Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

  Gladys’s youngest son, Oliver, was turning five. Miriam’s son Asher had celebrated his birthday the week before. It was one of those enchanted, hyperactive months when the weekends were saturated with birthday parties and the moms (and odd dad) worked hard to coordinate their schedules—you can take Saturday and we’ll take Sunday and next year we’ll switch—reserve the vetted play spaces, discover new, uncharted play spaces, and ponder overlong what to cram down the gullets of the diaphanous goodie bags, the gooey, the plastic, the cavity-inducing. It was a kindhearted competition as far as these things go. Perhaps exhausted by the game, Gladys went old school by holding Oliver’s party at home. Gladys downloaded the latest pastimes and tips from a parenting site she didn’t think anyone else had heard of yet. The pool would finally be finished by then and, weather willing, it would be a splendid inaugural bash.

  The pool wasn’t finished. Gladys told Mim that Lamont had run out of patience and wanted to fire the contractor, but everyone else was booked up, they’d checked. The back of the house was a jagged hell and they’d have to stay indoors on account of liability. And to top it all off, Gladys told her, Lamont was sick upstairs with the flu. One aspect of the afternoon remained unblemished, however. It was a drop-off party, that two-hour oasis in the harried parent’s calendar, egress to a world of manis and pedis, a pilfered nap, a glass or two of decent rosé. Mim left her kids there. They had buddies their own age, known each other since they were born. Asher, Jackson, and little Eve didn’t even spare a goodbye, trotting into the playroom where the other kids toiled in their commotion. “Good luck,” Mim said, as Gladys shut the door to keep the AC in.

  When she returned an hour and a half later—she had resolved to straighten up her office but had scratched at her crossword instead—she saw the ambulance outside but immediately calmed herself: Gladys would have called her if it had been one of her kids. Then the squad cars ran her off the road as they sped past, almost driving onto her friend’s front lawn and into her beloved hydrangeas and Mim thought, Maybe Gladys didn’t have time to call and something has happened to her babies. She was correct: Gladys didn’t have time to call.

  Twelve hours later, Mim was on the run like everyone else. Cast out into the dreary steppes. Mark Spitz didn’t ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.

  Mark Spitz thought of Mim and the toy store as he walked up to Wonton because of the encounter with Bravo Unit. Other people in their surprises, the different social outcomes in the new world. He rarely hung out this far downtown before the plague, had never run into people he knew on these streets, so it was odd seeing Angela and the other two on their rounds. Mark Spitz was surprised at how calm he had been as the businessman skel approached, how far removed he was from out there. He was one of six heavily armed soldiers. This was not Last Night in its cruel ministrations. This was the new kingdom of Zone One. His turf after all this time.

  The city—the pre-catastrophe city with its untold snares and machinations—intimidated him. He’d never lived on the island. He spent a sweltering August crashing with a college buddy in Bushwick, stranded on the L train, sure, but even when he could have scraped up enough dough for some miserable boot-camp apartment he had resisted moving to the city. He commuted to his job in Chelsea from his childhood home to save some money, he told himself. He wasn’t the only one putting off the big move; a lot of the people he grew up with shuffled back to Long Island after college, knowing it was safe there or realizing this after getting slapped around and bruised out in the world. If they had ever left at all.

  Looking back, it was silly. He wanted to find his bearings after his stint in California, have some sort of kick-ass job or unspecified achievement under his belt before he moved to Manhattan. To think that there had been a time when such a thing meant something: the signifiers of one’s position in the world. Today a rusty machete and bag of almonds made you a person of substance. He had waited on a sweet internship from one of the globe-strangling midtown firms or … he couldn’t think of it, what else would have made him comfortable walking down the New York streets in that hectic boil. He had been scared of the city. He knew how to dog-paddle and that was it. Now no one hogged the sidewalk so he couldn’t pass, beat him to that vacant subway seat, jousted with him. He only encountered slow desperadoes and fellow sheriffs, meting out justice in the territory.

  A feather of plastic stuck to his boot and flopped against the pavement. He tore it off. He was accustomed to the silence now, understood it as a part of himself, weightless gear he stowed in his pack next to the gauze and anticiprant. He walked in the middle of the street, between the ankles of the steel juggernauts. Past the barren windows. His beat was different than the marines’. The dead had poured out of the buildings when they heard the soldiers’ dinner bell of war whoops and gunfire, and were cut down. His own tour of the tenements and high-end edifices was calmer: he had time to interpret the rooms of asylum. Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population remained at a miraculous density, it seemed to him, for the empty rooms brimmed with evidence, in the stragglers they did or did not contain, in the busted barricades, in the expired relatives on the futon beds, arms crossed over their chests in ad hoc rites. The rooms stored anthropological clues re: kinship rituals and taboos. How they treated their dead.

  The rich tended to escape. Entire white-glove buildings were devoid, as Omega discovered after they worried the seams of and then shattered the glass doors to the lobby (no choice, despite the No-No Cards). The rich fled during the convulsions of the great evacuation, dragging their distilled possessions in wheeled luggage of European manufacture, leaving their thousand-dollar floor lamps to attract dust to their silver surfaces and recount luxury to later visitors, bowing like weeping willows over imported pile rugs. A larger percentage of the poor tended to stay, shoving layaway bureaus and media consoles up against the doors. There were those who decided to stay, willfully uncomprehending or stupid or incapacitated by the scope of the disaster, and those who could not leave for a hundred other reasons—because they were waiting for their girlfriend or mother or soul mate to make it home first, because their mobility was compromised or a relative was debilitated, crutched, too young. Because it was too impossible, the enormity of the thought: This is the end. He knew them all from their absences.

  He stood in the abandoned nests, kicking empty cans that had held the mainstay vegetables, backbone of a good American diet. Where terrified family units had quivered while waiting for the next-door neighbors to stop screaming for entry: Save us, let us in. When the screaming ceased, the residents waited for them to stop passing by the eyehole in the front door, deadly shadows in that tiny aperture. The plague-blind residents of apartments 7J and 9F, who had studiously ignored each other during the occasional elevator internment, had elected themselves to the condo board without dissenting votes and now patrolled the halls in search of bylaw infractions and flesh, pausing by the door as if they heard the breathing of those inside despite all those huddled critters did to silence themselves. In the living room on the fifth floor of the walk-up, the entombed lovers made a bed of expensive, hand-sewn blankets that was ringed by puddles of wax from the candles they’d used for dinner parties and romantic evenings at home, and murmured the newly minted endearments: “No, you take the last one, I ate yesterday” and “If I didn’t have you with me right now I would have killed myself long ago.” All of these waited for their moment of escape, those early days. All of these and the loners—the hipsters, the homesick transfer students and homebound retired teachers, the elderly who thought themselves long past being surprised by the invidious schemes of the world, the new arrivals with bad timing and zero friends and lacking anything resembling that false assemblage described as a “support syst
em,” and the biding cranks finally gifted with a perverted version of their long-awaited dream of liberation from humanity. They spent weeks or months holed up in their pads, devouring everything in the cheap cabinetry, every last morsel save for the upholstery, and even this occasionally bore marks of teeth, before finally making a break for it at whatever time of day they’d decided was safest, in the direction dictated by their mulled theories, toward the bridges, the river to search for a seaworthy vessel, the roof to wave down angels for a lift. Out, out.

  They had lived in the city in the days of the plague. They finished off the food and hope of rescue and packed a small bag. In time they left their apartments or else snuffed themselves according to the recipes offered by the manual of pop culture. He’d never met anyone in the camps or the great out there who had made it out of the city after the first couple of days. They left the doors unlocked.

  He became a connoisseur of the found poetry in the abandoned barricade. The minuscule, hardscrabble wedge of space between the piled-up furniture and the apartment door the departing had squeezed through. The wide, inviting arch of an old church that had been dwarfed by high-rises, the only open doorway on the block, the debris on the steps kicked away in the escape and the cleared path creating a kind of carpet for the bride and groom en route to the honeymoon limo. And out in the country, the one blank window among the other boarded-up windows on the first floor of the farmhouse, with its welcome mat of shattered glass. Those inside had made a break for it, and there the story ended. Did they make it? It was less depressing than the spectacle of the overcome barricade, the fortifications that failed, with their rotting, weather-lashed corpses and the expressionist eruptions of crimson across the surfaces.

  When he used to watch disaster flicks and horror movies he convinced himself he’d survive the particular death scenario: happen to be away from his home zip code when the megatons fell, upwind of the fallout, covering the bunker’s air vents with electrical tape. He was spread-eagled atop the butte and catching his breath when the tsunami swirled ashore, and in the lottery for a berth on the spacecraft, away from an Earth disintegrating under cosmic rays, his number was the last one picked and it happened to be his birthday. Always the logical means of evasion, he’d make it through as he always did. He was the only cast member to heed the words of the bedraggled prophet in Act I, and the plucky dude who slid the lucky heirloom knife from his sock and sawed at the bonds while in the next room the cannibal family bickered over when to carve him for dinner. He was the one left to explain it all to the skeptical world after the end credits, jibbering in blood-drenched dungarees before the useless local authorities, news media vans, and government agencies who spent half the movie arriving on the scene. I know it sounds crazy, but they came from the radioactive anthill, the sorority girls were dead when I got there, the prehistoric sea creature is your perp, dredge the lake and you’ll find the bodies in its digestive tract, check it out. By his sights, the real movie started after the first one ended, in the impossible return to things before.

  • • •

  This is the story Mark Spitz told that final Sunday. The bite had stopped geysering blood. It was just the two of them, as Kaitlyn worried over the comm in the front room. Gary asked, “Why do they call you Mark Spitz?”

  “I’d been at Happy Acres a few months, signed up for a bunch of work details, and I wanted to get out more. I missed it out there. I was malfunctioning—weird dreams, feeling gummed up—ever since I got picked up by the army.”

  When the convoy departed Camp Screaming Eagle, Happy Acres was still known as PA-12; on his arrival two days later, the signage proclaiming the new name was fresh and white and fragrant, the stencils curled in piles by the trash bins. Buffalo repositioned the settlements in the market—CT-6 into Gideon’s Triumph, VA-2 into Bubbling Brooks—and perhaps Mark Spitz was being repositioned as well, from scarred and hollow-eyed wanderer into contributing actor of the American Phoenix. He worked in Inventory, tracking how many gallons of peanut oil and cans of asparagus tips were coming in and going out, tending to glitches in the supply train between local camps. Was Happy Acres receiving its fair share of recovered antiseptic or not, a proper allocation of that newly discovered cache of floss, and more important, was Morning Glory hoarding toilet paper with malicious intent, or were they merely embroiled in a camp-wide, gastrointestinal misadventure? He recorded everything on sponsored recycled paper, in longhand like in the dark ages before computers. It passed the time.

  When word came down about the Northeast Corridor op, Mark Spitz was famished for change. He poked his ballot into the box and when they stapled the list of names on the rec center wall, right next to that day’s survivor roll, he cheered for the first time since that final Atlantic City excursion, when Kyle lumbered into a hot streak and the craps table went bonkers for a time. As far as the new employment went, clearing the corridor didn’t sound too terrible, capacious enough for both the orderly virtues of settlement life and the freebooting thrills of the wasteland shuck ’n’ jive.

  In the cinema of end-times, the roads feeding the evacuated city are often clear, and the routes out of town clotted with paralyzed vehicles. Whether government supercomputers have calculated beyond all doubt that the meteor will decimate downtown or the genetically engineered killer cockroaches are taking over the city, the inbound lanes are unimpeded. It makes for a stark visual image, the crazy hero returning to the doomed metropolis to save his kid or gal or to hunt down the encrypted computer file that might—just might!—reverse disaster, driving a hundred miles an hour into the hexed zip codes when all the other citizens are vamoosing, wide-eyed in terror, mouths decorated with flecks of white foam.

  In Mark Spitz’s particular apocalypse, the human beings were messy and did not obey rules, and every lane in and out, every artery and vein, was filled with outbound traffic. A disemboweled city, spilling its entrails, will tend to the disorderly side. If you want to fight against the stream of common sense, noble protagonist, you are going to have some trouble. For a time, the frenzied evacuees hack out precious distance between themselves and the blight. The cars and vans jerk forward, stop, stutter, a line makes a break for the shoulder and then there’s a new lane, premium guzzlers with four-wheel drive ditch the roads altogether and tromp over the semi-landscaped greenery at the edge of the highway, mowing down the sign informing you THIS MILE OF ROUTE 23 MAINTAINED BY THE MORTVILLE SENIORS CHOIR. The drivers and passengers don’t want to die. They have witnessed the grisly denouements of others, are panicked and shamed by how quickly they have jettisoned the props of civilization. A certain percentage will make it through, will escape to one of the rescue stations they’ve been hearing about on the radio, we have to, and hey, is it just me or have the announcers stopped mentioning Benjamin Franklin Elementary, do you think it’s still operational?

  The vehicles stop. Some obstruction they can’t see at the head of the line. Distressing. People shout rumors down the turnpike. Aunt Ethel stirs in the backseat, her new brain issuing commands, her macramé shawl drops from her bosom and she takes a hunk of meat out of Jeffrey Fitzsimmons’s neck, and nephew Jeffrey steers the two-year-old sport-utility vehicle into the Petersons’ Japanese compact, which is so crammed with heirlooms and bottled water and camping gear that Sam Peterson can barely see out the windows, not that he woulda had time to get out of the way even if he’d seen the Fitzsimmonses coming. Bang, crash, ploof of air-bag expanding, squish of metal impaling flesh in arrangements unforeseeable by crash-test professionals. The eight-car pile brings all the northern movement on the interstate to a halt. There’s no getting around. No backing up. Jammed in there. And then the dead start to move from the trees.

  Now it was time to open the lanes. If all went well, the Northeast Corridor will eventually stretch from D.C. to Boston and the precious cargo (medicine, bullets, foodstuffs, people) will travel unimpeded up and down the coast. Mark Spitz’s wrecker detail was responsible for a stretch of I-95 in mephitic Co
nnecticut and the occasional tributary, foraying from comfy Fort Golden Gate. In prelapsarian days, the base had been one of the largest retirement communities in the state, known for its facility with the latest trends and currents in Alzheimer’s care. The redbrick walls encircling the property, constructed to keep the befogged safe inside, now kept those with an entirely different impairment to their mental faculties outside. Naturally, there were more gun nests.

  The many-windowed campus buildings allowed the constant delectation of invigorating sunsets—indeed, it was hard for Mark Spitz to adjust to so much glass after a bunker existence—and the bungalows formerly inhabited by active, self-sufficient seniors were a serious upgrade from the communal bunks at the settlement camps. The dining hall was pastel and affirming, and no one complained when some rogue operative booted up the old sound system one day and the anodyne instrumentals scored every meal in a ceaseless loop of deracinated pop. The fort’s inhabitants fluttered down the concrete paths in electric carts and every night the windows crackled with the blue glow of screens, as the extensive video library reacquainted these minions of reconstruction with the old entertainments that had meant so much to them. It was hard to believe that there had once been faces like that, the beautiful ones with their promises and lures.

  Fort Golden Gate, in a suburb of Bridgeport, was a nexus of reconstruction initiatives. Mark Spitz played poker with nuclear technicians, civil engineers, and sundry gurus of infrastructure. It was from Golden Gate that the first recon teams ventured to explore the viability of a Manhattan operation. Months later, he remembered some of his hold ’em buddies had murmured about a “Zone One.”

  The majority of Golden Gate’s inhabitants hailed from the Northeast, in keeping with the demographics of ruin. It was an interregnum quirk: people tended to stay in-region, roving in circles, bouncing back off an invisible barrier two states south. A mountain range draped in imposing shadow scared them toward the survivor community the other wanderers kept babbling about. In the chow line, Mark Spitz’s fellow reconstruction drones trembled and tic’d like contestants in some deplorable PASD beauty contest. Observing them, Mark Spitz put the rebirth of civilization at even money. Even if every last skel dropped to the ground tomorrow, did these harrowed pilgrims possess the reserves to pull out of the death spiral? Will the gloomy survivors manage to reproduce, the newborns fatten up? Which of the hoary debilitations and the patient old illnesses will reap them? It was not hard to see the inhabitants of the camps devolve into demented relics too damaged to do anything more than dwindle into extinction in a generation or two.