Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

  The house looked normal from the outside. The shades were pulled and the lights were out save for the aforementioned glow of the floor lamp by the media center in the living room, that dependable illumination that had greeted him for years. His mother had been feeling “not so red hot,” in her mom parlance, and he surmised that they were half asleep in front of the upstairs digital video recorder as the final fifteen minutes of last week’s episode droned before them: the verdict of the judges and the expulsion of the latest scapegoat; the obscure precedents cited by the maverick district attorney; the reenactors of real crimes in their shabby thespianship. His parents often retreated to their old honeymoon nest after dinner, ceding to their son the living room, with its high-definition enhancements and twin leather recliners equipped with beverage holsters. The rec room was a marvel in every respect save its television, a rare impulse purchase on the part of his father, who consulted the roundups on the internet with dedication, often contributing his two- and three-star verdicts to the rabble chorus. The set was an off-brand mistake lately afflicted with a black bloom of dead pixels. Its sorry conjurations gave the family an excuse to enjoy the big television spectacles together upstairs, the ones that periodically reunited the riven nation, albeit in staggered broadcasts in the cascade of time zones.

  He scowled at the mail on the hall credenza, speculating anew over what misbegotten opt-in had birthed, among other bastards, his identification as a member of the opposite political party. (In the catastrophe, the demonic mailing lists were struck. One was free to choose a fresh affiliation from the rubbled platforms.) He decided to crow about his winnings. He moved up the stairs and was startled by the sound of his sneakers on the naked planks. The pavestone renovation had been part of a larger project that embraced, in its broad manifest, the retiling of the kitchen’s hexagonal expanse and the removal of the stairway carpet. This was a foot-level campaign. They worked on the house constantly, his parents. The projects took time. Although they were relatively young (young got younger and younger as the gatekeepers of media contemplated their mortality earlier and earlier), their makeover schemes betrayed an attempt to outwit death: Who had ever died during the installation of a backyard water feature, one that might dribble joy from polyvinyl chloride tubing? In bed, they thumbed adhesive notes into the margins of catalog pages and exchanged them like hostages over the sheets. Every room, every reconsidered and gussied square foot was an encroachment into immortality’s lot line. The blueprints, the specs, the back-of-the-envelope estimates. It would sustain them. The guest bathroom was next.

  Exhausted by the foot-level transformations, his parents were between renovation projects. Perhaps if it had been otherwise, they would still be alive.

  When he was six, he had walked in on his mother giving his father a blow job. A public-television program about the precariousness of life in the Serengeti, glimpsed in passing, had introduced him to dread, and it had been eating at him the previous few nights. Bad dreams. The hyenas and their keening. He needed to slip into his parents’ king-size bed, as he had when he was very young, before he had been banished to his own big-boy bed in accordance with the latest child-rearing philosophies. It was forbidden, but he decided to visit his parents. He padded down the hall, past the green eye of the carbon-monoxide detector, that ever-vigilant protector against invisible evil, and the bathroom and the linen closet. He opened the door to the master bedroom and there she was, gobbling up his father. His father ceased his unsettling growls and shouted for his son to leave. The incident was never referred to again, and it became the first occupant of the corner in his brain’s attic that he reserved for the great mortifications. The first occupant, but not the last.

  It was, naturally, to that night his thoughts fled when on his return from Atlantic City he opened the door of his parents’ bedroom and witnessed his mother’s grisly ministrations to his father. She was hunched over him, gnawing away with ecstatic fervor on a flap of his intestine, which, in the crepuscular flicker of the television, adopted a phallic aspect. He thought immediately of when he was six, not only because of the similar tableau before him but because of that tendency of the human mind, in periods of duress, to seek refuge in more peaceful times, such as a childhood experience, as a barricade against horror.

  That was the start of his Last Night story. Everybody had one.

  Mark Spitz and Gary returned to the law office and dragged the other two bodies down, Kaitlyn whistling behind them as they descended. She proposed lunch, and they squatted in the lobby underneath the glass case listing the building’s occupants, which were detailed by easily recombined white letters embedded in black felt. Like most lists of people, it was now a roll call of the dead, an inversely colored obituary page.

  “Are they a sponsor?” Gary asked. “We’re hungry.” He held up a chocolate bar retrieved from the spill of candy, breath mints, and hand sanitizer. The gate of the lobby newsstand had been ripped open and looted, probably by the marines, or else a post-evac survivor who’d run out of crackers and dared a raid.

  “Not yet,” Kaitlyn said.

  “But they might come aboard next week. Could happen. In which case it’s okay.”

  Kaitlyn shook her head.

  “The marines took what they wanted when they came through. How do you think they got all those NFL jerseys?”

  “That was before the regs came down. You have chocolate chip cookies in your MRE.”

  Gary tossed the candy bar and declined his standard joke. Usually when someone mentioned meals ready to eat, their military rations, Gary pointed out that survivors were MREs to the skels, hardy-har, punctuating it with his gravelly chuckle. Perhaps Gary was exhausted; it was the end of the week. “Just gonna get eaten up by the residents,” he said. “Pheenie bastards.”

  “Maybe they’ll put you here,” Mark Spitz said. He didn’t believe it.

  Buffalo had not yet divulged who was going to get resettled in Manhattan once the sweepers were finished, but Gary had long been skeptical that he would be among them. “You think we’re going to end up here? We ain’t special. They’re going to put the rich people here. Politicians and pro athletes. Those chefs from those cooking shows.”

  “It’s going to be a lottery,” Kaitlyn sighed. She opened a meat tube and squeezed it into her mouth.

  “Lottery, shit,” Gary said. “They’re going to put us on Staten Island.”

  “I thought you liked islands,” Mark Spitz said. Gary was a firm believer in the Island Theory of plague survival.

  “We like islands. Natural defenses. You know we like islands. But we wouldn’t live on Staten Island if they were giving out vaccines and hand jobs right off the ferry.”

  “They screen for DNA, you’ll be lucky they don’t turn you out the gates.” Trevor, one of the sweepers in Gamma Unit, maintained that he’d heard that Buffalo was working on a system of screening settlers according to their genetic desirability. Mark Spitz didn’t believe it but rationalized that he had a decent chance of getting a nice spot somewhere. Surely many of the high-functioning members of society had been killed off, allowing mediocre specimens such as himself to move up a notch.

  Kaitlyn tapped her headset distractedly, as if she’d been trying to make a weekend plan with one of her gal pals and her cell dropped the call. Did you lose me or did I lose you?

  “Anything?” Mark Spitz asked.

  She shook her head. They’d been out of contact with Fort Wonton for a week, ever since they departed for this grid. The comms went out with nettlesome frequency. It was hard to get a signal through on the best of days—the buildings bounced the waves between each other like kids playing keep-away—but the big culprit was mischievous bugs deep in the military communications software. The machines froze, chronically, and then they’d have to be rebooted and it took forever for the equipment to reinitialize. It was highly unlikely that the defense contractor awarded the bid would be prosecuted in the future, but this was the case even if the plague hadn’t cleared
the halls of justice of everyone save the odd robed straggler gripping a gavel in the empty chamber.

  The comm failures were annoying, but fortunately the sweepers didn’t need any orders apart from what grid was up next, and they got that every week when they returned to Wonton. “Let’s get going,” Kaitlyn said. “We’ll check in when we go back on Sunday.”

  As they packed their gear they saw that the bodies were gone. Disposal had picked them up without the sweepers observing, with the eerie efficiency that was their trademark. Outside Wonton, the most you ever saw of Disposal was their cart disappearing around a corner a block or two blocks ahead, as they slumped in their bright white hazmat suits. The carriage and the horse had been players in the Central Park tourist-ride industry, the former enduring the elements as it waited for reassignment—obviously, sightseeing had taken a hit the last few years—and the latter presumably living off weeds in the Great Lawn until they established Fort Wonton. The horse had been choppered to the Zone after it was spotted during an early uptown reconnaissance mission. “It seems like the right thing to do,” General Tavin said, and indeed the rescue operation’s planning and execution had fostered a great deal of morale, even more than news of the beer distributor’s sponsorship.

  The chopper pilot who brought Mark Spitz from the Northeast Corridor sustained a tour-guide spiel the whole trip down, narrating the eastern seaboard’s points of interest with an oddly perky flair. Mark Spitz suspected he was on drugs. When they reached Manhattan, he took them for a quick circuit over Central Park, “laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in one of the greatest landscaping undertakings Jesus has ever seen.” Mark Spitz had seen the park unscroll from the windows of the big skyscrapers crowding the perimeter, but never from this vantage. No picnickers idled on their blankets, no one goldbricked on the benches, and nary a Frisbee arced through the sky, but the park was at first-spring-day capacity. They didn’t stop to appreciate the scenery, these dead visitors; they ranged on the grass and walkways without purpose or sense, moving first this way and then strolling in another direction until, distracted by nothing in particular, they readjusted their idiot course. It was Mark Spitz’s first glimpse of Manhattan since the coming of the plague, and he thought to himself, My God, it’s been taken over by tourists.

  Diesel supply being what it was, the horse made sense, and the nag was game enough to lug the big metal cart attached to the carriage as Disposal made their circuit downtown, cleaning up after the sweeper units. Bring out your dead. The guys and gals in Disposal never removed their hazmat suits, in public at least, even when off the clock and prowling around Wonton with everyone else. Maybe they know something we don’t, Mark Spitz thought, as he saw them take their rations and scurry back to whatever building they’d staked out. They had duct-taped a shower-curtain rod to the carriage’s dashboard and tied a brass bell to it, which somehow ended up sounding more cheerful than macabre, sounding off in the distance.

  Gary snatched the stack of replacement body bags left by Disposal—they kept track, meticulously, dropping off new ones when a unit was running low—and the three of them headed up the stairwell to finish the building.

  It was always disquieting to see empty pavement where you’d dumped some terminated skels. It was as if they’d just walked away.

  • • •

  They stoppered the tunnels and blocked the bridges. They plugged the subways at the preordained stations, every one south of where the first wall would stand. The choppers lowered the swaying concrete segments one by one across the breadth of Canal Street as the dead gaped and clawed through the dust kicked up by the blades. More than a few of the unfortunates were pulverized. Perhaps this was the pilots’ intent. The final section went down at the edge of the river. Now they had a zone.

  The soldiers landed at the Battery Park staging area, near the Korean War memorial. They disembarked from the troop transports, this generation’s marines, and initiated the first sweep. Buffalo’s estimates vis-à-vis skel density south of Canal were stupendously botched. How could they have reckoned the numbers skulking in the great buildings. The dead poured into the street at the soldiers’ noise. Which was part of the plan. The grunts used themselves as bait, their invectives, war cries, and tunes drawing schools of the dead into their machine-gun fire.

  They rappelled from gunships into key intersections, eliminating a hundred shuddering skels before clipping back to the cables and floating out of the strike zone, camoed fairies of destruction. They strafed, loosed fusillades, and mastered the head shots, spinal separators, and cranial detonators that diverted the dead to the sidewalk against newspaper boxes, fire hydrants, antiterrorism planters, and inscrutable corporate-sponsored public art. The soldiers terminated targets on fire escapes, where they slumped like moths caught in wrought-iron cobwebs. Kill techniques cycled in their fads, in this week and out the next, as the soldiers refined and traded tips and accidental discoveries. Everyone had their own way of handling things. The red tears of tracers shrieked through the thoroughfares and stray bullets cratered the faces of banks, churches, condos, and franchises, every place of worship a city has to offer. Exquisite glass panes crashed down in their music, manufacturing geometric shapes that had never before existed in the history of the world, which in turn sharded into newer shapes and brilliant white dust. Shell casings danced and skipped on the asphalt like tossed cigarette butts. The gun smoke was sucked up into braids and curtains by the atmospheric patterns created by skyscrapers and avenue crevices, those mountain faces and valleys, and when it cleared the creatures gushed in renewed fortified lines.

  The soldiers discussed work over dinner. While they sucked meat paste off the roof of their mouths, they pondered how every type of store and building cultivated its own rhythms and customs, kept likely suspects loitering by the checkout counters, the help desks, and You Are Here maps of subterranean midtown concourses. The health clubs in the basements of rental buildings catering to young singles commanded their regulars and habitués, and the faculty lounges of mammoth public high schools maintained their assortments ricocheting off the coffee-machine counter, as they had before the plague. The major fast-food purveyors became, over time, reliable for a certain kind of experience and the reasonably priced surf-and-turf chain offered its own fortifying menu as the dead city continued its business in mirthless parody.

  One day they noticed the ebb. Impossible not to. The grotesque parades thinned. Slaughter slowed. The dead creaked forth in groups of a dozen, then five at a time, in pairs, and finally solo, taking their proper place atop the heaps of corpses as they were cut down. The soldiers steadied themselves atop the corpses in turn and drew a bead. They made hills. Putrefying mounds on the cobblestones of the crooked streets of the financial district. They rid the South Street Seaport of natives and tourists alike, and the breeze off the water carted away buckets of the stench. Snipers crosshaired on swaying silhouettes six, seven blocks crosstown, that sensible, age-old grid layout allowing passage for traffic that traveled at the speed of sound. As the numbers of the creatures thinned, the soldiers no longer offered themselves as lures. They hunted, ambled, leisurely, easygoing flaneurs drifting where the streets took them. The soldiers were the arrowhead of a global campaign and they understood it each time they overcame the resistance in the trigger, felt good about it. The soldiers took longer rest breaks, devising new branches of gallows humor, jokes that took root. They knew they were being fundamentally altered, in their very cells, inducted into a different class of trauma than the rest of the survivors. Semper fi. Then they went inside.

  They dispensed with the superstructures one by one, the global headquarters brimming with junior VPs and heads of accounts, the great sinks of money and insurance, the public housing projects with their cinder-block labyrinths and denimed minotaurs, the middle-income megaplexes and prewar co-ops. They stormed the municipal buildings whose functions were engraved in great stone blocks over the entrance for easy identification. Initially surprised at how many
skels they found ricocheting inside the government buildings, but it made sense once they thought about it. They landed on the roofs and rammed the stairwell doors, grateful for daylight whenever it penetrated. The most unexpected places pullulated with the things, for no reason they could fathom. Why this particular juice joint and not another, why this neighborhood greasy spoon, synagogue, bookstore, 99 cent store? Bas-reliefs of gryphons, sea serpents, and chimaeras coiled the length of the monumental old buildings, indicators of another era’s idea of craftsmanship and of what monsters might look like. The pulverized faces of the dead increased the zone’s percentage of faces that were less handsome than those of the cornice gargoyles. It had been a small number before the plague, despite the coteries of investment bankers.

  The marines eliminated the outside stragglers, the ones standing on the sidelines as the dead made their implacable sallies. The street vendor at his rolling cart brandishing a small rod covered with caked, dry mustard. The skateboarder posing on the filigreed manhole cover at the bottom of his favorite declivity. The window-shopper bewitched before a boarded-up department-store window, taking in a long-removed display that nonetheless unfurled its exquisitely arranged baubles behind the plywood. Who knew what went on in what remained of their minds, what mirages they made of the world. The marines shot them in the head, harmless or no.