Zone One

If you chose to hook up for a time, eventually you traded Last Night stories. In their bleak adventure, the survivors tried to crawl to the mythical settlements and forts they’d conjured in their minds, where the plague was part of a news segment recounting some other town’s tragedy, filler before the weather report, where there was electricity and local produce right out of the bag and kids played and there were little jumping rabbits. Haven, finally. Each retelling of one’s Last Night story was a step toward another fantastic refuge, that of truth. Mark Spitz had refined his Last Night story into three versions. The Silhouette was for survivors he wasn’t going to travel with for long. He had quickly soured on this stranger standing before him by the cellar door of the farmhouse, or by the metal detector of the department of motor vehicles, out of skel sightline, and he concocted the thin broth of the Silhouette from this despair over the death of connection. At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running. The Silhouette sufficed. No need to hand over his heart, the good stuff. The two parties had departed before they even started talking.

He offered the Anecdote, robust and carrying more on its ribs, to those he might hole up with for a night, in a long-cleaned-out family-owned Greek restaurant, a dilapidated trailer with weeds growing out of the carpet, or atop a toll plaza, baking up there but grateful for the 360-degree view. He also trotted out the Anecdote version for hookups with larger bands, when the Silhouette might appear rude, but the Obituary was too intimate to share with the half-formed huddled faces around the flashlights. The Anecdote included a gloss on Atlantic City, the trip home (spectacularly foreboding in retrospect, the ghosts playing basketball), and concluded with the phrase “I found my parents, and then I started running.” It was the smallest portion, he learned, that was acceptable to strangers to allow them to fall asleep without thinking he’d bludgeon them in their sleeping bags. The versions they gave in return were never enough to let him sleep, no matter the surfeit of telling details and sincerity.

The Obituary, although refined over the months and not without a rehearsed air, was nonetheless heartfelt, glancing off his true self more than once, replete with digressions about his lifelong friendship with Kyle, nostalgia for the old A.C. trips, the unsettling and “off” atmosphere of that last casino weekend, and a thorough description of the tableau at his house and its aftermath. Although the adjectives tended to be neutral in later retellings, the Obituary was the sacred in its current guise. The listener usually responded in kind, unless revisiting that longest of nights dispatched them into a fugue, which happened occasionally. They’d spent some time together. This might be the final human being they’d see before they died. Both speaker and listener, sharer and receiver, wanted to be remembered. The Obit got it all down for some calm, distant day when you were long disappeared and a stranger took the time to say your name.

Albatrosses materialized around the bend, of course, and two minutes of their company sufficed. They were too far gone. Sick, not with the plague but with the workhorse afflictions newly complicated in the wasteland, pneumonia and rheumatoid arthritis and the like. The things requiring generic meds that needed decoding in the stripped pharmacies. Or they were quite clearly mad. How’d this brain-wiped half-skel make it this far? God had watched over children and drunks, and now he watched over no one, but these unfortunates made it through somehow. They had no supplies, not a single weapon, owned nothing but their clothes and wounds. Perhaps they might snap out of it, that cough might disappear with a packet of rehydrated chicken soup, but he made a swift retreat, faster than if pursued by a hundred skels. Safer to assume they’d get him killed. A parent-child combo might pop up at the crest of the old country road, wan and wary, and Mark Spitz shrank from these, no matter how well outfitted they were. Parenthood made grown-ups unpredictable. They hesitated at the key moment out of consideration for their kid’s abilities or safety, they were paranoid he wanted to rape or eat their offspring, they slowed him down with their baby steps or kept him distracted as he pondered their erraticism. They were worse than the bandits, who only wanted your stuff and sometimes managed to take it, on the spot, or at gunpoint later when the opportunity presented itself, when you were sleeping or taking a piss. The parents were dangerous because they didn’t want your precious supplies. They possessed the valuables, and it hobbled their reasoning.