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 motherfucker 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 fucking corn.” He raised his glass to his friends across the table. “Clear some buildings. You have to admit, it passes the time.”
SUNDAY
“Move as a team, never move alone: Welcome to the Terrordome.”
When the wall fell, it fell quickly, as if it had been waiting for this moment, as if it had been created for the very instant of its failure. Barricades collapsed with haste once exposed for the riddled and rotten things they had always been. Beneath that façade of stability they were as ethereal as the society that created them. All the feverish subroutines of his survival programs booted up, for the first time in so long, and he located the flaw the instant before it expressed itself: there.
The morning the Zone died Omega slept in, murk-mouthed in hangover. Normally the unit would have punched out at 3:00 p.m. and hit Wonton, but Kaitlyn reminded them that they’d knocked off early yesterday. She “didn’t want to let them down,” them being that many-headed pheenie hydra, whether it quivered in a bauxite mine waiting for the dead weather to clear or was clutched tight to the happy bosom of a settlement camp and at this very moment scooping Sunday brunch out of aluminum tins in the mess hall. Mark Spitz registered Kaitlyn’s response to the news of the Tromanhauser Triplets, and interpreted this morning’s dedication as a sacrifice toward their welfare, zipping out across the miles: May it keep those tiny hearts pumping. In her action sequence, Kaitlyn emerged from the burning shed in slow motion, outrunning a covey of skels, one triplet under each arm and the last in a sling on her chest.
The two sweeper units wished each other swift recovery from dehydration and alcohol-wrung melancholy. Hair of the dog once they got back to Wonton, no question. Then it was back to work. Fulton x Gold. Yes, Omega savored their hard-won parking lot row by row, that void in their work detail, every blessed cubic foot of it and the fallow air rights to boot. The line of four-story tenements were devoid of demons, save for two suicides they bagged at 42 Gold. The pair killed themselves in identically laid-out junior one-bedrooms two floors apart. The elderly occupant of 2R hung herself from a stained-glass chandelier in the living room. Once the fixture tore away from the ceiling, the plaster bits mixed with the decomp sludge and lent her corpse a unique, lumpy texture that reminded Mark Spitz of the things lurking in old takeout. She had mutated, stranded in her cardboard carton at the back of the fridge. He recognized the ottoman on which she’d steadied herself; he had impulse-bought the same one online, on sale, the spring he moved into his parents’ rec room. Stainproof, one of the new miracle weaves, machine washable. He’d used it to change the recessed energy-saver bulbs in the track lighting, whose pallid light he accused of draining him of vitality and cheer.
The neighboring s
uicide upstairs blew his brains out on his sofa. The man in 4R was owl-faced with thin straw hair and shrunken limbs that poked from clothes a size too big. He’d starved before offing himself, noshing on the doomsday stock he gathered for his market-rate bunker: the bathroom tub was full of licked-clean cans and neatly flattened boxes, tied up and bagged in preparation for recycling day. Gary observed that his stench didn’t jibe with that of your average putrefying New Yorker, and indeed inspection of the hatbox next to the body revealed it to be the tomb of the fuzzy, deflated form of the calico recognizable from numerous photographs adorning the apartment. The suicide note mentioned this roommate prominently, conjecturing about a mingled animal and human afterlife that did not discriminate between species, or possession of a brain big enough to conceive of an afterlife. Neither resident was bitten; they acceded to their particular forbidden thoughts.
Omega bagged the two neighbors and left them in the street for Disposal. They zipped up the calico with its owner.
The fortune-teller was their final sweep of the day. It was almost six o’clock. Kaitlyn suggested they pick up here tomorrow, but Gary said, “I want to get my palm read.”
Mark Spitz could not fathom how this deathless codger of a storefront had endured the relentless metropolitan renovations. The only answer was that the city itself was as bewitched by the past as the little creatures who skittered on its back. The city refused to let them go: How else to explain the holdout establishments on block after block, in sentimental pockets across the grid? These stores had opened every morning to serve a clientele extinct even before the plague’s rampage, displaying objects of zero utility on felt behind smudged glass, dangling them on steel hooks where dust clung and colonized. Discontinued products, exterminated desires. The city protected them, Mark Spitz thought. The typewriter-repair shop, the shoe-repair joint with its antiquated neon calligraphy and palpable incompetence that warned away the curious, the family deli with its germ-herding griddle: They stuck to the block with their faded signage and ninety-nine-year leases, murmuring among themselves in a dying vernacular of nostalgia. Businesses north and south, to either side of them, sold the new things, the chromium gizmos that people needed, while the city blocks nursed these old places, held them close like secrets or tumors.
The fortune-teller’s was precisely such an atavistic enterprise, a straggler in the current argot, with disintegrating tinsel sparking dully beyond the tacky exhortations stenciled on the window. Garlands of Christmas lights and black necklaces of dead insects beaded at the bottom of the window display. Every other store on the block ministered to some yuppie lack, bent toward the local demographic sun and absorbing into its capillaries imported kitchen implements and upscale children’s accoutrements. Yet here was the fortune-teller’s. Could events have transpired differently? If Bravo had won Fulton x Gold, Mixed Residential/Business, that other unit’s blend of personalities might have shepherded events in a different direction. If it hadn’t been Omega’s last stop before R & R, perhaps Gary wouldn’t have been in such a jovial mood and played the fool. Later Mark Spitz untangled the string of inevitabilities. It looked like a choker of dead black flies.
Gary snipped the bolt and Mark Spitz helped him slide up the shop’s recalcitrant gate. The dark brass doorknob and lock were relics, smoothed to an otherworldly luster by the caress of generations’ hands. Mark Spitz didn’t see this tacky shop attracting a high volume of seekers, but who knew what vital shops operated here before the clairvoyant unpacked her arcana, the clandestine line of utility and desire terminating at this address. Real estate agents, butchers, antique jewelers, and cell providers stood behind the counter, tending customers who wore fedoras, then loops of metal in soft tissue. Hoop skirts, panty hose, then blue ink where the symbology of the upstart faiths and outsider iconography were carved into their skin. The sole page in this address’s photo album he could see was the one before him now.
The proprietor sat at the table in the center of the room. Eschewing the traditional finery of her profession, this straggler was dressed in the all-black uniform of a downtown punk. She was around Mark Spitz’s age, not yet thirty when the plague dropped her in its amber, with green streaks entwined in her ebony-dyed hair and smudged mascara deepening the plague bruises circling her eyes. The signs on the wall provided a menu of services in a popular computer font: Astrological Charts, Numerology, Aura Manipulation, and the enigmatic “Recalibration.” Small jars and bowls of herbs, rainbow powders, and bone-white charms perched on tiny metal shelves, props acquired from an internet retail site. Red and brown earth tones dominated the tapestries, pillows, and rugs, bestowing the aura of a lair. Omega stood before a medium’s sanctum as portrayed in pop culture, the demeanor of the clairvoyant herself bestowing a small, necessary tweak. The fortune-teller in the modern city, plying the Old World enchantments and scrying trade of her ancestors. Her parents probably thought she’d forsaken her heritage when she came home with that loop of metal in her nose, but it was an adjustment that allowed the family biz to keep up with the protean city. Everybody needs a shtick to keep competitive, Mark Spitz thought.
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 assault rifle.
Gary snickered mischievously.
Mark Spitz said, “For fuck’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.”
“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 associate 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 analogue 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 semaphore 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 séance 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.
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