Zone One

They progressed without speaking, still waking up on their march. Kaitlyn whistled “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction),” that irrepressible pheenie anthem, as they stomped through the gray puddles. “What if we get there,” Gary said finally, “and they’ve all keeled over? They finally caught what those kill-field skels got and all we have to do is bag them from now on?” He made this offering whenever they switched grids.

“That would be nice,” Mark Spitz said. The discovery of the kill fields that spring hastened the start of many a reconstruction operation. Word first arrived with the new survivors stumbling through the camp gates with their extravagant tales of meadows and mall parking lots brimming with the fallen dead. It wasn’t as if someone had neutralized them and departed without sterilizing the area-their heads were intact, they said. The dead looked as if they’d dropped in place.

Reentry into the anterooms of civilization was always difficult, and the longer the survivors spent out there, the harder it was to come back. But even after a hot shower, sleeping like stones for twelve hours straight, and tasting the corn (everyone was quite proud of the corn harvest, and rightfully so), the refugees continued with their wild stories. Then recon units came back with confirmation, video, up and down the coast. In wide-open places, the dead were falling en masse. A high-school football field in faraway Raleigh bumpy with bodies, a public park in Trenton where black flies zipped at the banquet. Buffalo sent down word of their think-tank scuttlebutt: The plague had finally, inevitably, exhausted what the human body could endure. There was a limit to the depredations, and that meant a limit to the devastation.

The reports of the scattered kill fields emerged at the same time, suggesting (according to some) a time frame for the course of infection. It was the season of encouraging dispatches. The establishment of steady communications with nations abroad, the intel traveling back and forth over the seas. Throw in the continued consolidation of the uninfected groups and clans, and the simple fact that skel attacks and sightings had diminished by all empirical measure, and one had reason to dust off the old optimism. You had only to look at the faint movement in the ashes: surely this is the American Phoenix Rising. At least that’s what the T-shirts said, lifted from the biodegradable cardboard boxes fresh from Buffalo. Toddler sizes available.

Mark Spitz observed the reduced skel numbers firsthand. There were simply fewer of them around, the chancred losers, a blessing during his time on the Corridor in accursed Connecticut and beyond. But kill fields aside-and there were no solid numbers regarding these sundry fallen, given the general appetite for a quick bonfire-no one could account for where the skels had gone. One school maintained that exposure had cut a lot of them down, the winter in its savagery. Speculation was above his pay grade, never mind that he was paid in socks and sunscreen.

Kaitlyn said, “Haven’t heard of that happening in urban areas yet.” She registered Gary’s deflated expression and, checking her usual impulses, added, “But maybe.”

Mark Spitz slapped his arm across Kaitlyn’s chest to stop her, a gesture he’d lifted from his parents, who had lifted it from their parents, who had remembered a time before seat belts: There was movement across the street.

The wasteland protocols booted up, obsolete or no. His brain compared the warehoused scenarios and previous engagements to the scene on Fulton Street, running demeanor, gear, posture, and facial expressions through the database. Dead or bandit, straggler or survivor, it was often hard to tell. Did they speak, that was the first test. Did they still have language. You took it from there. Before the rise of the camps, out in the land, you had to watch out for other people. The dead were predictable. People were not. Most were like Mark Spitz, isolated and squeaking by in the great out there, power bar by stale power bar. Once you ensured that you were both sentient, you gingerly approached to parley. Where are you coming from, onto what mirage have you fastened your hopes, have you seen any other people according to the old definitions, where shouldn’t we travel. The essential information.