Zone One

Gary explained their side enterprise. Scavengers plundered the pharmacies of the famous painkillers first, the good stuff, and then the proven downers, the tranquilizers road-tested by generations of glum moms. Entrepreneurial salvage and distribution of the numbing agents didn’t begin in earnest until the universal diagnosis of PASD exposed the unfortunate gap in Buffalo’s roster of pharmaceutical sponsors-for those willing to go on the hunt for the indispensable medley of benzodiazepines and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, this was a primo market opportunity. Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time. It was unwise to take a pill out in the wastes, as you might not wake up when you were supposed to, at the sound of the dead multitude clawing against the barn door, for example, but in Happy Acres and its ilk one was unburdened of the curse of eternal vigil. Miss a day here and there, zonked out on this or that-they’d earned it. “Someone’s got to step in,” No Mas said. “People are hurting.”

“What do you charge?” Mark Spitz said.

“Sliding scale, needs-based. Juice boxes accepted.”

The pharmacies and residential medicine cabinets were empty of narcotics and antibiotics, but the antidepressants in their plastic cylinders sprouted like orange mushrooms behind the mirrored doors, ready for harvest. Gary and some dependable players in other sweeper units delivered their booty to No Mas, and on Sunday No Mas rendezvoused with his Wonton connection, who got the pills out on choppers to the camps. A shadow Buffalo executing course corrections for reconstruction.

Mark Spitz told them he’d keep his mouth shut. Yes, it was a necessary service. Perhaps the Lieutenant could have benefited from the cutting-edge mood stabilizers. Perhaps not.

“You’re sure he wasn’t bit?” Carl asked for the third time.

“No,” Mark Spitz said.

“Leave a note?”

“No.”

“Damn.”

They suicided themselves in the homes they loved, surrounded by their beloved objects, or out in the wasteland they despised, alone in the cold dirt. Some arrived at the decision when they were safe in the camps, the semblance of normalcy permitting the first true accounting of the horror, its scope and unabating adversities. The unforgivable in all its faces. The suicides accepted, finally, what the world had become and acted logically. Buffalo was not enamored of the statistics, and ordered Dr. Herkimer to add a longer Prevention/Understanding Ideation unit to the PASD seminars. Killing yourself in the interregnum was understandable. Killing yourself in the age of the American Phoenix was a rebuke to its principles. “We Make Tomorrow!”-if we can get that far, Mark Spitz thought-so tomorrow needs a marketing rollout, hope, psychopharmacology, a rigorous policing of bad thinking, anything to stoke the delusion that we’ll make it through.

Now and again, Mark Spitz held desultory debates with his own forbidden thought, most recently the previous afternoon on Duane Street. He wished the fallen a safe journey.

“Maybe he was bored.”

One of the snipers observed the Lieutenant walk out to the helipad atop the bank. It was a quiet evening, sparse with the dead all day, one of the last quiet evenings before the devils started accumulating in their recent density. The sniper waved at the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant waved back and jammed a grenade into his mouth.

“Can you even fit a grenade into your mouth?” Carl asked.

“Gag reflex,” No Mas said.

“One of those little thermite jobs, sure,” Gary said.

“It’s sad,” Kaitlyn said.

Fabio had installed himself at the man’s desk. Fabio knew himself to be a pretender, from the way he started and almost knocked over his coffee when Mark Spitz showed up. He looked terrible, as if he’d been living in a hamper. He spoke fast, on high rev, as he apologized for not informing the sweepers earlier. With the whole eastern seaboard lit up and scrambling the last two weeks to cover the recent blips, Buffalo thought it best if the sweepers kept to their timetables.

“Blips?” Mark Spitz asked.

“Reversals, complications,” Fabio told him. “Blips.” Fabio was in command until they sent down a replacement. Buffalo had already missed the last two food drops.

The office’s digital player, enthroned on a doily in the microwave/coffeemaker nexus by the watercooler, had been playing a set of old pop and Mark Spitz was startled by the DJ’s sudden bluster: “Hey! All you out there. Hope you’re getting a chance to enjoy this sunshine today!” Surely there were no radio stations up yet. The DJ forecast fair skies for the rest of the afternoon, and Mark Spitz realized it was a recording of a radio block from some random afternoon before the disaster, a ghost transmission of yesterday’s deals on teeth bleaching, ads for movies playing in dead theaters, and last-minute invitations to join class-action suits.