Zone One Part 7

Ms. Macy removed a latex glove from her purse and pressed the controller's oversize red b.u.t.ton. 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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.ping 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. 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. 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 pa.s.sing soldiers engaged in a lively a cappella version of "Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction 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 a.s.s 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.s.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. 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 cla.s.s: 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. 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 ma.s.sage; 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 pa.s.sed whipped-cream canisters back and forth and huffed until they felt their brain cells pop like soap bubbles. they pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s 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 nave 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, s.h.i.tting 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 pa.s.sed 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 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. week. And then he moved on. If there's nothing out there, what's the point? If there's nothing out there, what's the point? He didn't have the answer. He laced his boots. 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-a-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 pa.s.sed. 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 cachaca 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. 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sumed 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 mult.i.tude 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." 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 mult.i.tude 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."

"d.a.m.n."

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. 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, spa.r.s.e with the dead all day, one of the last quiet evenings before the devils started acc.u.mulating 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.