“The rules have changed,” Natalie had said. “We have to think of ourselves now.”
“Fuck you, Natalie,” Kerans said, and that had been the end of the conversation.
He was wakeful most of the night that followed. Felicia was feverish. “Am I going to die, Dave?” she’d asked in one of her lucid moments. “Of course not,” he’d responded, the lie cleaving his heart.
Lanyan woke him at dawn. They stood shivering on the porch of the cabin and watched clouds mass among the peaks. The temperature had plunged overnight. The air smelled like snow.
“You win,” Lanyan said. “We’ll go down to Boulder.”
The snow caught them when they were winding down the rutted track from the cabin, big lazy flakes sifting through the barren trees to deliquesce on the Yukon’s acres of windshield. Nothing to worry about, Kerans thought in the backseat, cradling Felicia’s head in his lap. But the temperature—visible in digital blue on the dash—continued to plummet, twenty-five, fifteen, ten; by the time they hit paved road, a good hour and a half from the cabin, and itself a narrow, serpentine stretch of crumbling asphalt, the snow had gotten serious. The wipers carved arcs in the snow. Beyond the windows, the world had receded into a white haze.
Lanyan hunched closer to the wheel.
They crept along, pausing now and again to inch around an abandoned vehicle.
“We should have stayed where we were,” Natalie said, and the silence that followed seemed like assent.
But it was too late to turn back now.
Finally the road widened into a four-lane highway, clogged with vehicles. They plowed onward anyway, weaving drunkenly among the cars. By the time they reached the outskirts of Boulder, the headlights stabbed maybe fifteen feet into the swirling snow.
“I can’t see a thing,” Lanyan said. They turned aside into surface streets, finding their way at last into the decaying subdivision. They picked a house at random, a rancher with a brick façade in an empty cul-de-sac. The conventions of civilization held. Lanyan and Kerans scouted it out, while the women waited in the Yukon. They knocked, shouting, but no one came. Finally, they tested the door. It had been left unlocked; the owners had departed in a hurry, Kerans figured, fleeing the contagion. He wondered if they’d passed them dead somewhere on the highway, or if they’d made it into the higher altitudes in time. The house itself was empty. Maybe they’d gotten lucky. Maybe the frigid air would kill the virus before it could kill them. Maybe, Kerans thought. Maybe.
They settled Felicia on the sectional sofa in the great room, before the unblinking eye of the oversized flatscreen. Afterward, they searched the place more thoroughly, dosing Felicia with the amoxicillin and oxycodone they found in the medicine cabinet. Then the food in the pantry, tools neatly racked in the empty garage, a loaded pistol in a bedside table. Natalie tucked it in the belt of her jeans. Kerans flipped light switches, adjusted the thermostat, flicked on the television. Nothing. How quickly it all fell apart. They hunched around a portable radio instead: white noise all across the dial.
Welcome to the end of the world, it said.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
The snow kept coming, gusts of it, obscuring everything a dozen feet beyond the windows, then unveiling it in quick flashes: the blurred limb of a naked tree, the shadow of the Yukon at the curb. Kerans stood at the window as night fell, wondering what he’d expected to find. A hospital? A doctor? The hospitals must have been overwhelmed from the start, the doctors first to go.
The streetlights snapped alight—solar-charged batteries, the death throes of the world he’d grown up in. They illuminated clouds of billowing white that in other circumstances Kerans would have found beautiful. Cold groped at the window. He turned away.
Lanyan and Natalie had scrounged a handful of tealight candles. By their flickering luminescence, the great room took on a cathedral air. Darkness encroached from the corners and gathered in shrouds at the ceiling. They ate pork and beans warmed over the camp stove, spread their sleeping bags on the carpet, and talked. The same goddamn conversation they’d had for days now: surely we’re not the only ones and how many? and where? and what if?
“We’re probably already dying,” Natalie said, turning a baleful eye on Kerans. “Well, we’re down here now,” she said. “What’s your plan, Einstein?”
“I don’t have a plan. I didn’t figure on the snow.”
“You didn’t figure on a lot of things.”
“Cut it out,” Lanyan said.
“We didn’t have to do this, Cliff,” Natalie said.
“What did you expect me to do? I’ve known Felicia for years. I’ve known Dave longer. It’s not like we had access to weather reports.”
No, Kerans thought, that was another thing gone with the old world. Just like that. Everything evaporated.
By then the cold had become black, physical.
Kerans got to his feet. He tucked Felicia’s sleeping bag into the crevices of the sofa. She moaned. Her eyes fluttered. She reached for his hand.
Kerans shook two oxycodone out of the bottle.
“These’ll help you sleep.”
“Will you stay with me, Dave?”
All the way to the end, he thought, and he knew then that at some level, if only half-consciously, he had accepted what he had known in his heart back at the cabin. She was gone. She’d been gone the moment she’d slipped on that bed of scree. And he’d laughed, he remembered that, too. Whoops, he’d said, and she’d said, I’m hurt, Dave, her voice plaintive, frightened, tight with agony. He’d never heard her use that voice in seventeen years of marriage, and he knew then that she was beyond help. There was no help to be had. What had Natalie said? The rules have changed. We have to watch out for ourselves now. Yet Lanyan had surrendered the Yukon, and they had knocked on the door before barging into this house, just as they had knocked on the door of the summer cabin in the mountains before that. How long, he wondered, before they reverted to savagery?
“Will you stay with me, Dave?” she said.
“Of course.”
He slid into his sleeping bag. They held hands by candlelight until the oxycodone hit her and her fingers went limp. He tucked her arm under her sleeping bag—he could smell the wound, already suppurating with infection—and lay back.
The last of the tealights burned out.
Kerans glanced at the luminescent dial of his watch. Nine-thirty.
The streetlights’ spectral blue glow suffused the air.
He closed his eyes, but sleep eluded him. An endless loop unspooled against the dark screens of his eyelids: Felicia’s expression as the earth slipped out from under her feet. His helpless whoop of laughter. I’m hurt, Dave.
He opened his eyes.
“You awake, Cliff?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You think Natalie’s right? We’re all going to wind up coughing up blood in twenty-four hours or so?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe the snow,” Kerans said. “Maybe the cold has killed the virus.”
“Maybe.”
They were silent.
“One way or the other, we’ll find out, I guess,” Lanyan said.
Snow ticked at the windows like fingernails. Let me in. Let me in.
“About the Yukon—” Kerans said.
“It doesn’t matter, Dave. You’d have done the same for me.”
Would he? Kerans wondered. He liked to think so.
“I’m sorry I was an asshole,” Lanyan said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Felicia’s going to be okay.”
“Sure she is. I know.”