Zone One

Their idyll was terminated by one of the number, Abel, who had developed some theories about the plague and its agenda. He was one of those apocalypse-as-moral-hygiene people, with a college-sophomore socialist slant. The dead came to scrub the Earth of capitalism and the vast bourgeois superstructure, with its doilies, helicopter parenting, and streaming video, return us to nature and wholesome communal living. No one paid much attention, Mim said; Abel was a good worker and one encountered crazier folk out on the wastes.

Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring. The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren’t.

“Then one night,” Mim said, “it was over.” Most of the campers were down in the cellar-it was game night-when Abel came downstairs and said that he could no longer sit back and watch while the household ignored the verdict of the plague. What right do we have to laugh and carol and play Texas hold ’em while the rest of the world suffered its just punishment? “Which is why,” he told them, “I have opened the gates.”

They ran upstairs. Abel did more than open the gates. The dead engulfed the grounds, spilling into the great room from the veranda “like wedding guests looking for cocktails after the ceremony.” Abel must have lured them up the hill with promises of a buffet. The place was lost. “The usual helter-skelter,” Mim told him. She was separated from everybody else but managed to scramble to some backup gear she’d stashed by the far wall of the grounds for this very occasion. “Settle in all you want to,” Mim said. “Sign up for work duty and water the tomato plants. But you gotta stash a backup pack, ’cause it always comes tumbling down.”

He liked her immensely, despite her belief in Buffalo. They were vapor: the big settlement beyond the next rise, the military base two days’ walk, the utopian commune on the other side of the river. The place never existed or was long overrun by the time of your arrival, a stink of corpses and smoldering fires. Or it was lunatics and the crazy new society they’d cooked up, with a fascist constitution, or nutty rules like all the womenfolk had to sleep with the men to repopulate the race, or some other creepy secret you only discovered after you’d been there a few days, and when you had to split you found they’d hidden your weapons and stolen your bouillon cubes. Mark Spitz was off groups for now, but if the right outfit came along he’d start using Mim’s solution. Stash a spare.

Mark Spitz was prepared to take whatever batteries Mim didn’t want, but she insisted that they split them evenly. “I can’t carry all this, that’s ridiculous. Help yourself.” He had filled his pack when he heard Mim curse.

She was at the window. “Bad weather,” she said. He thought the snow had started; he’d smelled the impending snow since morning. Then he replaced her at the glass and saw Main Street. He dropped down. Was the back door locked? Yes. He and Mim crawled behind the aisles of toddler fare, the fake babies, squealing teddys, and assortment of cheap plastic shapes. It was the biggest dead stream he’d seen in months, a macabre parade walking from sidewalk to sidewalk in the wake of an invisible, infernal piper. Homecoming Day, Founder’s Birthday, the End of the War. Did small towns still celebrate soldiers who made it back from the front? Salute that miracle of making it through the ordeal? The festivities honoring the defeat of the plague, the armistice with chaos, wouldn’t match the spectacle outside. There wouldn’t be enough people left to hold a banner. He shook his head. Fucking Connecticut.

The necrotic multitudes marched past the toy-store windows. This sick procession. Mark Spitz and his new companion repaired to the stockroom. Maybe the weather marshaled the dead into that big group, repurposed synapses in their spongy and riddled brains compelling them from the wind, the blizzard washing over the seaboard. Some unfortunate souls would discover where the dead army waited out bad weather. Not him. Mark Spitz and Mim remained in the back. When the dead finally disappeared, the big furry flakes stuck to the road and sidewalk. In the lost days when the pipes poured and electrons filled the multifarious cables, the ambient heat of the ground prevented such quick accumulations. Now the snow piled swiftly on the deadened earth.