Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

  The woman in the window seat, a birdlike thing who hadn’t removed her beak from her tablet’s screen since boarding, looked at Kaitlyn for the first time as the static-y voice hit the intercom: We are being held here momentarily. The woman tugged the earbuds from their inputs in the sides of her skull. “Where are we, anyway?” she asked. Later, a national guardsman shot her six times in the back with a machine gun as she tried to make a break for the woods.

  After the announcement, the first person on his feet was a fifty-something man garbed in a blue denim suit, his beard mashed through red-and-green beads. He tried to transfer to the next car; the door did not budge. They were locked in. An hour passed. The bars on Kaitlyn’s cell dropped one by one and the wifi shut off for good. Before the other passengers lost reception with their personal networks (in one sinister moment, a cascade of disappointment), the news blogs filled in what the conductor withheld: The train was under quarantine. A passenger had been “acting strangely” in the café car, attracting the attention of train personnel. After a scuffle, the terrorist barricaded himself in a bathroom and threatened to release a biological agent. “They have to let us out,” someone wailed. A woman shouted, and everyone in the car looked out the windows at the military trucks and jeeps, the soldiers spilling onto the gravel shoulder of the right-of-way in their white hazmat suits. Kaitlyn couldn’t see their faces.

  The terror plot remained the cover story for the first couple of hours, plausible and self-organizing. Later, when Kaitlyn was on the run, she discovered what the rest of the country heard from the news media, before the news media was reduced to a numb scroll of rescue stations and an evanescent list of contradictory infection procedures. Before the media sighed into the depths, senescent, dumb. The train’s Patient Zero had turned feral in his seat—dropped out of humanity’s codes and into the solemn directives of the plague—and bit three people before being restrained; the conductor’s call for aid triggered a local military response. The authorities were on alert for certain keywords on the emergency channels, as it was early in the death of the world and the military still mobilized to distress calls. Some calls, anyway.

  No one was getting off that train. On that Eve of Last Night, some of the passengers in Kaitlyn’s car tried to make a break for it—chute out the emergency window and sprint through a perceived weakness in the cordon. Thus did Kaitlyn first encounter that interregnum cliché, wherein the alpha male or female recruits support for a nutty plan and organizes the doomed sortie: pell-mell out of the surrounded Victorian; bursting from the collapsible door of the trapped school bus in a whirlwind of ad hoc truncheons, ladles, and chimney pokers. Out of the quarantined train car that had been plucked from its steadfast route and deposited forty-eight hours in the future, into the collapse. On the last night before the Last Night, the machine guns dispatched these intrepid; after that, it would be teeth.

  When the soldiers suddenly bugged out the following evening—the armored vehicles spinning out into AWOL missions after loved ones or vain ops intended to keep it all from flying apart—Kaitlyn started running. She and the other passengers extricated themselves from the dead mass transit to master the new lessons, or else perished in their scattered elementaries. Eventually her run took her to Zone One, to Gary and Mark Spitz, the birthday celebration in the function room of an Italian restaurant, where on panels of dark wood the caricatures of the deceased regulars promenaded, famous and not famous, distended chins and knob noses protuberant and gross. Kaitlyn told them her Last Night story not to enter into ritualized mourning but to say: This is a story of how it used to be. When we didn’t know what was happening and were defenseless. Kaitlyn made a toast to Zone One and the new world they chipped from the stone, building by building, room by room, skel by skel. The intent of the caricature, Mark Spitz thought as he listened to her story, is to capture the monstrous we overlook every day. Maybe, she said, we can unsee the monsters again.

  Mark Spitz cradled this memory of their last celebration as he entered Wonton’s corona. It had been a lovely night, that time they tried to kid one another that the world was not ending. Listening to the gunfire from uptown, he knew what was happening. The barrier was about to fail. It was falling down, as it always did.

  It started like this: On White Street he flagged down Lester, one of the Alpha Unit guys and self-appointed party wrangler for Sunday R & R ever since their first week in the Zone. Lester carried a case of Long Island red, and a huge plastic bag of popcorn dangled from the fingers of his left hand. He nodded toward the wall, rolling his eyes at the barrage, as if vexed by the neighbor’s leaf blower during his annual barbecue. “Skels been coming for dinner all day, nonstop.” Had Mark Spitz heard about the Lieutenant? Yes, he had. Lester was scrounging supplies for the next wake, bound for the dumpling house.

  Mark Spitz told him he’d see them there, declining to tell him about Gary’s bite, per his friend’s wishes. Plus, Gary hated Lester.

  It never ceased to be an odd sight, the approach to Wonton at night. The unnatural glare of the op lights bleached the buildings bone-white as the shadows gathered the potsherds of the dead world. This night he noticed the dead bargains: the handwritten EVERYTHING MUST GO sign in the second-floor window of a shop of no decipherable purpose, a banner proclaiming the specialty sandwich at the fast-food chain. At the corner of Broadway and Canal, the scale of the engagement shocked him. The anxious overture of the previous afternoon had evolved into a lush, neurotic symphony. The machine guns fired without cessation. He’d become so accustomed to the gunfire, the steady escalation of its bluster, that he hadn’t considered how many men and women such an onslaught entailed. In the lairs atop the key structures overlooking the wall, twice as many snipers trained their scopes, muzzles crackling next to the squatting cornice gargoyles and the shells hopping on the rooftop tar. On the catwalk girding the human side of the wall, the troops were doubled up as well, strafing, reloading, zeroing in on a new target cluster up the avenue that was hidden from view by the wall, and then on to the next.

  He couldn’t see what the soldiers aimed at, but he could smell it. From the magnitude of the stench, the bodies putrefied in vast dunes on the other side of the barrier. West, toward the incinerators, the stack vented its puff of smoke and ash, but the fuel must have been sweeper deliveries, as Wonton had ceased scooping corpses from beyond the wall. The grab-crane duo, drenched in the rank fluids of the dead, were motionless, gigantic praying mantises caught in an inscrutable pose. Perhaps they hadn’t repaired the machines yet or had diverted those on crane detail to the perimeter to knock down skels. Yesterday’s pools of blood and gore had expanded into lakes fed by the mass of leaking corpses.

  The vicinity of the wall bristled and bucked with activity, but a few feet away, beyond the combat lines, the Sunday-evening routines puttered as usual, inconceivably: Engineers strolled in an insouciant haze as they planned the evening’s diversions, poker or a movie in one of the rec spaces; couples snuck off to their rendezvous before the new workweek implicated them; the guys and gals from the other sweeper teams waved at him to hurry up and join them at the dumpling house. After all this time in the abattoir, the survivors were completely inured to the agenda of catastrophe.

  They didn’t feel what he felt. Mark Spitz relished the cadence in his veins, the way his senses had ticked up into a state of uncanny alert. The rusty wasteland systems were powered up, the algorithms sorting input. As the door of the bank closed behind him, the muffling of the guns underscored the ferocious disposition of the street. HQ was tranquil, even for a Sunday night. Was the regular army on an op right now? No time to guess: He had a mission. The second-floor hall, so hectic as it channeled Buffalo’s whims toward actuality, was empty now.

  The Lieutenant’s—correction—Fabio’s office was locked. Mark Spitz rattled the door. Two cartons were stacked at his feet, the top one sliced open. He picked up one of the items inside: a combat helmet, the back of which had been branded with a butched-up drawing of t
he famous kid-show armadillo. The varmint made a muscle, bicep curving formidably, as he chomped a cigar butt between square white teeth. A cigar in this day and age, smoked by a kiddie icon: somebody was going to get fired. Mark Spitz had to give respect to reconstruction’s new mascot, who was more prepared for what was coming than anyone at Wonton. Except for him.

  Fabio let Mark Spitz in, tentatively, chary of the sweeper’s bad news, whatever its stripe. When Mark Spitz briefed him, Fabio mumbled a curse and his glance drifted to the windows overlooking the wall. The man was in a fog. He said, “Gonna have to fill out a special T-12 casualty form. I think I have one somewhere.” He hassled the top drawer of his desk, perplexed, fiddled in his pockets for keys.

  Mark Spitz yanked the man forward by his shirt. He laid out the situation in more emphatic terms.

  Fabio looked into Mark Spitz’s face, only recognizing him in that moment. He apologized. “I thought you said it was a straggler.”

  “What we thought.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s not,” Mark Spitz said. Fabio wasn’t partial to original thinking, but yes, Gary’s Gypsy curse was a problem. This mutiny broke the rules. If one skel broke the rules, there were more. It was survivor’s logic: If Mark Spitz was alive, there had to be others. Until the day it was not true. The fortune-teller must be a mistake, an errant bad comet loping into their solar system, the malfunctioning one percent of the malfunctioning one percent. Or else the world was resuming its decomp after these months of tenuous integrity, those stalwart membranes and harassed cell walls finally dissolving into a black spume.

  “Where’s Tammy?” Mark Spitz said. “He’ll need morphine.”

  “You think he has the time for that?” Fabio stared, blank as a midtown sidewalk. He said, “However you want to handle it. You can have access to her meds, but Tammy’s on a chopper to Happy Acres.”

  Mark Spitz asked why.

  “We lost contact three hours ago. Sent some army guys to check it out.”

  “What is it?”

  “The last transmission was hard to decipher.”

  “What Fabio is trying to say is that we’ve lost contact with everyone.” It was Bozeman, his puffy round face harassed by worry. He had ditched his clerk’s khakis for full combat gear, and Mark Spitz was surprised to see the RPG launcher slung over the man’s back.

  “It’s the comms,” Fabio said. “You know they’re on the fritz.”

  “It’s not the comms,” Bozeman said. “I came here to tell you to bring the sweepers in. It’s all hands on the wall now.”

  Fabio inclined his head toward the window. “It doesn’t seem that bad from here.”

  “Come to the roof.”

  As they hustled to the helipad, the remaining army guys tromped down the halls, weapons ready, anti-skel helmets fastened to their heads. Mark Spitz hadn’t seen a mobilization this big in ages. He regretted leaving his pack downtown.

  The artillery battered his eardrums again once they gained the roof. The military spots were trained on the wall below; unlocking one’s wheels, Bozeman groaned as he steered it to the eastern edge of the building. He adjusted the angle. The light joined those from other rooftops to unveil the horror of Broadway.

  The ocean had overtaken the streets, as if the news programs’ global warming simulations had finally come to pass and the computer-generated swells mounted to drown the great metropolis. Except it was not water that flooded the grid but the dead. It was the most mammoth convocation of their kind Mark Spitz had ever had the misfortune to see. The things were shoulder to shoulder across the entire width of the avenue, squeezed up against the buildings, an abhorrent parade that writhed and palsied up Broadway until the light failed. The damned bubbled and frothed on the most famous street in the world, the dead things still proudly indicating, despite their grime and wounds and panoply of leaking orifices, the tribes to which they had belonged, in gray pinstriped suits, classic rock T-shirts, cowboy boots, dashikis, striped cashmere cardigans, fringed suede vests, plush jogging suits. What they had died in. All the misery of the world channeled through this concrete canyon, the lament into which the human race was being transformed person by person. Every race, color, and creed was represented in this congregation that funneled down the avenue. As it had been before, per the myth of this melting-pot city. The city did not care for your story, the particular narrative of your reinvention; it took them all in, every immigrant in their strivings, regardless of bloodline, the identity of their homeland, the number of coins in their pocket. Nor did this plague discriminate; your blood fell instantly or your blood held out longer, but your blood always failed in the end.

  They had been young and old, natives and newcomers. No matter the hue of their skins, dark or light, no matter the names of their gods or the absences they countenanced, they had all strived, struggled, and loved in their small, human fashion. Now they were mostly mouths and fingers, fingers for extracting entrails from soft cavities, and mouths to rend and devour in pieces the distinct human faces they captured, that these faces might become less distinct, de-individuated flaps of masticated flesh, rendered anonymous like them, the dead. Their mouths could no longer manage speech yet they spoke nonetheless, saying what the city had always told its citizens, from the first settlers hundreds of years ago, to the shattered survivors of the garrison. What the plague had always told its hosts, from the first human being to have its blood invaded, to the latest victim out in the wasteland: I am going to eat you up.

  Mark Spitz’s idea of what lay beyond the Zone, the portrait created by the incessant gunfire, was dwarfed by the spectacle before him. The wall had kept this reality from him. It would not hold, it was obvious. He had to get back to Kaitlyn and Gary, and they needed to make a plan. The dead leaked in massive piles on the other side of the wall, mounting between the barrier and the buildings on the north side of Canal. It would have been impossible for the cranes to keep up, even in working condition. The dead clambered up the bodies of the fallen and were rent by the artillery, contributing to the heap, and these latest were trampled by the next wave, which was cut down in turn. The corpses entwined and tangled in a mutilated pile half as high as the wall, and dark fluids from their wounds sprayed and gurgled through the seams in the concrete where the broad sections met, the weight of the corpses compressing the interior murk from the carcasses as if they were overripe fruit. The barrier was a dam now, suppressing the roiling torrent of the wasteland. It would not hold.

  He saw the flaw, where it would break. The marines had maneuvered the concrete T segments into the heart of Canal, and once they stabilized the Zone, they secured them with redoubtable steel brackets two feet wide and two inches thick. The metal scaffolding of the catwalk assembly provided additional support on the Zone side against the malevolent forces of uptown. But Mark Spitz saw the chink through now-wastelanded eyes: the brackets were as flimsy as plywood boards nailed into a window frame, in that elemental image of the barricade. That’s where every fortification splintered: where the nail pierced the wood, the rivet penetrated the concrete. The prayer met the truth. There is always a place for the dead to find purchase.

  This night it was not a ravaged, skeletal hand that tore the plank away but the unholy mass of all the mobilized agony brimming Broadway. There was a furious blast of machine-gun fire, and more dead fell to the fleshy heap. The bracket at the western edge of the T section athwart the famous boulevard wrenched out of joint, and its brother connecting the next section east ejected from its moorings. It flew across the intersection and pulverized the face of an army clerk who had been gesturing to one of the snipers in her aerie. The tumbling concrete section ripped the catwalk free, and the metal armature halted the descent of the wall for a moment while hurling soldiers into the street; then it gave way. The soldier with the obliterated face fell to his knees at the same time the concrete slab hit the ground, crushing the Disposal agent who had been steering a load of rotting pets toward the inciner
ators and a young soldier who had been climbing one of the ladders up the catwalk. The dead sloshed through the gap, clambering over the concrete ramp and the crushed bodies, losing balance on the uneven surface and spinning in ludicrous pratfalls onto Canal. They stepped on one another, impelled one another forward in a current, spread in hungry rivulets east and west and downtown after being penned in for so long. Some of the dead that had been trapped at the bottom of the pile staggered to their feet and joined the advance.

  Here they came, the ambassadors of nil. Already the front door of the bank was impassable, already the dead infiltrated one block south of the shattered barrier to reclaim the Zone as their own. The soldiers on the catwalk were stranded. They fired their assault rifles down into the maelstrom of skels, but the scaffolding terminated in ramps at either end and the men and women on the wall were cornered. The time to risk a jump disappeared; there was no open space for a landing, so swiftly had the dead swept into the street. A portion of skels dallied to partake of the stunned soldiers at the foot of the wall, but most coursed down the avenue after other sustenance. The majority of the abominations did not stop to feed, as if being loosed upon the emptied streets was meal enough, as if right now it sufficed for them to walk, to persist beyond death.

  Looking down at them through the twisting ash, Mark Spitz shuddered. The dead streamed past the building like characters on an electronic ticker in Times Square, abstractions as impenetrable as the Quiet Storm’s vehicles. He’d always peered from the skyscraper windows into the streets, seeking. Close to the ground, almost at their level, he read their inhuman scroll as an argument: I was here, I am here now, I have existed, I exist still. This is our town.