Colson Whitehead - Zone One

Bozeman started up the truck. Mark Spitz tried to read the street signs, eyes adjusting to the darkness. When he saw the sign he was waiting for, he grabbed Nelson’s arm and said, “I have to check on my unit.” He hopped out, lost his footing and rolled painfully on the pavement.

He didn’t detect movement. The city here was still empty. For now, the moonlight allowed him to lay off the attention-drawing flashlight. He didn’t have line of sight, but doubtless the blue moon of his uncle’s building was eclipsed when the power cut off. He had seen it for the last time, he was sure. He calculated: The dead fanned from the hole in the wall, but they’d tend to splash down the big avenues. Mark Spitz’s mission was a lateral move across the Zone to the fortune-teller’s, before the creatures hit Chambers. He hadn’t taken a step toward Broadway when he heard the truck crash. He kept moving. He’d see them at the rendezvous or he wouldn’t. Halfway to Gold Street, he saw that his ash had stopped falling. Not enough memory, with his survival programs running, for his PASD. His past.

The sidewalk in front of the fortune-teller’s was bereft of illumination. He hoped to find Omega in the back apartment. He crept inside and whispered their names. There was no answer. He locked the door to the shop, relieved to get off the street; he envisioned the dead as they gained velocity on these declivitous downtown streets, gravity yanking them to the bottom of the map. Once the things spread evenly through Zone One—could he call it that anymore?—it would be impossible to pass. It was probably too late to use the subway as a shortcut. They are dripping down the steps to the platforms by now.

Mark Spitz had never gamed out an escape from the island, but yes, the terminal was a good bet. Especially given the standard traffic on the bridges. The Brooklyn-bound bridges were obstructed but a person could negotiate the barriers, given time. The problem was the legions of dead invariably massed there and stretching the entire lamentable length of the span, all the way to the other borough. He’d always thought it strange, the devotion of the congregation there, as if in their fallen state they still hungered for Manhattan. Then as now, they believed the magic of the island would cure them of their sicknesses.

He swept through the shop with alacrity, in case Gary had already turned. Nothing moved. Kaitlyn had mobilized, to check out what was happening at Wonton. By now she understood the situation and he prayed she remembered to beat it to the terminal. Perhaps they’d crossed each other in the darkness, like they used to do in the old days of the living city. Happened all the time that someone you loved moved through the avenues, half a block over, one block over from you as they navigated their day, unaware how close you were. You just missed each other.

He closed the door to the back apartment to hide the light from the trickling dead. He lit a candle, in the wasted steppes once more despite the flimsy promises of architecture. Gary had bled through the blanket Kaitlyn covered him with. How long after Mark Spitz went up to Wonton? When he was a block away? After a farewell chat with Kaitlyn, then deciding after he felt something shift in his brain? In all likelihood he sent Kaitlyn on a false errand and took the opportunity.

Mark Spitz lifted the blanket. This was not a job Gary would do half-assed, but it was necessary to make sure he’d done it proper. From the looks of it Kaitlyn had put two more bullets in him for good measure. He was about to drop the blanket when he saw the paper in Gary’s hand.

He pried the fingers, draped his friend again, and sank into the green armchair facing the sofa. Gary had been carrying it for a long time, from the creases and chewed edges, pocket to pocket to pocket. Since when, which asylum, consulted in the dark of how many failed refuges? Maybe he’d carried it since Last Night. It had been carefully ripped from a magazine, a level fur of fibers describing the inside edge. On one side, the island bulged from the blue waters of the Mediterranean, a knuckled lump of rock. It looked like a grenade, he thought. On the opposite, a street scene unraveled: A slim alley pullulated with men and women mid-errand, perhaps around noon. A trinket store hawked postcards on long wire racks, azure rectangles featuring more pictures of the island. A young couple enmeshed fingers at a small table outside a café, the red and white and brown logo of the espresso distributor half shadowed on a sign over the entrance. The table, aslant, jabbed its legs into cracks between cobblestones. A matchbox and a wad of napkin, the discarded shims, lay next to the woman’s red sandals.

The thought of Gary smuggling a picture of Corsica, France, in his pocket through the desert all this time, while suffering through his Spanish lessons, almost made Mark Spitz chortle. Gary clearing his throat, marshaling his rehearsed patter, the greetings and sweet talk, as he walked across the gangplank off the sub to his longed-for island.

Mark Spitz snuffed the candle and checked out front. The dead teetered down Gold, southward in their hideous procession. Sparse right now. Still time to make it past them.

He returned to the back room. He retrieved his flashlight from his pack. No way to date the photograph of the alley. It might as well have been the last afternoon in the world, a scene to be inserted in the montage sequence of the disaster movie. The oblivious citizens drift on the anvil of this mundane afternoon, unaware of the bomb, the meteor, the fateful chunk of rock from outer space entering the atmosphere. In thirty seconds they will cease to exist, but for now they live in their moment of safety. Snug in sunlight, their lover’s hand warm and true and solid in theirs.

The Lieutenant had asked Kaitlyn and him to picture a world where the stragglers were the dead majority, not an aberrant fraction. This photograph is what that would look like, Mark Spitz thought. The entire population snared in bygone moments, entranced by the world that no longer existed. Mesmerized by the outline of a shadow cast by a phantom that had made them happy once.

He had the forbidden thought. He didn’t push it away.

It was the second time in three days, the most close together since his farmhouse rescue. It was happening again: the end of the world. The last months had been a pause, a breather before the recommitment to annihilation. This time we cannot delude ourselves that we will make it out alive.

When was the last time someone had taken his picture? Rhode Island. It was a month before he was picked up in Northampton, during a two-week stint at a hot-sheet hotel. The national budget-hotel chain had purchased an even cheaper chain and was refurbishing and renovating the universally dilapidated properties, installing the high-definition television screens on their tilting arms, tearing out the cigarette-burned and bodily-fluid-soiled carpets to replace them with the futuristic stain-impervious fibers. The franchise Mark Spitz stumbled on had been surrounded by chain-link fencing during construction, reassuringly anti-skel. One appreciated the chime of chain links these days, that perimeter-definer and alarm system.

Survivors came and went. He staked out Room 12, which was a musty box of umber and gray. The other survivors were harmless. Tired, like him, on a becalmed plateau of the interregnum. He was at a wedding, in a discounted block for members of the party. Strangers to one another but connected all this time even if they didn’t know it, until thrown together in this little pocket of time outside their normal lives to bear witness. Except the ceremony kept being postponed. They extended their stays multiple times, rang the front-desk void, made the necessary excuses into the dead phones. Past complaining now, though.