ZONE

ONE

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also by colson whitehead

The Intuitionist John Henry Days The Colossus of New York Apex Hides the Hurt Sag Harbor

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colson whitehead

novel

Copyright COLSON WHITEHEAD 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by Harvill Secker 2011 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Copyright Colson Whitehead 2011 Colson Whitehead has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser First published in Great Britain in 2011 by HARVILL SECKER Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA [Link] Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: [Link]/[Link] The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9781846555985 The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. Our books carrying the FSC label are printed on FSC certified paper. FSC is the only forest certification scheme endorsed by the leading environmental organisations, including Greenpeace. Our paper procurement policy can be found at: [Link]/environment

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC

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to bill thomas

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The gray layer of dust covering things has become their best part.

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e always wanted to live in New York. His Uncle Lloyd lived downtown on Lafayette, and in the long stretches between visits he daydreamed about living in his apartment. When his mother and father dragged him to the city for that seasons agreed-upon exhibit or good-for-you Broadway smash, they usually dropped in on Uncle Lloyd for a quick hello. These afternoons were preserved in a series of photographs taken by strangers. His parents were holdouts in an age of digital multiplicity, raking the soil in lonesome areas of resistance: a coffee machine that didnt tell time, dictionaries made out of paper, a camera that only took pictures. The family camera did not transmit their coordinates to an orbiting satellite. It did not allow them to book airfare to beach resorts with close access to rain forests via courtesy shuttle. There was no prospect of video, high-def or otherwise. The camera was so backward that every lurching specimen his father enlisted from the passersby was able to operate it sans hassle, no matter the depth of cow-eyed vacancy in their tourist faces or local wretchedness inverting their spines. His family posed on the museum steps or beneath the brilliant marquee with the

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poster screaming over their left shoulders, always the same composition. The boy stood in the middle, his parents hands dead on his shoulders, year after year. He didnt smile in every picture, only that percentage culled for the photo album. Then it was in the cab to his uncles and up the elevator once the doorman screened them. Uncle Lloyd dangled in the doorframe and greeted them with a louche Welcome to my little bungalow. As his parents were introduced to Uncle Lloyds latest girlfriend, the boy was down the hall, giddy and squeaking on the leather of the cappuccino sectional and marveling over the latest permutations in home entertainment. He searched for the fresh arrival rst thing. This visit it was the wireless speakers haunting the corners like spindly wraiths, the next he was on his knees before a squat blinking box that served as some species of multimedia brainstem. He dragged a nger down their dark surfaces and then huffed on them and wiped the marks with his polo shirt. The televisions were the newest, the biggest, levitating in space and pulsing with a host of extravagant functions diagrammed in the unopened owners manuals. His uncle got every channel and maintained a mausoleum of remotes in the storage space inside the ottoman. The boy watched TV and loitered by the glass walls, looking out on the city through smoky anti-UV glass, nineteen stories up. The reunions were terric and rote, early tutelage in the recursive nature of human experience. What are you watching? the girlfriends asked as they padded in bearing boutique seltzer and chips, and hed say The buildings, feeling weird about the pull the skyline had on him. He was a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this magnicent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the teeth. But the girlfriends were talking about

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the monster movies on TV, the women in the monster movies bolting through the woods or shriveling in the closet trying not to make a sound or vainly agging down the pickup that might rescue them from the hillbilly slasher. The ones still standing at the credit roll made it through by dint of an obscure element in their character. I cant stand these scary stories, the girlfriends said before returning to the grown-ups, attempting an auntly emanation as if they might be the rst of their number promoted to that ofce. His fathers younger brother was fastidious when it came to expiration dates. He liked to watch monster movies and the city churning below. He xed on odd details. The ancient water towers lurking atop obstinate old prewars and, higher up, the massive central-air units that hunkered and coiled on the striving high-rises, glistening like extruded guts. The tar-paper pates of tenements. He spotted the occasional out-of-season beach chair jackknifed on gravel, seemingly gusted up from the street below. Who was its owner? This person staked out corners of the city and made a domain. He squinted at the slogans cantering along stairwell entrances, the Day-Glo threats and pidgin manifestos, a.k.a.s of impotent revolutionaries. Blinds and curtains were open, half open, shut, voids in a punch card decipherable only by defunct mainframes lodged in the crust of unmarked landlls. Pieces of citizens were on display in the windows, arranged by a curator with a taste for non sequitur: the splayed pinstriped legs of an urban golfer putting into a colander; half a ladys torso, wrapped in a turquoise blazer, as glimpsed through a trapezoid; a st trembling on a titanium desk. A shadow bobbed behind a bathrooms bumpy glass, steam slithering through the slit. He remembered how things used to be, the customs of the skyline. Up and down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one anothers shadows. Inevitability was mayor, term after term. Yes-

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terdays old masters, stately named and midwifed by once-famous architects, were insulted by the soot of combustion engines and by technological advances in construction. Time chiseled at elegant stonework, which swirled or plummeted to the sidewalk in dust and chips and chunks. Behind the faades their insides were butchered, recongured, rewired according to the next eras new theories of utility. Classic six into studio honeycomb, sweatshop killing oor into cordoned cubicle mill. In every neighborhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking ball and their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass them, steel into steel. The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves out of rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants. The addresses remained the same and so did the awed philosophies. It wasnt anyplace else. It was New York City. The boy was smitten. His family stopped by Uncle Lloyds every couple of months. He drank the seltzer, he watched monster movies, he was a sentry at the window. The building was a totem sheathed in blue metal, a changeling in the nest of old walk-ups. The zoning commission had tucked the bribes into their coats, and now there he was, oating over the tapering island. There was a message there, if he could teach himself the language. On rainyday visits the surfaces of the buildings were pitiless and blank, as they were this day, years later. With the sidewalks hidden from view, the boy conjured an uninhabited city, where no one lived behind all those miles and miles of glass, no one caught up with loved ones in living rooms lled with tasteful and afrming catalog furniture, and all the elevators hung like broken puppets at the end of long cables. The city as ghost ship on the last ocean at the rim of the world. It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature. If youd asked him on any of those childhood afternoons

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what he wanted to be when he grew uptapping his shoulder as the family car inserted itself into the queue for the Midtown Tunnel or as they hummed toward their exit on the Long Island Expresswayhe would have had nothing to offer with regards to profession or avocation. His father wanted to be an astronaut when he was a kid, but the boy had never been anything but earthbound, kicking pebbles. All he was truly sure of was that he wanted to live in a city gadget, something well-stocked and white-walled, equipped with rotating bosomy beauties. His uncles apartment resembled the future, a brand of manhood waiting on the other side of the river. When his unit nally started sweeping beyond the wallwhenever that washe knew he had to visit Uncle Lloyds apartment, to sit on the sectional one last time and stare at the nal, empty screen in the series. His uncles building was only a few blocks past the barrier and he found himself squinting at it when it strode into view. He searched for the apartment, counting metallic blue stories and looking for movement. The dark glass relinquished nothing. He hadnt seen his uncles name on any of the survivor rolls and prayed against a reunion, the slow steps coming down the hall. If youd asked him about his plans at the time of the ruin, the answer would have come easily: lawyering. He was bereft of attractive propositions, constitutionally unaccustomed to enthusiasm, and generally malleable when it came to his parents wishes, adrift on that gentle upper-middle-class current that kept its charges cheerfully bobbing far from the shoals of responsibility. It was time to stop drifting. Hence, law. He was long past nding it ironic when his unit swept a building in that weeks grid and they came upon a den of lawyers. They slogged through the blocks day after day and there had been too many rms in too many other buildings for it to have any novelty. But this day he paused. He slung his assault rie over his shoulder and parted the blinds at the end of the corridor. All he wanted was a shred of uptown. He tried

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to orient himself: Was he looking north or south? It was like dragging a fork through gruel. The ash smeared the citys palette into a gray hush on the best of days, but introduce clouds and a little bit of precip and the city became an altar to obscurity. He was an insect exploring a gravestone: the words and names were crevasses to get lost in, looming and meaningless. This was the fourth day of rain, Friday afternoon, and a conditioned part of him submitted to end-of-the-week lassitude, even if Fridays had lost their meaning. Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that clock-watching had returned, the slackers code, the concept of weekend. It had been a humdrum couple of days, reafrming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the rst time hed experienced it. A cheerful thought, in its way, given the catastrophe. Well be back. He dropped his pack, switched off the torch in his helmet, and pushed his forehead to the glass as if he were at his uncles, rearranging the architecture into a message. The towers emerged out of smudged charcoal, a collection of gments and notions of things. He was fteen oors up, in the heart of Zone One, and shapes trudged like slaves higher and higher into midtown. They called him Mark Spitz nowadays. He didnt mind. Mark Spitz and the rest of Omega Unit were half done with 135 Duane Street, chugging down from the roof at a productive clip. All clear so far. Only a few signs of mayhem in the building. A ransacked petty cash drawer on eighteen, half-eaten takeout rotting on scattered desks: superannuated currency and the nal lunches. As in most businesses they swept, the ofces had shut their doors before things completely deteriorated. The chairs were snug at their desks, where they had been tucked by the maintenance crew on their last night of work, the last sane evening in the world, only a few askew and facing the doors in trample-exit disarray. In the silence, Mark Spitz signed off on a rest period for him-

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self. Who knew? If things had been otherwise, he might have taken a position in this very rm, once he completed the obstacles attendant to a law degree. Hed been taking prep classes when the curtain fell and hadnt worried about getting in somewhere, or graduating or getting some brand of job afterward. Hed never had trouble with the American checklist, having successfully executed all the hurdles of his lifes stages, from preschool to junior high to college, with unwavering competence and nary a wobble into exceptionality or failure. He possessed a strange facility for the mandatory. Two days into kindergarten, for example, he attained the level of socialization deemed appropriate for those of his age and socioeconomic milieu (sharing, no biting, an almost soulful contemplation of instructions from people in authority) with a minimum of fuss. He nailed milestone after developmental milestone, as if every twitch were coached. Had they been aware of his location, child behaviorists would have cherished him, observing him through binoculars and scratching their ledgers as he conrmed their data and theories in his anonymous travails. He was their typical, he was their most, he was their average, receiving hearty thumbs-ups from the gents in the black van parked a discreet distance across the street. In this world, however, his reward was that void attending most human endeavor, with which all are well acquainted. His accomplishments, such as they were, gathered on the heap of the unsung. Mark Spitz kept his eyes open and watched his environment for cues, a survivalist even at a tender age. There was a code in every interaction, and he tuned in. He adjusted easily to the introduction of letter grades, that rst measure of ones facility with arbitrary contests. He staked out the B or the B chose him: it was his native land, and in high school and college he did not stray over the county line. At any rate his lot was irrevocable. He was not made team captain, nor was he the last one picked. He sidestepped detention and honor rolls with equal aplomb. Mark Spitzs

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high school had abolished the yearbook practice of nominating students the Most Likely to Do This or That, in the spirit of universal self-esteem following a host of acrimonious parent-teacher summits, but his most appropriate designation would have been Most Likely Not to Be Named the Most Likely Anything, and this was not a category. His aptitude lay in the well-executed muddle, never shining, never unking, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past lifes next random obstacle. It was his solemn expertise. Got him this far. He burped up some of that mornings breakfast paste, which had been concocted, according to the minuscule promises on the side of the tube, to replicate a nutritionists concept of how mamas apjacks topped with fresh blueberries tasted. His hand leaped to his mouth before he remembered he was alone. The attorneys had leased four oors, a sleek warren, and hadnt been doing too bad for themselves from the extent of their renovation. The oors above were chopped up into drab and modest suites, with dreary watercolors hooked into the spongy drywall of the waiting rooms and the same scuffed puke-pink tiles underfoot. Amenable leases made for a varied group of tenants, as motley as the collection found in the average rush-hour subway car. His unit swept consulting rms with eet and efcient-sounding names, they poked through the supply rooms of prosthetics dealers and mail-order seed companies. They swept travel agencies nearly extinct in an internet age, the exhortations and invitations on the posters hitting shrill and desperate registers. On nineteen, they walked in formation through the soundproofed rooms of a movie-production house that specialized in straight-to-video martial arts icks and in the gloom mistook a cardboard cutout of an action hero for a hostile. They were in the same kind of places day after day. Keys for the communal bathrooms down the hall hung on His and Hers hooks in Reception, afxed to broad plastic tongues. Recycled paper stretched expectantly across tables in doctors examination

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rooms like a smear of oatmeal and the magazines in the waiting rooms described an exuberant age now remote and hard to reconcile. It was impossible to nd a gossip magazine or newsweekly that had been published beyond a certain date. There was no more gossip and no more news. When they stepped into the lawyers suite they stumbled into a sophisticated grotto, as if the oors had been dealt into the building from some more upscale deck. In the waiting room, their helmet lights roved over the perplexing geometric forms in the carpet that they sullied with their combat boots, the broad panels of dark zebra wood covering the walls with elegant surety, and the low, sleek furniture that promised bruises yet, when tested, compressed ones body according to newly discovered principles of somatic harmony. Their three lights converged on the portrait of a man with inty eyes and the narrowed mouth of a peckish fox one of the founding fathers keeping watch from the great beyond. After a pause their lights diverged again, groping for movement in the corners and dark places. Mark Spitz felt it the instant they pushed in the glass doors and saw the rms name hovering in grim steel letters over the receptionists desk: these guys will crush you. Tradition and hard deals, inviolable ne print that would outlast its framers. He didnt know the nature of their practice. Perhaps they only represented charities and nonprots, but in that case he was sure their clients out-healed, out-helping-handed, overall out-charitied their competing charities, if it can be said that charities competed with one another. But of course they must, he thought. Even angels are animals. Once inside, the unit split up and he swept solo through the workstations. The ofce furniture was hypermodern and toylike, t for an app garage or a graphic-design rm keen on sketching the future. The surfaces of the desks were thick and transparent, hacked out of plastic and elevating the curvilinear monitors and keyboards in dioramas of productivity. The empty ergonomic

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chairs posed like amiable spiders, whispering a multiplicity of comfort and lumbar massage. He saw himself aloft on the webbing of the seat, wearing the suspenders and cuff links of his tribe, releasing wisps of unctuous cologne whenever he moved his body. Bring me the le, please. He goosed a leprechaun bobblehead with his assault rie and sent it wiggling on its spring. Per his custom, he avoided looking at the family pictures. He interpreted: We are studied in the old ways, and acolytes of whats to come. A ne home for a promising young lawyer. For all that had transpired outside this building in the great unraveling, the pure industry of this place still persisted. Insisting on itself. He felt it in his skin even though the people were gone and all the soft stuff was dead. Moldering lumps shot out tendrils in the commonarea fridges, and the vicinities of the dry watercoolers were devoid of shit-shooting idlers, but the ferns and yuccas were still green because they were plastic, the awards and citations remained secure on the walls, and the portraits of the bigwigs preserved one afternoons calculated poses. These things remained. He heard three shots from the other end of the oor, in familiar staccatoGary shooting open a door. Fort Wonton warned them repeatedly about brutalizing, vandalizing, or even extending the odd negative vibe toward the properties whenever possible, for obvious reasons. For conveniences sake, Buffalo printed up No-No Cardslaminated instruction squares that the sweepers were supposed to keep on their persons at all times. The broken window with the red circle and diagonal line across it was at the top of the deck. Gary couldnt restrain himself, however, future tenants and the grand design be damned. Why use the doorknob when you could light it up? They can x it when they move in, Gary said, as the smoke cleared from the C-4 hed used to vaporize the door of an Italian restaurants walk-in freezer. His crazy grin. As if cleaning up after semiautomatic re were the same as touching up dings in the plaster where the previous tenants had hung their

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black-and-white landscapes. Gary dematerialized the half-closed curtains of department-store dressing rooms, converted expensive Japanese room dividers into twisting confetti, and woe to bathroom stalls with sticky hinges. Coulda been one of them in there trying to remember how to take a piss, Gary explained. Never heard of such a case, Kaitlyn said. This is New York City, man. Kaitlyn rationed him to one unnecessary act of carnage per oor and Gary made the appropriate adjustments, even applying timeworn principles of suspense to when he attacked his targets. They never knew when hed strike next. He had just made his selection for the fteenth oor. Mark Spitz got in gear. Gary was close and he wanted to look busy in order to head off any wisecracks about his work ethic. He turned from the window and briey caught an edge of last nights dreamhe was in the country, undulating farmland, perhaps at Happy Acresbefore it squirmed away. He shook it off. He kicked in the door to Human Resources, thought Maybe Ill come back and ask for a job when this is all over, and saw his error. The door was not the issue. After all this time in the Zone, he knew the right place to slam these keypad doors so that they popped open, presto. The mistake lay in succumbing to the prevailing delusions. Giving in to that pandemic of pheenie optimism that was inescapable nowadays and made it hard to breathe, a contagion in its own right. They were on him in an instant. They had been there since the beginning, the four of them. Perhaps one had been attacked down on the pavement by some nut, that colorful metropolitan euphemism, and was sent home after getting a few stitches at the local underfunded ERDo you have your insurance card handy?before they understood the nature of the disaster. Then she turned feral and one lucky coworker made it out in time, locked the door, and left her cubicle-

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mates to fend for themselves. Some variation on that story. No one came back to help because they were overcome by their own situations. He was the rst live human being the dead had seen since the start, and the former ladies of HR were starving. After all this time, they were a thin membrane of meat stretched over bone. Their skirts were bunched on the oor, having slid off their shrunken hips long ago, and the dark jackets of their sensible dress suits were made darker still, and stiffened, by jagged arterial splashes and kernels of gore. Two of them had lost their high heels at some point during the long years of bumping around the room looking for an exit. One of them wore the same brand of panties his last two girlfriends had favored, with the distinctive frilled red edges. They were grimed and torn. He couldnt help but notice the thong, current demands on his attention aside. Hed made a host of necessary recalibrations but the old self made noises from time to time. Then that new self stepped in. He had to put them down. The youngest one wore its hair in a style popularized by a sitcom that took as its subject three roommates of seemingly immiscible temperaments and their attempts to make their fortune in this contusing city. A crotchety super and a amboyant neighbor rounded out the ensemble, and it was still appointment television, a top-ten show, at the time of the disaster. The hairdo was called a Marge, after Margaret Halstead, the charmingly klutzy actress whod trademarked it in the old days of red carpets and irty tte-ttes on late-night chat shows. She hadnt done anything for Mark Spitztoo skinnybut the legions of young ladies who ed their stunted towns and municipalities to reinvent themselves in the Big City recognized something in her ailings, and fetishized this piece of her. They had been reeled in by the old lie of making a name for oneself in the city; now they had to gure out how to survive. Hunt-and-gather rent money, forage ramen. In this weeks written-up clubs and small-plate eateries, loose ocks

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of Marges were invariably underfoot, sipping cinnamon-rimmed novelty cocktails and laughing too eagerly. The Marge nabbed Mark Spitz rst, snatching his left bicep and taking it in its teeth. It never looked at his face, ferocious on the mesh of his fatigues and aware exclusively of the meat it knew was underneath. Hed forgotten how much it hurt when a skel tried to get a good chomp going; it had been some time since one had gotten this close. The Marge couldnt penetrate the intricate blend of plastic bersonly an idiot cast aspersions on the new miracle fabric, born of plague-era necessitybut each rabid sally sent him howling. The rest of Omega would be here soon, tromping down the halls. He heard the sound of teeth splintering. The sweepers were supposed to stay together, the Lieutenant was rm about that, to prevent this very situation. But the last few grids had been so quiet, they hadnt stuck to orders. The Marge was occupied for the momentit took time for their diminished perceptions to catch on to the futility of the enterpriseso he directed his attention to the skel charging from two oclock. The bushy eyebrows, the whisper of a mustacheit was hard to avoid recognizing in this one his sixth-grade English teacher, Miss Alcott, who had diagrammed sentences in a soupy Bronx accent and fancied old-style torpedo bras. She smelled of jasmine when she passed his desk, plucking vocab quizzes. Hed always had a soft spot for Miss Alcott. This one was probably the rst infected. Everything below its eyes was a dark, gory muzzle, the telltale smear produced when a face burrowed deep into live esh. Just another day at the ofce when she gets bit by some New York whacko while loading up on spring mix at the corner delis Salad Lounge. Full of plague but unaware. That night the shivers came, and the legendary bad dreams everyone had heard about and prayed againstthe harbingers, the nightmares that were the subconscious rummaging

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through a lifetime for some kind of answer to or escape from this trap. With those early strains, you might last a whole day without ipping. She returns to her cubicle the next day because she hadnt taken a sick day in years. Then transformation. It happened every so often that he recognized something in these monsters, they looked like someone he had known or loved. Eighth-grade lab partner or lanky cashier at the mini-mart, college girlfriend spring semester junior year. Uncle. He lost time as his brain buzzed on itself. He had learned to get on with the business at hand, but on occasion Mark Spitz xed on eyes or a mouth that belonged to someone lost, actively seeking concordance. He hadnt decided if conjuring an acquaintance or loved one into these creatures was an advantage or not. A successful adaptation, as the Lieutenant put it. When Mark Spitz thought about itwhen they were bivouacked at night in some rich fucks loft or up to their chins in their sleeping bags on the oor of a Wall Street conference roomperhaps these recognitions ennobled his mission: He was performing an act of mercy. These things might have been people he knew, not-quites and almost-could-bes, they were somebodys family and they deserved release from their blood sentence. He was an angel of death ushering these things on their stalled journey from this sphere. Not a mere exterminator eliminating pests. He shot Miss Alcott in the face, converting resemblance to red mist, and then all the air was wrung from his chest and he was on the carpet. The one in the candy-pink dress suit had tackled himthe Marge wrenched him off-balance with her aggressive pursuit, and he couldnt right himself once this new one rammed him. It straddled him and he felt the rie grind into his back; hed slung it over his shoulder during his pit stop by the window. He looked into the skels spiderweb of gray hair. The jutting pins, the dumb thought: How long did it take for its wig to fall off ? (Time slowed down in situations like this, to grant dread a bigger stage.) The thing on top of him clawed into his neck with its seven remaining

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ngers. The other ngers had been bitten off at the knuckle and likely jostled about in the belly of one of its former coworkers. He realized hed dropped his pistol in the fall. Surely this one possessed the determination betting a true denizen of Human Resources, endowed by nature and shaped by nurture into its worthy avatar. The plagues recalibration of its faculties only honed the underlying qualities. Mark Spitzs rst ofce job had involved rattling a mail cart down the corridors of a payroll company located in a Hempstead ofce park not too far from his house. As a child hed decided the complex was some sort of clearinghouse for military intelligence, mistaking its impassive faades for clandestine power. The veil was lifted the rst day. The other guys in the mail room were his age and when his boss shut the door to his ofce they got a splendid doofus chorus going. The only downer was the ogre head of Human Resources, whod been relentless about Mark Spitzs paperwork, downright insidious about his W-this, W-that, the proper credentials. She served the places where human beings were paraphrased into numbers, components of bundled data to be shot out through ber-optic cable toward meaning. Your check cant be processed without complete paperwork. How was he supposed to know where his Social Security card was? His bedroom was a dig. He needed special excavating tools to nd socks. Youre not in the system. You might as well not exist. Where was The System now, after the calamity? It had been an invisible st oating above them for so long and now the ngers were open, disjoined, and everything slipped through, everything escaped. By August hed scurried back to the service industry, doling out pomegranate martinis on Ladies Wednesdays. He tried to heave Human Resources off him. The skels eyes dipped to the soft meat of his face. It went in for a bite. Like most of the grunts in the sweeper units, he declined to wear his faceplate, despite the regulations, No-No Card, and all the times hed witnessed that decision turn out poorly. You couldnt

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hump forty pounds of equipment up a New York City high-rise while fogging up a plastic faceplate. Supply lines were still a broken mess all around, and the sweepers were the lowest priority in everything except when it came to bullets. Everybody had enough bullets, from the Northeast Corridor to Omaha to Zone One, now that Buffalo had Barnes up and running, the former homemakers and chronic asthmatics and assorted old biddies on the assembly lines cranking out ammo day and night. Nowadays, Rosie the Riveter was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamalls discount-appliance emporium. Priorities: First Buffalo got what they needed, then the military, then civilian population, and nally the sweepers. Which meant Mark Spitz didnt have proper face gear, one of those fancy marine numbers with the lightweight impenetrable wire, proper ventilation, and neck sheathing. Hed seen one sad sack who patrolled in a goalies maskan affectation, really, because it was too easy for one of the skels to rip it off. Some of the guys in the other units had taken to drilling air holes into the thick plastic faceplate, and he made a note to try that last trick if he made it out of this mess. Face gear or no, however, you never wanted to get pinned. First time he saw someone get pinned by a group of them was in the early days, must have been, because he was still trying to get out of his neighborhood. An invisible barrier surrounded his zip code, each opportunity for escape was undermined by his certainty that things were about to go back to normal, that this savage new reality could not hold. He was wending to the strip mall half a mile from his housecivilizations nearest representative consisted of the 24-7 gas-and-cigarette vendor, the famously grim pizza-and-sub place, and a moribund dry cleaner, that reliable exacerbator of stains. Mark Spitz had spent the night up in

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the arms of an oak, the rst of many tree-limb slumber parties to come. It occurred to him that if anyone was equipped for this new situation, it was Mr. Provenzano and the reputed arsenal he had stashed in the basement of the pizza shop. The basement weapons stash was a sturdy and beloved topic of speculation among mayhem-adoring kids and insinuating grown-ups alike, fed by rumors of mob-induction ceremonies and a robust lore centered around the meat grinder. Mark Spitz didnt know if the pizza shop was accessible, but it was a better prospect than the silenced lanes of New Grove, the subdivision his parents had moved to thirty years before, their wedding gifts sitting in the foyer when they returned from their honeymoon. He waited for daylight and beat his numb legs and arms to get the blood into them. Then he cut through the clutch backyards, the hardwired shortcuts from his kid days, and crept and scrambled around the half-nished mini-mansion on Claremont trying to get the lay of the street before making a break for the main road. The construction company had lost liquidity the year before and his parents complained about the eyesore as if under contractual obligation. The plastic sheets rippling where there should have been walls, the great mounds of orange dirt that seeped out in defeat after every rain. It was a breeding ground for mosquitoes, his parents fussed. They spread sickness. The old man came jogging down the asphalt. A gray cardigan apped 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 didnt 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

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be, but maybe the authorities were xing 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, hangingthats how he always recalled it, thats what he saw as he ducked down behind the cinder blocks and watched. A length of red string pinned briey to the air, until the wind knocked it away. They didnt ght over the old man. They each got a piece. Of course there couldnt 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 youd wrapped yourself in, stuck your hopes to. Theyd 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 icecream truck. (Yes, time slowed down to give those competing factions in him room to rumble, the dark and the light.) Theyd wrestle Mark Spitz out of his fatigues the way hed pried meat out of claws, tails, shells. They were a legion of teeth and ngers. He grabbed Human Resources wispy hair and yanked its head out of its advance toward his nose. He didnt 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

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the mesh sleeve and glove. The light was such that he saw his face reected in Human Resources milky eyes, xed 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. (Hed seen, in that rst week, a Samaritan administer chest compresses to a stricken fellow citizen, lean down to give mouth-tomouth, 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 didnt know you liked the older ladies.
. . .

They started calling him Mark Spitz after they nally 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 skels 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.

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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 didnt always get the meanings right, but he had the delivery down, the correct intonations reinforced by countless exposures. In the aftermath of the engagement, Garys 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-rie 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 couldnt 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 worlds last junkie. Like everyone, hed 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 specically his ngernails, which were seemingly constructed of grime. As if he had clawed out of a cofn. Their rst week at Fort Wonton, there had

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existed a certain Sergeant Weller who rode Gary about the disreputable state of his ngernails, bringing up pre-plague regs of military comportment etc. and threatening to rain hell on him if he didnt 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 ofcers priorities did not include persecuting volunteers over dead standards. For his part, Gary didnt understand the fuss. Before the world broke, hed dropped out of school to crank bolts full-time in his fathers garage with his brothers, and he stood by this explanation for his appearance even though it had been years since hed 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 Garys youth preserved as a token of home. It was what hed scraped off the past and carried with him. Gary prodded the Marge with his rie. 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 ofce. Four of them and ve 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, shed 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, shed 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, rst in line to pull the lever, if not manning the polling booths, once they could again afford the indulgence of democracy.

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The Lieutenant put her in charge of Omega Unit for her constancy, although given his other two choices it didnt rank among his more visionary commands. She mumbled Sit-rep, sit-rep under her breath as she opened the door. Inside the supply closet, cartons and stacks of adhesive notepaper, tax forms, and incomprehensible health-plan packets awaited Business as Usual. No lunging adversary waited inside among the paper plates and Styro cups cached for the miserable ofce birthday parties and farewell get-togethers. Kaitlyn sat on the edge of a desk. She grimaced at the bodies, distressed by the number and the reminder that shed let her unit stray from procedure. Thought it was too quiet, she said. The owner of the desk had been drinking a diet cola and reading a best-selling romance/thriller Mark Spitz remembered from bus advertisements. Which one had it been, Mark Spitz speculated: Faceless over there? He corrected himself. There were ve desks and four bodies. One of them had made it out. Not everyone perished. Perhaps the owner of the desk was doing chores at that very moment in one of the settlement camps, Happy Acres or Sunny Days, replacing the toilet paper in one of the chemical lavatories, eliminating dented cans of beets from the larders, and sipping whatever regional favorite diet cola the scouting teams had scrounged. The insipid slogan popped up in his head, insistent as malwareWe Make Tomorrow!and he inched as he pictured the camps administrative assistant handing out the buttons, which were then obediently pinned to scavenged clothing one size too big or too small. Resist. He had to get all that crap out of his head or else it would turn out bad for him. To bolster this argument he made a glum appraisal of the bodies on the oor. We got here just in time. Gary lit a cigarette. Hed rescued a carton of sponsor cigarettes from a bodega the day before and had acquitted himself nicely so far. They were an economy brand that hadnt been advertised in thirty years; it sufced that parents and grandparents had exhaled its smoke into cribs, and the acrid scent

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of the blend and the cherry-red packaging were imprinted early, reminding its acionados years later of a happier, less complicated time. Had him on the ground about to give him a nose job, Gary added, using the tone he reserved for recounting particularly grisly and epic ways in which hed seen people expirehe was an almanac of this eld of studyand for deriding Mark Spitzs so-called survival tactics. Despite their friendship, the mechanic was not reluctant in sharing his bafement that Mark Spitz hadnt been cut down that rst week, when the great hordes of unadaptables had been exterminated or infected, too ill-equipped to deal with the realignment of the universe. Gary didnt have much sympathy for the dead, a.k.a. the squares, the suckers, and the saps. When using the word dead, most survivors signaled to the listener, through inection and context, whether they were talking about those who had been killed in the disaster or those who had been turned into vehicles of the plague. Gary made no such distinction; with few exceptions, they were equally detestable. The dead had paid their mortgages on time, and placed the well-promoted breakfast cereals on the table when the offspring leaped out of bed in their re-resistant jammies. The dead had graduated with admirable GPAs, congured monthly contributions to worthy causes, judiciously apportioned their 401(k)s across diverse sectors according to the wisdom of their dead licensed nancial advisers, and superimposed the borders of the good school districts on mental maps of their neighborhoods, which were often included on the long list when magazines ranked cities with the Best Quality of Life. In short, they had been honed and trained so thoroughly by that extinguished world that they were doomed in this new one. Gary was unmoved. From the mans description of his life before, the portrait Mark Spitz gathered was of a mist befuddled and banished by the signs and systems of straight life. Then came Last Night, transforming them all. In Garys case, latent talents announced themselves. He prided himself on how effortlessly he had grasped

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and mastered the new rules, as if he had waited for the introduction of hell his whole life. Mark Spitzs knack for last-minute escapes and improbable getaways was an insult. I got distracted, Mark Spitz said. He didnt feel the need to defend himself beyond that. He gave himself his usual B. Would he have bested his attackers if Gary hadnt arrived in time? Of course. He always did. Mark Spitz believed he had successfully banished thoughts of the future. He wasnt like the rest of them, the other sweepers, the soldiers up the island, or those haggard clans in the camps and caves, all the far-ung remnants behind their barricades, wherever people struggled and waited for victory or oblivion. The faint residue of humanity stuck to the sides of the world. You never heard Mark Spitz say When this is all over or Once things get back to normal or other sentiments of that brand, because he refused them. When it was all done, truly and nally done, you could talk about what you were going to do. See if your house still stood, enjoy a few rounds of How Many Neighbors Made It Through. Figure out how much of your life from before still remained and how much you had lost. This is what he had learned: If you werent concentrating on how to survive the next ve minutes, you wouldnt survive them. The recent reversals in the campaign had not swayed him to optimism, nor the T-shirts and buttons and the latest hope-delivery system sent down from Buffalo. He scolded himself for succumbing to a reverie, no matter how brief. All that pheenie bullshit had clouded his mind. The tranquillity of 135 Duane Street, however, and a vision of what might be made him slip. The man gets distracted, Gary drawled. Kaitlyns standard op directed her to ignore their razzing and bickering. She came over and inspected Mark Spitz. She got on her knees and gently pushed on the underside of his jaw, which still throbbed. He shook her away. She told him to knock it off. He had been trembling; he stopped as soon as she touched him.

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