Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

  The Lieutenant said, “You figure it out, you get back to me. Personally, I like them. Not supposed to say it out loud, but I think they’ve got it right and we’re the ninety-nine percent that have it all wrong.” He waited for Mark Spitz to turn away from the window. He tapped his desk, lightened the register of his voice, and the new sweeper rejoined him. “Who knows? Maybe it’ll work. The symbolism. If you can bring back New York City, you can bring back the world. Clear out Zone One, then the next, up to Fourteenth Street, Thirty-fourth, Times Square on up. Those sweet crosstown bus routes. I used to take the bus all the time when I lived here, to see the Famous New York Characters in all their glory. Spitting, scratching, talking in voices. Them, not me.” He batted at a fat fly. “We’ll take it back, barricade by barricade. Tell me, Mark Spitz, are you known for your optimistic disposition?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can tell.” The Lieutenant smiled. “That wall out there has to work. The barricade is the only metaphor left in this mess. The last one standing. Keep chaos out, order in. Chaos knocks on the door and bangs on the wood and gets a claw in. Will the boards hold until morning? You know what I’m talking about if you made it this far. There are small barricades—across the apartment door, then a whole house nailed up—and then we have the bigger barricades. The camp. The settlement. The city. We work our way to bigger walls.” Across the room, Fabio tried to catch his attention, but the Lieutenant dismissed the man with a flick. From his assistant’s expression, he was accustomed to his boss’s rhetorical flights. “One naturally thinks of the siege, but we overlook that because the word takes away our agency. Sure, I can play that game. We are safe inside from what is outside. We had our modern conveniences, the machines at the end of the power strip that kept away the primitive. I had my beloved cloud, you had yours.

  “I notice you are not staring vacantly at your palms. Good. Sometimes they ship these mopes in here, they’ve had their souls scooped out. They wash out pretty quick. The hard way. Now I screen everybody who comes in. See what kind of business they got behind the eyes. You passed the quiz. You’re still alive. Congratulations. Even got all your fingers. Which is a big plus in this line of work.”

  The Lieutenant held up a hand to his assistant, acquiescing. “We’re almost done and then you can go. I know the first thing people want to do when they get to Zone One is walk around. See the sights.” Outside, the lunchtime fusillade erupted anew. He rolled his eyes. “You get used to it. Spend some time here and you get used to it. What made you volunteer? You don’t like farming? I come from a family of farmers.”

  Mark Spitz didn’t know in that moment. It would take some time in the Zone for him to discover the reason. He said, “Just trying to do my part.”

  “Good answer! That can-do pheenie attitude. Personally, I say wake me when you bring back cilantro. Got any family?”

  He thought of Uncle Lloyd, but what was there to say. “I don’t know.”

  “Mostly joking with that one. I’ve been thinking about how in the old days, we had these special-ops dudes who did all the batshit stuff. Parachute into hostile territory, baroque wetwork, tiptoeing into the tent to garrote the warlord—pretend I didn’t say that—and these batshit killing machines were always single guys, single men and women, no families. What do they have to lose, right? But who has a family anymore? Everybody’s dead. All those vacation pictures floating in the cloud. Zip. Been thinking about that. Now we’re all batshit killing machines, could be a motherfucking granny wielding knitting needles. I digress.”

  The Lieutenant hesitated, then nodded wearily. “What we have here in Zone One is not a suicide mission. Just a bunch of stragglers. Welcome to the team.”

  The Lieutenant stared at him and Mark Spitz wondered if he was dismissed. Then the man clicked on once more. “You bunk where you want in the grid. Take your pick. Try not to break anything. They’re really big on that now. Sundays you come back here for check-in. Besides that, pop ’em, bag ’em, drag ’em. Any questions?”

  “Seems pretty straightforward,” Mark Spitz said. “This has been very informative.” Fabio handed him some paperwork. He was pulling the door shut behind him when he heard, “Think it might rain today. That’s what the old clouds say.”

  It did rain. It had been raining pretty much constantly since that day. At the window of the conference room, Mark Spitz looked out into a solemn nigrescence that was interrupted only by a white dome of light leeching out of Fort Wonton. The light climbed up a few stories on the Canal buildings like mold. He visualized the hard-core military lamps bleaching the concrete wall to sun-beaten bone white while the night-shift gunners sat in their nests or patrolled the catwalk, listening to the dead songs on their digital music devices. The cranes motionless, maybe being hosed off with sterilizing compound by Disposal. Tomorrow at Breakfast the machines would whine over the wall and clutch the corpses in their firm metal grip and drop them on our side.

  Kaitlyn and Gary slept. He resisted the urge to tug Kaitlyn’s paperback out of her hand—with her reflexes, she’d probably stab him in the eye. Still awake in a shallow layer of her mind. Mark Spitz had pretended to be asleep when his father used to check on him when he was a kid, but he was always awake before the door even opened. His brain processed the distinctive think-I’ll-peek-in-on-my-offspring gait out in the hall and a clerk in his awareness woke him in time for the turn of the doorknob, the creak at ten degrees, the second creak at fifty-five degrees, and the sliver of hall light prying under his eyelids. He fell asleep knowing someone watched over him.

  Gary and Kaitlyn would sleep until their personal danger detectors went off or morning arrived. They were exemplary sleepers, not that kind of pheenie who was up all night rewinding their private pageant of horrors. So much more efficient to be obsessed with such things when awake, to save it for when it might be converted into fuel.

  Who was his family now? A specter of an uncle floating half a mile uptown in a blue building. He had these two mutts. Mark Spitz lost his parents on Last Night, and Gary’s brothers perished in that initial wave as well, when the triplets joined the posse handling the Incident at the Local High School. This when the villagers still believed they could set up a quarantine, and it would work. That tooth-fairy period.

  The PTA meeting went worse than usual, even by the deplorable standards of Milton High School. The engaged, the outraged, and the merely trying to fill the blank space that was their lives had convened to argue over that spring’s big scandal, when one of the lesbian seniors announced her intention to bring her girlfriend to the prom. It had hit the national media as a fully operational event, with a berth on cable network chyron, pro-and-con expert panels, and mortifying nightly-news graphics. Lawsuits had been filed, the late-night wits bon-motted, and the Milton community wanted to see how to prevent such a thing in the future.

  At any rate, the assistant principal had been infected the previous afternoon while breaking up a fight between two elderly ladies in the parking lot of a discount-sneaker chain and had been lurking around the bio labs all day. Attracted by the noise, he interrupted the proceedings with brio. When the police arrived they locked the doors of the premises per the measures suggested by the web videos that had been uploaded by the government about the emerging epidemic, segregating the bitten from the unbitten, employing the gymnasium and assembly, respectively, and waiting for further instructions from the authorities. Who by this time were not even listening to the voice-mail messages from the less consequential municipalities, let alone dispatching a scramble team. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. It was too late. It had always been too late.

  Gary and his brothers were giddy over their deputization, only slightly deflated when told there weren’t enough badges to go around. They’d butted heads with Sheriff Dooley and his officers plenty of times, sure, but in these new circumstances it was easy to see that they were good men to have by your side, shitkickers. They didn’t take any mess, a trait that had hampered their upward mob
ility in former days but now provided opportunity. The brothers were even issued guns; Gary held on to his for almost a year in the following madness, before he accidentally dropped it while hightailing it out of a disused coal mine in South Carolina, no time to stop.

  The guards hadn’t heard anything from inside the school for twelve hours when the sheriff decided to go in. They peered past the wire-reinforced glass set in the thick institutional doors and into the halls they’d bullied through and grab-assed in during their teenage glory days. Saw nothing but shadows. Was this even the same place they remembered? In mistaking this place for something they knew, they undid themselves. For they were now in an entirely different country. It should be noted that as a general rule, the early rookie posses were not as successful as the later posses. Steep learning curve.

  As for Kaitlyn, she never saw her parents again after she departed on her trip to see her best gal pal Amy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Another member of their college-rooming group drove over from Philly and it turned out they hadn’t changed all that much since graduation. The same dull boys skulked around, indulged or ignored, and the trio didn’t have to force the in-jokes at all. They’d lost sleep fearing it would be otherwise. At the end of the weekend, however, the Sunset Dayliner did not return her to home and hearth. The train didn’t budge at all after the conductor got a report about the incident in the dining car and pulled the brakes outside Crawfordsville to wait for the National Guard. She was stuck. Untold misfortunes later, she was in New York City.

  Mark Spitz turned off the lamp. Outside, one of the potbelly transport planes cut the sky, red lights trailing. Grunts and experts rocked on the bucket seats, en route to where? Buffalo, or a make-shift landing field outside one of the camps? Bearing their disparate ammunition.

  In the days following his arrival in the Zone, he’d mulled over the Lieutenant’s theory of the barricades. Yes, they were the only vessel strong enough to contain our faith. But then there are the personal barricades, Mark Spitz thought. Since the first person met the second person. The ones that keep other people out and our madness in so we can continue to live. That’s the way we’ve always done it. It’s what this country was built on. The plague merely made it more literal, spelled it out in case you didn’t get it before. How were we to get through the day without our barricades? But look at him now, he thought. They were his family, Kaitlyn and Gary, and he was theirs. He owned nothing else besides them, and the features of his dead that he superimposed on the faces of the skels, those shoddy rubber masks he pulled out of his pockets. He knew it was pathetic to carry them with him, a lethal sentimentality, but it warded off the forbidden thought. The faces of his dead were part of his barricade, stuck on pikes atop the length of the concrete.

  He volunteered for Zone One while the rest of the wreckers on the Corridor remained because he was from around these parts. The lights of the broken city were few these days. A dim constellation hovered around the wall, smaller halos in the windows of the buildings that personnel staked out in far-flung Wonton, and in silent buildings across the downtown where drones like Mark Spitz cupped their palms around their little flames. North of the wall was darkness and the dead that scraped through that darkness.

  The city could be restored. When they were finished it could be something of what it had been. They would force a resemblance upon it, these new citizens come to fire up the metropolis. Their new lights pricking the blackness here and there in increments until it was the old skyline again, ingenious and defiant. The new lights seeping through the black veil like beads of blood pushing through gauze until it was suffused.

  Yes, he’d always wanted to live in New York.

  SATURDAY

  “The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace.”

  Initially the dreams, when safe nights permitted them, favored a classic anxiety paradigm. He was enmeshed in the institutional structures of his previous existence—in school, one of his blank jobs—and the other students and the teachers, fellow employees, and bosses were dead. Dead in a precipitous state of decay, winnowed by the plague: bones visibly gliding under taut skin at every movement, blackened gums bared when they told a joke or introduced a complicating element to the setup (the exam is today, the supervisor is on the warpath), their wounds mushy and livid. They leaked, leaked constantly from sores, eyes, ears, bites. In the dreams he was not bothered by their appearance, nor were they. They informed him that they’d all studied for the test save for him, the big assignment was due after lunch and not next week, the performance review was already under way, abetted by secret cameras. Not that he’d ever had a performance review in his life—it was a neurotic curve-ball his subconscious came up with to freak him out, employing the exotic cant of bona fide grown-ups. They were not the rabid dead or stragglers. They acted pretty much the same as they had before, his best friend, his insidious science teacher, his distracted boss. Except for the plague thing, these were the dreams he’d been having for years.

  The dreams changed once he made it to his first big settlement. He was no longer late for the final exam of a class he didn’t know he’d enrolled in, or about to deliver the big presentation to higher-ups when he suddenly realized he left the only copy in the backseat of the taxi. His dreams unfurled in the theater of the mundane. There was no pulse-quickening escalation of events, no stakes to mention. He took the train to work. He waited for his pepperoni slice’s extraction from the pizza joint’s hectic oven. He jawed with his girlfriend. And all the supporting characters were dead. The dead said, “Let’s stay in and get a movie,” “You want fries with that?,” “Do you know what time it is?,” while flies skittered on their faces searching for a soft flap to bury eggs in, shreds of human meat wedged in their front teeth like fabled spinach, and their arms terminated at the elbow to showcase a white peach of bone fringed with dangling muscle and dripping tendons. He said, “Sure, let’s stay in and snuggle, it’s been a long day,” “I’ll take the side salad instead, thank you,” “It’s ten of five. Gets dark early this time of year.”

  He downward-dogged in a drop-in yoga class as the skel next to him broke in half while essaying the pose. No one remarked upon this sight, not him, not the dead teacher, not the enthusiastic and limber dead around him, and not the bisected skel on the floral-patterned hemp mat, who flopped grotesquely through the rest of the hour like a real trooper. He got into his street clothes in the locker room as the yuppie skel beside him dragged an expensive watch over his wrist, grating the fresh scabs there. On impulse he purchased a deluxe combo juice at the café on the way out and decided not to say anything when the pimply skel dropped a banana slice into the blender. He hated banana. He drank it anyway, blowing into the striped straw to dislodge a plug of pulp, and stepped out to the sidewalk into the rush-hour stream of the dead on their way home, the paralegals, mohels, resigned temps, bike messengers, and slump-shouldered massage therapists, the panoply of citizens in the throes of their slow decay. The plague was a meticulous craftsman, dabbing effects with deliberation. They were falling apart but it would take a long time until the piece was finished. Only then could it sign its name. Until then, they walked.

  He took the subway to the commuter rail, curling his fingers around the pole still warm from the skel who had grasped it moments before. In the advertisements lodged just above eye level, airbrushed heads of the dead hawked trade schools and remedies. Some of the dead entered the train politely and others were quite rude as they shouldered into the car when he tried to gain the platform. Everybody trying to eke it home. On the commuter platform he made sure his monthly pass was secured in the nook in his wallet and he pictured the night ahead. Order in from his go-to takeout spot, pop open one of the beers, and watch the reality show he’d DVR’d three days before. He woke up as the train left the tunnel and they were out of the underground.

  The only unsettling thing about the dream was that he’d never taken a yoga class in his life.

  This series eluded the category
of nightmare. He awoke refreshed, or at least aloft in a routine state of morning dread in equilibrium for months. The new vintage of dreamscape left him feeling curiously indifferent. The dead small-talked, recited speculation over tomorrow’s cold front, numbly caromed from task to task as they had before, but they were sick. He recalled a theory of dreams from the old days that declared them wish-fulfillment, and another declaring that you are every person in your dreams, and each theory seemed equally plausible and moot and in the end he didn’t spend too much time analyzing. He was a busy man these days.

  To the next grid, and Godspeed. His unit squeezed MRE bacon-and-eggs paste onto their tongues—amber with brownish-red swirls—and packed up their gear. Kaitlyn deposited her celeb bio on the windowsill, as if gifting it to the next guest at the sun-splashed resort. They almost made it to the stairwell when she remembered the motion detector. She went back for it. That happened a lot these days. It was nice to know it was there even though it hadn’t sirened once since the start of their tour.

  Their new assignment was Fulton x Gold, Mixed Residential/Business, a few blocks east. It started as a no-bother drizzle but Mark Spitz pulled on his poncho on account of the ash, and the others followed suit when the rain intensified.

  They progressed without speaking, still waking up on their march. Kaitlyn whistled “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction),” that irrepressible pheenie anthem, as they stomped through the gray puddles. “What if we get there,” Gary said finally, “and they’ve all keeled over? They finally caught what those kill-field skels got and all we have to do is bag them from now on?” He made this offering whenever they switched grids.

  “That would be nice,” Mark Spitz said. The discovery of the kill fields that spring hastened the start of many a reconstruction operation. Word first arrived with the new survivors stumbling through the camp gates with their extravagant tales of meadows and mall parking lots brimming with the fallen dead. It wasn’t as if someone had neutralized them and departed without sterilizing the area—their heads were intact, they said. The dead looked as if they’d dropped in place.