Outside, the child is still working on her cookie. He sits her on his shoulders and walks along the street in front of the hotel. He eats his own cookie as they go. At the collision repair shop he tries the door but it is locked. He walks on a little farther and comes to an area in which there is a pile of gravel and some scattered concrete culvert pipes. He sets the child down to crawl on the gravel pile. Inside one of the pipes he finds two shovels, a small red jerrican that is a third full of gasoline, and a pair of twisted and dirty and hardened leather work gloves. A rusty wheelbarrow rests upside down against the culvert.
He stuffs the gloves in a back pocket of his jeans and takes a shovel. He puts the child on his shoulders again and goes back to the hotel. He leaves the shovel at the door but takes the child in with him this time.
He looks in all the rooms on all the floors. All the doors stand open, and all the beds are made up and all the curtains are closed. There are no more people, alive or dead. He finds no further packages of cookies but finds two miniature bottles of vodka and a half-bottle of red wine. These he leaves at the door of the hotel.
He takes the shovel and carries the child back toward the river. At a point where the ground looks soft but also where his sailboat can be seen he begins work on the graves. He does not dig them deep, but nevertheless it is well dark by the time he finishes.
There are no lights anywhere. The snow has turned to rain. The mass of the hotel stands out dimly against the clouds. Wearing the work gloves, he brings the man first, wrapped in the patchwork quilt. He uses the quilt again for the woman. He has to manage the child each time. He transports his own burden in the same sheet he used to bring her from the boat. Heaving with sobs, he carries his daughter and his wife through the near-total darkness and the cold rain toward the last grave.
Back at the hotel he tears up a sheet and makes a diaper and changes his daughter in the dark. They sleep in a bed in one of the rooms near the entrance. At dawn the child wakes crying with hunger. In the ground floor corridor the man finds a plastic bucket in a closet. It smells of cleaning liquid. He goes into the kitchen of the apartment and pours a little bleach into the bucket.
It is a cold morning, but the sky is clear. He takes the child and goes past the graves in the growing light and down to the river and fills the bucket. He lets it sit for a minute. Then he rinses it several times in the flowing water. Finally he fills it to a level at which it will not be too heavy to carry.
He makes another trip to bring the can of gas from the culvert. Then he leaves the child in the room and goes into the apartment. In the living room, beside the couch, there is a wooden end-table. It is stained sage green and looks like a high-school student’s woodworking project. He manages to knock it apart easily. In a closet he finds a pile of old newspapers. The one on top is the most recent. It is six months old. It has only two pages. The headline reads, Pandemic Confirmed.
At the hotel’s steps he breaks up the narrower pieces of the table. With the wood and the newspaper and a little of the gasoline he makes a fire and boils a few potatoes in the pot from the kitchen. He sterilizes a bowl and a spoon with bleach and rinses them with river water.
When the potatoes are done the man sits on the steps with his daughter and waits for their breakfast to cool. His daughter climbs on his lap and looks up into his eyes. There is a questioning expression on her face. She says “Momma?” The man picks her up and stands looking down into the fire. With a foot he nudges some unburned fragments onto the embers. He wipes tears from his face. Soon he sits down again and takes a bit of potato with the spoon and blows on it and tastes it. The child accepts it and opens her mouth for more.
When they have eaten, the child toddles around the parking lot while the man sits on the steps in the early sun. But soon he says “Come on, Zahra” and once more sets the child on his shoulders. They go back to the culverts. He sits the child in the wheelbarrow. “Can you hang on to this?” He lays the remaining shovel across her lap.
They go southwards and cross a main road. The only sound is from a slight breeze. Ahead he can see houses. In a few minutes he stops in the paved driveway of a ranch-style house. There is a large window, and he can see through it into a living room. He watches the window for a minute but sees no movement. The grass of the lawn is tall and wet and winter-dead. A pair of sparrows flutter among the stalks of this grass, but there are no birds at the empty feeder that hangs in front of the window. The lots in the area are small, and there are many houses of an almost identical design. But this house has wooden siding along the bottom part of the walls.
He puts the child into the grass, and she starts stumbling through it and laughing. He inserts the blade of the shovel under one of the wide overlapping boards of the brown-stained siding and tries to pry it loose. The board will not come loose, but it splits. He puts on the gloves and takes hold of the pointed end of the split-off part of the board and puts a foot against the wall and heaves. With a ripping sound the board splits along its entire length. Nails come out and the split-off part drops to the ground. At the far end it is almost as wide as an intact board. The man gives a grunt of triumph. He says “We’ve got firewood, Za-Za.” But he steps back as the door of the house opens. An old woman steps out.
She is Chinese. She is short and thin and has small brilliant black eyes. Straggly white hair hangs down about six inches below a blue baseball cap that says Vancouver 2010. She is wearing a baggy olive-green cardigan over flowered pink pyjamas. She has leather slippers with borders of fur. The bottoms of long underwear are visible between the slippers and the pyjama pants. She is holding a meat cleaver.
She says, in a clear and strong voice, ‘Go way. I cut your head off.” And she waves the cleaver.
The man steps into the grass to retrieve his daughter, who stands gaping at the woman.
The woman shouts “What you want?”
The man clears his throat and says “I’m sorry. I didn’t know there was anyone here. I thought everyone was… I was just trying to get some firewood so we can cook and stay warm.”
“My house not firewood. Go way”
“All right. We’re going. I’m sorry.” He sits the child in the wheelbarrow with the shovel and they start down the driveway, with the child leaning out to look back at the woman.
The woman calls “Where you live?”
The man sets the wheelbarrow down and points. “There. At the hotel.”
‘You all alone?”
“You’re the only person I’ve seen.”
They stand looking at each other for a while. The man goes to the wheelbarrow and picks his daughter up.
The woman says “Where mummy?”
‘She died.” Having said that, he waits a few seconds. “It’s just us. Are you all alone here?”
“No, I got big family. You come here try take house we kill you.”
“I don’t want your house. I want to stay at the hotel. It’s close to the river. For water.”
“You got food?”
“I found some potatoes. That’s all. I know you’re alone here. I’m not going to hurt you, and I’m not going to take your house. We’ll go now. If you want help with anything, just come to the hotel.”
Again they stand looking at each other. She says “Husband dead.”