Aurora(77)

“Please don’t go.”

“I still don’t believe that I will,” he said. “Isn’t that just like a human? Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and the experience of the billions who came before us, it’s still hard to get our heads around the idea that we are going to die.”

She pulled back and looked into his watery, brown eyes.

Norman smiled. “Now that’s what I call a hopeful species.”



Half an hour later, Aubrey walked back home as the sun set. She and Norman had eventually switched the conversation to lighter topics—how little they missed talking about politics, the quality of the sunlight through the woodsmoke, and the surprising deliciousness of unripened plums. Then he’d grown tired and drifted off. Aubrey kissed him lightly on the forehead and left him to his late-afternoon nap.

As she crossed the street, Phil looked up from where he was working and came to her, putting an arm around her shoulders and pulling her in close. She laid her head on his shoulder.

“You OK?” he asked.

She nodded, and her tears flowed again.

He held her for a while, letting her cry. When she stopped, he spoke softly. “You want some company tonight?”

“I’ll be fine.” She lifted her head. “I got your shirt wet.”

“And I just had this dry-cleaned.”

She smiled and looked up at him. He kissed her on the lips. “I’m around if you need me.”

“Has there ever been a lovelier sentence?” she asked. She turned, waved to one or two other neighbors, and climbed the steps of her front porch. She looked up at the hundred-year-old heap, her fixer-upper that had only ever gotten halfway fixed up, and she said a silent gratitude to the house for serving them well, for sheltering them through all the shitstorms of the past few months, the past few years. She went inside and closed the door.

By the same time tomorrow, her living room walls would be splashed with blood.





30.





Iowa City, Iowa

Thom had learned more about government cheese in an hour than he’d ever known in his life.

The hunger pangs had started five or six hours into the drive. He’d done enough intermittent fasting to know they’d pass in a while, and he attempted to direct his thoughts elsewhere. The emptiness and nausea were familiar, and as long as dizziness and confusion didn’t start up, he saw no reason why he couldn’t make it through a twenty-four-hour drive without eating. Gas hadn’t been a problem so far. Lisa, his assistant, was back in San Francisco, on generator power at the Vida offices, and in her relentless monitoring of satellite-phone and emergency-radio frequencies, she’d found him a temporary fuel station in western Nebraska. A tanker truck was parked in front of a Mobil station that was going to be open for a six-hour window, under heavy guard. Thom got there before most people knew about it and lost only an hour in line before heading back out with a full tank, ahead of his already ambitious arrival schedule.

But then his hunger turned ferocious, angry and gnawing. He was having trouble thinking straight, and he had no intention of rolling into whatever steaming mess Rusty had created with anything but a clear head. Lisa, again, had saved the day, this time finding a report on a FEMA frequency of a newly scheduled government food-distribution event, supervised by the Iowa National Guard. It was only thirty miles off his route. A couple hundred people were in line ahead of him when he got there, but there were still plenty of the processed cheese logs left when he reached the front. While he waited, he’d asked a lot of questions. Turns out government cheese isn’t so much one certain kind of cheese as all cheese. Cheddar, Colby, curd, and granular cheese all went into the vat, then they dumped in a load of emulsifiers and a few other things it was better not to think about, and it was melted, poured into footlong rectangular blocks, and cooled. The government had been making them since World War II, storing them in a hundred and fifty warehouses across the country and distributing them to schools, welfare recipients, and now victims of the nationwide food shortage.

The cheese was one of the most delicious things Thom had ever eaten. As soon as he was handed his, he’d stepped away from the line and slunk over to a grassy hillside with it, finding a spot away from the crowd. He sat down and was a good five or six mouthfuls into it, reminding himself not to hit it too hard—it was processed cheese, after all, and he was operating on an empty stomach—when he noticed a guy ten feet away staring at him.

Thom squinted. Had the guy recognized him? Was he some sort of starstruck tech geek?

The guy gestured, waving Thom over.

Thom looked behind him. Nope, the guy meant him. Thom waved in a “no, thanks” way, but the guy gestured again, insistent, and spoke softly. “You won’t regret it.” He held up a small brown bag, wrinkled and grease-stained, indicating its contents. He bounced his eyebrows suggestively.

Intrigued, Thom got up and moved closer. The guy, a Black man in his mid-thirties, looked up at him and smiled. “I don’t know any cheese that isn’t better with bread.”

He reached into the bag, tore off a large crust from an unsliced loaf of bread, and held it out to Thom discreetly. Thom looked both ways, sat down, and took the bread, grateful. He broke off a chunk of cheese, put it on the bread, and ate it. It was heavenly.

The guy smiled, pleased. “Actual bread. My mom bakes it in a stone oven in the back of the house. How long’s it been since you’ve had bread, right?”