Zone One

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 glass of airliner portholes for a glimpse of the building when he returned from a trip, sought its profile in the rows of skyscrapers 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 shimmering 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.

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 casserole salute to cheese that filled the car with a reluctant-to-dissipate stench, almost corporeal, another passenger. 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 passed 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 Passengers huddled by the handicapped-access bathroom in consternation, and she heard the time-honored threat of the impotent consumer: I’m going to get to the bottom of this. They had God-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 passed. The bars on Kaitlyn’s cell dropped one by one and the wifi shut off for good. Before the other passengers 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 passenger 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.