Gary frowned. “We don’t see anything.”
When Mark Spitz was a child, his father had shared his favorite nuclear-war movies with him. Father-son bonding on overcast afternoons. Fresh-faced rising stars who never made it big and crag-faced character actors marched through the acid-rain narratives and ash-smeared landscapes, soldiering on, slapping hysterical comrades across the face—get a grip on yourself, we’re going to make it—dropping one by one as they chased the rumors of sanctuary. He asked, “What does ‘apocalypse’ mean, Daddy?” and his father pressed pause and told him, “It means that in the future, things will be even worse than they are now.”
In college Mark Spitz coasted in his customary way through a history requirement about the cold war. They’d pegged their doomsday to split atoms. They were blind to the plague’s blueprint of destruction, but they’d seen the ash. The pervasive, inexorable gray was a local atmospheric anomaly, and not what Buffalo had been thinking of when they devised their American Phoenix, but it suited. Up out of the ash, reborn.
Carl paused. The others turned. One of the dead came down the avenue. It was a strange sight after all this time, out there in the open. On their streets. Mark Spitz had only seen one other free-range skel since his arrival. This one had escaped the marines’ sweep somehow, finally freeing itself from some crummy cell, the room in the bowling alley where they stored the past-prime shoes or the basement of the souvlaki joint. The skel had spotted them, awakened at their bickering, and it veered from the middle of the asphalt, crept between two foreign-made compacts, and slowly gained the sidewalk. It walked in the rain in the way no one walked in the rain, in a downpour like this, without shiver or frown, the water popping off its head and shoulders into a spray like a swarm of gnats. It approached them, implacable and sure, at the familiar grim pace.
The skel wore a morose and deeply stained pinstripe suit, with a solid crimson tie and dark brown tasseled loafers. A casualty, Mark Spitz thought. It was no longer a skel, but a version of something that predated the anguishes. Now it was one of those laid-off or ruined businessmen who pretend to go to the office for the family’s sake, spending all day on a park bench with missing slats to feed the pigeons bagel bits, his briefcase full of empty potato-chip bags and flyers for massage parlors. The city had long carried its own plague. Its infection had converted this creature into a member of its bygone loser cadre, into another one of the broke and the deluded, the mis-fitting, the inveterate unlucky. They tottered out of single-room occupancies or peeled themselves off the depleted relative’s pullout couch and stumbled into the sunlight for miserable adventures. He had seen them slowly make their way up the sidewalks in their woe, nurse an over-creamed cup of coffee at the corner greasy spoon in between health department crackdowns. This creature before them was the man on the bus no one sat next to, the haggard mystic screeching verdicts on the crowded subway car, the thing the new arrivals swore they’d never become but of course some of them did. It was a matter of percentages.
Carl took the shot and they resumed their negotiations.
“This isn’t going to un-fuck itself,” Kaitlyn said. “Mark Spitz, go up and see what the situation is.”
“Why does he get to go?” Carl said. Mark Spitz had never seen a hard case pout before.
“Because he knows how to walk in a straight line.”
Angela, Bravo’s leader, did not protest. She looked resigned to losing the grid, steeling herself for the next inconvenience, whatever it may be.
Kaitlyn unslung her assault rifle and dropped her pack. She sat cross-legged on the concrete. “Now who’s gonna go over there and zip up that skel?”
• • •
He met Mim in a toy store. The convenience marts, box outlets, pharmacies, and other likely suspects had been thoroughly excavated so Mark Spitz started hitting toy stores. The plague had reacquainted him with primal disappointments and in younger days he had been tormented by the fine print BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED often enough for it to leave a permanent dent. He thought this tactic ingenious—indeed, more than a few toy stores still had batteries behind the counter, even in loathsome Connecticut, where he encountered Mim during a noon raid. A handful of skels drifted down Main Street out front, the compasses in their veins quivering at no true north save the next square in front of them. He went around back to employee parking and spent a hairy ten minutes fretting the back door with a crowbar, scratching away, until he heard the muffled “Who is it?”
He said, “I’m alive,” and she let him in.
Her name was Miriam Cohen Levy and she was the last person to give him a full name for a long time. She’d been hitting toy stores since the start. “I have three kids,” she told him later.
They chatted in the robot aisle. Her gear sat at their feet in perky, neatly organized nylon packs. Her weapon of choice was a red-bladed fire ax, snatched from the wall of an elementary school or municipal building, and it was sparkling clean, even in the weak light trickling past the window display. “Germs,” she said. “But I prefer running whenever possible. The cardio.”
Mark Spitz noted that there were only two points of entry to the building. He pointed to the spiral staircase. “More toys upstairs. You can drop your pack there,” she said, like a good host. “You heading to Buffalo?”
“What’s there?”
“That’s where the government is now. They got a big compound organized.”
He hadn’t heard that one, but it was in accord with his theory that every rumored sanctuary was located in a place he’d never had the slightest intention of visiting. “Last I heard people were going to Cleveland.”
“That was awhile ago.”
“Buffalo is the new Cleveland.”
That’s what people were saying, she told him. Mim had hooked up with some Buffalo-bound pilgrims for a week, but then she got some kind of stomach thing and had to lie on her side all day, the only thing that helped. They apologized, but they had to leave her behind, nothing personal. She didn’t take offense. “Them’s the rules,” she told Mark Spitz, shoulders popping up in a brief shrug.
Mim had been mobile since her last camp imploded. She’d spent the summer and most of the autumn at a mansion in Darien: two and a half meals a day, stone walls, and a generator. The owners were dead, but the gardener’s son, Taylor, had keys and set up camp at the start of the abominations. He’d played Space War on the grounds as a kid, knew the clandestine tunnels dug during the reign of prohibition and maintained during the heyday of infidelity. Plenty of spare exits if others got skel-heavy. Taylor recruited fellow survivors on gas runs, or he caught them clambering over the walls, backpacks full of cans and accessories. If he saw something in you he liked, you were invited to stay. He dressed like biker-club muscle but was a very sweet soul; it was a costume, and when he ran off people, they obeyed.
“It wasn’t crazy-culty,” Mim said, sucking powder from a protein packet, licking the excess from her fingertip. “He didn’t try anything nuts, like you have to kill the oldest every Thursday at midnight—he just wanted people he could get along with. Pot-heads, mostly.” Willoughby Manor was thirty people at its biggest population, and well run. Organized forage runs, an activity board. “No bullies, no rapes. Low profile kept the dead from hanging around outside.” Lights out after dark was the rule, whereupon they gathered in the wine cellar for mellow evening tastings. Down in the branching tunnels there were ample amusements to pass the time. They played poker among the Brunellos, charades before the Argentine vintages, watched the cherished sitcoms in the final, unfinished room that was actually underneath the pool, imagine that. They’d plucked Mim from Darien’s main drag after she miscalculated the margin of safety while trying to outrun a skel swarm she’d accidentally wandered into. “Don’t you hate it when that happens?” she asked. “Minding your own business, on a lip balm mission, and then boom.” The Willoughbys scooped her up in an SUV and she enlisted.
“Sounds like a nice setup.”
“It wa
s great. I really thought I’d wait it out there.” She changed her tone. She was not the first to misread his face. “I still believe that—that we’re going to beat this thing. However long it takes. And then we’re all going to go home.”
He mashed his teeth together so as to maintain his mask.
Their idyll was terminated by one of the number, Abel, who had developed some theories about the plague and its agenda. He was one of those apocalypse-as-moral-hygiene people, with a college-sophomore socialist slant. The dead came to scrub the Earth of capitalism and the vast bourgeois superstructure, with its doilies, helicopter parenting, and streaming video, return us to nature and wholesome communal living. No one paid much attention, Mim said; Abel was a good worker and one encountered crazier folk out on the wastes.
Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring. The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren’t.
“Then one night,” Mim said, “it was over.” Most of the campers were down in the cellar—it was game night—when Abel came downstairs and said that he could no longer sit back and watch while the household ignored the verdict of the plague. What right do we have to laugh and carol and play Texas hold ’em while the rest of the world suffered its just punishment? “Which is why,” he told them, “I have opened the gates.”
They ran upstairs. Abel did more than open the gates. The dead engulfed the grounds, spilling into the great room from the veranda “like wedding guests looking for cocktails after the ceremony.” Abel must have lured them up the hill with promises of a buffet. The place was lost. “The usual helter-skelter,” Mim told him. She was separated from everybody else but managed to scramble to some backup gear she’d stashed by the far wall of the grounds for this very occasion. “Settle in all you want to,” Mim said. “Sign up for work duty and water the tomato plants. But you gotta stash a backup pack, ’cause it always comes tumbling down.”
He liked her immensely, despite her belief in Buffalo. They were vapor: the big settlement beyond the next rise, the military base two days’ walk, the utopian commune on the other side of the river. The place never existed or was long overrun by the time of your arrival, a stink of corpses and smoldering fires. Or it was lunatics and the crazy new society they’d cooked up, with a fascist constitution, or nutty rules like all the womenfolk had to sleep with the men to repopulate the race, or some other creepy secret you only discovered after you’d been there a few days, and when you had to split you found they’d hidden your weapons and stolen your bouillon cubes. Mark Spitz was off groups for now, but if the right outfit came along he’d start using Mim’s solution. Stash a spare.
Mark Spitz was prepared to take whatever batteries Mim didn’t want, but she insisted that they split them evenly. “I can’t carry all this, that’s ridiculous. Help yourself.” He had filled his pack when he heard Mim curse.
She was at the window. “Bad weather,” she said. He thought the snow had started; he’d smelled the impending snow since morning. Then he replaced her at the glass and saw Main Street. He dropped down. Was the back door locked? Yes. He and Mim crawled behind the aisles of toddler fare, the fake babies, squealing teddys, and assortment of cheap plastic shapes. It was the biggest dead stream he’d seen in months, a macabre parade walking from sidewalk to sidewalk in the wake of an invisible, infernal piper. Homecoming Day, Founder’s Birthday, the End of the War. Did small towns still celebrate soldiers who made it back from the front? Salute that miracle of making it through the ordeal? The festivities honoring the defeat of the plague, the armistice with chaos, wouldn’t match the spectacle outside. There wouldn’t be enough people left to hold a banner. He shook his head. Fucking Connecticut.
The necrotic multitudes marched past the toy-store windows. This sick procession. Mark Spitz and his new companion repaired to the stockroom. Maybe the weather marshaled the dead into that big group, repurposed synapses in their spongy and riddled brains compelling them from the wind, the blizzard washing over the seaboard. Some unfortunate souls would discover where the dead army waited out bad weather. Not him. Mark Spitz and Mim remained in the back. When the dead finally disappeared, the big furry flakes stuck to the road and sidewalk. In the lost days when the pipes poured and electrons filled the multifarious cables, the ambient heat of the ground prevented such quick accumulations. Now the snow piled swiftly on the deadened earth.
They held off on Last Night. He knew he was going to give her the Obituary when she opened the back door and emerged from the gloom. Skull faces had replaced human faces in his mind’s population, tight over the bone, staring without mercy, incisors out front. The stubborn ordinariness of her soft eyes and round, vigorous features were a souvenir. The yellow bandanna tight around her scalp tokened weekend chores, plucking acorns and twigs from the sputtering gutter, scraping last summer’s black residue from the grill. The ancient rites. She was like him, one of the unlikely ones, pushing through. Normal.
Instead of Last Night stories, they indulged in Where Ya From, which tended to produce more positive hits than it had before the plague, or so it seemed to Mark Spitz. As if all the survivors shared a clandestine link, established here and there across the course of their lives for the arrival of this event. Or perhaps he was merely easily awed by coincidence now, in the disconnectedness of his days. “Oh, you’re from Wilkes-Barre? Do you know Gabe Edelman?” “Really? That’s funny, we met at a sales conference in Akron once.” His life overlapped with the dentist duo, the bubbly truck driver, the insurance adjuster, and the rest of the sad-eyed lot, and it didn’t matter that it was all meaningless. “She must have gone to rehab since then because she wasn’t like that at all.” It was a séance to penetrate the veil of the great beyond. The disembodied knocking of spirits brightened their respective corners of darkness for a time. “I was there once, ate at a coffee shop that had the best apple pie. Do you know it? That’s it.” “My cousin went there. But he’s much older, you wouldn’t have crossed paths with him.” The associations hastened morning, when they went in different directions. Sometimes not until then. Sometimes the dead found them in the night.
He stayed with her, half in love with her before twilight. They didn’t intersect, although over time they discovered they were both fond of the same television shows. But everybody loved the same shows back then and popular culture was not the same thing as people and places. He couldn’t help but think that the juggernaut sitcoms and police procedurals were still in syndication somewhere on the planet, the laugh tracks and pre-commercial-break crescendos ringing out and lumbering forth in the evergloom. The shows had been so inescapable that they were past requiring electricity. At the very least, in a survivalist’s underground rec room or a government facility (Buffalo had yet to reveal itself), seasons one through seven of the hospital drama groundbreaking in its realism and the extras-filled box set of the critic-proof workplace comedy unfurled on the screens as the watchers debated breaking out the good stuff, the cheese puffs they’d been saving for a special occasion. They tugged open the cellophane: special occasions were over. The commercials were the new commercials, he imagined darkly, for lightweight kerosene canisters (When You Need to Burn the Dead in a Hurry!) and anticiprant (Four Out of Five Uninfected Doctors Agree: Still the Only Antibiotic That Matters!). One did not fast-forward through these ads. These were essential consumer items.
He and Mim had no one in common, apart from the calamity. They were both its fleas. “I’m just a mom,” she said, botch
ing the tense. That first night they broke open a carton of birthday candles, which provided no heat but the concept of fire warmed them. Mark Spitz blocked the draft from the back door with a row of stuffed armadillos and others in the armadillo’s troupe. She went first.
She was from Paterson, her husband’s hometown. They moved there once they found out about the baby. Her parents were useless, trapped in a narcissistic loop, but Harry’s mother was reliable and had a lot of time on her hands since her retirement. Mim came to love the town. She met some expectant moms online via the local parenting resource and in those disquieting postpartum days they assembled into a crew. They had plenty of babies over the next ten years, and she tapped a bona fide community into her auto-synced contact lists, especially after school started and she befriended the moms (and odd dad) she recognized from the two local playgrounds. “Didn’t you use to go to that tot lot next to Café Loulou?” “We met during that heat wave—you were kind enough to give my girl, Eve, two water balloons.”
Harry worked in sales at a company that compiled factoids for oldies stations: This plucky tune ruled the charts for an unprecedented twelve weeks in the summer of 1964. This irrepressible hit maker was born this day in 1946. Local DJs used them as a leavening agent in their patter and it was a sturdy business in an age of corporatized nostalgia, when each successive generation herded key favorites together to save them from nipping upstarts. Harry traveled a lot, but a religious webchat schedule erased the miles, especially in those early days when it was just the two of them. It was almost as if he were sitting on the couch when they grimaced and laughed into their minuscule lenses, as if Harry were on his laptop right next to her. When her ob-gyn told them their third child was on the way, they moved to their fourth and final Paterson address. New construction. Harry loved those old houses on the street he grew up on, but Mim never saw the appeal.