Zone One

“The city required people to make it go. When citizens flee or die, others must replace them.”

During Mark’s sweeps, he contemplates the makeup of New York City, a city that he has longed to live in since he was a young boy visiting his Uncle Lloyd’s Manhattan apartment. Now that New York City is largely devoid of people, he realizes that it is a defunct. It requires people to populate the space in order to constitute a true city. This is a not a romantic view in Mark’s eyes but rather points to a city’s transitory nature.

“Mark Spitz had noticed on numerous occasions that while the regular skels got referred to as it, the stragglers were awarded male and female pronouns, and he wondered what that meant.”

Throughout the novel, several people note the difference between skel and straggler behavior, although no one can explain how one becomes a skel rather than a straggler. A skel is directly violent, while a straggler tends to be harmless. That distinction makes stragglers more sympathetic to people like Mark, the Lieutenant, and Kaitlyn. As stragglers are frozen in time, performing repeatedly their last tasks before being bitten, they do not pose the same threat as skels. As the stragglers possess a more convincing humanity than their more monstrous counterparts, they have unconsciously been given pronouns by others to demarcate their difference.

“They’re mistakes […] They don’t do what they’re supposed to.”

One of the sympathizers of skels is the Lieutenant, an eccentric leader who confesses to Mark at their first meeting that he does not buy into Buffalo’s orders to kill all infected beings on sight. He entertains the idea that stragglers may just be “mistakes” who can potentially co-exist with humans in their harmless state.

“The wall out there has to work. The barricade is the only metaphor left in this mess. The last one standing.”

The wall becomes a significant symbol to survivors as it performs the literal duty of keeping skels out and protecting the humans inside it. However, it also has figurative value, as it stands for the last fortified action against skels. If the wall is breached in any camp or base, then it suggests the failure of reconstruction efforts and any hope for survival.

“The city would be restored. When they were finished it could be something of what it had been. They would force a resemblance upon it, these new citizens to fire up the metropolis.”

The reconstruction efforts, as communicated by officials in Buffalo, emphasize a desire to return a city to normalcy. For them, it means restoring everything as it once was, a task that may be impossible, given everything the city has endured. The restored city would have to be repopulated with traumatized people who will surely never be the same if they do survive.

“Even if every last skel dropped to the ground tomorrow, did these harrowed pilgrims possess the reserves to pull out of the death spiral? Will the gloomy survivors manage to reproduce, the newborns fatten up? Which of the hoary debilitations and the patient old illnesses will reap them? It was not hard to see the inhabitants of the camps devolve into demented relics too damaged to do anything more than dwindle into extinction in a generation or two.”

Mark wonders if avoiding infection or getting killed by skels are enough to constitute survival. For him, the “death spiral” has already been set off by the ensuing violence following the Last Night; any reconstruction effort would have to contend with the possibility of infertility, starvation, natural illness, and other ails that may befall the people outside of skels. Mark reasons that people may be so traumatized that they will not be able to recover enough from their current state to be effective in rebuilding efforts or see through the troubles ahead.

“He eliminated that which would destroy him. In the broken land, the manifold survival strategies honed over a lifetime of avoiding all consequences rewrote themselves for this new world, or perhaps they had finally discovered their true arena, the field of engagement that they had been created for.”

While Mark did not demonstrate any exceptional survival abilities prior to the Last Night, the desperation to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape seems to unearth some untapped abilities. In this post-apocalyptic environment, he is stronger, faster, and more intelligent—he can kill before getting killed. It is as if spending his former life “avoiding all consequences” had helped to shore up his abilities for survival at this very moment.

“He had suspicions, and every day in this wasteland supplied more evidence: He could not die.”

The events following the Last Night have tapped into Mark’s survival abilities. While the people around him have gradually died, his survival is proof to himself that survival is an anomalous state in the post-apocalyptic world. The statement, “He could not die” points to a quality within Mark that has sustained him all this time.

“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.”

Throughout the novel, Mark references his own mediocrity quite often. In his life prior to the Last Night, he led an uneventful existence and excelled at a job that required little skill. While the non-apocalyptic world possessed an order that did not service Mark, the post-apocalyptic world uprooted this order. In the post-apocalyptic chaos, Mark finds that he is thriving, as he is part of the marginal few who are able to survive it.

“He was a ghost. A straggler.”

On Mark’s way back to Fort Wonton, to settle a dispute about team assignments with the superiors, he takes a detour through a restaurant that he and his family used to frequent when he was a child. While at the restaurant, he thinks about how he haunts the establishment in the same way that stragglers haunt the remains of the city. He often considers how the stragglers’ habit of lingering within spaces that might have a sentimental connection for them is a very human quality. In this passage, rather than hold stragglers to a human standard, he finds that by contrast, he is very much like a straggler himself.

“That’s why I like stragglers. They know what they’re doing. Verve and a sense of purpose. What do we have? Fear and danger. The memories of all the ones you’ve lost. The regular skels, they’re all messed up. But your straggler, your straggler doesn’t have any of that. It’s always inhabiting its perfect moment. They’ve found it—where they belong.”

One of the few who express unlikely compassion for stragglers is Kaitlyn. During a conversation with Mark, she confesses that stragglers seem to possess knowledge about life that the surviving humans do not have. As survivors, they live their lives guided by the fear of dying. The stragglers, however, do not have to worry about dying, as the infection has changed their humanity. In this way, the stragglers are better at living than the surviving humans; they inhabit the world better than humans do now.

“New York City is the greatest city in the world. Imagine what all those heads of state and ambassadors will feel when they see what we’ve accomplished. You’ve accomplished. We brought this place back from the dead. The symbolism alone. If we can do that, we can do anything.”

Ms. Macy, a public relations official sent from Buffalo to report back on the progress on Zone One, offers inspirational speech to Bozeman and Mark. Her job is to paint a picture of successful reconstruction efforts. In this passage, she praises Fort Wonton’s accomplishments, revealing that the successful cleanup of Zone One will have symbolic value for all those who need hope about the future. In this speech, Ms. Macy reveals that her job is more than reporting back to Buffalo; it is also to inspire this same sentiment in the soldiers and sweepers working to clean up Zone One, as they must believe in reconstruction, too, in order to keep going. Mark realizes later that Ms. Macy’s promises are a lie and that the possibility of reconstruction is bleaker than most realize.

“The townspeople, of course, were the real monsters. It was the business of the plague to reveal our family members, friends, and neighbors as the creatures they had always been. And what had the plague exposed him to be?”

In the aftermath of the virus, people who were once family members, friends, or neighbors became unrecognizably violent upon infection. Mark reasons that in a strange way, the virus had unearthed everybody’s most monstrous qualities. He wonders what horrific trait this virus reveals within him, as someone who is unaffected, and if he is any less monstrous than those around him.

“Ever since the soldiers rescued him, he started losing them, the names. They were dust in his pocket. Their eccentricities, the moronic advice vis-à-vis food safety, the locations of the rescue centers they’d obsessed over lasted longer than their names. One night he got the urge to record what he remembered in one of the kiddie armadillo notebooks. It passed. He didn’t stir from his sleeping bag. Let them go, he thought. Except her.”

As a sufferer of PASD (Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder), Mark finds that his trauma response is to forget the times that he has been on the run prior to being rescued and brought to safety by U.S. soldiers. Despite his efforts to document his memories, he cannot seem to remember them effectively. Eventually, he gives up, but he hopes to remember Mim, someone he encountered along the way and who gave him the closest semblance of sustained normality during their time together.

“I’m here because there’s something worth bringing back.”

This quote is offered by Kaitlyn, who believes that humanity is worth restoring to how it was prior to the virus and societal collapse. It’s telling that Kaitlyn arrives as the most privileged member of the team, prior to the outbreak; it makes sense, then, that from her privileged perspective as an affluent Anglo, life and society were in good shape before the fall of humanity. 

“And then there were people like Quiet Storm, who carved their own pawns and rooks out of the weak clay and deployed them across their board, engaged in their own strategic reconstructions. Mark Spitz saw her mosaic, in its immense tonnage, outlasting all of Buffalo’s schemes, the operations under way and the ones yet to be articulated. What readership did she address? Gods and aliens, anyone who looks down at the right time, from the right perspective. To Anyone Who Can Read This: Stay Away. Please Help. Remember Me.”

While volunteering for the Northeast Corridor op, Mark met Quiet Storm, a woman who was obsessed with rearranging the cars along the I-95 to spell out an unknown message that can only be viewed from above. When Mark thinks about her a year later, he expresses admiration for leaving her own original mark on the world. He assumes that the message is likely both a warning and a plea to not forget her.

“Kaitlyn made a toast to Zone One and the new world they chipped from the stone, building by building, room by room, skel by skel. The intent of the caricature, Mark Spitz thought as he listened to her story, is to capture [what] we overlook every day. Maybe, she said, we can unsee the monsters again.”

During Kaitlyn’s birthday, she reveals the full story of her Last Night, which includes the horrific scene of her escaping from her train’s quarantine, once the virus got too out of hand for the U.S. military. In her toast, she makes a joke about the irony of reconstruction efforts that require acts of destruction (of buildings and skels) to complete. She explains that the skels are not the most horrific things she has witnessed but that humans are responsible for some of the most monstrous events. She suggests that perhaps one day they can “unsee the monsters again” and find some peace without violence.

“If one skel broke the rules, there had to be others.”

When a seemingly harmless straggler suddenly bites Gary with unprecedented swiftness, Mark realizes that stragglers have changed. Previously thought to be non-violent, the straggler that they encounter at the fortune-teller shop has defied what they know to be true about stragglers. From Mark’s experiences on the run, he knows that if this straggler can go against predictable habits, then other stragglers can be capable of sudden violence as well.

“The city did not care for your story, the particular narrative of your reinvention; it took them all in, every immigrant in their strivings, regardless of bloodline, the identity of their homeland, the number of coins in their pocket. Nor did this plague discriminate; your blood fell instantly or your blood held out longer, but your blood always failed in the end.”

All this time, Mark and the other sweepers have had domain over New York City, but upon the fall of Fort Wonton, they realize that the city is much bigger and more complicated than they understand. Historically, the city has taken in people of all statuses and origins; in the same way, Mark argues, “Nor did this plague discriminate,” suggesting that a city like New York City enables the inevitable gathering of skels as it once did its immigrants. The declaration that “your blood always failed in the end” refers both to the inevitability of being infected as well as the eventual mixing of diverse communities that once constituted the city.

“Mark Spitz’s idea of what lay beyond the Zone, the portrait created by the incessant gunfire, was dwarfed by the spectacle before him. The wall had kept this reality from him. It would not hold, it was obvious.”

During Mark’s time sweeping Zone One, he is so committed to his task and the promise of reconstruction that he does not realize the reality outside of Fort Wonton’s walls. The occasional gunfire has falsely convinced him that the soldiers presiding over the walls have been keeping the skels at bay. Little did Mark know that the skels had been amassing. 

“Close to the ground, almost at their level, he read their inhuman scroll as an argument: I was here, I am here now, I have existed, I exist still. This is our town.”

As Mark watches the parade of skels marching through the streets, they appear to unfold like a long scroll. Their numbers illustrate their insistence of their presence in the city.

“Of course he was smiling. This was where he belonged.”

While escaping with Bozeman, Ms. Macy, and other soldiers, Ms. Macy reveals that the progress she had initially reported about reconstruction was a lie. Despite the bleakness of this revelation, Mark cannot help but smile, a reaction that Ms. Macy finds odd and misplaced. Mark realizes that he flourishes at these peak moments of danger and desperation. He is most like himself when he is on the run. While the world is falling apart, he discovers that apocalypse, in contrast to normalcy, suits him.

“Why they’d tried to fix this island in the first place, he did not see now. Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.”

When Mark realizes that the reported progress on reconstruction efforts from Buffalo is a lie, he wonders about the purpose of trying to fix something that is inevitably driven towards its end. By pretending that the city could be patched up, everyone had deluded themselves of the fact that destruction was not all around them. This delusion prevents them from seeing the world for what it has become.