“Same things we see every flu season,” the epidemiologist said, “just worse.”
“So, for example …?”
“Aches and pains. A sudden high fever. Difficulty breathing. Look,” the epidemiologist said, “it’s a fast incubation period. If you’re exposed, you’re sick in three or four hours and dead in a day or two.”
“We’re going to take a quick commercial break,” the newscaster said.
The airline staff had no information. They were tight-lipped and frightened. They distributed food vouchers, which by power of suggestion made everyone hungry, so passengers formed lines to buy greasy cheese quesadillas and nacho plates at Concourse B’s only restaurant, which was ostensibly Mexican. The two young women in the kiosk continued to serve hot drinks and mildly stale baked goods, frowning every so often at their useless phones. Clark bought his way into the Skymiles Lounge and found Elizabeth Colton in an armchair near a television screen. Tyler sat cross-legged on the floor nearby, killing space aliens on a Nintendo console.
“It’s crazy,” Clark said to Elizabeth, words falling hopelessly short.
She was watching the news, her hands clasped at her throat.
“It’s unprecedented,” Elizabeth said. “In all of human history …,” she trailed off, shaking her head. Tyler groaned softly; he’d suffered a setback in the alien wars. They sat for a while in silence, watching, until Clark couldn’t watch anymore and excused himself to find more nachos.
A final plane was landing, an Air Gradia jet, but as Clark watched, it made a slow turn on the tarmac and moved away from instead of toward the terminal building. It parked in the far distance, and no ground crew went to meet it. Clark abandoned his nachos and went to the window. It occurred to him that the Air Gradia jet was as far away from the terminal as it could possibly go. This was where he was standing when the announcement came: for public-health reasons, the airport was closing immediately. There would be no flights for the indefinite future. All passengers were asked to collect their bags at Baggage Claim, to leave the premises in an orderly fashion, and to please not flip out.
“This can’t be happening,” the passengers said to each other and to themselves, over nacho platters and in angry clusters in front of vending machines. They swore at airport management, at the TSA, at the airlines, at their useless phones, furious because fury was the last defense against understanding what the news stations were reporting. Beneath the fury was something literally unspeakable, the television news carrying an implication that no one could yet bring themselves to consider. It was possible to comprehend the scope of the outbreak, but it wasn’t possible to comprehend what it meant. Clark stood by the terminal’s glass wall in the Mexican restaurant, watching the stillness of the Air Gradia jet in the far distance, and he realized later that if he didn’t understand at that moment why it was out there alone, it was only because he didn’t want to know.
The workers at the restaurants and the gift shop chased out their customers and locked down steel shutters and gates, walked away without looking back. The passengers around Clark began departing too, an exodus that merged with the slow processions leaving the other two concourses. Elizabeth and Tyler emerged from the Skymiles Lounge.
“Are you leaving?” Clark asked. It still wasn’t entirely real.
“Not yet,” Elizabeth said. She looked a little deranged, but so did everyone else. “Where would we go? You saw the news.” Everyone who’d been watching the news knew that roads everywhere were impassable, cars abandoned where they’d run out of gas, all commercial airlines shut down, no trains or buses. Most of them were leaving the airport anyway, because the voice over the intercom had said that they should.
“I think I’ll stay here for the moment,” Clark said. A few others apparently had had the same thought, and some who’d left returned after a half hour with reports that there was no ground transportation. The others had set out walking for Severn City, they said. Clark waited for an airport official to come and chase all of them away, the hundred-odd passengers who remained at the terminal, but none did. An Air Gradia agent was in tears by the ticket counter. The screen over her head still read AIR GRADIA FLIGHT 452 NOW ARRIVING, but when her radio crackled Clark heard the word quarantine.
Half of the remaining passengers had tied scarves or T-shirts over their mouths and noses, but it had been hours by now, and if they were all going to die of flu, Clark thought, wouldn’t at least some of them be sick already?
The passengers who remained in the airport were mostly foreign. They looked out the windows at the airplanes on which they’d arrived—Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air France—parked end to end on the tarmac. They spoke in languages Clark didn’t understand.
A little girl did cartwheels up and down the length of Concourse B.
Clark walked the length of the airport, restless, and was stunned to see that the security checkpoints were unmanned. He walked through and back three or four times, just because he could. He’d thought it would be liberating but all he felt was fear. He found himself staring at everyone he saw, looking for symptoms. No one seemed sick, but could they be carrying it? He found a corner as far from his fellow passengers as possible and stayed there for some time.
“We just have to wait,” Elizabeth said, when he came to sit with her again. “Surely by tomorrow morning we’ll see the National Guard.” Arthur had always liked her optimism, Clark remembered.
No one emerged from the Air Gradia jet on the tarmac.
A young man was doing push-ups by Gate B20. He’d do a set of ten, then lie on his back and stare unblinking at the ceiling for a while, then another ten, etc.
Clark found a discarded New York Times on a bench and read Arthur’s obituary. Noted film and stage actor, dead at fifty-one. A life summed up in a series of failed marriages—Miranda, Elizabeth, Lydia—and a son, whose present absorption in his handheld Nintendo was absolute. When Arthur collapsed onstage, someone from the audience had performed CPR, the obituary said, but that audience member remained unidentified. Clark folded the paper into his suitcase.
Clark’s grasp of Midwestern American geography was shaky. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was. He’d gathered from the items on offer at the souvenir shop that they were somewhere near Lake Michigan, which he could picture because he retained an internal bird’s-eye snapshot of the Great Lakes from his time in Toronto, but he’d never heard of Severn City. The airport seemed very new. Beyond the tarmac and the runways he could see only a line of trees. He tried to pinpoint his location on his iPhone, but the map wouldn’t load. No one’s phones were working, but word spread that there was a pay phone down in Baggage Claim. Clark stood in line for a half hour and then dialed all his numbers, but there were only busy signals and endless ringing. Where was everyone? The man behind him in line sighed loudly, so Clark gave up the phone and spent some time wandering the airport.
When he was tired of walking he returned to a bench he’d staked out earlier by Gate B17, lay on his back on the carpet between the bench and a wall of glass. Snow began to fall in the late afternoon. Elizabeth and Tyler were still in the Skymiles Lounge. He knew he should be sociable and talk to them, but he wanted to be alone, or as alone as he could be in an airport with a hundred other terrified and weeping people. He ate a dinner of corn chips and chocolate bars from a vending machine, spent some time listening to Coltrane on his iPod. He was thinking of Robert, his boyfriend of three months. Clark wanted very much to see him again. What was Robert doing at this moment? Clark stared up at the news. Around ten p.m. he brushed his teeth, returned to his spot by Gate B17, stretched out on the carpet and tried to imagine he was home in his bed.
He woke at three in the morning, shivering. The news had worsened. The fabric was unraveling. It will be hard to come back from this, he thought, because in those first days it was still inconceivable that civilization might not come back from this at all.
Clark was watching NBC when a teenager approached him. He’d noticed her earlier, sitting by herself with her head in her hands. She looked about seventeen and had a diamond nose stud that caught the light.
“I’m sorry to ask,” she said, “but do you have any Effexor?”
“Effexor?”
“I’ve run out,” she said. “I’m asking everyone.”
“I’m sorry, I haven’t any. What is it?”
“An antidepressant,” the girl said. “I thought I’d be home in Arizona by now.”
“I’m so sorry. How awful for you.”
“Well,” the girl said, “thanks anyway,” and Clark watched her walk away to make inquiries of a couple only slightly older than she was, who listened for a moment and then shook their heads in unison.