Authors: Colson Whitehead
On the short ride uptown the Zone stirred around Mark Spitz. After two blocks, a soldier bent to tie her sneakers, black goggles following the civilian as the jeep purred by. After three blocks a pair of soldiers humped a leather club chair down the sidewalk toward a hideout they’d scoped, like sophomores beguiled by a vision of the coolest dorm room. After four blocks they were firmly in Wonton’s domain, painlessly assimilated into the combine. Mark Spitz remembered his first ride in a military transport, the armored behemoth that retrieved him from the great out there. When he clambered out of the hatch and blinked at the perimeter lights and sentry nests, order in its accumulated manifestations, he knew he had been cast in a new production. This was no jerry-rigged
fortification of depleted wanderers, bolted together by blood and self-delusion, this was government. This was reconstruction. The end in abeyance.
• • •
His final night in the wastes transpired on the outskirts of Northampton, Massachusetts, neighbor to loathsome Connecticut but an entirely different beast. For weeks, Mark Spitz had avoided all but the smallest towns, as he’d come to perceive, correctly or incorrectly, that lately the dead gravitated to the former population centers. Or were repopulating the former population centers, to look at it another way. That’s where the complications awaited, time after time. For so many months there had existed an equivalency of peril between rural areas and cities. Now, out in the countryside, the density was lower. Few sightings, few attacks, fewer withdrawals from his reservoir of last-minute escapes. No one he hooked up with seconded his observations, but he was unswayed. They were clotting together, the dead; he spied idiot cliques or duos rather than singletons, and they stuck to the roads and man-made routes feeding into towns. When he came upon the Northampton farmhouse, he was convinced of his new travel method, circling around anything on his latest map that resembled a town as he tracked north. His theory was no more worthless than those offered by other survivors.
The farmhouse was prim and elegant, sticking up out of the overgrown lawn and companion acres, jutting from the industrious wildflowers and grasses like an iceberg. It was getting dark and he needed to bunk down, either inside or out atop the porch, depending on how he felt once he cased the property. He was feeling devil-may-care today, the weather was nice and he hadn’t tired of the constellations. Halfway to the front door and two feet above the ground, cans and rusting metal strips twisted on a wire that snaked around wooden stakes, encircling the house. A line
of magic powder that kept out evil spirits. The alarm system was intact. Planks from a disassembled shed or other outdoor construction, weather-beaten on one side and unblemished on the other, lay fast and even across both floors’ windows, so evenly that if they had been painted white he’d have taken it for an aesthetic choice. No light emerged from the cracks in the boards, the blacked-out windows allowing those inside to move around at night.
This was not a refuge assembled in haste but a sedulously executed bunker. Its architects intended to outlast the disaster here. Mark Spitz saw no indication that the castle had failed, the tangle of boards before the broken window where the hordes exploited a chink. The front door was secure and not splayed in the universal sign of harried evacuation. Soon it would be dark. Mark Spitz jerked the wire twice and slowly made his way up the front steps to the wraparound porch, hands up at his shoulders.
He called out. They’d had time to assess him from their spy hole, which he hadn’t sniffed out yet. Good for them. He knocked. He backed away, chose the side of the house without the porch, and prowled to the back. It was only polite to give them more time to deliberate. For later reference, he noted the location and number of the windows on both floors, and the drop to the ground. A gravel path curved toward a small barn out back and as he approached the structure, he waved back at the boarded windows, as innocent a gesture as he could manage. The barn’s windows were unfortified. It had been converted into a smart office, the walls a multicolored stream of book spines, with a small kitchenette and probably a bathroom behind the one door. Crimson-bound library books and squared piles of notes covered the antique desk in the middle of the room. Dead flowers slumped out of a turquoise vase on a wooden stand bearing an open volume of the
OED
. He was staring at a diorama. Maybe they’d let him spend the night in the studio unmolested and he’d be on his way in the morning. The sofa looked perfect.
The wild grasses behind the studio rasped a warning. The tree
line shook out two skels moving in tandem, matching each other’s laborious steps. The tallest one had been male, its stained overalls hanging from still-muscular shoulders. A recent inductee to the horrors. Its companion was of an earlier vintage, old school and Last Night from the extent of the winnowing, shuddering forth in a canary-yellow apron bearing the slogan “Hot Pot o’ Love” in puffy red letters. From the residue on the apron, tonight’s recent menu was home-made strawberry jam, or something decidedly less wholesome. The skels waded through the thistles in eerie synchronization. It was a trick of perspective, but he squinted nonetheless at this new wonder of parallel skellery.
Mark Spitz drew his pistol—he was in a pistol phase, despite the ammo hassle. The back door of the farmhouse creaked. A woman dashed toward him, brandishing an ax, clad in the leather padded suiting favored by motocross racers, bent low like a defensive lineman. The helmet covering her face prevented a read of her disposition. Another figure crouched in the kitchen doorway with a shotgun. The barrels glared at him. Mark Spitz called out softly: yes, my brain works, synapses still firing in all the important ways we’ve come to cherish. As the lady with the ax hurtled past him, tramping through goldenrod, she said, “Don’t shoot, dummy.” She reached the skels and decapitated them with two swift chops as they slowly raised their arms. Their bodies swayed, dark liquid burbling from tubes in their necks, then collapsed into a clump of foxtail at the same time.
“Get inside,” she said. “You’ve been out here too long already.”
He hadn’t gazed upon a kitchen that immaculate and decked out with appliances since the afternoon he’d tumbled into the quicksand of a marathon of that cooking show his mother used to like. Devices for pulping, fizzing, julienning, and caffeinating gleamed on the counters, making a case for themselves despite their incongruity with the dark pine floors and weathered cabinetry. Rusty cooking implements hung from the joists in manicured decay. A tidy galley was one of the first things to go in a hideout,
for obvious reasons. But the three residents maintained a heroic level of cleanliness. “The place was so nice when we found it,” Margie explained later, “seemed a shame to wreck it.”
Mark Spitz remained a guest long enough to get the recent history of the property. The absent owners had moved out here to flee the city, advance guard of a wave of upper-middle-class pioneers boldly striking out for the hinterlands in wagons of reclaimed wood covered in eco-friendly bamboo fiber. A photograph in the front hall captured the farmhouse in the flaking throes of neglect; in their renovations the newcomers had devoted countless hours and no small measure of love to the hulk, every inch of modern insulation and plumbing a prayer. The studio out back belonged to the professor. She taught literary theory at one of the local colleges, after making her mark with an evidently groundbreaking collection of essays about “The Body.” (Each attempt at the introduction gave Mark Spitz an ice-cream headache.) Her partner worked in steel. A line of pictures adorned the wall along the stairs, confirming that her own workspace was elsewhere. An airplane hangar would not have fit on the property, and there were probably zoning issues.
Jerry, the man wielding the shotgun, had sold them the house. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man with a county-sheriff scowl, his buzz cut glowing an unnatural orange from salvaged dye. Mark Spitz would have taken him for the leader of the group, had the others paid his protestations any mind. Jerry was the most antagonistic to granting Mark Spitz sanctuary for the night, let alone five minutes. “He led them here,” he said, eyeing their visitor’s pack. “Haven’t been any around for ten days.”
“I told you to let him in the second we spotted him,” Margie said. Underneath the helmet, hers was a minuscule, almost pixie face, although the livid gash stretching from her tiny earlobes to her jaw belied the sylvan cast to her features. She pulled a cylinder of antibacterial wipes from the cupboard beneath the sink and wiped the ax blade. “Leave him out there to poke around and he’s
a dinner bell,” she said. “You can see he’s harmless.” She looked at Mark Spitz. “No offense.”
“I haven’t seen a skel since the airport,” Mark Spitz said, referring to the commuter airport south. He’d dared a raid on the vending machines and loaded up on power bars before being forced to make a break for it. The dead were a risible sight on the geometry of the runway, taxiing this way and that with their scrambled guidance systems.
“Dag,” Tad said. “Ten days—that was a new record.” The final member of their group, Tad, was a slender young man who wore a faded green T-shirt that portrayed the zodiac in silver glitz. He sat at the barn-wood table in the middle of the kitchen when Mark Spitz came inside, assault rifle flat across his knobby knees. Backup in case the other two ran into trouble. His spectacles were thin wire frames held together by fraying black tape. He was Mark Spitz’s age, but his long ponytail was completely gray, which Mark Spitz took as a recent development.
Jerry lost the argument for expulsion quickly. The man’s objections seemed a performance for Mark Spitz’s benefit, to show him this wasn’t as slapdash an operation as it appeared. Mark Spitz promised to move on at first light and contributed his canned clams as an appetizer to that night’s repast of venison curry and mushrooms. He hated the tinny taste of canned clams but had carried them in his pack for three months for a day such as this, when he met an aficionado. Jerry was his man. In turn, Mark Spitz was grateful for the variation on deer, after the numbing rotation of venison stew, venison kebabs, and venison jerky he’d endured in the previous months. He’d met folks who carried around their favorite hot sauce in their pack, sure, drizzling it onto a rabbit drumstick or unidentifiable fowl, but few wanderers had the luxury or inclination to grind their own spice blends, and Mark Spitz appreciated this gustatory verve.
“Do you have any food allergies?” Tad asked.
“No.”
“I’ve been trying to perfect my peanut curry.”
They ate at the dining-room table, candlelight bestowing dramatic shadows to their movements as they forked morsels out of bowls decorated with pale green triangles, which looked to have been purchased at a neighbor’s yard sale for the nostalgia they invoked for visits at grandma’s house. It was still light outside, but behind the occluded windows it was always midnight. The house had probably been a no-shoes preserve before the catastrophe and now that edict kept the noise to the necessary minimum, and the dead walking on by.
He gave them the Anecdote and he listened to their stories in turn. Last Night swooped down on Margie as she visited a small island off Cape Cod, where she remained for the entire first year of the ruination. She’d been a houseguest at the beach compound of a college friend, bodysurfing and munching on clam rolls, and if she hadn’t decided to leave Monday morning instead of Sunday afternoon as planned, she might not have made it through. There were five houses on the island; two were unoccupied that weekend and one family decided to brave it to one of the shelters announced on the radio, in those early days of frantic transmissions and haven roll calls. They never returned. That left ten people on the tiny lump of sand, and they struggled and fretted together. They rowed to the mainland for foraging excursions in their little dinghy but mostly stuck to their island dunes, fishing and waiting for news. Bandits razed the community, creeping ashore one day in their ruinous morality. They raped, they pillaged, sparing nothing, not even the lobster traps, which they dragged ashore with glee. Margie was the only one to escape—she had ever prided herself on her swimming—and her placid stay left her ill-prepared for life in the wasteland.
“I caught up,” she said. They were playing hearts in the parlor. Mark Spitz didn’t know if her memories or her cards were responsible for her rueful expression. She tried to hoof it back to Vermont, where she worked for an outfit that sold artisanal pickles—“We
were really huge at all the big farmers’ markets”—but never made it out of the state. She hooked up with Tad in a high-school cafeteria, and together they returned to the farmhouse, lugging big plastic bags of powdered eggs. Tad was born the same year as Mark Spitz, but unlike Mark Spitz he’d found his vocation before the upheaval, scripting interstitial narrative sequences for a video-game company that specialized in first-person shooters. In between levels, Tad’s cutscenes on how the aliens came to be split into two adversarial species, or the magic amulet was lost in the volcano, allowed the players to rest their thumbs. A respite in their quest through the carnage.
Tad had attended college in town on the six-year plan, and returned after steady promotions at the game company, e-mailing his scripts from the group house he shared with his old buddies. He made a breathtaking wage compared to his peers, who wafted through the local service industries, pressing veggie sandwiches for coeds and hollowed-eyed dissertation jockeys, or selling gently used Adirondack chairs and a previous generation’s musty ball gowns and leisure suits to weekenders and summer people. Tad designed the house’s barricades, after he “just fell in love with the place.” The walk to the creek was a relatively secure jog with nice sight lines, and after he lucked out in a round of raids on the neighboring premises, he gathered a hearty store of rations. Before he found this place he was holed up on a marijuana farm with fellows of like-minded spiritual outlook. He wouldn’t talk about how that particular situation fell apart.