Zone One (34 page)

He pried the fingers, draped his friend again, and sank into the green armchair facing the sofa. Gary had been carrying it for a long time, from the creases and chewed edges, pocket to pocket to pocket. Since when, which asylum, consulted in the dark of how many failed refuges? Maybe he’d carried it since Last Night. It had been carefully ripped from a magazine, a level fur of fibers describing the inside edge. On one side, the island bulged from the blue waters of the Mediterranean, a knuckled lump of rock. It looked like a grenade, he thought. On the opposite, a street scene unraveled: A slim alley pullulated with men and women mid-errand, perhaps around noon. A trinket store hawked postcards on long wire racks, azure rectangles featuring more pictures of the island. A young couple enmeshed fingers at a small table outside a café, the red and white and brown logo of the espresso distributor half shadowed on a sign over the entrance. The table, aslant, jabbed its legs into cracks between cobblestones. A matchbox and a wad of napkin, the discarded shims, lay next to the woman’s red sandals.

The thought of Gary smuggling a picture of Corsica, France, in his pocket through the desert all this time, while suffering through his Spanish lessons, almost made Mark Spitz chortle. Gary clearing his throat, marshaling his rehearsed patter, the greetings and sweet talk, as he walked across the gangplank off the sub to his longed-for island.

Mark Spitz snuffed the candle and checked out front. The dead teetered down Gold, southward in their hideous procession. Sparse right now. Still time to make it past them.

He returned to the back room. He retrieved his flashlight from his pack. No way to date the photograph of the alley. It might as well have been the last afternoon in the world, a scene to be inserted in the montage sequence of the disaster movie. The oblivious citizens drift on the anvil of this mundane afternoon, unaware of the bomb, the meteor, the fateful chunk of rock from outer space entering the atmosphere. In thirty seconds they will cease to exist, but for now they live in their moment of safety. Snug in sunlight, their lover’s hand warm and true and solid in theirs.

The Lieutenant had asked Kaitlyn and him to picture a world where the stragglers were the dead majority, not an aberrant fraction. This photograph is what that would look like, Mark Spitz thought. The entire population snared in bygone moments, entranced by the world that no longer existed. Mesmerized by the outline of a shadow cast by a phantom that had made them happy once.

He had the forbidden thought. He didn’t push it away.

It was the second time in three days, the most close together since his farmhouse rescue. It was happening again: the end of the world. The last months had been a pause, a breather before the recommitment to annihilation. This time we cannot delude ourselves that we will make it out alive.

When was the last time someone had taken his picture? Rhode Island. It was a month before he was picked up in Northampton, during a two-week stint at a hot-sheet hotel. The national budget-hotel chain had purchased an even cheaper chain and was refurbishing and renovating the universally dilapidated properties, installing the high-definition television screens on their tilting arms, tearing out the cigarette-burned and bodily-fluid-soiled carpets to replace them with the futuristic stain-impervious fibers. The franchise Mark Spitz stumbled on had been surrounded by chain-link fencing during construction, reassuringly anti-skel. One appreciated the chime of chain links these days, that perimeter-definer and alarm system.

Survivors came and went. He staked out Room 12, which was a musty box of umber and gray. The other survivors were harmless. Tired, like him, on a becalmed plateau of the interregnum. He was at a wedding, in a discounted block for members of the party. Strangers to one another but connected all this time even if they didn’t know it, until thrown together in this little pocket of time outside their normal lives to bear witness. Except the ceremony kept being postponed. They extended their stays multiple times, rang the front-desk void, made the necessary excuses into the dead phones. Past complaining now, though.

Most nights, if people were up for it, they shared provisions in the tiny breakfast room off Reception, lentils or jam, and it was there he met the Simons. They were that rare thing in the wasteland, an intact family unit. Or they pretended to be. Rob and Lonnie, their kids Harold and Jennie. How they made it this far, he could not imagine. He was past curiosity, and at any rate Mom and Dad packed serious heat, ammo belts traversing their chests, tense hands never straying far from the holsters at their hips, explanation enough. Harold and Jennie were eleven and thirteen, respectively. They favored their father, especially in the eyes, and rarely spoke.

They stayed two nights. The second night they joined the small feast in Reception. Over stringy game-bird chili, Lonnie told the group they were headed to Buffalo. They had heard good things, met real soldiers who’d been there and spoke of putting it all back together. No one believed them. The Simons didn’t care. They contributed five chocolate chip cookies, if he remembered correctly, which were broken into quarters and distributed around.

Before returning to their room they asked Mark Spitz to take their picture. “We like to keep a record,” Rob said, placing the camera in his hands. It must have been a hassle to keep the device charged up; it was one of the last models, a buttonless cube
out of Japan that did everything. The family posed by the dingy coffee machine, arranging themselves into what he took to be their standard pose, not smiling but not put out or melancholic, either. Then they asked if they could take Mark Spitz’s picture.

“What for?”

“So we can remember what you look like,” Lonnie said.

The Simons checked out at first light. The next day, not long after noon, bandits swept through. They executed some of the residents of the motel, tortured others in a long game they’d been working on, testing the logic of the body. Eventually an escape opportunity presented itself and most of the guests made it out intact. They knew the drill, this far into the miseries. But that was the end of the wedding party, and it was on to the next human settlement.

There was no other reality apart from this: move on to the next human settlement, until you find the final one, and that’s where you die.

The parable of his journey back to the city. To keep moving, in the Mim sense. He’d always wanted to live in New York but that city didn’t exist anymore. He didn’t know if the world was doomed or saved, but whatever the next thing was, it would not look like what came before. There were no intersections with the avenues of Buffalo’s shimmering reconstructions, its boulevards did not cross their simulations and dioramas of futurity. It refused the shapes Mark Spitz conjured in his visions of reinvention in the big city.

He dropped his new rifle and picked up his old one. It had gotten him through the Zone. It would get him out of it. Why they’d tried to fix this island in the first place, he did not see now. Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had ended
and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.

Mark Spitz got his gear together. He stripped Gary’s pack of what he could use. He tucked Corsica in his back pocket. He waved to his friend and shut the door to the apartment.

In the stream of the street the dead bobbed in their invisible current. These were not the Lieutenant’s stragglers, transfixed by their perfect moments, clawing through to some long-gone version of themselves that existed only as its ghost. These were the angry dead, the ruthless chaos of existence made flesh. These were the ones who would resettle the broken city. No one else.

He was ready. He didn’t like his chances of making it to the terminal. Who knew how many of the others had made it there, the band from the truck, the sundry personnel of the garrison. Officers, cooks, and clerks. He hoped the sweepers split skel heads as they beat their way downtown, or else contrived the flawless plan that eluded everyone’s desperation. Kaitlyn. And if Mark Spitz did somehow blast, bludgeon, and dodge his way to the terminal, what then? It was foolish to dream of rescue.

The music sailed between the buildings, the tinkling bell and the demented melody produced at the animal’s every step. Mingled with the dead, Disposal’s horse drew his empty cart down the street. The animal clopped across the asphalt, mascot of ruin, without care or master. Even when it withdrew from sight, Mark Spitz heard it, the cheerful jingle insistent before the pitiless rock face of the metropolis. That’s how he interpreted the melody: cheerful and undying.

On to the next human settlement, and the one after that, where the barrier holds until you don’t need it anymore. He tightened the strap of the armadillo helmet. He strummed his vest pockets one last time and frowned at the density beyond the glass. They were really coming down out there. No, he didn’t like his chances of making it to the terminal at all. The river was closer. Maybe he should swim for it. It was a funny notion, the most ridiculous
idea, and he almost laughed aloud but for the creatures. He needed every second, regardless of his unrivaled mediocrity and the advantages this adaptation conferred in a mediocre world.

Fuck it, he thought. You have to learn how to swim sometime. He opened the door and walked into the sea of the dead.