Zone One

On Friday, the Omega team are on their scheduled patrol of Zone One. As they are making their way through the Human Resources floor of a building, Mark kicks open the lock to a conference room and comes upon a group of skels. He notices one of the skels looks like his former beloved teacher, Miss Alcott, and is paralyzed momentarily with empathy. When the skels notice him, he manages to shoot the one who looks like Miss Alcott but the others have descended on him during his moment of hesitation. He successfully frees himself when Gary intervenes and shoots the remaining skels. While Mark is appreciative of the rescue, he expresses disapproval of Gary’s unsympathetic manners towards the skels. When Kaitlyn arrives, she charges them with locating the dead skels’ IDs to complete their Incident Reports. 

The team continue through Zone One, encountering a seemingly harmless straggler that they nickname Ned the Copy Boy. Ned is hunched over the copier of the office and motionless. In a bout of sympathy, Mark asks aloud, “What if we let him stay?” (82). Ignoring Mark’s request, Kaitlyn shoots Ned. That night, the team fall asleep inside a conference room, leaving Mark to ponder the growing inhumanity of their survival state.