Isn’t the world better off without people? There is a balance — trees make a mess that fire cleans; rain extinguishes fire and swells green shoots from the ground; a deer eats the grass, then dies and rots into the dirt from which trees grow to make a mess — a balance that everything but man and virus acknowledge.
Then he hears some laughter in the distance, Clark delighting in something small, maybe a joke told or a grasshopper caught in her hair or the sun slanting through the clouds. That is all the convincing he needs. A hard woman giving herself up to joy. For a long time Lewis has felt overwhelmed by immensity — the measurable immensity of time and distance, as he rode and hiked and paddled so many thousands of miles over hundreds of days, and the incalculable immensity that can exist between people who betray or grieve or hate each other. And when he considers all the places he has traveled and dangers surmounted and people encountered and words written over the past few months, he feels overcome, vertiginous, swept away. It is the laughter that brings him back, makes him feel anchored. He is connected to Gawea, just as he is connected to Clark, a kind of family, the beginning of the community and renewal he imagined he might find here all along. There is hope after all. Life might be a catastrophe, but it is a beautiful catastrophe.
He cocks his arm and pitches the vial out. Once exposed to the air, the virus should expire within minutes. Far below, it bursts on some rocks, a glassy dust that sparkles. The river dimples and swallows its remains, one more pollutant.
“What was that?” A voice behind him, Clark’s.
“The end of the world.”
They walk back together. The sun hangs over the ocean and the moon hangs over the coastal mountains, as if in an uneasy truce. In the cracked parking lot of the sewage-treatment facility, the sisters stand beside their idling truck, the doors of it open. They heft something from the rear cab, what turns out to be a shortwave radio, and plunk it on the front seat and plug it into the cigarette lighter. It sparks out a puff of smoke they wave away.
One of them settles into the seat beside the radio and aims the antenna at the sky and fiddles with the frequency and begins a transmission. “Sam and Olivia Field sending report. Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Over.”
The other leans one arm against the open door, turning when she notices Lewis leaning in to watch them.
“Moon’s out,” she says. “She’s trying for a moon bounce.”
“Sam and Olivia Field sending report. Is anyone there? I repeat, is anyone there? Over.”
Lewis has been awake for two days. He feels too numb and exhausted to talk, to process what he sees. He can manage a small question, “Which one of you is Olivia?”
She stabs her chest with a thumb. “That’s me.”
“I’m sorry. I should have asked you that before.”
She shrugs.
“It’s a pretty name.”
Sam speaks into the radio again, waits, hears no response except the pop and buzz of static.
The wind rises and Lewis wavers where he stands. “I don’t understand. Who is she speaking to?”
“Boss.”
“Who — who do you work for?”
“The government. We work for the government.” She says this as though she is talking about what they should expect for weather or what they might cook for dinner.
“What?” Lewis gives a short laugh. “What government?”
“The American government.”
He looks at her a moment to see if she is joking. The flat expression on her face tells him she is not.
“You never asked,” she says and uncrosses her arms and peels back one of her sleeves to reveal on her biceps a tattoo — an American flag inked in black.
Epilogue
WASHINGTON, D.C., is a swamp. The streets are sluggish rivers, the buildings mossy canyons, negotiated by rafts and canoes and johnboats. Mosquitoes dirty the air with their humming swarms. Through the muck walk egrets on stilted legs. Alligators laze on the steps of the Smithsonian. The monument is a broken fang rising from a lake. The rafters and arches of every memorial are busy with the nests of thrashers and waxwings. The dome of the Capitol has cracked open like a hatched egg. Everything smells of crushed earthworms. Night is falling. Balls of blue fire burn, pockets of swamp gas begin to glow. So do the lamplit windows of the White House, though it is hardly white, vined and ridden with algae and bearded with moss. A turbine spins on its roof. Its blades groan up to speed as the wind rises.
Thunder mutters. A storm is coming. A storm is always coming, with hurricanes whirling off the Atlantic every other week. Rain speckles the water, then thickens, lashing at the windows. In one of them, a man looks up, though he can see nothing but his reflection. A black face against a black window. His beard, gouged by a meaty scar, is beginning to gray. He is shirtless and has a bit of a paunch, noticeable only when he is sitting. But his chest and shoulders are round with muscle. Sweat beads on his skin, drips down his back like the rain down the window.
This is a bedroom that doubles as an office. A four-poster bed rises beside the wooden desk where he sits in an orange circle of light thrown by a lamp. There is an inkpot, a pile of paper, books, a shortwave radio. He fiddles with the knobs, scratching through frequencies, settling now and then on voices that sometimes speak English and sometimes languages he does not recognize. He needs no translator to recognize the occasional panic and anger in their words.
There is a knock at the door, and when he does not respond to it, another knock follows, and when he does not respond to this, the door opens. A face peeks through, brown skinned, bald headed. Monroe, his valet. He wears a pocketed vest over a collared shirt. “Mr. President?”
He does not turn. His naked back carries an American flag tattoo across its shoulders. It is inked in black and broken by wormy scars.
“They’re waiting for you, sir.”
The door closes. He continues to listen for another minute, channeling between silence and voices. Lightning forks the sky outside, and the thunder that follows shakes the windows and fuzzes the radio. He snaps off the volume and rises from his desk and pulls on a shirt and begins to button it.
The room is walled with bookshelves and anchored by a long table made from rough-hewn pine. Around it sits his Cabinet, a small, bug-eyed woman, a man with a tumor bulging redly from his neck, a brown-bearded man missing a thumb, and a black woman with a gray nimbus of hair. They stand when he enters and then tuck their bodies back into their chairs when he motions for them to sit. He takes a chair at the head of the table and it groans beneath his weight.
An enormous map sits at the center of the table. It has been torn into many pieces and fitted together again to create a warped representation of the country. Water stained. Rimed with mold. The Midwest and Southwest are shaded a poisonous yellow. The Plains white. The Northwest green. The South, ranging from Texas to North Carolina, a watery blue. So many sections are surrounded by red circles indicating an uninhabitable blast zone, the biggest of them corralling the entire East Coast.
They motion to the map when they speak, talking about hazards and possibilities, a railroad line reconstructed here, a community built around a coal mine there. There are black Xs and red Xs sketched throughout the West, and there are skulls drawn on several states in the South, and the Cabinet members stab their fingers at these when they talk about rising threats.
All this time, the man they call president says nothing, his posture stiff and his hands balled on the table before him. His eyes flit from speaker to speaker, the only indication he is listening. There is one window with a crack running across it that weeps rain. Every now and then it goes blue-white with lightning. The room shivers with thunder and the lights sputter on and off.