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for you guys,” the Lieutenant said. He tossed the box of notebooks to the mule-eyed hulk slouching at the closest table, a man who went by the handle of the Professor, an appellation that contradicted his dumbfounded mien. He’d been a mate on a sport-fishing boat in sunnier times, steering rum-addled vacationers to schools of snapper via sonar. The Lieutenant motioned for him to pass the box around. “I know what you’re going to say—we need boots and they talk to us about numbers.”
    Actually they had boots, and most of the sweepers had raided sneaker stores for more comfortable designer footwear after a round of death marches up high-rise stairwells; fortunately for them, the sneaker sponsor had manufactured several product lines for different ages, aesthetic appetites, and athletic inclinations. It was comforting, in the recesses of buildings, to see your buddy’s heel blink from the tiny red LEDs in a novelty running shoe, although Mark Spitz did not partake because of the obvious ankle-exposure issue. Boots was the Lieutenant’s catchall term for truly clutch materiel, the elusive, the vital. Mark Spitz heard the others shifting in boredom at the reference. What did boots symbolize for the man? Order. Sturdy rules. His trove of bygones. All survivors had them, the pet names and metonyms they used to refer to their pasts. Bagel, java, baseball cap, the object that was all objects, the furnishings of the good old days. Why couldn’t the Lieutenant maintain his shrine? Everyone else did.
    Mark Spitz flipped through the pad. Faint pink-and-purple cacti sprouted in the margins. He recognized the sense of Buffalo’s plan. With the assembled data, their supply of eggheads could start projecting how many of the dead they’d find in your typical twenty-two-story corporate flagship, five-floor tenement, fifteen-story apartment complex, what have you. Every structure sheltered its likely trajectories and scenarios; they’d figured that out early. Take residential buildings, for example. Walk into one of the wizened tenements of downtown Manhattan and you could bet on finding at least one citizen who’d barricaded himself inside, turned, and then couldn’t get out. In the first wave, people got infected, barely making it home ahead of collapse. Then the plague wiped and reformatted their brains and they were trapped in their abodes, the most pathetic kind of city shut-in, their hands eventually groping their way toward expensive security locks but incapable of reaching them for the passel of splendid contemporary furniture they’d piled against it. Mark Spitz cursed his luck when he realized they were going to have to remove the door and get all that shit out of the way before they could put the skel down: the particle-board media centers laden with layaway plasmas, limited-issue replicas of Danish-modern wardrobes, the beloved go-to recliners grimed at the armrests from summers of sweat. These specimens were your average skels, not harmless stragglers but a reliable if small percentage of what you’d find in Zone One, so you had to stay frosty.
    By now, Mark Spitz could look at a building and know what kind of weather was brewing inside. Office towers were the least populated. The nine-to-fivers had stopped coming to work when it went down, and most of the rabid skels were lured out by the marines, which left stragglers. (Perhaps, he thought, there will be a study of the farthest a straggler had traveled to its haunting grounds—across streams! quicksand! perilous canyons!—but that was far in the future.) A building like 135 Duane, with its panoply of enterprises, had its idiosyncrasies but nonetheless conformed to the prevailing narrative. Department stores, multinational coffee chains, half-constructed condos. Churches and banh mi shops. Although every address, every new chunk of the grid assigned to them, contributed its special embroideries, the story never changed.
    2.4 stragglers per floor in this type of