Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

  Even money. He was glad to have his own bed, convertible from the sofa in the living room of a spacious and tastefully appointed bungalow. The owners had spent their sunset years on an assiduous circuit of the world’s top cruises, and photos of the grand ships sailed the wall over his head as he slept. Once or twice, the old couple crept into his current dream narratives, and the dead played shuffleboard and carried plates to the early-bird buffets, which visited a different world cuisine each night, All You Can Eat, All-inclusive.

  He shared the bungalow with the Quiet Storm and Richie, the three of them comprising half a wrecker team. The wrecker teams drove heavy-duty tows and boom trucks—imposing before the disaster, when welded and bolted and otherwise fastened to the latest fashions in anti-skel plating and grillwork, the trucks became the physical, diesel-powered manifestation of pure-blooded American bad-assery. Four guys worked the stalled vehicles, coaxing and untangling them from multifarious confusions, as the other two stood sentry on lookout-and-drop-’em duty. Mark Spitz and Richie took skel detail, popping any dead meter reader or dead weatherman that drifted in from the median, or was trapped in the backseat of, and pounding on the blood-smeared back window of, the overturned yellow cab, radio-station promo van, or hearse. You never played Solve the Wreck because the answer was obvious: It had been drive or die.

  Lookout had more downtime. The dead were low density in this part of the coast, in those days—they had stopped speculating about why and merely accepted it as fact—and the ones attracted to the noise of the engines never amounted to more than one or two every couple of hours. The trapped skels—skittering Little Leaguers sans hands, bound and trussed matrons with maniac snarls on their faces—were mere target practice, and few. If those fleeing cared enough to bring their feverish, succumbing kin on the trip, they weren’t going to abandon them once they had to hoof it. Most of the doors were wide open in the aftermath of escape. The refugees hastily considered the imponderables—take mama’s jewelry or the tackle box, the bag of rice or the carton of vitamins—and joined their neighbors on the run, disappearing into the abject void of the interregnum.

  “Probably Vanderbilt 80s, right?” Gary asked.

  “What?”

  “The wreckers? The tow trucks. Those guys are sweet.”

  “I really have no idea.”

  The work was straightforward. The keys were in the ignition or weren’t, the master keys worked or didn’t, they could push them off the road or the wreckers came into play, chains were hooked to chassis, the disabled behemoths winched over to the shoulder. Depending on the size and number of the lanes, the type of bottleneck, and the number of stalled vehicles, the vehicles were parked perpendicular or at angles to the road, or they made a new expressway wall of compacts, sports-cars hybrids, intermingled with the odd ice-cream truck whose freezers sloshed with melted sweets. In theory. The Quiet Storm followed to a different mandate.

  Mark Spitz encountered parables, as usual, in the evidence left behind. The freeway was clear for half a mile, and then the cars appeared, bumper-to-bumper, doors and hatchback wide, you tracked ahead to reconnoiter the scene and discovered the cause of the jam: a jackknifed eighteen-wheeler, collision of family vans, a barricade erected by the local county authorities out of short-sighted precaution. Half-devoured corpses slumped in the passenger seats, or were buckled in behind the wheel, final curse against traffic still discernable despite the fact that their lips had been eaten: the invective was deep in the muscle. If enough bodies were in proximity, the wreckers made a bonfire, but the elements and microbes were doing a swell job of cleaning things up on their own.

  It was nice zipping home at the end of the day down a stretch of highway you’d cleared. It was measurable progress, visible mileage into the new world. The work left aches in his flesh as proof, in the way inventory lists of bottled capers did not.

  “You haven’t got to the Mark Spitz part yet,” Gary said.

  “It’s soaking through again,” Mark Spitz said. He ripped open another medi-patch and continued.

  “I rode in the lead wrecker with the Quiet Storm,” he said. The Quiet Storm was one of the new skinheads, who shaved their scalps to commemorate their deprivations. It was just then taking off in the camps—how else to recognize one such as yourself, the most harrowed of the harrowed? She was an early rescue on the part of Buffalo’s recovery teams, a member of an etiolated clan that had spent a year locked in the basement jail of a small-town police station, the unlucky wards of a madman. She didn’t really go into it.

  She was a lean greyhound, hyperalert in the manner of those who’d suffered their refuge overrun too many times. Everyone got overrun, and then there existed those in a whole different tier of frequent-flier status. They never slept, rarely blinked. The Quiet Storm was more functional than most skinheads in that she still spoke, and occasionally permitted a smile to splinter her lips. She’d worked in a tree nursery before the recent engrueling of the world, tending to and cultivating the hedges that prevented the hoi polloi from peeking at the aristocracy. Not very effective barrier material, Mark Spitz thought when informed of her occupation, unable to stop his immediate assessment. Everything was either a weapon or a wall, to be quantified and sorted in its utility as such.

  She was their team leader and quite particular about how she liked her vehicles arranged on the asphalt, perhaps her previous job’s affection for the long view shaping her wreck style. Sometimes the Quiet Storm’s directives did not inspire conjecture as to her motives; equally as often her orders contravened intuition. On this segment of uneventful highway, there might be only five cars mucking up the right-of-way, and she’d order them parked perpendicular, or perhaps at a forty-five-degree angle, even though the shoulder had plenty of room for bumper-to-bumper. One school of car alignment maintained that this latter placement would, like a breaker, impede a swell of dead attracted to the noise of a convoy; Buffalo was a vocal proponent for a while. Mark Spitz noticed that the Quiet Storm favored patterns divisible by five, and grouped them by general size and occasionally by color, sometimes even towing a car for miles to fulfill her conception. The Quiet Storm consulted her tablet, skittering the stylus over the computer maps, effecting hieroglyphic notations. “Orders,” she said. Mark Spitz chalked it up to pointless military micromanagement or her brand of PASD, one or the other of these steadfast debilitations. It wasn’t until later that he saw the truth of it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  The wreckers parted the junk sea, de-gnarling, unwinding the chaos. When a mammoth pileup gave issue to a serpent of silenced vehicles uncoiling for miles, their system disassembled it. They restored order. Sometimes Mark Spitz imagined that for every inch of asphalt they cleared, they reversed an equal increment of tragedy, undid whatever misfortunes had befallen the missing occupants. He immediately mortified himself for such thinking and fixed on the next looming collision. After a month, short supply trains utilized the roads they had cleared, bearing lima beans to the west, moving the water trucks to the dry gallon containers. The alchemy of reconstruction. The mileage of the wrecker teams north and south of them would connect eventually, in the manner of the transcontinental railroad. Connect the isolated camps and forts one by one, link the independent towns just now seduced to the national bosom, bid the life-giving vital material flow once more: they secured the track, advanced the heading mile by mile.

  On the freeways Mark Spitz became a marksman. With the benefit of backup, line of sight, the luxury of drawing a bead on some slow-approaching creature at his leisure, he mastered the five target points on the skull most recommended by Buffalo for skel-dropping. (They’d done tests, collected oral testimony.) Some days the wreckers were outfitted with laser sights, if the army or marines passing through Golden Gate didn’t snag them, and after a time Mark Spitz articulated his own floating ruby bull’s-eye over the world when he went in for a kill with a bullet or a hatchet or baseball-size hunk of gra
nite, activating a calm computer register inside his brain that calculated distance and wind speed, compensated for the level of erraticism in the target, the distance and accessibility of escape routes. The exquisite new art of drop ’em.

  He eliminated that which would destroy him. In the broken land, the manifold survival strategies honed over a lifetime of avoiding all consequences rewrote themselves for this new world, or perhaps they had finally discovered their true arena, the field of engagement they had been created for. They had been put forth, tested, amended, debugged over a lifetime of tiny trials and contests, evasions of dangers big and small, social, symbolic, and, since the plague, lethal. If he’d been able to explain the extent of what was happening in his brain that day they nicknamed him Mark Spitz, the host of manic, overlapping processes, perhaps he’d have earned a different moniker, one suitable for the completely bloodless processes inside him.

  “I was finally complete, in a way.”

  “Not following.”

  “Sorry.”

  Their assignment on the day in question concerned a fouled-up segment of 95. One of the generals visiting Golden Gate on a fact-finding tour of New England reconstruction efforts had sworn by this highway when visiting family over the holidays, back in the good old dead world, and thus his pet shortcut became an official leg of the corridor. The skel weather was light, one or two per mile. The wreckers had started taking the kill fields for granted, it was hard not to; their fight-or-flight impulses no longer enjoyed their daily exercise regimen. The crew discovered clear blacktop between cities. “I need some cars,” the Quiet Storm told Mark Spitz. “It’s coming together in my mind.”

  A satisfied chuckle escaped the Quiet Storm when they reached the viaduct. The choker of lost vehicles, unruly and melancholy, stretched a mile. When the wreckers tracked ahead to see what kind of jam they had on their hands, they saw that it terminated at the northern edge of the concrete span, which was completely barriered by hotel courtesy shuttles and barbed wire. Three police cruisers butted bumpers beyond them, and the wreckers hazarded that this had been some country sheriff’s attempt at banishing the plague from his or her jurisdiction. They had failed, obviously, and the blockade had merely impeded these people’s escape, no doubt fatefully. No judgment. Whether the plague marked these pilgrims here or miles up the road, the resolution was the same.

  The wreckers split up. Martha, Jimmy, and Mel, the other half of the crew, took the southern end of the line of stillborn escape craft, and Mark Spitz’s contingent nabbed the viaduct. The cloudy water produced a pleasant melody beneath the span, a reassuring whisper. Taking care of the barbed wire looked to be a hassle, so Mark Spitz suggested they put off the barrier and start with clearing the bridge, which, it turned out, jibed with the Quiet Storm’s intentions for this lot. They confronted the familiar conveyances and the predictable anecdotes of desertion: four motorcycles that had squeezed between cars to the front of the blockage and then couldn’t turn around; utility vehicles that had been over-packed according to the emergency broadcast system’s monotoned instructions, in order to abandon the lifesaving supplies at this roadblock; a bare sedan with all its doors open because every seat had been taken, and then every seat evacuated, no trace.

  The only unusual specimen was the eighteen-wheeler athwart the span, the logo on the side of the trailer marking it as part of a box retailer’s fleet. The wreckers weren’t a salvage detail. Their manifest included a daily gas quota, which they siphoned once the vehicles were cleared, and they were allowed to grab for personal use any food they discovered, the energy bars and preservative-laden snack chips, but that was it. When Richie unlatched the back of the trailer, he told them later, it was to see if it was worth a later trip by a proper team. Richie was a stickler, a teenager who’d been taken in as a mascot by the first military detachment at Golden Gate. Clearing wrecks was his first detail beyond the walls of the campus.

  How and why the dead had been herded inside was a mystery. The Quiet Storm offered that it was a government job, the creatures earmarked for experiments, in those early days when that was a priority; perhaps a computer in Buffalo had this shipment flagged as MIA and after the engagement the file was appropriately amended. Mark Spitz’s theory was drawn from the stories of those who had kept their loved ones chained up in the rec room or the garage in hope of the cure’s arrival. The erection of this viaduct barricade was contemporaneous with the heyday of such optimistic gestures: We can beat this, this is just a temporary thing, if we keep our wits. He imagined the block association of a tight-knit suburb, some planned community off the interstate—on the border of the country club’s golf course, a quick drive to the outlet mall—corralling all their infected kin into the trailer, Mom and Dad, the Smiths and half of the Joneses, for a road trip. To a place where they could be cured, or set free, or exterminated with a semblance of dignity and a smidgen of religious custom. The driver of the cab was a local pillar, worked his way up from country-club caddie to master of the nabe, owning the biggest house on the cul-de-sac, a spectacular castle that seemed, on certain nights, to float on its own bourgeois cloud above the development. Didn’t mind driving a load of kids to the multiplex, to boot—if anyone can get them there, it’s him. “Sent to live on a farm upstate.”

  At the moment Richie reached for the trailer’s door, the Quiet Storm was settling before the cab’s dashboard, communing with the machine, and Mark Spitz crouched inside a minivan of German manufacture, opening a packet of chocolate-covered peanuts he’d found. He heard Richie shout. Richie rushed up the side of the truck toward his comrades, followed by the stupendous troop of skels he’d just released. Were there sixty or seventy or more? When they recounted the story later, they were invariably accused of exaggeration, and the anecdote stalled for a few minutes until the debate over that modern version of How Many Angels Can Dance on a Head of a Pin, How Many Dead Can Fit into a Trailer was settled. “Quite a few” was the invariable conclusion.

  At any rate, the wreckers were in the middle of the bridge, cut off from land. The trio had two weapons, as they had never needed more than that on an excursion. The Quiet Storm had stopped packing her rifle; she hadn’t used it in weeks, and then only when Richie was out with a stomach thing. That was the problem with progress—it made you soft. The dead shimmied and squeezed between the vehicles, the green convertible with the shredded vinyl top and the plumber’s van. When Richie removed himself from his sight lines, Mark Spitz proceeded to drop the creatures, bringing down a skel that wore bloody surgical scrubs—impossible to know if it had earned that mess on or off duty—and an urban cowgirl whose rhinestones sparkled coolly in the sunlight. He obliterated their faces and everything beneath their faces, but there was no way his team was going to get them all. The wreckers couldn’t quantify the horde’s numbers.

  “We’re not getting through this bunch,” the Quiet Storm said. They were calm. They assessed. The sheriff of the local municipality and his posse had blocked off their little patch of Heaven quite efficiently; the wreckers couldn’t even squeeze around on the railing past the barbed wire.

  “Looks deep enough,” Richie said as he jumped off the bridge and into the water.

  The drop was twenty feet. Richie’s head popped up ten yards downstream. He beckoned them down to the water. The Quiet Storm scratched her fingers through the bristles on her scalp, delivered a stream of invective, and followed his lead.

  It was impossible. Mark Spitz counted the massing dead. The forsaken devils waded between the cars, dumb and foul, groping toward their food supply, which had dwindled by two-thirds before their devoid mentalities. They were too brainless, he thought, to be disappointed by having to share the scraps of him after that endless internment in the trailer. No way Mark Spitz was going to be able to get past them. They were too many. You ran in this situation. A simple calculation without shame.

  Richie shouted from the shore. The gunfire would have alerted the other three wreckers; they’d have backup soon. I
nstinct should have plucked Mark Spitz from the bridge and dropped him into the current by now. But he did not move.

  When he told them later that he couldn’t swim, they laughed. It was perfect: from now on he was Mark Spitz. But he had no fear of the water, not with his dependable comrades down there, and his undimmed halo of luck. He knew a few strokes. No: he leaped to the hood of the late-model neo-station wagon and started firing, first taking out the grandmotherly type in the tracksuit and then the teenager wearing grimed soccer-team colors, because he knew he could not die. He vaulted onto the black sedan beside him and demolished the craniums of two more skels, who dropped and were stepped on by the replacements behind them. He had suspicions, and every day in this wasteland supplied more evidence: He could not die. This was his world now, in all its sublime crumminess, where intellect and ingenuity and talent were as equally meaningless as stubbornness, cowardice, and stupidity. He shot the one wearing green-lensed aviator glasses in the middle of the forehead, and twice shot the creature in the hunting jacket in the chest before he mortified it with a final blast. He could not die. Two more creatures tumbled to the asphalt, their craniums disintegrated. Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety.