Zone One

“We got here just in time.” Gary lit a cigarette. He’d rescued a carton of sponsor cigarettes from a bodega the day before and had acquitted himself nicely so far. They were an economy brand that hadn’t been advertised in thirty years; it sufficed that parents and grandparents had exhaled its smoke into cribs, and the acrid scent of the blend and the cherry-red packaging were imprinted early, reminding its aficionados years later of a happier, less complicated time. “Had him on the ground about to give him a nose job,” Gary added, using the tone he reserved for recounting particularly grisly and epic ways in which he’d seen people expire-he was an almanac of this field of study-and for deriding Mark Spitz’s so-called survival tactics. Despite their friendship, the mechanic was not reluctant in sharing his bafflement that Mark Spitz hadn’t been cut down that first week, when the great hordes of unadaptables had been exterminated or infected, too ill-equipped to deal with the realignment of the universe.

Gary didn’t have much sympathy for the dead, a.k.a. the “squares,” the “suckers,” and the “saps.” When using the word “dead,” most survivors signaled to the listener, through inflection and context, whether they were talking about those who had been killed in the disaster or those who had been turned into vehicles of the plague. Gary made no such distinction; with few exceptions, they were equally detestable. The dead had paid their mortgages on time, and placed the well-promoted breakfast cereals on the table when the offspring leaped out of bed in their fire-resistant jammies. The dead had graduated with admirable GPAs, configured monthly contributions to worthy causes, judiciously apportioned their 401(k)s across diverse sectors according to the wisdom of their dead licensed financial advisers, and superimposed the borders of the good school districts on mental maps of their neighborhoods, which were often included on the long list when magazines ranked cities with the Best Quality of Life. In short, they had been honed and trained so thoroughly by that extinguished world that they were doomed in this new one. Gary was unmoved. From the man’s description of his life before, the portrait Mark Spitz gathered was of a misfit befuddled and banished by the signs and systems of straight life. Then came Last Night, transforming them all. In Gary’s case, latent talents announced themselves. He prided himself on how effortlessly he had grasped and mastered the new rules, as if he had waited for the introduction of hell his whole life. Mark Spitz’s knack for last-minute escapes and improbable getaways was an insult.

“I got distracted,” Mark Spitz said. He didn’t feel the need to defend himself beyond that. He gave himself his usual B. Would he have bested his attackers if Gary hadn’t arrived in time? Of course. He always did.

Mark Spitz believed he had successfully banished thoughts of the future. He wasn’t like the rest of them, the other sweepers, the soldiers up the island, or those haggard clans in the camps and caves, all the far-flung remnants behind their barricades, wherever people struggled and waited for victory or oblivion. The faint residue of humanity stuck to the sides of the world. You never heard Mark Spitz say “When this is all over” or “Once things get back to normal” or other sentiments of that brand, because he refused them. When it was all done, truly and finally done, you could talk about what you were going to do. See if your house still stood, enjoy a few rounds of How Many Neighbors Made It Through. Figure out how much of your life from before still remained and how much you had lost. This is what he had learned: If you weren’t concentrating on how to survive the next five minutes, you wouldn’t survive them. The recent reversals in the campaign had not swayed him to optimism, nor the T-shirts and buttons and the latest hope-delivery system sent down from Buffalo. He scolded himself for succumbing to a reverie, no matter how brief. All that pheenie bullshit had clouded his mind. The tranquillity of 135 Duane Street, however, and a vision of what might be made him slip.

“The man gets distracted,” Gary drawled.