Zone One

“This place is different. Someplace has to be.” His head was on her stomach. Her fingertips drew letters on his scalp. Words? A name? Her kids’ names? “Or else we should just end it now.”

“Buffalo.”

“If there’s nothing out there, what’s the point?”

“There’s here.”

“Have to keep on moving, honey. You stay in one spot, you’re just another straggler.”

In the old joke, the intransigent father goes out for cigarettes and never comes back. The family is bereft. These days your companion in oblivion went out on a routine foraging run and never came back. One warm day, Mim left to scare up some pepper for the lentil soup and did not return. Gone, like that. He searched their neighborhood haunts, and the Main Street businesses they had put off raiding until a rainy-day need. Her various go-packs remained in their stashes. He discovered no indication of where it had happened, and it didn’t matter anyway, did it? He waited a week. And then he moved on. If there’s nothing out there, what’s the point? He didn’t have the answer. He laced his boots.

People disappeared. You never knew it was the last time you’d see them. For a long time, he retained most of their names. Before Northampton, he sometimes indulged visions of coming back one day to all the towns he’d stayed in during the catastrophe, in an electric car driven by his surly grandson. Meet the kids or spouses of the kindred he’d met out in the land, sit for a spell and drink a cup of tea on the plastic-covered sofa downstairs in the split-level. As if anyone they had loved would make it through.

Ever since the soldiers rescued him, he started losing them, the names. They were dust in his pocket. Their eccentricities, the moronic advice vis-a-vis food safety, the locations of the rescue centers they’d obsessed over lasted longer than their names. One night he got the urge to record what he remembered in one of the kiddie armadillo notebooks. It passed. He didn’t stir from his sleeping bag. Let them go, he thought. Except her.

Unlike Mim, the Lieutenant commanded a full complement of mourners. Omega and Bravo held the wake in a Brazilian restaurant on Pearl following a quick survey of the nabe. They’d gone out looking for the other sweeper teams to no avail. The comms were useless, unleashing a metallic howling that kindled dread even in their veteran bones. Their comrades would hear about it tomorrow, and the customary Sunday-night hang out would become a second, boozy memorial.

“He’d want it that way,” Carl said.

“Of that I am sure,” Mark Spitz said.

Work was over once Mark Spitz returned with the news. Angela reconfirmed their choice of venue after doing recon on the liquor inventory. She’d become partial to cachaca after a six-month thing with a Brazilian guy whose constant referencing of his nationality was a cornerstone of his personality, and the drink’s foreign provenance meant it was not subject to the looting regs. Unless the powers had changed the rules these last two weeks they’d been in the field-apparently all sorts of stuff was happening in the world while they roamed the bruises of this necropolis. Camps collapsing, imperiled triplets. The Lieutenant’s troops would produce a worthy memorial. Reggae issued from some dead busboy’s digital music dock, courtesy of Carl’s playlists, and went quite well with the caipirinhas, which didn’t taste half bad, chilled by chem cold packs and infused with the proper measure of lime juice and sugar. At the festivities’ kickoff, Angela was scrounging behind the bar when Kaitlyn started to speak. “Don’t,” Angela said.

“I was going to say, take two bottles,” Kaitlyn said.

Black silhouettes of blade-leafed jungle plants were painted on the walls, more goofy than exotic as they shape-shifted in the frothy light of their lamps and candles. They toasted the Lieutenant. They swapped remembrances of their first day in the Zone, their initial meetings with their eccentric superior officer, each taking a turn at the canvas. The instant Mark Spitz drained his second drink, No Mas grabbed the glass from his hand and mixed another. No Mas had been smiling at Mark Spitz and over-chuckling at his jokes since Mark Spitz walked in on him and Gary in the bathroom. From their furtive expressions, Mark Spitz assumed he’d interrupted some nouveau hand-job ritual, possibly of wretched Connecticut derivation.

“Don’t worry,” Gary told No Mas. “He’s cool.”