The maintenance of sanity required some recalibrations having to do with memory and sight. There were things Clark trained himself not to think about. Everyone he’d ever known outside the airport, for instance. And here at the airport, Air Gradia 452, silent in the distance near the perimeter fence, by unspoken agreement never discussed. Clark tried not to look at it and sometimes almost managed to convince himself that it was empty, like all of the other planes out there. Don’t think of that unspeakable decision, to keep the jet sealed rather than expose a packed airport to a fatal contagion. Don’t think about what enforcing that decision may have required. Don’t think about those last few hours on board.
Snow fell every few days after Roy left, but Elizabeth insisted on keeping a runway clear at all times. She was beginning to stare in a terrible way that made everyone afraid of her, so at first she was out there alone, shoveling the snow on Runway Seven by the hour, but then a few people went out to join her because celebrity still carried a certain currency and there she was all alone out there, gorgeous and single—and also, why not? Physical labor outdoors was preferable to wandering the same hatefully unchanging concourses or sitting around thinking about all the beloved people they were never going to see again or convincing themselves they heard voices coming from the Air Gradia jet. Eventually there were nine or ten people maintaining the runway, a core group who attracted volunteers from the periphery every now and again. Why not, though, really? Even if Elizabeth’s quarantine theory was too wonderful to be true—the idea that somewhere things continued on as before, untouched by the virus, children going to school and to birthday parties and adults going to work and meeting for cocktails in some other place, everyone talking about what a shame it was that North America had been lost but then the conversation eventually turning to sports, politics, the weather—there was still the military, with its secrets and its underground shelters, its stockpiles of fuel and medicine and food.
“They’ll need a clear runway to land on when they come for us,” Elizabeth said. “They’re going to come for us. You know that, right?”
“It’s possible,” Clark said, trying to be kind.
“If anyone was coming for us,” Dolores said, “I think they’d be here by now.”
But they did see an aircraft after the collapse, just one. On Day Sixty-five a helicopter crossed the sky in the far distance, the faintest vibration of sound moving rapidly from north to south, and they stood staring for some time after it passed. They kept up a vigil for a while after that, waiting outside in teams of two with brightly colored T-shirts to flag down aircraft in daylight, a signal fire burning all night, but nothing crossed the sky except birds and shooting stars.
The night sky was brighter than it had been. On the clearest nights the stars were a cloud of light across the breadth of the sky, extravagant in their multitudes. When Clark first noticed this, he wondered if he was possibly hallucinating. He assumed he held deep reservoirs of unspeakable damage that might at any moment blossom into insanity, the way his grandmother’s bone cancer had bloomed dark over the X-rays in her final months. But after a couple of weeks he felt that the thing with the stars was too consistent to be a hallucination—also too extreme, the way the airplanes cast shadows even when the moon was only a sliver—so he risked mentioning it to Dolores.
“It’s not your imagination,” Dolores said. He’d begun to think of her as his closest friend. They’d spent a pleasantly companionable day indoors, cleaning, and now they were helping build a bonfire with branches someone had dragged in from the woods. She explained it to him. One of the great scientific questions of Galileo’s time was whether the Milky Way was made up of individual stars. Impossible to imagine this ever having been in question in the age of electricity, but the night sky was a wash of light in Galileo’s age, and it was a wash of light now. The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricity. The thought sent shivers up Clark’s spine.
“The lights will come back on someday,” Elizabeth kept insisting, “and then we’ll all finally get to go home.” But was there actually any reason to believe this?
The citizens of the airport had taken to meeting at the bonfire every night, an unspoken tradition that Clark hated and loved. What he loved was the conversation, the moments of lightness or even just silence, the not being by himself. But sometimes the small circle of people and firelight seemed only to accentuate the emptiness of the continent, the loneliness of it, a candle flickering in vast darkness.
It’s surprising how quickly the condition of living out of a carry-on suitcase on a bench by a departure gate can begin to seem normal.
Tyler wore a sweater of Elizabeth’s that went to his knees, the increasingly filthy sleeves rolled up. He kept to himself mostly, reading his comic books or Elizabeth’s copy of the New Testament.
They traded languages. By Day Eighty most of the people who’d arrived without English were learning it, in informal groups, and the English speakers were studying one or more of the languages carried here by Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Air France. Clark was learning French from Annette, who’d been a Lufthansa flight attendant. He whispered phrases to himself as he went about the chores of daily existence, the hauling of water and washing of clothes in the sink, learning to skin a deer, building bonfires, cleaning. Je m’appelle Clark. J’habite dans l’aeroport. Tu me manques. Tu me manques. Tu me manques.
A rape on the night of Day Eighty-five, the airport woken after midnight by a woman’s scream. They tied the man up until sunrise and then drove him into the forest at gunpoint, told him if he returned he’d be shot. “I’ll die out here alone,” he said, sobbing, and no one disagreed but what else could they do?
“Why has no one come here?” Dolores asked. “That’s what I keep wondering. I don’t mean rescue. I just mean people wandering in.” The airport wasn’t especially remote. Severn City was no more than twenty miles away. No one walked in, but on the other hand, who was left? Early reports had put the mortality rate at 99 percent.
“And then one has to account for societal collapse,” Garrett said. “There might be no one left.” He was a businessman from the east coast of Canada. He’d been wearing the same suit since his flight had landed, except now he was pairing it with a Beautiful Northern Michigan T-shirt from the gift shop. He was bright-eyed in a way that Clark found disconcerting. “The violence, maybe cholera and typhoid, all the infections that were cured by antibiotics back when it was possible to obtain antibiotics, and then things like bee stings, asthma … Does anyone have a cigarette?”
“You’re funny,” Annette said. She’d run out of nicotine patches on Day Four. During a particularly rough stretch a few weeks back, she’d tried to smoke cinnamon from the coffee kiosk.
“Was that a no? And diabetes,” Garrett said, apparently forgetting the cigarette. “HIV. High blood pressure. Types of cancer that responded to chemotherapy, when chemotherapy was available.”
“No more chemotherapy,” Annette said. “I’ve thought of that too.”
“Everything happens for a reason,” Tyler said. Clark hadn’t noticed his approach. Tyler had been wandering the airport of late, and he had a way of moving so quietly that he seemed to materialize out of nowhere. He spoke so rarely that it was easy to forget he was there. “That’s what my mom said,” he added when everyone stared at him.
“Yeah, but that’s because Elizabeth’s a fucking lunatic,” Garrett said. Clark had noticed that he had a filter problem.
“In front of the kid?” Annette was twisting her Lufthansa neck scarf between her fingers. “That’s his mother you’re talking about. Tyler, don’t listen to him.” Tyler only stared at Garrett.
“I’m sorry,” Garrett said to Tyler. “I was out of line.” Tyler didn’t blink.
“You know,” Clark said, “I think we should consider sending out a scouting party.”
The scouts left at dawn on Day One Hundred: Tyrone, Dolores, and Allen, a schoolteacher from Chicago. There was some debate over whether the scouting party was actually a good idea. They’d been able to kill enough deer to live on and they had what they needed here, barely, except for soap and batteries, which they’d run out of, and what could possibly be out there except the pandemic? Nonetheless, the scouting party set out armed with Tyrone’s TSA handgun and some road maps.
The silence of Day One Hundred. Waiting for the scouting party to return with supplies, or return carrying the flu, or return t