Zone One

Gary wouldn’t spill which island he had in mind: “You’ll tell everybody and then it will be ruined.” Mark Spitz caught him reaching for Spain guidebooks on two occasions, Gary about to furtively pluck them off bookcases in silent apartments before aborting the mission, so he had discounted the landmasses and archipelagoes of the lower hemisphere. The Mediterranean, then. It was hard to argue with the logic of the Island die-hards and their sun-drenched dreams of carefree living once every meter inside the beach line had been swept. The ocean was a beautiful wall, that most majestic barricade. Living would be easy. They’d make furniture out of coconuts, forget technology, have litters of untamed children who said adorable things like, “Daddy, what’s ‘on demand’?”

In practice, something always went wrong. The Carolinas, for example. Someone snuck back to the mainland for penicillin or scotch, or a boatful of aspirants rowed ashore bearing a stricken member of their party they refused to leave behind, sad orange life vests encircling their heaving chests. The new micro-societies inevitably imploded, on the island getaways, in reclaimed prisons, at the mountaintop ski lodge accessible only by sabotaged funicular, in the underground survivalist hideouts finally summoned to utility. The rules broke down. The leaders exposed mental deficits through a series of misguided edicts and whims. “To be totally fair to both parties, we should cut this baby in half,” the chief declared, clad in insipid handmade regalia, and then it actually happened, the henchman cut the baby in half. Sex, the new codes of fucking left them confused. Miscreants pilfered a bean or two above their allotted five beans when no one was looking and the sentence at the trial left everyone more than a tad disillusioned. Bad luck came to call in the guise of a river of the dead or human raiders rumbling up the lone access road despite the strategically arranged camouflage brush. He’d seen this firsthand during the long months. People are people.

Now the big groups were in again: the elite antsy to drop their pawns, and the pawns hungry for purpose after so long without instructions. One day Mark Spitz looked around and found he no longer knew each person in camp, how they had arrived, who they’d lost-suddenly this settlement had become a community. Buffalo implemented food-distribution networks, specialized scavenger teams, work details keyed to antediluvian skill sets, and the survivors had something to hold in their hands besides the make-shift weapons they had nicknamed and pathetically conversed with in the small hours. The leaders toiled over the details of the paradigm-shifting enterprises like Zone One. So tentative bureaucracy rose from the amino-acid pools of madness, per its custom.

Mark Spitz had to admit that he preferred things now that Buffalo was in charge, replicating the old governmental structures. He liked the regular meals, for one thing: beef jerky and room-temperature high-fructose colas had devastated his insides. Others resisted the transition back. Sometimes the soldiers had to convince a well-armed doomsday cult that it was safe to come out from behind the fortified hatch, or rough up some hippies to get them to come off the farm, hydroponic breakthrough or no hydroponic breakthrough, but it seemed to work, the return of the old laws. In reconstruction, you knew where you stood.

His arrival at Fort Wonton was a deep immersion into the reanimated system. After finishing his tour of Central Park, the pilot beat it south over the crest of midtown edifices. From above, Mark Spitz registered the flaws in the skyline, the gaps, the misbegotten architecture of some of the specimens, the cheerless monotony of the glass surfaces. They did not seem so magnificent from above; they were pathetic, not a brigade charging the sky in unchecked ambition but a runty gang stunted and stymied. A botched ascension. The other passenger was similarly unmoved, for different reasons. He didn’t speak the entire trip or acknowledge Mark Spitz’s presence. He wore a smart black suit, spy sunglasses, and rested the black cylinder that was chained to his wrist in his lap, petting it slowly from time to time. He barely looked out the window save for the periodic robotic glance, followed by a nod, as if comparing his mental track of their journey with the landmark evidence below.

When the chopper touched down on the bank the man with the cylinder was met by two men in similar dress, similarly mute. Mark Spitz was invisible to them and vice versa: he never again saw the agents of this hush-hush division during his tour of duty in Zone One. He presumed they operated out of an anonymous building they had requisitioned, or in a government complex that had bided the disaster, alive with the hum of its sublevel generators.