Authors: Colson Whitehead
The only unusual specimen was the eighteen-wheeler athwart the span, the logo on the side of the trailer marking it as part of a box retailer’s fleet. The wreckers weren’t a salvage detail. Their manifest included a daily gas quota, which they siphoned once the vehicles were cleared, and they were allowed to grab for personal use any food they discovered, the energy bars and preservative-laden snack chips, but that was it. When Richie unlatched the back of the trailer, he told them later, it was to see if it was worth a later trip by a proper team. Richie was a stickler, a teenager who’d been taken in as a mascot by the first military detachment at Golden Gate. Clearing wrecks was his first detail beyond the walls of the campus.
How and why the dead had been herded inside was a mystery. The Quiet Storm offered that it was a government job, the creatures earmarked for experiments, in those early days when that was a priority; perhaps a computer in Buffalo had this shipment flagged as MIA and after the engagement the file was appropriately amended. Mark Spitz’s theory was drawn from the stories of those who had kept their loved ones chained up in the rec room or the garage in hope of the cure’s arrival. The erection of this viaduct barricade was contemporaneous with the heyday of such optimistic gestures: We can beat this, this is just a temporary thing, if we keep our wits. He imagined the block association of a tight-knit suburb, some planned community off the interstate—on the
border of the country club’s golf course, a quick drive to the outlet mall—corralling all their infected kin into the trailer, Mom and Dad, the Smiths and half of the Joneses, for a road trip. To a place where they could be cured, or set free, or exterminated with a semblance of dignity and a smidgen of religious custom. The driver of the cab was a local pillar, worked his way up from country-club caddie to master of the nabe, owning the biggest house on the cul-de-sac, a spectacular castle that seemed, on certain nights, to float on its own bourgeois cloud above the development. Didn’t mind driving a load of kids to the multiplex, to boot—if anyone can get them there, it’s him. “Sent to live on a farm upstate.”
At the moment Richie reached for the trailer’s door, the Quiet Storm was settling before the cab’s dashboard, communing with the machine, and Mark Spitz crouched inside a minivan of German manufacture, opening a packet of chocolate-covered peanuts he’d found. He heard Richie shout. Richie rushed up the side of the truck toward his comrades, followed by the stupendous troop of skels he’d just released. Were there sixty or seventy or more? When they recounted the story later, they were invariably accused of exaggeration, and the anecdote stalled for a few minutes until the debate over that modern version of How Many Angels Can Dance on a Head of a Pin, How Many Dead Can Fit into a Trailer was settled. “Quite a few” was the invariable conclusion.
At any rate, the wreckers were in the middle of the bridge, cut off from land. The trio had two weapons, as they had never needed more than that on an excursion. The Quiet Storm had stopped packing her rifle; she hadn’t used it in weeks, and then only when Richie was out with a stomach thing. That was the problem with progress—it made you soft. The dead shimmied and squeezed between the vehicles, the green convertible with the shredded vinyl top and the plumber’s van. When Richie removed himself from his sight lines, Mark Spitz proceeded to drop the creatures, bringing down a skel that wore bloody surgical scrubs—impossible
to know if it had earned that mess on or off duty—and an urban cowgirl whose rhinestones sparkled coolly in the sunlight. He obliterated their faces and everything beneath their faces, but there was no way his team was going to get them all. The wreckers couldn’t quantify the horde’s numbers.
“We’re not getting through this bunch,” the Quiet Storm said. They were calm. They assessed. The sheriff of the local municipality and his posse had blocked off their little patch of Heaven quite efficiently; the wreckers couldn’t even squeeze around on the railing past the barbed wire.
“Looks deep enough,” Richie said as he jumped off the bridge and into the water.
The drop was twenty feet. Richie’s head popped up ten yards downstream. He beckoned them down to the water. The Quiet Storm scratched her fingers through the bristles on her scalp, delivered a stream of invective, and followed his lead.
It was impossible. Mark Spitz counted the massing dead. The forsaken devils waded between the cars, dumb and foul, groping toward their food supply, which had dwindled by two-thirds before their devoid mentalities. They were too brainless, he thought, to be disappointed by having to share the scraps of him after that endless internment in the trailer. No way Mark Spitz was going to be able to get past them. They were too many. You ran in this situation. A simple calculation without shame.
Richie shouted from the shore. The gunfire would have alerted the other three wreckers; they’d have backup soon. Instinct should have plucked Mark Spitz from the bridge and dropped him into the current by now. But he did not move.
When he told them later that he couldn’t swim, they laughed. It was perfect: from now on he was Mark Spitz. But he had no fear of the water, not with his dependable comrades down there, and his undimmed halo of luck. He knew a few strokes. No: he leaped to the hood of the late-model neo-station wagon and started firing,
first taking out the grandmotherly type in the tracksuit and then the teenager wearing grimed soccer-team colors, because he knew he could not die. He vaulted onto the black sedan beside him and demolished the craniums of two more skels, who dropped and were stepped on by the replacements behind them. He had suspicions, and every day in this wasteland supplied more evidence: He could not die. This was his world now, in all its sublime crumminess, where intellect and ingenuity and talent were as equally meaningless as stubbornness, cowardice, and stupidity. He shot the one wearing green-lensed aviator glasses in the middle of the forehead, and twice shot the creature in the hunting jacket in the chest before he mortified it with a final blast. He could not die. Two more creatures tumbled to the asphalt, their craniums disintegrated. Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety.
He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down.
• • •
Forlorn Tribeca. Mark Spitz tracked west on his uptown sojourn and as he passed the corner lounge where he’d met Jennifer for drinks once after work, he allowed that it was possible his subconscious steered. At ten o’clock the bouncers dragged out the velvet rope and started choosing survivors, but early evening the attitude merely simmered. (Another barricade: sorting the sick from the healthy.) Happy hour was impenetrable, as bedraggled drones convened on stools and soft, low-slung couches, whipping out the measuring tape to see who had the biggest complaint and trying to forget that the minute you bury the miserable day it rises from
its coffin the next morning, this monster. Jennifer’s invite text received an eager response. She was a quick drinker who bullied and heckled her comrades into keeping pace. She’d make sure he got a full dose of medicine.
His job hadn’t been unduly bothersome; mostly he hated the commute from the Island and the sense of being becalmed. He worked in Customer Relationship Management, New Media Department, of a coffee multinational. A college buddy tipped him to it: “You’ll be perfect. It doesn’t require any skills.” The coffee company started in the Pacific Northwest with a single café and a proprietary roasting process, inquiries about which never failed to bring a thin, curious smile to the owners’ lips. One storefront divided into two, a dozen brick-and-mortar locations metastasized into an international franchise entity with a disposition, underdog yet indomitable, hawking paraphernalia that articulated in physical form the lifestyle philosophy the customer had unknowingly subscribed to years before, through a hundred submissions and tacit oaths, and was now fully ripened. Every package of beans brewed in the logo-dappled paraphernalia reminded you of the larger mission and the nation-state of like minds. Your home was your own personal franchise. Didn’t even have to post a sign in the bathroom reminding you to wash your hands.
The enchanted beans were organically farmed and humanely picked, the marketing uncanny in its engineering and ruthless in its implementation. It was his job to monitor the web in search of opportunities to sow product mindshare and nurture feelings of brand intimacy. As his supervisor put it. This meant, he soon learned, scouting websites and social-media apparatus for mentions of the brand family, and saying hello. He dispatched bots into the electronic ether, where they mingled among the various global sites and individual feeds, and when the bots returned with a hit or blip, he sent a message: “Thanks for coming, glad you liked the joe!” or “Next time try the Mocha Burst, you’ll thank me
later.” He perched on the high-tension wires like a binary vulture, ancient pixilated eyes peeled for scraps. When he saw meat, he pounced. Sometimes the recipient responded, sometimes not.
The denizens of the void, chewing on their tails, compulsively broadcasting the flimsy minutiae of their day-to-day on personal feeds and pages, didn’t have to name the products directly. The pale, thin boys two floors down in Implementation broadened the keywords to encompass the entire matrix of coffee consumption and coffee-philic modes of being so that references to caffeine, listlessness, overexcitement, lethargy, and all manner of daily combat preparedness pinged his workstation, whereupon he dispatched a “Why don’t you try our seasonal Jamaican blend next time you’re in the ’hood?” or a “Sounds like you need a hearty cup of Iced Number Seven!” He rationed exclamation points, cursed them by lunch, fell in love with them anew.
The company software kept tabs on his clients, as they were called, so that if they mentioned a birthday celebration or meaningful life event months later, he transmitted a frothy “Many more!” and offered a gift card redeemable in the contiguous states. Or a “Sorry about the breakup—sounds like it wasn’t going to work out anyway” and a gift card. It felt nice to send out a gift card, providing they sent him their info via secured connection. He was instructed to push the gift cards a certain number of times each day. They were a bit of a racket, when you added up the lost cards, the expirations, and the thirty cents left over here and there that was never used up.
His supervisor, strictly a tea man, and decaffeinated at that, encouraged him to cultivate an individual social-media persona. No cussing, no politics, use common sense, etc., the e-mail elaborated. He entered into artifice easily, it turned out, a natural at ersatz human connection and the postures of counterfeit empathy. He was helpful (“A sprinkle of cinnamon will add that special zing”), dispensed passive-aggressive admonishments (“Why go to our competitors when we’re up at the crack of dawn trying to make
you happy?”), and did not shrink from the anodyne (“Doesn’t a nice cup of coffee make the world live again?”). Without that human touch, he was told, they might as well push that rudimentary artificial-intelligence algorithm the nerd-practitioners cooked up, which everyone knew was a bust even before the battery of focus groups weighed in. No soul.
Two months after he started, there was a five percent uptick in the corporate site’s traffic. Whether this was due to Mark Spitz’s impersonation of caring or the rollout of the new affiliate program was unclear, but he received a pretty nice e-mail from his supervisor’s supervisor, the woman who had invented his job after some deep thinking at the annual retreat, along with a promise that his good work would be recognized come next quarterly review, which was actually going to be two quarters from now, as technically he was still a probationary hire.
It wasn’t the worst job he’d ever had. He was working there when Last Night slammed down, scratching at his law-exam-prep notebooks at night in the rec room. The New York headquarters of the coffee company was in Chelsea, a mile and a half past the wall. He could only speculate about who had made it out and who still roamed the halls. His social-media persona probably continued to punch the clock, gossiping with the empty air and spell-checking faux-friendly compositions, hitting Send. “Nothing cures the Just Got Exsanguinated Blues like a foam mustache, IMHO.” “Sucks that the funeral pyre is so early in the morning—why don’t you grab a large Sumatra so you can stay awake when you toss your grandma in? Wouldn’t want to sleep through that, LOL!”
By providence Mark Spitz glanced down Reade and spied the restaurant’s distinctive signage two blocks ahead, instantly reassuring. He was halfway to Wonton. His stomach fluttered. In his head he heard the tumultuous community board meeting where the residents complained over the news of its opening: Not in my backyard, it’ll ruin the neighborhood. Bistros and next-level gastro gizmos served Tribeca’s preferred grub, not vulgar chain
operations. No, Mark Spitz thought. This restaurant belonged everywhere. Living out of range of its concoctions was a tragedy. An easily avoidable tragedy, it turned out, given the many convenient locations.
He had time. He cut the bolt and rolled up the metal grate. Depending on the condition of the back exit, he was the first uninfected person inside since Last Night’s grisly embrace. There were plenty other, easier places to loot. Scavengers stripped the supermarkets and groceries and bodegas first, then restaurants, but the science of higher-level foraging never achieved full flower in the city, given the skel concentration before the marines’ arrival. The dead owned the island. Mark Spitz wasn’t hankering for industrial-size cans of buffalo sauce and powdered potatoes, but they were back there in the freezers, doubtless, next to the rotted maple-apple sausage links and salmon patties that had been squeezed into shape and packaged in the silent factories.
He listened for the dead scraping into dumb activity at his noise: nothing. He trained his helmet light where daylight failed, scanning the brass railings circling the family-size banquets, the deep dark wood of the bar with its elbow-fretted layers of lacquer. He scanned the checkerboard tile for any creature untangling its limbs from sub-table roost. Red-and-white checks provided faithful trim on the menus and the signs and the staff uniforms as well, which were not in evidence at this moment, thank God, draping some limp-hoofed wreck bearing plates from the kitchen with a “May I take your order?” gape. The uniforms had made the waiters and waitresses into referees adjudicating obscure food-related competitions. It did get kinda rough on All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp Tuesdays. His father got into a scuffle once re: dibs on a final spoonful of Oriental Shrimp that wobbled in a bath of orange gelatin. The incident became a running joke in his house, called for duty whenever they geared up for a trip to the local franchise. “Feel like punching someone in the face today,” his father said,
launching into a stream of mock-trash talk, and Mark Spitz knew where they were eating that evening.