Zone One

On Sunday, Omega embark on their final mission in Zone One. At a fortune teller shop, Mark, Gary, and Kaitlyn encounter a straggler fortune teller. She seems to be in a stupor and is seated at her table as if still awaiting customers. Gary jokes about having his palm read, placing his hand on the straggler. As the others joke with him, Mark notices that the straggler seems to be smiling, too. Suddenly, the straggler bites down on Gary’s hand. The others shoot the straggler but not before Gary is infected. Kaitlyn rushes out in the hopes of locating team Bravo for help. During her absence, Mark soothes Gary with stories of his past, especially the origin story of his nickname. Kaitlyn returns without any sighting of Bravo. Mark decides to return to Fort Wonton to locate additional medicine for Gary, asking Kaitlyn to look after the injured man in his absence. They discuss briefly what might happen if Gary turns into a skel quickly, and Kaitlyn assures him that she knows to kill him before he has the chance to fully transform. She says that as an act of mercy she will afford time for Gary to kill himself if he so chooses.

At Fort Wonton, Mark comes across one of the soldiers, Lester, who reports that several stragglers have been hanging around the walls all night. He notes this casually, as though he perceives this to be a regular occurrence and of no immediate threat. Mark senses that something more terrible is happening and rushes to find Fabio, a military clerk, locked in his office. He emphatically warns Fabio of the skels, which Fabio does not comprehend at first, thinking that only a handful of stragglers are at the walls. Bozeman enters and confirms that sweepers need to return to Fort Wonton immediately, as the situation outside the walls are worsening. They head to the roof to discover that hundreds of skels are marching outside of the walls.

As the last chopper has departed to Buffalo, Bozeman proposes that they make their way by car to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, an old rendezvous point where they hope governmental forces will come to their rescue. Bozeman, Fabio, Lester, and Ms. Macy escape in a truck. On the way, Ms. Macy reveals that all her talk about the impending summit is a lie. She admits, “This is PR” (250) and that it will be years before Zone One will ever be inhabitable. When they near the area by the fortune-teller shop, Mark departs from the truck to look for Kaitlyn. He determines that Kaitlyn had realized the severity of what is happening around them and has left shortly after Gary’s passing. Mark finds Gary’s dead body at the fortune teller shop, the corpse holding a picture of a landscape in Corsica, France. Mark assesses his chance of making it to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal on his own and reasons that survival is slim. Left with no choice, Mark pockets Gary’s things and fights his way through the crowd of skels in the streets.

In this section, Mark has a flashback that focuses on Kaitlyn’s birthday, when he leaves her with Gary. During one of their sweeps, Kaitlyn had kept dropping hints of her birthday, revealing eventually that it was on that very day. The others made makeshift cakes with their biscuit rations to celebrate. During her birthday, Kaitlyn revealed the full story of her Last Night. She was returning home to her family after visiting her college friends in Lancaster when the train suddenly stopped. She realized eventually that an infected person in one of the train cars had gone on to infect several others, prompting the National Guard to be called. The train cars were quarantined, and anyone trying to escape was shot. Once it became evident that there would be no survivors from that train, she made a run for it.

Mark also recalls his brief time in Rhode Island, where he made temporary residence at a hotel. There, he met the Simons family. The Simons asked Mark to take their picture and requested to take Mark’s as well, to remember the occasion. The day after the Simons family left the hotel, bandits came and killed nearly everyone there. Mark managed to escape.