Zone One

At Fort Wonton, the survivors distinguish between skels and stragglers to demarcate their varying levels of remaining humanity. The skels are hostile and attack at first sight, whereas the stragglers appear listless and paralyzed by their surroundings. While the orders from Buffalo are to kill every skel regardless of their demeanor, the Lieutenant expressed sympathy for the stragglers. He described the stragglers as “mistakes” and that “They don’t do what they’re supposed to” (119), which is to take apart human flesh. The Lieutenant seemed to express skepticism about the need to kill the stragglers, as they did not pose any immediate threats. He had also expressed that nobody seems to know how skels and stragglers are made but that ninety-nine percent happen to be skels. He said, “Buffalo’s still trying to figure out what makes one person become your regular pain-in-the-ass skel […] and what makes another into a straggler. That one percent” (119). The rarity of straggler occurrence seems to suggest the possibility of human co-existence with straggler populations as well. This is an idea that both Mark and the Lieutenant entertain.

The distinction between skels and stragglers signify fears of outside populations, in a manner akin to xenophobia. While both groups make up infected parties, the harmlessness of the latter seem to be of no consequence to everyone else and are assigned the same fate as the skels. The treatment of skels and stragglers is an exaggerated reflection of nationalist attitudes towards foreign bodies, in which the violence towards skels justifies equal force towards the stragglers. At the end of the novel, a parade of skels and stragglers descend upon Fort Wonton, and “Every race, color, and creed was represented in this congregation that funneled down the avenue” (302). The emphasis on the diversity of skels and stragglers points to the fearful outside force breaching the walls of a governmental space. This image depicting the amassing of skel and straggler populations critiques the fixity of national boundaries, as the outside will always inevitably breach the interior.