Zone One

He met Mim in a toy store. The convenience marts, box outlets, pharmacies, and other likely suspects had been thoroughly excavated so Mark Spitz started hitting toy stores. The plague had reacquainted him with primal disappointments and in younger days he had been tormented by the fine print BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED often enough for it to leave a permanent dent. He thought this tactic ingenious-indeed, more than a few toy stores still had batteries behind the counter, even in loathsome Connecticut, where he encountered Mim during a noon raid. A handful of skels drifted down Main Street out front, the compasses in their veins quivering at no true north save the next square in front of them. He went around back to employee parking and spent a hairy ten minutes fretting the back door with a crowbar, scratching away, until he heard the muffled “Who is it?”

He said, “I’m alive,” and she let him in.

Her name was Miriam Cohen Levy and she was the last person to give him a full name for a long time. She’d been hitting toy stores since the start. “I have three kids,” she told him later.

They chatted in the robot aisle. Her gear sat at their feet in perky, neatly organized nylon packs. Her weapon of choice was a red-bladed fire ax, snatched from the wall of an elementary school or municipal building, and it was sparkling clean, even in the weak light trickling past the window display. “Germs,” she said. “But I prefer running whenever possible. The cardio.”

Mark Spitz noted that there were only two points of entry to the building. He pointed to the spiral staircase. “More toys upstairs. You can drop your pack there,” she said, like a good host. “You heading to Buffalo?”

“What’s there?”

“That’s where the government is now. They got a big compound organized.”

He hadn’t heard that one, but it was in accord with his theory that every rumored sanctuary was located in a place he’d never had the slightest intention of visiting. “Last I heard people were going to Cleveland.”

“That was awhile ago.”

“Buffalo is the new Cleveland.”

That’s what people were saying, she told him. Mim had hooked up with some Buffalo-bound pilgrims for a week, but then she got some kind of stomach thing and had to lie on her side all day, the only thing that helped. They apologized, but they had to leave her behind, nothing personal. She didn’t take offense. “Them’s the rules,” she told Mark Spitz, shoulders popping up in a brief shrug.

Mim had been mobile since her last camp imploded. She’d spent the summer and most of the autumn at a mansion in Darien: two and a half meals a day, stone walls, and a generator. The owners were dead, but the gardener’s son, Taylor, had keys and set up camp at the start of the abominations. He’d played Space War on the grounds as a kid, knew the clandestine tunnels dug during the reign of prohibition and maintained during the heyday of infidelity. Plenty of spare exits if others got skel-heavy. Taylor recruited fellow survivors on gas runs, or he caught them clambering over the walls, backpacks full of cans and accessories. If he saw something in you he liked, you were invited to stay. He dressed like biker-club muscle but was a very sweet soul; it was a costume, and when he ran off people, they obeyed.

“It wasn’t crazy-culty,” Mim said, sucking powder from a protein packet, licking the excess from her fingertip. “He didn’t try anything nuts, like you have to kill the oldest every Thursday at midnight-he just wanted people he could get along with. Pot-heads, mostly.” Willoughby Manor was thirty people at its biggest population, and well run. Organized forage runs, an activity board. “No bullies, no rapes. Low profile kept the dead from hanging around outside.” Lights out after dark was the rule, whereupon they gathered in the wine cellar for mellow evening tastings. Down in the branching tunnels there were ample amusements to pass the time. They played poker among the Brunellos, charades before the Argentine vintages, watched the cherished sitcoms in the final, unfinished room that was actually underneath the pool, imagine that. They’d plucked Mim from Darien’s main drag after she miscalculated the margin of safety while trying to outrun a skel swarm she’d accidentally wandered into. “Don’t you hate it when that happens?” she asked. “Minding your own business, on a lip balm mission, and then boom.” The Willoughbys scooped her up in an SUV and she enlisted.

“Sounds like a nice setup.”

“It was great. I really thought I’d wait it out there.” She changed her tone. She was not the first to misread his face. “I still believe that-that we’re going to beat this thing. However long it takes. And then we’re all going to go home.”

He mashed his teeth together so as to maintain his mask.