Zone One

Fabio had distributed their grid assignments the previous Sunday. The Lieutenant had been summoned to Buffalo and now his second was in charge. With the big man out of town, Fabio informed them there was no need for them to come up. He instructed them to skip their usual R amp; R and stay out in the Zone, Disposal would drop some rations on their rounds. He sent the grids out over the comm and wished them luck. “We better get that R amp; R back,” Gary informed his unit, “or people will be sorry.”

“Lieutenant’s gonna have his ass when we tell him how he fucked up,” Angela said.

They returned to the awning, waiting for the rain to let up, like in the old days, average citizens save for the assault rifles. And the rest of the gear. A fat drop landed on the back of Mark Spitz’s hand; he wasn’t wearing his gloves. Gray particulate described its outline on his skin. The rain captured ash on the way down, and looking out into the street he imagined the drops as long, gray, plummeting streaks. Giants wrung dirty dishrags over his head. “Look at this,” he said to Gary. He pointed at his skin.

Gary frowned. “We don’t see anything.”

When Mark Spitz was a child, his father had shared his favorite nuclear-war movies with him. Father-son bonding on overcast afternoons. Fresh-faced rising stars who never made it big and crag-faced character actors marched through the acid-rain narratives and ash-smeared landscapes, soldiering on, slapping hysterical comrades across the face-get a grip on yourself, we’re going to make it-dropping one by one as they chased the rumors of sanctuary. He asked, “What does ‘apocalypse’ mean, Daddy?” and his father pressed pause and told him, “It means that in the future, things will be even worse than they are now.”

In college Mark Spitz coasted in his customary way through a history requirement about the cold war. They’d pegged their doomsday to split atoms. They were blind to the plague’s blueprint of destruction, but they’d seen the ash. The pervasive, inexorable gray was a local atmospheric anomaly, and not what Buffalo had been thinking of when they devised their American Phoenix, but it suited. Up out of the ash, reborn.

Carl paused. The others turned. One of the dead came down the avenue. It was a strange sight after all this time, out there in the open. On their streets. Mark Spitz had only seen one other free-range skel since his arrival. This one had escaped the marines’ sweep somehow, finally freeing itself from some crummy cell, the room in the bowling alley where they stored the past-prime shoes or the basement of the souvlaki joint. The skel had spotted them, awakened at their bickering, and it veered from the middle of the asphalt, crept between two foreign-made compacts, and slowly gained the sidewalk. It walked in the rain in the way no one walked in the rain, in a downpour like this, without shiver or frown, the water popping off its head and shoulders into a spray like a swarm of gnats. It approached them, implacable and sure, at the familiar grim pace.

The skel wore a morose and deeply stained pinstripe suit, with a solid crimson tie and dark brown tasseled loafers. A casualty, Mark Spitz thought. It was no longer a skel, but a version of something that predated the anguishes. Now it was one of those laid-off or ruined businessmen who pretend to go to the office for the family’s sake, spending all day on a park bench with missing slats to feed the pigeons bagel bits, his briefcase full of empty potato-chip bags and flyers for massage parlors. The city had long carried its own plague. Its infection had converted this creature into a member of its bygone loser cadre, into another one of the broke and the deluded, the mis-fitting, the inveterate unlucky. They tottered out of single-room occupancies or peeled themselves off the depleted relative’s pullout couch and stumbled into the sunlight for miserable adventures. He had seen them slowly make their way up the sidewalks in their woe, nurse an over-creamed cup of coffee at the corner greasy spoon in between health department crackdowns. This creature before them was the man on the bus no one sat next to, the haggard mystic screeching verdicts on the crowded subway car, the thing the new arrivals swore they’d never become but of course some of them did. It was a matter of percentages.

Carl took the shot and they resumed their negotiations.

“This isn’t going to un-fuck itself,” Kaitlyn said. “Mark Spitz, go up and see what the situation is.”

“Why does he get to go?” Carl said. Mark Spitz had never seen a hard case pout before.

“Because he knows how to walk in a straight line.”

Angela, Bravo’s leader, did not protest. She looked resigned to losing the grid, steeling herself for the next inconvenience, whatever it may be.

Kaitlyn unslung her assault rifle and dropped her pack. She sat cross-legged on the concrete. “Now who’s gonna go over there and zip up that skel?” • • •