Zone One

“Where’s Tammy?” Mark Spitz said. “He’ll need morphine.”

“You think he has the time for that?” Fabio stared, blank as a midtown sidewalk. He said, “However you want to handle it. You can have access to her meds, but Tammy’s on a chopper to Happy Acres.”

Mark Spitz asked why.

“We lost contact three hours ago. Sent some army guys to check it out.”

“What is it?”

“The last transmission was hard to decipher.”

“What Fabio is trying to say is that we’ve lost contact with everyone.” It was Bozeman, his puffy round face harassed by worry. He had ditched his clerk’s khakis for full combat gear, and Mark Spitz was surprised to see the RPG launcher slung over the man’s back.

“It’s the comms,” Fabio said. “You know they’re on the fritz.”

“It’s not the comms,” Bozeman said. “I came here to tell you to bring the sweepers in. It’s all hands on the wall now.”

Fabio inclined his head toward the window. “It doesn’t seem that bad from here.”

“Come to the roof.”

As they hustled to the helipad, the remaining army guys tromped down the halls, weapons ready, anti-skel helmets fastened to their heads. Mark Spitz hadn’t seen a mobilization this big in ages. He regretted leaving his pack downtown.

The artillery battered his eardrums again once they gained the roof. The military spots were trained on the wall below; unlocking one’s wheels, Bozeman groaned as he steered it to the eastern edge of the building. He adjusted the angle. The light joined those from other rooftops to unveil the horror of Broadway.

The ocean had overtaken the streets, as if the news programs’ global warming simulations had finally come to pass and the computer-generated swells mounted to drown the great metropolis. Except it was not water that flooded the grid but the dead. It was the most mammoth convocation of their kind Mark Spitz had ever had the misfortune to see. The things were shoulder to shoulder across the entire width of the avenue, squeezed up against the buildings, an abhorrent parade that writhed and palsied up Broadway until the light failed. The damned bubbled and frothed on the most famous street in the world, the dead things still proudly indicating, despite their grime and wounds and panoply of leaking orifices, the tribes to which they had belonged, in gray pinstriped suits, classic rock T-shirts, cowboy boots, dashikis, striped cashmere cardigans, fringed suede vests, plush jogging suits. What they had died in. All the misery of the world channeled through this concrete canyon, the lament into which the human race was being transformed person by person. Every race, color, and creed was represented in this congregation that funneled down the avenue. As it had been before, per the myth of this melting-pot city. The city did not care for your story, the particular narrative of your reinvention; it took them all in, every immigrant in their strivings, regardless of bloodline, the identity of their homeland, the number of coins in their pocket. Nor did this plague discriminate; your blood fell instantly or your blood held out longer, but your blood always failed in the end.

They had been young and old, natives and newcomers. No matter the hue of their skins, dark or light, no matter the names of their gods or the absences they countenanced, they had all strived, struggled, and loved in their small, human fashion. Now they were mostly mouths and fingers, fingers for extracting entrails from soft cavities, and mouths to rend and devour in pieces the distinct human faces they captured, that these faces might become less distinct, de-individuated flaps of masticated flesh, rendered anonymous like them, the dead. Their mouths could no longer manage speech yet they spoke nonetheless, saying what the city had always told its citizens, from the first settlers hundreds of years ago, to the shattered survivors of the garrison. What the plague had always told its hosts, from the first human being to have its blood invaded, to the latest victim out in the wasteland: I am going to eat you up.