Zone One

The vehicles stop. Some obstruction they can’t see at the head of the line. Distressing. People shout rumors down the turnpike. Aunt Ethel stirs in the backseat, her new brain issuing commands, her macrame shawl drops from her bosom and she takes a hunk of meat out of Jeffrey Fitzsimmons’s neck, and nephew Jeffrey steers the two-year-old sport-utility vehicle into the Petersons’ Japanese compact, which is so crammed with heirlooms and bottled water and camping gear that Sam Peterson can barely see out the windows, not that he woulda had time to get out of the way even if he’d seen the Fitzsimmonses coming. Bang, crash, ploof of air-bag expanding, squish of metal impaling flesh in arrangements unforeseeable by crash-test professionals. The eight-car pile brings all the northern movement on the interstate to a halt. There’s no getting around. No backing up. Jammed in there. And then the dead start to move from the trees.

Now it was time to open the lanes. If all went well, the Northeast Corridor will eventually stretch from D.C. to Boston and the precious cargo (medicine, bullets, foodstuffs, people) will travel unimpeded up and down the coast. Mark Spitz’s wrecker detail was responsible for a stretch of I-95 in mephitic Connecticut and the occasional tributary, foraying from comfy Fort Golden Gate. In prelapsarian days, the base had been one of the largest retirement communities in the state, known for its facility with the latest trends and currents in Alzheimer’s care. The redbrick walls encircling the property, constructed to keep the befogged safe inside, now kept those with an entirely different impairment to their mental faculties outside. Naturally, there were more gun nests.

The many-windowed campus buildings allowed the constant delectation of invigorating sunsets-indeed, it was hard for Mark Spitz to adjust to so much glass after a bunker existence-and the bungalows formerly inhabited by active, self-sufficient seniors were a serious upgrade from the communal bunks at the settlement camps. The dining hall was pastel and affirming, and no one complained when some rogue operative booted up the old sound system one day and the anodyne instrumentals scored every meal in a ceaseless loop of deracinated pop. The fort’s inhabitants fluttered down the concrete paths in electric carts and every night the windows crackled with the blue glow of screens, as the extensive video library reacquainted these minions of reconstruction with the old entertainments that had meant so much to them. It was hard to believe that there had once been faces like that, the beautiful ones with their promises and lures.

Fort Golden Gate, in a suburb of Bridgeport, was a nexus of reconstruction initiatives. Mark Spitz played poker with nuclear technicians, civil engineers, and sundry gurus of infrastructure. It was from Golden Gate that the first recon teams ventured to explore the viability of a Manhattan operation. Months later, he remembered some of his hold ’em buddies had murmured about a “Zone One.”

The majority of Golden Gate’s inhabitants hailed from the Northeast, in keeping with the demographics of ruin. It was an interregnum quirk: people tended to stay in-region, roving in circles, bouncing back off an invisible barrier two states south. A mountain range draped in imposing shadow scared them toward the survivor community the other wanderers kept babbling about. In the chow line, Mark Spitz’s fellow reconstruction drones trembled and tic’d like contestants in some deplorable PASD beauty contest. Observing them, Mark Spitz put the rebirth of civilization at even money. Even if every last skel dropped to the ground tomorrow, did these harrowed pilgrims possess the reserves to pull out of the death spiral? Will the gloomy survivors manage to reproduce, the newborns fatten up? Which of the hoary debilitations and the patient old illnesses will reap them? It was not hard to see the inhabitants of the camps devolve into demented relics too damaged to do anything more than dwindle into extinction in a generation or two.

Even money. He was glad to have his own bed, convertible from the sofa in the living room of a spacious and tastefully appointed bungalow. The owners had spent their sunset years on an assiduous circuit of the world’s top cruises, and photos of the grand ships sailed the wall over his head as he slept. Once or twice, the old couple crept into his current dream narratives, and the dead played shuffleboard and carried plates to the early-bird buffets, which visited a different world cuisine each night, All You Can Eat, All-inclusive.