Zone One

“Dag,” Tad said. “Ten days-that was a new record.” The final member of their group, Tad, was a slender young man who wore a faded green T-shirt that portrayed the zodiac in silver glitz. He sat at the barn-wood table in the middle of the kitchen when Mark Spitz came inside, assault rifle flat across his knobby knees. Backup in case the other two ran into trouble. His spectacles were thin wire frames held together by fraying black tape. He was Mark Spitz’s age, but his long ponytail was completely gray, which Mark Spitz took as a recent development.

Jerry lost the argument for expulsion quickly. The man’s objections seemed a performance for Mark Spitz’s benefit, to show him this wasn’t as slapdash an operation as it appeared. Mark Spitz promised to move on at first light and contributed his canned clams as an appetizer to that night’s repast of venison curry and mushrooms. He hated the tinny taste of canned clams but had carried them in his pack for three months for a day such as this, when he met an aficionado. Jerry was his man. In turn, Mark Spitz was grateful for the variation on deer, after the numbing rotation of venison stew, venison kebabs, and venison jerky he’d endured in the previous months. He’d met folks who carried around their favorite hot sauce in their pack, sure, drizzling it onto a rabbit drumstick or unidentifiable fowl, but few wanderers had the luxury or inclination to grind their own spice blends, and Mark Spitz appreciated this gustatory verve.

“Do you have any food allergies?” Tad asked.

“No.”

“I’ve been trying to perfect my peanut curry.”

They ate at the dining-room table, candlelight bestowing dramatic shadows to their movements as they forked morsels out of bowls decorated with pale green triangles, which looked to have been purchased at a neighbor’s yard sale for the nostalgia they invoked for visits at grandma’s house. It was still light outside, but behind the occluded windows it was always midnight. The house had probably been a no-shoes preserve before the catastrophe and now that edict kept the noise to the necessary minimum, and the dead walking on by.

He gave them the Anecdote and he listened to their stories in turn. Last Night swooped down on Margie as she visited a small island off Cape Cod, where she remained for the entire first year of the ruination. She’d been a houseguest at the beach compound of a college friend, bodysurfing and munching on clam rolls, and if she hadn’t decided to leave Monday morning instead of Sunday afternoon as planned, she might not have made it through. There were five houses on the island; two were unoccupied that weekend and one family decided to brave it to one of the shelters announced on the radio, in those early days of frantic transmissions and haven roll calls. They never returned. That left ten people on the tiny lump of sand, and they struggled and fretted together. They rowed to the mainland for foraging excursions in their little dinghy but mostly stuck to their island dunes, fishing and waiting for news. Bandits razed the community, creeping ashore one day in their ruinous morality. They raped, they pillaged, sparing nothing, not even the lobster traps, which they dragged ashore with glee. Margie was the only one to escape-she had ever prided herself on her swimming-and her placid stay left her ill-prepared for life in the wasteland.

“I caught up,” she said. They were playing hearts in the parlor. Mark Spitz didn’t know if her memories or her cards were responsible for her rueful expression. She tried to hoof it back to Vermont, where she worked for an outfit that sold artisanal pickles-“We were really huge at all the big farmers’ markets”-but never made it out of the state. She hooked up with Tad in a high-school cafeteria, and together they returned to the farmhouse, lugging big plastic bags of powdered eggs. Tad was born the same year as Mark Spitz, but unlike Mark Spitz he’d found his vocation before the upheaval, scripting interstitial narrative sequences for a video-game company that specialized in first-person shooters. In between levels, Tad’s cutscenes on how the aliens came to be split into two adversarial species, or the magic amulet was lost in the volcano, allowed the players to rest their thumbs. A respite in their quest through the carnage.