Colson Whitehead - Zone One

At Mark Spitz’s demurral, Gary attached an invisible headset to his ear and radioed, “Lieutenant, do you copy? We need our orders. Don’t leave us to Fabio, bruh.”

Gary could have addressed his brothers, had he been able to evade and outwit his denial over their deaths. Any séance was doomed, in Mark Spitz’s estimation, even if the young psychic had functioned properly, if she had still owned her talents. He’d sifted through the failed proofs of an afterlife many a cold night. There was a barrier at the end of one’s life, yes, but nothing on the other side. How could there be? The plague stopped the heart, one’s essence sloughed off the pathetic human meat and dog-paddled through the ectoplasm or whatever, and then the plague restarted the heart. What kind of cruel deity granted a glimpse of the angelic sphere, only to yank it away and condemn you to a monster’s vantage? Sentenced you to observe the world through the sad aperture of the dead, suffer the gross parody of your existence. Outside Zone One, the souls sat trapped in the bleachers, spectators to the travesties committed by their alienated hands.

The death of the afterlife was not without its perks, however, sparing Mark Spitz the prospect of an eternity reliving his mistakes and seeing their effects ripple, however briefly and uselessly, through history.

“This Gypsy’s missing a few screws,” Gary said. He lifted the slab of her hand and dropped its dead weight on the table.

Kaitlyn rejoined them. “Looks like she started living back there once it went down.” She shook her head at the tableau before her but was unable to be authentically appalled. It had been a long day. “You’re sick, Gary.”

“Nothing you’d like to ask, Kaitlyn?” Gary gripped the fortune-teller’s hand again. “Don’t you want to know when you meet Mr. Right?”

“Okay, I’ll bite—”

“Wrong word.”

His comrades settled into Solve the Skel joviality, Mark Spitz told himself to relax. It had been a rough two days, between Human Resources and the Lieutenant’s execution of the forbidden thought. In half an hour they’d be at Wonton and another week closer to the remaking of the world. He felt something in his skin, though, the faintest of vibrations.

Kaitlyn asked, “Will the Triplets make it through?”

“What’s the matter, plague got your tongue?… Hold on, I’m getting something…” Gary vamped, eyes clenched. “Three brave souls…”

“Cheyenne, fool. Is Cheyenne okay?”

“The answer is… Yes!”

“Sweet lord.”

Mark Spitz asked, “Will we make it through?”

Gary opened one eye and grinned. “Let me check, hold on a sec… Madame Gypsy, can you help us see the future?”

We make the future, Mark Spitz thought. That’s why we’re here.

“It’s hazy,” Gary said. He concentrated harder, hand trembling. “What you really want to know is, will you make it through?”

“Yes.”

“Hold on a sec…” Gary’s body convulsed, a ferocious psychic current entering at that intersection of his skin and that of the fortune-teller. The mechanic couldn’t keep a straight face as he combated the forces of the spirit world, frail conduit. For the first time Mark Spitz noticed the tiny smile engraved into the fortune-teller’s black lips, as if she enjoyed the joke as well, or an altogether different amusement, the exact grain and texture of which only she could appreciate. Gary collapsed on the table, milked the moment, and then wearily raised his head. “They say everything is going to be all right, Mark Spitz. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

To be a good sport, Mark Spitz made a show of relief. On the street, his ash had begun to fall, his vanguard flakes.

“Okay, up, up, Gary,” Kaitlyn said, “let’s finish this off.”

“Don’t sulk,” Gary said. He lifted his fingers from the fortune-teller’s hand and the instant he broke contact she grabbed his hand and chomped deep into the meat between the index finger and thumb. Blood sprayed, paused, sprayed again with the exertions of his heart. The Gypsy’s mouth ground back and forth, ripping and chewing, and she gobbled up his thumb.

Kaitlyn’s bullets disintegrated her head and she slumped to the floor, spewing the dark fluid in her veins onto the shelves of a home-assembly particle-board bookcase filled with her occult troves. Before her face was liquefied, her smile returned to her blood-splashed lips: a broad, satisfied crescent of teeth. Or so Mark Spitz imagined.

He ministered to Gary’s wound while Kaitlyn shot the fortune-teller four more times, cursing. Gary’s shrieks of shock and agony turned into a command for anticiprant. “Gimme the shit, where’s the shit, gimme the shit,” he cried, hands roving over his vest. Mark Spitz found his friend’s supply of antibiotic, in the same pocket that held this week’s hoard of mood stabilizers. Gary gobbled up the anticiprant, and then Mark Spitz’s stash and Kaitlyn’s. He howled.

It was folklore, the megadose of drugs that snuffed out the plague if you swallowed it quickly enough. Anticiprant had been a second-tier antibiotic in the previous world; no telling how it had been cast as the cavalry repelling the invading spirochetes of the plague. Poll a random mess table at a resettlement camp and you’d find one or two pheenies who claimed to know someone who knew someone who had been saved by this prophylaxis. When pressed, of course, no one could claim firsthand knowledge. Mark Spitz didn’t believe in its powers. More likely, the original carriers of this doomsday folklore hadn’t received a proper wallop of the plague, enough to infect. But it didn’t hurt to carry some pills in your pocket. People carried crucifixes and holy books. Why not an easy-to-swallow caplet of faith, in a new fast-acting formula.

Kaitlyn stabbed Gary’s arm with a morphine ampoule and finished dressing the wound. She wiped the blood off with a fuchsia hand towel from the back bathroom. He moaned and glared at his Gypsy as if to cut her open and fish around for his thumb and sew it back on. “Gypsy curse,” he said, spitting a ruby to the dusty carpet. The white mitt at the end of his wrist was pricked with red specks that bloomed into red petals, became a bouquet. Mark Spitz opened another dressing.

They didn’t have to get into the heavy stuff yet. There was time. It was faster now, after generations and mutations, but there was time.

“I want more pills,” Gary said.

“I’ll see if Bravo is still up the block,” Kaitlyn said. Given their temperament, the unit was long back at Wonton, but Mark Spitz knew she wanted a chance to try and get a signal out to report the situation. Get a higher-up to weigh in, even if it was lowly Fabio.

They settled in the back room. The fortune-teller had dug out a meager alcove in the interregnum, for a few weeks at least. The apartment bore the telltale markers of siege life, in the goo mounds of candle wax, the ziggurat of cans of beans and soup. The couch and its cocoon of blankets was the nest where she plotted her unsuccessful escape. Mark Spitz helped Gary over to it, the wounded man traducing their dead host with every step.

Kaitlyn will be right back, Mark Spitz reassured. She’s dependable.

Gary dragged a fistful of quilt to his chin, like an old lady vexed by an ineradicable draft. “Why do they call you Mark Spitz?” he asked.

He told him about the wreckers, the Northeast Corridor, and the jokes when they got back to Fort Golden Gate from the viaduct. He’d laughed along with everyone else, but later he had to look up Mark Spitz, in a surreptitious mission for an old paper encyclopedia. First he had to find one, which took time. Finally he was saved by movie night at the bungalow of one of the infrastructure guys; the previous inhabitants owned a big fat dictionary, old school, with pictures, even. His nicknamesake had been an Olympic swimmer in the previous century, a real thoroughbred who’d held the world record for the most gold medals in one game: freestyle, butterfly. The Munich Games—Munich, where the scientists had made biohaz soup of the infected, in the early days of the plague, as they worked toward a vaccine. The word “soup” had stayed with him, after one of the denizens of the wasteland had told him the story. People were becoming less than people everywhere, he had thought: monsters, soup.