Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,60

physical, diesel-powered manifestation of pure-blooded American bad-assery. Four guys worked the stalled vehicles, coaxing and untangling them from multifarious confusions, as the other two stood sentry on lookout-and-drop-’em duty. Mark Spitz and Richie took skel detail, popping any dead meter reader or dead weatherman that drifted in from the median, or was trapped in the backseat of, and pounding on the blood-smeared back window of, the overturned yellow cab, radio-station promo van, or hearse. You never played Solve the Wreck because the answer was obvious: It had been drive or die.

Lookout had more downtime. The dead were low density in this part of the coast, in those days—they had stopped speculating about why and merely accepted it as fact—and the ones attracted to the noise of the engines never amounted to more than one or two every couple of hours. The trapped skels—skittering Little Leaguers sans hands, bound and trussed matrons with maniac snarls on their faces—were mere target practice, and few. If those fleeing cared enough to bring their feverish, succumbing kin on the trip, they weren’t going to abandon them once they had to hoof it. Most of the doors were wide open in the aftermath of escape. The refugees hastily considered the imponderables—take mama’s jewelry or the tackle box, the bag of rice or the carton of vitamins—and joined their neighbors on the run, disappearing into the abject void of the interregnum.

“Probably Vanderbilt 80s, right?” Gary asked.

“What?”

“The wreckers? The tow trucks. Those guys are sweet.”

“I really have no idea.”

The work was straightforward. The keys were in the ignition or weren’t, the master keys worked or didn’t, they could push them off the road or the wreckers came into play, chains were hooked to chassis, the disabled behemoths winched over to the shoulder. Depending on the size and number of the lanes, the type of bottleneck, and the number of stalled vehicles, the vehicles were parked perpendicular or at angles to the road, or they made a new expressway wall of compacts, sports-cars hybrids, intermingled with the odd ice-cream truck whose freezers sloshed with melted sweets. In theory. The Quiet Storm followed to a different mandate.

Mark Spitz encountered parables, as usual, in the evidence left behind. The freeway was clear for half a mile, and then the cars appeared, bumper-to-bumper, doors and hatchback wide, you tracked ahead to reconnoiter the scene and discovered the cause of the jam: a jackknifed eighteen-wheeler, collision of family vans, a barricade erected by the local county authorities out of short-sighted precaution. Half-devoured corpses slumped in the passenger seats, or were buckled in behind the wheel, final curse against traffic still discernable despite the fact that their lips had been eaten: the invective was deep in the muscle. If enough bodies were in proximity, the wreckers made a bonfire, but the elements and microbes were doing a swell job of cleaning things up on their own.

It was nice zipping home at the end of the day down a stretch of highway you’d cleared. It was measurable progress, visible mileage into the new world. The work left aches in his flesh as proof, in the way inventory lists of bottled capers did not.

“You haven’t got to the Mark Spitz part yet,” Gary said.

“It’s soaking through again,” Mark Spitz said. He ripped open another medi-patch and continued.

“I rode in the lead wrecker with the Quiet Storm,” he said. The Quiet Storm was one of the new skinheads, who shaved their scalps to commemorate their deprivations. It was just then taking off in the camps—how else to recognize one such as yourself, the most harrowed of the harrowed? She was an early rescue on the part of Buffalo’s recovery teams, a member of an etiolated clan that had spent a year locked in the basement jail of a small-town police station, the unlucky wards of a madman. She didn’t really go into it.

She was a lean greyhound, hyperalert in the manner of those who’d suffered their refuge overrun too many times. Everyone got overrun, and then there existed those in a whole different tier of frequent-flier status. They never slept, rarely blinked. The Quiet Storm was more functional than most skinheads in that she still spoke, and occasionally permitted a smile to splinter her lips. She’d worked in a tree nursery before the recent engrueling of the world, tending to and cultivating the hedges that prevented the hoi polloi from peeking at the aristocracy. Not very effective barrier material, Mark Spitz thought when informed of her