Zone One

“Want a lift?”

Now the world was muck. But systems die hard—they outlive their creators and unlike plagues do not require individual hosts—and thus it was a well-organized muck with a hierarchy, accountability, and, increasingly, paperwork. Bozeman’s appointment in the current order was as Wonton’s top military clerk, principal caretaker of the camp’s holistic integrity in all aspects. Every night, Bozeman held the garrison over his shoulder and burped it, cooing work-order lullabies. He knew the secret contents of the parcels in the bellies of the choppers crisscrossing the seaboard, he ensured that designated calibers reached the waiting chambers, he slept nights with the key to the fridge that held the brass’s grass-fed porterhouse on a chain around his puffy neck. Mark Spitz was surprised to see their steward at the wheel of the jeep, as the man rarely strayed from the second-floor offices of the bank. Surely the farther he strayed from ground zero, the more he shriveled.

In the passenger seat, a civilian wrapped in a black pencil skirt and white blouse sized up Mark Spitz over the rim of her blue-tinted sunglasses. She was a meteor crashed from another part of the solar system, or a place even more remote, life before the agony, strutting from a magazine catering to the contemporary professional woman. The cover lines were scrubbed of compatibility tests and dispatches from the frontiers of How to Please Your Man research, and teased instead testimonials to self-sufficiency, the virtues of a contained existence, the holy grail of complete actualization. She threatened a fly with a glossy white folder and smiled at Mark Spitz, the first bona fide citizen he’d seen since the Zone. “Plenty of room,” she said. It was, in addition, the first time he’d seen someone wearing pearls since he started running.

Mark Spitz did as he was told. Bozeman informed him they were headed to HQ after a brief pit stop on West Broadway. “This is Ms. Macy,” he said. “She’s here from Buffalo doing some recon.” Bozeman put a bit of spin on this last word, what Mark Spitz would have called ironic if the world hadn’t rendered such a thing into scarcity. Irony was an ore buried too deep in the crust and the machine did not exist on Earth that was capable of reaching it. The clerk kept his eyes on the road, swerving around mammoth scorched patches of asphalt where the marines roasted dead skels before Disposal’s implementation. The black spots of buckled tar were no threat to the vehicle. Mark Spitz chalked it up to superstition.

They jetted past a row of upscale clothing stores, the final displays and markdowns pouting in the jaundiced light. Ms. Macy said “Oh!” and then “Never mind” as she realized that her current escorts would not be simpatico with an impromptu raid. Mark Spitz smiled. It was like being on a long road trip, moving through the city, whether on foot or in a car, with Kaitlyn and Gary or anyone else. Your fancy dangled coyly through a shopwindow and the old consumer electrons agitated with purpose. Then you squashed the impulse at the reality that you were not stopping, it was too late to stop, there were other passengers besides you and your whim. The moment disappeared. You’d be disappointed anyway. The store at the side of the road was not so eccentric now that you got a good look at it, that authentic mom-and-pop fare curdled on the tines, and the oldest roller coaster in the state closed down years before and the rat-poison warnings prevented even a quick look-see of the dilapidated premises. Like all mirages, they evaporated up close.

Anti-looting regs kept the world-renowned shopping of New York City off-limits, but he suspected Ms. Macy had enough pull to arrange an after-hours spree, for a price. Four juice boxes.

She turned to Mark Spitz. “Let me take this opportunity to thank you on behalf of Buffalo for all the great work you men and women are doing,” she said. She tucked a sprig of hair behind her ear. “You have a lot of supporters up there.”

“Thanks.”

The jeep shot left and Ms. Macy clutched her seat, perfect nails pinioning the cushion. He’d call the nail polish light blue but a more fanciful appellation no doubt decorated the bottle. “It’s not often I’m out in the trenches,” she said. “Mostly we sit around our little conference table with our sad little plant and our wipe board and come up with our grand plans. But that’s changing.” Grit infiltrated her eyes and she twisted around to massage them in the cracked mirror of her compact, tilting it to find a workable angle.

Bozeman pulled up in front of a boutique hotel, caressing the curb as he parked. The army had cleared the cars from this side of the street since the last time Mark Spitz was here. The dark metal sheeting of the façade was artificially stressed, striated and pocked with calculated imperfection that in this depleted era implied foresightedness. Surely this was the forward-looking architecture they had all been waiting for. Mark Spitz recognized the humble inn from its regular invocations by the extinct gossip pages. It was home to premiere parties of dud movies and the desperate pell-mell drug binges of celebrities and rich children who had never been hugged properly. Ms. Macy and her escort stepped to the sidewalk, the young woman scampering ahead for the glass awning that kept the rain at bay with bone-white glass and stainless-steel ribbing. “Why don’t you come with,” Ms. Macy said, bowing to see Mark Spitz’s face. “I could use your expertise.”

He didn’t know what she meant, as his only expertise was his cockroach impersonation, the infinite resilience of said critter he had down cold. A continuous grumble of gunfire from the wall uptown murdered the silence. They walked over the sparkling cubes of glass that had once been the front doors, Ms. Macy tentative in her pumps and frowning and making clucking sounds. Bozeman tracked ahead to scout the first-floor lounge, that dim sac nestled into Reception like a tumor. Mark Spitz made a quick survey of the hallway feeding into the restrooms and hidden employee preserves. He sensed the three of them were alone but beat it back to the lobby just in case. The place was clear of skels, but it wouldn’t make anyone happy if he were wrong and one of Buffalo’s own got her face eaten, in such beautiful shoes.

Ms. Macy paced the cold tile, slow and pensive. He liked the sound of her heels on the floor. They echoed with enticing glamour, like the growling of a promising party behind the door at the end of the hall. She said, “Five blocks.” It was five blocks to the wall, he calculated, and twenty-plus floors above before they ran out of rooms. She was looking for housing.

Bozeman emerged from the lounge and shrugged when Mark Spitz looked at him for an explanation.

“I thought you said the doors were fixed,” Ms. Macy said. “We don’t want squirrels and rats and God knows what else moving in here.”

“We’re working on finding a proper glazier, ma’am,” Bozeman said.

“Glazier?”

“Window-makers, dealers in glass. So far the only ones we’ve turned up are in the far camps. They’re really cracking down on nonessential air travel lately, what with the operation gearing up.”

She shook her head. “Don’t get caught up in the deprivation game. That’s the old days.” She appeared vexed, and dumbfounded as to the source of her vexation. Then she looked up at the ceiling, where a crude map of old Dutch New York unscrolled in slapdash yellow strokes. The amateur nature of the rendering was intentional, to ameliorate the bloodless deliberation on display everywhere else. Her shoulders sank. “How are the rooms?”

“Fine. Apart from what’s in the folder.” He added, “As far as I know. I wasn’t here during the inspection. But they’re very good at their jobs.”

“In Buffalo all we have to go on is what you tell us.”

“Evacuated in the first wave. Whole place locked up.” He paused. Locked up except for the front doors. “But we can go upstairs and conduct a personal inspection if you like.”

“With the elevators out?” She made some notes. “Those will have to go,” she said, pointing to the wall art. Two monstrous canvases hulked above the black leather couches, depicting the metropolis at night from a vulture’s vantage. In the first, fires burned at intersections, faint but unsettling in their even dispersal through the grid, while the companion piece maintained the angle but captured the rapacious fires gnawing their way up the buildings, the inhabitants curled over windowsills watching the progress of the flames. The hungry catastrophe, creeping apace. Wall art.

“They are a bit gloomy,” Mark Spitz said. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to speak, if he was employing his expertise, but he wanted to let Bozeman off the hook. During their first weeks in the Zone, the sweepers hit the grids without the new mesh fatigues. An indispensable bit of gear, to say the least, but the sweepers were not at the top of the list. When the shipment was finally en route, Bozeman tipped Mark Spitz and he was first in line at distribution. “You’re a Long Island boy,” he explained later, “like me.”

“The thing about these boutique hotels is that you can be anywhere in the world,” Ms. Macy said. “They really had it down before the plague—the international language of hospitality.”

“Ever been to Barcelona?” Bozeman asked. “They stay up all night.”

“I’m thinking kids,” Ms. Macy said. She slashed a red marker across her mental wipe board: Let’s put our heads together, team. “Pictures of pheenie kids in the camps, cavorting and pitching in. Pressing seeds into the soil and sharpening machetes. No machetes—kid stuff. Smiling and laughing and doing kid stuff. They’re the future, after all. That’s what this whole thing is about, the future.”

The future required many things, but it had not occurred to Mark Spitz that it needed interior decorating. Yes, kids would really tie the room together. He hadn’t been aware that he missed the sleek argot of the urban professional class. It was like a favorite sweater pulled out at the first autumn chill, tested and reassuring and cozy. The future was what formerly had been called a transitional neighborhood. Essential services in short supply, the poodle-grooming salons and scruffy cafés, but if you got in at the right time it didn’t matter that the building next door was writhing with skels. Eventually they’ll be displaced three subway stops away by rising rents and you’ll never see them again. The boîtes are coming, be patient, my pet. “Why are you here, Ms. Macy?” Mark Spitz asked.

The visitor deliberated. “I’m not supposed to say anything yet,” she said, “but you guys are safe. We’ve been lobbying for it, and we just got word last week that Manhattan is going to be the site of the next summit. Great news, right?”

Mark Spitz and Bozeman marshaled an appropriate response.

“New York City is the greatest city in the world. Imagine what all those heads of state and ambassadors will feel when they see what we’ve accomplished. You’ve accomplished. We brought this place back from the dead. The symbolism alone. If we can do that, we can do anything.”

“We might even be in Zone Two at that point, if we stay on schedule,” Bozeman said, taking the advantage.

“This is America.”

“Shoot.”

“I know,” she said. She had a halo, trick lighting. “Isn’t it great?” She ran her fingers along the top of the reception desk, fiddling the dust between her fingers. “An oasis, as soon as they set foot in the Zone. I can sign off on this place, I think. They’ll enjoy their stay. As they used to say.”

They returned to the jeep. Ms. Macy walked backward, pinning the details into her mind’s scrapbook. “Rip up the carpet and put in something red,” she ordered her invisible assistant. “Some kids losing their baby teeth, grinning and doing what they do.” She slapped the pages of her notebook until she found a fresh page. “First thing at Wonton I’m going to get on the comm and have them send a photographer to Happy Acres and Rainbow Village to snag some head shots. There must be some good kids somewhere.”

On the short ride uptown the Zone stirred around Mark Spitz. After two blocks, a soldier bent to tie her sneakers, black goggles following the civilian as the jeep purred by. After three blocks a pair of soldiers humped a leather club chair down the sidewalk toward a hideout they’d scoped, like sophomores beguiled by a vision of the coolest dorm room. After four blocks they were firmly in Wonton’s domain, painlessly assimilated into the combine. Mark Spitz remembered his first ride in a military transport, the armored behemoth that retrieved him from the great out there. When he clambered out of the hatch and blinked at the perimeter lights and sentry nests, order in its accumulated manifestations, he knew he had been cast in a new production. This was no jerry-rigged fortification of depleted wanderers, bolted together by blood and self-delusion, this was government. This was reconstruction. The end in abeyance.

• • •

His final night in the wastes transpired on the outskirts of Northampton, Massachusetts, neighbor to loathsome Connecticut but an entirely different beast. For weeks, Mark Spitz had avoided all but the smallest towns, as he’d come to perceive, correctly or incorrectly, that lately the dead gravitated to the former population centers. Or were repopulating the former population centers, to look at it another way. That’s where the complications awaited, time after time. For so many months there had existed an equivalency of peril between rural areas and cities. Now, out in the countryside, the density was lower. Few sightings, few attacks, fewer withdrawals from his reservoir of last-minute escapes. No one he hooked up with seconded his observations, but he was unswayed. They were clotting together, the dead; he spied idiot cliques or duos rather than singletons, and they stuck to the roads and man-made routes feeding into towns. When he came upon the Northampton farmhouse, he was convinced of his new travel method, circling around anything on his latest map that resembled a town as he tracked north. His theory was no more worthless than those offered by other survivors.

The farmhouse was prim and elegant, sticking up out of the overgrown lawn and companion acres, jutting from the industrious wildflowers and grasses like an iceberg. It was getting dark and he needed to bunk down, either inside or out atop the porch, depending on how he felt once he cased the property. He was feeling devil-may-care today, the weather was nice and he hadn’t tired of the constellations. Halfway to the front door and two feet above the ground, cans and rusting metal strips twisted on a wire that snaked around wooden stakes, encircling the house. A line of magic powder that kept out evil spirits. The alarm system was intact. Planks from a disassembled shed or other outdoor construction, weather-beaten on one side and unblemished on the other, lay fast and even across both floors’ windows, so evenly that if they had been painted white he’d have taken it for an aesthetic choice. No light emerged from the cracks in the boards, the blacked-out windows allowing those inside to move around at night.

This was not a refuge assembled in haste but a sedulously executed bunker. Its architects intended to outlast the disaster here. Mark Spitz saw no indication that the castle had failed, the tangle of boards before the broken window where the hordes exploited a chink. The front door was secure and not splayed in the universal sign of harried evacuation. Soon it would be dark. Mark Spitz jerked the wire twice and slowly made his way up the front steps to the wraparound porch, hands up at his shoulders.

He called out. They’d had time to assess him from their spy hole, which he hadn’t sniffed out yet. Good for them. He knocked. He backed away, chose the side of the house without the porch, and prowled to the back. It was only polite to give them more time to deliberate. For later reference, he noted the location and number of the windows on both floors, and the drop to the ground. A gravel path curved toward a small barn out back and as he approached the structure, he waved back at the boarded windows, as innocent a gesture as he could manage. The barn’s windows were unfortified. It had been converted into a smart office, the walls a multicolored stream of book spines, with a small kitchenette and probably a bathroom behind the one door. Crimson-bound library books and squared piles of notes covered the antique desk in the middle of the room. Dead flowers slumped out of a turquoise vase on a wooden stand bearing an open volume of the OED. He was staring at a diorama. Maybe they’d let him spend the night in the studio unmolested and he’d be on his way in the morning. The sofa looked perfect.

The wild grasses behind the studio rasped a warning. The tree line shook out two skels moving in tandem, matching each other’s laborious steps. The tallest one had been male, its stained overalls hanging from still-muscular shoulders. A recent inductee to the horrors. Its companion was of an earlier vintage, old school and Last Night from the extent of the winnowing, shuddering forth in a canary-yellow apron bearing the slogan “Hot Pot o’ Love” in puffy red letters. From the residue on the apron, tonight’s recent menu was home-made strawberry jam, or something decidedly less wholesome. The skels waded through the thistles in eerie synchronization. It was a trick of perspective, but he squinted nonetheless at this new wonder of parallel skellery.

Mark Spitz drew his pistol—he was in a pistol phase, despite the ammo hassle. The back door of the farmhouse creaked. A woman dashed toward him, brandishing an ax, clad in the leather padded suiting favored by motocross racers, bent low like a defensive lineman. The helmet covering her face prevented a read of her disposition. Another figure crouched in the kitchen doorway with a shotgun. The barrels glared at him. Mark Spitz called out softly: yes, my brain works, synapses still firing in all the important ways we’ve come to cherish. As the lady with the ax hurtled past him, tramping through goldenrod, she said, “Don’t shoot, dummy.” She reached the skels and decapitated them with two swift chops as they slowly raised their arms. Their bodies swayed, dark liquid burbling from tubes in their necks, then collapsed into a clump of foxtail at the same time.

“Get inside,” she said. “You’ve been out here too long already.”

He hadn’t gazed upon a kitchen that immaculate and decked out with appliances since the afternoon he’d tumbled into the quicksand of a marathon of that cooking show his mother used to like. Devices for pulping, fizzing, julienning, and caffeinating gleamed on the counters, making a case for themselves despite their incongruity with the dark pine floors and weathered cabinetry. Rusty cooking implements hung from the joists in manicured decay. A tidy galley was one of the first things to go in a hideout, for obvious reasons. But the three residents maintained a heroic level of cleanliness. “The place was so nice when we found it,” Margie explained later, “seemed a shame to wreck it.”

Mark Spitz remained a guest long enough to get the recent history of the property. The absent owners had moved out here to flee the city, advance guard of a wave of upper-middle-class pioneers boldly striking out for the hinterlands in wagons of reclaimed wood covered in eco-friendly bamboo fiber. A photograph in the front hall captured the farmhouse in the flaking throes of neglect; in their renovations the newcomers had devoted countless hours and no small measure of love to the hulk, every inch of modern insulation and plumbing a prayer. The studio out back belonged to the professor. She taught literary theory at one of the local colleges, after making her mark with an evidently groundbreaking collection of essays about “The Body.” (Each attempt at the introduction gave Mark Spitz an ice-cream headache.) Her partner worked in steel. A line of pictures adorned the wall along the stairs, confirming that her own workspace was elsewhere. An airplane hangar would not have fit on the property, and there were probably zoning issues.

Jerry, the man wielding the shotgun, had sold them the house. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man with a county-sheriff scowl, his buzz cut glowing an unnatural orange from salvaged dye. Mark Spitz would have taken him for the leader of the group, had the others paid his protestations any mind. Jerry was the most antagonistic to granting Mark Spitz sanctuary for the night, let alone five minutes. “He led them here,” he said, eyeing their visitor’s pack. “Haven’t been any around for ten days.”

“I told you to let him in the second we spotted him,” Margie said. Underneath the helmet, hers was a minuscule, almost pixie face, although the livid gash stretching from her tiny earlobes to her jaw belied the sylvan cast to her features. She pulled a cylinder of antibacterial wipes from the cupboard beneath the sink and wiped the ax blade. “Leave him out there to poke around and he’s a dinner bell,” she said. “You can see he’s harmless.” She looked at Mark Spitz. “No offense.”

“I haven’t seen a skel since the airport,” Mark Spitz said, referring to the commuter airport south. He’d dared a raid on the vending machines and loaded up on power bars before being forced to make a break for it. The dead were a risible sight on the geometry of the runway, taxiing this way and that with their scrambled guidance systems.

“Dag,” Tad said. “Ten days—that was a new record.” The final member of their group, Tad, was a slender young man who wore a faded green T-shirt that portrayed the zodiac in silver glitz. He sat at the barn-wood table in the middle of the kitchen when Mark Spitz came inside, assault rifle flat across his knobby knees. Backup in case the other two ran into trouble. His spectacles were thin wire frames held together by fraying black tape. He was Mark Spitz’s age, but his long ponytail was completely gray, which Mark Spitz took as a recent development.

Jerry lost the argument for expulsion quickly. The man’s objections seemed a performance for Mark Spitz’s benefit, to show him this wasn’t as slapdash an operation as it appeared. Mark Spitz promised to move on at first light and contributed his canned clams as an appetizer to that night’s repast of venison curry and mushrooms. He hated the tinny taste of canned clams but had carried them in his pack for three months for a day such as this, when he met an aficionado. Jerry was his man. In turn, Mark Spitz was grateful for the variation on deer, after the numbing rotation of venison stew, venison kebabs, and venison jerky he’d endured in the previous months. He’d met folks who carried around their favorite hot sauce in their pack, sure, drizzling it onto a rabbit drumstick or unidentifiable fowl, but few wanderers had the luxury or inclination to grind their own spice blends, and Mark Spitz appreciated this gustatory verve.

“Do you have any food allergies?” Tad asked.

“No.”

“I’ve been trying to perfect my peanut curry.”

They ate at the dining-room table, candlelight bestowing dramatic shadows to their movements as they forked morsels out of bowls decorated with pale green triangles, which looked to have been purchased at a neighbor’s yard sale for the nostalgia they invoked for visits at grandma’s house. It was still light outside, but behind the occluded windows it was always midnight. The house had probably been a no-shoes preserve before the catastrophe and now that edict kept the noise to the necessary minimum, and the dead walking on by.

He gave them the Anecdote and he listened to their stories in turn. Last Night swooped down on Margie as she visited a small island off Cape Cod, where she remained for the entire first year of the ruination. She’d been a houseguest at the beach compound of a college friend, bodysurfing and munching on clam rolls, and if she hadn’t decided to leave Monday morning instead of Sunday afternoon as planned, she might not have made it through. There were five houses on the island; two were unoccupied that weekend and one family decided to brave it to one of the shelters announced on the radio, in those early days of frantic transmissions and haven roll calls. They never returned. That left ten people on the tiny lump of sand, and they struggled and fretted together. They rowed to the mainland for foraging excursions in their little dinghy but mostly stuck to their island dunes, fishing and waiting for news. Bandits razed the community, creeping ashore one day in their ruinous morality. They raped, they pillaged, sparing nothing, not even the lobster traps, which they dragged ashore with glee. Margie was the only one to escape—she had ever prided herself on her swimming—and her placid stay left her ill-prepared for life in the wasteland.

“I caught up,” she said. They were playing hearts in the parlor. Mark Spitz didn’t know if her memories or her cards were responsible for her rueful expression. She tried to hoof it back to Vermont, where she worked for an outfit that sold artisanal pickles—“We were really huge at all the big farmers’ markets”—but never made it out of the state. She hooked up with Tad in a high-school cafeteria, and together they returned to the farmhouse, lugging big plastic bags of powdered eggs. Tad was born the same year as Mark Spitz, but unlike Mark Spitz he’d found his vocation before the upheaval, scripting interstitial narrative sequences for a video-game company that specialized in first-person shooters. In between levels, Tad’s cutscenes on how the aliens came to be split into two adversarial species, or the magic amulet was lost in the volcano, allowed the players to rest their thumbs. A respite in their quest through the carnage.

Tad had attended college in town on the six-year plan, and returned after steady promotions at the game company, e-mailing his scripts from the group house he shared with his old buddies. He made a breathtaking wage compared to his peers, who wafted through the local service industries, pressing veggie sandwiches for coeds and hollowed-eyed dissertation jockeys, or selling gently used Adirondack chairs and a previous generation’s musty ball gowns and leisure suits to weekenders and summer people. Tad designed the house’s barricades, after he “just fell in love with the place.” The walk to the creek was a relatively secure jog with nice sight lines, and after he lucked out in a round of raids on the neighboring premises, he gathered a hearty store of rations. Before he found this place he was holed up on a marijuana farm with fellows of like-minded spiritual outlook. He wouldn’t talk about how that particular situation fell apart.

Tad fancied himself a hearts guru, not without cause. He shot the moon with irritating frequency that night as Mark Spitz maintained his standard B-grade execution, consistently in second or third place. As Tad tallied the last game of the night, stifling a grin, he told their visitor how when Jerry showed up at the door with fresh meat, he was immediately invited to stay after the pro forma examination. Jerry hooked up with the Massachusetts National Guard when the plague rolled in, touting his extensive knowledge of the area—“I’ve been helping people find their dream homes in Hampshire County for fifteen years, damn it”—and his two tours of duty in one of the Middle East wars. The local search-and-destroy posse outlasted many in the country, a whole three weeks, although by the final day, Jerry had to admit, it was only him and a former greeter at one of the local big-box stores, a man who suffered from senile dementia and kept pestering Jerry about their trip to the zoo. After the man died in his sleep, Jerry hunted solo, scraping by until he joined a caravan of six RVs headed to Canada. “The intel seemed good on that one,” he said, still disappointed. They had become a backward people, stunted and medieval: the world is flat, the Sun revolves around the Earth, everything is better in Canada. The travelers made it to Niagara Falls before things disintegrated in their predicable course, “over a woman of all things.” He returned to his hometown after spending the winter in Buffalo, only two miles from the fledgling HQ of reconstruction, although no one in the house knew this.

The trio was staying. Until the skels died off for real or were exterminated by a revivified government and galvanized citizenry sick of living in caves and eating ramen. “This is a war we can win,” Jerry said. The hunting was good, the water supply accessible, and their complementary talents and temperaments made for a convivial household, as such things go. “It’s nice to have a fourth for hearts,” Jerry admitted after the final game that evening, and Margie seconded. Mark Spitz stretched out on the parlor sofa and slept with his pistol under a frilly white pillow. He dreamed of Mim.

He asked, but no one knew what had happened to the owners.

He woke up in the middle of the night. Each night, before he went to sleep, he repeated to himself his current location, to ward off the morning vertigo, the disorientation that affirmed his utter unmooring from all things. He had murmured to himself: the projection booth of the discount theater that showed indie films, an elm tree off the overpass. A farmhouse in New England. He had no confusion over his whereabouts when he woke, and he listened for the thing that had punctured his rest. It called again: metal on metal. Tad appeared on the landing, the candle’s light on his white pajamas making him into a ghost.

“Too dark to see what it is,” Tad said. They waited. The alarm tinkled anew, then was silenced. “That’s the wire breaking. Raccoons will do that,” he said. “Sometimes.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Margie told him the next morning. She placed a cup of chamomile tea on the coffee table. “Not until they wander off.” Peel-away spy-hole slits were set into the tar-papered windows. This morning each window confirmed that the dead infiltrated the yard on all sides, ten or so having wandered onto the grounds in their misbegotten mission. A hard-luck ballerina and a kid with a green Mohawk roved in figure eights. They remained, not drifting away like dandelion seeds as they should have but tarrying on the property.

As the hours passed, the residents worked over the problem. Mark Spitz hadn’t drawn them because the dead appeared hours later. And they hadn’t given any indication to the skels that there might be dinner inside; they were sure of their precautions. “We’re goddamned ninjas in here.” They whispered, they padded in socks, they startled at the slightest noise, a kitchen drawer too hastily shut or unexpectedly brisant flatulence. Nonetheless, the creatures didn’t slink away in their infamous habit, and by lunch twice as many roamed the weeds. Margie wished she’d made a water run the day before, the first of their band to vocalize the fear they might be besieged for an unknowable length of time.

By dinner there were fifty. Mark Spitz was confounded: They lingered over an empty plate. Happened all the time that a skel might seem to sense someone quivering behind a door, inside the cellar or guest bedroom, but if you kept still, you waited them out. None of them had witnessed this before, a convocation this inexorable and unlikely, given the absence of aural or visual stimuli to attract or keep the skels interested. Insofar as their febrile brains could be said to be interested in anything. Mark Spitz and his hosts played hearts until late and prayed the gruesome assembly would adjourn by morning. Tad, preoccupied, did not repeat the previous night’s championship.

The next two days the dead roamed the drizzle in gloomy addition. The creatures displayed no curiosity about the house. They didn’t dig their blackened fingers between the planks to wrench the barricade, tug the gutters, collect around the doors, or scrabble at the walls. If it had been accursed Connecticut, the place would be a pile of timber by now, naked chimney poking up like a bone. Mark Spitz recalled an animation in high-school physics, where the red molecules inside a balloon recoiled from the skin in random vectors, ever in motion, ever directionless, ever bound. Why did this motley remain in the skin of the property line, and why did more of them keep coming? They counted a hundred by next night’s supper, the same ones from the first morning—a priest oozing from every visible orifice, a paunchy woman dressed for the gym, the cop—and their silently recruited companions.

“Maybe they’re locavores,” Tad said.

“They blew in, they’ll blow out,” Jerry said. He was bent over the mail slot, under a black hood. The monsters were a kind of weather after all; Mark Spitz noticed that they’d started being described as such, among wanderers who had never met, in spontaneous linguistic consensus. They could have terminated the first ones, but now there were too many. All they could do was wait. Mark Spitz reconstructed the grounds and local topography in his mind, a disembodied presence gyring over Hampshire County. If the dead started ripping the house apart: Jump out one of the back windows and head for the creek, or break for the road? Solo, what he knew best, or take one of the others with him? He hadn’t the opportunity that first evening to stash one of Mim’s emergency packs. No one side of the house offered better escape prospects than another. The dead diffused evenly in the flowers and drab grasses, just another species of weed carried in by the wind.

“I wish they’d hurry up and take their heads off, already,” Tad said. The they in question were whatever new authorities emerged out of the darkness with guns and slogans and fresh vegetables. At Tad’s sentiment, Mark Spitz’s hosts began to air their post-plague plans and schemes. This was a rare pastime, at least in his vicinity, not easily indulged in, and Mark Spitz was surprised to hear perfectly (relatively) sane people partake. More than a jinx on deliverance, this was straddling reality with a pillow while it was sleeping and pressing down while it bucked and kicked. Especially with the invaders out in the yard, waiting for an invitation. From the nodding and encouraging affirmations, it was a regular diversion of theirs, like hearts. He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it.

Tad was working on a new video game. He had it all mapped out. One level would take place in a fortified farmhouse in the middle of the country, then it switches to towns, cities, each step more complicated and deadly than the last. “It’ll move a million copies,” he said. “Those old World War II games still sell. Vietnam, realistic Middle East shooters. It’s catharsis. Whether you were on the front lines or at home. And here we’re all on the front lines at home. If you did what we’re doing, it’s therapy. How are you going to kill the nightmares when this is all over? It’s a healthy outlet for aggression. And the babies who aren’t even born yet—it’ll teach them about what Mommy did in the war. I won’t even have to make it up this time.”

“Don’t put me in it,” Jerry said. “Hard enough meeting a good woman. And now everybody’s dead, to boot.”

“I’ll have them work up a Crusty Old Guy avatar. If they can do space aliens, they can do you, Jerry.”

Jerry said he’d resume selling real estate. Surplus inventory will be a tough nut in every market, but once rightful owners and heirs are sorted out, business will start up again. “Not to be morbid,” he said, “but that’s facts. In a time of national despair—like a recession—you have to hustle for clients because people don’t know what they’re capable of if they really put their minds to it. Buyers won’t need convincing this time around.” Northampton will appeal for all the reasons it has always appealed, he told them, but there will be even larger numbers of people trying to move out of the cities and start fresh. Too many memories in their old neighborhoods. “Take a house like this—you don’t see another in any direction. It’s a healing thing,” he said, too forcefully, as if mentally imprinting the new slogan onto business cards.

Margie shushed him. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the congregation outside.

“Sorry, dear.”

“Still pickles, Margie?” Tad asked.

“If they make it through,” she said, referring to her former employers. “Maybe I’ll start it up again myself.”

“Another brine mess you’re getting yourself into,” Tad teased. She punched him in the arm. They were a family. Mark Spitz was at his girlfriend’s house for the holidays, stuck on the sofa with her kin while she took a nap upstairs. They passed his test, and he theirs. What were the chances of this raggedy bunch finding one another in the ruins, he wondered. Drawn together by the magic of this place the same way the missing owners were, inspired to make a new start. The toy store. He’d had something like this, briefly, in the toy store. The accident that outlives its circumstance and blossoms. All over the country survivors formed ill-fated tribes that the dead inevitably tore to shreds. Desperate latecomers asked for asylum from those inside and were turned away at the barrel of a semiauto: This is our house. He’d slept in the dead trees and now here he was with this family. He could’ve spent the night inside the studio and awakened to a property full of skels. Would he have made it out? As before, home was a beloved barricade. When school, work, the many-headed beast of strangers and villains comprising the world threatened to destroy, home remained, family remained, and the locks would hold, the lullabies would ward off all bogeymen. He was trapped in this house and he couldn’t think of where else he’d rather be.

Margie asked Mark Spitz what his plans were. She’d scratched at the wound on her face all night, and a clear bead of fluid appeared at the edge of the scab. They each wanted to resume where they left off. Go back to the place where they were safe, he thought. Early notes in his unified theory of stragglers.

“Move to the city,” he said.

They offered to let him stay after the siege, if he liked. He said yes.

It ended quickly three days later. Mark Spitz could have kept his wits a good deal longer, but his companions were fashioned of less durable alloys. Mark Spitz pegged Jerry to be the first to crack. Mark Spitz was from Long Island and maintained the suburban boy’s suspicion of the pastoral, and here was a man who hunted, gutted, and dressed big game. Mark Spitz cast Jerry as the cowboy right-winger who was going to show this vermin who was boss, blast one of the front windows into splinters and start sending these cretins to their God. Firing into the agitated horde until one of the monsters got ahold of his gun barrel, wrestled it away, and the rest started picking at all the boards. It always happened quick. One part of the barricade failed, and then it was as if the refuge sighed and everything disintegrated at once. The spell of protection sputtered, all out of eldritch juice, and the mighty stronghold was made of straw again. All it took was one flaw in the system, a bug roosting deep in the code, to initiate the cascade of failure.

Tad, when he snapped, was the type to unlatch the front door and run screaming into the mess of them. Suicide by skel. There was a limit to what the human mind, born into that sweet and safe and lost world, could endure. He hadn’t suspected Margie, whom he had decided to save if possible. Bring her with him out the second-floor window, then on the top of the porch, jump and roll and keep moving. In retrospect, the fact that she wore her motocross gear for the final forty-eight hours might have been a hint.

Yes, Margie beat him to the porch roof. In the parlor, Mark Spitz read a spy thriller on the orange shag rug by the fireplace and the other two men were deep in quiet rounds of rummy. They didn’t hear her ease the boards from her bedroom window, but they could not overlook the explosion of glass outside. Margie screamed, “This is our island! Get your filthy hands off of me!” Tad and Mark Spitz broke for the spy holes, but Jerry understood and sprinted upstairs, yelling her name. In the middle of the yard three skels twisted in the blaze of the Molotov cocktail, the dry barnyard grass and sow thistle crackling into sparks and sheaves of flame. The burning security guard, whom Mark Spitz had watched for a whole hour the previous afternoon in a fit of impregnable boredom, staggered and fell on his face as the other dead twisted toward the house, half their ghoulish faces upturned to the commotion on the second story, and the rest to the bottom floor and its suddenly intriguing fortifications. They moved on the house, the mob of them constricting with purpose. Finally the things knew why they had gathered there, as if there had ever been any other reason.

Margie screamed again and the next bomb detonated among the creatures. The bottle was one of those that had held the concoctions of French seltzer and fruit juice, with the elegant label describing the manufacturer’s legend, the commitment to quality, and the ancestral springs. It was a direct hit on the ballerina. The thing collided with another skel, one of the local hippie varietals, and that one went up in flames. The nights had been so dark, moonless and dead, and now the fires livened it all to exuberant performance, embers pirouetting in the air. The wrestling upstairs continued. Glass shattered, and he saw flaming liquid pour over the lip of the porch’s roof and onto the front steps. Not long now.

His mechanism clicked and stuttered. Once again in a stranger’s house, the next residence in the endless neighborhood that snared him his first night on the run. Their different layouts and constructions did not fool him; chimney or no chimney, English basement or cinder-block sump-pumped storeroom, he moved through a single infernal subdivision without outlet, serried cul-de-sacs and dead-ends overlooking broken land. He invited himself in to spend the night and the houses were empty or filled with the dead. It was as simple as that. He couldn’t save these strangers any more than they could save him. His hosts were as alien to him as the soiled rabble mustered outside, now clawing at the windows and doors, ravenous for access. The creatures would find it. The house sighed around him, submitting to the business of dying.

Mark Spitz went for his gun and pack. Tad paused at the landing. He translated the expression on Mark Spitz’s face and bolted upstairs to help his housemates. The ground growled and shook. Hell dropping pretense at last and opening up to claim them. No time to ponder that. He computed: The noise will draw most of the skels out front, but a number will head for the nearest point of entry. The backyard would still be rife with them. Upstairs was a no-go. One of the dining-room windows shattered. The teeming porch. He fought the urge to reinforce the perimeter there. Useless to try and save it. They’d be at the other windows even if he did get that table up there. He couldn’t do it by himself. They were taking on water. Upstairs they were fighting. One plan: Fall back to a bedroom on the second floor and barricade as the first floor filled with skels. They’re on the stairs in minutes and then he is locked in the tiny room. Even if most of them came inside, enough would remain in the yard to be a problem if he jumped. Think: The porch is on fire. For a second he pictured himself underneath the news copter as the folks in more fortunate weather watched from home. He was on the roof, the brown floodwaters pouring around the house. Why do these yokels build a house there when they know it’s a flood zone, why do they keep rebuilding? He says, Because this disaster is our home. I was born here.

The line of ceramic teapots above the fireplace hopped to the floor at the tremors. They don’t have earthquakes in Massachusetts. In goddamned Connecticut, either, but Mark Spitz didn’t put it past that territory to figure out a way to outwit geological process, out of spite. No, the monster vehicles approached. The vibrations surged into him through his feet. He reached the kitchen and the barrage started. The bullets penetrated from every direction, shredding the wainscoting and knickknacks, the hard-won bounty of a hundred internet auctions, casting splinters and shards into the air like the confetti guts of firecrackers. A pebbled-glass lampshade jigsawed, the chandelier’s dead bulbs popped, and the wooden doors of the media center finally revealed the vulgar flat-screen TV hidden inside, that lost treasure. He hit the floor. Beyond the walls, a woman spat orders. She was authority. The gunfire halted. Resumed. Mark Spitz rolled over on his back. Debris and glass roiled in the air, the long three-tined forks and oversize ladles hopped from their hooks. The kitchen was ruined, he thought. He mourned the kitchen, its stolid German cappuccino maker, the retro-style juicer with its cool mercury lines, the stainless-steel fridge’s long-barren ice dispenser. Bit of a fixer-upper, needs TLC.

One of the dead bumped open the swinging doors. Some ex-kid in a denim vest festooned with buttons detailing the slogans of doomed causes and the unphotogenic candidates stumping for esoteric platforms. The doors bounced back and clocked it in the face. Mark Spitz fired, missed, and then his bullet smeared away the top of the thing’s cranium as three high-caliber bullets burst through its chest. The artillery paused again. Boots pummeled the stairs and kicked in the front door, not that there was much of it left, he reckoned. Isolated shots crackled in the yard—picking off the remainders. How many of them were there? Bandits? He’d dealt with bandits. The scenarios impelling bandits toward their ill works were nothing compared to the visions slithering in his head. Bandits were a restaurant out of tonight’s special and late trains and undependable wifi. He could handle bandits. He said, “I’m alive in here! I’m alive in here!” The kitchen doors swung open again. He looked up.

He never got to ask Margie what finally made her crack. If she pushed Jerry off the roof into their hungry arms or if he slipped. She disappeared into the woods when the convoy took a piss break. Captain Childs wasn’t going to wait. “Those are the kind that get you into trouble,” she said before ordering them to move out. The caravan continued north for another two hours. Mark Spitz and Tad slumped in the bucket seats of the armored vehicle, eavesdropping on the young men muttering into their headsets. He pictured himself laid out on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, plugged into machines and bottles. They’re not using the siren because he is going to make it. They are specialists. They will not let him perish.

He climbed up the ladder into the crisp daylight. A corporal helped him out of the hatch and off the transport and he was inside Camp Screaming Eagle.

Safe.

• • •