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It had been rendered foreign by the storm, all snow and shadows, black silhouettes of trees, the underwater shine of a glass greenhouse dome.
“Has anyone been informed? Who do we call?” “I should call his lawyer,” the producer said. This solution was inarguable, but so depressing that the group drank for several minutes in silence before anyone could bring themselves to speak.
The name the news outlets were going with—the Georgia Flu—had struck Jeevan as disarmingly pretty.
If it had been anyone other than Hua, Jeevan wouldn’t have believed it, but he had never known a man with a greater gift for understatement. If Hua said there was an epidemic, then epidemic wasn’t a strong enough word.
AN INCOMPLETE LIST:
There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no
place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels.
By then most people had settled somewhere, because the gasoline had all gone stale by Year Three and you can’t keep walking forever.
“People want what was best about the world,”
remembered the stories they’d been told about WiFi and the impossible-to-imagine Cloud, wondered if the Internet might still be out there somehow,
The Symphony was insufferable, hell was other flutes or other people or whoever had used the last of the rosin or whoever missed the most rehearsals, but the truth was that the Symphony was their only home.
Because survival is insufficient.
“that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason.”
Have you considered the perfection of the virus?”
I submit, my beloved people, that such a perfect agent of death could only be divine.
Law & Order—is there an actor in New York who hasn’t worked on Law & Order?—that lands him an agent and turns into a recurring role on a different Law & Order, one of the spin-offs.
but by the time she gets home they’re all wrong, the black skirt shining with acrylic fibers, the blouse in a synthetic fabric that clings unpleasantly, everything cheap-looking and highly flammable.
The disorientation of meeting one’s sagging contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls, under-eye pouches, unexpected lines, and then the terrible realization that one probably looks just as old as they do.
Do you remember commercials? DIALLO: I do, regrettably.
I’m thinking of a town we visited once just outside our usual territory, north of Kincardine, and then they tell you that they were saved from the Georgia Flu and survived the collapse because they’re superior people and free from sin, and what can you say to that? It isn’t logical. You can’t argue with it. You just remember your own lost family and either want to cry or harbor murderous thoughts.
rumors held that the south was exceptionally dangerous, bristling with guns, and what might they have done to survive down there?—but
“Yeah, but it’s a dumb move. Someone always got executed in the bathroom.”
“If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”
Hell is the absence of the people you long for.
this was the pleasure of being alive in Year Twenty, this calmer age. For the first ten or twelve years after the collapse, he would have been much more likely to shoot them on sight.
“Unsparing,” Clark said. “That could mean anything.” But probably nothing good, he decided. No one’s ever described as being unsparingly kind.
“YOU’VE GOT TO STOP singing that song,” Frank said. “Sorry, but it’s the perfect song.” “I don’t disagree, but you’ve got a terrible singing voice.”
the entire history of being stranded in airports up to that point was also a history of eventually becoming unstranded,
The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.
Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky.
Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers.
They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be much worse.”
“I think maybe he’s picked up some strange ideas about, well, about what happened.” He still had no words for it, he realized. No one spoke of it directly. “What kind of strange ideas?” “He thinks the pandemic happened for a reason,” Clark said. “It did happen for a reason.” “Well, right, but I mean a reason besides the fact that almost everyone on earth caught an extremely deadly swine-flu mutation. He seems to think there was some sort of divine judgment involved.”
“I’ve heard of a dozen prophets over the years. It’s not an uncommon occupation.”
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.
it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.
He has no expectation of seeing an airplane rise again in his lifetime, but is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain?
