Zone One

Saturday’s visit to the local military installation was not as auspicious. Mark Spitz registered the manic vibe the moment he left the jeep. Bozeman had parked over on Hudson, per Ms. Macy’s interest in seeing the Coakleys, and because “parking is a bitch” over by Wonton Main. Same old, same old. The local blizzard was under way, and the machine gunners up and down Canal shuddered over their weapons in neurotic fervor, rending the bodies of the things beyond the barrier with a profusion of high-velocity projectiles. The thunder the soldiers made had reverberated between the buildings all day, so much so that it had scurried beneath his attention until he got close. The fallen skels were hidden by the wall, and from the amount of artillery expended Mark Spitz imagined the hostiles changed into some new variety of monster, a second transformation that would induct the survivors into the next devastating ring of hell. Wide scaly wings, rapier-length fangs, a ridge of spikes popping out of their spines. You thought you knew the plague? It was just getting started. Act II of the End of the World following the intermission, let’s wrap this up, folks.

“I apologize for the noise, Ms. Macy,” Bozeman said as they walked to the corner. “A lot of them showing up for Lunch today, as we say around here. Breakfast, too. Beaucoup activity the last few days, I’m sure you’ve been briefed.”

She didn’t hear him, distracted by the evanescent currents of white flakes. “It looks like snow.”

They turned onto Canal, where the incinerators waited at the curb like lunch trucks competing for the noon rush, although in this case the machines waited to be fed. The two rigs were the size of shipping containers, perched on trailers that had dragged them through the Zone after they had been deposited by aerial crane. Who knew which military installation’s thighs they had slithered from, what manner of other devices gestated in the neighboring R & D lab. As far as Mark Spitz determined, technological innovation since the advent of the plague had been limited to two major inventions and one minor one. The neo-aramid wonder fabric of their fatigues and combat gear was major; Gary’s Lasso resided at the other end of utility. Word was the principals behind the mesh had, before the plague, impinged on the body-armor patents of a big-time weapons manufacturer, and they’d been ordered to cease and desist production of the miracle garment. The exigencies of reconstruction erased all legal arguments, however: one company’s factory was in a cleared zone, and one was not. They’d sort it all out once doomsday went into remission.

The Coakley was the other prize. Although named after its creator, it was a government asset from ignition switch to heat sensor. The incinerator had been jerry-rigged for mobility, and the rear loader was obviously a late addition—the rough metal in coarse contrast to the gleaming silver body—but its original purpose remained. It burned things. Here, it burned the bodies of the dead with uncanny efficiency, swallowing what the soldiers fed into it and converting it to smoke, fly ash, and a shovelful of hard material too stubborn to be entirely consumed. Hearts, mostly. That thick muscle. The machine’s purpose was clear; why it had been invented and its intended deployment before the plague was a mystery. Whatever the case, the Coakley had proven itself a most worthy recruit. The kerosene savings alone.

Mark Spitz had never seen Disposal without their biohazard suits on, but by now he recognized Annie and Lily by their voices and gait. They were in the middle of a burn, the geyser of white smoke and ash issuing violently from the stack atop the incinerator. The stack periscoped three stories, and from there the canyon vortices scattered the particles. It could not be said the others in Zone One shared Mark Spitz’s perception of the ash, its constancy and pervasiveness. The ash did swirl in a radius around the incinerators, it landed as dandruff on their shoulders, and, yes, perhaps a small percentage was conscripted by rain on its way down. Certainly the downdrafts and eddies created by high-rises, the suction currents and zephyrs generated by the smaller buildings, gusted the flakes in turbulent jets across downtown. Certainly when the machine fired, it generated a localized atmosphere. But the ash did not shroud the metropolis, it did not taint the air in any sickening measure. A skel bonfire or kerosene party probably sent more toxic stuff into the air. But for Mark Spitz it was everywhere. In every raindrop on his skin and the pavement, sullying every edifice and muting the blue sky: the dust of the dead. It was in his lungs, becoming assimilated into his body, and he despised it.

He kept it to himself, this particular face of his PASD, although he did slip from time to time. It was a low-level hallucination as such things went, no real impairment. No need to share it, even if Mark Spitz couldn’t help being disturbed that for the most part his symptoms appeared after he was rescued in Northampton, accumulating manifestations. His new brand of skel dream, his ID-duty nausea, the fantastic visions of ash. He’d been healthier, more kink-free, in the lost days. Vertigo seized him now, at the edge of the wall. Where was he? He told himself, I am in New York City, I am in New York City on the street where I used to buy cheap headphones. He looked past the roaring, belching machine to traffic signs that had directed drivers to the sluice leading to New Jersey. These blocks had been so busy, so feverish, compressing the vehicles into the tunnel that would take them under the water to the other side. Moving the little bodies into a channel the same way the smokestack directed the little flakes through its insides and out into the air. The dead continued to commute, so hardwired was the custom.

Bozeman introduced the Disposal techs to the visitor from Buffalo. Annie and Lily swung the sagging body bag into the machine’s rear loader. “We can’t shake hands,” Annie said, bowing. The tough plastic creaked at every movement.

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Lily said. She leaned against one of the red biohazard bins used to ferry corpses up and down Canal. The grab cranes picked up the bodies, lifted them over the wall, and dropped them into the bins, but so much blood and infectious murk leaked from the mangled bodies that finally they had reserved one traffic lane at the foot of the barrier for corpse transport. Too much gore and ichor splatter, too many soldiers frantically gobbling megadoses of anticiprant when it splashed on them, depleting the medics’ stash. The carts were filled with the bodies of the uptown skels and, intermittently, the bagged skels retrieved from the sweepers, and then they were rolled over here to this final place.

The cart before Mark Spitz overflowed, arms and legs hanging over the rim as if attached to boaters enjoying cool lake waters on a summer afternoon. Given this grisly abundance, and the constant barrage from the machine guns, he had his explanation of why they were busy feeding the second Coakley while the first was still firing. They were having serious dead weather up here at the wall.

“So this ash is—” Ms. Macy said.

“Yes—particulate by-product of high-temperature combustion,” Lily said.

Ms. Macy nodded as if agreeing with the choice of red her boss had ordered for the table. “You guys got the prototype. A lot of camps would kill to get one of these babies.”

“We need them the most,” Annie said.

“Everybody needs them. We’re all in this together.”

“Tell Buffalo we’re very grateful for the new unit,” Bozeman said. “I know there have been a lot of supply troubles, this last week especially, with all the—”

“You got lucky,” Ms. Macy interrupted. She turned to Mark Spitz and the two Disposal techs. “There have been some reversals.”

“What kind of reversals?”

“Reversals. Complications. There are always complications in business. The client changes their mind. The teamsters won’t unload the booth and hump it to the convention hall. You have to think on your feet. May I?”

Annie offered her the control pad, the cable connecting it to the incinerator sweeping across the asphalt. “Usually we like to stuff as many as we can in there before we fire it, but you’re the guest.”

Ms. Macy removed a latex glove from her purse and pressed the controller’s oversize red button. The machine emitted a warning and the rear loader tumbled the four corpses into the compactor. They disappeared into the belly of the thing. The bucket slid back with a hydraulic grumbling to receive the next load. “How many do you do per load?” she asked.

“We don’t keep count,” Annie said. There may have been a note of derision, but the inflection was hard to discern.

“A lot,” Lily said. “Enough. Heavy days like this, lotta skels coming in, we keep both going pretty steady.”

“I hate these heavy-flow days,” Annie said.

“I’m sure we can get those numbers for you, ma’am,” Bozeman said. He passed the compactor keypad back to Annie.

“We should really recycle those,” Ms. Macy said, pointing to the biohazard bin. It took Mark Spitz a second to realize she referred to the body bags intermingled with the wall corpses.

“I know, it’s terrible,” Lily said.

“It’s what?”

“It’s terrible,” Lily repeated, louder this time to account for her helmet, and the renewed volley down the street. “The environment.” They all turned at the approaching scraping noise. Mark Spitz identified Chip as the inhabitant of the white suit steering the fresh load of bodies. Chip reminded him of the old workers in the fashion district who shoved their clothes racks up the sidewalk and cursed the idiot cattle impeding their progress. The old New York. Mark Spitz rubbed his tongue against his teeth. That was ash he tasted. Whether it was actually there was another question.

“Told you to hold off for a while,” Annie said. “Still got this whole batch.”

“These are from down-Zone,” Chip said. “We’re not picking up anything from the wall until they get the crane fixed.”

“Complications,” Bozeman said to Ms. Macy. He smiled. “Shall we continue our tour?”

Mark Spitz had wasted enough time. He’d had his diversions, in the restaurant, the hotel, and now this tourist leisure cruise. The guys waited for him downtown. This excursion would tide him over until they returned for R & R tomorrow. He was about to take his leave when Lily said, “Hey, lady.”

“Yes?”

“There have been rumors.”

“Of?” Ms. Macy clasped her folder to her breast and pressed her lips shut, her chin slightly upturned to brunt the surf.

“Ms. Macy—is it true we lost Vista Del Mar?”

Bozeman sighed. “Bubbling Brooks.”

“No, that’s okay,” Ms. Macy said. She was prepared. “It was bound to get out. No shame in telling the truth. We’re still sorting it out, but it looks like they’d been having a density problem outside and somehow the gates were breached. Human error, most likely.”

“How many—”

“They’re still surveying.”

“What about the Triplets?”

“I know one got out.”

“Cheyenne?”

“I don’t know which one.”

Annie placed her hand on her partner’s shoulder. It was pathetic, the sight of the two of them moving in their white hazmat suits in a dumb show of consolation. The sabotaged connection. They looked like mascots of a brand of cookie dough, meant to hypnotize the kids between cartoons. Did Annie know someone in Bubbling Brooks, or just the Triplets? In all likelihood they each knew someone there, whether they were aware of it or not: the appallingly friendly security guard from the office complex three jobs ago, or the freckled best friend from summer camp you hadn’t thought of in years. He heard Ms. Macy say the words “isolated incident.”

“You get back upstate,” Chip said, “you tell them we need another crane down here. Maybe two. You can see what kind of volume we get here sometimes.”

Ms. Macy’s fingers trundled to a fresh page in her notebook. She smiled. “From your lips to Buffalo’s ears.”

They left Disposal to matters of immolation and started for the bank. Ms. Macy asked Mark Spitz where Fort Wonton had found him, and he started to describe the operation on I-95 but was interrupted by one of the rooftop snipers, who shouted directions to a machine gunner on the wall. “Over there, dude—the priest!” The gunner swiveled and divested himself of twenty rounds. The sniper cheered and did a jig.

“It’s so quiet in Buffalo,” she said.

Bozeman caught the brief flicker in Ms. Macy’s eyes and said, “The more the merrier, way I see it. It’ll be awhile before Buffalo sends down the manpower we need to finally cap the island, but in the meantime, the more tourists we have streaming in from the burbs, the less we have to neutralize later.” He tucked her elbow into his palm to steer her around the trio of mechanics squatting before the open plate at the base of the grab crane. The machine’s mammoth claw dangled three stories above, stalled over the wall and dripping on the corpses piled on the other side. Pools of blood gathered at the seams in the concrete wall where the brackets held the segments together, a wrinkled skin developing at the edges where they dried. The pools were becoming giant scabs.

“I hope you’ll convey how smoothly things are running,” Bozeman continued. “That we are a vital installation, even if the next summit is far off.”

“You needn’t worry.”

“Though Chip may be right that we might need another crane. Or two.”

It’s different, Mark Spitz thought. Wonton was off-kilter. A vibration insinuated itself, a disquieting under-tremor to every movement and sound. Perhaps it was a higher-than-normal flood of skels at the wall. Had the fusillade paused since his arrival? More likely the loss of Bubbling Brooks. Bubbling Brooks was one of the bigger camps, fifteen thousand people last he heard. What was their sideline, besides the Triplets? Munitions? Pills? It escaped him. Some of these soldiers had worked there, dropped off survivors there. Had family there, maybe. Buffalo will be upset, of course, with this interruption of their timetables. There had to be survivors, he thought. Had to be. But a loss like that, after the recent run of good news, would certainly cripple morale. Above him the snipers trained the scopes, aimed, dropped their targets, moved to the next target in robotic sequence. The soldiers had no other course in Wonton but to avenge themselves on the dead before them, the ones they can see. Do it for Cheyenne.

Bubbling Brooks was bad news. Mark Spitz felt terrible, of course, but he knew that the refuge had done what all refuges do eventually: It failed. What else could you expect from despicable Connecticut? Precisely this kind of tribulation.

They paused at the shiny, worn steps of the bank and held the doors for three passing soldiers engaged in a lively a cappella version of “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction).” Bozeman told Ms. Macy he’d meet her in the conference room. “You’ll be fine on your own?”

She winked. “This is the American Phoenix. You’re never on your own.”

Bozeman appraised her ass as she went inside. “Wouldn’t mind some of those Buffalo wings,” he said. He dropped his hand on Mark Spitz’s shoulder and switched to his majordomo voice. “I haven’t seen you since it happened. Sorry about your man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Was I not supposed to say anything? I’m such an a*shole.”

• • •

They stayed in the toy store for months. That other, less flamboyant, more deliberate ruination altering the planet’s climate had been under way for more than a hundred years, squeezing milder winters into the Northeast. People got used to it, the unopened bags of sodium chloride gathering cobwebs next to the kids’ boogie boards in the garage, the nightly news footage of the venerable ice shelf splashing into the frigid seas, squeezed in if there were no more pressing outrages, or a celebrity death. The first winter of the plague was a throwback to how they used to do it in the good old days: early, unmerciful, endless. The survivors endured the tandem disasters in their refuges, without the solace of warmer days. Warm weather meant you had to go outside again.

“Kinda retro,” Mim said, surveying the unlikely drifts on Main Street.

“I know,” Mark Spitz said. “Come back. I’m cold.”

It was the healthiest relationship he’d ever had, and not because they had a lot in common, such as a need for food, water, and fire. In the time before the flood, Mark Spitz had a habit of making his girlfriends into things that were less than human. There was always a point, sooner or later, when they crossed a line and became creatures: following a lachrymose display while waiting in line for admission to the avant-garde performance; halfway into a silent rebuke when he underplayed his enthusiasm about attending her friend’s wedding. Once it was only a look, a transit of anxiety across her eyes in which he glimpsed some irremediable flaw or future betrayal. And like that, the person he had fallen in love with was gone. They had been replaced by this familiar abomination, this thing that shared the same face, same voice, same familiar mannerisms that had once comforted him. To anyone else, the simulation was perfect. If he tried to make his case, as in his horror movies, the world would indulge his theory, even participate in a reasonable-sounding test, one that would not succeed in convincing them. But he would know. He knew where they failed in their humanity. He would leave.

Over time he learned how to isolate those last nights and say, That’s when they broke through the barrier. In the middle of the argument over the meaning of the foreign film they had been forced to see as members of an educated class: there. When they ran out of gas en route to the weekend at the friend’s cabin and sat in the car for half an hour under the bleak moon: right there. When the last nights became identifiable, the lag time between the incident and the leave-taking diminished. He suffered no appeal. There was no way they could convince him they were human. He was dragging a corpse out of a laundry joint on Chambers Street down in the Zone when he realized that the voice admonishing him to ditch the survivors he’d hooked up with, warning him away from others, was an echo of his relationship-snuffing voice. They are lost, they are the dead, it is time to leave.

Mim did not change. Horns didn’t pop out of her head or matted fur sprout on her hindquarters. Perhaps it would have happened to her in time. They were safe in the toy store. Granted asylum. To look at the lunar surface outside the shop, perhaps they were not on Earth at all, and subject to a different sort of gravity, new rules. No dead moved in the snow; Mim reckoned they were holed up in cellars, the abandoned gymnasiums of run-down high schools, caves and sewers and wherever else these monsters hibernated. No other survivors happened by; they were holed up, too, slowly rubbing their hands over the books they burned for heat, the novels devoted to the codes of the dead world, the histories, the poetry that went up so easily. Perhaps he and Mim were the last ones left. An entire society in a toy store on Main Street.

They furnished their pad in a series of forays, as if it were their first one, everything secondhand or at unbeatable prices—i.e., free. They hit all the local stores, affixing on objects in unison, disagreeing and deferring over placement with magnanimity: books; batteries; milk-crate accent tables; low-sodium ramen; lightweight portable stove; various buckets and plastic containers full of melted snow and purified water; the hyssop- and sandalwood-scented aromatherapy candles; lamps with adjustable arms capable of reducing their cones of illumination to the size of one six-point letter if needed; inflatable mattress with multiple comfort settings and heat massage; plastic boxes of antibacterial baby wipes that made them redolent of artificial lemons and lent their skin, when touched by the other’s lips or tongue, a metallic tang. They read and played games. The place was lousy with board games, of course, the childhood stalwarts and the modern abstrusities with mind-bending premises and loopy procedures. Every week or two they passed whipped-cream canisters back and forth and huffed until they felt their brain cells pop like soap bubbles.

They stashed emergency go-packs at either end of town, his and hers. They were not so deluded.

When the snows ebbed, it emerged that Main Street was a sort of dead highway for some reason. “How the roads are laid out around here, I guess,” Mim said, but it made for a lot of traffic. They nested in the reliquary on the second floor, where they could leave the shades open in daylight without fear. At the end of the spiral staircase the store’s owner, Manny (“Good Old” as they came to call him), displayed his prized commodities: the collectible defectives, limited editions, the whispered-about rarities. Anyone born after World War I could have found intersection with their secret or not-so-secret nostalgia in that trove of Depression-era rag dolls, atomic-age ray guns and scale-model fighter jets, intricate military play sets of quaint lethality, and action figures of cameo characters who had been inserted into the sequel for the express purpose of action-figure production. In the original packaging or an accomplished facsimile, and behind locked glass cabinets.

“This stuff is really valuable,” he said. His childish excitement flickering.

“Where? To whom? For what? That’s the old world.”

She was right, but he had hoped she’d play along, if only for a moment. The boy that wandered the cellar of his personality still nursed the naïve hunger for a life of adventure. As a kid he’d invented scenarios for adulthood: to outrun a fireball, swing across the air shaft on a wire, dismember the gargoyle army with the enchanted blade that only he could wield. Now he was grown up and the plague had granted him his wish and rendered it a silly grotesque. It was not so glamorous to spend two days doubled over, shitting your guts out because you’d gambled on the expired bottle of kiwi juice. All the other kids turned out to be postal workers, roofers, beloved teachers, and died. Mark Spitz was living the dream! Take a bow, Mark Spitz.

The key to the cabinet was downstairs, probably, but he let the treasures be. The generations had fixated on their lost toys, added to their already regrettable debt loads to obtain these tokens because the fantasies sustained them, the stories of the hand-shy orphans who discover their stolen birthright and rescue the kingdom or planetary system, the subgenre of misunderstood aliens and mechanical men who yearned to love. He’d always seen himself in them, the robots who roved the galaxy in search of the emotion chip, the tentacled things that were, beneath their mottled, puckered membranes, more human than the murderous villagers who hunted them for their difference.

The townspeople, of course, were the real monsters. It was the business of the plague to reveal our family members, friends, and neighbors as the creatures they had always been. And what had the plague exposed him to be? Mark Spitz endured as the race was killed off one by one. A part of him thrived on the end of the world. How else to explain it: He had a knack for apocalypse. The plague touched them all, blood contact or no. The secret murderers, dormant rapists, and latent fascists were now free to express their ruthless natures. The congenitally timid, those who had been stingy with their dreams for themselves, those who came out of the womb scared and remained so: These, too, found a final stage for their weakness and in their last breaths were fulfilled. I’ve always been like this. Now I’m more me.

They passed the time, made the nights as lovely as they could. When they discovered they were out of condoms, she told him to pull out and they came otherwise. “Enough babies,” she said. Before the plague, he’d always thought it weird when people said that, as they croaked about overpopulation, the millions of kids in want of a good home, ever-shrinking planetary resources of manifold aspect. Now Mark Spitz understood plainly what they had meant by “What kind of person would bring a child into this world” and then recited statistics about polluted water tables on the other side of the world, the asphyxiated ecosphere. The answer was, “Only a monster would bring a child into this world.”

The last snows were a month behind them. They were lying on the roof looking at the stars. He’d grown up after the time when they taught the constellations, but he knew a handful. Mim was acquainted with a few more. They kept their voices down. The reality: if it was warm enough for them to stargaze, it was warm enough to start moving.

“I’ll say one thing about the world today, it really keeps the pounds off,” she said.

“Starvation will do that.”

“I think it was all the running. I haven’t been in this kind of shape since college.” She brought up Buffalo. Mim still believed in Buffalo.

“By the time you hear about a place, it’s gone,” Mark Spitz said. “I think the very act of hearing about a place seems to will its disappearance.”

“This place is different. Someplace has to be.” His head was on her stomach. Her fingertips drew letters on his scalp. Words? A name? Her kids’ names? “Or else we should just end it now.”

“Buffalo.”

“If there’s nothing out there, what’s the point?”

“There’s here.”

“Have to keep on moving, honey. You stay in one spot, you’re just another straggler.”

In the old joke, the intransigent father goes out for cigarettes and never comes back. The family is bereft. These days your companion in oblivion went out on a routine foraging run and never came back. One warm day, Mim left to scare up some pepper for the lentil soup and did not return. Gone, like that. He searched their neighborhood haunts, and the Main Street businesses they had put off raiding until a rainy-day need. Her various go-packs remained in their stashes. He discovered no indication of where it had happened, and it didn’t matter anyway, did it? He waited a week. And then he moved on. If there’s nothing out there, what’s the point? He didn’t have the answer. He laced his boots.

People disappeared. You never knew it was the last time you’d see them. For a long time, he retained most of their names. Before Northampton, he sometimes indulged visions of coming back one day to all the towns he’d stayed in during the catastrophe, in an electric car driven by his surly grandson. Meet the kids or spouses of the kindred he’d met out in the land, sit for a spell and drink a cup of tea on the plastic-covered sofa downstairs in the split-level. As if anyone they had loved would make it through.

Ever since the soldiers rescued him, he started losing them, the names. They were dust in his pocket. Their eccentricities, the moronic advice vis-à-vis food safety, the locations of the rescue centers they’d obsessed over lasted longer than their names. One night he got the urge to record what he remembered in one of the kiddie armadillo notebooks. It passed. He didn’t stir from his sleeping bag. Let them go, he thought. Except her.

Unlike Mim, the Lieutenant commanded a full complement of mourners. Omega and Bravo held the wake in a Brazilian restaurant on Pearl following a quick survey of the nabe. They’d gone out looking for the other sweeper teams to no avail. The comms were useless, unleashing a metallic howling that kindled dread even in their veteran bones. Their comrades would hear about it tomorrow, and the customary Sunday-night hang out would become a second, boozy memorial.

“He’d want it that way,” Carl said.

“Of that I am sure,” Mark Spitz said.

Work was over once Mark Spitz returned with the news. Angela reconfirmed their choice of venue after doing recon on the liquor inventory. She’d become partial to cachaça after a six-month thing with a Brazilian guy whose constant referencing of his nationality was a cornerstone of his personality, and the drink’s foreign provenance meant it was not subject to the looting regs. Unless the powers had changed the rules these last two weeks they’d been in the field—apparently all sorts of stuff was happening in the world while they roamed the bruises of this necropolis. Camps collapsing, imperiled triplets. The Lieutenant’s troops would produce a worthy memorial. Reggae issued from some dead busboy’s digital music dock, courtesy of Carl’s playlists, and went quite well with the caipirinhas, which didn’t taste half bad, chilled by chem cold packs and infused with the proper measure of lime juice and sugar. At the festivities’ kickoff, Angela was scrounging behind the bar when Kaitlyn started to speak. “Don’t,” Angela said.

“I was going to say, take two bottles,” Kaitlyn said.

Black silhouettes of blade-leafed jungle plants were painted on the walls, more goofy than exotic as they shape-shifted in the frothy light of their lamps and candles. They toasted the Lieutenant. They swapped remembrances of their first day in the Zone, their initial meetings with their eccentric superior officer, each taking a turn at the canvas. The instant Mark Spitz drained his second drink, No Mas grabbed the glass from his hand and mixed another. No Mas had been smiling at Mark Spitz and over-chuckling at his jokes since Mark Spitz walked in on him and Gary in the bathroom. From their furtive expressions, Mark Spitz assumed he’d interrupted some nouveau hand-job ritual, possibly of wretched Connecticut derivation.

“Don’t worry,” Gary told No Mas. “He’s cool.”

Gary explained their side enterprise. Scavengers plundered the pharmacies of the famous painkillers first, the good stuff, and then the proven downers, the tranquilizers road-tested by generations of glum moms. Entrepreneurial salvage and distribution of the numbing agents didn’t begin in earnest until the universal diagnosis of PASD exposed the unfortunate gap in Buffalo’s roster of pharmaceutical sponsors—for those willing to go on the hunt for the indispensable medley of benzodiazepines and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, this was a primo market opportunity. Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time. It was unwise to take a pill out in the wastes, as you might not wake up when you were supposed to, at the sound of the dead multitude clawing against the barn door, for example, but in Happy Acres and its ilk one was unburdened of the curse of eternal vigil. Miss a day here and there, zonked out on this or that—they’d earned it. “Someone’s got to step in,” No Mas said. “People are hurting.”

“What do you charge?” Mark Spitz said.

“Sliding scale, needs-based. Juice boxes accepted.”

The pharmacies and residential medicine cabinets were empty of narcotics and antibiotics, but the antidepressants in their plastic cylinders sprouted like orange mushrooms behind the mirrored doors, ready for harvest. Gary and some dependable players in other sweeper units delivered their booty to No Mas, and on Sunday No Mas rendezvoused with his Wonton connection, who got the pills out on choppers to the camps. A shadow Buffalo executing course corrections for reconstruction.

Mark Spitz told them he’d keep his mouth shut. Yes, it was a necessary service. Perhaps the Lieutenant could have benefited from the cutting-edge mood stabilizers. Perhaps not.

“You’re sure he wasn’t bit?” Carl asked for the third time.

“No,” Mark Spitz said.

“Leave a note?”

“No.”

“Damn.”

They suicided themselves in the homes they loved, surrounded by their beloved objects, or out in the wasteland they despised, alone in the cold dirt. Some arrived at the decision when they were safe in the camps, the semblance of normalcy permitting the first true accounting of the horror, its scope and unabating adversities. The unforgivable in all its faces. The suicides accepted, finally, what the world had become and acted logically. Buffalo was not enamored of the statistics, and ordered Dr. Herkimer to add a longer Prevention/Understanding Ideation unit to the PASD seminars. Killing yourself in the interregnum was understandable. Killing yourself in the age of the American Phoenix was a rebuke to its principles. “We Make Tomorrow!”—if we can get that far, Mark Spitz thought—so tomorrow needs a marketing rollout, hope, psychopharmacology, a rigorous policing of bad thinking, anything to stoke the delusion that we’ll make it through.

Now and again, Mark Spitz held desultory debates with his own forbidden thought, most recently the previous afternoon on Duane Street. He wished the fallen a safe journey.

“Maybe he was bored.”

One of the snipers observed the Lieutenant walk out to the helipad atop the bank. It was a quiet evening, sparse with the dead all day, one of the last quiet evenings before the devils started accumulating in their recent density. The sniper waved at the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant waved back and jammed a grenade into his mouth.

“Can you even fit a grenade into your mouth?” Carl asked.

“Gag reflex,” No Mas said.

“One of those little thermite jobs, sure,” Gary said.

“It’s sad,” Kaitlyn said.

Fabio had installed himself at the man’s desk. Fabio knew himself to be a pretender, from the way he started and almost knocked over his coffee when Mark Spitz showed up. He looked terrible, as if he’d been living in a hamper. He spoke fast, on high rev, as he apologized for not informing the sweepers earlier. With the whole eastern seaboard lit up and scrambling the last two weeks to cover the recent blips, Buffalo thought it best if the sweepers kept to their timetables.

“Blips?” Mark Spitz asked.

“Reversals, complications,” Fabio told him. “Blips.” Fabio was in command until they sent down a replacement. Buffalo had already missed the last two food drops.

The office’s digital player, enthroned on a doily in the microwave/coffeemaker nexus by the watercooler, had been playing a set of old pop and Mark Spitz was startled by the DJ’s sudden bluster: “Hey! All you out there. Hope you’re getting a chance to enjoy this sunshine today!” Surely there were no radio stations up yet. The DJ forecast fair skies for the rest of the afternoon, and Mark Spitz realized it was a recording of a radio block from some random afternoon before the disaster, a ghost transmission of yesterday’s deals on teeth bleaching, ads for movies playing in dead theaters, and last-minute invitations to join class-action suits.

A new recruit Mark Spitz hadn’t seen before, one of the teenagers from the camps, entered the office and dropped himself at Fabio’s old desk. Distribution may be a mess right now, but Buffalo had a lot of spare parts lying around.

“We can’t believe Fabio’s been our man up there and we didn’t even know it,” Gary said.

“It’s disgraceful,” Kaitlyn said.

They quickly ran out of remembrances. Honestly, they didn’t know him that well. “Pretty cool boss,” Carl said. They waded into deep, frigid silences and drank. Carl changed the mix on the digital music player, saying, “This one’s remixes.” It had been rare to memorialize someone’s passing. You were on the run; you left the bodies behind to leak fluids in the sun. This was the first time since the world ended that most of them had the luxury to do things in the old style. They had little to say.

The drinks executed their mission. No Mas saluted the silhouettes on the wall, slow, catching on his gears, and Mark Spitz guessed the man was performing his Lieutenant impression for his inner audience. No Mas smiled faintly. Kaitlyn strangled a loop of hair on her index finger. She caught Mark Spitz looking at her and said, “The subway.”

Seven weeks into their mission, the Lieutenant had Fabio summon them from the field. This was unprecedented, as they only returned to Wonton on Sundays and were now deep in the rhythms of their work flow, replete with Monday-morning despair, hump-day torpor, and a fragile strain of muted Friday-afternoon euphoria. The comms still worked back then, providing a tether to a mending civilization. For his part, Mark Spitz appreciated the interruption of that week’s grid. Omega wormed through the intestines of a starter-apartment rental tower, and floor after floor of beige carpet, noise-permeable walls, and fingerprint-smudged doorways soured his disposition. His friends in the city lived in buildings like that, and the hallways reeked of the dead ambitions decomping behind the doors. They’d had hopes. Now the cheap, emptied construction signified the complete eradication of aspiration, all luminous notions.

In the dumpling house, the Lieutenant told them that Buffalo wanted them to sweep out the subway tunnels.

“I thought the marines already did that,” Metz said.

“Mostly,” the Lieutenant explained. When the marines landed, they’d locked up the black gates and turnstiles to the platforms. The thinking was, they’d clear out the tunnels later. But once they cottoned to the fact that the top of the island was uncapped and the northward rails were wide open, the brass grew apprehensive. Even though skel migration patterns didn’t work that way, everyone started having nightmares of miles and miles of tunnels brimming and bursting with the dead, envisioning the uptown lines as umbral channels rerouting these very, very sick passengers to right beneath their tamed Zone boulevards. Ghoulish faces smeared into the bars and verminous mitts clawed through the metal grating in a hellish rendition of the worst rush hour ever, gates wrenching free from the concrete platforms … In their final mission before redeployment to the latest, more fashionable instability up or down the coast, the marines blocked the underground tunnels at the northern edge of the Zone, as if the Great Wall of Canal extended through the asphalt and deep into the Earth’s crust. Then the marines swept through the downtown shadows after the trapped skels.

It was the Lieutenant’s first week in the Zone. Buffalo was all paperwork; he wanted a proper posting. He led a platoon down the Lexington Avenue line. “Sketchy is the word I’d use. We’d tamed aboveground. Put them down. Underground was skel territory—as if it still belonged to the interregnum, even though it was just under our feet. Even with the subways blocked off, there was this feeling that the other end of the tunnel, its terminus, was in the dead land. Claustrophobic as hell, despite the trolleys we had on the tracks carrying the spots—the brass had reallocated our night-vision gear for some op up north, so we had to bring our own light. You’re not in the city anymore down there. It’s medieval. Water streaming down the wall like a catacomb, rats running around, and then you’re lurching in the pits between the tracks. The third rail’s dead, but it’s still creepy, like it could come on any second and zap you.

“But the main thing was never knowing what was around the next bend or how many were going to come pouring out of the dark. Guys pissing themselves in fear, even after all they’d seen in the wasteland. To make it extra hellish, the general had the bright idea to make us bring flamethrowers, which was fine for making human—or subhuman—torches, but there was no ventilation. When the subway’s running, they got superfans going to keep the air in circulation. Halfway in, it’s full of dead air down there, eyes burning from the smoke, can’t breathe, skels crashing at us through the flames—”

The Lieutenant paused. He wasn’t selling the sweepers on their temporary reassignment very well. He poured a glass of water from the plastic pitcher on the podium. “But we pulled it off. Elbow grease, American Phoenix, rah rah. Now they want you to finish it so it’s a hundred percent. Do what you’re doing now, pop ’n’ drop whatever skels have wandered in from some maintenance conduit over the last weeks, or that one random fellow in the supply room. If any. The hard stuff has been taken care of,” he said. The Lieutenant’s face sketched a look of bravado Mark Spitz had not seen on the man before, so he took it to be fake.

Omega and Gamma were assigned the Seventh Avenue line, Canal to South Ferry. The most noble of subway routes in Mark Spitz’s estimation, hallowed meridian of Manhattan Island. When the two sweeper units arrived at the uptown side of Canal, the yellow tile of the station entrance generated a familiar calm in him. During his first teenage missions in the New York City underground, the steps leading to a subway platform offered refuge from the madness of the streets above, sparing him the skyscrapers’ indictment of his shabby suburban self and the constant jostling of strangers, who cut him off, scowled at his tentative steps, tried to puncture his eyeballs with their umbrella spokes and render him defenseless so they could devour him. He caught his breath on the platforms and furtively checked the transit-authority app on his phone so that no one would know he didn’t have a clue of where he was going. He was a rube, but he was no tourist. One day he’d live here and be one of their tribe. Mark Spitz got out at his stop, at some part of the city he’d never been before, to complete the assignment given by a website—in search of imported sneakers or limited-edition hoodies—eager to school himself in this new cranny of the city.

Back then, if the worst happened, his phone would transmit the coordinates of his murdered body to the satellite and back down to the authorities and eventually to his parents on Long Island. What a quaint notion, to die while looking for cool T-shirts.

The sweepers unlocked the gates and gained the platform. They did not speak. They tightened the straps of their night-vision goggles and waited for their eyes to recalibrate to a new, murky-green modality that made them into scrabbling things at the bottom of a deep-sea chasm. It was as the Lieutenant described it: a decrepit dungeon, with a slow, miasmal atmosphere and secret topography. Trevor said, “Looks like we just missed the train,” and they laughed and walked over to the hooked ladder at the south end of the platform.

Gamma was a unit of mellow bandwidth, third-generation potheads to a man, who couldn’t wait for the new era of marijuana tolerance sure to come in reconstruction, the legislative no-brainers and utopian buds. “When we put it all back together, we will institutionalize joy,” Foreskin said, “for the medicinal toke is the balm of oblivion.” Richard Cowl, a.k.a. Dick Cowl, a.k.a. Foreskin, was Gamma’s leader and a former sommelier at a high-end novelty eatery in Cambridge that specialized in offal. “Which is sort of amusing, given the skel’s yen for human entrails. They’re my regulars!” Even in these times of scarcity he was a vegetarian. He never sampled the exotic delicacies on his employer’s menu but accomplished a mean pairing nonetheless. According to him, at any rate—pre-plague triumphs were often exaggerated, given the lack of contradicting witnesses.

Joshua and Trevor were the other two Gammas. The only description Joshua gave of his former life was that “I was an alcoholic, and I’m still an alcoholic.” One Sunday at Wonton, Josh related how his mother flipped on Last Night and Mark Spitz almost shared his similar tale but declined. Josh didn’t have the bearing of one who was going to make it to the other side; there was something taffy to him, despite the fact he’d survived this long, and to tell him the story would be like pouring coffee into a broken saucer. As for Trevor, he had been a mall security guard in the bright, prelapsarian days of shopping abundance. When they met, Gary teased that Trevor must be glad to “finally have a real gun” after his stint as a fake cop, and Trevor had replied evenly that he hadn’t needed a gun in his mall rounds. He had everything he needed in his hands—Trevor was a master-level practitioner of a branch of martial arts Mark Spitz had never heard of but, after an impromptu demonstration, had become convinced of its lethal pedigree. Gamma got high every night, the minute they bivouacked for the night, “In police stations if one is handy,” Foreskin said.

One of the most solemn rounds of rock-paper-scissors in human history ruled in favor of Omega: Gamma was on point. “It’s all right,” Foreskin said. To draw the skels out, Josh started playing an old heavy metal song on a kazoo. The title eluded Mark Spitz. In the video the band played a bar mitzvah dressed in thick biker leather. Top-notch anti-skel gear in retrospect, save for the exposed neck. Soon they were all humming the song, then giddily crooning it at the top their voices.

The Franklin Street station hove into sight when they heard a holler, back from Canal. Safeties clicked. The dead did not speak. Was it some misbegotten freak who’d been eking it out down here, hiding? Mark Spitz had never come across a true homesteader, but the marines had rounded up a few on their first rounds through the Zone. Citizens who’d locked themselves in insubstantial one-bedrooms and unlikely studios and somehow made it through until the soldiers came to take back the city. What must it have been like, to see the choppers after all that time, after they’d emptied the larder of hope and had only mealy, unleavened stubbornness to chew on? Marines sliding down cables, grinding up the bodies of the dead with their .50-.50s, those devils that had besieged them for so long. They were insane, most of them, and had to be pried out screaming before being taken to the Wonton medics, where the top-shelf antipsychotics awaited. One or two attacked their rescuers, shooting the soldiers in the head, unable to believe in their deliverance—and some homesteaders were no doubt mistaken for skels in turn, palsying in their PASD. There weren’t many, but they did exist. Some homesteaders were still immured north of the barrier; a few managed to signal choppers and were plucked from the roofs. Perhaps others shrank from view when they heard a helicopter, content in whatever doomsday theater played out in their traumatized heads.

Omega and Gamma readied their weapons. Gary lit a cigarette. Mark Spitz thought of the old sign in the token booths: I AM THE STATION MANAGER. I AM ASSISTING OTHER CUSTOMERS. YOU WILL RECOGNIZE ME BY MY BURGUNDY VEST. The man identified himself, and when he got close enough Mark Spitz saw he was not wearing a burgundy vest. It wasn’t some transit authority rep or bearded subterranean hermit who hailed them, but the Lieutenant, in full combat gear, the first time they’d seen him so outfitted. Their laconic boss was aboveground in Wonton; down here he was a real soldier, veteran of the calamity. Shamed, the sweepers assumed their idiosyncratic versions of combat stances. “Thought I’d tag along and get some exercise,” the Lieutenant said.

He hadn’t geared up in months, “But it’s like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.” Over whiskey the following Sunday, he confided to Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn that he’d had a bad feeling about Broadway, ever since Buffalo gave the green light.

Mark Spitz kept tripping over the crossties. He didn’t like walking in the rut, where the bilge seeped into his boots, so he jumped from tie to tie like a kid in a hopscotch grid. He was paranoid about the niches cut into the wall, where a track worker might duck if caught in front of a train. Each black hole harbored a skel, each maintenance corridor was full of hostiles about to spill onto the track, the native population bursting from their shadow habitat to rout the invaders.

“We’ve never been on the subway before,” Gary said.

“Usually you ride in train cars,” Mark Spitz said.

“Do you think they’ll start it up again?”

“Have to get around somehow. Zone One, Zone Two. Once they get the juice on.” The subway will be reduced in the next world, stripped of its powers like some punished god. Forced to recapitulate childhood stages, when it extended through the savage city neighborhood by neighborhood, line by line.

“Queens?”

“I don’t think we’re sweeping Queens anytime soon,” the Lieutenant said. “It’s Queens. But yeah, there will be power.”

“It will be nice to watch TV again,” Kaitlyn said.

“Certainly,” the Lieutenant said. “There’s some idiot in Bubbling Brooks right now thinking up a plague sitcom.” He whirled at a scurrying sound, then resumed his march. “Filmed in front of a live studio audience. Half filled.”

Mark Spitz imagined the hunchback in the cement-block chamber a mile beneath the city, sweating through a yellowed wifebeater, who hit the switch. A hundred thousand refrigerators hum-to at once, 12:00 blinks on the displays of a million microwave ovens and digital video players, all the sad machines that had shut off in the middle of their humble duties, waiting for orders. The hallway lights of tenements and corporate towers snap on, and in the underground, the red and green signal indicators. The magic third rail in deadly awareness. The machines wake to a new world where their old routines are void. As if they were human beings powered down by the plague and then reinitialized for an alternative purpose.

He acclimated to the underneath world, the echoes of their voices and boots that fluttered from wall to wall like bats, the spitting and streaming water that pushed through every crack. An eerie tranquillity settled in his chest. There had been a lot of ash swirling in the air that day, oppressive in its steady, mindless assault on his personal zone, settling in drifts on his barriers. The black stations were an asylum again, the platform a sturdy rock to cling to, as it had been when he was a teenage explorer in the city and the vast human current was attacking him, plucking at him. Before the unwinding of the world, he could always catch his breath here, beneath the uncountable tonnage of the city, the mass of strivers’ aspirations and evanescent hopes, and prepare himself for the next engagement. So it was again.

Everything was copacetic until Chambers, when that eternal question confronted them: local or express. “What do you think, Lieutenant, South Ferry or Brooklyn?” Joshua asked. He snapped his sponsor chewing gum like a bored teen being shuttled to the family reunion. They’d seen rats, dried blood puddles, dust, and chips of bullet-lacerated subway tile, but not a single skel. The marine operation had been so noisy that any plague-blind galoot skulking in the tunnels had been drawn out and cut down. When Disposal came for the bodies, they’d terminated the one or two laggards that wandered out like the unpopular kids no one had told about the end of hide-and-seek two hours prior. It was becoming apparent to Gamma and Omega that underground was as straightforward as their aboveground sweep. Actually, easier, for any stragglers—the odd, befuddled straphanger waiting for the train that would never pull in, or the token clerk hovering over a stack of two-day passes—had already been wiped out. The darkness did not squeeze so tightly now.

“We’ll do South Ferry first, get to the end of the line, and then double back,” the Lieutenant said.

“Then we have to come back tomorrow to finish,” Foreskin said.

“Then we come back tomorrow.”

“How about we take the express and Omega takes the local?” Foreskin suggested. Split up, rendezvous here, and call it a day.

The Lieutenant glared at the two southbound tunnels, the dead black eyes of them. Gary raised his eyebrows, clowning.

“We’re up in the Zone day and night,” Trevor said. “This is just another basement, if you ask me. We’ve been in some serious basements the last few weeks.”

“Serious basements,” Joshua said. They all nodded at the sage assessment, and Mark Spitz chuckled. Nobody knows the basements we’ve seen …

The Lieutenant stalled in the loop of one of his trademark hesitations and relented. Gamma chose the express tracks, which sloped down south of the station, and Omega took the local. Foreskin resumed Gary’s heavy metal song and the two units proceeded to their fates. During a later Sunday-night confab in the dumpling house, the Lieutenant regretted not riding with Gamma. “The bad feeling I got was an express-track bad feeling, not a local-track feeling, but this escaped me when we split up. I f*cked up.” He had brought a present: ice cubes. They clicked and tocked in their glasses. Kaitlyn crunched them in her teeth. That’s the express all over, Mark Spitz thought: It gets you to your final destination quicker. He decided the Lieutenant’s bad feeling told him that the express was a preordained clusterf*ck, and that’s why he posse’d with Omega. To save those who could be saved.

“Bzzzz bzzzz,” Gary said. He tapped the third rail with his sneaker.

Mark Spitz was on point. Kaitlyn diligently retraced Gary’s footsteps, as if they were in a minefield. It was getting on his nerves. “For luck,” she told him when he complained. He told her to back up. She didn’t. The Lieutenant pulled up the rear, dawdling for a reason, trying to figure out what detail eluded him.

“What’s next?” Gary asked.

The old World Trade Center station, Mark Spitz thought. That was a long time ago, but he remembered.

The reports of Gamma’s assault rifles churned through the tunnel as if on slick steel wheels. Mark Spitz looked uptown and downtown to fix the origin of the gunfire, and he was back on a platform in the old days, trying to figure out if that was his train approaching or the opposite track’s. They ran back to Chambers. Their night vision atomized the beams and struts into grains, flimsy pixels, that rose and submerged from shadow. The world dissolved into and re-formed out of darkness with each step, and the barrage continued. Three weapons firing, shouts, then a lesser volley. One weapon silenced. The Lieutenant hollered commonsense rules of engagement, but between the gunfire and the military jargon, Mark Spitz found it hard to make out. He relied on his standard translation of mayhem, which had served him well so far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God,” Angela said.

“Those poor people.”

“The Triplets! What about the Triplets?”

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

“Which one? Was it Finn?”

“I don’t know.”

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

“Poor Cheyenne,” Kaitlyn said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I apologize again for not bringing ice.”

“It’s fine.”

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

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

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