Zone One Part 9

A hunk of the fortune-teller's neck beneath her right ear was absent. The exposed meat resembled torn-up pavement tinted crimson, a scabbed hollow of gaping gristle, tubes, and pipes: the city's skin ripped back. She haunted her old workstation, hands flat on the ruby-red cloth adorning the small round table. There were two chairs, her messages intended for one soul at a time.

Kaitlyn said, "I got the back" and retreated into the recesses of the shop, parting the curtain of red beads with her a.s.sault rifle.

Gary snickered mischievously.

Mark Spitz said, "For f.u.c.k's sake." His new policy announced itself: The sooner you take the stragglers down, the better. They weren't the Lieutenant's sentimentalized angels, dispensing obscure lessons through the simple fact of their existence, and Mark Spitz's impulse to leave Ned the Copy Boy at his post in the empty office was no mercy. These things were not kin to their perished resemblances but vermin that needed to be put down. Why had he faltered?

Gary dropped his pack and ensconced himself in the seeker's chair, removing his mesh gloves with a theatrical flourish. He arranged the proprietor's pale and faintly gray hand on his open palm. "Just a quick reading, Mark Spitz," Gary said. "There are things we need to know." chair, removing his mesh gloves with a theatrical flourish. He arranged the proprietor's pale and faintly gray hand on his open palm. "Just a quick reading, Mark Spitz," Gary said. "There are things we need to know."

"It's disrespectful," Mark Spitz said. He raised his rifle; Gary waved it away. Gary wasn't inclined to abuse on the caliber of his old bandit cronies, but that didn't mean Mark Spitz wanted to be a witness, and there was no point in mocking a skel unless you had a witness. Mark Spitz couldn't isolate the origin of his distaste, and was disinclined to a.s.sociate it with the previous afternoon's solicitude toward Ned. He was too tired to take on the added freight of new symptoms.

His hand nestled in hers, Gary's black fingernails found a.n.a.logue in the red grit beneath their host's. Soothseeker and soothsayer alike had clawed through their respective cemetery dirt. Gary winched his eyebrows. "Anyone you want to talk to in the Great Beyond, Mark Spitz?"

A few blocks past the wall, his uncle's apartment hovered nineteen stories above the street, a pulsing presence. Mark Spitz didn't need a medium; signal flares and semaph.o.r.e would have sufficed. What revelation would Uncle Lloyd have delivered? What did his uncle know now that he hadn't known before the cataclysm? Nothing. Nothing Mark Spitz hadn't already discovered in the wasteland.

At Mark Spitz's demurral, Gary attached an invisible headset to his ear and radioed, "Lieutenant, do you copy? We need our orders. Don't leave us to Fabio, bruh."

Gary could have addressed his brothers, had he been able to evade and outwit his denial over their deaths. Any seance was doomed, in Mark Spitz's estimation, even if the young psychic had functioned properly, if she had still owned her talents. He'd sifted through the failed proofs of an afterlife many a cold night. There was a barrier at the end of one's life, yes, but nothing on the other side. How could there be? The plague stopped the heart, one's essence sloughed off the pathetic human meat and dog-paddled through the ectoplasm or whatever, and then the plague restarted the heart. What kind of cruel deity granted a glimpse of the angelic sphere, only to yank it away and condemn you to a monster's vantage? Sentenced you to observe the world through the sad aperture of the dead, suffer the gross parody of your existence. Outside Zone One, the souls sat trapped in the bleachers, spectators to the travesties committed by their alienated hands. one's essence sloughed off the pathetic human meat and dog-paddled through the ectoplasm or whatever, and then the plague restarted the heart. What kind of cruel deity granted a glimpse of the angelic sphere, only to yank it away and condemn you to a monster's vantage? Sentenced you to observe the world through the sad aperture of the dead, suffer the gross parody of your existence. Outside Zone One, the souls sat trapped in the bleachers, spectators to the travesties committed by their alienated hands.

The death of the afterlife was not without its perks, however, sparing Mark Spitz the prospect of an eternity reliving his mistakes and seeing their effects ripple, however briefly and uselessly, through history.

"This Gypsy's missing a few screws," Gary said. He lifted the slab of her hand and dropped its dead weight on the table.

Kaitlyn rejoined them. "Looks like she started living back there once it went down." She shook her head at the tableau before her but was unable to be authentically appalled. It had been a long day. "You're sick, Gary."

"Nothing you'd like to ask, Kaitlyn?" Gary gripped the fortune-teller's hand again. "Don't you want to know when you meet Mr. Right?"

"Okay, I'll bite-"

"Wrong word."

His comrades settled into Solve the Skel joviality, Mark Spitz told himself to relax. It had been a rough two days, between Human Resources and the Lieutenant's execution of the forbidden thought. In half an hour they'd be at Wonton and another week closer to the remaking of the world. He felt something in his skin, though, the faintest of vibrations.

Kaitlyn asked, "Will the Triplets make it through?"

"What's the matter, plague got your tongue?...Hold on, I'm getting something..." Gary vamped, eyes clenched. "Three brave souls..."

"Cheyenne, fool. Is Cheyenne okay?"

"The answer is...Yes!"

"Sweet lord."

Mark Spitz asked, "Will we make it through?"

Gary opened one eye and grinned. "Let me check, hold on a sec...Madame Gypsy, can you help us see the future?"

We make the future, Mark Spitz thought. That's why we're here.

"It's hazy," Gary said. He concentrated harder, hand trembling. "What you really want to know is, will you make it through?"

"Yes."

"Hold on a sec..." Gary's body convulsed, a ferocious psychic current entering at that intersection of his skin and that of the fortune-teller. The mechanic couldn't keep a straight face as he combated the forces of the spirit world, frail conduit. For the first time Mark Spitz noticed the tiny smile engraved into the fortune-teller's black lips, as if she enjoyed the joke as well, or an altogether different amus.e.m.e.nt, the exact grain and texture of which only she could appreciate. Gary collapsed on the table, milked the moment, and then wearily raised his head. "They say everything is going to be all right, Mark Spitz. You don't have to worry about a thing."

To be a good sport, Mark Spitz made a show of relief. On the street, his ash had begun to fall, his vanguard flakes.

"Okay, up, up, Gary," Kaitlyn said, "let's finish this off."

"Don't sulk," Gary said. He lifted his fingers from the fortune-teller's hand and the instant he broke contact she grabbed his hand and chomped deep into the meat between the index finger and thumb. Blood sprayed, paused, sprayed again with the exertions of his heart. The Gypsy's mouth ground back and forth, ripping and chewing, and she gobbled up his thumb.

Kaitlyn's bullets disintegrated her head and she slumped to the floor, spewing the dark fluid in her veins onto the shelves of a home-a.s.sembly particle-board bookcase filled with her occult troves. Before her face was liquefied, her smile returned to her blood-splashed lips: a broad, satisfied crescent of teeth. Or so Mark Spitz imagined. troves. Before her face was liquefied, her smile returned to her blood-splashed lips: a broad, satisfied crescent of teeth. Or so Mark Spitz imagined.

He ministered to Gary's wound while Kaitlyn shot the fortune-teller four more times, cursing. Gary's shrieks of shock and agony turned into a command for anticiprant. "Gimme the s.h.i.+t, where's the s.h.i.+t, gimme the s.h.i.+t," he cried, hands roving over his vest. Mark Spitz found his friend's supply of antibiotic, in the same pocket that held this week's h.o.a.rd of mood stabilizers. Gary gobbled up the anticiprant, and then Mark Spitz's stash and Kaitlyn's. He howled.

It was folklore, the megadose of drugs that snuffed out the plague if you swallowed it quickly enough. Anticiprant had been a second-tier antibiotic in the previous world; no telling how it had been cast as the cavalry repelling the invading spirochetes of the plague. Poll a random mess table at a resettlement camp and you'd find one or two pheenies who claimed to know someone who knew someone who had been saved by this prophylaxis. When pressed, of course, no one could claim firsthand knowledge. Mark Spitz didn't believe in its powers. More likely, the original carriers of this doomsday folklore hadn't received a proper wallop of the plague, enough to infect. But it didn't hurt to carry some pills in your pocket. People carried crucifixes and holy books. Why not an easy-to-swallow caplet of faith, in a new fast-acting formula.

Kaitlyn stabbed Gary's arm with a morphine ampoule and finished dressing the wound. She wiped the blood off with a fuchsia hand towel from the back bathroom. He moaned and glared at his Gypsy as if to cut her open and fish around for his thumb and sew it back on. "Gypsy curse," he said, spitting a ruby to the dusty carpet. The white mitt at the end of his wrist was p.r.i.c.ked with red specks that bloomed into red petals, became a bouquet. Mark Spitz opened another dressing.

They didn't have to get into the heavy stuff yet. There was time. It was faster now, after generations and mutations, but there was time. time. It was faster now, after generations and mutations, but there was time.

"I want more pills," Gary said.

"I'll see if Bravo is still up the block," Kaitlyn said. Given their temperament, the unit was long back at Wonton, but Mark Spitz knew she wanted a chance to try and get a signal out to report the situation. Get a higher-up to weigh in, even if it was lowly Fabio.

They settled in the back room. The fortune-teller had dug out a meager alcove in the interregnum, for a few weeks at least. The apartment bore the telltale markers of siege life, in the goo mounds of candle wax, the ziggurat of cans of beans and soup. The couch and its coc.o.o.n of blankets was the nest where she plotted her unsuccessful escape. Mark Spitz helped Gary over to it, the wounded man traducing their dead host with every step.

Kaitlyn will be right back, Mark Spitz rea.s.sured. She's dependable.

Gary dragged a fistful of quilt to his chin, like an old lady vexed by an ineradicable draft. "Why do they call you Mark Spitz?" he asked.

He told him about the wreckers, the Northeast Corridor, and the jokes when they got back to Fort Golden Gate from the viaduct. He'd laughed along with everyone else, but later he had to look up Mark Spitz, in a surrept.i.tious mission for an old paper encyclopedia. First he had to find one, which took time. Finally he was saved by movie night at the bungalow of one of the infrastructure guys; the previous inhabitants owned a big fat dictionary, old school, with pictures, even. His nicknamesake had been an Olympic swimmer in the previous century, a real thoroughbred who'd held the world record for the most gold medals in one game: freestyle, b.u.t.terfly. The Munich Games-Munich, where the scientists had made biohaz soup of the infected, in the early days of the plague, as they worked toward a vaccine. The word "soup" had stayed with him, after one of the denizens of the wasteland had told him the story. People were becoming less than people everywhere, he had thought: monsters, soup. told him the story. People were becoming less than people everywhere, he had thought: monsters, soup.

Seven gold medals? Eight? Here was one of the subordinate ironies in the nickname: He was anything but an Olympian. The medals awarded this Mark Spitz were stamped from discarded slag. Mark Spitz explained the reference of his sobriquet to Gary, adding, "Plus the black-people-can't-swim thing."

"They can't? You can't?"

"I can. A lot of us can. Could. It's a stereotype."

"I hadn't heard that. But you have to learn how to swim sometime."

"I tread water perfectly."

He found it unlikely that Gary was not in owners.h.i.+p of a master list of racial, gender, and religious stereotypes, cross-indexed with corresponding punch lines as well as meta-textual dissection of those punch lines, but he did not press his friend. Chalk it up to morphine. There was a single Us now, reviling a single Them. Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next, and so on, and they were packed together again, tight and suffocating on top of each other? Or was that particular bramble of animosities, fears, and envies impossible to recreate? If they could bring back paperwork, Mark Spitz thought, they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns.

There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.

Gary had ceased speaking in his fraternal we. Were the weevils munching through even now, gnawing ca.n.a.ls in his brain-stuff? He heard Kaitlyn reenter the shop. He recognized her walk, but he had to double-check. With Gary's attack, he was one foot in the wasteland again, and nothing could be taken for granted. He felt energized, a reptilian k.n.o.b at the base of his skull throbbing.

Kaitlyn dropped into the mora.s.s of the orange beanbag chair, sinking deeper than she expected, and told them she saw no sign of Bravo. Still only a squall of feedback on the comm. Gary closed his eyes. Mark Spitz said, "Stay awake. Stay awake. There's one more thing about the highway I want to tell you. You'll think it's cool."

He told his unit how he'd discovered the clandestine heart of the Quiet Storm's maneuvers. He was aboard the chopper on his way to the Zone. The other wreckers had opted to stay on the corridor. Richie didn't like "the big city" as he called it, although like many who uttered these words, he had never been. Mark Spitz didn't point out that what he most likely despised about the city was gone: the people. The Quiet Storm told him she still had work to do, in her weird affect, which he didn't pay attention to at the time. He finally saw it from above, what she had carved into the interstate. While the other wreckers, indeed all the other survivors, could only perceive the wasteland on its edge, the Quiet Storm was in the sky, inventing her alphabet and making declarations in a row of five green hatchbacks parked perpendicular to the median, in a sequence of black-and-white luxury sedans arranged nose to nose two miles down the road, in a burst of ten minivans in glinting enamel tilted at an acute angle half a mile farther north. The grammar lurked in the numbers and colors, the meaning encoded in the s.p.a.ces between the vehicular syllables, half a mile, quarter mile. Five jeeps lined up south by southwest on a north-south stretch of highway: This was one volley of energy, uncontained by the routes carved out by settlers two hundred years before, or reified by urban planners steering the populace toward the developers' shopping centers. Ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east-west were the fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching on an arrow aimed at-what? Tomorrow? What readers? Then his chopper was over a midsize city in botched Connecticut, beyond the margins of her ma.n.u.script, and he was halfway to Zone One. Connecticut, beyond the margins of her ma.n.u.script, and he was halfway to Zone One.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"We don't know how to read it yet. All we can do right now is pay witness."

She wrote her way into the future. Buffalo huffed over its machinations and narratives of replenishment, and the wretched pheenies stabbed their b.l.o.o.d.y knees and elbows into the sand as they slunk toward their mirages. And then there were people like the Quiet Storm, who carved their own p.a.w.ns and rooks out of the weak clay and deployed them across their board, engaged in their own strategic reconstructions. Mark Spitz saw her mosaic, in its immense tonnage, outlasting all of Buffalo's schemes, the operations under way and the ones yet to be articulated. What readers.h.i.+p did she address? G.o.ds and aliens, anyone who looks down at the right time, from the right perspective. To Anyone Who Can Read This: Stay Away. Please Help. Remember Me.

"Maybe it says: It's safe now, we're gone. Maybe it says: I'm still here." She had told him when she declined to leave the corridor that she wasn't finished yet.

"Sounds like PASD to me," Gary said. "In Rainbow Village this one guy wrote Bible verses in his own s.h.i.+t." He tapped his vest after his sponsor cigarettes, drowsy. "Who's going to go up and get me more penicillin?"

"I'll go," Mark Spitz said.

"Try not to f.u.c.k around, going on about how the ash is falling," Gary said. "You're not going to mention the ash, right?"

"Yes."

"I see you looking out the window," he said. "It's best to keep it to yourself, I think." Like a parent telling a kid to lay off the nostril-mining, just for an hour. People might talk.

"You're not on your deathbed. Death-futon."

"How am I supposed to light a cigarette with this?"

Mark Spitz waited for Kaitlyn to join him outside. Up the street, Disposal had tossed the bodies of the suicides into the back of their cart. The overcast sky ushered in premature evening and he wondered if it was going to rain, even though the thunder he heard wasn't meteorological but martial. Kaitlyn emerged from the shop, wiping her fingers with antibacterial wipes. "He says he wants to stay here," she said. "He doesn't want to see anyone."

"I'll check in with Fabio, hit up the medic for something to make him more comfortable." The euphemism came easily. "What if he turns quick?"

"I'm ready. I won't leave him alone. I only came out here in case he wanted a minute to off himself."

"Okay."

"Run."

He beat it uptown. Two blocks uptown he realized he'd forgotten his pack; he decided not to go back for it. The thunder of the artillery intensified, cleaved from the lightning that might have, for an instant, lit his pa.s.sage through the worsening gloom, livened his ash into brief fireflies. The thunder has lost his brother, he thought. When was the last time they enjoyed a proper dinner as a family? Done it right, without griping about the bra.s.s at Wonton, complaining about blisters, had a dinner devoid of one person's brooding or sullen reverie about the time before the flood. Omega had taken it for granted, the family meal. It came to him as he skidded onto Broadway: Kaitlyn's birthday. They were yo-yoing up and down the stairwells of a corporate megalith and she'd dropped no less than three anecdotes detailing some of the key birthday parties of her youth: the educational visit to the eco-friendly ranch where alpacas nibbled gray pellets from her tiny palm, their rough tongues tickling; the excursion to the mad scientist's laboratory where her third-grade friends had spun filaments of cotton candy; the surprise party it seemed the whole town was in on, so elaborately did the charade about the "visit to the dentist" unfold. Eventually Gary had no choice but to ask when her big day was. "Today," she said, as the body bag in her hands spontaneously unzipped, loosing chunky gallons of fluids and innards. but to ask when her big day was. "Today," she said, as the body bag in her hands spontaneously unzipped, loosing chunky gallons of fluids and innards.

Omega cut their biscuits in half for buns, lit a ball of C-4 to make a fire, and grilled up some spamburgers, which they consumed happily in the private room of an upscale Italian restaurant off Laight. "Fancy," Gary said, belching. A pinch of c.u.min and coriander made all the difference, it was unanimous. Omega drank some of the Long Island cabernet that had been circulating around Wonton, after one of the generals dispatched a search-and-rescue team to the Bridgehampton vineyard. The vintners were ensconced at Camp El Dorado, became sponsors, patriots.

It was after they opened the cellophane on the coconut cupcakes and crooned the mandatory song that Kaitlyn told them the Last Night story she had held back for so long. Hers was no numb recital; she did not tell them out of compulsion to indulge in the cheap catharsis of the Big Share. She told them to eulogize to the disaster. She said, "Let me tell you about the night I started running, and make a toast to the end of that race."

He ran. Uncle Lloyd's building reared up as he turned the corner, one of the garrison's spotlights fixed on the sheer blue metal of its midsection. He flagged: What was it trying to tell him? He'd pressed his nose to the thick gla.s.s of airliner portholes for a glimpse of the building when he returned from a trip, sought its profile in the rows of skysc.r.a.pers when he was caught on one of the expressways that fed the metropolis, and when he finally rescued it from the crowd, its blue skin soaring over the bores never failed to cheer him. Each time he thought: One day I will live in a place like that, be a man of the city. Now the s.h.i.+mmering blue moon the spotlight punched out of the night sky was alien and unnerving. It was not the same building. It had been replaced. He ran through the ash, which was really coming down now, in his mind or everywhere, in slow, thick flakes that eased to the sidewalk in implacable surety. He was close enough to the incinerators that it was possible it was real ash. The Lieutenant was in that stuff, smithereened by the Coakleys. that it was possible it was real ash. The Lieutenant was in that stuff, smithereened by the Coakleys.

The night of her birthday, in the Italian eatery, Kaitlyn explained that she booked the train even though it was more expensive than flying because there was so much of the country she had never seen. The invigorating virtues of the scenic route. While the world outside the windows was inspiring, the one inside the car was less so. Erratic shooting pains traversed her calves after three hours in her stiff seat, and the wifi whispered in and out so capriciously that she gave up on the half season of the lawyer show she'd intended to stream. The final queasy indignity occurred when a person or persons three rows back unleashed a sort of ca.s.serole salute to cheese that filled the car with a reluctant-to-dissipate stench, almost corporeal, another pa.s.senger. But her friends were waiting for her on the platform when she arrived for their reunion weekend, beckoning from beyond the metal barriers, where the steel-eyed German shepherds of the security teams chafed on their chains. Kaitlyn forgot the train's farrago of torments until her pals returned her to the station three days later.

Her homebound train stopped outside Crawfordsville. The name of the town lilted in her brain all this time later, singsongy, the locale in a country-and-western song where the singer met her unexpected love, or lost it. The Sunset Dayliner did not budge, the lights stuttered, the circulated air loudly chugged on and off-a moment of turbulence, as if they had pa.s.sed through a bad pocket. On the other side of this disturbance, one of the conductors hustled between the seats toward the front of the train, ignoring questions, eschewing eye contact, and mumbling in code to his crackling handset. A pair of Concerned Pa.s.sengers huddled by the handicapped-access bathroom in consternation, and she heard the time-honored threat of the impotent consumer: I'm going to I'm going to get to the bottom of this get to the bottom of this. They had G.o.d-given rights as paying customers, the phone numbers of corporate hotlines awaited in their smartphones, beckoned from the internet, consumer-protection apparatus listed helpful e-mail addresses to capture their appeals and apply remedies.

The woman in the window seat, a birdlike thing who hadn't removed her beak from her tablet's screen since boarding, looked at Kaitlyn for the first time as the static-y voice hit the intercom: We are being held here momentarily. The woman tugged the earbuds from their inputs in the sides of her skull. "Where are we, anyway?" she asked. Later, a national guardsman shot her six times in the back with a machine gun as she tried to make a break for the woods.

After the announcement, the first person on his feet was a fifty-something man garbed in a blue denim suit, his beard mashed through red-and-green beads. He tried to transfer to the next car; the door did not budge. They were locked in. An hour pa.s.sed. The bars on Kaitlyn's cell dropped one by one and the wifi shut off for good. Before the other pa.s.sengers lost reception with their personal networks (in one sinister moment, a cascade of disappointment), the news blogs filled in what the conductor withheld: The train was under quarantine. A pa.s.senger had been "acting strangely" in the cafe car, attracting the attention of train personnel. After a scuffle, the terrorist barricaded himself in a bathroom and threatened to release a biological agent. "They have to let us out," someone wailed. A woman shouted, and everyone in the car looked out the windows at the military trucks and jeeps, the soldiers spilling onto the gravel shoulder of the right-of-way in their white hazmat suits. Kaitlyn couldn't see their faces.

The terror plot remained the cover story for the first couple of hours, plausible and self-organizing. Later, when Kaitlyn was on the run, she discovered what the rest of the country heard from the news media, before the news media was reduced to a numb scroll of rescue stations and an evanescent list of contradictory infection procedures. Before the media sighed into the depths, senescent, dumb. The train's Patient Zero had turned feral in his seat-dropped out of humanity's codes and into the solemn directives of the plague-and bit three people before being restrained; the conductor's call for aid triggered a local military response. The authorities were on alert for certain keywords on the emergency channels, as it was early in the death of the world and the military still mobilized to distress calls. Some calls, anyway. scroll of rescue stations and an evanescent list of contradictory infection procedures. Before the media sighed into the depths, senescent, dumb. The train's Patient Zero had turned feral in his seat-dropped out of humanity's codes and into the solemn directives of the plague-and bit three people before being restrained; the conductor's call for aid triggered a local military response. The authorities were on alert for certain keywords on the emergency channels, as it was early in the death of the world and the military still mobilized to distress calls. Some calls, anyway.

No one was getting off that train. On that Eve of Last Night, some of the pa.s.sengers in Kaitlyn's car tried to make a break for it-chute out the emergency window and sprint through a perceived weakness in the cordon. Thus did Kaitlyn first encounter that interregnum cliche, wherein the alpha male or female recruits support for a nutty plan and organizes the doomed sortie: pell-mell out of the surrounded Victorian; bursting from the collapsible door of the trapped school bus in a whirlwind of ad hoc truncheons, ladles, and chimney pokers. Out of the quarantined train car that had been plucked from its steadfast route and deposited forty-eight hours in the future, into the collapse. On the last night before the Last Night, the machine guns dispatched these intrepid; after that, it would be teeth.

When the soldiers suddenly bugged out the following evening-the armored vehicles spinning out into AWOL missions after loved ones or vain ops intended to keep it all from flying apart-Kaitlyn started running. She and the other pa.s.sengers extricated themselves from the dead ma.s.s transit to master the new lessons, or else perished in their scattered elementaries. Eventually her run took her to Zone One, to Gary and Mark Spitz, the birthday celebration in the function room of an Italian restaurant, where on panels of dark wood the caricatures of the deceased regulars promenaded, famous and not famous, distended chins and k.n.o.b noses protuberant and gross. Kaitlyn told them her Last Night story not to enter into ritualized mourning but to say: This is a story of how it used to be. When we didn't know what was happening and were defenseless. Kaitlyn made a toast to Zone One and the new world they chipped from the stone, building by building, room by room, skel by skel. The intent of the caricature, Mark Spitz thought as he listened to her story, is to capture the monstrous we overlook every day. Maybe, she said, we can unsee the monsters again. Night story not to enter into ritualized mourning but to say: This is a story of how it used to be. When we didn't know what was happening and were defenseless. Kaitlyn made a toast to Zone One and the new world they chipped from the stone, building by building, room by room, skel by skel. The intent of the caricature, Mark Spitz thought as he listened to her story, is to capture the monstrous we overlook every day. Maybe, she said, we can unsee the monsters again.

Mark Spitz cradled this memory of their last celebration as he entered Wonton's corona. It had been a lovely night, that time they tried to kid one another that the world was not ending. Listening to the gunfire from uptown, he knew what was happening. The barrier was about to fail. It was falling down, as it always did.

It started like this: On White Street he flagged down Lester, one of the Alpha Unit guys and self-appointed party wrangler for Sunday R & R ever since their first week in the Zone. Lester carried a case of Long Island red, and a huge plastic bag of popcorn dangled from the fingers of his left hand. He nodded toward the wall, rolling his eyes at the barrage, as if vexed by the neighbor's leaf blower during his annual barbecue. "Skels been coming for dinner all day, nonstop." Had Mark Spitz heard about the Lieutenant? Yes, he had. Lester was scrounging supplies for the next wake, bound for the dumpling house.

Mark Spitz told him he'd see them there, declining to tell him about Gary's bite, per his friend's wishes. Plus, Gary hated Lester.

It never ceased to be an odd sight, the approach to Wonton at night. The unnatural glare of the op lights bleached the buildings bone-white as the shadows gathered the potsherds of the dead world. This night he noticed the dead bargains: the handwritten EVERYTHING MUST GO EVERYTHING MUST GO sign in the second-floor window of a shop of no decipherable purpose, a banner proclaiming the specialty sandwich sign in the second-floor window of a shop of no decipherable purpose, a banner proclaiming the specialty sandwich at the fast-food chain. At the corner of Broadway and Ca.n.a.l, the scale of the engagement shocked him. The anxious overture of the previous afternoon had evolved into a lush, neurotic symphony. The machine guns fired without cessation. He'd become so accustomed to the gunfire, the steady escalation of its bl.u.s.ter, that he hadn't considered how many men and women such an onslaught entailed. In the lairs atop the key structures overlooking the wall, twice as many snipers trained their scopes, muzzles crackling next to the squatting cornice gargoyles and the sh.e.l.ls hopping on the rooftop tar. On the catwalk girding the human side of the wall, the troops were doubled up as well, strafing, reloading, zeroing in on a new target cl.u.s.ter up the avenue that was hidden from view by the wall, and then on to the next. at the fast-food chain. At the corner of Broadway and Ca.n.a.l, the scale of the engagement shocked him. The anxious overture of the previous afternoon had evolved into a lush, neurotic symphony. The machine guns fired without cessation. He'd become so accustomed to the gunfire, the steady escalation of its bl.u.s.ter, that he hadn't considered how many men and women such an onslaught entailed. In the lairs atop the key structures overlooking the wall, twice as many snipers trained their scopes, muzzles crackling next to the squatting cornice gargoyles and the sh.e.l.ls hopping on the rooftop tar. On the catwalk girding the human side of the wall, the troops were doubled up as well, strafing, reloading, zeroing in on a new target cl.u.s.ter up the avenue that was hidden from view by the wall, and then on to the next.

He couldn't see what the soldiers aimed at, but he could smell it. From the magnitude of the stench, the bodies putrefied in vast dunes on the other side of the barrier. West, toward the incinerators, the stack vented its puff of smoke and ash, but the fuel must have been sweeper deliveries, as Wonton had ceased scooping corpses from beyond the wall. The grab-crane duo, drenched in the rank fluids of the dead, were motionless, gigantic praying mantises caught in an inscrutable pose. Perhaps they hadn't repaired the machines yet or had diverted those on crane detail to the perimeter to knock down skels. Yesterday's pools of blood and gore had expanded into lakes fed by the ma.s.s of leaking corpses.

The vicinity of the wall bristled and bucked with activity, but a few feet away, beyond the combat lines, the Sunday-evening routines puttered as usual, inconceivably: Engineers strolled in an insouciant haze as they planned the evening's diversions, poker or a movie in one of the rec s.p.a.ces; couples snuck off to their rendezvous before the new workweek implicated them; the guys and gals from the other sweeper teams waved at him to hurry up and join them at the dumpling house. After all this time in the abattoir, the survivors were completely inured to the agenda of catastrophe.

They didn't feel what he felt. Mark Spitz relished the cadence in his veins, the way his senses had ticked up into a state of uncanny alert. The rusty wasteland systems were powered up, the algorithms sorting input. As the door of the bank closed behind him, the m.u.f.fling of the guns underscored the ferocious disposition of the street. HQ was tranquil, even for a Sunday night. Was the regular army on an op right now? No time to guess: He had a mission. The second-floor hall, so hectic as it channeled Buffalo's whims toward actuality, was empty now. in his veins, the way his senses had ticked up into a state of uncanny alert. The rusty wasteland systems were powered up, the algorithms sorting input. As the door of the bank closed behind him, the m.u.f.fling of the guns underscored the ferocious disposition of the street. HQ was tranquil, even for a Sunday night. Was the regular army on an op right now? No time to guess: He had a mission. The second-floor hall, so hectic as it channeled Buffalo's whims toward actuality, was empty now.

The Lieutenant's-correction-Fabio's office was locked. Mark Spitz rattled the door. Two cartons were stacked at his feet, the top one sliced open. He picked up one of the items inside: a combat helmet, the back of which had been branded with a butched-up drawing of the famous kid-show armadillo. The varmint made a muscle, bicep curving formidably, as he chomped a cigar b.u.t.t between square white teeth. A cigar in this day and age, smoked by a kiddie icon: somebody was going to get fired. Mark Spitz had to give respect to reconstruction's new mascot, who was more prepared for what was coming than anyone at Wonton. Except for him.

Fabio let Mark Spitz in, tentatively, chary of the sweeper's bad news, whatever its stripe. When Mark Spitz briefed him, Fabio mumbled a curse and his glance drifted to the windows overlooking the wall. The man was in a fog. He said, "Gonna have to fill out a special T-12 casualty form. I think I have one somewhere." He ha.s.sled the top drawer of his desk, perplexed, fiddled in his pockets for keys.

Mark Spitz yanked the man forward by his s.h.i.+rt. He laid out the situation in more emphatic terms.

Fabio looked into Mark Spitz's face, only recognizing him in that moment. He apologized. "I thought you said it was a straggler."

"What we thought."

"That doesn't sound good."

"It's not," Mark Spitz said. Fabio wasn't partial to original thinking, but yes, Gary's Gypsy curse was a problem. This mutiny broke the rules. If one skel broke the rules, there were more. It was survivor's logic: If Mark Spitz was alive, there had to be others. Until the day it was not true. The fortune-teller must be a mistake, an errant bad comet loping into their solar system, the malfunctioning one percent of the malfunctioning one percent. Or else the world was resuming its decomp after these months of tenuous integrity, those stalwart membranes and hara.s.sed cell walls finally dissolving into a black spume. thinking, but yes, Gary's Gypsy curse was a problem. This mutiny broke the rules. If one skel broke the rules, there were more. It was survivor's logic: If Mark Spitz was alive, there had to be others. Until the day it was not true. The fortune-teller must be a mistake, an errant bad comet loping into their solar system, the malfunctioning one percent of the malfunctioning one percent. Or else the world was resuming its decomp after these months of tenuous integrity, those stalwart membranes and hara.s.sed cell walls finally dissolving into a black spume.

"Where's Tammy?" Mark Spitz said. "He'll need morphine."

"You think he has the time for that?" Fabio stared, blank as a midtown sidewalk. He said, "However you want to handle it. You can have access to her meds, but Tammy's on a chopper to Happy Acres."

Mark Spitz asked why.

"We lost contact three hours ago. Sent some army guys to check it out."

"What is it?"

"The last transmission was hard to decipher."

"What Fabio is trying to say is that we've lost contact with everyone." It was Bozeman, his puffy round face hara.s.sed by worry. He had ditched his clerk's khakis for full combat gear, and Mark Spitz was surprised to see the RPG launcher slung over the man's back.