his brothers failed in their rescue. In the light of their helmets, the blood was very dark against the rails, mixing with the black water trapped in the ruts. No one said “Name That Bloodstain!” because you didn’t play Name That Bloodstain! with people you knew. Mark Spitz told himself, I can Name That Bloodstain! in five seconds: It looks like the future.

That was the end of sweepers in the subway. The Lieutenant informed Buffalo the tunnels could wait until the next detachment of marines arrived, when they initiated Zone Two. He wasn’t going to send his people back down there. “One of my unit leaders majored in communications, for God’s sake.”

Bravo and Omega drained their glasses in the Brazilian churrascaria. No one talked. The digital musical player chirped uplifting verses about summer love. Mark Spitz realized he hadn’t told them about Bubbling Brooks yet.

“Oh my God,” Angela said.

“Those poor people.”

“The Triplets! What about the Triplets?”

“They say one made it out,” Mark Spitz said.

“Which one? Was it Finn?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope it was Finn,” No Mas said. “He’s my favorite. That little motherfucker got heart.”

“Poor Cheyenne,” Kaitlyn said.

Gary closed his eyes and nodded, communing with the world’s most hardscrabble triplet.

They set up the motion detectors and bunked, nestling gamey rims of sleeping bags under their noses. Kaitlyn propped herself on her elbows, flossing. She said, “Bright and early, back to work.” The matter of who owned the disputed grid, with its walk-ups and cherished parking lot, had been settled in Omega’s favor. One final gift from the Lieutenant.

Mark Spitz closed his eyes to the jungle shadows on the wall. The last time he saw the Lieutenant had been in the dumpling house, as their Sunday-night confab was winding down. Kaitlyn was asleep, leaning against the wall in a full-on snore session. Greater Wonton was in a jovial mood. Italy’s prime minister had released Gina Spens pinups, for the sake of global morale, wherein the bikini-clad warrior woman posed with a machine gun on a beach, draped herself coyly on a radar panel, and the like. There had been another three kill fields reported, even though one turned out not to be a bona fide kill field but the dumping ground of some master-level skel slaughterer, identity unknown. (Buffalo was keen to find him for a profile.) Good news, although the Lieutenant’s features argued otherwise. Mark Spitz said, “You resist?”

“I’m not immune. I sleep poorly, but I nap rich. The plague is the plague, though. I don’t see a reason to believe it’s finished.”

“Didn’t take you for a divine-justice whacko.”

“Not God. Nature, if you have to call it something. Correcting
an imbalance. It kicks us out of our robotic routine, what they called my dad before we pulled the plug: persistent vegetative state. Comeuppance for a flatlined culture.”

“Maybe it’s corrected now,” Mark Spitz said. He’d had a lot of whiskey for a tint of optimism to leak into his words. “Got rid of the extra population and now it’s done.” He was immediately disgusted with himself for phrasing it that way and checked to make sure Kaitlyn, his externalized conscience, hadn’t heard. She snored.

“Maybe Buffalo is right and we’re done with the plague and this is a vital enterprise we’re doing here. Maybe we’re merely butchers scraping off the gone-bad bits off the meat and putting it back under the glass.”

“Then why are you here, if it’s doomed?”

“I apologize again for not bringing ice.”

“It’s fine.”

“I was trying to make it into a weekly thing, but I forgot.” He took a big sip. “You know why they walk around? They walk around because they’re too stupid to know they’re dead.”

“I’m here because there’s something worth bringing back.”

“That’s straggler thinking.” He smiled. It was the faintest of disturbances on his face, as if a black eel miles below on the ocean floor had turned in its sleep and left this slim reverberation on the surface. “I’m grateful. Buffalo has given us some busywork to keep our minds off things. Dig a drainage ditch for the camp, shuck the fucking corn.” He raised his glass to his friends across the table. “Clear some buildings. You have to admit, it passes the time.”

W
hen the wall fell, it fell quickly, as if it had been waiting for this moment, as if it had been created for the very instant of its failure. Barricades collapsed with haste once exposed for the riddled and rotten things they had always been. Beneath that façade of stability they were as ethereal as the society that created them. All the feverish subroutines of his survival programs booted up, for the first time in so long, and he located the flaw the instant before it expressed itself: there.

The morning the Zone died Omega slept in, murk-mouthed in hangover. Normally the unit would have punched out at 3:00 p.m. and hit Wonton, but Kaitlyn reminded them that they’d knocked off early yesterday. She “didn’t want to let them down,”
them
being that many-headed pheenie hydra, whether it quivered in a bauxite mine waiting for the dead weather to clear or was clutched tight to the happy bosom of a settlement camp and at this very moment scooping Sunday brunch out of aluminum tins in the mess hall. Mark Spitz registered Kaitlyn’s response to the news of the Tromanhauser Triplets, and interpreted this morning’s dedication as a sacrifice toward their welfare, zipping out across the
miles: May it keep those tiny hearts pumping. In her action sequence, Kaitlyn emerged from the burning shed in slow motion, outrunning a covey of skels, one triplet under each arm and the last in a sling on her chest.

The two sweeper units wished each other swift recovery from dehydration and alcohol-wrung melancholy. Hair of the dog once they got back to Wonton, no question. Then it was back to work. Fulton x Gold. Yes, Omega savored their hard-won parking lot row by row, that void in their work detail, every blessed cubic foot of it and the fallow air rights to boot. The line of four-story tenements were devoid of demons, save for two suicides they bagged at 42 Gold. The pair killed themselves in identically laid-out junior one-bedrooms two floors apart. The elderly occupant of 2R hung herself from a stained-glass chandelier in the living room. Once the fixture tore away from the ceiling, the plaster bits mixed with the decomp sludge and lent her corpse a unique, lumpy texture that reminded Mark Spitz of the things lurking in old takeout. She had mutated, stranded in her cardboard carton at the back of the fridge. He recognized the ottoman on which she’d steadied herself; he had impulse-bought the same one online, on sale, the spring he moved into his parents’ rec room. Stainproof, one of the new miracle weaves, machine washable. He’d used it to change the recessed energy-saver bulbs in the track lighting, whose pallid light he accused of draining him of vitality and cheer.

The neighboring suicide upstairs blew his brains out on his sofa. The man in 4R was owl-faced with thin straw hair and shrunken limbs that poked from clothes a size too big. He’d starved before offing himself, noshing on the doomsday stock he gathered for his market-rate bunker: the bathroom tub was full of licked-clean cans and neatly flattened boxes, tied up and bagged in preparation for recycling day. Gary observed that his stench didn’t jibe with that of your average putrefying New Yorker, and indeed inspection of the hatbox next to the body revealed it to be the tomb of
the fuzzy, deflated form of the calico recognizable from numerous photographs adorning the apartment. The suicide note mentioned this roommate prominently, conjecturing about a mingled animal and human afterlife that did not discriminate between species, or possession of a brain big enough to conceive of an afterlife. Neither resident was bitten; they acceded to their particular forbidden thoughts.

Omega bagged the two neighbors and left them in the street for Disposal. They zipped up the calico with its owner.

The fortune-teller was their final sweep of the day. It was almost six o’clock. Kaitlyn suggested they pick up here tomorrow, but Gary said, “I want to get my palm read.”

Mark Spitz could not fathom how this deathless codger of a storefront had endured the relentless metropolitan renovations. The only answer was that the city itself was as bewitched by the past as the little creatures who skittered on its back. The city refused to let them go: How else to explain the holdout establishments on block after block, in sentimental pockets across the grid? These stores had opened every morning to serve a clientele extinct even before the plague’s rampage, displaying objects of zero utility on felt behind smudged glass, dangling them on steel hooks where dust clung and colonized. Discontinued products, exterminated desires. The city protected them, Mark Spitz thought. The typewriter-repair shop, the shoe-repair joint with its antiquated neon calligraphy and palpable incompetence that warned away the curious, the family deli with its germ-herding griddle: They stuck to the block with their faded signage and ninety-nine-year leases, murmuring among themselves in a dying vernacular of nostalgia. Businesses north and south, to either side of them, sold the new things, the chromium gizmos that people needed, while the city blocks nursed these old places, held them close like secrets or tumors.