Zone One - By Colson Whitehead Page 0,89
said, “The subway.”
Seven weeks into their mission, the Lieutenant had Fabio summon them from the field. This was unprecedented, as they only returned to Wonton on Sundays and were now deep in the rhythms of their work flow, replete with Monday-morning despair, hump-day torpor, and a fragile strain of muted Friday-afternoon euphoria. The comms still worked back then, providing a tether to a mending civilization. For his part, Mark Spitz appreciated the interruption of that week’s grid. Omega wormed through the intestines of a starter-apartment rental tower, and floor after floor of beige carpet, noise-permeable walls, and fingerprint-smudged doorways soured his disposition. His friends in the city lived in buildings like that, and the hallways reeked of the dead ambitions decomping behind the doors. They’d had hopes. Now the cheap, emptied construction signified the complete eradication of aspiration, all luminous notions.
In the dumpling house, the Lieutenant told them that Buffalo wanted them to sweep out the subway tunnels.
“I thought the marines already did that,” Metz said.
“Mostly,” the Lieutenant explained. When the marines landed, they’d locked up the black gates and turnstiles to the platforms. The thinking was, they’d clear out the tunnels later. But once they cottoned to the fact that the top of the island was uncapped and the northward rails were wide open, the brass grew apprehensive. Even though skel migration patterns didn’t work that way, everyone started having nightmares of miles and miles of tunnels brimming and bursting with the dead, envisioning the uptown lines as umbral channels rerouting these very, very sick passengers to right beneath their tamed Zone boulevards. Ghoulish faces smeared into the bars and verminous mitts clawed through the metal grating in a hellish rendition of the worst rush hour ever, gates wrenching free from the concrete platforms … In their final mission before redeployment to the latest, more fashionable instability up or down the coast, the marines blocked the underground tunnels at the northern edge of the Zone, as if the Great Wall of Canal extended through the asphalt and deep into the Earth’s crust. Then the marines swept through the downtown shadows after the trapped skels.
It was the Lieutenant’s first week in the Zone. Buffalo was all paperwork; he wanted a proper posting. He led a platoon down the Lexington Avenue line. “Sketchy is the word I’d use. We’d tamed aboveground. Put them down. Underground was skel territory—as if it still belonged to the interregnum, even though it was just under our feet. Even with the subways blocked off, there was this feeling that the other end of the tunnel, its terminus, was in the dead land. Claustrophobic as hell, despite the trolleys we had on the tracks carrying the spots—the brass had reallocated our night-vision gear for some op up north, so we had to bring our own light. You’re not in the city anymore down there. It’s medieval. Water streaming down the wall like a catacomb, rats running around, and then you’re lurching in the pits between the tracks. The third rail’s dead, but it’s still creepy, like it could come on any second and zap you.
“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