Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.

PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder.

New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example. The main difference was that there were fewer people.

Bring out your dead.

That’s the way we’ve always done it. It’s what this country was built on. The plague merely made it more literal, spelled it out in case you didn’t get it before.

He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.

Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety.

He’d always seen himself in them, the robots who roved the galaxy in search of the emotion chip, the tentacled things that were, beneath their mottled, puckered membranes, more human than the murderous villagers who hunted them for their difference.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

“You know why they walk around? They walk around because they’re too stupid to know they’re dead.”