Zone One

The terror plot remained the cover story for the first couple of hours, plausible and self-organizing. Later, when Kaitlyn was on the run, she discovered what the rest of the country heard from the news media, before the news media was reduced to a numb scroll of rescue stations and an evanescent list of contradictory infection procedures. Before the media sighed into the depths, senescent, dumb. The train’s Patient Zero had turned feral in his seat-dropped out of humanity’s codes and into the solemn directives of the plague-and bit three people before being restrained; the conductor’s call for aid triggered a local military response. The authorities were on alert for certain keywords on the emergency channels, as it was early in the death of the world and the military still mobilized to distress calls. Some calls, anyway.

No one was getting off that train. On that Eve of Last Night, some of the passengers in Kaitlyn’s car tried to make a break for it-chute out the emergency window and sprint through a perceived weakness in the cordon. Thus did Kaitlyn first encounter that interregnum cliche, wherein the alpha male or female recruits support for a nutty plan and organizes the doomed sortie: pell-mell out of the surrounded Victorian; bursting from the collapsible door of the trapped school bus in a whirlwind of ad hoc truncheons, ladles, and chimney pokers. Out of the quarantined train car that had been plucked from its steadfast route and deposited forty-eight hours in the future, into the collapse. On the last night before the Last Night, the machine guns dispatched these intrepid; after that, it would be teeth.

When the soldiers suddenly bugged out the following evening-the armored vehicles spinning out into AWOL missions after loved ones or vain ops intended to keep it all from flying apart-Kaitlyn started running. She and the other passengers extricated themselves from the dead mass transit to master the new lessons, or else perished in their scattered elementaries. Eventually her run took her to Zone One, to Gary and Mark Spitz, the birthday celebration in the function room of an Italian restaurant, where on panels of dark wood the caricatures of the deceased regulars promenaded, famous and not famous, distended chins and knob noses protuberant and gross. Kaitlyn told them her Last Night story not to enter into ritualized mourning but to say: This is a story of how it used to be. When we didn’t know what was happening and were defenseless. Kaitlyn made a toast to Zone One and the new world they chipped from the stone, building by building, room by room, skel by skel. The intent of the caricature, Mark Spitz thought as he listened to her story, is to capture the monstrous we overlook every day. Maybe, she said, we can unsee the monsters again.

Mark Spitz cradled this memory of their last celebration as he entered Wonton’s corona. It had been a lovely night, that time they tried to kid one another that the world was not ending. Listening to the gunfire from uptown, he knew what was happening. The barrier was about to fail. It was falling down, as it always did.

It started like this: On White Street he flagged down Lester, one of the Alpha Unit guys and self-appointed party wrangler for Sunday R amp; R ever since their first week in the Zone. Lester carried a case of Long Island red, and a huge plastic bag of popcorn dangled from the fingers of his left hand. He nodded toward the wall, rolling his eyes at the barrage, as if vexed by the neighbor’s leaf blower during his annual barbecue. “Skels been coming for dinner all day, nonstop.” Had Mark Spitz heard about the Lieutenant? Yes, he had. Lester was scrounging supplies for the next wake, bound for the dumpling house.

Mark Spitz told him he’d see them there, declining to tell him about Gary’s bite, per his friend’s wishes. Plus, Gary hated Lester.