Authors: Colson Whitehead
“But the main thing was never knowing what was around the next bend or how many were going to come pouring out of the dark. Guys pissing themselves in fear, even after all they’d seen in the wasteland. To make it extra hellish, the general had the bright idea to make us bring flamethrowers, which was fine for making human—or subhuman—torches, but there was no ventilation. When the subway’s running, they got superfans going to keep the air in circulation. Halfway in, it’s full of dead air down there, eyes burning from the smoke, can’t breathe, skels crashing at us through the flames—”
The Lieutenant paused. He wasn’t selling the sweepers on their temporary reassignment very well. He poured a glass of water from the plastic pitcher on the podium. “But we pulled it off. Elbow grease, American Phoenix, rah rah. Now they want you to finish it so it’s a hundred percent. Do what you’re doing now, pop ’n’ drop whatever skels have wandered in from some maintenance conduit over the last weeks, or that one random fellow in the supply room. If any. The hard stuff has been taken care of,” he said. The Lieutenant’s face sketched a look of bravado Mark Spitz had not seen on the man before, so he took it to be fake.
Omega and Gamma were assigned the Seventh Avenue line, Canal to South Ferry. The most noble of subway routes in Mark Spitz’s estimation, hallowed meridian of Manhattan Island. When the two sweeper units arrived at the uptown side of Canal, the yellow tile of the station entrance generated a familiar calm in him. During his first teenage missions in the New York City underground, the steps leading to a subway platform offered refuge from the madness of the streets above, sparing him the skyscrapers’ indictment of his shabby suburban self and the constant jostling of strangers, who cut him off, scowled at his tentative steps, tried to puncture his eyeballs with their umbrella spokes and render him defenseless so they could devour him. He caught his breath on the platforms and furtively checked the transit-authority app on his phone so that no one would know he didn’t have a clue of where he was going. He was a rube, but he was no tourist. One day he’d live here and be one of their tribe. Mark Spitz got out at his stop, at some part of the city he’d never been before, to complete the assignment given by a website—in search of imported sneakers or limited-edition hoodies—eager to school himself in this new cranny of the city.
Back then, if the worst happened, his phone would transmit the coordinates of his murdered body to the satellite and back down to the authorities and eventually to his parents on Long Island. What a quaint notion, to die while looking for cool T-shirts.
The sweepers unlocked the gates and gained the platform. They did not speak. They tightened the straps of their night-vision goggles and waited for their eyes to recalibrate to a new, murky-green modality that made them into scrabbling things at the bottom of a deep-sea chasm. It was as the Lieutenant described it: a decrepit dungeon, with a slow, miasmal atmosphere and secret topography. Trevor said, “Looks like we just missed the train,” and they laughed and walked over to the hooked ladder at the south end of the platform.
Gamma was a unit of mellow bandwidth, third-generation
potheads to a man, who couldn’t wait for the new era of marijuana tolerance sure to come in reconstruction, the legislative no-brainers and utopian buds. “When we put it all back together, we will institutionalize joy,” Foreskin said, “for the medicinal toke is the balm of oblivion.” Richard Cowl, a.k.a. Dick Cowl, a.k.a. Foreskin, was Gamma’s leader and a former sommelier at a high-end novelty eatery in Cambridge that specialized in offal. “Which is sort of amusing, given the skel’s yen for human entrails. They’re my regulars!” Even in these times of scarcity he was a vegetarian. He never sampled the exotic delicacies on his employer’s menu but accomplished a mean pairing nonetheless. According to him, at any rate—pre-plague triumphs were often exaggerated, given the lack of contradicting witnesses.
Joshua and Trevor were the other two Gammas. The only description Joshua gave of his former life was that “I was an alcoholic, and I’m still an alcoholic.” One Sunday at Wonton, Josh related how his mother flipped on Last Night and Mark Spitz almost shared his similar tale but declined. Josh didn’t have the bearing of one who was going to make it to the other side; there was something taffy to him, despite the fact he’d survived this long, and to tell him the story would be like pouring coffee into a broken saucer. As for Trevor, he had been a mall security guard in the bright, prelapsarian days of shopping abundance. When they met, Gary teased that Trevor must be glad to “finally have a real gun” after his stint as a fake cop, and Trevor had replied evenly that he hadn’t needed a gun in his mall rounds. He had everything he needed in his hands—Trevor was a master-level practitioner of a branch of martial arts Mark Spitz had never heard of but, after an impromptu demonstration, had become convinced of its lethal pedigree. Gamma got high every night, the minute they bivouacked for the night, “In police stations if one is handy,” Foreskin said.
One of the most solemn rounds of rock-paper-scissors in human history ruled in favor of Omega: Gamma was on point.
“It’s all right,” Foreskin said. To draw the skels out, Josh started playing an old heavy metal song on a kazoo. The title eluded Mark Spitz. In the video the band played a bar mitzvah dressed in thick biker leather. Top-notch anti-skel gear in retrospect, save for the exposed neck. Soon they were all humming the song, then giddily crooning it at the top their voices.
The Franklin Street station hove into sight when they heard a holler, back from Canal. Safeties clicked. The dead did not speak. Was it some misbegotten freak who’d been eking it out down here, hiding? Mark Spitz had never come across a true homesteader, but the marines had rounded up a few on their first rounds through the Zone. Citizens who’d locked themselves in insubstantial one-bedrooms and unlikely studios and somehow made it through until the soldiers came to take back the city. What must it have been like, to see the choppers after all that time, after they’d emptied the larder of hope and had only mealy, unleavened stubbornness to chew on? Marines sliding down cables, grinding up the bodies of the dead with their .50-.50s, those devils that had besieged them for so long. They were insane, most of them, and had to be pried out screaming before being taken to the Wonton medics, where the top-shelf antipsychotics awaited. One or two attacked their rescuers, shooting the soldiers in the head, unable to believe in their deliverance—and some homesteaders were no doubt mistaken for skels in turn, palsying in their PASD. There weren’t many, but they did exist. Some homesteaders were still immured north of the barrier; a few managed to signal choppers and were plucked from the roofs. Perhaps others shrank from view when they heard a helicopter, content in whatever doomsday theater played out in their traumatized heads.
Omega and Gamma readied their weapons. Gary lit a cigarette. Mark Spitz thought of the old sign in the token booths: I AM THE STATION MANAGER. I AM ASSISTING OTHER CUSTOMERS. YOU WILL RECOGNIZE ME BY MY BURGUNDY VEST. The man identified
himself, and when he got close enough Mark Spitz saw he was not wearing a burgundy vest. It wasn’t some transit authority rep or bearded subterranean hermit who hailed them, but the Lieutenant, in full combat gear, the first time they’d seen him so outfitted. Their laconic boss was aboveground in Wonton; down here he was a real soldier, veteran of the calamity. Shamed, the sweepers assumed their idiosyncratic versions of combat stances. “Thought I’d tag along and get some exercise,” the Lieutenant said.
He hadn’t geared up in months, “But it’s like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.” Over whiskey the following Sunday, he confided to Mark Spitz and Kaitlyn that he’d had a bad feeling about Broadway, ever since Buffalo gave the green light.
Mark Spitz kept tripping over the crossties. He didn’t like walking in the rut, where the bilge seeped into his boots, so he jumped from tie to tie like a kid in a hopscotch grid. He was paranoid about the niches cut into the wall, where a track worker might duck if caught in front of a train. Each black hole harbored a skel, each maintenance corridor was full of hostiles about to spill onto the track, the native population bursting from their shadow habitat to rout the invaders.
“We’ve never been on the subway before,” Gary said.
“Usually you ride in train cars,” Mark Spitz said.
“Do you think they’ll start it up again?”
“Have to get around somehow. Zone One, Zone Two. Once they get the juice on.” The subway will be reduced in the next world, stripped of its powers like some punished god. Forced to recapitulate childhood stages, when it extended through the savage city neighborhood by neighborhood, line by line.
“Queens?”
“I don’t think we’re sweeping Queens anytime soon,” the Lieutenant said. “It’s Queens. But yeah, there will be power.”
“It will be nice to watch TV again,” Kaitlyn said.
“Certainly,” the Lieutenant said. “There’s some idiot in Bubbling
Brooks right now thinking up a plague sitcom.” He whirled at a scurrying sound, then resumed his march. “Filmed in front of a live studio audience. Half filled.”
Mark Spitz imagined the hunchback in the cement-block chamber a mile beneath the city, sweating through a yellowed wifebeater, who hit the switch. A hundred thousand refrigerators hum-to at once, 12:00 blinks on the displays of a million microwave ovens and digital video players, all the sad machines that had shut off in the middle of their humble duties, waiting for orders. The hallway lights of tenements and corporate towers snap on, and in the underground, the red and green signal indicators. The magic third rail in deadly awareness. The machines wake to a new world where their old routines are void. As if they were human beings powered down by the plague and then reinitialized for an alternative purpose.
He acclimated to the underneath world, the echoes of their voices and boots that fluttered from wall to wall like bats, the spitting and streaming water that pushed through every crack. An eerie tranquillity settled in his chest. There had been a lot of ash swirling in the air that day, oppressive in its steady, mindless assault on his personal zone, settling in drifts on his barriers. The black stations were an asylum again, the platform a sturdy rock to cling to, as it had been when he was a teenage explorer in the city and the vast human current was attacking him, plucking at him. Before the unwinding of the world, he could always catch his breath here, beneath the uncountable tonnage of the city, the mass of strivers’ aspirations and evanescent hopes, and prepare himself for the next engagement. So it was again.
Everything was copacetic until Chambers, when that eternal question confronted them: local or express. “What do you think, Lieutenant, South Ferry or Brooklyn?” Joshua asked. He snapped his sponsor chewing gum like a bored teen being shuttled to the family reunion. They’d seen rats, dried blood puddles, dust, and chips of bullet-lacerated subway tile, but not a single skel. The
marine operation had been so noisy that any plague-blind galoot skulking in the tunnels had been drawn out and cut down. When Disposal came for the bodies, they’d terminated the one or two laggards that wandered out like the unpopular kids no one had told about the end of hide-and-seek two hours prior. It was becoming apparent to Gamma and Omega that underground was as straightforward as their aboveground sweep. Actually, easier, for any stragglers—the odd, befuddled straphanger waiting for the train that would never pull in, or the token clerk hovering over a stack of two-day passes—had already been wiped out. The darkness did not squeeze so tightly now.
“We’ll do South Ferry first, get to the end of the line, and then double back,” the Lieutenant said.
“Then we have to come back tomorrow to finish,” Foreskin said.
“Then we come back tomorrow.”
“How about we take the express and Omega takes the local?” Foreskin suggested. Split up, rendezvous here, and call it a day.
The Lieutenant glared at the two southbound tunnels, the dead black eyes of them. Gary raised his eyebrows, clowning.
“We’re up in the Zone day and night,” Trevor said. “This is just another basement, if you ask me. We’ve been in some serious basements the last few weeks.”
“Serious basements,” Joshua said. They all nodded at the sage assessment, and Mark Spitz chuckled. Nobody knows the basements we’ve seen …
The Lieutenant stalled in the loop of one of his trademark hesitations and relented. Gamma chose the express tracks, which sloped down south of the station, and Omega took the local. Foreskin resumed Gary’s heavy metal song and the two units proceeded to their fates. During a later Sunday-night confab in the dumpling house, the Lieutenant regretted not riding with Gamma. “The bad feeling I got was an express-track bad feeling, not a local-track feeling, but this escaped me when we split up. I fucked up.” He
had brought a present: ice cubes. They clicked and tocked in their glasses. Kaitlyn crunched them in her teeth. That’s the express all over, Mark Spitz thought: It gets you to your final destination quicker. He decided the Lieutenant’s bad feeling told him that the express was a preordained clusterfuck, and that’s why he posse’d with Omega. To save those who could be saved.
“Bzzzz bzzzz,” Gary said. He tapped the third rail with his sneaker.
Mark Spitz was on point. Kaitlyn diligently retraced Gary’s footsteps, as if they were in a minefield. It was getting on his nerves. “For luck,” she told him when he complained. He told her to back up. She didn’t. The Lieutenant pulled up the rear, dawdling for a reason, trying to figure out what detail eluded him.
“What’s next?” Gary asked.
The old World Trade Center station, Mark Spitz thought. That was a long time ago, but he remembered.
The reports of Gamma’s assault rifles churned through the tunnel as if on slick steel wheels. Mark Spitz looked uptown and downtown to fix the origin of the gunfire, and he was back on a platform in the old days, trying to figure out if that was his train approaching or the opposite track’s. They ran back to Chambers. Their night vision atomized the beams and struts into grains, flimsy pixels, that rose and submerged from shadow. The world dissolved into and re-formed out of darkness with each step, and the barrage continued. Three weapons firing, shouts, then a lesser volley. One weapon silenced. The Lieutenant hollered commonsense rules of engagement, but between the gunfire and the military jargon, Mark Spitz found it hard to make out. He relied on his standard translation of mayhem, which had served him well so far.