Zone One

The chopper pilot who brought Mark Spitz from the Northeast Corridor sustained a tour-guide spiel the whole trip down, narrating the eastern seaboard’s points of interest with an oddly perky flair. Mark Spitz suspected he was on drugs. When they reached Manhattan, he took them for a quick circuit over Central Park, “laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in one of the greatest landscaping undertakings Jesus has ever seen.” Mark Spitz had seen the park unscroll from the windows of the big skyscrapers crowding the perimeter, but never from this vantage. No picnickers idled on their blankets, no one goldbricked on the benches, and nary a Frisbee arced through the sky, but the park was at first-spring-day capacity. They didn’t stop to appreciate the scenery, these dead visitors; they ranged on the grass and walkways without purpose or sense, moving first this way and then strolling in another direction until, distracted by nothing in particular, they readjusted their idiot course. It was Mark Spitz’s first glimpse of Manhattan since the coming of the plague, and he thought to himself, My God, it’s been taken over by tourists.

Diesel supply being what it was, the horse made sense, and the nag was game enough to lug the big metal cart attached to the carriage as Disposal made their circuit downtown, cleaning up after the sweeper units. Bring out your dead. The guys and gals in Disposal never removed their hazmat suits, in public at least, even when off the clock and prowling around Wonton with everyone else. Maybe they know something we don’t, Mark Spitz thought, as he saw them take their rations and scurry back to whatever building they’d staked out. They had duct-taped a shower-curtain rod to the carriage’s dashboard and tied a brass bell to it, which somehow ended up sounding more cheerful than macabre, sounding off in the distance.

Gary snatched the stack of replacement body bags left by Disposal-they kept track, meticulously, dropping off new ones when a unit was running low-and the three of them headed up the stairwell to finish the building.

It was always disquieting to see empty pavement where you’d dumped some terminated skels. It was as if they’d just walked away. • • •

They stoppered the tunnels and blocked the bridges. They plugged the subways at the preordained stations, every one south of where the first wall would stand. The choppers lowered the swaying concrete segments one by one across the breadth of Canal Street as the dead gaped and clawed through the dust kicked up by the blades. More than a few of the unfortunates were pulverized. Perhaps this was the pilots’ intent. The final section went down at the edge of the river. Now they had a zone.

The soldiers landed at the Battery Park staging area, near the Korean War memorial. They disembarked from the troop transports, this generation’s marines, and initiated the first sweep. Buffalo’s estimates vis-a-vis skel density south of Canal were stupendously botched. How could they have reckoned the numbers skulking in the great buildings. The dead poured into the street at the soldiers’ noise. Which was part of the plan. The grunts used themselves as bait, their invectives, war cries, and tunes drawing schools of the dead into their machine-gun fire.

They rappelled from gunships into key intersections, eliminating a hundred shuddering skels before clipping back to the cables and floating out of the strike zone, camoed fairies of destruction. They strafed, loosed fusillades, and mastered the head shots, spinal separators, and cranial detonators that diverted the dead to the sidewalk against newspaper boxes, fire hydrants, antiterrorism planters, and inscrutable corporate-sponsored public art. The soldiers terminated targets on fire escapes, where they slumped like moths caught in wrought-iron cobwebs. Kill techniques cycled in their fads, in this week and out the next, as the soldiers refined and traded tips and accidental discoveries. Everyone had their own way of handling things. The red tears of tracers shrieked through the thoroughfares and stray bullets cratered the faces of banks, churches, condos, and franchises, every place of worship a city has to offer. Exquisite glass panes crashed down in their music, manufacturing geometric shapes that had never before existed in the history of the world, which in turn sharded into newer shapes and brilliant white dust. Shell casings danced and skipped on the asphalt like tossed cigarette butts. The gun smoke was sucked up into braids and curtains by the atmospheric patterns created by skyscrapers and avenue crevices, those mountain faces and valleys, and when it cleared the creatures gushed in renewed fortified lines.