Summary

Mark Spitz remembers when he first got to Manhattan and assigned to a sweeper crew. Prior to this he had spent an untold amount of time by himself, running around the northeast, surviving day-to-day in this post-apocalyptic America. He briefly introduces the leaders of the cleanup effort, the Buffalo Headquarters, which facilitated and subsidized the city’s sweeper units. Buffalo was planning a corporate campaign around survival, inspiring survivors to look toward the future and remain positive. While the people running the Buffalo headquarters were the smartest available survivors, the sweepers were an “unlikely lot: unemployable man-children . . . people like Mark Spitz” (31). Mark Spitz recalls the Lieutenant of Manhattan’s cleanup project informing the sweepers that Buffalo wanted to know how many of the dead were in the city, and how likely it was that Manhattan could be reestablished as human territory.

Mark Spitz...