disgusted with himself for phrasing it that way and checked to make sure Kaitlyn, his externalized conscience, hadn’t heard. She snored.
“Maybe Buffalo is right and we’re done with the plague and this is a vital enterprise we’re doing here. Maybe we’re merely butchers scraping off the gone-bad bits off the meat and putting it back under the glass.”
“Then why are you here, if it’s doomed?”
“I apologize again for not bringing ice.”
“It’s fine.”
“I was trying to make it into a weekly thing, but I forgot.” He took a big sip. “You know why they walk around? They walk around because they’re too stupid to know they’re dead.”
“I’m here because there’s something worth bringing back.”
“That’s straggler thinking.” He smiled. It was the faintest of disturbances on his face, as if a black eel miles below on the ocean floor had turned in its sleep and left this slim reverberation on the surface. “I’m grateful. Buffalo has given us some busywork to keep our minds off things. Dig a drainage ditch for the camp, shuck the fucking corn.” He raised his glass to his friends across the table. “Clear some buildings. You have to admit, it passes the time.”
SUNDAY
“Move as a team, never move alone: Welcome to the Terrordome.”
When the wall fell, it fell quickly, as if it had been waiting for this moment, as if it had been created for the very instant of its failure. Barricades collapsed with haste once exposed for the riddled and rotten things they had always been. Beneath that façade of stability they were as ethereal as the society that created them. All the feverish subroutines of his survival programs booted up, for the first time in so long, and he located the flaw the instant before it expressed itself: there.
The morning the Zone died Omega slept in, murk-mouthed in hangover. Normally the unit would have punched out at 3:00 p.m. and hit Wonton, but Kaitlyn reminded them that they’d knocked off early yesterday. She “didn’t want to let them down,” them being that many-headed pheenie hydra, whether it quivered in a bauxite mine waiting for the dead weather to clear or was clutched tight to the happy bosom of a settlement camp and at this very moment scooping Sunday brunch out of aluminum tins in the mess hall. Mark Spitz registered Kaitlyn’s response to the news of the Tromanhauser Triplets, and interpreted this morning’s dedication as a sacrifice toward their welfare, zipping out across the miles: May it keep those tiny hearts pumping. In her action sequence, Kaitlyn emerged from the burning shed in slow motion, outrunning a covey of skels, one triplet under each arm and the last in a sling on her chest.
The two sweeper units wished each other swift recovery from dehydration and alcohol-wrung melancholy. Hair of the dog once they got back to Wonton, no question. Then it was back to work. Fulton x Gold. Yes, Omega savored their hard-won parking lot row by row, that void in their work detail, every blessed cubic foot of it and the fallow air rights to boot. The line of four-story tenements were devoid of demons, save for two suicides they bagged at 42 Gold. The pair killed themselves in identically laid-out junior one-bedrooms two floors apart. The elderly occupant of 2R hung herself from a stained-glass chandelier in the living room. Once the fixture tore away from the ceiling, the plaster bits mixed with the decomp sludge and lent her corpse a unique, lumpy texture that reminded Mark Spitz of the things lurking in old takeout. She had mutated, stranded in her cardboard carton at the back of the fridge. He recognized the ottoman on which she’d steadied herself; he had impulse-bought the same one online, on sale, the spring he moved into his parents’ rec room. Stainproof, one of the new miracle weaves, machine washable. He’d used it to change the recessed energy-saver bulbs in the track lighting, whose pallid light he accused of draining him of vitality and cheer.
The neighboring suicide upstairs blew his brains out on his sofa. The man in 4R was owl-faced with thin straw hair and shrunken limbs that poked from clothes a size too big. He’d starved before offing himself, noshing on the doomsday stock he gathered for his market-rate bunker: the bathroom tub was full of licked-clean cans and neatly flattened boxes, tied up and bagged in preparation for recycling day. Gary observed that his stench didn’t jibe with that of your average putrefying New Yorker,