Zone One (11 page)

Gary snatched the stack of replacement body bags left by Disposal—they kept track, meticulously, dropping off new ones when a unit was running low—and the three of them headed up the stairwell to finish the building.

It was always disquieting to see empty pavement where you’d dumped some terminated skels. It was as if they’d just walked away.

•   •   •

They stoppered the tunnels and blocked the bridges. They plugged the subways at the preordained stations, every one south of where
the first wall would stand. The choppers lowered the swaying concrete segments one by one across the breadth of Canal Street as the dead gaped and clawed through the dust kicked up by the blades. More than a few of the unfortunates were pulverized. Perhaps this was the pilots’ intent. The final section went down at the edge of the river. Now they had a zone.

The soldiers landed at the Battery Park staging area, near the Korean War memorial. They disembarked from the troop transports, this generation’s marines, and initiated the first sweep. Buffalo’s estimates vis-à-vis skel density south of Canal were stupendously botched. How could they have reckoned the numbers skulking in the great buildings. The dead poured into the street at the soldiers’ noise. Which was part of the plan. The grunts used themselves as bait, their invectives, war cries, and tunes drawing schools of the dead into their machine-gun fire.

They rappelled from gunships into key intersections, eliminating a hundred shuddering skels before clipping back to the cables and floating out of the strike zone, camoed fairies of destruction. They strafed, loosed fusillades, and mastered the head shots, spinal separators, and cranial detonators that diverted the dead to the sidewalk against newspaper boxes, fire hydrants, antiterrorism planters, and inscrutable corporate-sponsored public art. The soldiers terminated targets on fire escapes, where they slumped like moths caught in wrought-iron cobwebs. Kill techniques cycled in their fads, in this week and out the next, as the soldiers refined and traded tips and accidental discoveries. Everyone had their own way of handling things. The red tears of tracers shrieked through the thoroughfares and stray bullets cratered the faces of banks, churches, condos, and franchises, every place of worship a city has to offer. Exquisite glass panes crashed down in their music, manufacturing geometric shapes that had never before existed in the history of the world, which in turn sharded into newer shapes and brilliant white dust. Shell casings danced and skipped on the asphalt like tossed cigarette butts. The gun smoke was sucked up
into braids and curtains by the atmospheric patterns created by skyscrapers and avenue crevices, those mountain faces and valleys, and when it cleared the creatures gushed in renewed fortified lines.

The soldiers discussed work over dinner. While they sucked meat paste off the roof of their mouths, they pondered how every type of store and building cultivated its own rhythms and customs, kept likely suspects loitering by the checkout counters, the help desks, and You Are Here maps of subterranean midtown concourses. The health clubs in the basements of rental buildings catering to young singles commanded their regulars and habitués, and the faculty lounges of mammoth public high schools maintained their assortments ricocheting off the coffee-machine counter, as they had before the plague. The major fast-food purveyors became, over time, reliable for a certain kind of experience and the reasonably priced surf-and-turf chain offered its own fortifying menu as the dead city continued its business in mirthless parody.

One day they noticed the ebb. Impossible not to. The grotesque parades thinned. Slaughter slowed. The dead creaked forth in groups of a dozen, then five at a time, in pairs, and finally solo, taking their proper place atop the heaps of corpses as they were cut down. The soldiers steadied themselves atop the corpses in turn and drew a bead. They made hills. Putrefying mounds on the cobblestones of the crooked streets of the financial district. They rid the South Street Seaport of natives and tourists alike, and the breeze off the water carted away buckets of the stench. Snipers crosshaired on swaying silhouettes six, seven blocks crosstown, that sensible, age-old grid layout allowing passage for traffic that traveled at the speed of sound. As the numbers of the creatures thinned, the soldiers no longer offered themselves as lures. They hunted, ambled, leisurely, easygoing flaneurs drifting where the streets took them. The soldiers were the arrowhead of a global campaign and they understood it each time they overcame the
resistance in the trigger, felt good about it. The soldiers took longer rest breaks, devising new branches of gallows humor, jokes that took root. They knew they were being fundamentally altered, in their very cells, inducted into a different class of trauma than the rest of the survivors. Semper fi. Then they went inside.

They dispensed with the superstructures one by one, the global headquarters brimming with junior VPs and heads of accounts, the great sinks of money and insurance, the public housing projects with their cinder-block labyrinths and denimed minotaurs, the middle-income megaplexes and prewar co-ops. They stormed the municipal buildings whose functions were engraved in great stone blocks over the entrance for easy identification. Initially surprised at how many skels they found ricocheting inside the government buildings, but it made sense once they thought about it. They landed on the roofs and rammed the stairwell doors, grateful for daylight whenever it penetrated. The most unexpected places pullulated with the things, for no reason they could fathom. Why this particular juice joint and not another, why this neighborhood greasy spoon, synagogue, bookstore, 99 cent store? Bas-reliefs of gryphons, sea serpents, and chimaeras coiled the length of the monumental old buildings, indicators of another era’s idea of craftsmanship and of what monsters might look like. The pulverized faces of the dead increased the zone’s percentage of faces that were less handsome than those of the cornice gargoyles. It had been a small number before the plague, despite the coteries of investment bankers.

The marines eliminated the outside stragglers, the ones standing on the sidelines as the dead made their implacable sallies. The street vendor at his rolling cart brandishing a small rod covered with caked, dry mustard. The skateboarder posing on the filigreed manhole cover at the bottom of his favorite declivity. The window-shopper bewitched before a boarded-up department-store window, taking in a long-removed display that nonetheless unfurled its exquisitely arranged baubles behind the plywood. Who knew
what went on in what remained of their minds, what mirages they made of the world. The marines shot them in the head, harmless or no.

Some of the marines died. Some of them didn’t hear the warnings until too late for all the gunfire. Some of them lost their bearings in the macabre spectacle, drifting off into reveries of overidealized chapters of their former lives, and were overcome. Some of them were bit, losing baseballs of meat from their arms and legs. Some of them disappeared under hordes, maybe a glove sticking out, waving, and it was unclear if the hand was under the direction of the fallen soldier or if it was being jostled by the feasting. Funeral rites were abbreviated. They incinerated the bodies of their comrades with the rest of the dead.

They nozzled diesel into the bulldozers and dump trucks. The air filled with buzzing flies the way it had once been filled with the hydraulic whine of buses, the keening of emergency vehicles, strange chants into cell phones, high heels on sidewalk, the vast phantasmagorical orchestra of a living city. They loaded the dead. The rains washed the blood after a time. The New York City sewer system in its bleak centuries had suffered worse.

The marines were redeployed, some upstate to hasten completion of the northern initiatives, others to hush-hush engagements out West. Not many details apart from that. The army arrived, then the corps of engineers with plans for the next phase. They cradled the tubes of blueprints and schematics of the metropolitan systems under their armpits, bestowed upon them by Buffalo after excavation from some undisclosed climate-controlled government storehouse.

Any structure under twenty stories was left to the sweepers. Hence Mark Spitz. When his unit finished number 135, they were done with Duane x Church, Mixed Residential/Business. Then it was on to the next.

“Shouldn’t be too many hostiles,” Kaitlyn said. They started back up the stairs of 135 Duane. The sweepers gobbled and assimilated
the military lingo into their systems with gusto. Mingled with the fresh slang, the new vocabulary of the disaster was their last-ditch armor plate. They tucked it under their fatigues, over their hearts, the holy verses that might catch the bullet.

Other phrases in vogue were less invigorating and uplifting: extinction, doomsday, end of the world. They lacked zing. They did not stir the masses from their poly-this poly-that inflatable mattresses to pledge their lives to reconstruction. Early in the reboot, Buffalo agreed on the wisdom of rebranding survival. They maintained a freakish menagerie of specialists up there, superior brains yanked from the camps, and what did these folks do all day but try and think up better ways to hone the future, tossing ideograms up on whiteboards and conferring at their self-segregated tables in the sublevel cafeteria, lowering their voices when outsiders walked by balancing orange trays. Some of them were hard at work crafting the new language, and they came up with more than a few winners; the enemy they faced would not succumb to psychological warfare, but that didn’t mean that the principles needed to remain unutilized.

It was a new day. Now, the people were no longer mere survivors, half-mad refugees, a pathetic, shit-flecked, traumatized herd, but the “American Phoenix.” The more popular diminutive
pheenie
had taken off in the settlements, which also endured their round of cosmetics, as Camp 14 was rechristened New Vista, and Roanoke became Bubbling Brooks. Mark Spitz’s first civilian camp was Happy Acres, and indeed everyone’s mood did brighten a bit on seeing that name on the gate next to the barbed wire and electric fencing. Mark Spitz thought the merchandise helped out a lot, too, the hoodies and sun visors and such. The frigid hues and brittle lines of the logo conformed to a very popular design trend in the months preceding Last Night, and it was almost as if the culture was picking up where it left off.

Omega discovered 135 Duane’s lone straggler on four. After the conference room, it was clear sailing, no skels, and since this
was not a residential building, no pets, the odd bichon frise or hypoallergenic kitty decomping on the scuffed aquamarine corridor tile. The fourth floor had been hacked into a warren of one- and two-room offices, most without windows. Last-chance operations outracing collection agencies and bankruptcy judges, slumping into sadder and shoddier offices in their withering prospects. Half extinct before the coming of the plague, it was that last bad winter that wiped them off the Earth.

The straggler stood in the back room of an empty office. No telling what the former enterprise had been. Half-crushed cardboard boxes rested on the beige carpet next to crumpled sheets covered with the black lines and rows of the best-selling spreadsheet program. A beat-up telephone trailed its umbilicus, caught mid-crawl from the premises. The copy machine dominated the back room, buttons grubbed by fingerprints, paper tray sticking out like a fat green tongue. The straggler’s right hand held up the cover and he bent slightly. Like all stragglers, he did not flinch at their approach. He peered into the glassed-off guts of the machine, as still as the dust, bent paper clips, overnight-mail packaging, and other assorted leavings in the room.

“Ned the Copy Boy enjoyed his job. Enjoyed it too much,” Mark Spitz said.

“Come on, you can do better than that,” Kaitlyn said.

He was a young man, dwindled in his clothes like all skels, but his red bow tie cinched his collar around his neck. He appeared to have been bitten in his armpit; a cone of dried blood terminated there, fanning out in the lumpy shape of a rocket ship’s exhaust.

Gary thought and contributed, “More toner, stat!”

Kaitlyn rattled off in quick succession: “My God, it’s full of stars.” And, “If we can identify whose gluteus maximus this is, we’ll have our culprit.” Finally, “I can see my house from here.”

Solve the Straggler broke up the day with its meager amusements and unearthed a vein of humor in Kaitlyn, a glimpse of the kind of wit she had shared with her friends, family, and members
of her favored social-media networks. The game served another purpose in that it gave the sweepers mastery over a small corner of the disaster, the cruel enigma that had decimated their lives. How did the copy boy, or copy repairman, or toner fetishist end up here? Had he traveled miles, had he been here since Last Night? Had he worked in this office six incarnations ago, when it was an accountant’s or dietitian’s office? The most frightening proposition was that he had no connection to this place, that this fourth-floor office was simply where he broke down. If his presence here was random, then why not an entire world governed by randomness, with all that implied? Solve the Straggler, and you took a nibble out of the pure chaos the world had become.

It was certainly less bleak than Name That Bloodstain!, another pastime. What do you see?—that kid’s cloud game gone wrong: Mount Rushmore, Texas, a space shuttle, a dream house, my mom’s grave. Like all sweepers they joshed about the strange creatures before them, trying to muster the most clever hypothesis about how the Girl Scout ended up in that boxing ring, or why the guy in the bus-driver uniform was bent in the ice-cream store freezer scooping up dried cakes of mud. The answers to Solve the Straggler were logical, fanciful, or absurd (“Bananas!” Kaitlyn shouted once), according to the tenor of the day.

Skel mutilation was another popular amusement, although not on Kaitlyn’s watch, not that Mark Spitz was so inclined. He assumed that Gary had indulged in abhorrent Connecticut, where it was a local custom. “Just having fun,” the excuse went, on the rare occasions when one was asked for. A neutralized skel was a perfect stage for one’s sadism, whether you were a dabbler, merely taking your time in terminating the thing before you, pruning a finger here or an ear there, or a master-level practitioner, restless all night trying to think up novel variations.