Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

  The Lieutenant said, “An irritating number of you have been bugging me from the field for updates, even though I keep telling you to keep the comm channels clear, so here’s the deal: The Tromanhauser Triplets are out of ICU.”

  Everyone applauded. Kaitlyn thanked God. Mark Spitz had walked in on her praying their first night in the Zone. She had stopped to talk to her God in the middle of flossing, the minty white thread looped around her index finger. Kaitlyn was embarrassed, although most people had started praying, or increased the frequency of their prayers, for obvious reasons. Religion had been a taboo subject in former times, but now impromptu proselytizing sessions broke out in besieged department-store stockrooms, in the attics of crumbling Midwest Victorians, as the holed-up survivors swapped deities and afterlife hypotheses. It passed the time until morning and the resumption of the gauntlet. Kaitlyn apologized, saying “I just want them to be safe,” and he knew she was talking about the Triplets. Even Gary expressed concern in their progress, as they were fellow, natural multiples in an age where such a thing had been “cheapened by that IVF crap,” as he put it. “They’re gonna know what we know,” Gary said, “how it is for our kind.”

  Mark Spitz clapped his hands desultorily. Doris Tromanhauser whiled away the ruination holed up in the Trenton branch of a respectable international bank, as part of a bunkered-down ensemble who’d given their fealty to an easily fortified brass-studded front door and impressive stone construction, both holdovers from a time when customers preferred impenetrability over glass-walled transparency in their neighborhood reserve. (Current events put an end to that debate for good.) The plucky band dwindled as they were forced to make the inevitable forays outside; all those present in the dumpling house were versed in this scenario, the relentless subtractions. Finally it was just Doris and one of the men who could have been the Triplets’ father, until in due course he, too, ventured out for supplies. (A sequence of ménages made paternity impossible to establish, and a DNA test was, alas, impossible.) He never came back. The familiar story. After six months on her lonesome, surviving on who knows what, high-fiber deposit slips and credit-card brochures, she was rescued by a Bubbling Brooks recon unit. She did not survive the delivery, and the Triplets were in a bad way, bank literature being devoid of nutrients essential to prenatal development.

  New life in the midst of devastation. Corn, babies. Word of the Tromanhausers spread through the Northeast settlements quicker than any uplifting news of this or that reconstruction effort, or contact with some faraway country that had been written off long ago. The babies even diverted survivors from delight in the discovery of the latest kill field, that phenomenon encountered with increasing regularity, the mystery that pointed to an ebbing of the plague. Did you hear that Finn opened his eyes, that Cheyenne is still unresponsive, they’re not sure but they suspect that something may be amiss with Dylan’s heart, a hole or a bump? Mark Spitz was pulling for them, rooting for them, or whatever it was that one did when the world was ending and a statistically meaningless fraction of the planet’s extant population encountered a slightly larger daily portion of misfortune. He didn’t want to get too invested. He was a firm believer, in the absence of any traditionally recognized faith, or even nontraditional and gaining traction in these murderous days, in the reserve tank. It was important to maintain a reserve tank of feeling topped off in case of emergency. Mark Spitz was not going to spare any for these cubs. A year ago, in the middle of the collapse, these babies would have been another miserable footnote, too small an item on the list of atrocities to merit more than a sad shake of your tragedy-boggled head. (And a footnote to what, for that matter. No one was writing this book. All the writers were busy pouring jugs of kerosene on the heaps of the dead, pitching in for a change.) But now things were different. To pheenies, these babies were localized hope, and they needed the Triplets to pull through. Buffalo could announce a vaccine tomorrow, or a process for reversing the tortures of the plague, and they’d still be talking Tromanhauser Triplets.

  “We’re all glad to hear this news, I’m sure,” the Lieutenant said in a monotone. “If you want to donate part of your rations to their care, put your X on the sign-up sheet before you head out.” He pressed his fingers to his temples and started rubbing in slow, assuaging circles. “Last but not least in this bona fide gusher of good tidings, your heavy loads be lightened by the news that USS Endeavor embarked safely and is en route to the summit.”

  The Endeavor was a nuclear sub. After what happened on Air Force One, it was the only way His Excellency would make the journey, and who could blame him.

  “Get ’em, Gina!” Gary howled, earning guffaws. Gina Spens was Italy’s emissary to the summit. Before the catastrophe, she had been a pornographic-film star of nimble and well-documented prowess, a Top 25 search string on adult sites across three hemispheres. She had her fans. Her comeback as it were, for she had retired from the business, was occasioned by the End of the World As We Know It, that epic saga to which all were audience and supporting cast. Still shooting, rewritten on the fly on account of the discouraging dailies. Gina performed her own stunts in a series of action sequences throughout Italy’s contest against the dead—the Encounter at Horror Gorge and the legendary Ambush of the Wretches, among other credulity-testing adversities. Her feats trickled out with the reestablishment of communications with the European powers, and for her exertions she had become a player in her homeland’s provisional government. Provisional governments were really big these days, an international fad in the grand old style.

  A society manufactures the heroes it requires. Gina was that new species of celebrity emerging from the calamity, elevated by the altered definitions of valor and ingenuity. They walked among us, on every continent, in the territories of every depleted nation. What American had not thrilled to the inspiring story of Dave Peters, who spent six months drifting in a catamaran in a Michigan lake, living off a carton of cashews and paddling away whenever he drifted too close to shore, which teemed with the dead. Everyone thrilled to the story of Wilhelmina Godiva and her grain-silo fortress, how she’d battled her way to the Maryland settlements armed with nothing but her famous rusty pitchfork, which was now enshrined over the front gate of Camp Victory’s Sword. Her mind was gone, sure, but she made it through, and her followers took care of her, wiping spittle from her lips as she murmured her prophecies into her digital recorder. Across the ocean, Gina Spens masterminded search-and-destroy missions in southern Italy and became a worldwide sensation, whispered about in the dancing glow of scavenged antimosquito candles. The more unlikely the tale of survival, the absurd extremity of one’s circumstances in a world of extreme circumstance, the greater one’s fame. Gina had made some spectacular kills. Yes, she had her fans.

  “I’ll keep you posted on how that goes, natch,” the Lieutenant said. It was their last bulletin from beyond the island until next week. He distributed their new grid assignments. He closed with his standard “Now run along like good little pheenies,” his sardonic pronunciation of the slang drawing grins. The Lieutenant’s strategic informalities comforted his troops when they were out in the field. One of them worked on reconstruction, a real fucking human being among the abstractions doling out pronouncements and paradigms in Buffalo.

  They were dismissed. On their own. “We ain’t doing no homework,” Gary said as Omega walked out of the dumpling house. He said it loud enough for the guys in his old unit to hear, Mark Spitz noticed, to show them that he was the same man, even though he was saddling up with characters of questionable mettle, the kind of saps they used to rob for rice in the dismal days of the interregnum.

  “I’ll do it,” Kaitlyn said. “I was elected Secretary of the Student Council twice.” Mark Spitz shuddered as if bitten: to admit such a thing without a smidgen of self-consciousness. To say it with pride. Who on the planet had put those words together in that sequence since the outbreak: Secretary of the Student Council? It was a half-recalled lullaby overheard on the str
eet, cooed by some young mom bent over her kid in the summer glare, rekindling innocence: Secretary of the Student Council. The effect was abetted by a rare appearance of the sun, slumping out from the gray. Not too much ash in the sky even though they were only a few blocks from the wall.

  He had been here before. It wasn’t the Chinatown of old, but in the corners of his perception the pixels resolved themselves and reduced to zero the distance between Old Chinatown and New Chinatown. The crooked streets had been cleared to give the military vehicles access and soldiers walked slowly on their rounds, making jokes, cracking wise over a shop sign’s mangled English, debating the attractiveness of the lady corporal who had arrived on that morning’s transport. This section of Zone One contained the busiest streets in the city now. (Or the busiest streets where the people were still people—he retreated from the shadow that crept up, of uptown corners where the uncounted hordes gallivanted mindlessly.) The grunts and commissioned officers, the sweepers and the engineers, were nattily decked out in fresh, unblemished fatigues, in the new puncture- and tear- and abrasion-proof mesh, totally deluxe, they wore utility vests and carried weapons held in place by an assortment of snaps, buckles, and holsters, but they were doing what people did in a city: catching a breath between errands. And that was life.

  As a kid, Mark Spitz executed Chinatown runs for fireworks and bootlegs, and the congestion had always overwhelmed him, the way it had many sons and daughters of Nassau County. Grow up on Long Island living off one of the spiral arms of the expressway, and nothing kicked up the vertigo more than a visit to Chinatown, with its discordant and jostling multitudes. It was the stereotype of fast-talking, fast-walking, eagerly lacerating New York distilled into a potent half mile. You do not belong. You will be devoured by this monster. Outside the dumpling house, in this resettled northern edge of Zone One, the tiny chaos—the sudden shock of a supply truck’s horn or a jeep backfiring—was the sound of promise, of a civilization stepping clear of the charnel house. The welter of Chinatown had been the larger hustle of the entire city condensed, and now the echo of that noise in this handful of streets spoke of a vanished order that might reassert itself. If you believed in the mission. The neighborhood would never be that roiling and exuberant again—at least in Mark Spitz’s lifetime. They needed Tromanhauser Triplets and their ilk, the repopulating engine of babies, the unborn. But for a second, Mark Spitz glimpsed something of the new city they had been sent to build.

  Omega walked downtown to their next assignment: Grid 98, Chambers x West Broadway, Mixed Residential/Business. “Here’s to it’s all walk-ups,” Mark Spitz said.

  “We wouldn’t mind some more parking lots,” Gary said.

  “Or a big gas station,” Kaitlyn said.

  Parking lots were freebies. No one ever knocked a gigantic parking lot, snug in the bosom of that week’s grid.

  “It’s about one and a half clicks,” Gary said.

  “Twenty blocks,” Mark Spitz corrected.

  “Clicks.”

  “Blocks.”

  “Clicks,” Gary said as they marched toward West Broadway. Adding, “We hate that armadillo. Creeped us out since the crib.”

  Kaitlyn didn’t mind the ludicrous notebook and in fact relished the opportunity to divert her companions down her nostalgia’s alley. “I used to have all that stuff, I had everything,” she said, proceeding to deep-caption the plushies, posters, and plastic statuary on display in her childhood’s museum, the manifold tie-in merch of the effeminate armadillo’s brand family. Gary smuggled his distinct bit of home under his fingernails, and their unit leader carried hers in the errant conversational tidbit or dimpled inflection that made it possible to pretend the three of them had been whisked away from the dead city and were riding in her family minivan, bouncing in the bright and splendid past, en route to the mall to meet up with the gang by the fountain in the middle of the food court, or queue up for the latest 3-D smash.

  Kaitlyn’s native herd had grazed on the sweet berries of gentility. Mark Spitz didn’t have a complete dossier on Kaitlyn that day, but he was working on it. She had been bioengineered in the birthing vats of a sanctified midwestern principality, an upper-middle-class Kingdom of Bruiselessness. Here she was, long curls peeking out of her helmet, head cocked as she double-checked orders over the comm and absentmindedly wiped gore from her knife, when she should have been braiding the hair of one of her fellow sorority pledges, in her favorite pad-around-the-dorm sweatpants, sexually ambiguous pop avatar crooning from the computer speakers. Of course she had been elected Secretary of the Student Council twice: Who would make up such a thing?

  Their unit might be standing before a line of hair dryers in a tony hair salon, nigh shod in jellyfish clumps of brains, and Kaitlyn would perkily chatter on about how she’d spent summers at her grandparents’ cabin “doing the usual stuff, you know, riding horses and lifeguarding,” or earning cosmetics money at the ice-cream store with her “Best Friends Forever Amy and Jordan.” You don’t say? Mark Spitz saw it clearly: Kaitlyn’s implacable march through a series of imaginative and considered birthday parties—her parents were so thoughtful, here was a blessing bestowed from one generation to the next—each birthday party transcending the last and approaching a kind of birthday-party perfection that once accomplished would usher in an exquisite new age of bourgeois utopia. They strove, they plotted, they got the e-mail of that new magician in town, with his nouveau prestidigitations. Maybe, he thought one night, it wasn’t utopia that they had worked toward after all, and it was Kaitlyn herself who had summoned the plague: as she cut into the first slice of cake at her final, perfect birthday party, history had come to an end. She had blown out the candles on the old era, blotted out the dinosaurs’ heavens, sent the great ice sheet scraping forth, the blood counts zooming up into madness.

  Working the island with Kaitlyn, Mark Spitz received steady dispatches from the extinguished world, weathered but still legible. That place lived on and persisted in her, in the minuscule tumult of Chinatown, and as long as she breathed, and others like her, perhaps it might return. When Omega wound down at night after their shift, Kaitlyn fired up the transporter and materialized these pristine artifacts of normalcy into their bivouac. “One time at Model UN, we pulled the fire alarm after hours because there were these cute boys from Michigan and we wanted to see them in their pj’s.” Gary and Mark Spitz traded incredulous glances: After all they had witnessed, whole realms of the peculiar had been held in reserve.

  She had made it through. Just as Gary couldn’t picture how in the hell a galoot like Mark Spitz bumbled through the host of menaces unscathed, so was Kaitlyn’s journey impossible to imagine. No one at Fort Wonton, man or woman, failed to experience an episode of cognitive dissonance on meeting Kaitlyn, being subjected to her buoyant giggle. But she had done the same things they all had been forced to do. She had been hunted, and she had escaped. She had killed and had watched as the cast of her anecdotes was cut down, her former fellow pledges and debate partners. Her parents, who had obviously trained her in more than just the ways of a sunny disposition for her to have made it this far. She had survived, and that’s why she was here in Zone One. No matter what her life had been before.

  The scientists wanted the sweeper data to superimpose it on their map of the smithereens and generate prophecies. Kaitlyn and her stories of the past were another stencil to lay over the disaster, to remind them of the former shape of the world. In their separate warrens, these different parties toiled over the future with their instruments: “We Make Tomorrow!” Why else were they in Manhattan but to transport the old ways across the violent passage of the calamity to the safety of the other side? If you don’t believe that, Mark Spitz asked himself, why are you here?

  • • •

  Omega finished the operation in Human Resources. It was a larger and messier cleanup than usual for a single room in an office building. Four rabid infected in one room, that was a blip in a straggler mission, especially after th
e marines’ monstrous cull. Nothing Mark Spitz couldn’t handle, but he cursed the idea that months of dropping stragglers had attenuated his skills.

  There were your standard-issue skels, and then there were the stragglers. Most skels, they moved. They came to eat you—not all of you, but a nice chomp here or there, enough to pass on the plague. Cut off their feet, chop off their legs, and they’d gnash the air as they heaved themselves forward by their splintered fingernails, looking for some ankle action. The marines had eliminated most of this variety before the sweepers arrived.

  The stragglers, on the other hand, did not move, and that’s what made them a suitable objective for civilian units. They were a succession of imponderable tableaux, the malfunctioning stragglers and the places they chose to haunt throughout the Zone and beyond. An army of mannequins, limbs adjusted by an inscrutable hand. The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on the ottoman, blank attentive face waiting for the patient who was late, ever late, and unpacking the reasons for this would consume a large portion of a session that would never occur. The patient failed to arrive, was quite tardy, was dead, was running through a swamp with a hatchet, pursued by monsters. The pock-faced assistant manager of the shoe store crouched before the foot-measuring instrument, frozen, sans customers, the left shoes of his bountiful stock on display along the walls of the shop on miniature plastic ledges. The vitamin-store clerk stalled out among the aisles, depleted among the plenty, the tiny bottles containing gel-capped ancient remedies and placebos. The owner of the plant store dipped her fingers into the soil of a pot earmarked for a city plant, one hearty in the way the shop’s customers were hearty, for wasn’t every citizen on the grand island a sort of sturdy indoor variety that didn’t need much sunlight. A man wrapped in the colors of the Jamaican flag loitered over the new bongs, the crème de la crème of head-shop apparatus, rainbow bulbs perforated according to the latest notions about air circulation, intake, draw. No smoke, no fire. In the desolate consumer-electronics showroom, the up-selling floor salesman halted mid-pitch, as if psychoanalyzing a skeptical rube who was simply, ever and always, not in the room, not in the market for purchases big-ticket or otherwise. A man bent before a mirror that perched on the glass counter of a sunglasses store, his fingers holding on the arms of invisible shades. A woman cradled a wedding dress in the dressing room’s murk, reenacting without end a primal moment of expectation. A man lifted the hood of a copy machine. They did not move when you happened on them. They didn’t know you were there. They kept watching their movies.