Zone One

SATURDAY


“The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace.”





Initially the dreams, when safe nights permitted them, favored a classic anxiety paradigm. He was enmeshed in the institutional structures of his previous existence—in school, one of his blank jobs—and the other students and the teachers, fellow employees, and bosses were dead. Dead in a precipitous state of decay, winnowed by the plague: bones visibly gliding under taut skin at every movement, blackened gums bared when they told a joke or introduced a complicating element to the setup (the exam is today, the supervisor is on the warpath), their wounds mushy and livid. They leaked, leaked constantly from sores, eyes, ears, bites. In the dreams he was not bothered by their appearance, nor were they. They informed him that they’d all studied for the test save for him, the big assignment was due after lunch and not next week, the performance review was already under way, abetted by secret cameras. Not that he’d ever had a performance review in his life—it was a neurotic curve-ball his subconscious came up with to freak him out, employing the exotic cant of bona fide grown-ups. They were not the rabid dead or stragglers. They acted pretty much the same as they had before, his best friend, his insidious science teacher, his distracted boss. Except for the plague thing, these were the dreams he’d been having for years.

The dreams changed once he made it to his first big settlement. He was no longer late for the final exam of a class he didn’t know he’d enrolled in, or about to deliver the big presentation to higher-ups when he suddenly realized he left the only copy in the backseat of the taxi. His dreams unfurled in the theater of the mundane. There was no pulse-quickening escalation of events, no stakes to mention. He took the train to work. He waited for his pepperoni slice’s extraction from the pizza joint’s hectic oven. He jawed with his girlfriend. And all the supporting characters were dead. The dead said, “Let’s stay in and get a movie,” “You want fries with that?,” “Do you know what time it is?,” while flies skittered on their faces searching for a soft flap to bury eggs in, shreds of human meat wedged in their front teeth like fabled spinach, and their arms terminated at the elbow to showcase a white peach of bone fringed with dangling muscle and dripping tendons. He said, “Sure, let’s stay in and snuggle, it’s been a long day,” “I’ll take the side salad instead, thank you,” “It’s ten of five. Gets dark early this time of year.”

He downward-dogged in a drop-in yoga class as the skel next to him broke in half while essaying the pose. No one remarked upon this sight, not him, not the dead teacher, not the enthusiastic and limber dead around him, and not the bisected skel on the floral-patterned hemp mat, who flopped grotesquely through the rest of the hour like a real trooper. He got into his street clothes in the locker room as the yuppie skel beside him dragged an expensive watch over his wrist, grating the fresh scabs there. On impulse he purchased a deluxe combo juice at the café on the way out and decided not to say anything when the pimply skel dropped a banana slice into the blender. He hated banana. He drank it anyway, blowing into the striped straw to dislodge a plug of pulp, and stepped out to the sidewalk into the rush-hour stream of the dead on their way home, the paralegals, mohels, resigned temps, bike messengers, and slump-shouldered massage therapists, the panoply of citizens in the throes of their slow decay. The plague was a meticulous craftsman, dabbing effects with deliberation. They were falling apart but it would take a long time until the piece was finished. Only then could it sign its name. Until then, they walked.

He took the subway to the commuter rail, curling his fingers around the pole still warm from the skel who had grasped it moments before. In the advertisements lodged just above eye level, airbrushed heads of the dead hawked trade schools and remedies. Some of the dead entered the train politely and others were quite rude as they shouldered into the car when he tried to gain the platform. Everybody trying to eke it home. On the commuter platform he made sure his monthly pass was secured in the nook in his wallet and he pictured the night ahead. Order in from his go-to takeout spot, pop open one of the beers, and watch the reality show he’d DVR’d three days before. He woke up as the train left the tunnel and they were out of the underground.

The only unsettling thing about the dream was that he’d never taken a yoga class in his life.

This series eluded the category of nightmare. He awoke refreshed, or at least aloft in a routine state of morning dread in equilibrium for months. The new vintage of dreamscape left him feeling curiously indifferent. The dead small-talked, recited speculation over tomorrow’s cold front, numbly caromed from task to task as they had before, but they were sick. He recalled a theory of dreams from the old days that declared them wish-fulfillment, and another declaring that you are every person in your dreams, and each theory seemed equally plausible and moot and in the end he didn’t spend too much time analyzing. He was a busy man these days.

To the next grid, and Godspeed. His unit squeezed MRE bacon-and-eggs paste onto their tongues—amber with brownish-red swirls—and packed up their gear. Kaitlyn deposited her celeb bio on the windowsill, as if gifting it to the next guest at the sun-splashed resort. They almost made it to the stairwell when she remembered the motion detector. She went back for it. That happened a lot these days. It was nice to know it was there even though it hadn’t sirened once since the start of their tour.

Their new assignment was Fulton x Gold, Mixed Residential/Business, a few blocks east. It started as a no-bother drizzle but Mark Spitz pulled on his poncho on account of the ash, and the others followed suit when the rain intensified.

They progressed without speaking, still waking up on their march. Kaitlyn whistled “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction),” that irrepressible pheenie anthem, as they stomped through the gray puddles. “What if we get there,” Gary said finally, “and they’ve all keeled over? They finally caught what those kill-field skels got and all we have to do is bag them from now on?” He made this offering whenever they switched grids.

“That would be nice,” Mark Spitz said. The discovery of the kill fields that spring hastened the start of many a reconstruction operation. Word first arrived with the new survivors stumbling through the camp gates with their extravagant tales of meadows and mall parking lots brimming with the fallen dead. It wasn’t as if someone had neutralized them and departed without sterilizing the area—their heads were intact, they said. The dead looked as if they’d dropped in place.

Reentry into the anterooms of civilization was always difficult, and the longer the survivors spent out there, the harder it was to come back. But even after a hot shower, sleeping like stones for twelve hours straight, and tasting the corn (everyone was quite proud of the corn harvest, and rightfully so), the refugees continued with their wild stories. Then recon units came back with confirmation, video, up and down the coast. In wide-open places, the dead were falling en masse. A high-school football field in faraway Raleigh bumpy with bodies, a public park in Trenton where black flies zipped at the banquet. Buffalo sent down word of their think-tank scuttlebutt: The plague had finally, inevitably, exhausted what the human body could endure. There was a limit to the depredations, and that meant a limit to the devastation.

The reports of the scattered kill fields emerged at the same time, suggesting (according to some) a time frame for the course of infection. It was the season of encouraging dispatches. The establishment of steady communications with nations abroad, the intel traveling back and forth over the seas. Throw in the continued consolidation of the uninfected groups and clans, and the simple fact that skel attacks and sightings had diminished by all empirical measure, and one had reason to dust off the old optimism. You had only to look at the faint movement in the ashes: surely this is the American Phoenix Rising. At least that’s what the T-shirts said, lifted from the biodegradable cardboard boxes fresh from Buffalo. Toddler sizes available.

Mark Spitz observed the reduced skel numbers firsthand. There were simply fewer of them around, the chancred losers, a blessing during his time on the Corridor in accursed Connecticut and beyond. But kill fields aside—and there were no solid numbers regarding these sundry fallen, given the general appetite for a quick bonfire—no one could account for where the skels had gone. One school maintained that exposure had cut a lot of them down, the winter in its savagery. Speculation was above his pay grade, never mind that he was paid in socks and sunscreen.

Kaitlyn said, “Haven’t heard of that happening in urban areas yet.” She registered Gary’s deflated expression and, checking her usual impulses, added, “But maybe.”

Mark Spitz slapped his arm across Kaitlyn’s chest to stop her, a gesture he’d lifted from his parents, who had lifted it from their parents, who had remembered a time before seat belts: There was movement across the street.

The wasteland protocols booted up, obsolete or no. His brain compared the warehoused scenarios and previous engagements to the scene on Fulton Street, running demeanor, gear, posture, and facial expressions through the database. Dead or bandit, straggler or survivor, it was often hard to tell. Did they speak, that was the first test. Did they still have language. You took it from there. Before the rise of the camps, out in the land, you had to watch out for other people. The dead were predictable. People were not. Most were like Mark Spitz, isolated and squeaking by in the great out there, power bar by stale power bar. Once you ensured that you were both sentient, you gingerly approached to parley. Where are you coming from, onto what mirage have you fastened your hopes, have you seen any other people according to the old definitions, where shouldn’t we travel. The essential information.

If you chose to hook up for a time, eventually you traded Last Night stories. In their bleak adventure, the survivors tried to crawl to the mythical settlements and forts they’d conjured in their minds, where the plague was part of a news segment recounting some other town’s tragedy, filler before the weather report, where there was electricity and local produce right out of the bag and kids played and there were little jumping rabbits. Haven, finally. Each retelling of one’s Last Night story was a step toward another fantastic refuge, that of truth. Mark Spitz had refined his Last Night story into three versions. The Silhouette was for survivors he wasn’t going to travel with for long. He had quickly soured on this stranger standing before him by the cellar door of the farmhouse, or by the metal detector of the department of motor vehicles, out of skel sightline, and he concocted the thin broth of the Silhouette from this despair over the death of connection. At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running. The Silhouette sufficed. No need to hand over his heart, the good stuff. The two parties had departed before they even started talking.

He offered the Anecdote, robust and carrying more on its ribs, to those he might hole up with for a night, in a long-cleaned-out family-owned Greek restaurant, a dilapidated trailer with weeds growing out of the carpet, or atop a toll plaza, baking up there but grateful for the 360-degree view. He also trotted out the Anecdote version for hookups with larger bands, when the Silhouette might appear rude, but the Obituary was too intimate to share with the half-formed huddled faces around the flashlights. The Anecdote included a gloss on Atlantic City, the trip home (spectacularly foreboding in retrospect, the ghosts playing basketball), and concluded with the phrase “I found my parents, and then I started running.” It was the smallest portion, he learned, that was acceptable to strangers to allow them to fall asleep without thinking he’d bludgeon them in their sleeping bags. The versions they gave in return were never enough to let him sleep, no matter the surfeit of telling details and sincerity.

The Obituary, although refined over the months and not without a rehearsed air, was nonetheless heartfelt, glancing off his true self more than once, replete with digressions about his lifelong friendship with Kyle, nostalgia for the old A.C. trips, the unsettling and “off” atmosphere of that last casino weekend, and a thorough description of the tableau at his house and its aftermath. Although the adjectives tended to be neutral in later retellings, the Obituary was the sacred in its current guise. The listener usually responded in kind, unless revisiting that longest of nights dispatched them into a fugue, which happened occasionally. They’d spent some time together. This might be the final human being they’d see before they died. Both speaker and listener, sharer and receiver, wanted to be remembered. The Obit got it all down for some calm, distant day when you were long disappeared and a stranger took the time to say your name.

Albatrosses materialized around the bend, of course, and two minutes of their company sufficed. They were too far gone. Sick, not with the plague but with the workhorse afflictions newly complicated in the wasteland, pneumonia and rheumatoid arthritis and the like. The things requiring generic meds that needed decoding in the stripped pharmacies. Or they were quite clearly mad. How’d this brain-wiped half-skel make it this far? God had watched over children and drunks, and now he watched over no one, but these unfortunates made it through somehow. They had no supplies, not a single weapon, owned nothing but their clothes and wounds. Perhaps they might snap out of it, that cough might disappear with a packet of rehydrated chicken soup, but he made a swift retreat, faster than if pursued by a hundred skels. Safer to assume they’d get him killed. A parent-child combo might pop up at the crest of the old country road, wan and wary, and Mark Spitz shrank from these, no matter how well outfitted they were. Parenthood made grown-ups unpredictable. They hesitated at the key moment out of consideration for their kid’s abilities or safety, they were paranoid he wanted to rape or eat their offspring, they slowed him down with their baby steps or kept him distracted as he pondered their erraticism. They were worse than the bandits, who only wanted your stuff and sometimes managed to take it, on the spot, or at gunpoint later when the opportunity presented itself, when you were sleeping or taking a piss. The parents were dangerous because they didn’t want your precious supplies. They possessed the valuables, and it hobbled their reasoning.

He hooked up with strangers for a while, exchanged a grimy jar of cranberry sauce or a juice box per the new greeting ritual, and swapped information on the big matters of the day, like dead concentrations, and small things like the state of the world. A few months into the collapse, only the fools asked about the government, the army, the designated rescue stations, all the unattainable islands, and the fools were dwindling every day. He hung with them until they decided on divergent destinations, got into an argument over skel behavior theories or how to spot lurking botulism in a dented can. People were invested in the oddest things these days. He hung with them until they were attacked and they died and he didn’t. Sometimes he ditched them because they talked too f*cking much.

He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.

After Mim, Mark Spitz dispensed with good-luck speeches and see-you-down-the-roads. He crept at first light. He heard his temporary companions wake at the small scrabbling of his leave-taking but they didn’t budge from their dingy sleeping bags once they realized he wasn’t stealing their stuff, the batteries and pocket drives full of family photos. They didn’t care for the goodbyes, either.

That afternoon on Fulton, Mark Spitz shut down his welcome routines after they identified the three figures across the street. They were people. They wore ponchos, and what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho. The dead did not wear ponchos. Gary shouted greetings, followed by endearing epithets. The gang rejoined with enthusiasm, crooning the chorus from a bit of schmaltz about islands in the stream.

It was Bravo Unit: Angela, No Mas, and Carl. Given the enigmatic pattern of the Lieutenant’s grid assignments, it was rare that units stumbled on one another in the Zone. The ten sweeper units crisscrossed downtown like locals checking off a to-do list: to the overnight-delivery place to rush the application, jetting to the dry cleaner, to the specialty cheese store for that esoteric hunk after stupidly asking their host if they could bring anything. When they bumped into one another it was a pleasant diversion.

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 f*cked 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-f*ck 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.

Mim had been mobile since her last camp imploded. She’d spent the summer and most of the autumn at a mansion in Darien: two and a half meals a day, stone walls, and a generator. The owners were dead, but the gardener’s son, Taylor, had keys and set up camp at the start of the abominations. He’d played Space War on the grounds as a kid, knew the clandestine tunnels dug during the reign of prohibition and maintained during the heyday of infidelity. Plenty of spare exits if others got skel-heavy. Taylor recruited fellow survivors on gas runs, or he caught them clambering over the walls, backpacks full of cans and accessories. If he saw something in you he liked, you were invited to stay. He dressed like biker-club muscle but was a very sweet soul; it was a costume, and when he ran off people, they obeyed.

“It wasn’t crazy-culty,” Mim said, sucking powder from a protein packet, licking the excess from her fingertip. “He didn’t try anything nuts, like you have to kill the oldest every Thursday at midnight—he just wanted people he could get along with. Pot-heads, mostly.” Willoughby Manor was thirty people at its biggest population, and well run. Organized forage runs, an activity board. “No bullies, no rapes. Low profile kept the dead from hanging around outside.” Lights out after dark was the rule, whereupon they gathered in the wine cellar for mellow evening tastings. Down in the branching tunnels there were ample amusements to pass the time. They played poker among the Brunellos, charades before the Argentine vintages, watched the cherished sitcoms in the final, unfinished room that was actually underneath the pool, imagine that. They’d plucked Mim from Darien’s main drag after she miscalculated the margin of safety while trying to outrun a skel swarm she’d accidentally wandered into. “Don’t you hate it when that happens?” she asked. “Minding your own business, on a lip balm mission, and then boom.” The Willoughbys scooped her up in an SUV and she enlisted.

“Sounds like a nice setup.”

“It was great. I really thought I’d wait it out there.” She changed her tone. She was not the first to misread his face. “I still believe that—that we’re going to beat this thing. However long it takes. And then we’re all going to go home.”

He mashed his teeth together so as to maintain his mask.

Their idyll was terminated by one of the number, Abel, who had developed some theories about the plague and its agenda. He was one of those apocalypse-as-moral-hygiene people, with a college-sophomore socialist slant. The dead came to scrub the Earth of capitalism and the vast bourgeois superstructure, with its doilies, helicopter parenting, and streaming video, return us to nature and wholesome communal living. No one paid much attention, Mim said; Abel was a good worker and one encountered crazier folk out on the wastes.

Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring. The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren’t.

“Then one night,” Mim said, “it was over.” Most of the campers were down in the cellar—it was game night—when Abel came downstairs and said that he could no longer sit back and watch while the household ignored the verdict of the plague. What right do we have to laugh and carol and play Texas hold ’em while the rest of the world suffered its just punishment? “Which is why,” he told them, “I have opened the gates.”

They ran upstairs. Abel did more than open the gates. The dead engulfed the grounds, spilling into the great room from the veranda “like wedding guests looking for cocktails after the ceremony.” Abel must have lured them up the hill with promises of a buffet. The place was lost. “The usual helter-skelter,” Mim told him. She was separated from everybody else but managed to scramble to some backup gear she’d stashed by the far wall of the grounds for this very occasion. “Settle in all you want to,” Mim said. “Sign up for work duty and water the tomato plants. But you gotta stash a backup pack, ’cause it always comes tumbling down.”

He liked her immensely, despite her belief in Buffalo. They were vapor: the big settlement beyond the next rise, the military base two days’ walk, the utopian commune on the other side of the river. The place never existed or was long overrun by the time of your arrival, a stink of corpses and smoldering fires. Or it was lunatics and the crazy new society they’d cooked up, with a fascist constitution, or nutty rules like all the womenfolk had to sleep with the men to repopulate the race, or some other creepy secret you only discovered after you’d been there a few days, and when you had to split you found they’d hidden your weapons and stolen your bouillon cubes. Mark Spitz was off groups for now, but if the right outfit came along he’d start using Mim’s solution. Stash a spare.

Mark Spitz was prepared to take whatever batteries Mim didn’t want, but she insisted that they split them evenly. “I can’t carry all this, that’s ridiculous. Help yourself.” He had filled his pack when he heard Mim curse.

She was at the window. “Bad weather,” she said. He thought the snow had started; he’d smelled the impending snow since morning. Then he replaced her at the glass and saw Main Street. He dropped down. Was the back door locked? Yes. He and Mim crawled behind the aisles of toddler fare, the fake babies, squealing teddys, and assortment of cheap plastic shapes. It was the biggest dead stream he’d seen in months, a macabre parade walking from sidewalk to sidewalk in the wake of an invisible, infernal piper. Homecoming Day, Founder’s Birthday, the End of the War. Did small towns still celebrate soldiers who made it back from the front? Salute that miracle of making it through the ordeal? The festivities honoring the defeat of the plague, the armistice with chaos, wouldn’t match the spectacle outside. There wouldn’t be enough people left to hold a banner. He shook his head. F*cking Connecticut.

The necrotic multitudes marched past the toy-store windows. This sick procession. Mark Spitz and his new companion repaired to the stockroom. Maybe the weather marshaled the dead into that big group, repurposed synapses in their spongy and riddled brains compelling them from the wind, the blizzard washing over the seaboard. Some unfortunate souls would discover where the dead army waited out bad weather. Not him. Mark Spitz and Mim remained in the back. When the dead finally disappeared, the big furry flakes stuck to the road and sidewalk. In the lost days when the pipes poured and electrons filled the multifarious cables, the ambient heat of the ground prevented such quick accumulations. Now the snow piled swiftly on the deadened earth.

They held off on Last Night. He knew he was going to give her the Obituary when she opened the back door and emerged from the gloom. Skull faces had replaced human faces in his mind’s population, tight over the bone, staring without mercy, incisors out front. The stubborn ordinariness of her soft eyes and round, vigorous features were a souvenir. The yellow bandanna tight around her scalp tokened weekend chores, plucking acorns and twigs from the sputtering gutter, scraping last summer’s black residue from the grill. The ancient rites. She was like him, one of the unlikely ones, pushing through. Normal.

Instead of Last Night stories, they indulged in Where Ya From, which tended to produce more positive hits than it had before the plague, or so it seemed to Mark Spitz. As if all the survivors shared a clandestine link, established here and there across the course of their lives for the arrival of this event. Or perhaps he was merely easily awed by coincidence now, in the disconnectedness of his days. “Oh, you’re from Wilkes-Barre? Do you know Gabe Edelman?” “Really? That’s funny, we met at a sales conference in Akron once.” His life overlapped with the dentist duo, the bubbly truck driver, the insurance adjuster, and the rest of the sad-eyed lot, and it didn’t matter that it was all meaningless. “She must have gone to rehab since then because she wasn’t like that at all.” It was a séance to penetrate the veil of the great beyond. The disembodied knocking of spirits brightened their respective corners of darkness for a time. “I was there once, ate at a coffee shop that had the best apple pie. Do you know it? That’s it.” “My cousin went there. But he’s much older, you wouldn’t have crossed paths with him.” The associations hastened morning, when they went in different directions. Sometimes not until then. Sometimes the dead found them in the night.

He stayed with her, half in love with her before twilight. They didn’t intersect, although over time they discovered they were both fond of the same television shows. But everybody loved the same shows back then and popular culture was not the same thing as people and places. He couldn’t help but think that the juggernaut sitcoms and police procedurals were still in syndication somewhere on the planet, the laugh tracks and pre-commercial-break crescendos ringing out and lumbering forth in the evergloom. The shows had been so inescapable that they were past requiring electricity. At the very least, in a survivalist’s underground rec room or a government facility (Buffalo had yet to reveal itself), seasons one through seven of the hospital drama groundbreaking in its realism and the extras-filled box set of the critic-proof workplace comedy unfurled on the screens as the watchers debated breaking out the good stuff, the cheese puffs they’d been saving for a special occasion. They tugged open the cellophane: special occasions were over. The commercials were the new commercials, he imagined darkly, for lightweight kerosene canisters (When You Need to Burn the Dead in a Hurry!) and anticiprant (Four Out of Five Uninfected Doctors Agree: Still the Only Antibiotic That Matters!). One did not fast-forward through these ads. These were essential consumer items.

He and Mim had no one in common, apart from the calamity. They were both its fleas. “I’m just a mom,” she said, botching the tense. That first night they broke open a carton of birthday candles, which provided no heat but the concept of fire warmed them. Mark Spitz blocked the draft from the back door with a row of stuffed armadillos and others in the armadillo’s troupe. She went first.

She was from Paterson, her husband’s hometown. They moved there once they found out about the baby. Her parents were useless, trapped in a narcissistic loop, but Harry’s mother was reliable and had a lot of time on her hands since her retirement. Mim came to love the town. She met some expectant moms online via the local parenting resource and in those disquieting postpartum days they assembled into a crew. They had plenty of babies over the next ten years, and she tapped a bona fide community into her auto-synced contact lists, especially after school started and she befriended the moms (and odd dad) she recognized from the two local playgrounds. “Didn’t you use to go to that tot lot next to Café Loulou?” “We met during that heat wave—you were kind enough to give my girl, Eve, two water balloons.”

Harry worked in sales at a company that compiled factoids for oldies stations: This plucky tune ruled the charts for an unprecedented twelve weeks in the summer of 1964. This irrepressible hit maker was born this day in 1946. Local DJs used them as a leavening agent in their patter and it was a sturdy business in an age of corporatized nostalgia, when each successive generation herded key favorites together to save them from nipping upstarts. Harry traveled a lot, but a religious webchat schedule erased the miles, especially in those early days when it was just the two of them. It was almost as if he were sitting on the couch when they grimaced and laughed into their minuscule lenses, as if Harry were on his laptop right next to her. When her ob-gyn told them their third child was on the way, they moved to their fourth and final Paterson address. New construction. Harry loved those old houses on the street he grew up on, but Mim never saw the appeal.

Gladys’s youngest son, Oliver, was turning five. Miriam’s son Asher had celebrated his birthday the week before. It was one of those enchanted, hyperactive months when the weekends were saturated with birthday parties and the moms (and odd dad) worked hard to coordinate their schedules—you can take Saturday and we’ll take Sunday and next year we’ll switch—reserve the vetted play spaces, discover new, uncharted play spaces, and ponder overlong what to cram down the gullets of the diaphanous goodie bags, the gooey, the plastic, the cavity-inducing. It was a kindhearted competition as far as these things go. Perhaps exhausted by the game, Gladys went old school by holding Oliver’s party at home. Gladys downloaded the latest pastimes and tips from a parenting site she didn’t think anyone else had heard of yet. The pool would finally be finished by then and, weather willing, it would be a splendid inaugural bash.

The pool wasn’t finished. Gladys told Mim that Lamont had run out of patience and wanted to fire the contractor, but everyone else was booked up, they’d checked. The back of the house was a jagged hell and they’d have to stay indoors on account of liability. And to top it all off, Gladys told her, Lamont was sick upstairs with the flu. One aspect of the afternoon remained unblemished, however. It was a drop-off party, that two-hour oasis in the harried parent’s calendar, egress to a world of manis and pedis, a pilfered nap, a glass or two of decent rosé. Mim left her kids there. They had buddies their own age, known each other since they were born. Asher, Jackson, and little Eve didn’t even spare a goodbye, trotting into the playroom where the other kids toiled in their commotion. “Good luck,” Mim said, as Gladys shut the door to keep the AC in.

When she returned an hour and a half later—she had resolved to straighten up her office but had scratched at her crossword instead—she saw the ambulance outside but immediately calmed herself: Gladys would have called her if it had been one of her kids. Then the squad cars ran her off the road as they sped past, almost driving onto her friend’s front lawn and into her beloved hydrangeas and Mim thought, Maybe Gladys didn’t have time to call and something has happened to her babies. She was correct: Gladys didn’t have time to call.

Twelve hours later, Mim was on the run like everyone else. Cast out into the dreary steppes. Mark Spitz didn’t ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.

Mark Spitz thought of Mim and the toy store as he walked up to Wonton because of the encounter with Bravo Unit. Other people in their surprises, the different social outcomes in the new world. He rarely hung out this far downtown before the plague, had never run into people he knew on these streets, so it was odd seeing Angela and the other two on their rounds. Mark Spitz was surprised at how calm he had been as the businessman skel approached, how far removed he was from out there. He was one of six heavily armed soldiers. This was not Last Night in its cruel ministrations. This was the new kingdom of Zone One. His turf after all this time.

The city—the pre-catastrophe city with its untold snares and machinations—intimidated him. He’d never lived on the island. He spent a sweltering August crashing with a college buddy in Bushwick, stranded on the L train, sure, but even when he could have scraped up enough dough for some miserable boot-camp apartment he had resisted moving to the city. He commuted to his job in Chelsea from his childhood home to save some money, he told himself. He wasn’t the only one putting off the big move; a lot of the people he grew up with shuffled back to Long Island after college, knowing it was safe there or realizing this after getting slapped around and bruised out in the world. If they had ever left at all.

Looking back, it was silly. He wanted to find his bearings after his stint in California, have some sort of kick-ass job or unspecified achievement under his belt before he moved to Manhattan. To think that there had been a time when such a thing meant something: the signifiers of one’s position in the world. Today a rusty machete and bag of almonds made you a person of substance. He had waited on a sweet internship from one of the globe-strangling midtown firms or … he couldn’t think of it, what else would have made him comfortable walking down the New York streets in that hectic boil. He had been scared of the city. He knew how to dog-paddle and that was it. Now no one hogged the sidewalk so he couldn’t pass, beat him to that vacant subway seat, jousted with him. He only encountered slow desperadoes and fellow sheriffs, meting out justice in the territory.

A feather of plastic stuck to his boot and flopped against the pavement. He tore it off. He was accustomed to the silence now, understood it as a part of himself, weightless gear he stowed in his pack next to the gauze and anticiprant. He walked in the middle of the street, between the ankles of the steel juggernauts. Past the barren windows. His beat was different than the marines’. The dead had poured out of the buildings when they heard the soldiers’ dinner bell of war whoops and gunfire, and were cut down. His own tour of the tenements and high-end edifices was calmer: he had time to interpret the rooms of asylum. Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population remained at a miraculous density, it seemed to him, for the empty rooms brimmed with evidence, in the stragglers they did or did not contain, in the busted barricades, in the expired relatives on the futon beds, arms crossed over their chests in ad hoc rites. The rooms stored anthropological clues re: kinship rituals and taboos. How they treated their dead.

The rich tended to escape. Entire white-glove buildings were devoid, as Omega discovered after they worried the seams of and then shattered the glass doors to the lobby (no choice, despite the No-No Cards). The rich fled during the convulsions of the great evacuation, dragging their distilled possessions in wheeled luggage of European manufacture, leaving their thousand-dollar floor lamps to attract dust to their silver surfaces and recount luxury to later visitors, bowing like weeping willows over imported pile rugs. A larger percentage of the poor tended to stay, shoving layaway bureaus and media consoles up against the doors. There were those who decided to stay, willfully uncomprehending or stupid or incapacitated by the scope of the disaster, and those who could not leave for a hundred other reasons—because they were waiting for their girlfriend or mother or soul mate to make it home first, because their mobility was compromised or a relative was debilitated, crutched, too young. Because it was too impossible, the enormity of the thought: This is the end. He knew them all from their absences.

He stood in the abandoned nests, kicking empty cans that had held the mainstay vegetables, backbone of a good American diet. Where terrified family units had quivered while waiting for the next-door neighbors to stop screaming for entry: Save us, let us in. When the screaming ceased, the residents waited for them to stop passing by the eyehole in the front door, deadly shadows in that tiny aperture. The plague-blind residents of apartments 7J and 9F, who had studiously ignored each other during the occasional elevator internment, had elected themselves to the condo board without dissenting votes and now patrolled the halls in search of bylaw infractions and flesh, pausing by the door as if they heard the breathing of those inside despite all those huddled critters did to silence themselves. In the living room on the fifth floor of the walk-up, the entombed lovers made a bed of expensive, hand-sewn blankets that was ringed by puddles of wax from the candles they’d used for dinner parties and romantic evenings at home, and murmured the newly minted endearments: “No, you take the last one, I ate yesterday” and “If I didn’t have you with me right now I would have killed myself long ago.” All of these waited for their moment of escape, those early days. All of these and the loners—the hipsters, the homesick transfer students and homebound retired teachers, the elderly who thought themselves long past being surprised by the invidious schemes of the world, the new arrivals with bad timing and zero friends and lacking anything resembling that false assemblage described as a “support system,” and the biding cranks finally gifted with a perverted version of their long-awaited dream of liberation from humanity. They spent weeks or months holed up in their pads, devouring everything in the cheap cabinetry, every last morsel save for the upholstery, and even this occasionally bore marks of teeth, before finally making a break for it at whatever time of day they’d decided was safest, in the direction dictated by their mulled theories, toward the bridges, the river to search for a seaworthy vessel, the roof to wave down angels for a lift. Out, out.

They had lived in the city in the days of the plague. They finished off the food and hope of rescue and packed a small bag. In time they left their apartments or else snuffed themselves according to the recipes offered by the manual of pop culture. He’d never met anyone in the camps or the great out there who had made it out of the city after the first couple of days. They left the doors unlocked.

He became a connoisseur of the found poetry in the abandoned barricade. The minuscule, hardscrabble wedge of space between the piled-up furniture and the apartment door the departing had squeezed through. The wide, inviting arch of an old church that had been dwarfed by high-rises, the only open doorway on the block, the debris on the steps kicked away in the escape and the cleared path creating a kind of carpet for the bride and groom en route to the honeymoon limo. And out in the country, the one blank window among the other boarded-up windows on the first floor of the farmhouse, with its welcome mat of shattered glass. Those inside had made a break for it, and there the story ended. Did they make it? It was less depressing than the spectacle of the overcome barricade, the fortifications that failed, with their rotting, weather-lashed corpses and the expressionist eruptions of crimson across the surfaces.

When he used to watch disaster flicks and horror movies he convinced himself he’d survive the particular death scenario: happen to be away from his home zip code when the megatons fell, upwind of the fallout, covering the bunker’s air vents with electrical tape. He was spread-eagled atop the butte and catching his breath when the tsunami swirled ashore, and in the lottery for a berth on the spacecraft, away from an Earth disintegrating under cosmic rays, his number was the last one picked and it happened to be his birthday. Always the logical means of evasion, he’d make it through as he always did. He was the only cast member to heed the words of the bedraggled prophet in Act I, and the plucky dude who slid the lucky heirloom knife from his sock and sawed at the bonds while in the next room the cannibal family bickered over when to carve him for dinner. He was the one left to explain it all to the skeptical world after the end credits, jibbering in blood-drenched dungarees before the useless local authorities, news media vans, and government agencies who spent half the movie arriving on the scene. I know it sounds crazy, but they came from the radioactive anthill, the sorority girls were dead when I got there, the prehistoric sea creature is your perp, dredge the lake and you’ll find the bodies in its digestive tract, check it out. By his sights, the real movie started after the first one ended, in the impossible return to things before.

• • •