the ruins of Luxor and Mycenae, and spent days exploring the glorious Alhambra in Spain. Great civilizations, now dead. Twice they had visited Pompeii, an entire city that had been entombed in an instant. If there was a lesson in these ruins, Henry thought, it was that civilizations were built on the arrogance of progress. We believe that nature is no match for human ingenuity and that nature can be tamed. Pompeii reminds us that the incomparable ferocity of nature will never be fully tamed.
So Henry shouldn’t have been surprised by what he saw unfolding below him—nature already reclaiming the marks of civilization on the land. Although the contagion had subsided, it had left behind a society that was broken and distrustful and flooded by despair. Kudzu was enveloping abandoned farmhouses and roadside gas stations. The slow and perhaps inexorable process of consuming human history was under way.
And yet there remained scattered signs of life. Smoke rose from brushfires where some determined farmer was clearing land. A few cars were visible when the plane flew over the interstate highway and banked toward Atlanta. The great city itself looked unmarred but also vacant, despite the spider web of highways feeding into it. Defenseless, Henry thought. Another round of Kongoli could render Atlanta extinct.
At least the military was still operating. The admiral had been thoughtful enough to issue Henry a week’s worth of provisions in a backpack—mainly crackers, peanut butter, fruit, nuts, and cereal, out of consideration for Henry’s vegetarian diet, although he included several packages of buffalo jerky in case of desperation. He also provided fresh underwear, socks, and T-shirts. Henry still had his wallet with about a hundred Saudi riyals, along with a MasterCard and a debit card of uncertain usefulness. Aside from that, Henry had his Qur’an and his new cane.
The little plane dropped like a mosquito onto the runway, then taxied past a fleet of giant C-130 transport planes, coming to a halt on an apron of pavement beside a giant hangar.
“Where do you go from here?” the pilot asked.
“Atlanta.”
“Well, good luck, sir.”
“Wait,” said Henry, “how do I get to Atlanta?”
“It’s a pretty long hike, I’d say. Tell you what,” the pilot said, pointing east, “if you walk a couple miles in that direction, you’ll come to the interstate. From there, it’s about twenty miles to the city. Folks are pretty cautious, and there’s not a lot of traffic, but you may luck out and catch a ride. You don’t look all that threatening.”
It took Henry an hour under the swampy September sun just to get to the interstate cloverleaf. Fortunately, he had three bottles of water in the backpack, which weighed heavily on his shoulders. Sweat poured down his back and soaked his shirt. He stuck out his thumb whenever a car passed, but there were so few and they all went by as if they were fleeing justice.
Still, he was alive. He had never felt more intensely the privilege of existence than he did walking along the shoulder of the bright interstate. What a beautiful highway, Henry thought, a marvel, really, the mark of a once formidable civilization. What will people of the future think—if there are people of the future—when they come upon this magnificent road, buried perhaps under vines or layers of sediment.
He set the pack down and ate almonds in the shade of an overpass. There was a single flip-flop nearby and an empty bag of chips caught in a crevice that fluttered when cars drove past. He considered his conversation with Captain Dixon the night before. Doomsday. Could it really happen? Henry had vivid childhood memories of the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear exchange. It was always there but not really there, the possibility of universal extinction, a fantasy that he used to entertain sometimes at night when his grandmother put him to bed. How often he had fretted over what would happen to him if she too passed away. These sober thoughts were interrupted by a giant cloud of gnats that swarmed around him. He waved at them fecklessly, unable to breathe without inhaling them. He pulled the neck of his T-shirt over his nose and pressed on.
Another car zoomed by.
To avoid speculating about his family, Henry contemplated his return to his old lab at the CDC to learn what progress they had made on Kongoli. Marco and the team must have developed a vaccine by now. He longed to hear their thoughts, to be in the familiar