Zone One

Mark Spitz lifted the blanket. This was not a job Gary would do half-assed, but it was necessary to make sure he’d done it proper. From the looks of it Kaitlyn had put two more bullets in him for good measure. He was about to drop the blanket when he saw the paper in Gary’s hand.

He pried the fingers, draped his friend again, and sank into the green armchair facing the sofa. Gary had been carrying it for a long time, from the creases and chewed edges, pocket to pocket to pocket. Since when, which asylum, consulted in the dark of how many failed refuges? Maybe he’d carried it since Last Night. It had been carefully ripped from a magazine, a level fur of fibers describing the inside edge. On one side, the island bulged from the blue waters of the Mediterranean, a knuckled lump of rock. It looked like a grenade, he thought. On the opposite, a street scene unraveled: A slim alley pullulated with men and women mid-errand, perhaps around noon. A trinket store hawked postcards on long wire racks, azure rectangles featuring more pictures of the island. A young couple enmeshed fingers at a small table outside a cafe, the red and white and brown logo of the espresso distributor half shadowed on a sign over the entrance. The table, aslant, jabbed its legs into cracks between cobblestones. A matchbox and a wad of napkin, the discarded shims, lay next to the woman’s red sandals.

The thought of Gary smuggling a picture of Corsica, France, in his pocket through the desert all this time, while suffering through his Spanish lessons, almost made Mark Spitz chortle. Gary clearing his throat, marshaling his rehearsed patter, the greetings and sweet talk, as he walked across the gangplank off the sub to his longed-for island.

Mark Spitz snuffed the candle and checked out front. The dead teetered down Gold, southward in their hideous procession. Sparse right now. Still time to make it past them.

He returned to the back room. He retrieved his flashlight from his pack. No way to date the photograph of the alley. It might as well have been the last afternoon in the world, a scene to be inserted in the montage sequence of the disaster movie. The oblivious citizens drift on the anvil of this mundane afternoon, unaware of the bomb, the meteor, the fateful chunk of rock from outer space entering the atmosphere. In thirty seconds they will cease to exist, but for now they live in their moment of safety. Snug in sunlight, their lover’s hand warm and true and solid in theirs.

The Lieutenant had asked Kaitlyn and him to picture a world where the stragglers were the dead majority, not an aberrant fraction. This photograph is what that would look like, Mark Spitz thought. The entire population snared in bygone moments, entranced by the world that no longer existed. Mesmerized by the outline of a shadow cast by a phantom that had made them happy once.

He had the forbidden thought. He didn’t push it away.

It was the second time in three days, the most close together since his farmhouse rescue. It was happening again: the end of the world. The last months had been a pause, a breather before the recommitment to annihilation. This time we cannot delude ourselves that we will make it out alive.

When was the last time someone had taken his picture? Rhode Island. It was a month before he was picked up in Northampton, during a two-week stint at a hot-sheet hotel. The national budget-hotel chain had purchased an even cheaper chain and was refurbishing and renovating the universally dilapidated properties, installing the high-definition television screens on their tilting arms, tearing out the cigarette-burned and bodily-fluid-soiled carpets to replace them with the futuristic stain-impervious fibers. The franchise Mark Spitz stumbled on had been surrounded by chain-link fencing during construction, reassuringly anti-skel. One appreciated the chime of chain links these days, that perimeter-definer and alarm system.

Survivors came and went. He staked out Room 12, which was a musty box of umber and gray. The other survivors were harmless. Tired, like him, on a becalmed plateau of the interregnum. He was at a wedding, in a discounted block for members of the party. Strangers to one another but connected all this time even if they didn’t know it, until thrown together in this little pocket of time outside their normal lives to bear witness. Except the ceremony kept being postponed. They extended their stays multiple times, rang the front-desk void, made the necessary excuses into the dead phones. Past complaining now, though.