Zone One

His machine trembled to life. The speakers picked up the song in the third verse, blaring at the preferred deafening setting marked by a notch of tape. A quarter of the occupants proceeded to hum and bop their heads; it had been a powerhouse single twelve summers ago. No room at the bar. The regulars at their posts groused about when management was going to fix the wobbly stool, they’d been suffering for weeks. The bartender’s girlfriend tried to get his attention but he practiced his trade’s skill of selective vision, which he employed all too often when he was not behind the bar. Then he saw her and grinned. It was their anniversary. Three months. Smeared plates marched up the busboy’s arm; he pretended to drop one, joshing with the elderly couple grabbing a bite before bridge. Same day every week, same dishes, same lousy tip. In the corner, the rambunctious party of eight started in with “Happy Birthday” and customers in the vicinity were shamed into joining in or at least mouthing the words. The hostess directed the termite specialists to a two-top underneath the high-def and they asked for another table. The game was on in half an hour and they hated the pregame announcer so ferociously that they’d been looking forward to heckling him all day. The hostess’s new diet was doing the trick for a change, everyone kept telling her so and it seemed like they really meant it. Indeed her uniform was too big. Fortunately she still had her old one somewhere, or had she thrown it out? Then another table cooked up a drunken “Happy Birthday,” even though no one in their party was having a birthday, for they were under the mistaken impression that it earned them a free round. They confused this chain for that other chain. The new waitress bore the tepid meat loaf back into the kitchen. Every week her apologies would diminish in sincerity.

His parents were right where he left them, his dad unbuckling his belt one notch and his mom grinning, eyes bright at the sight of him, sipping from the oversize green straw in her banana daiquiri. The red vinyl was still warm. It was their night out. • • •

“Want a lift?”

Now the world was muck. But systems die hard-they outlive their creators and unlike plagues do not require individual hosts-and thus it was a well-organized muck with a hierarchy, accountability, and, increasingly, paperwork. Bozeman’s appointment in the current order was as Wonton’s top military clerk, principal caretaker of the camp’s holistic integrity in all aspects. Every night, Bozeman held the garrison over his shoulder and burped it, cooing work-order lullabies. He knew the secret contents of the parcels in the bellies of the choppers crisscrossing the seaboard, he ensured that designated calibers reached the waiting chambers, he slept nights with the key to the fridge that held the brass’s grass-fed porterhouse on a chain around his puffy neck. Mark Spitz was surprised to see their steward at the wheel of the jeep, as the man rarely strayed from the second-floor offices of the bank. Surely the farther he strayed from ground zero, the more he shriveled.

In the passenger seat, a civilian wrapped in a black pencil skirt and white blouse sized up Mark Spitz over the rim of her blue-tinted sunglasses. She was a meteor crashed from another part of the solar system, or a place even more remote, life before the agony, strutting from a magazine catering to the contemporary professional woman. The cover lines were scrubbed of compatibility tests and dispatches from the frontiers of How to Please Your Man research, and teased instead testimonials to self-sufficiency, the virtues of a contained existence, the holy grail of complete actualization. She threatened a fly with a glossy white folder and smiled at Mark Spitz, the first bona fide citizen he’d seen since the Zone. “Plenty of room,” she said. It was, in addition, the first time he’d seen someone wearing pearls since he started running.

Mark Spitz did as he was told. Bozeman informed him they were headed to HQ after a brief pit stop on West Broadway. “This is Ms. Macy,” he said. “She’s here from Buffalo doing some recon.” Bozeman put a bit of spin on this last word, what Mark Spitz would have called ironic if the world hadn’t rendered such a thing into scarcity. Irony was an ore buried too deep in the crust and the machine did not exist on Earth that was capable of reaching it. The clerk kept his eyes on the road, swerving around mammoth scorched patches of asphalt where the marines roasted dead skels before Disposal’s implementation. The black spots of buckled tar were no threat to the vehicle. Mark Spitz chalked it up to superstition.