Zone One

It never ceased to be an odd sight, the approach to Wonton at night. The unnatural glare of the op lights bleached the buildings bone-white as the shadows gathered the potsherds of the dead world. This night he noticed the dead bargains: the handwritten EVERYTHING MUST GO sign in the second-floor window of a shop of no decipherable purpose, a banner proclaiming the specialty sandwich at the fast-food chain. At the corner of Broadway and Canal, the scale of the engagement shocked him. The anxious overture of the previous afternoon had evolved into a lush, neurotic symphony. The machine guns fired without cessation. He’d become so accustomed to the gunfire, the steady escalation of its bluster, that he hadn’t considered how many men and women such an onslaught entailed. In the lairs atop the key structures overlooking the wall, twice as many snipers trained their scopes, muzzles crackling next to the squatting cornice gargoyles and the shells hopping on the rooftop tar. On the catwalk girding the human side of the wall, the troops were doubled up as well, strafing, reloading, zeroing in on a new target cluster up the avenue that was hidden from view by the wall, and then on to the next.

He couldn’t see what the soldiers aimed at, but he could smell it. From the magnitude of the stench, the bodies putrefied in vast dunes on the other side of the barrier. West, toward the incinerators, the stack vented its puff of smoke and ash, but the fuel must have been sweeper deliveries, as Wonton had ceased scooping corpses from beyond the wall. The grab-crane duo, drenched in the rank fluids of the dead, were motionless, gigantic praying mantises caught in an inscrutable pose. Perhaps they hadn’t repaired the machines yet or had diverted those on crane detail to the perimeter to knock down skels. Yesterday’s pools of blood and gore had expanded into lakes fed by the mass of leaking corpses.

The vicinity of the wall bristled and bucked with activity, but a few feet away, beyond the combat lines, the Sunday-evening routines puttered as usual, inconceivably: Engineers strolled in an insouciant haze as they planned the evening’s diversions, poker or a movie in one of the rec spaces; couples snuck off to their rendezvous before the new workweek implicated them; the guys and gals from the other sweeper teams waved at him to hurry up and join them at the dumpling house. After all this time in the abattoir, the survivors were completely inured to the agenda of catastrophe.

They didn’t feel what he felt. Mark Spitz relished the cadence in his veins, the way his senses had ticked up into a state of uncanny alert. The rusty wasteland systems were powered up, the algorithms sorting input. As the door of the bank closed behind him, the muffling of the guns underscored the ferocious disposition of the street. HQ was tranquil, even for a Sunday night. Was the regular army on an op right now? No time to guess: He had a mission. The second-floor hall, so hectic as it channeled Buffalo’s whims toward actuality, was empty now.

The Lieutenant’s-correction-Fabio’s office was locked. Mark Spitz rattled the door. Two cartons were stacked at his feet, the top one sliced open. He picked up one of the items inside: a combat helmet, the back of which had been branded with a butched-up drawing of the famous kid-show armadillo. The varmint made a muscle, bicep curving formidably, as he chomped a cigar butt between square white teeth. A cigar in this day and age, smoked by a kiddie icon: somebody was going to get fired. Mark Spitz had to give respect to reconstruction’s new mascot, who was more prepared for what was coming than anyone at Wonton. Except for him.

Fabio let Mark Spitz in, tentatively, chary of the sweeper’s bad news, whatever its stripe. When Mark Spitz briefed him, Fabio mumbled a curse and his glance drifted to the windows overlooking the wall. The man was in a fog. He said, “Gonna have to fill out a special T-12 casualty form. I think I have one somewhere.” He hassled the top drawer of his desk, perplexed, fiddled in his pockets for keys.

Mark Spitz yanked the man forward by his shirt. He laid out the situation in more emphatic terms.

Fabio looked into Mark Spitz’s face, only recognizing him in that moment. He apologized. “I thought you said it was a straggler.”

“What we thought.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not,” Mark Spitz said. Fabio wasn’t partial to original thinking, but yes, Gary’s Gypsy curse was a problem. This mutiny broke the rules. If one skel broke the rules, there were more. It was survivor’s logic: If Mark Spitz was alive, there had to be others. Until the day it was not true. The fortune-teller must be a mistake, an errant bad comet loping into their solar system, the malfunctioning one percent of the malfunctioning one percent. Or else the world was resuming its decomp after these months of tenuous integrity, those stalwart membranes and harassed cell walls finally dissolving into a black spume.