Zone One

“But by this time the Army Corps is redeployed on that crazy shit they’re cooking up in Baltimore, and we’re not going to get the manpower to block uptown for months. The marines tasked elsewhere, too. Crazy. Buffalo’s attitude is, Let the sweepers do their thing and then we’ll fix that little glitch when we start on Zone Two. In the old days, we’d have a court-martial, but good old Tattinger, the guy in charge of this clusterfuck, got his face eaten off a week later, so there’s that I guess.” He shook his head. Laboriously, as if commanding the muscles one by one. “You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ by the way. You’re a civilian. We work for you, although some of them have forgotten that around here.”

The sudden menace of gunfire interrupted. He talked over it. “You have a lot of experience with stragglers?” he asked. “That wasn’t your bailiwick out on the Corridor.”

“Same as anyone else. You can’t help it, being out there. Pop ’em and drop ’em.” That easy vernacular.

“Where was your first?”

The question surprised him. No one asked questions like that. Mark Spitz had been navigating repulsive Connecticut. Behind a half-built housing development there was a field that had been chewed up by dozers to make room for another line of houses. At the far side of the field a highway ran north-south, and that was his day’s mission, make it a few paces up his map. He saw the man standing in the middle of the dirt. At first he thought it was a scarecrow, it was so still, even though it eschewed stereotypical scarecrow stance and this was no farm. The figure’s right arm stretched to grasp the sky. Mark Spitz waited for him to move. He scanned the territory, then tried to get the man’s attention in that moronic stage whisper he used so much in those early days. If it was a skel, he’d kill it; he didn’t see any others around. That was the rule: Don’t leave them around to infect other people if you can get away with it.

He crept toward him. Mark Spitz was in a baseball-bat phase and he got his slugger grip ready. The figure was an older man, dwindling inside his red polo shirt and khaki pants. A string trailed from his hand, leading to a roughed-up box kite that had been dragged a great, difficult distance from the look of it. Was the man in shock? Mark Spitz didn’t know if the guy had shrunk from malnutrition or the plague. He didn’t want to know, actually. He gave the thing’s shoulder a pro forma shake. He’d abandoned his share of crippled survivors. Couldn’t save everyone.

The man’s mind had been eliminated. He didn’t stir when Mark Spitz snapped his fingers in his ears, blink at the stimuli. The man’s gaze, if such a barren thing could be called that, was leveled at a void above the horizon. Any activity or process in him was directed at pouring some undetectable message into that spot in the sky. Mark Spitz shook his shoulder, prepared to jump away if necessary. What did he see there?

He abandoned the man in the field. Then it was like in the old days when he came across some energetic new fad, a nouveau jacket or complicated haircut: He started seeing them everywhere, sitting patiently at a bus stop or holding a leaf up to the sun or standing in the field they’d played in as a child, before they grew up, before the dozers. When he mentioned these creatures to a band he hooked up with for a brief time, they gave him the term: stragglers. “They’re all messed up.”

Mark Spitz related a version of this to the Lieutenant, who stroked his chin skeptically. “Buffalo’s still trying to explain what makes one person become your regular pain-in-the-ass skel,” the Lieutenant said, “and what makes another into a straggler. That one percent. Buffalo’s not really known for explaining shit. How they can walk around for so long just feeding off their own bodies. Why they don’t bleed out. Buffalo will tell you that the plague converts the human body into the perfect vehicle for spreading copies of itself. Thanks for the news flash. But what’s up with this aberrant one percent?”

Mark Spitz said, “I don’t know.” He could have added his own questions. How come, rain or shine, the stragglers stand at their posts? Hottest day of the year, monsoon, they’re standing there foul and oblivious. Caught in a web.

“They’re mistakes,” the Lieutenant said. “They don’t do what they’re supposed to. You know that super-secret bunker in England? Those guys are the real deal, three more Nobel Prize winners on tap than Buffalo. They’ve been studying this thing, squinting at the microbe, cutting it up, and all the British guys can come up with is that the stragglers are mistakes. Nobody knows anything.”

Mark Spitz turned to the movement at the border of his vision. Outside the window, ash had begun to fall in drowsy flakes.