Zone One

As for Mark Spitz, the pilot gave him a thumbs-up, took off, and stranded him in the middle of the bright reflective paint of the landing X. He felt as if his ride had forgotten to pick him up at the airport or train station, and he decided that he was more far gone than he thought for this comparison to occur to him. A walk to the edge of the roof and the sight of the beautiful wall cured him of disappointment. He’d been granted a glimpse on the approach, whirring over the desiccated skels writhing on the sidewalk in their mindless pantomime, then over that other territory beyond the wall, the human side, but it was different up close. The machine gunners strafed and perforated the intermittent skels from their catwalk nests, the beefy crane operators clawed up the sopping corpses and plunked them in cherry-red biohazard bins. The snipers lounged on scattered rooftops, taking potshots up Broadway and goofing off. This was real live human business even though only a thin concrete wall separated them from the plague and its tortured puppets. The world was divided between the wasteland he had roamed for so long and this place, loud and rude, cool and industrious, the front line of the new order. He put aside his petulance over his meager welcome. This was chicken soup.

The stairwell door opened on the controlled mania of a military operation in full swing. He’d served on the new bases before and taken orders in the mobile trailers of the ad hoc HQs, but on the island it was different. It felt like a city, as if order did not terminate at the electric fence but strode forth, extending up every avenue and inside each building. The city was back in teeming business behind every bleak window and street entrance. He’d soon take it for granted, when he returned to Wonton for check-in and turned a corner to suddenly find himself on living streets. In the hallway, he squeezed past soldiers, clerks, and officers. He had yet to parse the hierarchy. Comms squealed and buzzed behind closed doors. Pictographs and signs on the walls hectored about sanitation procedures and vandalism edicts in Buffalo’s pet font. He stood in the middle of the stream, pack dangling in his hand, as he listened to conversation phase in and out. Noise, fabulous noise.

Three privates sniggered as Mark Spitz blinked in the current, a hick stupefied by the bright lights of the big city. He was dressed in an old SWAT uniform taken from a locker in a Bridgeport police station, back in accursed Connecticut. When off duty, the civilians working the Northeast Corridor wore old cop gear to distinguish them from the regular army, as if their general conduct and deportment did not suffice. He’d sewn up parts of it over the months, poorly. “Hey, you missed a spot,” one of the soldiers jeered, lobbing the standard sweeper joke. As in, broom. He’d heard it before.

Fort Wonton’s nerve center was an old bank. The owners had changed over the years in the inevitable consolidations, liquidations, and takeovers, but the building still stood, a tiny granite hut among the furious high-story construction in downtown over the last hundred years. The offices overlooked the main intersection of the wall, Broadway and Canal.

A soldier carrying a stack of folders whistled. “You Spitz?”

Fabio led Mark Spitz to the office. When he saw his new charge flinch at a sudden round of machine-gun fire, Fabio told him, “They usually come in three waves these days. Kinda regular, so we call it Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.” The artillery increased for a short burst. “That there,” he said, “is Lunch.”

The Lieutenant’s office had eastern and northern exposure, and perhaps at one time enjoyed a healthy wash of morning light, but the skyscrapers and the sun’s reluctance to bless the zone surely extinguished that phenomenon. Maps of different segments of the Zone hung on the walls, covered in incomprehensible marks, tinted different hues, and the old, varnished desks made Mark Spitz think he’d wandered into a World War II campaign, on another island in the Pacific. The ceilings were twelve feet tall, and the large half-moon windows overlooked the wall. A ponytailed soldier prowled lazily across the scaffolding, looking at something or someone at the foot of the barricade, on the other side. She took a quick shot, shook her body like a wet dog, and stretched.