Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

  When they came to the highway there was a sign indicating the direction to the airport, but finding the airport would have been as simple as following the traffic jam. Everyone had apparently been trying to get there at the end, just before they ran out of gasoline or had to abandon their cars in the gridlock or died of flu at the wheel. There was no sign of the prophet, no movement among the endless lines of cars glittering in sunlight.

  They walked on the gravel shoulder. There was a place where ivy had spread from the forest and covered acres of highway in green. They waded through it, the leaves soft on Kirsten’s sandaled feet. Every sense attuned to the air around her, trying to sense the prophet’s position—behind or ahead?—and met only by the racket of the world around them, the cicadas, the birds, dragonflies, a passing family of deer. The alignment of the cars was askew, some stopped at odd angles, some hard up against the bumper of the next vehicle, others halfway off the road. The windshield wipers were up, puddles of rusted chains tangled around some of the wheels. It had been snowing, then, perhaps heavily, and the highway hadn’t been plowed. The cars had slipped and skidded on packed snow and ice.

  “What is it?” August asked, and she realized that she’d stopped. The flu, the snow, the gridlock, the decision: wait in the car, boxed in now by all the cars that have piled up behind, idling to keep the heat on until you run out of gas? Or abandon your car to walk, perhaps with young children, but where exactly? Farther on, toward the airport? Back home?

  “Do you see something?” Sayid spoke in a whisper. August had been supporting him for the last mile or so, Sayid’s arm over his shoulders.

  I see everything. “It’s nothing,” Kirsten said. She had once met an old man up near Kincardine who’d sworn that the murdered follow their killers to the grave, and she was thinking of this as they walked, the idea of dragging souls across the landscape like cans on a string. The way the archer had smiled, just at the end.

  They took the exit to the airport and reached the roadblock in the midafternoon. An ancient plywood quarantine sign warning of the Georgia Flu, a line of fallen traffic cones and orange plastic fencing collapsing to the ground. The thought of walking here in the snowstorm, desperate to get away from the sickness in town, and at the end of that walk there’s this sign, and when you read it you understand that it isn’t going to be possible to get away from this. By now perhaps you’re already ill, perhaps carrying a feverish small child in your arms. Kirsten turned away from the roadblock, and knew without looking that there would be skeletons in the forest here. Some people would have turned back and retraced their steps for miles, tried to find another way to escape from an illness that was everywhere, that was inescapable by then. Others, sick or very tired, would have stepped off the road and lay down on their backs to watch the snow falling down upon them, to look up at the cold sky. I dreamt last night I saw an airplane. She stopped walking, overcome by the thought of Dieter, and in that moment of stillness she heard the distant bark of a dog.

  “Kirsten,” August said over his shoulder. She saw in his face that he hadn’t heard what she had. “We’re almost there.”

  “Into the woods,” she said quietly. “I think I heard the prophet’s dog.” They helped Sayid off the road. He was very pale now. He collapsed into the underbrush, gasping, and closed his eyes.

  In the quiet that followed the dog’s bark, Kirsten crouched in the bushes and listened to her heartbeat. The prophet and his men had been some distance behind them. A long time passed before she heard their footsteps. The sound seemed strangely amplified, but she knew it was only the tension singing through her, her senses made acute by fear. The sunlight on this stretch of road was filtered through leaves, and her first sighting was the long barrel of the prophet’s rifle moving in and out of shadow as he walked. He led the group, serene and unhurried, the dog trotting by his side. The boy who’d escaped Kirsten and August’s ambush that morning carried a handgun now, the machete strapped to his back, and behind them walked a man with a complicated weapon of a kind that Kirsten had never seen before, a vicious metal crossbow with four short arrows preloaded, and a fourth man with a shotgun.

  Don’t stop. Don’t stop. But as the dog drew alongside the bush where Kirsten was hiding, he slowed and raised his nose in the air. Kirsten held her breath. She hadn’t gone far enough from the road, she realized. She was no more than ten paces away.

  “You smell something, Luli?” the man with the crossbow asked. The dog barked once. Kirsten held her breath. The men gathered around the dog.

  “Probably just another squirrel,” the boy said, but he sounded uneasy. Kirsten saw that he was afraid, and the realization carried such sadness. I never wanted any of this.

  “Or maybe there’s someone in the woods.”

  “Last time he barked, it was just a squirrel.”

  The dog had gone still, his nose twitching. Please, she thought, please. But Luli barked again and stared directly at Kirsten through her screen of leaves.

  The prophet smiled.

  “I see you,” the man with the crossbow said.

  She could rise out of the underbrush and throw a knife, and as it spun through the air she would be felled by a bullet or a metal arrow—the crossbow and three guns were trained on her now—or she could remain unmoving until they were forced to approach, attack at close range and be killed by one of the others. But would they approach at all, or would they fire into the bush behind which she was hiding? She felt August’s anguish, a low current in the air. He was better hidden than she, crouched behind a stump.

  A metal arrow drove into the dirt by her feet with a hollow thud.

  “The next one lands in your heart.” The man with the crossbow was older than the prophet, an old burn scar on his face and neck. “Stand up. Slowly. Hands in the air.”

  Kirsten rose out of hiding.

  “Drop the knife.”

  She let it fall from her hand into the underbrush. Acutely aware of the other two knives in her belt, so close but unreachable. If she reached now, if she were fast enough, would there be time to at least take out the prophet before the first bullet tore her heart? Unlikely.

  “Step forward. If you reach for those knives, you’ll be dead.” The man with the crossbow spoke calmly. Nothing about this situation was new to him. The boy looked stricken.

  The shock of realizing that this was probably actually the ending, after a lifetime of near misses, after all this time. She walked forward through the radiant world, the sunlight and shadow and green. Thinking of trying to do something heroic, sending a knife spinning through the air as she fell. Thinking, please don’t let them find August and Sayid. Thinking of Dieter, although thoughts of Dieter carried a pain that was almost physical, like probing at an open wound. She stepped up onto the hard surface of the road and stood before the prophet, her hands in the air.

  “Titania,” the prophet said. He raised the point of his rifle to the spot between her eyes. In his gaze she saw only curiosity. He was interested to see what would happen next. All three guns were on Kirsten. The man with the crossbow was sighting his weapon into the underbrush, but nothing in his aim or his movements suggested that he’d seen August or Sayid. The prophet nodded to the boy, who stepped forward and pulled her knives very gently from her belt. She recognized him now. He’d been the sentry as they left St. Deborah by the Water, standing watch and roasting his dinner on a stick. He didn’t meet her eyes. The dog had apparently lost interest in following scents from the woods and had laid down on the pavement, watching them, his chin resting on his paw.

  “On your knees,” the prophet said. She knelt. The point of the rifle followed her. He stepped closer.

  She swallowed. “Do you have a name?” she asked. Some vague instinct to stall.

  “Sometimes names are an encumbrance. Where are your companions?”

  “The Symphony? I don’t know.” The pain of this, even now when it was too late to matter anymore. Thinking of the Symphony, the horse-drawn caravans m
oving under the summer sky, the clopping of horses. Traveling somewhere or perhaps already at the airport, in safety, in grace. She loved them so desperately.

  “And your other companions? The ones who helped you kill my men on the road this morning.”

  “We had no choice.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Where are they?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Are you sure?” He moved the rifle just slightly, tracing a small circle in the air.

  “There were three of us,” she said, “including Sayid. Your archer got the other two before he died.” It was plausible. The boy with the machete had run away before the archer fell. She was careful not to look at him.

  “My archer was a good man,” the prophet said. “Loyal.”

  Kirsten was silent. She understood the calculations August was making at that moment. The prophet’s rifle was an inch from her forehead. If August revealed his position by taking out one of the men, the others would be upon him and Sayid in an instant. Sayid was defenseless, lying bloodied and weakened, and Kirsten—kneeling on the road, disarmed, a gun to her head—would in all likelihood still die.

  “I have walked all my life through this tarnished world,” the prophet said, “and I have seen such darkness, such shadows and horrors.”

  Kirsten didn’t want to look at the prophet anymore, or more precisely, she didn’t want the last thing she saw on earth to be his face and the point of the rifle. She raised her head to look past him at leaves flickering in sunlight, at the brilliant blue of the sky. Birdsong. Aware of every breath, every heartbeat passing through her. She wished she could convey a message to August, to reassure him somehow: I know it was me or all three of us. I understand why you couldn’t shoot. She wished she could tell Sayid that she still loved him. A sense memory of lying next to Sayid in the nights before they broke up, the curve of his ribs under her hand when she ran her hand down the length of his body, the soft curls at the nape of his neck.

  “This world,” the prophet said, “is an ocean of darkness.”

  She was astonished to see that the boy with the handgun was crying, his face wet. If she could only speak to August. We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.

  “Someone’s coming,” one of the prophet’s men said. Kirsten heard it too. A distant percussion of hooves, two or three horses approaching at a brisk walk from the direction of the highway.

  The prophet frowned, but didn’t look away from Kirsten’s face.

  “Do you know who’s coming?” he asked.

  “No,” she whispered. How distant were the horses? She couldn’t tell.

  “Whoever they are,” the prophet said, “they’ll arrive too late. You think you kneel before a man, but you kneel before the sunrise. We are the light moving over the surface of the waters, over the darkness of the undersea.”

  “The Undersea?” she whispered, but the prophet was no longer listening to her. A look of perfect serenity had come over his face and he was looking at her, no, through her, a smile on his lips.

  “ ‘We long only to go home,’ ” Kirsten said. This was from the first issue, Station Eleven. A face-off between Dr. Eleven and an adversary from the Undersea. “ ‘We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth.’ ”

  The prophet’s expression was unreadable. Did he recognize the text?

  “ ‘We have been lost for so long,’ ” she said, still quoting from that scene. She looked past him at the boy. The boy was staring at the gun in his hands. He was nodding, seemingly to himself. “ ‘We long only for the world we were born into.’ ”

  “But it’s too late for that,” the prophet said. He drew in his breath and adjusted his grip on the rifle.

  The shot was so loud that she felt the sound in her chest, a thud by her heart. The boy was in motion and she wasn’t dead, the shot hadn’t come from the prophet’s rifle. In the fathomless silence that followed the sound, she touched her fingertips to her forehead and watched the prophet fall before her, the rifle loose in his hands. The boy had shot the prophet in the head. The other two men seemed frozen in amazement, only for an instant but in that instant one of August’s arrows sang through the air and the man holding the crossbow crumpled, choking on blood. The man with the shotgun fired wildly into the trees and then his trigger clicked uselessly, no ammunition, he cursed and fumbled in his pocket until another arrow pierced his forehead and he fell, and then Kirsten and the boy were alone on the road together.

  The boy was wild-eyed, his lips moving, staring at the prophet where he lay in a rapidly spreading pool of blood. He lifted the handgun to his mouth. “Don’t,” Kirsten said, “no, please—” But the boy closed his lips around the barrel and fired.

  She knelt there, looking at them, and then lay on her back to look up at the sky. Birds wheeling. The shock of being alive. She turned her head and looked into the prophet’s dead blue eyes. Her ears were ringing. She felt the vibration of hooves on the road now. August shouted her name and she looked up as the Symphony’s forward scouts rounded the curve of the road on horseback like a vision from a dream, Viola and Jackson, sunlight glinting on their weapons and on the binoculars that hung on Viola’s neck.

  “Do you want this?” August asked some time later. Kirsten had been sitting by the prophet, staring at him, while Jackson helped Sayid out of the forest and August and Viola went through the bags that had belonged to the prophet and his men. “I found it in the prophet’s bag.”

  A copy of the New Testament, held together with tape. Kirsten opened it to a random page. It was nearly illegible, a thicket of margin notes and exclamation points and underlining.

  A folded piece of paper fell out of the book.

  It was a page torn from a copy of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven, the first page of Station Eleven she’d ever seen that hadn’t come from her copies of the books. The entire page devoted to a single image: Dr. Eleven kneels by the lifeless body of Captain Lonagan, his mentor and friend. They are in a room that Dr. Eleven sometimes uses as a meeting place, an office area with a glass wall that overlooks the City, the bridges and islands and boats. Dr. Eleven is distraught, a hand over his mouth. An associate is there too, a speech bubble floating over his head: “You were his second-in-command, Dr. Eleven. In his absence, you must lead.”

  Who were you? How did you come to possess this page? Kirsten knelt by the prophet, by the pool of his blood, but he was just another dead man on another road, answerless, the bearer of another unfathomable story about walking out of one world and into another. One of his arms was outstretched toward her.

  August was talking to her again, crouched by her side. “The Symphony’s only a few hours behind us,” he was saying very gently. “Viola and Jackson are going back to them, and the three of us will go on ahead to the airport. It isn’t far.”

  I have walked all my life through this tarnished world. After she walked out of Toronto with her brother, after that first unremembered year, her brother had been plagued by nightmares. “The road,” he’d always said, when she shook him awake and asked what he’d been dreaming of. He’d said, “I hope you never remember it.”

  The prophet was about her age. Whatever else the prophet had become, he’d once been a boy adrift on the road, and perhaps he’d had the misfortune of remembering everything. Kirsten brushed her hand over the prophet’s face to close his eyes, and placed the folded page from Station Eleven in his hand.

  51

  WHEN SAYID AND AUGUST AND KIRSTEN walked away from the bodies on the road, resuming their slow progress to the airport, the prophet’s dog followed at some distance. When they stopped to rest, the dog sat a few yards away, watching them.

  “Luli,” Kirsten said. “Luli.” She threw a strip of dried venison, and the dog snapped it out of the air. He came close and let her stroke his head. She ran her fingers through the thick fur at the base of his neck. When they set ou
t again, the dog stayed close by her side.

  A half mile farther, the road curved out of the trees, the terminal building massive in the near distance. It was a two-story monolith of concrete and glass, shimmering over an ocean of parking lot. Kirsten knew they were almost certainly being watched by now, but she saw no movement in the landscape. The dog whined and raised his nose in the air.

  “Do you smell that?” Sayid asked.

  “Someone’s roasting a deer,” August said. The road divided before them, separate lanes for Arrivals, Departures, and Parking. “Which way?”

  “Let’s pretend there’s a way to get off this continent.” Sayid had a distant look about him. The last time he’d seen an airport had been two months before the collapse, when he’d returned home from visiting his family in Berlin and landed for the last time at Chicago O’Hare. “Let’s go to Departures.”

  The Departures lane rose to a second-story entrance, a line of glass-and-steel revolving doors, a municipal bus glinting in sunlight. They were a hundred yards from the door when the whistle sounded, three short blasts. Two sentries stepped out from behind the bus, a woman and a man, their crossbows aimed at the ground.

  “Sorry about the crossbows,” the man said pleasantly, “necessary precaution, I’m afraid—” But he stopped then, confused, because the woman’s bow had clattered to the pavement and she was running to the new arrivals, she was laughing and shouting their names and trying to embrace all of them at once.