Reentry into the anterooms of civilization was always difficult, and the longer the survivors spent out there, the harder it was to come back. But even after a hot shower, sleeping like stones for twelve hours straight, and tasting the corn (everyone was quite proud of the corn harvest, and rightfully so), the refugees continued with their wild stories. Then recon units came back with confirmation, video, up and down the coast. In wide-open places, the dead were falling en masse. A high-school football field in faraway Raleigh bumpy with bodies, a public park in Trenton where black flies zipped at the banquet. Buffalo sent down word of their think-tank scuttlebutt: The plague had finally, inevitably, exhausted what the human body could endure. There was a limit to the depredations, and that meant a limit to the devastation.
The reports of the scattered kill fields emerged at the same time, suggesting (according to some) a time frame for the course of infection. It was the season of encouraging dispatches. The establishment of steady communications with nations abroad, the intel traveling back and forth over the seas. Throw in the continued consolidation of the uninfected groups and clans, and the simple fact that skel attacks and sightings had diminished by all empirical measure, and one had reason to dust off the old optimism. You had only to look at the faint movement in the ashes: surely this is the American Phoenix Rising. At least that’s what the T-shirts said, lifted from the biodegradable cardboard boxes fresh from Buffalo. Toddler sizes available.
Mark Spitz observed the reduced skel numbers firsthand. There were simply fewer of them around, the chancred losers, a blessing during his time on the Corridor in accursed Connecticut and beyond. But kill fields aside—and there were no solid numbers regarding these sundry fallen, given the general appetite for a quick bonfire—no one could account for where the skels had gone. One school maintained that exposure had cut a lot of them down, the winter in its savagery. Speculation was above his pay grade, never mind that he was paid in socks and sunscreen.
Kaitlyn said, “Haven’t heard of that happening in urban areas yet.” She registered Gary’s deflated expression and, checking her usual impulses, added, “But maybe.”
Mark Spitz slapped his arm across Kaitlyn’s chest to stop her, a gesture he’d lifted from his parents, who had lifted it from their parents, who had remembered a time before seat belts: There was movement across the street.
The wasteland protocols booted up, obsolete or no. His brain compared the warehoused scenarios and previous engagements to the scene on Fulton Street, running demeanor, gear, posture, and facial expressions through the database. Dead or bandit, straggler or survivor, it was often hard to tell. Did they speak, that was the first test. Did they still have language. You took it from there. Before the rise of the camps, out in the land, you had to watch out for other people. The dead were predictable. People were not. Most were like Mark Spitz, isolated and squeaking by in the great out there, power bar by stale power bar. Once you ensured that you were both sentient, you gingerly approached to parley. Where are you coming from, onto what mirage have you fastened your hopes, have you seen any other people according to the old definitions, where shouldn’t we travel. The essential information.
If you chose to hook up for a time, eventually you traded Last Night stories. In their bleak adventure, the survivors tried to crawl to the mythical settlements and forts they’d conjured in their minds, where the plague was part of a news segment recounting some other town’s tragedy, filler before the weather report, where there was electricity and local produce right out of the bag and kids played and there were little jumping rabbits. Haven, finally. Each retelling of one’s Last Night story was a step toward another fantastic refuge, that of truth. Mark Spitz had refined his Last Night story into three versions. The Silhouette was for survivors he wasn’t going to travel with for long. He had quickly soured on this stranger standing before him by the cellar door of the farmhouse, or by the metal detector of the department of motor vehicles, out of skel sightline, and he concocted the thin broth of the Silhouette from this despair over the death of connection. At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running. The Silhouette sufficed. No need to hand over his heart, the good stuff. The two parties had departed before they even started talking.
He offered the Anecdote, robust and carrying more on its ribs, to those he might hole up with for a night, in a long-cleaned-out family-owned Greek restaurant, a dilapidated trailer with weeds growing out of the carpet, or atop a toll plaza, baking up there but grateful for the 360-degree view. He also trotted out the Anecdote version for hookups with larger bands, when the Silhouette might appear rude, but the Obituary was too intimate to share with the half-formed huddled faces around the flashlights. The Anecdote included a gloss on Atlantic City, the trip home (spectacularly foreboding in retrospect, the ghosts playing basketball), and concluded with the phrase “I found my parents, and then I started running.” It was the smallest portion, he learned, that was acceptable to strangers to allow them to fall asleep without thinking he’d bludgeon them in their sleeping bags. The versions they gave in return were never enough to let him sleep, no matter the surfeit of telling details and sincerity.
The Obituary, although refined over the months and not without a rehearsed air, was nonetheless heartfelt, glancing off his true self more than once, replete with digressions about his lifelong friendship with Kyle, nostalgia for the old A.C. trips, the unsettling and “off” atmosphere of that last casino weekend, and a thorough description of the tableau at his house and its aftermath. Although the adjectives tended to be neutral in later retellings, the Obituary was the sacred in its current guise. The listener usually responded in kind, unless revisiting that longest of nights dispatched them into a fugue, which happened occasionally. They’d spent some time together. This might be the final human being they’d see before they died. Both speaker and listener, sharer and receiver, wanted to be remembered. The Obit got it all down for some calm, distant day when you were long disappeared and a stranger took the time to say your name.
Albatrosses materialized around the bend, of course, and two minutes of their company sufficed. They were too far gone. Sick, not with the plague but with the workhorse afflictions newly complicated in the wasteland, pneumonia and rheumatoid arthritis and the like. The things requiring generic meds that needed decoding in the stripped pharmacies. Or they were quite clearly mad. How’d this brain-wiped half-skel make it this far? God had watched over children and drunks, and now he watched over no one, but these unfortunates made it through somehow. They had no supplies, not a single weapon, owned nothing but their clothes and wounds. Perhaps they might snap out of it, that cough might disappear with a packet of rehydrated chicken soup, but he made a swift retreat, faster than if pursued by a hundred skels. Safer to assume they’d get him killed. A parent-child combo might pop up at the crest of the old country road, wan and wary, and Mark Spitz shrank from these, no matter how well outfitted they were. Parenthood made grown-ups unpredictable. They hesitated at the key moment out of consideration for their kid’s abilities or safety, they were paranoid he wanted to rape or eat their offspring, they slowed him down with their baby steps or kept him distracted as he pondered their erraticism. They were worse than the bandits, who only wanted your stuff and sometimes managed to take it, on the spot, or at gunpoint later when the opportunity presented itself, when you were sleeping or taking a piss. The parents were dangerous because they didn’t want your precious supplies. They possessed the valuables, and it hobbled their reasoning.
He hooked up with strangers for a while, exchanged a grimy jar of cranberry sauce or a juice box per the new greeting ritual, and swapped information on the big matters of the day, like dead concentrations, and small things like the state of the world. A few months into the collapse, only the fools asked about the government, the army, the designated rescue stations, all the unattainable islands, and the fools were dwindling every day. He hung with them until they decided on divergent
destinations, got into an argument over skel behavior theories or how to spot lurking botulism in a dented can. People were invested in the oddest things these days. He hung with them until they were attacked and they died and he didn’t. Sometimes he ditched them because they talked too fucking much.
He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.
After Mim, Mark Spitz dispensed with good-luck speeches and see-you-down-the-roads. He crept at first light. He heard his temporary companions wake at the small scrabbling of his leave-taking but they didn’t budge from their dingy sleeping bags once they realized he wasn’t stealing their stuff, the batteries and pocket drives full of family photos. They didn’t care for the goodbyes, either.
That afternoon on Fulton, Mark Spitz shut down his welcome routines after they identified the three figures across the street. They were people. They wore ponchos, and what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho. The dead did not wear ponchos. Gary shouted greetings, followed by endearing epithets. The gang rejoined with enthusiasm, crooning the chorus from a bit of schmaltz about islands in the stream.
It was Bravo Unit: Angela, No Mas, and Carl. Given the enigmatic pattern of the Lieutenant’s grid assignments, it was rare that units stumbled on one another in the Zone. The ten sweeper units crisscrossed downtown like locals checking off a to-do list: to the overnight-delivery place to rush the application, jetting to the dry cleaner, to the specialty cheese store for that esoteric hunk after stupidly asking their host if they could bring anything. When they bumped into one another it was a pleasant diversion.
As usual, Gary had history with those they encountered. He served with all three while cleaning out maddening Connecticut before assignment to the Zone. Connecticut with its pustulant hordes sans limit and notorious talent for coining new faces of bad luck, degenerate Connecticut with its starless nights and famished mornings, Bad News Connecticut birthed ragged crews that stuck together. In comparison, Mark Spitz and the few sweepers from elsewhere were green recruits perpetually repeating their first day of duty. He had a particular dislike for No Mas, who bragged around Wonton about his scrapbook of straggler humiliation. “Who’d you see this week?” a sweeper might goad during Sunday-night R & R, whereupon No Mas dutifully chronicled his latest shenanigans. He carried a big red marker in his utility vest and liked to draw clumsy clown grins on the slack faces of the stragglers, christening each with a name appropriate to that profession. Then he pressed the muzzle of his assault rifle to the temple of Mr. Chuckles or Her Most Exalted Highness the Lady Griselda, smiled for the birdie, and had Angela take a picture before he splattered their craniums. Sunday nights at HQ No Mas shared a cot with a young clerk who printed out his souvenirs on glossy paper. “If you find Captain Giggles, give me a call—I hate that guy,” one of his audience offered in return, extending an I Heart New York mug full of whiskey. Just having a little fun.
Angela and Carl were more discreet about their transgressions, at least in mixed company, but Mark Spitz had heard them reminisce about their time together in a bandit crew, ripping off weaker survivors for aspirin and thermal underwear and who knows what other bad acts. He effortlessly pictured their carefree promotion up the American Phoenix to stations of venal authority. Investigating individuals who had been narced on for illicit salvage—“I don’t know how all those shoes got in my closet, officer, but aren’t they divine?”—and then bartering the confiscated goods on the black market. Or working as a New York City landlord, say, assigning apartments to the newcomers according to appetite and mealy whim, accepting the odd bribe or sexual favor for a better building, better block, southern exposure. Two bathrooms, park views, and basement storage would resume their currency in the new order, and insalubrious bureaucracy create its avatars. They came from Connecticut, repugnant Connecticut.
The rain redoubled. The two units huddled under the purple-and-orange awning of a popular doughnut-and-coffee concern and debriefed each other on the week. Bravo related how they lost half a day and filled two packs of body bags clearing out a den of decomposing suicides from the pews of a Ukrainian church. The usual: Gather ’round and grab a cup everybody, it’ll be quick. Halfway through, Bravo stopped trying to pry the crucifixes out of their hands and simply zipped them up with the corpses.
It had been a slow couple of grids for Omega, apart from Mark Spitz’s takedown, and Kaitlyn, in her circumspection, did not mention that episode. She wound up telling them about the secret Chinese nightclub. Omega decided it had been a gangster hangout, up two flights of rickety stairs above a store that sold shriveled herbs that looked like the fingers of the dead. The back room was filled with electronic gambling machines, pistols with taped-up grips, and jail-bait pinups. A high-tech safe crouched in a wall cavity, full of who knew what, opium and sundry incriminations. It was a mobster den out of some movie, she told them. She forgot they’d actually found the place two weeks ago and had already told the story. No one stopped her. It was raining. They were taking a coffee break.
Mark Spitz rubbed his eyes. He would have told Bravo about the sad straggler in the repair shop, but he had a hard time articulating why it fascinated him. They’d found the tinkerer huddled at his majestically cluttered worktable, poised over the guts of a VCR. Around his hands the metal housings of machines abutted, a thin metal skyline. The old man was surrounded by obsolete technology, the ungainly array of devices that had been a previous generation’s top of the line for listening to music or crisping toast. What brand of idiot loved these broken machines enough to search the internet for this joint, take time out of their lives to bring them here for removal of the dust bunnies perched on the motherboards? The kind of idiot that knows that idiots exist who sign a lease for this kind of thing. They nourished each other’s delusions. The piles of pieces reminded Mark Spitz of when they’d swept through the prosthetics distributor’s and they were surrounded by pink half arms and feet, dangling from the ceiling, climbing out of boxes. These incomplete people. All the dead parts.
No Mas and Gary lit cigarettes, prompting Kaitlyn to glower and commence to cough theatrically. Angela thanked Christ it was Saturday and they’d head back to Wonton for a night of R & R tomorrow. She asked if they’d seen anyone else around.
Kaitlyn shook her head. “Pretty dead.”
“Ran into Teddy and them on West Broadway,” Carl said. He grinned. “Saw the smoke first. They were having a cookout.”
Gary chuckled. Kaitlyn requested coordinates.
“Can’t remember,” Carl said. He reeked of urine. “They dragged out a portable grill and set it up under the big glass canopy of some fancy condo. Red tablecloth on the sidewalk and everything.”
“What were they cooking?” Kaitlyn asked, no doubt envisioning burgers molded from contraband processed meat. Stolen grill, pilfered tablecloth. Two infractions right there.
They grew cagey. Connecticut style. “Maybe it was MREs, you have to ask them.”
“All I know is that it smelled good,” No Mas said.
“Could get written up for that,” Kaitlyn muttered. Gary shrugged. Angela changed the subject by asking where they were headed.
Gary stepped out, checked the street sign. “Here.”
“You’re incorrect,” Carl said. His face tightened. “This is our spot.”
Their grid assignments were identical. Fulton x Gold. They moved into the intersection to double-check they weren’t bickering over adjacent blocks, and all of them couldn’t help but notice that the east side of Gold had received the benediction of three- and four-story town houses, and that a huge open-air parking lot dominated the north side of Fulton. A bonanza. A four-day job max, but in the right hands it could be stretched out over a leisurely six or seven with Wonton being none the wiser. This would be a quarrel.
“We got here first,” No Mas said.
“First’s got nothing to do with it,” Mark Spitz said. The
parking lot was mostly empty. Not even the stray corpse slumped over a steering wheel to bag up. They didn’t have orders to check the trunks.
“It’s ours.”
“Not like the Lieutenant to make a mistake,” Kaitlyn said. “Call him on your comm. Ours is on the fritz.”
“Comm?” No Mas said. “Haven’t got shit on that all week.”
“They got these pheenie grandmas making this crap, what do you expect,” Carl said.
Gary loosed a series of expletives. “Ee-ho de puta. Fabio. Remember that time he gave Marcy a grid and it turned out it was on the other side of the wall? Up on Spring Street. That dude is off his meds.” Gary looked at No Mas and Mark Spitz caught the other man swiftly glance down to examine the sidewalk.
Fabio had distributed their grid assignments the previous Sunday. The Lieutenant had been summoned to Buffalo and now his second was in charge. With the big man out of town, Fabio informed them there was no need for them to come up. He instructed them to skip their usual R & R and stay out in the Zone, Disposal would drop some rations on their rounds. He sent the grids out over the comm and wished them luck. “We better get that R & R back,” Gary informed his unit, “or people will be sorry.”
“Lieutenant’s gonna have his ass when we tell him how he fucked up,” Angela said.
They returned to the awning, waiting for the rain to let up, like in the old days, average citizens save for the assault rifles. And the rest of the gear. A fat drop landed on the back of Mark Spitz’s hand; he wasn’t wearing his gloves. Gray particulate described its outline on his skin. The rain captured ash on the way down, and looking out into the street he imagined the drops as long, gray, plummeting streaks. Giants wrung dirty dishrags over his head. “Look at this,” he said to Gary. He pointed at his skin.
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