Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,84
running,” Bozeman continued. “That we are a vital installation, even if the next summit is far off.”
“You needn’t worry.”
“Though Chip may be right that we might need another crane. Or two.”
It’s different, Mark Spitz thought. Wonton was off-kilter. A vibration insinuated itself, a disquieting under-tremor to every movement and sound. Perhaps it was a higher-than-normal flood of skels at the wall. Had the fusillade paused since his arrival? More likely the loss of Bubbling Brooks. Bubbling Brooks was one of the bigger camps, fifteen thousand people last he heard. What was their sideline, besides the Triplets? Munitions? Pills? It escaped him. Some of these soldiers had worked there, dropped off survivors there. Had family there, maybe. Buffalo will be upset, of course, with this interruption of their timetables. There had to be survivors, he thought. Had to be. But a loss like that, after the recent run of good news, would certainly cripple morale. Above him the snipers trained the scopes, aimed, dropped their targets, moved to the next target in robotic sequence. The soldiers had no other course in Wonton but to avenge themselves on the dead before them, the ones they can see. Do it for Cheyenne.
Bubbling Brooks was bad news. Mark Spitz felt terrible, of course, but he knew that the refuge had done what all refuges do eventually: It failed. What else could you expect from despicable Connecticut? Precisely this kind of tribulation.
They paused at the shiny, worn steps of the bank and held the doors for three passing soldiers engaged in a lively a cappella version of “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction).” Bozeman told Ms. Macy he’d meet her in the conference room. “You’ll be fine on your own?”
She winked. “This is the American Phoenix. You’re never on your own.”
Bozeman appraised her ass as she went inside. “Wouldn’t mind some of those Buffalo wings,” he said. He dropped his hand on Mark Spitz’s shoulder and switched to his majordomo voice. “I haven’t seen you since it happened. Sorry about your man.”
“What do you mean?”
“Was I not supposed to say anything? I’m such an asshole.”
• • •
They stayed in the toy store for months. That other, less flamboyant, more deliberate ruination altering the planet’s climate had been under way for more than a hundred years, squeezing milder winters into the Northeast. People got used to it, the unopened bags of sodium chloride gathering cobwebs next to the kids’ boogie boards in the garage, the nightly news footage of the venerable ice shelf splashing into the frigid seas, squeezed in if there were no more pressing outrages, or a celebrity death. The first winter of the plague was a throwback to how they used to do it in the good old days: early, unmerciful, endless. The survivors endured the tandem disasters in their refuges, without the solace of warmer days. Warm weather meant you had to go outside again.
“Kinda retro,” Mim said, surveying the unlikely drifts on Main Street.
“I know,” Mark Spitz said. “Come back. I’m cold.”
It was the healthiest relationship he’d ever had, and not because they had a lot in common, such as a need for food, water, and fire. In the time before the flood, Mark Spitz had a habit of making his girlfriends into things that were less than human. There was always a point, sooner or later, when they crossed a line and became creatures: following a lachrymose display while waiting in line for admission to the avant-garde performance; halfway into a silent rebuke when he underplayed his enthusiasm about attending her friend’s wedding. Once it was only a look, a transit of anxiety across her eyes in which he glimpsed some irremediable flaw or future betrayal. And like that, the person he had fallen in love with was gone. They had been replaced by this familiar abomination, this thing that shared the same face, same voice, same familiar mannerisms that had once comforted him. To anyone else, the simulation was perfect. If he tried to make his case, as in his horror movies, the world would indulge his theory, even participate in a reasonable-sounding test, one that would not succeed in convincing them. But he would know. He knew where they failed in their humanity. He would leave.
Over time he learned how to isolate those last nights and say, That’s when they broke through the barrier. In the middle of the argument over the meaning of the foreign film they had been forced to see as