Zone One

At the moment Richie reached for the trailer’s door, the Quiet Storm was settling before the cab’s dashboard, communing with the machine, and Mark Spitz crouched inside a minivan of German manufacture, opening a packet of chocolate-covered peanuts he’d found. He heard Richie shout. Richie rushed up the side of the truck toward his comrades, followed by the stupendous troop of skels he’d just released. Were there sixty or seventy or more? When they recounted the story later, they were invariably accused of exaggeration, and the anecdote stalled for a few minutes until the debate over that modern version of How Many Angels Can Dance on a Head of a Pin, How Many Dead Can Fit into a Trailer was settled. “Quite a few” was the invariable conclusion.

At any rate, the wreckers were in the middle of the bridge, cut off from land. The trio had two weapons, as they had never needed more than that on an excursion. The Quiet Storm had stopped packing her rifle; she hadn’t used it in weeks, and then only when Richie was out with a stomach thing. That was the problem with progress-it made you soft. The dead shimmied and squeezed between the vehicles, the green convertible with the shredded vinyl top and the plumber’s van. When Richie removed himself from his sight lines, Mark Spitz proceeded to drop the creatures, bringing down a skel that wore bloody surgical scrubs-impossible to know if it had earned that mess on or off duty-and an urban cowgirl whose rhinestones sparkled coolly in the sunlight. He obliterated their faces and everything beneath their faces, but there was no way his team was going to get them all. The wreckers couldn’t quantify the horde’s numbers.

“We’re not getting through this bunch,” the Quiet Storm said. They were calm. They assessed. The sheriff of the local municipality and his posse had blocked off their little patch of Heaven quite efficiently; the wreckers couldn’t even squeeze around on the railing past the barbed wire.

“Looks deep enough,” Richie said as he jumped off the bridge and into the water.

The drop was twenty feet. Richie’s head popped up ten yards downstream. He beckoned them down to the water. The Quiet Storm scratched her fingers through the bristles on her scalp, delivered a stream of invective, and followed his lead.

It was impossible. Mark Spitz counted the massing dead. The forsaken devils waded between the cars, dumb and foul, groping toward their food supply, which had dwindled by two-thirds before their devoid mentalities. They were too brainless, he thought, to be disappointed by having to share the scraps of him after that endless internment in the trailer. No way Mark Spitz was going to be able to get past them. They were too many. You ran in this situation. A simple calculation without shame.

Richie shouted from the shore. The gunfire would have alerted the other three wreckers; they’d have backup soon. Instinct should have plucked Mark Spitz from the bridge and dropped him into the current by now. But he did not move.

When he told them later that he couldn’t swim, they laughed. It was perfect: from now on he was Mark Spitz. But he had no fear of the water, not with his dependable comrades down there, and his undimmed halo of luck. He knew a few strokes. No: he leaped to the hood of the late-model neo-station wagon and started firing, first taking out the grandmotherly type in the tracksuit and then the teenager wearing grimed soccer-team colors, because he knew he could not die. He vaulted onto the black sedan beside him and demolished the craniums of two more skels, who dropped and were stepped on by the replacements behind them. He had suspicions, and every day in this wasteland supplied more evidence: He could not die. This was his world now, in all its sublime crumminess, where intellect and ingenuity and talent were as equally meaningless as stubbornness, cowardice, and stupidity. He shot the one wearing green-lensed aviator glasses in the middle of the forehead, and twice shot the creature in the hunting jacket in the chest before he mortified it with a final blast. He could not die. Two more creatures tumbled to the asphalt, their craniums disintegrated. Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety.

He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down. • • •