back cilantro. Got any family?”
He thought of Uncle Lloyd, but what was there to say. “I don’t know.”
“Mostly joking with that one. I’ve been thinking about how in the old days, we had these special-ops dudes who did all the batshit stuff. Parachute into hostile territory, baroque wetwork, tiptoeing into the tent to garrote the warlord—pretend I didn’t say that—and these batshit killing machines were always single guys, single men and women, no families. What do they have to lose, right? But who has a family anymore? Everybody’s dead. All those vacation pictures floating in the cloud. Zip. Been thinking about that. Now we’re all batshit killing machines, could be a motherfucking granny wielding knitting needles. I digress.”
The Lieutenant hesitated, then nodded wearily. “What we have here in Zone One is not a suicide mission. Just a bunch of stragglers. Welcome to the team.”
The Lieutenant stared at him and Mark Spitz wondered if he was dismissed. Then the man clicked on once more. “You bunk where you want in the grid. Take your pick. Try not to break anything. They’re really big on that now. Sundays you come back here for check-in. Besides that, pop ’em, bag ’em, drag ’em. Any questions?”
“Seems pretty straightforward,” Mark Spitz said. “This has been very informative.” Fabio handed him some paperwork. He was pulling the door shut behind him when he heard, “Think it might rain today. That’s what the old clouds say.”
It did rain. It had been raining pretty much constantly since that day. At the window of the conference room, Mark Spitz looked out into a solemn nigrescence that was interrupted only by a white dome of light leeching out of Fort Wonton. The light climbed up a few stories on the Canal buildings like mold. He visualized the hard-core military lamps bleaching the concrete wall to sun-beaten bone white while the night-shift gunners sat in their nests or patrolled the catwalk, listening to the dead songs on their digital music devices. The cranes motionless, maybe being hosed off with sterilizing compound by Disposal. Tomorrow at Breakfast the machines would whine over the wall and clutch the corpses in their firm metal grip and drop them on our side.
Kaitlyn and Gary slept. He resisted the urge to tug Kaitlyn’s paperback out of her hand—with her reflexes, she’d probably stab him in the eye. Still awake in a shallow layer of her mind. Mark Spitz had pretended to be asleep when his father used to check on him when he was a kid, but he was always awake before the door even opened. His brain processed the distinctive think-I’ll-peek-in-on-my-offspring gait out in the hall and a clerk in his awareness woke him in time for the turn of the doorknob, the creak at ten degrees, the second creak at fifty-five degrees, and the sliver of hall light prying under his eyelids. He fell asleep knowing someone watched over him.
Gary and Kaitlyn would sleep until their personal danger detectors went off or morning arrived. They were exemplary sleepers, not that kind of pheenie who was up all night rewinding their private pageant of horrors. So much more efficient to be obsessed with such things when awake, to save it for when it might be converted into fuel.
Who was his family now? A specter of an uncle floating half a mile uptown in a blue building. He had these two mutts. Mark Spitz lost his parents on Last Night, and Gary’s brothers perished in that initial wave as well, when the triplets joined the posse handling the Incident at the Local High School. This when the villagers still believed they could set up a quarantine, and it would work. That tooth-fairy period.
The PTA meeting went worse than usual, even by the deplorable standards of Milton High School. The engaged, the outraged, and the merely trying to fill the blank space that was their lives had convened to argue over that spring’s big scandal, when one of the lesbian seniors announced her intention to bring her girlfriend to the prom. It had hit the national media as a fully operational event, with a berth on cable network chyron, pro-and-con expert panels, and mortifying nightly-news graphics. Lawsuits had been filed, the late-night wits bon-motted, and the Milton community wanted to see how to prevent such a thing in the future.
At any rate, the assistant principal had been infected the previous afternoon while breaking up a fight between two elderly ladies in the parking lot of a discount-sneaker