Zone One

“I’ll have them work up a Crusty Old Guy avatar. If they can do space aliens, they can do you, Jerry.”

Jerry said he’d resume selling real estate. Surplus inventory will be a tough nut in every market, but once rightful owners and heirs are sorted out, business will start up again. “Not to be morbid,” he said, “but that’s facts. In a time of national despair-like a recession-you have to hustle for clients because people don’t know what they’re capable of if they really put their minds to it. Buyers won’t need convincing this time around.” Northampton will appeal for all the reasons it has always appealed, he told them, but there will be even larger numbers of people trying to move out of the cities and start fresh. Too many memories in their old neighborhoods. “Take a house like this-you don’t see another in any direction. It’s a healing thing,” he said, too forcefully, as if mentally imprinting the new slogan onto business cards.

Margie shushed him. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the congregation outside.

“Sorry, dear.”

“Still pickles, Margie?” Tad asked.

“If they make it through,” she said, referring to her former employers. “Maybe I’ll start it up again myself.”

“Another brine mess you’re getting yourself into,” Tad teased. She punched him in the arm. They were a family. Mark Spitz was at his girlfriend’s house for the holidays, stuck on the sofa with her kin while she took a nap upstairs. They passed his test, and he theirs. What were the chances of this raggedy bunch finding one another in the ruins, he wondered. Drawn together by the magic of this place the same way the missing owners were, inspired to make a new start. The toy store. He’d had something like this, briefly, in the toy store. The accident that outlives its circumstance and blossoms. All over the country survivors formed ill-fated tribes that the dead inevitably tore to shreds. Desperate latecomers asked for asylum from those inside and were turned away at the barrel of a semiauto: This is our house. He’d slept in the dead trees and now here he was with this family. He could’ve spent the night inside the studio and awakened to a property full of skels. Would he have made it out? As before, home was a beloved barricade. When school, work, the many-headed beast of strangers and villains comprising the world threatened to destroy, home remained, family remained, and the locks would hold, the lullabies would ward off all bogeymen. He was trapped in this house and he couldn’t think of where else he’d rather be.

Margie asked Mark Spitz what his plans were. She’d scratched at the wound on her face all night, and a clear bead of fluid appeared at the edge of the scab. They each wanted to resume where they left off. Go back to the place where they were safe, he thought. Early notes in his unified theory of stragglers.

“Move to the city,” he said.

They offered to let him stay after the siege, if he liked. He said yes.

It ended quickly three days later. Mark Spitz could have kept his wits a good deal longer, but his companions were fashioned of less durable alloys. Mark Spitz pegged Jerry to be the first to crack. Mark Spitz was from Long Island and maintained the suburban boy’s suspicion of the pastoral, and here was a man who hunted, gutted, and dressed big game. Mark Spitz cast Jerry as the cowboy right-winger who was going to show this vermin who was boss, blast one of the front windows into splinters and start sending these cretins to their God. Firing into the agitated horde until one of the monsters got ahold of his gun barrel, wrestled it away, and the rest started picking at all the boards. It always happened quick. One part of the barricade failed, and then it was as if the refuge sighed and everything disintegrated at once. The spell of protection sputtered, all out of eldritch juice, and the mighty stronghold was made of straw again. All it took was one flaw in the system, a bug roosting deep in the code, to initiate the cascade of failure.

Tad, when he snapped, was the type to unlatch the front door and run screaming into the mess of them. Suicide by skel. There was a limit to what the human mind, born into that sweet and safe and lost world, could endure. He hadn’t suspected Margie, whom he had decided to save if possible. Bring her with him out the second-floor window, then on the top of the porch, jump and roll and keep moving. In retrospect, the fact that she wore her motocross gear for the final forty-eight hours might have been a hint.