a minor rock outfit whose one big charter was a muscular anthem that tried to identify, verse by verse, the meaning of stamina. It was a stadium staple, a real rouser, the royalties evidently providing ample down-payment money. In the blown-up magazine covers on the walls, the owner was perpetually on the verge of being elbowed from the frame by the rest of the band, who were of a more rarefied attractiveness. Such was the drummer’s lot. An orgy tub squatted in the center in the master bath, roomy and guardrailed.
Omega slept in the living room, taking turns on the white sectional. It was pleasant in the loft; one night they even made a fire. Kaitlyn discovered a tube of her favorite moisturizer in the medicine cabinet and Gary caught her taking a dab. He tsk-tsked and pulled out his No-No Cards, brandishing the one depicting a red slash across an open fridge door. The massive, oversize windows didn’t have shades or blinds, but there were no neighbors gathering gossip in the beyond, no ambient street light to keep them awake, no light at all.
They spent their last night on this grid, however, on the eighteenth floor of number 135, at Mark Spitz’s request. In general, they bivouacked on the lower floors, for obvious reasons. In normal circumstances, Kaitlyn and Gary would have vetoed this choice of camp, but they relented without protest. Mark Spitz had been unusually quiet ever since the attack, save for his strange intercession on behalf of the copy boy. If he sought something in this place, something he needed, they were willing to climb all those flights and help him out. This time. He’d used up his chits for a while.
They unrolled their sleeping bags in the conference room of a consulting firm, shoving the gargantuan desk up against the wall and laying their packs across it. They consumed their MREs and eased into their nocturnal rituals after activating a motion detector in the hallway: Gary smoked and skipped through sections of his foreign-language audiobook, Kaitlyn speed-read one of her biographies of dead celebrities, and Mark Spitz paced. After so long in the wild, it still took Mark Spitz a long time to power down his myriad subsystems. There are pills, Gary told him, but he didn’t want to be dulled. He was wired at night, bucking on a vector of PASD, but it had kept him alive.
The sleeping bag was comfortable enough on the teal carpet squares, but he missed sleeping in the trees, entwined in the branches like a kite. In the woods bordering the dead subdivision, in a public park going native according to primeval inclination, levitating over koi in the acupuncturist’s backyard garden. In those early days, he roved from empty house to empty house like the other isolates, making it up as he went along. He cased the abode in advance of night, selected his entry point, and then swept the ranch house or split-level or other locally popular construction room by room. He checked the basements, the closets, the dryer (you never know), made test noises to draw out any skels inside, but not loud enough to alert a pack cruising outside. He discovered plague-stricken unfortunates who had been locked away in attics like the photo albums of bad weddings, and came upon leaking wretches handcuffed to bedposts by fluffy erotic handcuffs. He put down any skel or skels who emerged from the den or romper room and he made a hasty retreat if it got too hot, taking the pile-covered stairs two at a time or vaulting out the window, the inevitable window, landing messily on the patio set. He knew when it was time to split. It clicked in his brain, the same way he’d known which desk to choose in a new classroom on the first day of a fresh school year, the one that would place him in a zone that reduced the chances of being called on, amid a high concentration of smart kids and inveterate hand-raisers but at a distinct and quirky angle to the teacher’s vision that enabled Mark Spitz to pop in and out of his or her attention. The same way he knew exactly how late he could roll into work without it becoming “an issue,” how often he could pull off this feat, and how busy he had to appear at different times of the day according to his boss’s scofflaw-seeking trawls through the cubicles. He’d always known when