Zone One

She was a lean greyhound, hyperalert in the manner of those who’d suffered their refuge overrun too many times. Everyone got overrun, and then there existed those in a whole different tier of frequent-flier status. They never slept, rarely blinked. The Quiet Storm was more functional than most skinheads in that she still spoke, and occasionally permitted a smile to splinter her lips. She’d worked in a tree nursery before the recent engrueling of the world, tending to and cultivating the hedges that prevented the hoi polloi from peeking at the aristocracy. Not very effective barrier material, Mark Spitz thought when informed of her occupation, unable to stop his immediate assessment. Everything was either a weapon or a wall, to be quantified and sorted in its utility as such.

She was their team leader and quite particular about how she liked her vehicles arranged on the asphalt, perhaps her previous job’s affection for the long view shaping her wreck style. Sometimes the Quiet Storm’s directives did not inspire conjecture as to her motives; equally as often her orders contravened intuition. On this segment of uneventful highway, there might be only five cars mucking up the right-of-way, and she’d order them parked perpendicular, or perhaps at a forty-five-degree angle, even though the shoulder had plenty of room for bumper-to-bumper. One school of car alignment maintained that this latter placement would, like a breaker, impede a swell of dead attracted to the noise of a convoy; Buffalo was a vocal proponent for a while. Mark Spitz noticed that the Quiet Storm favored patterns divisible by five, and grouped them by general size and occasionally by color, sometimes even towing a car for miles to fulfill her conception. The Quiet Storm consulted her tablet, skittering the stylus over the computer maps, effecting hieroglyphic notations. “Orders,” she said. Mark Spitz chalked it up to pointless military micromanagement or her brand of PASD, one or the other of these steadfast debilitations. It wasn’t until later that he saw the truth of it.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m getting there.”

The wreckers parted the junk sea, de-gnarling, unwinding the chaos. When a mammoth pileup gave issue to a serpent of silenced vehicles uncoiling for miles, their system disassembled it. They restored order. Sometimes Mark Spitz imagined that for every inch of asphalt they cleared, they reversed an equal increment of tragedy, undid whatever misfortunes had befallen the missing occupants. He immediately mortified himself for such thinking and fixed on the next looming collision. After a month, short supply trains utilized the roads they had cleared, bearing lima beans to the west, moving the water trucks to the dry gallon containers. The alchemy of reconstruction. The mileage of the wrecker teams north and south of them would connect eventually, in the manner of the transcontinental railroad. Connect the isolated camps and forts one by one, link the independent towns just now seduced to the national bosom, bid the life-giving vital material flow once more: they secured the track, advanced the heading mile by mile.

On the freeways Mark Spitz became a marksman. With the benefit of backup, line of sight, the luxury of drawing a bead on some slow-approaching creature at his leisure, he mastered the five target points on the skull most recommended by Buffalo for skel-dropping. (They’d done tests, collected oral testimony.) Some days the wreckers were outfitted with laser sights, if the army or marines passing through Golden Gate didn’t snag them, and after a time Mark Spitz articulated his own floating ruby bull’s-eye over the world when he went in for a kill with a bullet or a hatchet or baseball-size hunk of granite, activating a calm computer register inside his brain that calculated distance and wind speed, compensated for the level of erraticism in the target, the distance and accessibility of escape routes. The exquisite new art of drop ’em.

He eliminated that which would destroy him. In the broken land, the manifold survival strategies honed over a lifetime of avoiding all consequences rewrote themselves for this new world, or perhaps they had finally discovered their true arena, the field of engagement they had been created for. They had been put forth, tested, amended, debugged over a lifetime of tiny trials and contests, evasions of dangers big and small, social, symbolic, and, since the plague, lethal. If he’d been able to explain the extent of what was happening in his brain that day they nicknamed him Mark Spitz, the host of manic, overlapping processes, perhaps he’d have earned a different moniker, one suitable for the completely bloodless processes inside him.

“I was finally complete, in a way.”

“Not following.”

“Sorry.”