Colson Whitehead - Zone One

“Gag reflex,” No Mas said.

“One of those little thermite jobs, sure,” Gary said.

“It’s sad,” Kaitlyn said.

Fabio had installed himself at the man’s desk. Fabio knew himself to be a pretender, from the way he started and almost knocked over his coffee when Mark Spitz showed up. He looked terrible, as if he’d been living in a hamper. He spoke fast, on high rev, as he apologized for not informing the sweepers earlier. With the whole eastern seaboard lit up and scrambling the last two weeks to cover the recent blips, Buffalo thought it best if the sweepers kept to their timetables.

“Blips?” Mark Spitz asked.

“Reversals, complications,” Fabio told him. “Blips.” Fabio was in command until they sent down a replacement. Buffalo had already missed the last two food drops.

The office’s digital player, enthroned on a doily in the microwave/coffeemaker nexus by the watercooler, had been playing a set of old pop and Mark Spitz was startled by the DJ’s sudden bluster: “Hey! All you out there. Hope you’re getting a chance to enjoy this sunshine today!” Surely there were no radio stations up yet. The DJ forecast fair skies for the rest of the afternoon, and Mark Spitz realized it was a recording of a radio block from some random afternoon before the disaster, a ghost transmission of yesterday’s deals on teeth bleaching, ads for movies playing in dead theaters, and last-minute invitations to join class-action suits.

A new recruit Mark Spitz hadn’t seen before, one of the teenagers from the camps, entered the office and dropped himself at Fabio’s old desk. Distribution may be a mess right now, but Buffalo had a lot of spare parts lying around.

“We can’t believe Fabio’s been our man up there and we didn’t even know it,” Gary said.

“It’s disgraceful,” Kaitlyn said.

They quickly ran out of remembrances. Honestly, they didn’t know him that well. “Pretty cool boss,” Carl said. They waded into deep, frigid silences and drank. Carl changed the mix on the digital music player, saying, “This one’s remixes.” It had been rare to memorialize someone’s passing. You were on the run; you left the bodies behind to leak fluids in the sun. This was the first time since the world ended that most of them had the luxury to do things in the old style. They had little to say.

The drinks executed their mission. No Mas saluted the silhouettes on the wall, slow, catching on his gears, and Mark Spitz guessed the man was performing his Lieutenant impression for his inner audience. No Mas smiled faintly. Kaitlyn strangled a loop of hair on her index finger. She caught Mark Spitz looking at her and said, “The subway.”

Seven weeks into their mission, the Lieutenant had Fabio summon them from the field. This was unprecedented, as they only returned to Wonton on Sundays and were now deep in the rhythms of their work flow, replete with Monday-morning despair, hump-day torpor, and a fragile strain of muted Friday-afternoon euphoria. The comms still worked back then, providing a tether to a mending civilization. For his part, Mark Spitz appreciated the interruption of that week’s grid. Omega wormed through the intestines of a starter-apartment rental tower, and floor after floor of beige carpet, noise-permeable walls, and fingerprint-smudged doorways soured his disposition. His friends in the city lived in buildings like that, and the hallways reeked of the dead ambitions decomping behind the doors. They’d had hopes. Now the cheap, emptied construction signified the complete eradication of aspiration, all luminous notions.

In the dumpling house, the Lieutenant told them that Buffalo wanted them to sweep out the subway tunnels.

“I thought the marines already did that,” Metz said.

“Mostly,” the Lieutenant explained. When the marines landed, they’d locked up the black gates and turnstiles to the platforms. The thinking was, they’d clear out the tunnels later. But once they cottoned to the fact that the top of the island was uncapped and the northward rails were wide open, the brass grew apprehensive. Even though skel migration patterns didn’t work that way, everyone started having nightmares of miles and miles of tunnels brimming and bursting with the dead, envisioning the uptown lines as umbral channels rerouting these very, very sick passengers to right beneath their tamed Zone boulevards. Ghoulish faces smeared into the bars and verminous mitts clawed through the metal grating in a hellish rendition of the worst rush hour ever, gates wrenching free from the concrete platforms… In their final mission before redeployment to the latest, more fashionable instability up or down the coast, the marines blocked the underground tunnels at the northern edge of the Zone, as if the Great Wall of Canal extended through the asphalt and deep into the Earth’s crust. Then the marines swept through the downtown shadows after the trapped skels.

It was the Lieutenant’s first week in the Zone. Buffalo was all paperwork; he wanted a proper posting. He led a platoon down the Lexington Avenue line. “Sketchy is the word I’d use. We’d tamed aboveground. Put them down. Underground was skel territory—as if it still belonged to the interregnum, even though it was just under our feet. Even with the subways blocked off, there was this feeling that the other end of the tunnel, its terminus, was in the dead land. Claustrophobic as hell, despite the trolleys we had on the tracks carrying the spots—the brass had reallocated our night-vision gear for some op up north, so we had to bring our own light. You’re not in the city anymore down there. It’s medieval. Water streaming down the wall like a catacomb, rats running around, and then you’re lurching in the pits between the tracks. The third rail’s dead, but it’s still creepy, like it could come on any second and zap you.

“But the main thing was never knowing what was around the next bend or how many were going to come pouring out of the dark. Guys pissing themselves in fear, even after all they’d seen in the wasteland. To make it extra hellish, the general had the bright idea to make us bring flamethrowers, which was fine for making human—or subhuman—torches, but there was no ventilation. When the subway’s running, they got superfans going to keep the air in circulation. Halfway in, it’s full of dead air down there, eyes burning from the smoke, can’t breathe, skels crashing at us through the flames—”

The Lieutenant paused. He wasn’t selling the sweepers on their temporary reassignment very well. He poured a glass of water from the plastic pitcher on the podium. “But we pulled it off. Elbow grease, American Phoenix, rah rah. Now they want you to finish it so it’s a hundred percent. Do what you’re doing now, pop ’n’ drop whatever skels have wandered in from some maintenance conduit over the last weeks, or that one random fellow in the supply room. If any. The hard stuff has been taken care of,” he said. The Lieutenant’s face sketched a look of bravado Mark Spitz had not seen on the man before, so he took it to be fake.

Omega and Gamma were assigned the Seventh Avenue line, Canal to South Ferry. The most noble of subway routes in Mark Spitz’s estimation, hallowed meridian of Manhattan Island. When the two sweeper units arrived at the uptown side of Canal, the yellow tile of the station entrance generated a familiar calm in him. During his first teenage missions in the New York City underground, the steps leading to a subway platform offered refuge from the madness of the streets above, sparing him the skyscrapers’ indictment of his shabby suburban self and the constant jostling of strangers, who cut him off, scowled at his tentative steps, tried to puncture his eyeballs with their umbrella spokes and render him defenseless so they could devour him. He caught his breath on the platforms and furtively checked the transit-authority app on his phone so that no one would know he didn’t have a clue of where he was going. He was a rube, but he was no tourist. One day he’d live here and be one of their tribe. Mark Spitz got out at his stop, at some part of the city he’d never been before, to complete the assignment given by a website—in search of imported sneakers or limited-edition hoodies—eager to school himself in this new cranny of the city.