On the fourth day, Jason went out to buy something for his arm.
He had lasted three days in the gray sweatshirt. It was too warm for it, and it was starting to smell, and the left sleeve had stretched out of shape from being pulled down over his hand a thousand times. And it didn't work. A sleeve could cover an arm. It couldn't cover a hand. Every time he reached for a door handle, or a glass, or the remote control, the cuff rode up, and there they were, the thin dark ends of the lines, curling out across his knuckles like roots coming up through a pavement.
Tim had seen the arm on the first night and never asked about it again. Not everybody would be Tim.
His phone buzzed on the kitchen counter while he was putting on his jacket. He didn't recognize the sound at first. Then he did, and picked it up, and it was Sarah.
Email from the uni. Classes suspended until further notice.
A second message came in while he was still reading the first.
Further notice = until the next one, at least. Nobody's sitting in a lecture hall with that hanging over them.
And a third.
Hawkins is at Mercy General. Still asleep. The guy from the back row too. My cousin's a nurse there. She says they've stopped saying "when he wakes up."
Then a fourth, after a longer pause.
Little at a time, ok?
Jason read all four twice. The next one. He stood there in the kitchen with his jacket half on, looking at the words, and the apartment seemed very quiet around him.
He typed ok, and sent it, and put the phone in his pocket.
"You're going out?" Tim said, from the couch. He hadn't left it much in four days. "Out out? Outside?"
"Shops are open."
"Shops are open," Tim agreed, darkly, as if that proved something. He looked at Jason for a moment. Then he sighed. "Get milk. If there's any. There's never any. Nobody knows why. It's like the voice in the sky took all the milk."
* * *
The city was trying very hard to look normal.
The city was closed. Nothing in, nothing out, for a week at least: the trains stopped, police cars parked across the bridges and the highway ramps. Every night from eleven until six, there was a curfew, and the streets emptied, and the sirens wailed at eleven exactly. But in the daytime, inside the city, life was allowed to go on, and so people had gone back to work, because nobody had told them not to. The buses were running. The coffee shops were open. There were people on the pavements, walking their dogs and carrying their shopping and talking on their phones, and if you looked at it quickly, from a distance, it could have been any ordinary week.
Jason didn't look at it quickly. He had spent seventy years learning not to.
He walked slowly, with his left hand in the pocket of his jacket and his eyes on the pavement, the way you walk through a part of the forest where something might be watching you. He didn't hurry and he didn't dawdle. He kept to the edge of the pavement. He didn't look anyone in the face for longer than a second. He had decided, before he left the apartment, that he was going to be the least interesting person on every street he walked down.
And still, he noticed.
He noticed that nobody stood close to anybody. In the line outside the bakery on Fourth, there was a full step between every customer and the next, as if someone had painted marks on the ground. He noticed that people walked a little faster than they used to, and looked up a little more often, and that when two strangers passed on a narrow stretch of pavement, both of them glanced, very quickly, at the other one's hands.
He noticed a woman waiting at a crosswalk who saw him coming and pulled her little boy closer, by the hood of his coat, without looking at him. He noticed a man at a bus stop who watched him all the way down the street, over the top of a newspaper he wasn't reading.
He didn't know what to make of it.
It might be the city. Four days ago everybody on Earth had fallen down at the same second, and a voice had spoken inside every head, and some people had not gotten up. Of course they were frightened. Of course they were watching each other.
Or it might be him.
He didn't know anymore what he looked like from the outside. He had been alone, or nearly alone, for so long that he had forgotten how to tell. He walked past a shop window and caught sight of a skinny young man in a dark jacket with one hand in his pocket, walking very steadily, and for a second he didn't recognize him at all.
He looked away, and kept walking.
* * *
There were posters on the lamp posts.
He had seen the first ones on the second morning, and there were more of them every day. Printed at home, most of them, taped up in a hurry. A photo, a name, a phone number. Missing since Tuesday.Taken to an unknown facility, please call.Did not come home from work. He would never just leave.
Some of them were for sleepers, families who had lost track of somebody in the chaos of the first night, when the hospitals had overflowed and the buses had started taking people to gymnasiums and church halls. Some of them were not. Some of them were for people who had woken up, and gone home, and then, a day later, or two, simply hadn't been there anymore.
Jason stopped in front of one of those. A young man, about his own age, grinning at the camera with a paper crown on his head. Woke up fine. Went out Wednesday morning for cigarettes. Never came back.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he looked up. Across the street, above a bank, an electronic billboard was cycling slowly through its advertisements. A phone. A car. A sofa sale. And then a black screen, and clean white letters.
DID YOU COME BACK DIFFERENT?
You're not alone. We can help.
Confidential. Discreet. Generously compensated.
A small logo in the corner, a sort of stylized silver eye, and two words underneath it in thin capitals: SILVER EYES. Then the sofas again.
Jason put his head down and kept walking.
* * *
The mall was on the far side of the river, a long, low building of glass and pale concrete with a parking lot all around it, and it was open, and people were going in and out of it as if nothing had happened.
Something had happened.
He saw it as soon as he went through the doors. Halfway down the main concourse, a shoe store had a sheet of plywood screwed over its front where the window should have been. Two doors down, a phone shop had a long crack running corner to corner across its glass, held together with tape. Opposite, an electronics store had no window at all, only an empty frame and a security guard standing in front of it with his arms folded, and inside, rows of bare shelves, and dark rectangles on the walls where screens had hung.
He stood still for a moment and read it, the way he used to read a beach after a storm.
Three stores. Not more. All close together, all on the same stretch of the concourse. No scorch marks. No blood. The broken glass had been swept up, and the rest of the mall was untouched: the fountain still running, the pharmacy open, the café full of people. Whatever had happened here, it had started all at once, and it had stopped all at once. Somebody had broken a window, and somebody else had broken another, and for a few minutes it must have looked as if the whole building was going to go. And then it hadn't. Someone had stopped it, or it had simply run out of breath.
A panic that hadn't caught. That was all.
He walked past the plywood and the security guard and didn't look at either of them.
* * *
The clothing store was near the far end, a big, bright chain store full of mirrors, with a sign in the window in cheerful red letters: WE'RE OPEN! 5% OFF EVERYTHING! The autumn collection had just come in. There were tables of sweaters near the front, and a rack of coats, and, on a low table by the fitting rooms, a neat pile of scarves in dark colors, folded into squares.
He found a black one. Long, and plain, and soft, and heavy. When he let it fall open from his hand, it nearly reached the floor.
He took it to the counter.
The girl behind it was about his own age, with dark hair pulled back too tight and a name tag that said MEG. She smiled at him when he came up, a quick, bright, professional smile, and he saw it the moment she did it: the smile was a lid, and there was a lot underneath it, pushing up.
"Just the scarf?"
"Just the scarf."
She scanned it. Her hands were not quite steady. She fumbled the tag, and laughed at herself, and tried again. "Getting ready for winter early," she said. "Smart. I keep telling people. Everyone's going to want one in a month and we'll be out."
"It's for my arm," Jason said.
She looked up. He had taken his left hand out of his pocket to reach for his wallet, and the cuff of the sweatshirt had ridden up, the way it always did. He saw her eyes go to it, to the dark lines on his knuckles, and stop.
"I hurt it," he said. "The pharmacies are out of bandages."
"Oh. Oh, right." Her face cleared, and then, unexpectedly, crumpled a little. "God, yeah. Everybody hurt something. When everyone fell. My roommate broke her wrist on the bathroom sink. My manager split his chin open on the counter, right here." She touched the counter with two fingers, as if to check that it was still there. "Six stitches. He was back at work the next day. He says it's important to keep things normal. Business as usual." She laughed. It came out slightly wrong. "He put up the sign."
Jason followed her glance to the window. WE'RE OPEN! 5% OFF EVERYTHING!
"Five percent," she said. "For the end of the world."
* * *
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He stood at the counter and waited, the way he used to wait by the fire when Alexander had something on his mind and hadn't decided yet whether to say it. And after a moment, it came.
"Do you think it's going to happen again?"
She said it very quietly, with her eyes on the scanner. Then, before he could answer, she rushed on, as if she had been holding it in for days and couldn't stop now that it had started.
"Because it said trials. Didn't it? It didn't say a trial. It said a series of trials. I remember it exactly. And everybody's acting like it's over. My manager. The news. My mom keeps saying well, at least it's over, and I want to say, Mom, it literally told us it wasn't over, and I don't, because what's the point?" She was folding the scarf now, very carefully, into a smaller and smaller square. "It asked me to choose. I don't know if it asked you. It asked me, and I was so scared I just said the first one, I said easy, and then I fell down, and then I woke up on the floor back there, by the fitting rooms, and about a minute had gone by. That's it. That's all that happened to me." She swallowed. "So does that mean I passed? Or that I didn't even start? Or that it's coming back for me later? Nobody knows. Nobody knows anything. And I'm here, selling sweaters."
She stopped. She had folded the scarf into a square so small it wouldn't fold anymore.
"Sorry," she said. "Sorry, I don't know why I'm telling you all this."
"It's okay."
"It's not, you came in for a scarf." She shook her head, and laughed again, and this time it was more like a real laugh. "It's just, you're really... calm. Do you know that? Everybody who comes in here is so wound up. They grab things and they don't look at you and they want to get out. You just stand there." She looked at him, a little puzzled. "Like none of it touches you."
Jason thought about a beach, and a long line of sticks at the edge of a forest. He thought about a captain in her cabin, and a commodore on the sand, and twenty years of watching the horizon for a sail.
"It touches me," he said.
She looked at him a moment longer. Whatever she saw in his face, it made her go quiet. Then she looked down, and unfolded the scarf, and folded it again, properly this time, and put it in a bag.
"Okay," she said, mostly to herself. "Okay. I'm giving you another five percent. For making you listen to all that." She tapped at the register before he could object. "Ten percent off. My manager will never know. It's the least I can do."
"You don't have to."
"I know." She held out the bag. "Feel better. Your arm, I mean."
"Thank you, Meg."
She blinked, surprised that he had read her name tag. Then she smiled, and this time it wasn't a lid.
* * *
He found a fitting room at the back of the store, and drew the curtain, and wrapped his arm.
He did it the way he had bound wounds for seventy years, on himself and on others: starting high under the shoulder and working down. Turn over turn, firm and flat, each one overlapping the last by half. Over the elbow. Down the forearm. Twice around the wrist, for strength. Across the back of the hand and between the thumb and finger and around again, until only the last joints of his fingers showed, and the lines on them were too fine to see unless you were looking for them. He tucked the end in and pressed it flat.
Then he looked in the mirror.
It looked like a bandage. A sprain, maybe, or a burn, wrapped up by somebody who hadn't had anything better to wrap it with. The kind of thing people looked at once, and felt sorry about, and stopped seeing.
He stuffed the sweatshirt into the bag, and put his jacket back on over his T-shirt, and went out.
* * *
He was hungry. That was still new. For seventy years, hunger had been a thing that told him to go and fish, or check the snares, or climb the fruit trees. Here, it just told him to buy something.
At the end of the concourse there was a small restaurant with six tables and a counter, half café and half soup kitchen, with steamed-up windows and a menu on a chalkboard. There was a television on a bracket high up in the corner, with the news on. He ordered the first thing on the board, which was fish soup, and sat at the small table by the wall, where he could see the door and the counter and the television without turning his head.
The soup came in a deep white bowl. He ate it slowly, the way he ate everything now. It was good. It was too salty and full of things that had never seen the sea, and it was good.
On the screen, a woman in a gray jacket was reading the news.
Four days on from F-Day, she said, and the picture is still far from clear.
F-Day. Tim had explained that to him on the second morning, with great relish. "Officially, it's First Day," he had said. "Unofficially, it's Fucked-up Day. Guess which one people actually use."
Authorities continue to report a sharp rise in the number of missing persons across the region, the newsreader went on, in the smooth, even voice of someone reading words she had not written. Police stress that many of these cases are likely to be linked to the confusion of the first days, and urge families not to draw conclusions.
The picture cut to a harbor, at night, under floodlights. Shipping containers. Men in dark uniforms. A long table laid out on the dock, covered with something under a tarpaulin.
In a separate development, customs officers last night seized a substantial shipment of weapons at the port. Officials have not said where the shipment came from or who it was intended for, but sources close to the investigation suggest that it may be connected to a new organization which has been active in the city since F-Day.
The picture came back to the studio. The newsreader looked straight into the camera.
Authorities have described this group, which is known only as the Association, as a terrorist organization. No further details are available at this time. The public are reminded that it is the duty of every individual to report any suspicious or unusual behavior to the authorities. Reports can be made in complete confidence, on the number below.
A phone number appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Jason looked down at his soup.
There was not much left. A little broth at the bottom of the bowl, and a single piece of white fish, and some kind of herb floating on the surface. He bent his head over it, and finished it, very slowly, one spoonful at a time, and didn't look up.
Above him, the television moved on to the weather. Sun tomorrow. Clouds later in the week.
It was only when he set the spoon down that he noticed the room had gone quiet.
He didn't lift his head. He didn't need to. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see all of it. The couple at the next table, with their sandwiches untouched in front of them. The old man at the counter, with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. The cook, behind the counter, with a ladle in his hand. All of them had been looking at the screen. All of them, very slowly, were looking away from it now. And one or two of them, very quickly, there and gone, were looking at each other.
Suspicious or unusual behavior.
Jason sat at his small table by the wall, with his left arm wrapped in black wool from the shoulder to the knuckles, and his empty bowl in front of him, and was very, very still.
On the screen, a cheerful man in a blue suit was pointing at a map, and promising sunshine.