Colson Whitehead - Zone One

Bozeman shook his head. “By now she knows the situation. Everyone’s on their own.” He pointed out that her quarters were half a mile south of Wonton; with luck she was on her way to the rendezvous.

“Which is?” Ms. Macy asked.

The first and last discussion of a fallback position was during the initial sweep, Bozeman explained, when Battery Park was the designated staging area for the op. The Staten Island Ferry Terminal served as the command center in those early days. “From there we can get air support. Rescue. Boats. If people remember that’s where we’re supposed to go,” he added.

“And if there’s anyone left to pick us up.”

Mark Spitz patted his chest for the reassurance of his gear and was reminded that his stuff was in the back room of the fortune-teller’s. Happy Acres out of contact, the other camps as well: This was not a local occurrence. Maybe this dark tsunami swallowed the entire star-crossed seaboard, camp by camp, maybe this was what was happening everywhere, all over the world. The patient stabilized for a time but now the final seizures announced themselves, the diminishing spasms conveying the body’s meat to room temperature. Mark Spitz could play along with rescue talk, for the sake of the two army runts at least. The Lieutenant had designated the terminal as the fallback position at that first dumpling-house briefing, he recalled. Or was he inventing that moment, in the manner that you accomplice yourself to the shifting premises of a dream? The other sweeper units, from Alpha on up, were on the move; the wave of the dead would have swept past the dumpling joint by now. He hoped they had weapons with them, hadn’t been hitting the sponsored booze all day.

“There’s no time,” Mark Spitz said.

“For what?”

“To sit here.”

They scudded through the guts of Grid 003, Broadway x Canal, Business, passing through the termite corridors the Army Corps of Engineers had carved. Outside in the street the dead poured downtown. The wall was breached, but the bottleneck, coupled with the vagaries of skel diffusion patterns, meant they still had a chance of pushing through this local density.

“Walking is bullshit,” Ms. Macy said.

“We have trucks,” Bozeman said. He took point. The southern end of HQ was a Vietnamese restaurant on Lispenard. They cut the lights in the kitchen, and then Bozeman sent out one of the army guys to do the same in the main dining room. The problem being if one of the dead on the street saw the movement, attracting a covey to block their exit. Nelson made it through, and the band moved to the front of the restaurant, trying to stay out of the streetlight. The dead seeped through the east—west corridor of Lispenard but they preferred the wide avenues of Broadway, from what Mark Spitz could see from his angle. Two trucks were parked across the street, facing west. Depending on the skel distribution on Hudson, they could grind through until they outpaced the wave.

“Keys should be in there,” Bozeman said.

Ms. Macy slumped by the coatroom. “I’m supposed to go in that?”

“I said we have trucks,” Bozeman said.

We’ll need momentum, Mark Spitz thought. These were scooting-around trucks, canvas-topped.

“I assumed armored,” Ms. Macy said. “Fuck am I supposed to do, ride in the back?”

“Beats walking.”

“It’s useless,” Nelson said. He had been weeping. He wept anew. “No one’s going to pick us up.”

“He’s right,” Ms. Macy said. “You don’t know Buffalo. They’re not going to send out a gunship to clean up a public relations stunt when they got camps falling right and left.”

“Public relations,” Fabio said.

“You have no idea how far we are from normal, do you?” She sneered at their incomprehension, exhaled. “I’m too good at my job.”

Nelson said, “I’m the last one left of my town. Everybody’s dead.”

“This is PR,” Ms. Macy said. “It’ll be years before we’re able to resettle this island. We don’t even have food for the winter.”

Nelson said, “My own hands.”

Fabio staggered as if slugged in his gut. “You said the summit.”

She peered out through the glass again, taking the temperature, and shook her head. “Summit. You think he’s coming back? If I had a goddamned sub, I wouldn’t be coming back to this dump. Look at it out there. Those pricks are probably trying to figure out which island in the Bahamas to settle on.” She checked her pistol. “Why are you smiling?”

She was talking to Mark Spitz. Shame rippled through him, the echo of a civilized self. He put it down. He was smiling because he hadn’t felt this alive in months. Ever since he left the fortune-teller’s, as the kinetics of the artillery hammered through his boots, shuddered into his bones, and sought synchrony with his heart’s thump, he’d entered a state of tremulous euphoria. He was an old tenement radiator sheathed in chipped paint, knocking and whistling in the corner as it filled with steam heat. The sensation peaked the instant the wall collapsed and, in its ebb, he was the owner of a woeful recognition: It was not the dead that passed through the barrier but the wasteland itself, the territory he had kept at bay since the farmhouse. It embraced him; he slid inside it. Macy was correct. There would be no rescue at the terminal, no choppers dropping out of the sky at dawn after the longest night in the world. They had lost contact because the black tide had rolled in everywhere, no place was spared this deluge, everyone was drowning. Of course he was smiling. This was where he belonged.

At Bozeman’s signal they made a break for it, this sad platoon, the army guys providing cover on their Broadway flank, Mark Spitz out in front with Fabio. The gunfire of the Canal engagements couldn’t cover the reports as they routed the skels on Lispenard. Mark Spitz willed his rounds into the coordinates above the targets’ spinal columns, as if it were possible to mentally steer them; the bullets penetrated their intended destination. Everything above the things’ jawlines erupted into jelly. Nelson and Chad may have been green to Wonton but they were old hands at this brand of close fighting; they dropped five hostiles in quick succession, silent save for Nelson’s blubbering.

Bozeman started the truck; Macy hopped in the passenger seat and shut the cab door. Everyone else made it into the back except for Fabio. He was halfway in when the truck lurched forward as Bozeman reacquainted himself with the mechanism. Fabio grasped for balance as if it twisted in the air before him and just as he seized it, four blood-streaked hands snatched him into the vortex. Mark Spitz trained his assault rifle on the skel in the janitor uniform as it chomped into Fabio’s neck to loose a small fountain of blood. As the truck pulled away onto Hudson, he had time to put three rounds into Fabio’s chest and terminate the man’s screams.

The grisly tide rolled in. The truck rocked as it crunched over the dead. In the back of the truck they heard the tattoo of bodies bouncing off the hood as Bozeman managed to gather speed, the prow smashing through the breakers. Mark Spitz and Chad drew a bead on the dumb-faced skels in their wake, the ones who stood gaping, following the truck’s course down the rapids. Then Mark Spitz realized he’d been cast into scarcity once more; these bullets were going to have to last. He held his fire. Outside the radius of Wonton, the streets had not been cleared of cars and trucks, and he braced himself as Bozeman zigged and zagged around obstructions. At one turn, Chad almost fell out of the back, mouth yawning in panic. Mark Spitz grabbed his arm and reeled him in.

By North Moore Street they had outpaced the inundation. Ms. Macy cursed when the truck halted. The dead surged behind them in the middle of the ave, advancing downtown. Chad and Nelson took a few down before they heard “Hold your fire!” from beyond the canvas. They made room for four soldiers, three of them hoisting an unconscious comrade into the truck. The prone figure was covered in blood, but it didn’t appear to be from a bite. A new blossom of explosions colored the uptown sky orange and red, and as they receded, the lights went out. Wonton lost power. Nelson blubbered. The streets were dark. The garrison was completely submerged.