Station Eleven

“Will you be staying here awhile?” Clark asked.

“If you’ll have us,” Jeremy said. “We’ve been separated from our people.”

“Wait till you hear who their people are,” Sullivan said. “You remember those newspapers out of New Petoskey?”

“The Traveling Symphony,” Charlie said.

“These people of yours,” Sullivan was wiggling his fingers at the baby, Annabel, who stared past his fingers at his face. “You didn’t tell me how you lost them.”

“It’s a complicated story,” Charlie said. “There was a prophet. He said he was from here.”

From here? Had the airport ever had a prophet? Clark felt certain he’d remember a prophet. “What was his name?”

“I’m not sure anyone knows,” Jeremy said. He began describing the blond-haired man who had held sway over the town of St. Deborah by the Water, ruling with a combination of charisma, violence, and cherry-picked verses from the Book of Revelation. He stopped when he saw the look on Clark’s face. “Is something wrong?”

Clark rose unsteadily from the armchair. They stared at him as he made his way to the museum’s first display case.

“Is his mother still alive?” Clark was looking at Elizabeth’s passport, at its photograph from the inconceivable past.

“Whose mother? The prophet’s?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so,” Charlie said. “I never heard anything about her.”

“There’s no old woman there with him?”

“No.”

What became of you, Elizabeth, out there on the road with your son? But what, after all, had become of anyone? His parents, his colleagues, all his friends from his life before the airport, Robert? If all of them had vanished, uncounted and unmarked, why not Elizabeth too? He closed his eyes. Thinking of a boy standing on the tarmac by the ghost plane, Air Gradia Flight 452, Arthur Leander’s beloved only son, reading verses about plagues aloud to the dead.

48

THREE DAYS AFTER Kirsten and August became separated from the Symphony, behind a garden shed in an overgrown backyard on the outskirts of Severn City, Kirsten woke abruptly with tears in her eyes. She’d dreamt that she’d been walking down the road with August, then she turned and he was gone and she knew he was dead. She’d screamed his name, she’d run down the road but he was nowhere. When she woke he was watching her, his hand on her arm.

“I’m right here,” he said. She must have said his name aloud.

“It’s nothing. Just a dream.”

“I had bad dreams too.” He was holding his silver Starship Enterprise in his other hand.

It wasn’t quite morning. The sky was brightening, but night lingered below in the shadows, gray light, dewdrops suspended in the grass.

“Let’s wash up,” August said. “We might meet people today.”

They crossed the road to the beach. The water mirrored the pearl sky, the first pink of sunrise rippling. They bathed with some shampoo Kirsten had found in that last house—it left a scent of synthetic peaches on their skin and floating islands of bubbles on the lake—and Kirsten washed and wrung out her dress, put it on wet. August had scissors in his suitcase. She cut his hair—it was falling in his eyes—and then he cut hers.

“Have faith,” he whispered. “We’ll find them.”

Resort hotels stood along the lakeshore, the windows mostly broken and their shards reflecting the sky. Trees pushed up through the parking lots between rusted cars. Kirsten and August abandoned their suitcases, the wheels too loud on rough pavement, made bundles out of bedsheets and carried the supplies over their shoulders. After a mile or two they saw a sign with a white airplane hanging askew over an intersection, an arrow pointed toward the center of town.

Severn City had been a substantial place once. There were commercial streets of redbrick buildings, flowers riotous in planters, and the roots of maple trees disrupting the sidewalks. A flowering vine had taken over most of the post office and extended across the street. They walked as silently as possible, weapons in hand. Birds moved in and out of broken windows and perched on sagging utility wires.

“August.”

“What?”

“Did you just hear a dog bark?”

Just ahead was the overgrown wilderness of a municipal park, a low hill rising beside the road. They climbed up into the underbrush, moving quickly, threw their bundles aside and crouched low. A flash of movement at the end of a side street: a deer, bounding away from the lakeshore.