Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,9

Fort Wonton, there had existed a certain Sergeant Weller who rode Gary about the disreputable state of his fingernails, bringing up pre-plague regs of military comportment etc. and threatening to “rain hell” on him if he didn’t shape up, but Weller got his throat ripped out during a recon trip in a Newark railway station, and that was the end of that. The other officers’ priorities did not include persecuting volunteers over dead standards. For his part, Gary didn’t understand the fuss. Before the world broke, he’d dropped out of school to crank bolts full-time in his father’s garage with his brothers, and he stood by this explanation for his appearance even though it had been years since he’d worked on a car or truck. Which left Mark Spitz to opine that what they were seeing was the original grime, the very grime of Gary’s youth preserved as a token of home. It was what he’d scraped off the past and carried with him.

Gary prodded the Marge with his rifle. “No one told me it was Casual Friday,” he said. Whether or not you agreed that Gary looked worse than your standard-issue plague-shriveled skel, it was indisputable that he had worse manners.

Kaitlyn materialized, running in from the hall and then slowing down and shaking her head as she took in the mess. She asked Mark Spitz if he was okay and surveyed the office. “Four of them and five desks,” she said. She padded over to the supply closet. Any creature trapped inside would be making a racket at the commotion, but Kaitlyn was a stickler. From her stories, she’d been a grade-grubber before the disaster, and Mark Spitz had watched her maintain a grade-grubbing continuum in the throes of reconstruction, rubbing her thumbs over the No-No Cards and applying a yellow highlighter to the typo-ridden manuals from Buffalo. If she survived, she’d doubtless continue to be a grade-grubber in that coming, reborn world they crawled toward, paying her bills in a timely fashion once goods and vital services and autopay reappeared, first in line to pull the lever, if not manning the polling booths, once they could again afford the indulgence of democracy. The Lieutenant put her in charge of Omega Unit for her constancy, although given his other two choices it didn’t rank among his more visionary commands.

She mumbled “Sit-rep, sit-rep” under her breath as she opened the door. Inside the supply closet, cartons and stacks of adhesive notepaper, tax forms, and incomprehensible health-plan packets awaited Business as Usual. No lunging adversary waited inside among the paper plates and Styro cups cached for the miserable office birthday parties and farewell get-togethers. Kaitlyn sat on the edge of a desk. She grimaced at the bodies, distressed by the number and the reminder that she’d let her unit stray from procedure. “Thought it was too quiet,” she said.

The owner of the desk had been drinking a diet cola and reading a best-selling romance/thriller Mark Spitz remembered from bus advertisements. Which one had it been, Mark Spitz speculated: Faceless over there? He corrected himself. There were five desks and four bodies. One of them had made it out. Not everyone perished. Perhaps the owner of the desk was doing chores at that very moment in one of the settlement camps, Happy Acres or Sunny Days, replacing the toilet paper in one of the chemical lavatories, eliminating dented cans of beets from the larders, and sipping whatever regional favorite diet cola the scouting teams had scrounged. The insipid slogan popped up in his head, insistent as malware—“We Make Tomorrow!”—and he flinched as he pictured the camp’s administrative assistant handing out the buttons, which were then obediently pinned to scavenged clothing one size too big or too small. Resist. He had to get all that crap out of his head or else it would turn out bad for him. To bolster this argument he made a glum appraisal of the bodies on the floor.

“We got here just in time.” Gary lit a cigarette. He’d rescued a carton of sponsor cigarettes from a bodega the day before and had acquitted himself nicely so far. They were an economy brand that hadn’t been advertised in thirty years; it sufficed that parents and grandparents had exhaled its smoke into cribs, and the acrid scent of the blend and the cherry-red packaging were imprinted early, reminding its aficionados years later of a happier, less complicated time. “Had him on the ground about to give him a nose