Zone One (30 page)

The fortune-teller’s was precisely such an atavistic enterprise,
a straggler in the current argot, with disintegrating tinsel sparking dully beyond the tacky exhortations stenciled on the window. Garlands of Christmas lights and black necklaces of dead insects beaded at the bottom of the window display. Every other store on the block ministered to some yuppie lack, bent toward the local demographic sun and absorbing into its capillaries imported kitchen implements and upscale children’s accoutrements. Yet here was the fortune-teller’s. Could events have transpired differently? If Bravo had won Fulton x Gold, Mixed Residential/Business, that other unit’s blend of personalities might have shepherded events in a different direction. If it hadn’t been Omega’s last stop before R & R, perhaps Gary wouldn’t have been in such a jovial mood and played the fool. Later Mark Spitz untangled the string of inevitabilities. It looked like a choker of dead black flies.

Gary snipped the bolt and Mark Spitz helped him slide up the shop’s recalcitrant gate. The dark brass doorknob and lock were relics, smoothed to an otherworldly luster by the caress of generations’ hands. Mark Spitz didn’t see this tacky shop attracting a high volume of seekers, but who knew what vital shops operated here before the clairvoyant unpacked her arcana, the clandestine line of utility and desire terminating at this address. Real estate agents, butchers, antique jewelers, and cell providers stood behind the counter, tending customers who wore fedoras, then loops of metal in soft tissue. Hoop skirts, panty hose, then blue ink where the symbology of the upstart faiths and outsider iconography were carved into their skin. The sole page in this address’s photo album he could see was the one before him now.

The proprietor sat at the table in the center of the room. Eschewing the traditional finery of her profession, this straggler was dressed in the all-black uniform of a downtown punk. She was around Mark Spitz’s age, not yet thirty when the plague dropped her in its amber, with green streaks entwined in her ebony-dyed hair and smudged mascara deepening the plague bruises circling
her eyes. The signs on the wall provided a menu of services in a popular computer font: Astrological Charts, Numerology, Aura Manipulation, and the enigmatic “Recalibration.” Small jars and bowls of herbs, rainbow powders, and bone-white charms perched on tiny metal shelves, props acquired from an internet retail site. Red and brown earth tones dominated the tapestries, pillows, and rugs, bestowing the aura of a lair. Omega stood before a medium’s sanctum as portrayed in pop culture, the demeanor of the clairvoyant herself bestowing a small, necessary tweak. The fortune-teller in the modern city, plying the Old World enchantments and scrying trade of her ancestors. Her parents probably thought she’d forsaken her heritage when she came home with that loop of metal in her nose, but it was an adjustment that allowed the family biz to keep up with the protean city. Everybody needs a shtick to keep competitive, Mark Spitz thought.

A hunk of the fortune-teller’s neck beneath her right ear was absent. The exposed meat resembled torn-up pavement tinted crimson, a scabbed hollow of gaping gristle, tubes, and pipes: the city’s skin ripped back. She haunted her old workstation, hands flat on the ruby-red cloth adorning the small round table. There were two chairs, her messages intended for one soul at a time.

Kaitlyn said, “I got the back” and retreated into the recesses of the shop, parting the curtain of red beads with her assault rifle.

Gary snickered mischievously.

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 séance 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.”

“Hold on a sec …” Gary’s body convulsed, a ferocious psychic current entering at that intersection of his skin and that of the fortune-teller. The mechanic couldn’t keep a straight face as he combated the forces of the spirit world, frail conduit. For the first time Mark Spitz noticed the tiny smile engraved into the fortune-teller’s black lips, as if she enjoyed the joke as well, or an altogether different amusement, the exact grain and texture of which only she could appreciate. Gary collapsed on the table, milked the moment, and then wearily raised his head. “They say everything is going to be all right, Mark Spitz. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

To be a good sport, Mark Spitz made a show of relief. On the street, his ash had begun to fall, his vanguard flakes.

“Okay, up, up, Gary,” Kaitlyn said, “let’s finish this off.”

“Don’t sulk,” Gary said. He lifted his fingers from the fortune-teller’s hand and the instant he broke contact she grabbed his hand and chomped deep into the meat between the index finger and thumb. Blood sprayed, paused, sprayed again with the exertions of his heart. The Gypsy’s mouth ground back and forth, ripping and chewing, and she gobbled up his thumb.

Kaitlyn’s bullets disintegrated her head and she slumped to the floor, spewing the dark fluid in her veins onto the shelves of a home-assembly particle-board bookcase filled with her occult
troves. Before her face was liquefied, her smile returned to her blood-splashed lips: a broad, satisfied crescent of teeth. Or so Mark Spitz imagined.

He ministered to Gary’s wound while Kaitlyn shot the fortune-teller four more times, cursing. Gary’s shrieks of shock and agony turned into a command for anticiprant. “Gimme the shit, where’s the shit, gimme the shit,” he cried, hands roving over his vest. Mark Spitz found his friend’s supply of antibiotic, in the same pocket that held this week’s hoard of mood stabilizers. Gary gobbled up the anticiprant, and then Mark Spitz’s stash and Kaitlyn’s. He howled.

It was folklore, the megadose of drugs that snuffed out the plague if you swallowed it quickly enough. Anticiprant had been a second-tier antibiotic in the previous world; no telling how it had been cast as the cavalry repelling the invading spirochetes of the plague. Poll a random mess table at a resettlement camp and you’d find one or two pheenies who claimed to know someone who knew someone who had been saved by this prophylaxis. When pressed, of course, no one could claim firsthand knowledge. Mark Spitz didn’t believe in its powers. More likely, the original carriers of this doomsday folklore hadn’t received a proper wallop of the plague, enough to infect. But it didn’t hurt to carry some pills in your pocket. People carried crucifixes and holy books. Why not an easy-to-swallow caplet of faith, in a new fast-acting formula.

Kaitlyn stabbed Gary’s arm with a morphine ampoule and finished dressing the wound. She wiped the blood off with a fuchsia hand towel from the back bathroom. He moaned and glared at his Gypsy as if to cut her open and fish around for his thumb and sew it back on. “Gypsy curse,” he said, spitting a ruby to the dusty carpet. The white mitt at the end of his wrist was pricked with red specks that bloomed into red petals, became a bouquet. Mark Spitz opened another dressing.

They didn’t have to get into the heavy stuff yet. There was
time. It was faster now, after generations and mutations, but there was time.

“I want more pills,” Gary said.

“I’ll see if Bravo is still up the block,” Kaitlyn said. Given their temperament, the unit was long back at Wonton, but Mark Spitz knew she wanted a chance to try and get a signal out to report the situation. Get a higher-up to weigh in, even if it was lowly Fabio.

They settled in the back room. The fortune-teller had dug out a meager alcove in the interregnum, for a few weeks at least. The apartment bore the telltale markers of siege life, in the goo mounds of candle wax, the ziggurat of cans of beans and soup. The couch and its cocoon of blankets was the nest where she plotted her unsuccessful escape. Mark Spitz helped Gary over to it, the wounded man traducing their dead host with every step.

Kaitlyn will be right back, Mark Spitz reassured. She’s dependable.

Gary dragged a fistful of quilt to his chin, like an old lady vexed by an ineradicable draft. “Why do they call you Mark Spitz?” he asked.

He told him about the wreckers, the Northeast Corridor, and the jokes when they got back to Fort Golden Gate from the viaduct. He’d laughed along with everyone else, but later he had to look up Mark Spitz, in a surreptitious mission for an old paper encyclopedia. First he had to find one, which took time. Finally he was saved by movie night at the bungalow of one of the infrastructure guys; the previous inhabitants owned a big fat dictionary, old school, with pictures, even. His nicknamesake had been an Olympic swimmer in the previous century, a real thoroughbred who’d held the world record for the most gold medals in one game: freestyle, butterfly. The Munich Games—Munich, where the scientists had made biohaz soup of the infected, in the early days of the plague, as they worked toward a vaccine. The word “soup” had stayed with him, after one of the denizens of the wasteland had
told him the story. People were becoming less than people everywhere, he had thought: monsters, soup.

Seven gold medals? Eight? Here was one of the subordinate ironies in the nickname: He was anything but an Olympian. The medals awarded this Mark Spitz were stamped from discarded slag. Mark Spitz explained the reference of his sobriquet to Gary, adding, “Plus the black-people-can’t-swim thing.”

“They can’t? You can’t?”

“I can. A lot of us can. Could. It’s a stereotype.”

“I hadn’t heard that. But you have to learn how to swim sometime.”

“I tread water perfectly.”

He found it unlikely that Gary was not in ownership of a master list of racial, gender, and religious stereotypes, cross-indexed with corresponding punch lines as well as meta-textual dissection of those punch lines, but he did not press his friend. Chalk it up to morphine. There was a single Us now, reviling a single Them. Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next, and so on, and they were packed together again, tight and suffocating on top of each other? Or was that particular bramble of animosities, fears, and envies impossible to recreate? If they could bring back paperwork, Mark Spitz thought, they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns.