the party-supply store and slit open the belly of a goat-shaped piñata with his blade. “We didn’t know they made this candy anymore.”
Mark Spitz removed his glove and rolled some bonbons in his hand. They were flavor combos of fruit he’d never heard of, the habitués of a jungle on another damp hemisphere. “That stuff has been in there since before you were born,” he said.
Kaitlyn gently removed the piñata from Gary’s hands. “It’s tiresome, babysitting.”
Gary proposed that the human body required sugar after periods of extended exertion, and was rebuffed. Kaitlyn pulled out her notebook. “Mark Spitz?”
He went looking for the creature’s ID. The general theory contended that stragglers haunted what they knew. The where was obvious: You were standing in it. But the why was always somewhere else. This skel they’d discovered by the row of helium tanks, her hand dangling on a valve. She was wearing a gorilla costume. The costume draped off her shoulders, deflated on her shrunken form. She wasn’t wearing the head, which was nowhere in sight.
He was exhausted—they’d hit two res high-rises back-to-back, and there had been a lot of dead pets to lug down—but he couldn’t help sleuthing. Why did this cipher stake out this store, and this particular spot? On the wall by the register, next to the taped-up first-day-of-business good-luck dollar bills, a photograph captured a burly man surrounded by smiling children who nipped at the bag of candy he held an inch out of reach. The owner, let’s say. Mark Spitz glimpsed no family resemblance before he eliminated the straggler’s face. Was she the spouse, an employee or former employee, and if so, what about this place shouldered its way into her mentality, past the plague, summoning her here? Then there was the suit. Had she been infected while wearing the gorilla outfit, or put it on as she got sicker and sicker with the disease, and if this was the case, what made her select it as her shroud? Before the plague, the sight of someone walking the street in that costume wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow—Manhattan was Manhattan—and in its aftermath, such a vision added only a small portion of the prevailing macabre. Why her post by the helium tank, the paw on the valve that complicated the mystery? When Mark Spitz shot her in the head she brought down the tank with her. The gong of the thing hitting the floor was the loudest sound they’d heard in weeks, in that silent city. They jumped.
Mark Spitz unzipped the suit to check for a wallet. The skel was nude, her body mottled with brown plague spots. An apple-size chunk of meat was missing from her forearm. Perhaps the explanation of her outfit and how she made it to this spot was plausible in the context of her former life. But there was no one to tell her story. Mark Spitz’s bullet had transformed everything above her neck into globules of toxic fluid, gristle, and shards of bone.
Kaitlyn suggested Mark Spitz take a look-see in the back for an ID. He went into the recesses of the store. No light seeped from the street. He switched on his torch. The office conformed to the familiar disarray of small downtown businesses. Management had piled invoices, overstock, and decades of tax returns into a fortification of clutter that might protect them from extinction. The light from his helmet traveled over the file cabinets and boxes of seasonal merchandise, the lifeblood plastic Easter eggs and jack-o’-lantern streamers. He didn’t find her clothes, or any clues, and the next moment he was weeping, fingers curled into a nautilus across his face and snot seeping into his mouth, sweetly.
The next time they needed to fill out an Incident Report, Mark Spitz begged off, and eventually Kaitlyn took note and removed him from the detail. He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension. He was not alone. “Survivors are slow or incapable of forming new attachments,” or so the latest diagnoses droned, although a cynic might identify this as a feature of modern life merely intensified or fine-tuned with the introduction of the plague.
Buzzwords had returned, and what greater proof of the rejuvenation of the world, the return to Eden, than a new