Zone One

He went into a tree cycle for months at a time, weather permitting (that quaint picnic language), because he hated bunking in an empty house knowing that its occupants were most likely some variety of dead. Perhaps this was the start of his aversion to ID detail, all those times he pushed a bureau up against the door of a bedroom and watched the crap on top tumble to the floor, boxes of gaudy jewelry, cologne in turquoise glass, the family pictures in the fragile plastic frames. It was worse when he came across a straggler, although he didn’t know the word then. A woman in a bathrobe measured out coffee into the Swedish machine, frozen there. A teenager wielded a lacrosse stick in his funky bedroom, and in the next town over the pigtailed little princess arranged chewed-up unicorns on the cardboard top of an old board game that had never made it into her family’s regular rotation, a fad game with too many or too few instructions. He bashed their heads in with a baseball bat of course; he’d quickly cottoned on to their harmlessness, but didn’t know back then if they’d suddenly awaken at some inner cuckoo chime and start the chase. The plague didn’t let you in on its rules; they weren’t printed on the inside of the box. You had to learn them one by one. The majority of skels were rabid, and then there was this subset. It was early enough in the unpleasantness that they hadn’t begun to waste away yet, earn the name skeleton. Which made it worse. In the half-light, before he could see their wounds, he was a harmless cat burglar who accidentally broke into the wrong house, the one next door to his target. The occupants were home. He wanted to apologize, and did on a few occasions. They didn’t respond. They looked like regular people, until he saw the missing parts or the make-shift, suppurating bandages. Cemetery statuary, weeping angels and sooted cherubs, standing over their own graves. Stick to the trees, he told himself.

Gary said, “Kwan-to kwesta? Kwan-to kwesta? Kwan-to, kwan-to.”

He learned to keep still, ease into a sleep shallow enough to still perceive and react to peril, practicing a quick jungle swing/running/landing combo in case one or more of them looked up and saw him, which they never did. They never came when you were vigilant; they came for you when you had one foot in the past, recollecting a dead notion of safety. Way he saw it, if you were going to get surrounded, you were going to get surrounded-if your luck went that way, it didn’t matter if you were up an oak or in a colonial revival.

The first time he’d shared his tree affinity with another survivor, she said, “So what? Everybody sleeps in the trees from time to time.” They’d all done the same things during the miseries. Manhattan was a template for other feral cities and Mark Spitz was a sort of template, too, he’d figured out. The stories were the same, whether Last Night enveloped them on Long Island or in Lancaster or Louisville. The close calls, the blind foraging, the accretion of loss. Half starved on the roof of the local real estate office, crouching so they wouldn’t be seen from the street and have the ravenous dead clot around the only exit. Contorted in a stainless-steel restaurant cabinet and waiting for morning to break, when it was time to split for the next evanescent refuge. Listening, ever listening for footsteps. The insomniac’s brutal scenario had become the encompassing reality across the planet. There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth, and it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all. Even if they didn’t know it.

Kaitlyn said, “Can you not do that in here? Hello-secondhand smoke kills.”

Mark Spitz wondered how Gary would handle changing these common Spanish phrases for use with his dependable “we.” “Gary, you gonna catch a ride on that sub to get to your island?”

Gary removed his headset. “If we have to. We can get assigned no problem, all the stuff we’ve done out here for them.”

“You probably have to be in the navy,” Kaitlyn said.

“Half the navy’s been eaten. We’re not worried. We’ll swab the decks, whatever.” He replaced his headphones and loudly added, “Soon as we get to the island, we’re done climbing stairs.”