Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

  He asked, but no one knew what had happened to the owners.

  He woke up in the middle of the night. Each night, before he went to sleep, he repeated to himself his current location, to ward off the morning vertigo, the disorientation that affirmed his utter unmooring from all things. He had murmured to himself: the projection booth of the discount theater that showed indie films, an elm tree off the overpass. A farmhouse in New England. He had no confusion over his whereabouts when he woke, and he listened for the thing that had punctured his rest. It called again: metal on metal. Tad appeared on the landing, the candle’s light on his white pajamas making him into a ghost.

  “Too dark to see what it is,” Tad said. They waited. The alarm tinkled anew, then was silenced. “That’s the wire breaking. Raccoons will do that,” he said. “Sometimes.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Margie told him the next morning. She placed a cup of chamomile tea on the coffee table. “Not until they wander off.” Peel-away spy-hole slits were set into the tar-papered windows. This morning each window confirmed that the dead infiltrated the yard on all sides, ten or so having wandered onto the grounds in their misbegotten mission. A hard-luck ballerina and a kid with a green Mohawk roved in figure eights. They remained, not drifting away like dandelion seeds as they should have but tarrying on the property.

  As the hours passed, the residents worked over the problem. Mark Spitz hadn’t drawn them because the dead appeared hours later. And they hadn’t given any indication to the skels that there might be dinner inside; they were sure of their precautions. “We’re goddamned ninjas in here.” They whispered, they padded in socks, they startled at the slightest noise, a kitchen drawer too hastily shut or unexpectedly brisant flatulence. Nonetheless, the creatures didn’t slink away in their infamous habit, and by lunch twice as many roamed the weeds. Margie wished she’d made a water run the day before, the first of their band to vocalize the fear they might be besieged for an unknowable length of time.

  By dinner there were fifty. Mark Spitz was confounded: They lingered over an empty plate. Happened all the time that a skel might seem to sense someone quivering behind a door, inside the cellar or guest bedroom, but if you kept still, you waited them out. None of them had witnessed this before, a convocation this inexorable and unlikely, given the absence of aural or visual stimuli to attract or keep the skels interested. Insofar as their febrile brains could be said to be interested in anything. Mark Spitz and his hosts played hearts until late and prayed the gruesome assembly would adjourn by morning. Tad, preoccupied, did not repeat the previous night’s championship.

  The next two days the dead roamed the drizzle in gloomy addition. The creatures displayed no curiosity about the house. They didn’t dig their blackened fingers between the planks to wrench the barricade, tug the gutters, collect around the doors, or scrabble at the walls. If it had been accursed Connecticut, the place would be a pile of timber by now, naked chimney poking up like a bone. Mark Spitz recalled an animation in high-school physics, where the red molecules inside a balloon recoiled from the skin in random vectors, ever in motion, ever directionless, ever bound. Why did this motley remain in the skin of the property line, and why did more of them keep coming? They counted a hundred by next night’s supper, the same ones from the first morning—a priest oozing from every visible orifice, a paunchy woman dressed for the gym, the cop—and their silently recruited companions.

  “Maybe they’re locavores,” Tad said.

  “They blew in, they’ll blow out,” Jerry said. He was bent over the mail slot, under a black hood. The monsters were a kind of weather after all; Mark Spitz noticed that they’d started being described as such, among wanderers who had never met, in spontaneous linguistic consensus. They could have terminated the first ones, but now there were too many. All they could do was wait. Mark Spitz reconstructed the grounds and local topography in his mind, a disembodied presence gyring over Hampshire County. If the dead started ripping the house apart: Jump out one of the back windows and head for the creek, or break for the road? Solo, what he knew best, or take one of the others with him? He hadn’t the opportunity that first evening to stash one of Mim’s emergency packs. No one side of the house offered better escape prospects than another. The dead diffused evenly in the flowers and drab grasses, just another species of weed carried in by the wind.

  “I wish they’d hurry up and take their heads off, already,” Tad said. The they in question were whatever new authorities emerged out of the darkness with guns and slogans and fresh vegetables. At Tad’s sentiment, Mark Spitz’s hosts began to air their post-plague plans and schemes. This was a rare pastime, at least in his vicinity, not easily indulged in, and Mark Spitz was surprised to hear perfectly (relatively) sane people partake. More than a jinx on deliverance, this was straddling reality with a pillow while it was sleeping and pressing down while it bucked and kicked. Especially with the invaders out in the yard, waiting for an invitation. From the nodding and encouraging affirmations, it was a regular diversion of theirs, like hearts. He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it.

  Tad was working on a new video game. He had it all mapped out. One level would take place in a fortified farmhouse in the middle of the country, then it switches to towns, cities, each step more complicated and deadly than the last. “It’ll move a million copies,” he said. “Those old World War II games still sell. Vietnam, realistic Middle East shooters. It’s catharsis. Whether you were on the front lines or at home. And here we’re all on the front lines at home. If you did what we’re doing, it’s therapy. How are you going to kill the nightmares when this is all over? It’s a healthy outlet for aggression. And the babies who aren’t even born yet—it’ll teach them about what Mommy did in the war. I won’t even have to make it up this time.”

  “Don’t put me in it,” Jerry said. “Hard enough meeting a good woman. And now everybody’s dead, to boot.”

  “I’ll have them work up a Crusty Old Guy avatar. If they can do space aliens, they can do you, Jerry.”

  Jerry said he’d resume selling real estate. Surplus inventory will be a tough nut in every market, but once rightful owners and heirs are sorted out, business will start up again. “Not to be morbid,” he said, “but that’s facts. In a time of national despair—like a recession—you have to hustle for clients because people don’t know what they’re capable of if they really put their minds to it. Buyers won’t need convincing this time around.” Northampton will appeal for all the reasons it has always appealed, he told them, but there will be even larger numbers of people trying to move out of the cities and start fresh. Too many memories in their old neighborhoods. “Take a house like this—you don’t see another in any direction. It’s a healing thing,” he said, too forcefully, as if mentally imprinting the new slogan onto business cards.

  Margie shushed him. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the congregation outside.

  “Sorry, dear.”

  “Still pickles, Margie?” Tad asked.

  “If they make it through,” she said, referring to her former employers. “Maybe I’ll start it up again myself.”

  “Another brine mess you’re getting yourself into,” Tad teased. She punched him in the arm. They were a family. Mark Spitz was at his girlfriend’s house for the holidays, stuck on the sofa with her kin while she took a nap upstairs. They passed his test, and he theirs. What were the chances of this raggedy bunch finding one another in the ruins, he wondered. Drawn together by the magic of this place the same way the missing owners were, inspired to make a new start. The toy store. He’d had something like this, briefly, in the toy store. The accident that outlives its circumstance and blossoms. All over the country survivors formed ill-fated tribes that the dead inevitably tore to shreds. Desperate latecomers asked for asylum from those inside and were turned away at the barrel of a semiauto: This is our house. He’d slept in the dead trees and now here he was with this family. He could’ve spent the night inside the st
udio and awakened to a property full of skels. Would he have made it out? As before, home was a beloved barricade. When school, work, the many-headed beast of strangers and villains comprising the world threatened to destroy, home remained, family remained, and the locks would hold, the lullabies would ward off all bogeymen. He was trapped in this house and he couldn’t think of where else he’d rather be.

  Margie asked Mark Spitz what his plans were. She’d scratched at the wound on her face all night, and a clear bead of fluid appeared at the edge of the scab. They each wanted to resume where they left off. Go back to the place where they were safe, he thought. Early notes in his unified theory of stragglers.

  “Move to the city,” he said.

  They offered to let him stay after the siege, if he liked. He said yes.

  It ended quickly three days later. Mark Spitz could have kept his wits a good deal longer, but his companions were fashioned of less durable alloys. Mark Spitz pegged Jerry to be the first to crack. Mark Spitz was from Long Island and maintained the suburban boy’s suspicion of the pastoral, and here was a man who hunted, gutted, and dressed big game. Mark Spitz cast Jerry as the cowboy right-winger who was going to show this vermin who was boss, blast one of the front windows into splinters and start sending these cretins to their God. Firing into the agitated horde until one of the monsters got ahold of his gun barrel, wrestled it away, and the rest started picking at all the boards. It always happened quick. One part of the barricade failed, and then it was as if the refuge sighed and everything disintegrated at once. The spell of protection sputtered, all out of eldritch juice, and the mighty stronghold was made of straw again. All it took was one flaw in the system, a bug roosting deep in the code, to initiate the cascade of failure.

  Tad, when he snapped, was the type to unlatch the front door and run screaming into the mess of them. Suicide by skel. There was a limit to what the human mind, born into that sweet and safe and lost world, could endure. He hadn’t suspected Margie, whom he had decided to save if possible. Bring her with him out the second-floor window, then on the top of the porch, jump and roll and keep moving. In retrospect, the fact that she wore her motocross gear for the final forty-eight hours might have been a hint.

  Yes, Margie beat him to the porch roof. In the parlor, Mark Spitz read a spy thriller on the orange shag rug by the fireplace and the other two men were deep in quiet rounds of rummy. They didn’t hear her ease the boards from her bedroom window, but they could not overlook the explosion of glass outside. Margie screamed, “This is our island! Get your filthy hands off of me!” Tad and Mark Spitz broke for the spy holes, but Jerry understood and sprinted upstairs, yelling her name. In the middle of the yard three skels twisted in the blaze of the Molotov cocktail, the dry barnyard grass and sow thistle crackling into sparks and sheaves of flame. The burning security guard, whom Mark Spitz had watched for a whole hour the previous afternoon in a fit of impregnable boredom, staggered and fell on his face as the other dead twisted toward the house, half their ghoulish faces upturned to the commotion on the second story, and the rest to the bottom floor and its suddenly intriguing fortifications. They moved on the house, the mob of them constricting with purpose. Finally the things knew why they had gathered there, as if there had ever been any other reason.

  Margie screamed again and the next bomb detonated among the creatures. The bottle was one of those that had held the concoctions of French seltzer and fruit juice, with the elegant label describing the manufacturer’s legend, the commitment to quality, and the ancestral springs. It was a direct hit on the ballerina. The thing collided with another skel, one of the local hippie varietals, and that one went up in flames. The nights had been so dark, moonless and dead, and now the fires livened it all to exuberant performance, embers pirouetting in the air. The wrestling upstairs continued. Glass shattered, and he saw flaming liquid pour over the lip of the porch’s roof and onto the front steps. Not long now.

  His mechanism clicked and stuttered. Once again in a stranger’s house, the next residence in the endless neighborhood that snared him his first night on the run. Their different layouts and constructions did not fool him; chimney or no chimney, English basement or cinder-block sump-pumped storeroom, he moved through a single infernal subdivision without outlet, serried cul-de-sacs and dead-ends overlooking broken land. He invited himself in to spend the night and the houses were empty or filled with the dead. It was as simple as that. He couldn’t save these strangers any more than they could save him. His hosts were as alien to him as the soiled rabble mustered outside, now clawing at the windows and doors, ravenous for access. The creatures would find it. The house sighed around him, submitting to the business of dying.

  Mark Spitz went for his gun and pack. Tad paused at the landing. He translated the expression on Mark Spitz’s face and bolted upstairs to help his housemates. The ground growled and shook. Hell dropping pretense at last and opening up to claim them. No time to ponder that. He computed: The noise will draw most of the skels out front, but a number will head for the nearest point of entry. The backyard would still be rife with them. Upstairs was a no-go. One of the dining-room windows shattered. The teeming porch. He fought the urge to reinforce the perimeter there. Useless to try and save it. They’d be at the other windows even if he did get that table up there. He couldn’t do it by himself. They were taking on water. Upstairs they were fighting. One plan: Fall back to a bedroom on the second floor and barricade as the first floor filled with skels. They’re on the stairs in minutes and then he is locked in the tiny room. Even if most of them came inside, enough would remain in the yard to be a problem if he jumped. Think: The porch is on fire. For a second he pictured himself underneath the news copter as the folks in more fortunate weather watched from home. He was on the roof, the brown floodwaters pouring around the house. Why do these yokels build a house there when they know it’s a flood zone, why do they keep rebuilding? He says, Because this disaster is our home. I was born here.

  The line of ceramic teapots above the fireplace hopped to the floor at the tremors. They don’t have earthquakes in Massachusetts. In goddamned Connecticut, either, but Mark Spitz didn’t put it past that territory to figure out a way to outwit geological process, out of spite. No, the monster vehicles approached. The vibrations surged into him through his feet. He reached the kitchen and the barrage started. The bullets penetrated from every direction, shredding the wainscoting and knickknacks, the hard-won bounty of a hundred internet auctions, casting splinters and shards into the air like the confetti guts of firecrackers. A pebbled-glass lampshade jigsawed, the chandelier’s dead bulbs popped, and the wooden doors of the media center finally revealed the vulgar flat-screen TV hidden inside, that lost treasure. He hit the floor. Beyond the walls, a woman spat orders. She was authority. The gunfire halted. Resumed. Mark Spitz rolled over on his back. Debris and glass roiled in the air, the long three-tined forks and oversize ladles hopped from their hooks. The kitchen was ruined, he thought. He mourned the kitchen, its stolid German cappuccino maker, the retro-style juicer with its cool mercury lines, the stainless-steel fridge’s long-barren ice dispenser. Bit of a fixer-upper, needs TLC.

  One of the dead bumped open the swinging doors. Some ex-kid in a denim vest festooned with buttons detailing the slogans of doomed causes and the unphotogenic candidates stumping for esoteric platforms. The doors bounced back and clocked it in the face. Mark Spitz fired, missed, and then his bullet smeared away the top of the thing’s cranium as three high-caliber bullets burst through its chest. The artillery paused again. Boots pummeled the stairs and kicked in the front door, not that there was much of it left, he reckoned. Isolated shots crackled in the yard—picking off the remainders. How many of them were there? Bandits? He’d dealt with bandits. The scenarios impelling bandits toward their ill works were nothing compared to the visions slithering in his head. Bandits were a restaurant out of tonight’s special and late trains and undependable wifi. He could handle bandits. He said, “I’m alive in
here! I’m alive in here!” The kitchen doors swung open again. He looked up.

  He never got to ask Margie what finally made her crack. If she pushed Jerry off the roof into their hungry arms or if he slipped. She disappeared into the woods when the convoy took a piss break. Captain Childs wasn’t going to wait. “Those are the kind that get you into trouble,” she said before ordering them to move out. The caravan continued north for another two hours. Mark Spitz and Tad slumped in the bucket seats of the armored vehicle, eavesdropping on the young men muttering into their headsets. He pictured himself laid out on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, plugged into machines and bottles. They’re not using the siren because he is going to make it. They are specialists. They will not let him perish.

  He climbed up the ladder into the crisp daylight. A corporal helped him out of the hatch and off the transport and he was inside Camp Screaming Eagle.

  Safe.

  • • •

  Saturday’s visit to the local military installation was not as auspicious. Mark Spitz registered the manic vibe the moment he left the jeep. Bozeman had parked over on Hudson, per Ms. Macy’s interest in seeing the Coakleys, and because “parking is a bitch” over by Wonton Main. Same old, same old. The local blizzard was under way, and the machine gunners up and down Canal shuddered over their weapons in neurotic fervor, rending the bodies of the things beyond the barrier with a profusion of high-velocity projectiles. The thunder the soldiers made had reverberated between the buildings all day, so much so that it had scurried beneath his attention until he got close. The fallen skels were hidden by the wall, and from the amount of artillery expended Mark Spitz imagined the hostiles changed into some new variety of monster, a second transformation that would induct the survivors into the next devastating ring of hell. Wide scaly wings, rapier-length fangs, a ridge of spikes popping out of their spines. You thought you knew the plague? It was just getting started. Act II of the End of the World following the intermission, let’s wrap this up, folks.