Colson Whitehead - Zone One

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 studio 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.