The following day, a Saturday, the Omega Unit bumps into another team, the Bravo Unit, while on duty. While PASD has a variety of symptoms, Mark is afflicted most acutely with frequent nightmares. As a result of this experience, Mark, like most of the survivors, struggles with PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. When Mark returns home after the end of the gambling binge, he finds his mother bent over his father 'gnawing away with ecstatic fervor on a flap of his intestines' in what becomes known as the Last Night before the total collapse of society. So consumed by their gambling, Mark and Kyle fail to realize that the plague is spreading rapidly. In an extended flashback sequence, it is revealed that Mark was at a casino with his friend Kyle when the plague broke out. Thankfully, Mark is rescued by Gary, and the Omega Unit continues on its mission. Mark is joined in this endeavor by two other survivors named Kaitlyn and Gary, and together three form the Omega Unit.Īt the beginning of the novel, Mark is nearly killed by a group of four skels who had been trapped in a locked room of an office building. Told over a three-day period–with frequent flashbacks to Mark's life before the plague and in the early days following–the plot follows Mark as he works as a 'sweeper' tasked with killing the remaining skels and stragglers in a fortified area of Manhattan named Zone One. And then things start to go terribly wrong… At once a chilling horror story and a literary novel by a contemporary master, Zone One is a dazzling portrait of modern civilization in all its wretched, shambling glory.Zone Onefollows protagonist Mark Spitz as he struggles to survive in the aftermath of a plague that has turned the vast majority of the population into zombified 'skels' and 'stragglers.

Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street-aka Zone One.

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys: A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead