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the drop of a hat. You need to plan. Especially with the roads the way they are.”
    The man in pinstripes sighed and rolled his eyes. “If it was up to you we would still be planning the trip to Washington after everyone there had already packed up and gone down to Raleigh.”
    Jeffrey had to hand it to the skeleton—he had a way of helping people realize they were disgusted or horrified when they hadn’t previously known it; he had a way of getting already irritated people to yell out their windows that they weren’t going to take it anymore.
    The screen went black.
    “Why do you insist on watching that stuff?” Jeffrey said to Katherine, the remote still in his hand. “It just makes you worry.”
    He had to admit, though, that this show was better than most of what was left for entertainment. Twenty years ago, there were more than forty radio stations available in the area. Now, there were only three still broadcasting live across the airwaves. A couple of stations, their doors already closed for the last time, kept a loop of songs playing over and over. Others had pre-recorded motivational speeches playing, intended to keep people’s spirits up. The other stations became static. The only thing remaining were a handful of men bantering all day about the Blocks and what to do with them. One show was compassionate toward the silent army, but most of them, not realizing their time as shock jocks had already ended, spoke about using Blocks to fill the potholes in roads or for target practice. The last time Jeffrey ever listened to one of these shows, the host was laughing about wanting to use hundreds of motionless Block bodies to spell out HELP in giant letters so anyone watching from outer space would see it and know we were still fucked.
    And yet, as bad as the radio could be, it wasn’t as bad as the gangs roaming southern California. Without any new teens to recruit, their youngest members were now in their thirties. The bandana-wearing delinquents didn’t bother with drive-by shootings anymore. Most of the members had moved into gated communities with cast-iron fences originally intended to keep their kind out. The fences were spray painted with symbols to let everyone else know exactly which gang was living in which celebrity’s former mansion. No longer, though, did the gangs go around the rest of the city spray painting nonsense on brick walls and underpasses. No one had understood what things like “808” and “Squirrely 4 Ever” were supposed to mean anyway. To add insult to injury, a senior citizens’ club in Los Angeles had seen a collection of graffiti at the old rec center and thought it was a beautiful way to liven up depressed people, so they started a club to paint every abandoned office building with happy images of Hokusai waves, Starry Nights, and even The School of Athens. The entire city was soon covered with graffiti that warmed everyone’s heart. Gang symbols seemed foolish against such artistry.
    That didn’t stop the gangs from spreading their symbols, however. They were just spread in a different way: Blocks were being found all around the city with insignias tattooed on their foreheads. A Block’s family would turn their backs at a park, or even in their own backyard, just long enough for a group of forty-year old thugs to kidnap the motionless body, drive the Block around the neighborhood in a van, before dropping them back off. The only difference was that the Block had a fresh tattoo, inked in the gang’s colors, right on their forehead.
    In Chicago, before the city was evacuated, two rival gangs competed for how many new members they could get. The Great De-evolution was in full swing, so the only new members were Blocks. Gangs made daily raids on the Block shelters to kidnap the biggest and meanest looking Blocks they could find. The mannequin-like bodies were dressed up in the gang’s colors. But the Blocks never learned fancy gang signs. They never stole or robbed. They