Zone One

Working the island with Kaitlyn, Mark Spitz received steady dispatches from the extinguished world, weathered but still legible. That place lived on and persisted in her, in the minuscule tumult of Chinatown, and as long as she breathed, and others like her, perhaps it might return. When Omega wound down at night after their shift, Kaitlyn fired up the transporter and materialized these pristine artifacts of normalcy into their bivouac. “One time at Model UN, we pulled the fire alarm after hours because there were these cute boys from Michigan and we wanted to see them in their pj’s.” Gary and Mark Spitz traded incredulous glances: After all they had witnessed, whole realms of the peculiar had been held in reserve.

She had made it through. Just as Gary couldn’t picture how in the hell a galoot like Mark Spitz bumbled through the host of menaces unscathed, so was Kaitlyn’s journey impossible to imagine. No one at Fort Wonton, man or woman, failed to experience an episode of cognitive dissonance on meeting Kaitlyn, being subjected to her buoyant giggle. But she had done the same things they all had been forced to do. She had been hunted, and she had escaped. She had killed and had watched as the cast of her anecdotes was cut down, her former fellow pledges and debate partners. Her parents, who had obviously trained her in more than just the ways of a sunny disposition for her to have made it this far. She had survived, and that’s why she was here in Zone One. No matter what her life had been before.

The scientists wanted the sweeper data to superimpose it on their map of the smithereens and generate prophecies. Kaitlyn and her stories of the past were another stencil to lay over the disaster, to remind them of the former shape of the world. In their separate warrens, these different parties toiled over the future with their instruments: “We Make Tomorrow!” Why else were they in Manhattan but to transport the old ways across the violent passage of the calamity to the safety of the other side? If you don’t believe that, Mark Spitz asked himself, why are you here? • • •

Omega finished the operation in Human Resources. It was a larger and messier cleanup than usual for a single room in an office building. Four rabid infected in one room, that was a blip in a straggler mission, especially after the marines’ monstrous cull. Nothing Mark Spitz couldn’t handle, but he cursed the idea that months of dropping stragglers had attenuated his skills.

There were your standard-issue skels, and then there were the stragglers. Most skels, they moved. They came to eat you-not all of you, but a nice chomp here or there, enough to pass on the plague. Cut off their feet, chop off their legs, and they’d gnash the air as they heaved themselves forward by their splintered fingernails, looking for some ankle action. The marines had eliminated most of this variety before the sweepers arrived.