Zone One

It did rain. It had been raining pretty much constantly since that day. At the window of the conference room, Mark Spitz looked out into a solemn nigrescence that was interrupted only by a white dome of light leeching out of Fort Wonton. The light climbed up a few stories on the Canal buildings like mold. He visualized the hard-core military lamps bleaching the concrete wall to sun-beaten bone white while the night-shift gunners sat in their nests or patrolled the catwalk, listening to the dead songs on their digital music devices. The cranes motionless, maybe being hosed off with sterilizing compound by Disposal. Tomorrow at Breakfast the machines would whine over the wall and clutch the corpses in their firm metal grip and drop them on our side.

Kaitlyn and Gary slept. He resisted the urge to tug Kaitlyn’s paperback out of her hand-with her reflexes, she’d probably stab him in the eye. Still awake in a shallow layer of her mind. Mark Spitz had pretended to be asleep when his father used to check on him when he was a kid, but he was always awake before the door even opened. His brain processed the distinctive think-I’ll-peek-in-on-my-offspring gait out in the hall and a clerk in his awareness woke him in time for the turn of the doorknob, the creak at ten degrees, the second creak at fifty-five degrees, and the sliver of hall light prying under his eyelids. He fell asleep knowing someone watched over him.

Gary and Kaitlyn would sleep until their personal danger detectors went off or morning arrived. They were exemplary sleepers, not that kind of pheenie who was up all night rewinding their private pageant of horrors. So much more efficient to be obsessed with such things when awake, to save it for when it might be converted into fuel.

Who was his family now? A specter of an uncle floating half a mile uptown in a blue building. He had these two mutts. Mark Spitz lost his parents on Last Night, and Gary’s brothers perished in that initial wave as well, when the triplets joined the posse handling the Incident at the Local High School. This when the villagers still believed they could set up a quarantine, and it would work. That tooth-fairy period.

The PTA meeting went worse than usual, even by the deplorable standards of Milton High School. The engaged, the outraged, and the merely trying to fill the blank space that was their lives had convened to argue over that spring’s big scandal, when one of the lesbian seniors announced her intention to bring her girlfriend to the prom. It had hit the national media as a fully operational event, with a berth on cable network chyron, pro-and-con expert panels, and mortifying nightly-news graphics. Lawsuits had been filed, the late-night wits bon-motted, and the Milton community wanted to see how to prevent such a thing in the future.

At any rate, the assistant principal had been infected the previous afternoon while breaking up a fight between two elderly ladies in the parking lot of a discount-sneaker chain and had been lurking around the bio labs all day. Attracted by the noise, he interrupted the proceedings with brio. When the police arrived they locked the doors of the premises per the measures suggested by the web videos that had been uploaded by the government about the emerging epidemic, segregating the bitten from the unbitten, employing the gymnasium and assembly, respectively, and waiting for further instructions from the authorities. Who by this time were not even listening to the voice-mail messages from the less consequential municipalities, let alone dispatching a scramble team. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. It was too late. It had always been too late.

Gary and his brothers were giddy over their deputization, only slightly deflated when told there weren’t enough badges to go around. They’d butted heads with Sheriff Dooley and his officers plenty of times, sure, but in these new circumstances it was easy to see that they were good men to have by your side, shitkickers. They didn’t take any mess, a trait that had hampered their upward mobility in former days but now provided opportunity. The brothers were even issued guns; Gary held on to his for almost a year in the following madness, before he accidentally dropped it while hightailing it out of a disused coal mine in South Carolina, no time to stop.

The guards hadn’t heard anything from inside the school for twelve hours when the sheriff decided to go in. They peered past the wire-reinforced glass set in the thick institutional doors and into the halls they’d bullied through and grab-assed in during their teenage glory days. Saw nothing but shadows. Was this even the same place they remembered? In mistaking this place for something they knew, they undid themselves. For they were now in an entirely different country. It should be noted that as a general rule, the early rookie posses were not as successful as the later posses. Steep learning curve.