Station Eleven

“When she came home crying today,” Michael said, “I found myself thinking, maybe it’s time we stopped telling them these crazy stories. Maybe it’s time we let go.”

“I don’t want to let go,” Jeevan said.

“Is someone calling you?” Daria asked.

“I hope not,” Jeevan said, but then he heard it too.

They followed him back to the motel, where a man had just arrived on horseback, his arm around a woman slumped over in the saddle.

“My wife’s been shot,” he said, and in the way he spoke, Jeevan understood that he loved her. When they pulled the woman down she was shivering despite the heat of the evening, half-conscious, her eyelids fluttering. They carried her into the motel room that served as Jeevan’s surgery. Michael lit the oil lamps and the room filled with yellow light.

“You’re the doctor?” the man who’d brought her asked. He looked familiar, but Jeevan couldn’t place him. He was perhaps in his forties, his hair braided in cornrows that matched his wife’s.

“Closest thing we’ve got,” Jeevan said. “What’s your name?”

“Edward. Are you saying you’re not a real doctor?”

“I trained as a paramedic, before the flu. I apprenticed to a doctor near here for five years, till he decided to move farther south. I’ve picked up what I can.”

“But you didn’t go to med school,” Edward said in tones of misery.

“Well, I’d love to, but I understand they’ve stopped accepting applications.”

“I’m sorry.” Edward wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief. “I’ve heard you’re good. I mean no offense. She’s just, she’s been shot—”

“Let me see if I can help.”

Jeevan hadn’t seen a gunshot wound in some time. By Year Fifteen, the ammunition was running low, guns used rarely and only for hunting. “Tell me what happened,” he said, mostly to distract Edward.

“The prophet happened.”

“I don’t know who that is.” At least the wound was fairly clean, a hole where the bullet had entered her abdomen, no exit wound. She’d lost some blood. Her pulse was weak but steady. “What prophet?”

“I thought the man’s legend preceded him,” Edward said. He was holding his wife’s hand. “He’s been all over the south.”

“I’ve heard of a dozen prophets over the years. It’s not an uncommon occupation.” Jeevan found a bottle of moonshine in the cupboard.

“You sterilizing the equipment with that?”

“I sterilized the needle in boiling water earlier, but I’m going to sterilize it again in this.”

“The needle? You’re sewing her up without getting the bullet out?”

“Too dangerous,” Jeevan said softly. “Look, the bleeding’s just about stopped. If I go in there looking for it, she might bleed out. Safer to leave it in.” He poured some moonshine into a bowl and rubbed his hands with it, ran needle and thread through the alcohol.

“Can I do anything?” Edward was hovering.

“The three of you can hold her still while I’m sewing. So there was a prophet,” he said. He’d found it best to distract the people who came in with his patients.

“He came through this afternoon,” Edward said. “Him and his followers, maybe twenty of them altogether.”

Jeevan remembered where he’d seen Edward before. “You live up on the old plantation, don’t you? I went up there with the doctor a few times, back in my apprenticeship days.”

“Yes, the plantation, exactly. We’re out on the fields, and a friend of mine comes running, says there’s a group of twenty or twenty-two approaching, walking down the road singing some kind of weird hymn. After a while I hear it too, and eventually they reach us. A group of them, smiling, walking all together in a clump. By the time they reach us, they’ve stopped singing, and there are fewer of them than I’m expecting, maybe more like fifteen.” Edward was silent for a moment as Jeevan poured alcohol over the woman’s stomach. She moaned, and a thin trickle of blood left the wound.

“Keep talking.”

“So we ask them who they are, and their leader smiles at me and says, ‘We are the light.’ ”

“The light?” Jeevan drew the needle through the woman’s skin. “Don’t look,” he said, when Edward swallowed. “Just hold her still.”

“That’s when I knew who he was. Stories had reached us, from traders and such. These people, they’re ruthless. They’ve got some crazy theology, they’re armed and they take what they want. So I’m trying to stay cool, we all are, I can see my neighbors have realized what we’re dealing with too. I ask if there’s something they need or if this is just a social call, and the prophet smiles at me and says they have something we want, and they’d be willing to trade this thing we want for guns and ammunition.”

“You still have ammo?”

“Did until today. There was a fair stockpile at the plantation. And as he’s talking, I’m looking around, and I realize I don’t know where my kid is. He was with his mother, but where’s his mother? I ask them, ‘What is it you have that you think we want?’ ”

“Then what?”

“Then the group parts down the middle, and there’s my son. They’ve got him. The kid’s five, okay? And they’ve got him bound and gagged. And I’m terrified now, because where’s his mother?”

“So you gave them the weapons?”