Zone One

In his downtime, Gary worked on an instrument for neutralizing skels. He recruited Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn into the only extant focus group on the planet, spitballing for weeks. The latest iteration involved a long rod with a ratcheted collar at the business end. The collar, in turn, was attached to a mesh bag, made of the same tear- and tooth-resistant material as their fatigues. When you came across a skel, you manipulated the collar around its head, then jerked back. The collar cinched tight like handcuffs, detached from the rod, “And voila: Skel in a Bag.” The captured monsters couldn’t bite through, or see. They were neutralized. You could do what you wanted with them.

The problem was that the only thing to do with a captured skel was to put it down.

Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn had pointed this out to Gary on numerous occasions, among their other criticisms of the invention. The skel-catcher, or You-Grab-It or Lasso, whatever name Gary settled on (there had been brief flirtation with the Gary), was useless in close quarters. It required a low density of hostiles-with two or more creatures in the area, too many variables complicated execution. It tied up both your hands so that you couldn’t pull off a last-second head shot if need be. But those were concerns of implementation. The main problem, of course, was that no one wanted a captured skel. In the early days, the government required a stock of the recently infected and the thoroughly turned for experiments, to search for a cure, cook up a vaccine, or simply investigate the phenomenon “in the name of science.” The vaccine work continued-what were they going to do, boot out the epidemiologist now that priorities had shifted to infrastructure?-and in their subterranean labs Buffalo certainly still rode hard on the centrifuges and electron microscopes, but the market for fresh skels did not exist, the odd hillbilly torture dungeon aside. No one used the word “cure” anymore. The plague so transformed the human body that no one still believed they could be restored. Sure, rumors persisted that a team of Swiss scientists were holed up in the Alps working on processes to reverse the effects, but most survivors had seen enough skels to know the verdict of the plague could not be overturned. No. The only thing to do with a lassoed skel was to put it down. As soon as possible.

Gary was undeterred. He had been making diagrams for a patent, despite the small matter of there being no patent office in the land to process it. “I’m going to be rich,” he maintained, as he sulked over his unit’s lack of enthusiasm. Spoken like a true pheenie, Mark Spitz thought. Despite other contrary vectors of his personality, Gary maintained his own reservoir of pheenie optimism, a hazy vision, after all this time, of his insertion into the dreamscape of American prosperity. There would be room enough in his fabulous mansion for chambers devoted to his dead brothers’ memory, along with the standard lap pool and 5,000 Btu gas grill. The sketches of his invention reminded Mark Spitz of cave paintings, but this was only appropriate given the culture’s precipitous regression.

“The Lasso,” Mark Spitz said. “You’re really onto something there.”

Although the sign at the exit informed them that an alarm would sound, this was not the case. They tugged the heaps across the black-and-white tile of the lobby and lurched into the slurry that passed for rain these days.

They left the bags in the middle of the street for Disposal, Gary darting back into the building to avoid the downpour. Mark Spitz felt the rain on his face. This was not stuff you wanted on your skin, to see the residue from the rain when it dried. It reminded Mark Spitz of when he visited his cousins in Florida and he emerged from the ocean with brown globs of oil on his chest and legs, the stuff still drifting ashore so long after the big spill. As a frigid worm of water snuck under his collar, he saw that this block of Duane Street appeared unruined. It was any city block on a normal day of that expired calendar, five minutes before dawn, say, when most of the city was still sleeping it off. Duane had not been allocated, so the army mechanics hadn’t cleared it, and the spectrum of vehicles popular at the time of the ruin were lined up at the curb, waiting for the return from the errand, the commute, the trip home. Nothing had been boarded up, there were no firefight traces or other signs of mayhem, and a finicky wind had kicked all the litter around the corner. From time to time Mark Spitz happened on these places in Zone One, where he strolled down a movie set, earning scale as an extra in a period piece about the dead world.