Zone One

Gary thought and contributed, “More toner, stat!”

Kaitlyn rattled off in quick succession: “My God, it’s full of stars.” And, “If we can identify whose gluteus maximus this is, we’ll have our culprit.” Finally, “I can see my house from here.”

Solve the Straggler broke up the day with its meager amusements and unearthed a vein of humor in Kaitlyn, a glimpse of the kind of wit she had shared with her friends, family, and members of her favored social-media networks. The game served another purpose in that it gave the sweepers mastery over a small corner of the disaster, the cruel enigma that had decimated their lives. How did the copy boy, or copy repairman, or toner fetishist end up here? Had he traveled miles, had he been here since Last Night? Had he worked in this office six incarnations ago, when it was an accountant’s or dietitian’s office? The most frightening proposition was that he had no connection to this place, that this fourth-floor office was simply where he broke down. If his presence here was random, then why not an entire world governed by randomness, with all that implied? Solve the Straggler, and you took a nibble out of the pure chaos the world had become.

It was certainly less bleak than Name That Bloodstain!, another pastime. What do you see?-that kid’s cloud game gone wrong: Mount Rushmore, Texas, a space shuttle, a dream house, my mom’s grave. Like all sweepers they joshed about the strange creatures before them, trying to muster the most clever hypothesis about how the Girl Scout ended up in that boxing ring, or why the guy in the bus-driver uniform was bent in the ice-cream store freezer scooping up dried cakes of mud. The answers to Solve the Straggler were logical, fanciful, or absurd (“Bananas!” Kaitlyn shouted once), according to the tenor of the day.

Skel mutilation was another popular amusement, although not on Kaitlyn’s watch, not that Mark Spitz was so inclined. He assumed that Gary had indulged in abhorrent Connecticut, where it was a local custom. “Just having fun,” the excuse went, on the rare occasions when one was asked for. A neutralized skel was a perfect stage for one’s sadism, whether you were a dabbler, merely taking your time in terminating the thing before you, pruning a finger here or an ear there, or a master-level practitioner, restless all night trying to think up novel variations.

The stragglers posed for a picture and never moved again, trapped in a snapshot of their lives. In their paralysis, they invited a more perplexing variety of abuse. One might draw a Hitler mustache on one, or jab a sponsor cigarette between a straggler’s lips. Administer a wedgie. They didn’t flinch. They took it. And then they were deactivated-beheaded or got their brains blown out. Although the subject was not mentioned in the PASD seminars Herkimer held with the camp shrinks, it was generally assumed that this behavior was a healthy outlet. Occupational therapy.

Mark Spitz had noticed on numerous occasions that while the regular skels got referred to as it, the stragglers were awarded male and female pronouns, and he wondered what that meant. “What’s his name?” he said.

“What do you mean, what’s his name?” Gary said.

“It has to be something.”

“Buffalo don’t want the names.”

“Still.”

“His name is Ned the Copy Boy.”

“What if we let him stay?” Mark Spitz didn’t know why he said it. “He’s not hurting anyone. Look at this room. We’re standing in the most depressing room in the entire city.”

His comrades looked at each other but did not comment. “Let’s wrap this puppy up,” Kaitlyn said, and popped him in the head.

If they had played Name That Bloodstain!, Mark Spitz would have said, North America. They would need a lot of new windows in the days to come, he thought. And plenty of bleach. These would be thriving industries, full of opportunities. Perhaps Gary should hang up his Lasso and get into the blood-scrubbing industry. Get in on the ground floor. Erase the stains.

The copy boy was the final straggler in the building. Kaitlyn recorded his details in the notebook. They dragged the body out into the twilight and punched out for the day as Disposal’s bell jingled in the distance. Mark Spitz listened to it fade. It was the sound of the god of death from one of the forgotten religions, the one that got it right, upstaging the pretenders with their billions of duped faithful. Every god ever manufactured by the light of cave fires to explain the thunder or calling forth the fashionable supplications in far-flung temples was the wrong one. He had come around after all this time, preening as he toured the necropolis, his kingdom risen at last. • • •