Zone One

The stragglers, on the other hand, did not move, and that’s what made them a suitable objective for civilian units. They were a succession of imponderable tableaux, the malfunctioning stragglers and the places they chose to haunt throughout the Zone and beyond. An army of mannequins, limbs adjusted by an inscrutable hand. The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on the ottoman, blank attentive face waiting for the patient who was late, ever late, and unpacking the reasons for this would consume a large portion of a session that would never occur. The patient failed to arrive, was quite tardy, was dead, was running through a swamp with a hatchet, pursued by monsters. The pock-faced assistant manager of the shoe store crouched before the foot-measuring instrument, frozen, sans customers, the left shoes of his bountiful stock on display along the walls of the shop on miniature plastic ledges. The vitamin-store clerk stalled out among the aisles, depleted among the plenty, the tiny bottles containing gel-capped ancient remedies and placebos. The owner of the plant store dipped her fingers into the soil of a pot earmarked for a city plant, one hearty in the way the shop’s customers were hearty, for wasn’t every citizen on the grand island a sort of sturdy indoor variety that didn’t need much sunlight. A man wrapped in the colors of the Jamaican flag loitered over the new bongs, the creme de la creme of head-shop apparatus, rainbow bulbs perforated according to the latest notions about air circulation, intake, draw. No smoke, no fire. In the desolate consumer-electronics showroom, the up-selling floor salesman halted mid-pitch, as if psychoanalyzing a skeptical rube who was simply, ever and always, not in the room, not in the market for purchases big-ticket or otherwise. A man bent before a mirror that perched on the glass counter of a sunglasses store, his fingers holding on the arms of invisible shades. A woman cradled a wedding dress in the dressing room’s murk, reenacting without end a primal moment of expectation. A man lifted the hood of a copy machine. They did not move when you happened on them. They didn’t know you were there. They kept watching their movies.

One morning Mark Spitz stumbled on some brain-wiped wretch standing at the fry station of the big hamburger chain and had to shoot him on general principles. Out of the abundance of a life, to choose fry duty.

They were safe in their houses. In front of the televisions, of course, a host of this type biding their time until the electricity came back on, the problem was solved, and the program resumed where it had stopped. All the time in the world. Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment. In the bath, fully clothed before the nippled showerhead and its multiple-flow settings. Tilting a fluted vacuum attachment toward the scrunched curtains and their legendary hard-to-reach places. Underneath blankets and duvets whose number and thickness referred to a different season, a previous winter of mysterious significance. Slipping a disc into the game machine. Crotch-down on the yoga mat. Spooning bran from a bowl. Surfing the dead web. Yawning. Stretching. Flossing. Wound down and alone in their habitat.

For Omega’s purposes, their habitat was Zone One.

In Human Resources, Gary corralled purses and read out the ages of the dead. He didn’t bother with the names. No one cared about the names, not them, not the higher-ups. Since they hadn’t maintained records of the dead starting Last Night, there was no point: easier to keep records of the living. Fewer numbers to work with, for one thing, and unimpeachable given the ascension of the survivor rolls to the status of holy register. They endured setbacks-supply lines broke down and refuges were overrun, not so much now, but in the interregnum everyone had been forced to flee a hideout or ill-considered shelter multiple times. No matter the daily advances and reversals, however, the names of the survivors maintained their willful stream into the zones of stability, over the comm, scrawled on paper, recited from memory by the weary emissary of a band coming in from the cold: These are the living.