Zone One

As for Kaitlyn, she never saw her parents again after she departed on her trip to see her best gal pal Amy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Another member of their college-rooming group drove over from Philly and it turned out they hadn’t changed all that much since graduation. The same dull boys skulked around, indulged or ignored, and the trio didn’t have to force the in-jokes at all. They’d lost sleep fearing it would be otherwise. At the end of the weekend, however, the Sunset Dayliner did not return her to home and hearth. The train didn’t budge at all after the conductor got a report about the incident in the dining car and pulled the brakes outside Crawfordsville to wait for the National Guard. She was stuck. Untold misfortunes later, she was in New York City.

Mark Spitz turned off the lamp. Outside, one of the potbelly transport planes cut the sky, red lights trailing. Grunts and experts rocked on the bucket seats, en route to where? Buffalo, or a make-shift landing field outside one of the camps? Bearing their disparate ammunition.

In the days following his arrival in the Zone, he’d mulled over the Lieutenant’s theory of the barricades. Yes, they were the only vessel strong enough to contain our faith. But then there are the personal barricades, Mark Spitz thought. Since the first person met the second person. The ones that keep other people out and our madness in so we can continue to live. That’s the way we’ve always done it. It’s what this country was built on. The plague merely made it more literal, spelled it out in case you didn’t get it before. How were we to get through the day without our barricades? But look at him now, he thought. They were his family, Kaitlyn and Gary, and he was theirs. He owned nothing else besides them, and the features of his dead that he superimposed on the faces of the skels, those shoddy rubber masks he pulled out of his pockets. He knew it was pathetic to carry them with him, a lethal sentimentality, but it warded off the forbidden thought. The faces of his dead were part of his barricade, stuck on pikes atop the length of the concrete.

He volunteered for Zone One while the rest of the wreckers on the Corridor remained because he was from around these parts. The lights of the broken city were few these days. A dim constellation hovered around the wall, smaller halos in the windows of the buildings that personnel staked out in far-flung Wonton, and in silent buildings across the downtown where drones like Mark Spitz cupped their palms around their little flames. North of the wall was darkness and the dead that scraped through that darkness.

The city could be restored. When they were finished it could be something of what it had been. They would force a resemblance upon it, these new citizens come to fire up the metropolis. Their new lights pricking the blackness here and there in increments until it was the old skyline again, ingenious and defiant. The new lights seeping through the black veil like beads of blood pushing through gauze until it was suffused.

Yes, he’d always wanted to live in New York.

SATURDAY

“The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace.”

I nitially the dreams, when safe nights permitted them, favored a classic anxiety paradigm. He was enmeshed in the institutional structures of his previous existence-in school, one of his blank jobs-and the other students and the teachers, fellow employees, and bosses were dead. Dead in a precipitous state of decay, winnowed by the plague: bones visibly gliding under taut skin at every movement, blackened gums bared when they told a joke or introduced a complicating element to the setup (the exam is today, the supervisor is on the warpath), their wounds mushy and livid. They leaked, leaked constantly from sores, eyes, ears, bites. In the dreams he was not bothered by their appearance, nor were they. They informed him that they’d all studied for the test save for him, the big assignment was due after lunch and not next week, the performance review was already under way, abetted by secret cameras. Not that he’d ever had a performance review in his life-it was a neurotic curve-ball his subconscious came up with to freak him out, employing the exotic cant of bona fide grown-ups. They were not the rabid dead or stragglers. They acted pretty much the same as they had before, his best friend, his insidious science teacher, his distracted boss. Except for the plague thing, these were the dreams he’d been having for years.