Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,83

was hard to discern.

“A lot,” Lily said. “Enough. Heavy days like this, lotta skels coming in, we keep both going pretty steady.”

“I hate these heavy-flow days,” Annie said.

“I’m sure we can get those numbers for you, ma’am,” Bozeman said. He passed the compactor keypad back to Annie.

“We should really recycle those,” Ms. Macy said, pointing to the biohazard bin. It took Mark Spitz a second to realize she referred to the body bags intermingled with the wall corpses.

“I know, it’s terrible,” Lily said.

“It’s what?”

“It’s terrible,” Lily repeated, louder this time to account for her helmet, and the renewed volley down the street. “The environment.” They all turned at the approaching scraping noise. Mark Spitz identified Chip as the inhabitant of the white suit steering the fresh load of bodies. Chip reminded him of the old workers in the fashion district who shoved their clothes racks up the sidewalk and cursed the idiot cattle impeding their progress. The old New York. Mark Spitz rubbed his tongue against his teeth. That was ash he tasted. Whether it was actually there was another question.

“Told you to hold off for a while,” Annie said. “Still got this whole batch.”

“These are from down-Zone,” Chip said. “We’re not picking up anything from the wall until they get the crane fixed.”

“Complications,” Bozeman said to Ms. Macy. He smiled. “Shall we continue our tour?”

Mark Spitz had wasted enough time. He’d had his diversions, in the restaurant, the hotel, and now this tourist leisure cruise. The guys waited for him downtown. This excursion would tide him over until they returned for R & R tomorrow. He was about to take his leave when Lily said, “Hey, lady.”

“Yes?”

“There have been rumors.”

“Of?” Ms. Macy clasped her folder to her breast and pressed her lips shut, her chin slightly upturned to brunt the surf.

“Ms. Macy—is it true we lost Vista Del Mar?”

Bozeman sighed. “Bubbling Brooks.”

“No, that’s okay,” Ms. Macy said. She was prepared. “It was bound to get out. No shame in telling the truth. We’re still sorting it out, but it looks like they’d been having a density problem outside and somehow the gates were breached. Human error, most likely.”

“How many—”

“They’re still surveying.”

“What about the Triplets?”

“I know one got out.”

“Cheyenne?”

“I don’t know which one.”

Annie placed her hand on her partner’s shoulder. It was pathetic, the sight of the two of them moving in their white hazmat suits in a dumb show of consolation. The sabotaged connection. They looked like mascots of a brand of cookie dough, meant to hypnotize the kids between cartoons. Did Annie know someone in Bubbling Brooks, or just the Triplets? In all likelihood they each knew someone there, whether they were aware of it or not: the appallingly friendly security guard from the office complex three jobs ago, or the freckled best friend from summer camp you hadn’t thought of in years. He heard Ms. Macy say the words “isolated incident.”

“You get back upstate,” Chip said, “you tell them we need another crane down here. Maybe two. You can see what kind of volume we get here sometimes.”

Ms. Macy’s fingers trundled to a fresh page in her notebook. She smiled. “From your lips to Buffalo’s ears.”

They left Disposal to matters of immolation and started for the bank. Ms. Macy asked Mark Spitz where Fort Wonton had found him, and he started to describe the operation on I-95 but was interrupted by one of the rooftop snipers, who shouted directions to a machine gunner on the wall. “Over there, dude—the priest!” The gunner swiveled and divested himself of twenty rounds. The sniper cheered and did a jig.

“It’s so quiet in Buffalo,” she said.

Bozeman caught the brief flicker in Ms. Macy’s eyes and said, “The more the merrier, way I see it. It’ll be awhile before Buffalo sends down the manpower we need to finally cap the island, but in the meantime, the more tourists we have streaming in from the burbs, the less we have to neutralize later.” He tucked her elbow into his palm to steer her around the trio of mechanics squatting before the open plate at the base of the grab crane. The machine’s mammoth claw dangled three stories above, stalled over the wall and dripping on the corpses piled on the other side. Pools of blood gathered at the seams in the concrete wall where the brackets held the segments together, a wrinkled skin developing at the edges where they dried. The pools were becoming giant scabs.

“I hope you’ll convey how smoothly things are