every ten or twenty steps.
'Hello? Anybody? Hello? Anybody?'
They passed bus benches and empty storefronts and hundreds of abandoned cars, some of them stalled out in the middle of the road. There were paperback novels lying open on the sidewalk, and carry-away bags from Chinese restaurants, and even the occasional briefcase or backpack. Once they found a skateboard rolling back and forth in a drainage culvert, struggling against the wind. But they did not see any people. It occurred to Luka that this was the first morning in years he had failed to complete an edition of the Sims Sheet. And though it was true that the only reader he had discovered so far was a blind man, and so probably not a reader at all, he felt for a moment like a kid who had forgotten to do his homework. It was something he knew about himself, something he had long known: there was always a teacher standing somewhere over his shoulder.
As the day wore on, he and the blind man spiraled farther and farther away from their starting point, reaching the river on one side and the skirts of the conservatory district on the other, until the soft white-blue of the sky began to bruise over and they headed back to Luka's apartment building. It was understood between them that the blind man would stay another night. Or another two nights. Or another three. That he would stay as long as it took for them to discover or be discovered by someone.
Luka had no idea where the man usually made his home. He didn't seem to be the type of person who would have a pet or a lot of possessions to take care of. Luka wouldn't have been surprised if he slept in a different place every night, on whichever couch or bed or carpet he happened to find himself.
He woke up early the next morning to the smell of something cooking. He went into the kitchen.
The blind man had found a jar of batter in the refrigerator and was pressing waffles into shape between the hinged metal pans of a waffle iron. Luka could see the batter sizzling and darkening as it spilled over the circumference of the pan.
'You know you talk in your sleep,' the blind man said.
As far as he could tell, Luka had not made so much as a sound as he entered. 'I do? What do I say?'
''They're still down there.' 'The best thing I've ever done.' That sort of thing.'
Luka thought about it for a minute. 'I have absolutely no idea what that means,' he said.
He ate a plateful of the waffles, which were surprisingly well cooked – a perfect crisp brown at the edges, but fluffy at the center – and then the two of them set off into the city. They explored the same terrain they had covered the day before, but in straight lines this time rather than linked circles, to make sure they hadn't missed anybody. They had to take shelter under the awning of a liquor store during one of the city's sudden thunderstorms, but the rain lasted only a few minutes, and then they were off again.
It wasn't until late that afternoon that they found another survivor.
Her name was Minny Rings, and they spotted her trying on gloves behind the window of a discount clothing store. She gave a start and clutched her chest when Luka tapped on the window. Then she rushed outside exclaiming, 'Thank God! Thank God!' She looked as though she wanted to wrap her arms around the two of them. Instead, though, she just put her fingers to the cuffs of their jackets for a moment. She had been dead less than a week, she said, when the only other people in her building, an old Russian woman and her son, who was even older, slipped out the bottom of the funnel. She hadn't seen anybody since. She had spent the last few days walking around her neighborhood, watching the birds fly from rooftop to rooftop, and rattling doorknobs to find out whether they were unlocked. She had made her way into dozens of empty shops and apartments, looking through piles of clothing, stacks of antique maps, and display cases full of jewelry. She had turned up a library of old books inside someone's painted wooden trunk, and she had filled most of the last couple of nights reading one of them.
'What book?' Luka asked.
'The Master and Margarita.'
'Mikhail Bulgakov. I love that book.'
'Me, too,' she said. Luka watched as she brought her thumb and her forefinger to the corners of her lips. It looked as though she were trying to tug her smile down into a frown. A nervous tic, he supposed.
The blind man, who was leaning against the wall, took off one of his shoes and beat at the heel until a pebble rolled out. Then he squeezed his foot back inside. 'The air is getting colder,' he said suddenly, and sure enough, the sun was falling. The tops of the trees still caught its full light, but the trunks and the scaffolding of the lower limbs were sliced off by the hard shadows of the buildings, so that when Luka's vision blurred, he saw only the very highest branches. They looked like ornaments floating in the sky.
Minny touched Luka's arm. She asked, 'Are you okay?'
'Why?'
'You looked like you were about to faint there.'
'Did I? I'm just tired from walking, I guess. Tired and hungry. We haven't eaten anything since this morning.'
'Mm-hmm. Look, what do you think about the two of you coming back to my place with me?' she said. 'I don't want to be too – what? Forward. Pushy. But I'd rather not let you out of my sight right now. I'm just around the corner,' she said hopefully, and she pointed her finger.
So Luka and the blind man followed her back to her apartment, which was a small one-bedroom on the ground floor of a converted school building, sparsely furnished with a few folding chairs and a coffee table. She brewed a pot of coffee, and later, after they had eaten, as the dishes soaked in the sink, she brought their talk gradually around to the crossing and the other world. She wanted to know how the two of them had died.,
'A car accident,' Luka said. 'I always knew I would die in a car accident, and that's exactly what happened. I was on the highway, and I hit the front wedge of one of those concrete dividing walls, and the car broke apart into a million pieces. It was like my body stopped and the rest of me just kept on going. Like a dream almost. It wasn't even raining. I just lost control of the wheel.'
'And what about you?' Minny asked the blind man.
'Old age,' he said after a short pause, which, like all his pauses, might have been either thoughtful or oblivious – Luka couldn't tell. 'Old age and neglect.'
The night had deepened outside, so that the lamps in the apartment, which had seemed so weak just an hour or so before, glowed like miniature, shining suns.
'And what happened to you?' Luka asked Minny.
'The same thing that happened to everyone else,' she said. 'The Blinks.'
She seemed reluctant to say anything more, and Luka didn't press her.
He already knew most of the broad details, anyway. The rapidly progressing illness that began with an itching behind the eyes. The flight of the population from the coasts and the cities. The looting and the vandalism. The desperation and the brutality. He must have conducted a hundred interviews in the last few weeks of the newspaper, and the story had always been the same.
The conversation fell away, and the three of them sat quietly listening to the faucet drip into the sink. Every so often, the water would strike the edge of a metal pan with a whispery, cymbal-like brushing sound before it shifted and began falling into the soapy water again.
After a while, Minny excused herself to go to the bedroom. She wanted to finish reading her book. 'I'm only about twenty pages from the end. It won't take me long. You don't mind, do you?'
'Go right ahead.'
'Fantastic.' She came back half an hour later, already dressed in her pajamas, and slipped the book onto a small wooden shelf that was recessed into the living room wall. She stood there for a long while with her hands resting on her hips. 'I'm trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do,' she said to herself. Then, after a few seconds, 'Oh, well. I guess it will come to me eventually.'
They stayed up another hour or so discussing their plans for the next day. Though Minny knew almost nothing about the city as it existed beyond the few blocks of her neighborhood, she wanted to join Luka and the blind man in their hunt for other survivors. It was decided that when morning came, if the three of them were still there and no one had disappeared, they would head deeper into the conservatory district together. It was Luka's feeling that where there were three people there were bound to be four, and where there were four there were bound to be
