Free Zone One by Colson Whitehead

hooks: cowboys and robots from chart-busting sci-fi trilogies, ethnically obscure kiddie-show mascots, jungle beasts with long tails intended for the flirty tickling of faces. Kingdoms’ worth of princesses and their plastic accoutrements, stamped out on the royal assembly line, and the requisite Naughty Nurse suspended in the dead air, tilting in her rounds. Do Not Expose to Open Flame. For Amusement Only. The masks had been made in Korea, delivering back to the West the faces they had given the rest of the globe: presidents, screen stars, and mass murderers. The rubber filament inevitably snapped from the staple after five minutes. The graft wouldn’t take.
    Gary crouched on the floor of the party-supply store and slit open the belly of a goat-shaped piñata with his blade. “We didn’t know they made this candy anymore.”
    Mark Spitz removed his glove and rolled some bonbons in his hand. They were flavor combos of fruit he’d never heard of, the habitués of a jungle on another damp hemisphere. “That stuff has been in there since before you were born,” he said.
    Kaitlyn gently removed the piñata from Gary’s hands. “It’s tiresome, babysitting.”
    Gary proposed that the human body required sugar after periods of extended exertion, and was rebuffed. Kaitlyn pulled out her notebook. “Mark Spitz?”
    He went looking for the creature’s ID. The general theory contended that stragglers haunted what they knew. The where was obvious: You were standing in it. But the why was always somewhere else. This skel they’d discovered by the row of helium tanks, her hand dangling on a valve. She was wearing a gorilla costume. The costume draped off her shoulders, deflated on her shrunken form. She wasn’t wearing the head, which was nowhere in sight.
    He was exhausted—they’d hit two res high-rises back-to-back, and there had been a lot of dead pets to lug down—but he couldn’t help sleuthing. Why did this cipher stake out this store, and this particular spot? On the wall by the register, next to the taped-up first-day-of-business good-luck dollar bills, a photograph captured a burly man surrounded by smiling children who nipped at the bag of candy he held an inch out of reach. The owner, let’s say. Mark Spitz glimpsed no family resemblance before he eliminated the straggler’s face. Was she the spouse, an employee or former employee, and if so, what about this place shouldered its way into her mentality, past the plague, summoning her here? Then there was the suit. Had she been infected while wearing the gorilla outfit, or put it on as she got sicker and sicker with the disease, and if this was the case, what made her select it as her shroud? Before the plague, the sight of someone walking the street in that costume wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow—Manhattan was Manhattan—and in its aftermath, such a vision added only a small portion of the prevailing macabre. Why her post by the helium tank, the paw on the valve that complicated the mystery? When Mark Spitz shot her in the head she brought down the tank with her. The gong of the thing hitting the floor was the loudest sound they’d heard in weeks, in that silent city. They jumped.
    Mark Spitz unzipped the suit to check for a wallet. The skelwas nude, her body mottled with brown plague spots. An apple-size chunk of meat was missing from her forearm. Perhaps the explanation of her outfit and how she made it to this spot was plausible in the context of her former life. But there was no one to tell her story. Mark Spitz’s bullet had transformed everything above her neck into globules of toxic fluid, gristle, and shards of bone.
    Kaitlyn suggested Mark Spitz take a look-see in the back for an ID. He went into the recesses of the store. No light seeped from the street. He switched on his torch. The office conformed to the familiar disarray of small downtown businesses. Management had piled invoices, overstock, and decades of tax returns into a fortification