Colson Whitehead: Zone One

The old man came jogging down the asphalt. A gray cardigan flapped over his bare chest, and green plaid pants cut off a comical length above his slippers, which were secured to his feet with black electrical tape. Six of the devils congregated on the lawn of a mock Tudor halfway down the street, and they turned at the sound of him. The old man ran faster, veering to arc around them, but he didn’t make it. Dark aviator glasses covered his eyes and he had a wireless rig stuck in his ear, into which he narrated his progress. Was the old man actually talking to someone? The phones were dead, all the stalwart and dependable networks had ceased to be, but maybe the authorities were fixing things out there, Mark Spitz remembered thinking, the government was getting control. Authority laying on hands. Two of them got the old man down and then all of them were on him like ants who received a chemical telegram about a lollipop on the sidewalk. There was no way the old man could get up. It was quick. They each grabbed a limb or convenient point of purchase while he screamed. They began to eat him, and his screaming brought more of them teetering down the street. All over the world this was happening: a group of them hears food at the same time and they twist their bodies in unison, that dumb choreography. A cord of blood zipped up out of their huddle, hanging—that’s how he always recalled it, that’s what he saw as he ducked down behind the cinder blocks and watched. A length of red string pinned briefly to the air, until the wind knocked it away. They didn’t fight over the old man. They each got a piece. Of course there couldn’t have been anyone at the other end of the call because the phones never came back on. The old man had been barking into the void.

Let them pin you and you were dead. Let them pin you and there was no way to stop them from ripping off whatever pitiful armor you’d wrapped yourself in, stuck your hopes to. They’d get you. He had wafted through damp summer afternoons at Long Beach, amid the chewy scent of fried clams. Cartoon lobster on the thin plastic bib, the stupefying melody of the predatory ice-cream truck. (Yes, time slowed down to give those competing factions in him room to rumble, the dark and the light.) They’d wrestle Mark Spitz out of his fatigues the way he’d pried meat out of claws, tails, shells. They were a legion of teeth and fingers. He grabbed Human Resources’ wispy hair and yanked its head out of its advance toward his nose. He didn’t have a free hand to grab his knife, but he pinpointed the place in its skull where he would have stuck it. He looked after his pistol. It lay near his waist. The Marge was on its knees, creeping down his arm to the gap between the mesh sleeve and glove. The light was such that he saw his face reflected in Human Resources’ milky eyes, fixed in that mindless void. Then he felt the fourth skel grab his leg and he lost himself.

He had the forbidden thought.

He woke. He bucked Human Resources off his chest and it tumbled onto the Marge. Mark Spitz grabbed his pistol and shot it in the forehead.

The fourth one tried to grit down on his leg and was thwarted by his fatigues. Most of the meat in its face had been chewed away. (He’d seen, in that first week, a Samaritan administer chest compresses to a stricken fellow citizen, lean down to give mouth-to-mouth, and have his nose ripped off.) Thin, wide loops of gold dangled from its earlobes, chiming against each other as it scuttled up his body, and he aimed at a place at the top of its skull and put it down.

Gary said, “I got you.” Gary kicked the Marge off him and held its shoulder down with his boot.

Mark Spitz turned his face to avoid the spray, squeezing his lips into a crack. He heard two shots. All four were down.

“Mark Spitz, Mark Spitz,” Gary said. “We didn’t know you liked the older ladies.”

They started calling him Mark Spitz after they finally found their way back to camp after the incident on I-95. The name stuck. No harm. Affront was a luxury, like shampoo and affection.

He rolled away from the bodies toward the paper shredder and tried to catch his breath. He heaved, sweat riveting his brow. The faceless skel’s foot swished back and forth like the tail of an animal dozing on concrete in a zoo. Then it stopped at the end of a circuit and did not stir.

Mark Spitz said, “Thank you.”

“Mazel tov,” Gary said.

In the last few weeks Gary had started employing the vocab of the polyglot city, as it had been transmitted through popular culture: the eponymous sitcoms of Jewish comedians; the pay-cable Dominican gangster show; the rat-a-tat verses of totemic hip-hop singles. He didn’t always get the meanings right, but he had the delivery down, the correct intonations reinforced by countless exposures.

In the aftermath of the engagement, Gary’s body withdrew into its customary scarecrow posture. In his mastery of technique, the man was an exemplar of the new civilian recruits, memorizing and then implementing the correct assault-rifle and blade technique, and melding his homegrown survival skills with crashcoursed military lore. Mark Spitz was lucky to serve in his unit. But he looked horrible. Each morning when they woke, Mark Spitz marveled anew at how his comrade was scarcely in better shape than the creatures they were sent to eradicate. (Discounting the ones missing body parts, of course.) Gary had a granite complexion, gray and pitted skin. Mark Spitz couldn’t help but think that something bad roosted deep in his bones, uncatalogued and undiagnosable. His eye sockets were permanently sooted, his cheeks scooped out. His preferred gait was a controlled slouch, with which he slunk around corners and across rooms, the world’s last junkie. Like everyone, he’d skipped plenty of meals over the last few years, though on Gary the weight loss registered not as the result of scarcity but as the slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing. Mark Spitz was disabused of this theory when Gary showed him a picture taken at his sixth birthday party, the same ill demeanor evident even then.

Whatever the sickness, whether it was biological or metaphysical, its discharge leaked out of his hands, more specifically his fingernails, which were seemingly constructed of grime. As if he had clawed out of a coffin. Their first week at Fort Wonton, there had existed a certain Sergeant Weller who rode Gary about the disreputable state of his fingernails, bringing up pre-plague regs of military comportment etc. and threatening to “rain hell” on him if he didn’t shape up, but Weller got his throat ripped out during a recon trip in a Newark railway station, and that was the end of that. The other officers’ priorities did not include persecuting volunteers over dead standards. For his part, Gary didn’t understand the fuss. Before the world broke, he’d dropped out of school to crank bolts full-time in his father’s garage with his brothers, and he stood by this explanation for his appearance even though it had been years since he’d worked on a car or truck. Which left Mark Spitz to opine that what they were seeing was the original grime, the very grime of Gary’s youth preserved as a token of home. It was what he’d scraped off the past and carried with him.

Gary prodded the Marge with his rifle. “No one told me it was Casual Friday,” he said. Whether or not you agreed that Gary looked worse than your standard-issue plague-shriveled skel, it was indisputable that he had worse manners.

Kaitlyn materialized, running in from the hall and then slowing down and shaking her head as she took in the mess. She asked Mark Spitz if he was okay and surveyed the office. “Four of them and five desks,” she said. She padded over to the supply closet. Any creature trapped inside would be making a racket at the commotion, but Kaitlyn was a stickler. From her stories, she’d been a grade-grubber before the disaster, and Mark Spitz had watched her maintain a grade-grubbing continuum in the throes of reconstruction, rubbing her thumbs over the No-No Cards and applying a yellow highlighter to the typo-ridden manuals from Buffalo. If she survived, she’d doubtless continue to be a grade-grubber in that coming, reborn world they crawled toward, paying her bills in a timely fashion once goods and vital services and autopay reappeared, first in line to pull the lever, if not manning the polling booths, once they could again afford the indulgence of democracy. The Lieutenant put her in charge of Omega Unit for her constancy, although given his other two choices it didn’t rank among his more visionary commands.