Zone One

Mark Spitz said, “For fuck’s sake.” His new policy announced itself: The sooner you take the stragglers down, the better. They weren’t the Lieutenant’s sentimentalized angels, dispensing obscure lessons through the simple fact of their existence, and Mark Spitz’s impulse to leave Ned the Copy Boy at his post in the empty office was no mercy. These things were not kin to their perished resemblances but vermin that needed to be put down. Why had he faltered?

Gary dropped his pack and ensconced himself in the seeker’s chair, removing his mesh gloves with a theatrical flourish. He arranged the proprietor’s pale and faintly gray hand on his open palm. “Just a quick reading, Mark Spitz,” Gary said. “There are things we need to know.”

“It’s disrespectful,” Mark Spitz said. He raised his rifle; Gary waved it away. Gary wasn’t inclined to abuse on the caliber of his old bandit cronies, but that didn’t mean Mark Spitz wanted to be a witness, and there was no point in mocking a skel unless you had a witness. Mark Spitz couldn’t isolate the origin of his distaste, and was disinclined to associate it with the previous afternoon’s solicitude toward Ned. He was too tired to take on the added freight of new symptoms.

His hand nestled in hers, Gary’s black fingernails found analogue in the red grit beneath their host’s. Soothseeker and soothsayer alike had clawed through their respective cemetery dirt. Gary winched his eyebrows. “Anyone you want to talk to in the Great Beyond, Mark Spitz?”

A few blocks past the wall, his uncle’s apartment hovered nineteen stories above the street, a pulsing presence. Mark Spitz didn’t need a medium; signal flares and semaphore would have sufficed. What revelation would Uncle Lloyd have delivered? What did his uncle know now that he hadn’t known before the cataclysm? Nothing. Nothing Mark Spitz hadn’t already discovered in the wasteland.

At Mark Spitz’s demurral, Gary attached an invisible headset to his ear and radioed, “Lieutenant, do you copy? We need our orders. Don’t leave us to Fabio, bruh.”

Gary could have addressed his brothers, had he been able to evade and outwit his denial over their deaths. Any seance was doomed, in Mark Spitz’s estimation, even if the young psychic had functioned properly, if she had still owned her talents. He’d sifted through the failed proofs of an afterlife many a cold night. There was a barrier at the end of one’s life, yes, but nothing on the other side. How could there be? The plague stopped the heart, one’s essence sloughed off the pathetic human meat and dog-paddled through the ectoplasm or whatever, and then the plague restarted the heart. What kind of cruel deity granted a glimpse of the angelic sphere, only to yank it away and condemn you to a monster’s vantage? Sentenced you to observe the world through the sad aperture of the dead, suffer the gross parody of your existence. Outside Zone One, the souls sat trapped in the bleachers, spectators to the travesties committed by their alienated hands.

The death of the afterlife was not without its perks, however, sparing Mark Spitz the prospect of an eternity reliving his mistakes and seeing their effects ripple, however briefly and uselessly, through history.

“This Gypsy’s missing a few screws,” Gary said. He lifted the slab of her hand and dropped its dead weight on the table.

Kaitlyn rejoined them. “Looks like she started living back there once it went down.” She shook her head at the tableau before her but was unable to be authentically appalled. It had been a long day. “You’re sick, Gary.”

“Nothing you’d like to ask, Kaitlyn?” Gary gripped the fortune-teller’s hand again. “Don’t you want to know when you meet Mr. Right?”

“Okay, I’ll bite-”

“Wrong word.”

His comrades settled into Solve the Skel joviality, Mark Spitz told himself to relax. It had been a rough two days, between Human Resources and the Lieutenant’s execution of the forbidden thought. In half an hour they’d be at Wonton and another week closer to the remaking of the world. He felt something in his skin, though, the faintest of vibrations.

Kaitlyn asked, “Will the Triplets make it through?”

“What’s the matter, plague got your tongue?… Hold on, I’m getting something…” Gary vamped, eyes clenched. “Three brave souls…”

“Cheyenne, fool. Is Cheyenne okay?”

“The answer is… Yes!”

“Sweet lord.”

Mark Spitz asked, “Will we make it through?”

Gary opened one eye and grinned. “Let me check, hold on a sec… Madame Gypsy, can you help us see the future?”

We make the future, Mark Spitz thought. That’s why we’re here.

“It’s hazy,” Gary said. He concentrated harder, hand trembling. “What you really want to know is, will you make it through?”

“Yes.”