Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

In short, they had been honed and trained so thoroughly by that extinguished world that they were doomed in this new one.

The info-gathering directives came down from Buffalo a week after they were deployed to the island.

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. It was easier to walk down the street. No grim herds of out-of-towners shuffled about, no amateur fascist up the street machinated to steal the next cab.

Anticiprant had been a second-tier antibiotic in the previous world; no telling how it had been cast as the cavalry repelling the invading spirochetes of the plague.