Station Eleven Read Online Free PDF Page A

anyone thought. I’ve just been talking to Hua. You have to leave the city.” He glanced up in time to see the look the checkout girl gave him.
    “ Have to? What? Where are you, Jeevan?” He was signing his name on the slip, struggling with the cart toward the exit, where the order of the store ended and the frenzy of the storm began. It was difficult to steer the cart with one hand. There were already fivecarts parked haphazardly between benches and planters, dusted now with snow.
    “Just turn on the news, Laura.”
    “You know I don’t like to watch the news before bed. Are you having a panic attack?”
    “What? No. I’m going to my brother’s place to make sure he’s okay.”
    “Why wouldn’t he be?”
    “You’re not even listening. You never listen to me.” Jeevan knew this was a petty thing to say in the face of a probable flu pandemic, but couldn’t resist. He plowed the cart into the others and dashed back into the store. “I can’t believe you left me at the theater,” he said. “You just left me at the theater performing CPR on a dead actor.”
    “Jeevan, tell me where you are.”
    “I’m in a grocery store.” It was eleven fifty-five. This last cart was all grace items: vegetables, fruit, bags of oranges and lemons, tea, coffee, crackers, salt, preserved cakes. “Look, Laura, I don’t want to argue. This flu’s serious, and it’s fast.”
    “What’s fast?”
    “This flu, Laura. It’s really fast. Hua told me. It’s spreading so quickly. I think you should get out of the city.” At the last moment, he added a bouquet of daffodils.
    “What? Jeevan—”
    “You’re healthy enough to get on an airplane,” he said, “and then you’re dead a day later. I’m going to stay with my brother. I think you should pack up now and go to your mother’s place before everyone finds out and the roads get clogged up.”
    “Jeevan, I’m concerned. This sounds paranoid to me. I’m sorry I left you at the theater, I just really had a headache and I—”
    “Please turn on the news,” he said. “Or go read it online or something.”
    “Jeevan, please tell me where you are, and I’ll—”
    “Just do it, Laura, please,” he said, and then he hung up, becausehe was at the checkout counter for the last time now and the moment to talk to Laura had passed. He was trying so hard not to think about Hua.
    “We’re about to close,” the clerk said.
    “This is my last time through,” he told her. “You must think I’m a nut.”
    “I’ve seen worse.” He’d scared her, he realized. She’d heard some of his phone calls, and there was the television with its unsettling news.
    “Well, just trying to prepare.”
    “For what?”
    “You never know when something disastrous might happen,” Jeevan said.
    “That?” She gestured toward the television. “It’ll be like SARS,” she said. “They made such a big deal about it, then it blew over so fast.” She didn’t sound entirely convinced.
    “This isn’t like SARS. You should get out of the city.” He’d only wanted to be truthful, perhaps to help her in some way, but he saw immediately that he’d made a mistake. She was scared, but also she thought he was insane. She stared flatly at him as she rang up the final few items and a moment later he was outside in the snow again, a goateed young man from the produce department locking the doors behind him. Standing outside with seven enormous shopping carts to transport through the snow to his brother’s apartment, soaked in sweat and also freezing, feeling foolish and afraid and a little crazy, Hua at the edge of every thought.
    It took the better part of an hour to push the shopping carts one at a time through the snow and across his brother’s lobby and then maneuver them into the freight elevator, for unscheduled use of which Jeevan had to bribe the night doorman, and to move them in shifts up to the twenty-second floor. “I’m a survivalist,” Jeevan explained.
    “We don’t