Authors: Colson Whitehead
His arrival at Fort Wonton was a deep immersion into the reanimated system. After finishing his tour of Central Park, the pilot beat it south over the crest of midtown edifices. From above, Mark Spitz registered the flaws in the skyline, the gaps, the misbegotten architecture of some of the specimens, the cheerless monotony of the glass surfaces. They did not seem so magnificent from above; they were pathetic, not a brigade charging the sky in unchecked ambition but a runty gang stunted and stymied. A botched ascension. The other passenger was similarly unmoved, for different reasons. He didn’t speak the entire trip or acknowledge Mark Spitz’s presence. He wore a smart black suit, spy sunglasses, and rested the black cylinder that was chained to his wrist in his lap, petting it slowly from time to time. He barely looked out the window save for the periodic robotic glance, followed by a nod, as if comparing his mental track of their journey with the landmark evidence below.
When the chopper touched down on the bank the man with the cylinder was met by two men in similar dress, similarly mute. Mark Spitz was invisible to them and vice versa: he never again saw the agents of this hush-hush division during his tour of duty in Zone One. He presumed they operated out of an anonymous building they had requisitioned, or in a government complex that had bided the disaster, alive with the hum of its sublevel generators.
As for Mark Spitz, the pilot gave him a thumbs-up, took off, and stranded him in the middle of the bright reflective paint of
the landing X. He felt as if his ride had forgotten to pick him up at the airport or train station, and he decided that he was more far gone than he thought for this comparison to occur to him. A walk to the edge of the roof and the sight of the beautiful wall cured him of disappointment. He’d been granted a glimpse on the approach, whirring over the desiccated skels writhing on the sidewalk in their mindless pantomime, then over that other territory beyond the wall, the human side, but it was different up close. The machine gunners strafed and perforated the intermittent skels from their catwalk nests, the beefy crane operators clawed up the sopping corpses and plunked them in cherry-red biohazard bins. The snipers lounged on scattered rooftops, taking potshots up Broadway and goofing off. This was real live human business even though only a thin concrete wall separated them from the plague and its tortured puppets. The world was divided between the wasteland he had roamed for so long and this place, loud and rude, cool and industrious, the front line of the new order. He put aside his petulance over his meager welcome. This was chicken soup.
The stairwell door opened on the controlled mania of a military operation in full swing. He’d served on the new bases before and taken orders in the mobile trailers of the ad hoc HQs, but on the island it was different. It felt like a city, as if order did not terminate at the electric fence but strode forth, extending up every avenue and inside each building. The city was back in teeming business behind every bleak window and street entrance. He’d soon take it for granted, when he returned to Wonton for check-in and turned a corner to suddenly find himself on living streets. In the hallway, he squeezed past soldiers, clerks, and officers. He had yet to parse the hierarchy. Comms squealed and buzzed behind closed doors. Pictographs and signs on the walls hectored about sanitation procedures and vandalism edicts in Buffalo’s pet font. He stood in the middle of the stream, pack dangling in his hand,
as he listened to conversation phase in and out. Noise, fabulous noise.
Three privates sniggered as Mark Spitz blinked in the current, a hick stupefied by the bright lights of the big city. He was dressed in an old SWAT uniform taken from a locker in a Bridgeport police station, back in accursed Connecticut. When off duty, the civilians working the Northeast Corridor wore old cop gear to distinguish them from the regular army, as if their general conduct and deportment did not suffice. He’d sewn up parts of it over the months, poorly. “Hey, you missed a spot,” one of the soldiers jeered, lobbing the standard sweeper joke. As in, broom. He’d heard it before.
Fort Wonton’s nerve center was an old bank. The owners had changed over the years in the inevitable consolidations, liquidations, and takeovers, but the building still stood, a tiny granite hut among the furious high-story construction in downtown over the last hundred years. The offices overlooked the main intersection of the wall, Broadway and Canal.
A soldier carrying a stack of folders whistled. “You Spitz?”
Fabio led Mark Spitz to the office. When he saw his new charge flinch at a sudden round of machine-gun fire, Fabio told him, “They usually come in three waves these days. Kinda regular, so we call it Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.” The artillery increased for a short burst. “That there,” he said, “is Lunch.”
The Lieutenant’s office had eastern and northern exposure, and perhaps at one time enjoyed a healthy wash of morning light, but the skyscrapers and the sun’s reluctance to bless the zone surely extinguished that phenomenon. Maps of different segments of the Zone hung on the walls, covered in incomprehensible marks, tinted different hues, and the old, varnished desks made Mark Spitz think he’d wandered into a World War II campaign, on another island in the Pacific. The ceilings were twelve feet tall, and the large half-moon windows overlooked the wall. A
ponytailed soldier prowled lazily across the scaffolding, looking at something or someone at the foot of the barricade, on the other side. She took a quick shot, shook her body like a wet dog, and stretched.
People carried themselves differently in the thrall of PASD. Per Herkimer, each was marked. Everyone he saw walked around with a psychological limp, with a collapsed shoulder here or a disobedient, half-shut eyelid there, and that current favorite, the allover crumpling, as if the soul were imploding or the mind sucking the extremities into itself. Mark Spitz sported this last manifestation from time to time, in maudlin moods, only unwrenching when adrenaline straightened him out. Anyone with perfect posture was faking it, overcompensating for entrenched trauma. In the Lieutenant’s case, the man’s movements were marked by a distinct reluctance, the slightest gesture requiring a hesitation before it could be completed—it needed to be vetted, triple-checked before morose execution. The input could not be trusted, as if the logic of the lost world were struggling to reassert itself: Surely this is not happening.
He spotted Mark Spitz and his hand ratcheted up to a slow come-hither wave. “Sit, sit, sit,” he said. His thumb was pressed to his temple and his index finger was embedded in the middle of his brow as he squinted at his desk.
“Have your file right here,” the Lieutenant said. “On sponsored paper—they browbeat some recycling magnate into giving the okay. Writing on paper like in the Stone Age. Used to be everything was in the cloud, little puffy data floating here and there. Now we’re back to paper. You hear people talking, they miss cable TV, basketball, they miss local organic greens cold-washed three times. I miss the cloud. It was all of me up there. The necessary docs and e-mails and key photographs. The proof.” He coughed into his fist. “Now it’s evaporated. Least we still have the old-fashioned clouds. What about you?”
“Me what, sir?”
“What do you miss?”
Mark Spitz sat up straight. “Traffic.”
“And where do you fall on the question of cumulus versus cirrus?”
“The puffy ones.”
“Cumulus! Has its plus sides, the Rorschach thing, but I’m a cirrus man born and bred. Can’t beat a coherent layer of cirrus, self-organized, covering the sky. Sunset, bottle of Shiraz, and the usual double entendres? The way we used to do it. Nonetheless, I see where you’re coming from, young man.”
The Lieutenant glanced between the file and Mark Spitz to confirm the man before him. As the Lieutenant talked, his manic delivery gave counterpoint to the physical hesitancy. “Says here you did a good job mopping up I-95, adjusted to the transition from camp life to active duty. Except for an incident on a bridge? Some people, you know. But you made it out, that’s the important thing, right? ‘The mighty Phoenix shall spread its wings.’ What do I call you?”
“Mark Spitz is fine,” he said. It was the truth. “It’s caught on.”
“Wanted to make sure. People like to be called what they like to be called. Served under Corporal Kinder?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fucking idiot. Part of the brain trust working on phase one around here, forgot to cap the island.”
Mark Spitz had heard tell of the so-called technical difficulties, but he wanted the Lieutenant’s description of it. He was starting to like this character. He’d been forced to endure such a low variety of PASD in Happy Acres—a host of inappropriate staring, unabated drooling, and compulsive finger-sniffing—that the man’s almost sophisticated strain was refreshing. Urbane and citified compared to that bumpkin sniveling.
“We have to quarantine the island,” the Lieutenant said, “so we can clean it out. The subways, the bridges, tunnels. Secret exits most people don’t know about. Civilians anyway, but we do, we
have the maps. All kinds of holes in the island of Manhattan. It’s startling. They do the big sweep of Zone One, guns blazing, turkey shoot, put the wall up, but then they notice something. Every day there are more and more skels up at the wall. The marines cut them down—you saw the .50-.50s on your way in. But still. Proper ordnance is not the point. Everybody’s, What the fuck.
“They finally have this big confab, right down the hall in fact, General Carter’s down from Buffalo and he wants to know what the problem is, where they’re all coming from. Because there’s too many to only come from uptown. Then one of the bright boys asks, ‘Is it possible they’re using the George Washington Bridge, maybe?’ Like they’re commuting from Jersey. Then it hits them. They didn’t shut it down above Canal. All that shit is still wide open. Lincoln Tunnel, GWB, Triborough, all of it. Plum forgot. All these skels visiting the Big City like they did before all the shit went down. Piling into tour buses for a Broadway matinee.”
“Wow.”
“But by this time the Army Corps is redeployed on that crazy shit they’re cooking up in Baltimore, and we’re not going to get the manpower to block uptown for months. The marines tasked elsewhere, too. Crazy. Buffalo’s attitude is, Let the sweepers do their thing and then we’ll fix that little glitch when we start on Zone Two. In the old days, we’d have a court-martial, but good old Tattinger, the guy in charge of this clusterfuck, got his face eaten off a week later, so there’s that I guess.” He shook his head. Laboriously, as if commanding the muscles one by one. “You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ by the way. You’re a civilian. We work for you, although some of them have forgotten that around here.”
The sudden menace of gunfire interrupted. He talked over it. “You have a lot of experience with stragglers?” he asked. “That wasn’t your bailiwick out on the Corridor.”
“Same as anyone else. You can’t help it, being out there. Pop ’em and drop ’em.” That easy vernacular.
“Where was your first?”
The question surprised him. No one asked questions like that. Mark Spitz had been navigating repulsive Connecticut. Behind a half-built housing development there was a field that had been chewed up by dozers to make room for another line of houses. At the far side of the field a highway ran north—south, and that was his day’s mission, make it a few paces up his map. He saw the man standing in the middle of the dirt. At first he thought it was a scarecrow, it was so still, even though it eschewed stereotypical scarecrow stance and this was no farm. The figure’s right arm stretched to grasp the sky. Mark Spitz waited for him to move. He scanned the territory, then tried to get the man’s attention in that moronic stage whisper he used so much in those early days. If it was a skel, he’d kill it; he didn’t see any others around. That was the rule: Don’t leave them around to infect other people if you can get away with it.
He crept toward him. Mark Spitz was in a baseball-bat phase and he got his slugger grip ready. The figure was an older man, dwindling inside his red polo shirt and khaki pants. A string trailed from his hand, leading to a roughed-up box kite that had been dragged a great, difficult distance from the look of it. Was the man in shock? Mark Spitz didn’t know if the guy had shrunk from malnutrition or the plague. He didn’t want to know, actually. He gave the thing’s shoulder a pro forma shake. He’d abandoned his share of crippled survivors. Couldn’t save everyone.
The man’s mind had been eliminated. He didn’t stir when Mark Spitz snapped his fingers in his ears, blink at the stimuli. The man’s gaze, if such a barren thing could be called that, was leveled at a void above the horizon. Any activity or process in him was directed at pouring some undetectable message into that spot in the sky. Mark Spitz shook his shoulder, prepared to jump away if necessary. What did he see there?
He abandoned the man in the field. Then it was like in the
old days when he came across some energetic new fad, a nouveau jacket or complicated haircut: He started seeing them everywhere, sitting patiently at a bus stop or holding a leaf up to the sun or standing in the field they’d played in as a child, before they grew up, before the dozers. When he mentioned these creatures to a band he hooked up with for a brief time, they gave him the term: stragglers. “They’re all messed up.”
Mark Spitz related a version of this to the Lieutenant, who stroked his chin skeptically. “Buffalo’s still trying to explain what makes one person become your regular pain-in-the-ass skel,” the Lieutenant said, “and what makes another into a straggler. That one percent. Buffalo’s not really known for explaining shit. How they can walk around for so long just feeding off their own bodies. Why they don’t bleed out. Buffalo will tell you that the plague converts the human body into the perfect vehicle for spreading copies of itself. Thanks for the news flash. But what’s up with this aberrant one percent?”
Mark Spitz said, “I don’t know.” He could have added his own questions. How come, rain or shine, the stragglers stand at their posts? Hottest day of the year, monsoon, they’re standing there foul and oblivious. Caught in a web.