“It’s crazy,” Clark said to Elizabeth, words falling hopelessly short.
She was watching the news, her hands clasped at her throat.
“It’s unprecedented,” Elizabeth said. “In all of human history …,” she trailed off, shaking her head. Tyler groaned softly; he’d suffered a setback in the alien wars. They sat for a while in silence, watching, until Clark couldn’t watch anymore and excused himself to find more nachos.
A final plane was landing, an Air Gradia jet, but as Clark watched, it made a slow turn on the tarmac and moved away from instead of toward the terminal building. It parked in the far distance, and no ground crew went to meet it. Clark abandoned his nachos and went to the window. It occurred to him that the Air Gradia jet was as far away from the terminal as it could possibly go. This was where he was standing when the announcement came: for public-health reasons, the airport was closing immediately. There would be no flights for the indefinite future. All passengers were asked to collect their bags at Baggage Claim, to leave the premises in an orderly fashion, and to please not flip out.
“This can’t be happening,” the passengers said to each other and to themselves, over nacho platters and in angry clusters in front of vending machines. They swore at airport management, at the TSA, at the airlines, at their useless phones, furious because fury was the last defense against understanding what the news stations were reporting. Beneath the fury was something literally unspeakable, the television news carrying an implication that no one could yet bring themselves to consider. It was possible to comprehend the scope of the outbreak, but it wasn’t possible to comprehend what it meant. Clark stood by the terminal’s glass wall in the Mexican restaurant, watching the stillness of the Air Gradia jet in the far distance, and he realized later that if he didn’t understand at that moment why it was out there alone, it was only because he didn’t want to know.
The workers at the restaurants and the gift shop chased out their customers and locked down steel shutters and gates, walked away without looking back. The passengers around Clark began departing too, an exodus that merged with the slow processions leaving the other two concourses. Elizabeth and Tyler emerged from the Skymiles Lounge.
“Are you leaving?” Clark asked. It still wasn’t entirely real.
“Not yet,” Elizabeth said. She looked a little deranged, but so did everyone else. “Where would we go? You saw the news.” Everyone who’d been watching the news knew that roads everywhere were impassable, cars abandoned where they’d run out of gas, all commercial airlines shut down, no trains or buses. Most of them were leaving the airport anyway, because the voice over the intercom had said that they should.
“I think I’ll stay here for the moment,” Clark said. A few others apparently had had the same thought, and some who’d left returned after a half hour with reports that there was no ground transportation. The others had set out walking for Severn City, they said. Clark waited for an airport official to come and chase all of them away, the hundred-odd passengers who remained at the terminal, but none did. An Air Gradia agent was in tears by the ticket counter. The screen over her head still read AIR GRADIA FLIGHT 452 NOW ARRIVING, but when her radio crackled Clark heard the word quarantine.
Half of the remaining passengers had tied scarves or T-shirts over their mouths and noses, but it had been hours by now, and if they were all going to die of flu, Clark thought, wouldn’t at least some of them be sick already?
The passengers who remained in the airport were mostly foreign. They looked out the windows at the airplanes on which they’d arrived—Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air France—parked end to end on the tarmac. They spoke in languages Clark didn’t understand.
A little girl did cartwheels up and down the length of Concourse B.
Clark walked the length of the airport, restless, and was stunned to see that the security checkpoints were unmanned. He walked through and back three or four times, just because he could. He’d thought it would be liberating but all he felt was fear. He found himself staring at everyone he saw, looking for symptoms. No one seemed sick, but could they be carrying it? He found a corner as far from his fellow passengers as possible and stayed there for some time.
“We just have to wait,” Elizabeth said, when he came to sit with her again. “Surely by tomorrow morning we’ll see the National Guard.” Arthur had always liked her optimism, Clark remembered.
No one emerged from the Air Gradia jet on the tarmac.
A young man was doing push-ups by Gate B20. He’d do a set of ten, then lie on his back and stare unblinking at the ceiling for a while, then another ten, etc.