Station Eleven Read Online Free Page B

cart—was he overreacting?—but he was committed, he’d decided, too late to turn back. The clerk raised an eyebrow.
    “I’m parked just outside,” Jeevan said. “I’ll bring the cart back.” The clerk nodded, tired. She was young, early twenties probably, with dark bangs that she kept pushing out of her eyes. He forcedthe impossibly heavy cart outside and half-pushed, half-skidded through the snow at the exit. There was a ramp down into a small parklike arrangement of benches and planters. The cart gained speed on the incline, bogged down in deep snow and slid sideways into a planter.
    It was eleven twenty. The supermarket closed in forty minutes. He was imagining how long it would take to bring the cart up to Frank’s apartment, to unload it, the time required for explanations and tedious reassurances of sanity before he could return to the grocery store for more supplies. Could there be any harm in leaving the cart here for the moment? There was no one on the street. He called Hua on his way back into the store.
    “What’s happening now?” Jeevan moved quickly through the store while Hua spoke. Another case of water—Jeevan was under the impression that one can never have too much—and then cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf, pasta, anything that looked like it might last a while. The hospital was full of flu patients and the situation was identical at the other hospitals in the city. The ambulance service was overwhelmed. Thirty-seven patients had died now, including every patient who’d been on the Moscow flight and two ER nurses who’d been on duty when the first patients came in. Jeevan was standing by the cash register again, the clerk scanning his cans and packages. Hua said he’d called his wife and told her to take the kids and leave the city tonight, but not by airplane. The part of the evening that had transpired in the Elgin Theatre seemed like possibly a different lifetime. The clerk was moving very slowly. Jeevan passed her a credit card and she scrutinized it as though she hadn’t just seen it five or ten minutes ago.
    “Take Laura and your brother,” Hua said, “and leave the city tonight.”
    “I can’t leave the city tonight, not with my brother. I can’t rent a wheelchair van at this hour.”
    In response there was only a muffled sound. Hua was coughing.
    “Are you sick?” Jeevan was pushing the cart toward the door.
    “Good night, Jeevan.” Hua disconnected and Jeevan was alone in the snow. He felt possessed. The next cart was all toilet paper. The cart after that was more canned goods, also frozen meat and aspirin, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape.
    “I work for a charity,” he said to the girl behind the cash register, his third or fourth time through, but she wasn’t paying much attention to him. She kept glancing up at the small television above the film development counter, ringing his items through on autopilot. Jeevan called Laura on his sixth trip through the store, but his call went to voice mail.
    “Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling another cart with food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his twenty-second-floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind, and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, trying to avoid making eye contact with the clerk.
    “Jeevan, where are you?” Laura sounded slightly accusatory. He handed over his credit card.
    “Are you watching the news?”
    “Should I be?”
    “There’s a flu epidemic, Laura. It’s serious.”
    “That thing in Russia or wherever? I knew about that.”
    “It’s here now. It’s worse than