mind how everyone’d get bit—let’s say it was airborne instead. What would we do with them? All these skels standing around. Can’t cure them. Bring ’em home into ‘familiar surroundings’ and they’d probably just get up and walk back to where you found them. You leave them there, it seems to me. Wherever they chose. Let them sit in the cubicles, let them ride the bus all day and night and in the depot after hours. Chillin’ on the beach catching some rays. They don’t know what’s going on—they probably think it’s business as usual. Going about their day like they always did.”
“That’s sick,” Kaitlyn said, crossing her arms. “You’re sick.” Kaitlyn invariably described her parents in the past tense, resisting the scenario where they walked slowly through her hometown, muddle-minded and peckish. Mark Spitz figured she imagined Mom and Dad at the backyard gas grill, frozen and damned on the slate patio.
Frenetic honks came from the street: the driver of a jeep warning Sunday-night drunks out of the way. The Lieutenant leaned back into the vinyl banquette with his customary sluggishness. “No, you’re right. Mustn’t humanize them. The whole thing breaks down unless you are fundamentally sure that they are not you. I do not resemble that animal, you tell yourself, as you squat in the back of the convenience store, pissing in a bucket and cooking up mangy squirrel for dinner.” The Lieutenant took a loud slurp. Mark Spitz couldn’t tell if the man was belittling Kaitlyn or his own trodden illusions. “You’re still the person you were before the plague, you tell yourself, even though you’re running for dear life through the parking lot of some shitty mall, being chased by a gang of monsters. I have not been reduced. ‘Hey, maybe this dead guy has some stuff in his shopping cart I can eat.’ ”
Kaitlyn moved her mouth and then checked herself. She had dealt with deadbeat teachers before and prevailed. “If the plague transmits through the air,” she said, “you wouldn’t keep them around.”
“This is an abstract thought process.”
Mark Spitz said, “After a while we wouldn’t even notice them.”
The Lieutenant worked up a mealy grimace. “That’s why I like stragglers. They know what they’re doing. Verve and a sense of purpose. What do we have? Fear and danger. The memories of all the ones you’ve lost. The regular skels, they’re all messed up. But your straggler, your straggler doesn’t have any of that. It’s always inhabiting its perfect moment. They’ve found it—where they belong.” He stopped. “Mark Spitz, I see you’ve taken to the whiskey. It’s nice, right?”
They finished the bottle. The next week, the three of them wandered in one by one and it became a Sunday-night custom.
In the restaurant months later, after more contact with the creatures, grid after tedious grid, he wondered if they chose these places or if the places chose them. No telling the visions wrought by the crossed wires in their brains, that bad electricity traipsing through their blighted synapses. He thought of that first straggler, standing in the disappearing field with his stupid kite. The easy narrative held that he played there as a kid, gazing up at the sky, oblivious to the things that made him stumble. Maybe it wasn’t what had happened in a specific place—favorite room or stretch of beach or green and weedy pasture—but the association permanently fixed to that place. That’s where I decided to ask her to marry me, in this elevator, and now I exist in that moment of possibility again. The guy had only spent a minute in that space but it had altered his life irrevocably. So he haunts it. This is the hotel room where our daughter was conceived and being in here now it is like she is with me again. It wasn’t the hotel room itself that was important, with its blotched carpet and missing room-service menu and pilfered corkscrew, but the outcome nine months later. The straggler was in thrall to Room 1410, not the long nights in the nursery making sure those diminutive lungs continued to rise and fall, or the sun-kissed infinity pool of the resort where they spent their best four days/three nights, the steps at stage left where they hugged after the school play. So she haunts it, Room 1410. Relieved of care and worry, the stragglers lived eternally and undying in their personal heavens. Where the goblin world and its assaults were banished and there was nothing but possibility.
He stripped