Zone One (6 page)

The Lieutenant said, “And again, please ignore the scuttlebutt about what they use for fertilizer. What else, my young friends, what else? Supposedly the new incinerator is going run double our capacity, so you know what that means—”

“Ash Wednesday!” yelled someone in the back.

“And Thursday and Friday.” The Lieutenant consulted the feed and informed them that a senior board member of that juggernaut clothing empire had turned up at Victory’s Sword and magnanimously pledged his company’s goods to the effort. The Lieutenant allowed his troops a minute, and then told them to simmer down. It would be difficult to describe their enthusiasm as unwarranted. The company cultivated four product lines: an upscale boutique providing sophisticated apparel fit for a day at the office or an evening out on the town; a mass-market suite of sensible, everyday basics; modestly priced designs for the cost-conscious consumer; and a recently acquired purveyor of plus-size lingerie that had fallen on hard times but had been turned around
by the smart management of their new parent company. All the clothes were well crafted regardless of their price point; the company kept abreast of the latest fronts in cheap child labor. “The entire corporate family is open for business,” the Lieutenant said, “for any item with a retail price of under thirty dollars. Check the price tags, fellas! If you need new skivvies or a sweatshirt or something.”

“Can’t get no sweatshirt under thirty dollars!”

Someone in the back, at one of the undesirable tables by the toilets, countered that it was easy enough to acquire a sweatshirt for less than that sum at the bargain store. Another seconded this assertion.

“Gary’s getting some big-lady teddies,” yelled one of Gary’s old cronies.

“We think it feels good under the mesh—you should try it,” Gary said, baring his gray teeth in a line. Everyone who worked with Gary quickly adjusted to the man’s habit of referring to himself with the first-person plural. He was a triplet, one of three brothers. The other two perished on Last Night, but Gary continued to speak for their collective, maintaining what Mark Spitz assumed was a lifelong practice of presenting a united fraternal front to all who did not share their precise genetic makeup. It was a disturbing vision, Gary and his other versions standing in their mobile home’s kitchen demanding sweets or more cartoons, much more disturbing than hearing a man in combat fatigues relate the enthusiasms of ghosts. PASD had as many faces as there were uninfected, and, as was the case with the Wasteland Starers, you took someone else’s particular symptoms as harmless foibles. Simple courtesy, lest they take objection to yours.

Mark Spitz resolved to pick up some new socks. Now that the anti-looting regs were in effect, everyone—soldier and civilian and sweeper alike—was prohibited from foraging goods and materials belonging to anyone other than an official sponsor, whether it was Southern whiskey or all-natural depilatories. Food was exempt—juice
boxes were still legal tender in some parts of the country—but for the most part, no more stealing, people. There had been laws once; to abide by their faint murmuring, despite the interregnum, was to believe in their return. To believe in reconstruction.

The prohibitions were hard to enforce, however, for obvious reasons. The civilians in the camps could be policed, as most never left the perimeter, but untold Americans still walked the great out there, beyond order’s embrace, like slaves who didn’t know they’d been emancipated. The sanctioned salvage teams were largely unsupervised and the soldiers had personal needs that escaped the classifications on requisition forms, did not have ID numbers. Officers confiscated contraband when it was flaunted in their faces—designer sunglasses and the robust leathers favored by motorcycle fans of both serious and dilettante persuasion—but they had better things to do than babysit. Kaitlyn, in deference to the hall-monitor part of her disposition, kept watch on the two men under her supervision, Gary especially, and for good reason. He’d been a master bandit before the rise of the camps and, in addition, rather enjoyed Kaitlyn’s shrill intonation when she used her discipline voice.

Buffalo created an entire division dedicated to pursuing official sponsors whenever a representative turned up, in exchange for tax breaks once the reaper laid down his scythe and things were up and running again. (Additional goodies the public would never find out about weeviled the fine print.) There were understandable difficulties in tracking down survivors in positions of authority over, say, the biggest national pharmaceutical chain or bicycle manufacturer, but they strolled into camp from time to time, with the typical scars but eager to contribute. They generally put a price cap on their goods or specified a particular product in their brand family, one not too dear, but their sacrifices were appreciated nonetheless. Pledge all your tiny cartons of children’s applesauce, in all the nation’s far-flung groceries and convenience stores? It was a no-brainer: they were expired anyway. The civilians
out in the wild, unaware of the regulations, would be welcomed into the system in time, and they would obey.

Socks. Yes, socks. The prospect of a nice new three-pack of athletic socks never failed to hearten Mark Spitz.

The Lieutenant said, “An irritating number of you have been bugging me from the field for updates, even though I keep telling you to keep the comm channels clear, so here’s the deal: The Tromanhauser Triplets are out of ICU.”

Everyone applauded. Kaitlyn thanked God. Mark Spitz had walked in on her praying their first night in the Zone. She had stopped to talk to her God in the middle of flossing, the minty white thread looped around her index finger. Kaitlyn was embarrassed, although most people had started praying, or increased the frequency of their prayers, for obvious reasons. Religion had been a taboo subject in former times, but now impromptu proselytizing sessions broke out in besieged department-store stockrooms, in the attics of crumbling Midwest Victorians, as the holed-up survivors swapped deities and afterlife hypotheses. It passed the time until morning and the resumption of the gauntlet. Kaitlyn apologized, saying “I just want them to be safe,” and he knew she was talking about the Triplets. Even Gary expressed concern in their progress, as they were fellow, natural multiples in an age where such a thing had been “cheapened by that IVF crap,” as he put it. “They’re gonna know what we know,” Gary said, “how it is for our kind.”

Mark Spitz clapped his hands desultorily. Doris Tromanhauser whiled away the ruination holed up in the Trenton branch of a respectable international bank, as part of a bunkered-down ensemble who’d given their fealty to an easily fortified brass-studded front door and impressive stone construction, both holdovers from a time when customers preferred impenetrability over glass-walled transparency in their neighborhood reserve. (Current events put an end to that debate for good.) The plucky band dwindled as they were forced to make the inevitable forays outside; all those present in the dumpling house were versed in this scenario,
the relentless subtractions. Finally it was just Doris and one of the men who could have been the Triplets’ father, until in due course he, too, ventured out for supplies. (A sequence of ménages made paternity impossible to establish, and a DNA test was, alas, impossible.) He never came back. The familiar story. After six months on her lonesome, surviving on who knows what, high-fiber deposit slips and credit-card brochures, she was rescued by a Bubbling Brooks recon unit. She did not survive the delivery, and the Triplets were in a bad way, bank literature being devoid of nutrients essential to prenatal development.

New life in the midst of devastation. Corn, babies. Word of the Tromanhausers spread through the Northeast settlements quicker than any uplifting news of this or that reconstruction effort, or contact with some faraway country that had been written off long ago. The babies even diverted survivors from delight in the discovery of the latest kill field, that phenomenon encountered with increasing regularity, the mystery that pointed to an ebbing of the plague. Did you hear that Finn opened his eyes, that Cheyenne is still unresponsive, they’re not sure but they suspect that something may be amiss with Dylan’s heart, a hole or a bump? Mark Spitz was pulling for them, rooting for them, or whatever it was that one did when the world was ending and a statistically meaningless fraction of the planet’s extant population encountered a slightly larger daily portion of misfortune. He didn’t want to get too invested. He was a firm believer, in the absence of any traditionally recognized faith, or even nontraditional and gaining traction in these murderous days, in the reserve tank. It was important to maintain a reserve tank of feeling topped off in case of emergency. Mark Spitz was not going to spare any for these cubs. A year ago, in the middle of the collapse, these babies would have been another miserable footnote, too small an item on the list of atrocities to merit more than a sad shake of your tragedy-boggled head. (And a footnote to what, for that matter. No one was writing this book. All the writers were busy pouring jugs of kerosene on
the heaps of the dead, pitching in for a change.) But now things were different. To pheenies, these babies were localized hope, and they needed the Triplets to pull through. Buffalo could announce a vaccine tomorrow, or a process for reversing the tortures of the plague, and they’d still be talking Tromanhauser Triplets.

“We’re all glad to hear this news, I’m sure,” the Lieutenant said in a monotone. “If you want to donate part of your rations to their care, put your X on the sign-up sheet before you head out.” He pressed his fingers to his temples and started rubbing in slow, assuaging circles. “Last but not least in this bona fide gusher of good tidings, your heavy loads be lightened by the news that USS
Endeavor
embarked safely and is en route to the summit.”

The
Endeavor
was a nuclear sub. After what happened on Air Force One, it was the only way His Excellency would make the journey, and who could blame him.

“Get ’em, Gina!” Gary howled, earning guffaws. Gina Spens was Italy’s emissary to the summit. Before the catastrophe, she had been a pornographic-film star of nimble and well-documented prowess, a Top 25 search string on adult sites across three hemispheres. She had her fans. Her comeback as it were, for she had retired from the business, was occasioned by the End of the World As We Know It, that epic saga to which all were audience and supporting cast. Still shooting, rewritten on the fly on account of the discouraging dailies. Gina performed her own stunts in a series of action sequences throughout Italy’s contest against the dead—the Encounter at Horror Gorge and the legendary Ambush of the Wretches, among other credulity-testing adversities. Her feats trickled out with the reestablishment of communications with the European powers, and for her exertions she had become a player in her homeland’s provisional government. Provisional governments were really big these days, an international fad in the grand old style.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires. Gina was that
new species of celebrity emerging from the calamity, elevated by the altered definitions of valor and ingenuity. They walked among us, on every continent, in the territories of every depleted nation. What American had not thrilled to the inspiring story of Dave Peters, who spent six months drifting in a catamaran in a Michigan lake, living off a carton of cashews and paddling away whenever he drifted too close to shore, which teemed with the dead. Everyone thrilled to the story of Wilhelmina Godiva and her grain-silo fortress, how she’d battled her way to the Maryland settlements armed with nothing but her famous rusty pitchfork, which was now enshrined over the front gate of Camp Victory’s Sword. Her mind was gone, sure, but she made it through, and her followers took care of her, wiping spittle from her lips as she murmured her prophecies into her digital recorder. Across the ocean, Gina Spens masterminded search-and-destroy missions in southern Italy and became a worldwide sensation, whispered about in the dancing glow of scavenged antimosquito candles. The more unlikely the tale of survival, the absurd extremity of one’s circumstances in a world of extreme circumstance, the greater one’s fame. Gina had made some spectacular kills. Yes, she had her fans.

“I’ll keep you posted on how that goes, natch,” the Lieutenant said. It was their last bulletin from beyond the island until next week. He distributed their new grid assignments. He closed with his standard “Now run along like good little pheenies,” his sardonic pronunciation of the slang drawing grins. The Lieutenant’s strategic informalities comforted his troops when they were out in the field. One of them worked on reconstruction, a real fucking human being among the abstractions doling out pronouncements and paradigms in Buffalo.

They were dismissed. On their own. “We ain’t doing no homework,” Gary said as Omega walked out of the dumpling house. He said it loud enough for the guys in his old unit to hear, Mark Spitz noticed, to show them that he was the same man, even though he
was saddling up with characters of questionable mettle, the kind of saps they used to rob for rice in the dismal days of the interregnum.

“I’ll do it,” Kaitlyn said. “I was elected Secretary of the Student Council twice.” Mark Spitz shuddered as if bitten: to admit such a thing without a smidgen of self-consciousness. To say it with pride. Who on the planet had put those words together in that sequence since the outbreak: Secretary of the Student Council? It was a half-recalled lullaby overheard on the street, cooed by some young mom bent over her kid in the summer glare, rekindling innocence: Secretary of the Student Council. The effect was abetted by a rare appearance of the sun, slumping out from the gray. Not too much ash in the sky even though they were only a few blocks from the wall.

He had been here before. It wasn’t the Chinatown of old, but in the corners of his perception the pixels resolved themselves and reduced to zero the distance between Old Chinatown and New Chinatown. The crooked streets had been cleared to give the military vehicles access and soldiers walked slowly on their rounds, making jokes, cracking wise over a shop sign’s mangled English, debating the attractiveness of the lady corporal who had arrived on that morning’s transport. This section of Zone One contained the busiest streets in the city now. (Or the busiest streets where the people were still people—he retreated from the shadow that crept up, of uptown corners where the uncounted hordes gallivanted mindlessly.) The grunts and commissioned officers, the sweepers and the engineers, were nattily decked out in fresh, unblemished fatigues, in the new puncture- and tear- and abrasion-proof mesh, totally deluxe, they wore utility vests and carried weapons held in place by an assortment of snaps, buckles, and holsters, but they were doing what people did in a city: catching a breath between errands. And that was life.