no one was looking. He grew dizzy in his mesh. He felt like a little kid who’d split for the restroom and then forgot where his parents were sitting. Another family had replaced his own when he reached the table, no kin of his at all, they hailed from the badlands, sizing him up, suspicious and foreign. An elemental horror roiled in his skull and he swiveled his head, sweeping his light across the darkness and dust. Search as he might, this time he was not going to find them.
He was a ghost. A straggler.
The monster-movie speculations of his childhood had forced him, during many a dreary midnight, to wonder what sort of skel he’d make if the plague transformed his blood into poison. The standard-issue skel possessed no room for improvisation, of course. He’d hit his repugnant marks. But what kind of straggler would he make? What did he love, what place had been important to him? Job or home, bull’s-eye of cathected energy. Yes, he loved his home. Perhaps he’d end up there, installing himself in his worn perch on the right-hand side of the sofa (right if you are facing the entertainment center, and where else would you be facing). Perhaps there.
He consulted the tattered ledger containing his employment history. He didn’t see himself maundering around the cashier of that artisanal sandwich joint he worked in for two summers, that loser gig, or so emotionally imprinted on his time slinging coladas that he’d devote his existence to swabbing the bar with a gray rag until his body disintegrated into flakes. Or the American Phoenix mobilized past Zone One and the next zones and starting cleaning up the rest of the country, and some future sweeper on a future crew shot him in the head. If he got infected when alone, that is—the tacit death pact was the new next-round’s-on-me. Put me down if I get bit. And he certainly wasn’t going to troop up to Chelsea and pretend to type perky encomiums into the dead web. Maybe he’d come here.
One Sunday night early in his tour, he was sipping sponsored wine with Kaitlyn in the dumpling shop when the Lieutenant bounded through the door. Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn had ditched the gathering in the dim sum palace after a platoon recharging en route to Buffalo started in with the stale skel jokes endured a hundred times before. (“I told you to give me head, not eat my head.”) Then the Connecticut gang, Gary included, tried to compete with the marines, enumerating baroque skel mutilations and beheadings, and it was time to go.
“This is my real office,” the Lieutenant said. “Sanctum sanctorum.” He waved them down when they rose. “But you may join me. I have wisdom, and I see you are seekers.” Mark Spitz knew the Lieutenant was bombed come nightfall, smelled the sweetish, boozy wisping from his pores in the daytime, and now it was late in the evening. On this matter, Mark Spitz remained true to his policy of judge not the dysfunctions of others, lest ye be judged.
The Lieutenant weaseled into the booth next to Mark Spitz, across from Kaitlyn. “Irish wake,” he said. The label on his whiskey was missing to hide the name of the unsponsored distillery, snotty yellow bands of glue levitating on the bottle.
Kaitlyn shivered and drew her arms to her chest.
The Lieutenant said, “Gooseflesh. The night breeze or the drifting rads?” He rubbed the corner of his mouth. “We secured our nuclear plants against mishap—secured the nuclear plants and Fort Knox and the bigwigs’ bunkers—but not everyone did. Now we got all this misty meltdown stuff, flying over the Pacific. Like invisible snow.”
“Or ash,” Mark Spitz said.
“Or ash.” The Lieutenant inquired about the Zone and they delivered upbeat reports about how unexpectedly easy the job was turning out to be. Pop this one here, that one there. Zip ’em up. Hardly any trouble at all. Kaitlyn told him they might finish ahead of Buffalo’s projections. “I’m glad it’s just stragglers,” she said.
“We’re all glad,” the Lieutenant said. “Bless ’em. Imagine what the world would be if the plague made them ninety-nine percent of the skels, and not the other way around. That’d be some shit.” Had they ever thought about that?
The sweepers admitted they hadn’t. The Lieutenant grabbed two water glasses and filled them with whiskey, tinking them against the wineglasses. “Mix and match,” he said. He hunched over the table. “Help me out, picture ninety-nine percent straggler. Never