“Thank you,” I managed. Tears flooded my throat; some great primitive wash of terror rose from my gut, strangling any other words.

Zhou might not have children of his own, but he was no stranger to the sight of a parent dissolving in grief. He retrieved a thin, cheap tissue from its box on the nightstand and swiped it, gently, beneath my eyes. “Here, now,” he said. “The tears, they make you tired. Kira, you cannot sleep in here, there is no room. You should go home, just for a little while, and gather your strength for the children.”

“No,” I said. The thought of Rorie waking alone to the sight of her brother tethered to life only by the grace of a breathing machine; no. No, I’d stay right here.

Zhou sighed. “Of course,” he said. “Of course. I will have them send in some extra blankets. Perhaps you can make a nest on the floor.”

20

The Wilds of Connecticut

COMPTON

NEW YORK CITY

237 Days After Patient Zero

In contrast to the height of the pandemic, New York hummed with activity on this, an ordinary Saturday afternoon. Life here had settled; despite a last-ditch effort by the virus to conquer Atlanta and a few other scattered places, in most areas of the United States the infection seemed to have diminished, if not outright burned itself out. Here in the hospital, the halls thronged with all the usual denizens of a medical center, hustling by with seeming normality on their way to the cafeteria or to visit their sick grandmother or to extract someone’s problematic gallbladder. Seeming normality, of course, being a relative term, because if you looked closely, quite a bit had changed.

First, masks. They covered all the faces here in the emergency department, but that wasn’t out of place in a structure designed to battle illness; even in the pre-plague days of eight months ago, nobody would have glanced twice at a bunch of people parading down a hospital corridor in surgical masks. Unlike, say, the subway or the grocery store, where even now Compton could not help envisioning a time traveler from the recent past staring in bewilderment at all the covered faces, wondering if the apocalypse was nigh or what. There were still some mask holdouts scattered here and there who bellowed in outrage at the idea of sissified government weaklings trying to tell them what to wear, as if the government weren’t already insisting they wear things like seat belts and, for that matter, clothes. But for the most part, those people lived in areas where they hadn’t been cremating their relatives day in and day out. In New York, if you encountered a maskless person, it often meant they had survived the illness and tested positive for antibodies, which, so far, correlated well with immunity to reinfection.