Zone One

Tad had attended college in town on the six-year plan, and returned after steady promotions at the game company, e-mailing his scripts from the group house he shared with his old buddies. He made a breathtaking wage compared to his peers, who wafted through the local service industries, pressing veggie sandwiches for coeds and hollowed-eyed dissertation jockeys, or selling gently used Adirondack chairs and a previous generation’s musty ball gowns and leisure suits to weekenders and summer people. Tad designed the house’s barricades, after he “just fell in love with the place.” The walk to the creek was a relatively secure jog with nice sight lines, and after he lucked out in a round of raids on the neighboring premises, he gathered a hearty store of rations. Before he found this place he was holed up on a marijuana farm with fellows of like-minded spiritual outlook. He wouldn’t talk about how that particular situation fell apart.

Tad fancied himself a hearts guru, not without cause. He shot the moon with irritating frequency that night as Mark Spitz maintained his standard B-grade execution, consistently in second or third place. As Tad tallied the last game of the night, stifling a grin, he told their visitor how when Jerry showed up at the door with fresh meat, he was immediately invited to stay after the pro forma examination. Jerry hooked up with the Massachusetts National Guard when the plague rolled in, touting his extensive knowledge of the area-“I’ve been helping people find their dream homes in Hampshire County for fifteen years, damn it”-and his two tours of duty in one of the Middle East wars. The local search-and-destroy posse outlasted many in the country, a whole three weeks, although by the final day, Jerry had to admit, it was only him and a former greeter at one of the local big-box stores, a man who suffered from senile dementia and kept pestering Jerry about their trip to the zoo. After the man died in his sleep, Jerry hunted solo, scraping by until he joined a caravan of six RVs headed to Canada. “The intel seemed good on that one,” he said, still disappointed. They had become a backward people, stunted and medieval: the world is flat, the Sun revolves around the Earth, everything is better in Canada. The travelers made it to Niagara Falls before things disintegrated in their predicable course, “over a woman of all things.” He returned to his hometown after spending the winter in Buffalo, only two miles from the fledgling HQ of reconstruction, although no one in the house knew this.

The trio was staying. Until the skels died off for real or were exterminated by a revivified government and galvanized citizenry sick of living in caves and eating ramen. “This is a war we can win,” Jerry said. The hunting was good, the water supply accessible, and their complementary talents and temperaments made for a convivial household, as such things go. “It’s nice to have a fourth for hearts,” Jerry admitted after the final game that evening, and Margie seconded. Mark Spitz stretched out on the parlor sofa and slept with his pistol under a frilly white pillow. He dreamed of Mim.

He asked, but no one knew what had happened to the owners.

He woke up in the middle of the night. Each night, before he went to sleep, he repeated to himself his current location, to ward off the morning vertigo, the disorientation that affirmed his utter unmooring from all things. He had murmured to himself: the projection booth of the discount theater that showed indie films, an elm tree off the overpass. A farmhouse in New England. He had no confusion over his whereabouts when he woke, and he listened for the thing that had punctured his rest. It called again: metal on metal. Tad appeared on the landing, the candle’s light on his white pajamas making him into a ghost.

“Too dark to see what it is,” Tad said. They waited. The alarm tinkled anew, then was silenced. “That’s the wire breaking. Raccoons will do that,” he said. “Sometimes.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Margie told him the next morning. She placed a cup of chamomile tea on the coffee table. “Not until they wander off.” Peel-away spy-hole slits were set into the tar-papered windows. This morning each window confirmed that the dead infiltrated the yard on all sides, ten or so having wandered onto the grounds in their misbegotten mission. A hard-luck ballerina and a kid with a green Mohawk roved in figure eights. They remained, not drifting away like dandelion seeds as they should have but tarrying on the property.