Zone One

Their assignment on the day in question concerned a fouled-up segment of 95. One of the generals visiting Golden Gate on a fact-finding tour of New England reconstruction efforts had sworn by this highway when visiting family over the holidays, back in the good old dead world, and thus his pet shortcut became an official leg of the corridor. The skel weather was light, one or two per mile. The wreckers had started taking the kill fields for granted, it was hard not to; their fight-or-flight impulses no longer enjoyed their daily exercise regimen. The crew discovered clear blacktop between cities. “I need some cars,” the Quiet Storm told Mark Spitz. “It’s coming together in my mind.”

A satisfied chuckle escaped the Quiet Storm when they reached the viaduct. The choker of lost vehicles, unruly and melancholy, stretched a mile. When the wreckers tracked ahead to see what kind of jam they had on their hands, they saw that it terminated at the northern edge of the concrete span, which was completely barriered by hotel courtesy shuttles and barbed wire. Three police cruisers butted bumpers beyond them, and the wreckers hazarded that this had been some country sheriff’s attempt at banishing the plague from his or her jurisdiction. They had failed, obviously, and the blockade had merely impeded these people’s escape, no doubt fatefully. No judgment. Whether the plague marked these pilgrims here or miles up the road, the resolution was the same.

The wreckers split up. Martha, Jimmy, and Mel, the other half of the crew, took the southern end of the line of stillborn escape craft, and Mark Spitz’s contingent nabbed the viaduct. The cloudy water produced a pleasant melody beneath the span, a reassuring whisper. Taking care of the barbed wire looked to be a hassle, so Mark Spitz suggested they put off the barrier and start with clearing the bridge, which, it turned out, jibed with the Quiet Storm’s intentions for this lot. They confronted the familiar conveyances and the predictable anecdotes of desertion: four motorcycles that had squeezed between cars to the front of the blockage and then couldn’t turn around; utility vehicles that had been over-packed according to the emergency broadcast system’s monotoned instructions, in order to abandon the lifesaving supplies at this roadblock; a bare sedan with all its doors open because every seat had been taken, and then every seat evacuated, no trace.

The only unusual specimen was the eighteen-wheeler athwart the span, the logo on the side of the trailer marking it as part of a box retailer’s fleet. The wreckers weren’t a salvage detail. Their manifest included a daily gas quota, which they siphoned once the vehicles were cleared, and they were allowed to grab for personal use any food they discovered, the energy bars and preservative-laden snack chips, but that was it. When Richie unlatched the back of the trailer, he told them later, it was to see if it was worth a later trip by a proper team. Richie was a stickler, a teenager who’d been taken in as a mascot by the first military detachment at Golden Gate. Clearing wrecks was his first detail beyond the walls of the campus.

How and why the dead had been herded inside was a mystery. The Quiet Storm offered that it was a government job, the creatures earmarked for experiments, in those early days when that was a priority; perhaps a computer in Buffalo had this shipment flagged as MIA and after the engagement the file was appropriately amended. Mark Spitz’s theory was drawn from the stories of those who had kept their loved ones chained up in the rec room or the garage in hope of the cure’s arrival. The erection of this viaduct barricade was contemporaneous with the heyday of such optimistic gestures: We can beat this, this is just a temporary thing, if we keep our wits. He imagined the block association of a tight-knit suburb, some planned community off the interstate-on the border of the country club’s golf course, a quick drive to the outlet mall-corralling all their infected kin into the trailer, Mom and Dad, the Smiths and half of the Joneses, for a road trip. To a place where they could be cured, or set free, or exterminated with a semblance of dignity and a smidgen of religious custom. The driver of the cab was a local pillar, worked his way up from country-club caddie to master of the nabe, owning the biggest house on the cul-de-sac, a spectacular castle that seemed, on certain nights, to float on its own bourgeois cloud above the development. Didn’t mind driving a load of kids to the multiplex, to boot-if anyone can get them there, it’s him. “Sent to live on a farm upstate.”