Station Eleven

“We gave them the guns, they gave me my boy. Another group of them had taken my wife. That’s why there were fifteen there in front of me and not twenty. They’d taken her off down the road ahead as a kind of, I don’t know, insurance policy”—his voice thick with disgust—“and they tell us if no one comes after them, my wife will come walking down the road in an hour or two, unharmed. They say they’re traveling out of the area, headed north, and this is the last we’ll see of them. All the time smiling, so peaceful, like they’ve done nothing wrong. So we get the boy, they leave with the guns and ammo, and we wait. Three hours later she still hasn’t come down the road, so a few of us go after them and we find her shot on the roadside.”

“Why did they do it?” The woman was awake, Jeevan realized. She was crying silently, her eyes closed. One last stitch.

“She said the prophet wanted her to stay with them,” Edward said, “go north with them and become a wife to one of his men, and she said no, so the prophet shot her. Not to kill her, obviously, at least not quickly. Just to cause her pain.”

Jeevan clipped the thread and pressed a clean towel to the woman’s stomach. “A bandage,” he said to Daria, but she was already by his side with strips of an old sheet. He wrapped the woman carefully.

“She’ll be okay,” he said, “provided it doesn’t get infected, and there’s no reason to think it will. Bullets are self-sterilizing, the heat of them. We were careful with the alcohol. But you two should stay here for a few days.”

“I’m grateful,” Edward said.

“I do what I can.”

When he’d cleaned up and the woman had fallen into a fitful sleep, her husband by her side, Jeevan put the bloody needle in a saucepan and crossed the road to the river. He knelt in the grass to fill the pan with water and returned to the motel, where he lit the makeshift oven in front of the room he lived in and set the saucepan on top of it. He sat on a nearby picnic table to wait for the water to boil.

Jeevan filled a pipe with tobacco from his shirt pocket, a soothing ritual. Trying to think of nothing but the stars and the sound of the river, trying not to think about the woman’s pain and her blood and the kind of people who would shoot out of spite and leave her lying there on the roadside. McKinley was south of the old plantation. If the prophet was true to his word then he and his people were moving away from McKinley, headed into the unsuspecting north. Why north, Jeevan wondered, and how far would they go? He was thinking of Toronto, of walking through snow. Thoughts of Toronto led inevitably back to thoughts of his brother, a tower by the lake, ghost city crumbling, the Elgin Theatre still displaying the posters for King Lear, the memory of that night at the beginning and the end of everything when Arthur died.

Daria had come up behind him. He started when she touched his arm. The water was boiling and had been for some time, the needle probably sterile by now. Daria took his hand in her own and kissed it gently. “It’s late,” she murmured. “Come to bed.”

47

CLARK AT SEVENTY, in Year Nineteen: he was more tired than he had been, and he moved slowly. His joints and hands ached, especially in cold weather. He shaved his entire head now, not just the left side, and wore four rings through his left ear. His dear friend Annette had died of an unknown illness in Year Seventeen, and he wore her Lufthansa neck scarf in memory. He wasn’t specifically sad anymore, but he was aware of death at all times.

There was an armchair in the museum from which he could see almost the entire tarmac. The preparation area where the hunters hung their deer and boar and rabbits from a rack improvised on the underside of the wing of a 737, carving meat for the people and feeding innards to the dogs. The graveyard between Runways Six and Seven, each grave marked by an airplane tray table driven into the ground, details of the deceased carved into the tray’s hard plastic. He’d left some wildflowers on Annette’s grave that morning and he could see them from here, a splash of blue and purple. The line of jets parked end to end on the periphery, streaked now with rust. The gardens, half-hidden from view by the airplanes parked at gates. The cornfield, Air Gradia 452 alone in the distance, the chain-link perimeter fence with its coils of concertina wire and beyond that the forest, the same trees he’d been staring at for two decades.

He’d recently made all of the Water Inc. 360° reports available for public viewing, on the theory that everyone involved was almost certainly dead. The former executives in the airport read these with great interest. There were three reports altogether, one each for the subordinates, peers, and superiors of a probably long-deceased Water Inc. executive named Dan.