At noon the next day, the passengers boarded via a wheeled staircase they’d found in a hangar, and a crowd gathered on the tarmac to watch the plane depart. The sound of the engines was startling after these days of silence. There was a long period when nothing happened, the engines roaring, before the plane worked its way out of the line of parked aircraft with a series of delicate lurching turns—it left a gap between the Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa jets—and made a slow curve to the runway. Someone—impossible to see who at this distance—was waving in one of the windows. A few people waved back. The plane started down the runway, gathered speed, the wheels left the ground, and the watchers held their breaths for the moment of ascent, but the machine didn’t falter, it rose instead of falling, and as it receded into the clear blue sky Clark realized he had tears on his face. 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. Clark watched until it disappeared.
That night no one had much to say around the fire. Fifty-four of them now, the ones who’d decided against Los Angeles. The venison was too tough. Everyone chewed silently. Tyler, who seemed to almost never speak, stood close by Elizabeth and stared into the flames.
Clark glanced at his watch. The plane had departed five hours ago. It was nearing the western edge of the continent, or it had been forced to land on an unlit runway somewhere short of California, or it had plummeted into some dark landscape in flames. It would land in Los Angeles and the passengers would walk out into a different world, or it would land and be overcome by a mob, or it would crash into runways clogged with other planes. The passengers would find their families again, or they wouldn’t. Was there still electricity in Los Angeles? All those solar panels in the southern light. All his memories of that city. Miranda at the dinner party, smoking outside while her husband flirted with his next wife. Arthur sunning himself by the pool, a pregnant Elizabeth dozing by his side.
“I can’t wait till things get back to normal,” she said now, shivering in the firelight, and Clark could think of absolutely nothing to say.
The departure of the Los Angeles flight left two pilots, Stephen and Roy. Roy announced his intention to fly out the day after the Los Angeles flight departed.
“Just reconnaissance,” he said. “I figure I’ll fly up to Marquette—I’ve got a buddy up there—I’ll take a look around, try to get some information on what’s going on, maybe get some supplies, and come back.”
He left alone the next morning in a small plane. He didn’t return.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Elizabeth insisted. “Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?”
“Well,” Clark offered, “it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?” They were sitting together in the Skymiles Lounge, where Elizabeth and Tyler had set up camp.
“I don’t know.” Elizabeth spoke slowly, looking out at the tarmac. “I’ve been taking art history classes on and off for years, between projects. And of course art history is always pressed up close against non-art history, you see catastrophe after catastrophe, terrible things, all these moments when everyone must have thought the world was ending, but all those moments, they were all temporary. It always passes.”
Clark was silent. He didn’t think this would pass.
Elizabeth began telling him about a book she’d read once, years ago when she’d been stuck—but not this stuck, obviously—in an airport, and it was a vampire book, actually, not her usual sort of thing, but it had a device she kept thinking of. The setup was post-apocalyptic, she said, so you naturally assumed as you were reading it that the world had ended, all of it, but then it became clear through an ingenious flash-forward device that actually it wasn’t all of civilization that was lost, it was just North America, which had been placed under quarantine to keep the vampirism from spreading.
“I don’t think this is a quarantine,” Clark said. “I think there’s actually really nothing out there, or at least nothing good.”
There were in fact a number of solid arguments against the quarantine theory, namely that the pandemic had started in Europe, the last news reports had indicated chaos and disarray on every continent except Antarctica, and anyway how would one even go about isolating North America in the first place, given air travel and the fact that South America was after all more or less attached?