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glad they’re going to eradicate the zombies?”
    “They’re going to what?” he asked.
    The barrage started again, but he said, “What are they going to do to the zombies?”
    “They’re going to eradicate them, like they did everywhere else.”
    “Why?” he asked.
    This puzzled the mob. “Don’t you think they should be?”
    He shook his head.
    “Gerrold! Why not?”
    Why not indeed? “Because,” he said, slowly, and the silence came down, except for the clicking of cameras and the hum of the news vans idling, “because they’re just … like animals. They’re just doing what’s in their nature to be doing.” He shrugged.
    Then the barrage started again. “Gerrold! Gerrold! Do you think people are evil?” But by then he was on his way to a military trailer, an examination by an army doctor, a cup of hot coffee, and a meal and a long hot shower.
    Behind him the city was dark. At the moment, it felt cold behind him, but safe, too, in its quiet. He didn’t really want to go back there. Not yet.
    He wished he’d had time to set them one last fire before he’d left.

Special Economics

    What are you doing?” a guy asked her.
“I am divorced,” she said. She had always thought of herself as a person who would one day be divorced, so it didn’t seem like a big stretch to claim it. Staying married to one person was boring. She figured she was too complicated for that. Interesting people had complicated lives. “I’m looking for a job. But I do hip-hop, too” she explained.
    “Hip-hop?” He was a middle-aged man with stubble on his chin who looked as if he wasn’t looking for a job but should be.
    “Not like Shanghai,” she said, “Not like Hi-Bomb. They do gangsta stuff, which I don’t like. Old fashioned. Like M.I.A.,” she said. “Except not political, of course.” She gave a big smile. This was all way beyond the guy. Jieling started the boom box. M.I.A was Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lankan hip-hop artist who had started all on her own years ago. She had sung, she had danced, she had done her own videos. Of course M.I.A. lived in London, which made it easier to do hip-hop and become famous.
    Jieling had no illusions about being a hip-hop singer, but it had been a good way to make some cash up north in Baoding where she came from. Set up in a plague-trash market and dance for yuan.
    Jieling did her opening, her own hip-hop moves, a little like Maya and a little like some things she had seen on MTV, but not too sexy, because Chinese people did not throw you money if you were too sexy. Only April, and it was already hot and humid.
    Ge down, ge down,
    lang-a-lang-a-lang-a.
    Ge down, ge down,
    lang-a-lang-a-lang-a.

    She had borrowed the English. It sounded very fresh. Very criminal.
    The guy said, “How old are you?”
    “Twenty-two,” she said, adding three years to her age, still dancing and singing.
    Maybe she should have told him she was a widow? Or an orphan? But there were too many orphans and widows after so many people died in the bird flu plague. There was no margin in that. Better to be divorced. He didn’t throw any money at her, just flicked open his cellphone to check listings from the market for plague trash. This plague-trash market was so big it was easier to check online, even if you were standing right in the middle of it. She needed a new cell phone. Hers had finally fallen apart right before she headed south.
    Shenzhen people were apparently too jaded for hip-hop. She made fifty-two yuan, which would pay for one night in a bad hotel where country people washed cabbage in the communal sink.
    The market was full of secondhand stuff. When over a quarter of a billion people died in four years, there was a lot of second-hand stuff. But there was still a part of the market for new stuff and street food, and that’s where Jieling found the cell phone seller. He had a cart with stacks of flat plastic cell phone kits printed with circuits and scored. She flipped through;