Zone One

Mark Spitz and Gary returned to the law office and dragged the other two bodies down, Kaitlyn whistling behind them as they descended. She proposed lunch, and they squatted in the lobby underneath the glass case listing the building’s occupants, which were detailed by easily recombined white letters embedded in black felt. Like most lists of people, it was now a roll call of the dead, an inversely colored obituary page.

“Are they a sponsor?” Gary asked. “We’re hungry.” He held up a chocolate bar retrieved from the spill of candy, breath mints, and hand sanitizer. The gate of the lobby newsstand had been ripped open and looted, probably by the marines, or else a post-evac survivor who’d run out of crackers and dared a raid.

“Not yet,” Kaitlyn said.

“But they might come aboard next week. Could happen. In which case it’s okay.”

Kaitlyn shook her head.

“The marines took what they wanted when they came through. How do you think they got all those NFL jerseys?”

“That was before the regs came down. You have chocolate chip cookies in your MRE.”

Gary tossed the candy bar and declined his standard joke. Usually when someone mentioned meals ready to eat, their military rations, Gary pointed out that survivors were MREs to the skels, hardy-har, punctuating it with his gravelly chuckle. Perhaps Gary was exhausted; it was the end of the week. “Just gonna get eaten up by the residents,” he said. “Pheenie bastards.”

“Maybe they’ll put you here,” Mark Spitz said. He didn’t believe it.

Buffalo had not yet divulged who was going to get resettled in Manhattan once the sweepers were finished, but Gary had long been skeptical that he would be among them. “You think we’re going to end up here? We ain’t special. They’re going to put the rich people here. Politicians and pro athletes. Those chefs from those cooking shows.”

“It’s going to be a lottery,” Kaitlyn sighed. She opened a meat tube and squeezed it into her mouth.

“Lottery, shit,” Gary said. “They’re going to put us on Staten Island.”

“I thought you liked islands,” Mark Spitz said. Gary was a firm believer in the Island Theory of plague survival.

“We like islands. Natural defenses. You know we like islands. But we wouldn’t live on Staten Island if they were giving out vaccines and hand jobs right off the ferry.”

“They screen for DNA, you’ll be lucky they don’t turn you out the gates.” Trevor, one of the sweepers in Gamma Unit, maintained that he’d heard that Buffalo was working on a system of screening settlers according to their genetic desirability. Mark Spitz didn’t believe it but rationalized that he had a decent chance of getting a nice spot somewhere. Surely many of the high-functioning members of society had been killed off, allowing mediocre specimens such as himself to move up a notch.

Kaitlyn tapped her headset distractedly, as if she’d been trying to make a weekend plan with one of her gal pals and her cell dropped the call. Did you lose me or did I lose you?

“Anything?” Mark Spitz asked.

She shook her head. They’d been out of contact with Fort Wonton for a week, ever since they departed for this grid. The comms went out with nettlesome frequency. It was hard to get a signal through on the best of days-the buildings bounced the waves between each other like kids playing keep-away-but the big culprit was mischievous bugs deep in the military communications software. The machines froze, chronically, and then they’d have to be rebooted and it took forever for the equipment to reinitialize. It was highly unlikely that the defense contractor awarded the bid would be prosecuted in the future, but this was the case even if the plague hadn’t cleared the halls of justice of everyone save the odd robed straggler gripping a gavel in the empty chamber.

The comm failures were annoying, but fortunately the sweepers didn’t need any orders apart from what grid was up next, and they got that every week when they returned to Wonton. “Let’s get going,” Kaitlyn said. “We’ll check in when we go back on Sunday.”

As they packed their gear they saw that the bodies were gone. Disposal had picked them up without the sweepers observing, with the eerie efficiency that was their trademark. Outside Wonton, the most you ever saw of Disposal was their cart disappearing around a corner a block or two blocks ahead, as they slumped in their bright white hazmat suits. The carriage and the horse had been players in the Central Park tourist-ride industry, the former enduring the elements as it waited for reassignment-obviously, sightseeing had taken a hit the last few years-and the latter presumably living off weeds in the Great Lawn until they established Fort Wonton. The horse had been choppered to the Zone after it was spotted during an early uptown reconnaissance mission. “It seems like the right thing to do,” General Tavin said, and indeed the rescue operation’s planning and execution had fostered a great deal of morale, even more than news of the beer distributor’s sponsorship.