the metropolis, it did not taint the air in any sickening measure. A skel bonfire or kerosene party probably sent more toxic stuff into the air. But for Mark Spitz it was everywhere. In every raindrop on his skin and the pavement, sullying every edifice and muting the blue sky: the dust of the dead. It was in his lungs, becoming assimilated into his body, and he despised it.
He kept it to himself, this particular face of his PASD, although he did slip from time to time. It was a low-level hallucination as such things went, no real impairment. No need to share it, even if Mark Spitz couldn’t help being disturbed that for the most part his symptoms appeared after he was rescued in Northampton, accumulating manifestations. His new brand of skel dream, his ID-duty nausea, the fantastic visions of ash. He’d been healthier, more kink-free, in the lost days. Vertigo seized him now, at the edge of the wall. Where was he? He told himself, I am in New York City, I am in New York City on the street where I used to buy cheap headphones. He looked past the roaring, belching machine to traffic signs that had directed drivers to the sluice leading to New Jersey. These blocks had been so busy, so feverish, compressing the vehicles into the tunnel that would take them under the water to the other side. Moving the little bodies into a channel the same way the smokestack directed the little flakes through its insides and out into the air. The dead continued to commute, so hardwired was the custom.
Bozeman introduced the Disposal techs to the visitor from Buffalo. Annie and Lily swung the sagging body bag into the machine’s rear loader. “We can’t shake hands,” Annie said, bowing. The tough plastic creaked at every movement.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Lily said. She leaned against one of the red biohazard bins used to ferry corpses up and down Canal. The grab cranes picked up the bodies, lifted them over the wall, and dropped them into the bins, but so much blood and infectious murk leaked from the mangled bodies that finally they had reserved one traffic lane at the foot of the barrier for corpse transport. Too much gore and ichor splatter, too many soldiers frantically gobbling megadoses of anticiprant when it splashed on them, depleting the medics’ stash. The carts were filled with the bodies of the uptown skels and, intermittently, the bagged skels retrieved from the sweepers, and then they were rolled over here to this final place.
The cart before Mark Spitz overflowed, arms and legs hanging over the rim as if attached to boaters enjoying cool lake waters on a summer afternoon. Given this grisly abundance, and the constant barrage from the machine guns, he had his explanation of why they were busy feeding the second Coakley while the first was still firing. They were having serious dead weather up here at the wall.
“So this ash is—” Ms. Macy said.
“Yes—particulate by-product of high-temperature combustion,” Lily said.
Ms. Macy nodded as if agreeing with the choice of red her boss had ordered for the table. “You guys got the prototype. A lot of camps would kill to get one of these babies.”
“We need them the most,” Annie said.
“Everybody needs them. We’re all in this together.”
“Tell Buffalo we’re very grateful for the new unit,” Bozeman said. “I know there have been a lot of supply troubles, this last week especially, with all the—”
“You got lucky,” Ms. Macy interrupted. She turned to Mark Spitz and the two Disposal techs. “There have been some reversals.”
“What kind of reversals?”
“Reversals. Complications. There are always complications in business. The client changes their mind. The teamsters won’t unload the booth and hump it to the convention hall. You have to think on your feet. May I?”
Annie offered her the control pad, the cable connecting it to the incinerator sweeping across the asphalt. “Usually we like to stuff as many as we can in there before we fire it, but you’re the guest.”
Ms. Macy removed a latex glove from her purse and pressed the controller’s oversize red button. The machine emitted a warning and the rear loader tumbled the four corpses into the compactor. They disappeared into the belly of the thing. The bucket slid back with a hydraulic grumbling to receive the next load. “How many do you do per load?” she asked.
“We don’t keep count,” Annie said. There may have been a note of derision, but the inflection