Zone One

by Colson Whitehead

He was the first live human being the dead had seen since the start, and the former ladies of HR were starving.

Nowadays, Rosie the Riveter was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall’s discount-appliance emporium.

This is what he had learned: If you weren’t concentrating on how to survive the next five minutes, you wouldn’t survive them.

One morning Mark Spitz stumbled on some brain-wiped wretch standing at the fry station of the big hamburger chain and had to shoot him on general principles. Out of the abundance of a life, to choose fry duty.

New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

Mark Spitz slapped his arm across Kaitlyn’s chest to stop her, a gesture he’d lifted from his parents, who had lifted it from their parents, who had remembered a time before seat belts: There was movement across the street.

I do this, it's a reflex. People under 40 or so don't know what the hell i'm doing.

That afternoon on Fulton, Mark Spitz shut down his welcome routines after they identified the three figures across the street. They were people. They wore ponchos, and what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho. The dead did not wear ponchos.

To think that there had been a time when such a thing meant something: the signifiers of one’s position in the world. Today a rusty machete and bag of almonds made you a person of substance.

In prelapsarian days, the base had been one of the largest retirement communities in the state, known for its facility with the latest trends and currents in Alzheimer’s care. The redbrick walls encircling the property, constructed to keep the befogged safe inside, now kept those with an entirely different impairment to their mental faculties outside. Naturally, there were more gun nests.

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