Chapter 5: Survival Day

Sean Dooley had a system for second period, and the system was Kayla Brandt’s homework.

“Two through ten,” he said. “I’ll take the rest.”

“Two through ten is the assignment,” Kayla said, without looking up. “There is no rest.”

“See, that’s what I’m saying. You do two through ten, I’ll do—“

“No.”

“It’s the first day.”

“And you’re already behind,” Kayla said. She had her clipboard on her knees and her pen in her teeth, which was how she talked when she was already doing two other things.

Adrian sat in the front row with his book open and his hands flat on the desk. The name card was still taped to the corner, printed off a computer and gone over in marker by somebody who pressed too hard. The room smelled like hot dust and floor wax, and behind that, faint and coppery, the old water standing in the radiator.

The bell went. Mrs. Corrigan came in with her coffee and the roll sheet and set both down.

“Voss.”

“Here.”

“I know you’re here. I’m Mrs. Corrigan.” She looked at him a second longer than she needed to, then stopped looking. “If something in this room doesn’t work for you, you tell me, and I’ll fix it, and I won’t make a speech about it. That’s the whole policy. Page ninety-one.”

Around the room, twenty-three books opened. Adrian turned his a half second later.

“You need the page?” the girl on his left said. “It’s ninety-one.”

“I’ve got it.”

She waited, in case he wanted more than that. Then she turned back to her own book.

“Page ninety-one,” Mrs. Corrigan said again. “We’re not skimming it today.”

Two rows back, mostly breath: “She skims. She always skims.”

“Shh,” Kayla said.

Mrs. Corrigan wrote high on the board, left of center, and the marker came off it with a wet squeak and she shook it. “A hundred years ago this was a planet with more than two hundred countries on it. You could get on a boat in one and get off in a different one three weeks later. People did that for work, for school, for a wedding. Nobody thought it was remarkable. Nobody wrote it down.”

She turned from the board.

“On March ninth, a hundred years ago, a fog came up out of Antarctica.” She wrote 3/9 and boxed it. “It didn’t blow in. There was no storm attached to it, no earthquake, no reading on any instrument we had. It came up out of the ice and went out from there in every direction, and in twenty-four hours it covered ninety-eight percent of the surface of this planet.” She wrote 98% under the date and boxed that too. “That’s the number. Twenty years from now, if somebody asks you what happened on March ninth, you’ll say ninety-eight percent. Write it down.”

“Mrs. Corrigan.” Kayla’s hand was up and her pen was down. “Ninety-eight percent of the land or ninety-eight percent of the surface?”

“Surface. Which is worse.”

Kayla wrote it down and underlined it twice.

The radiator ticked. Outside, the district’s ground crew was mowing the ball field, and the mower came up the long side and turned and went back, and the sound went away and came back, and went away.

“It went over the buildings,” Mrs. Corrigan said. “It went over the forests. It went over the water. Everything anybody had ever built in ninety-eight percent of the world was under it by the end of the first day, and nobody could look at it, because nothing goes through it. Not light. Not sound. Not radio. Every instrument we own has been pointed at that fog for a hundred years, and every instrument we own has come back with the same answer, which is nothing.” She picked up her coffee, looked at it, and put it back down. “And if you breathe it, or it touches your skin, you’re dead. Not sick. Dead. That’s the appendix on page ninety-four, and it’s the shortest paragraph in the book.”

Somebody in the back said, low, “Guess I’ll hold my breath.”

The laugh came mostly from the back rows. Mrs. Corrigan let it go.

“That’s not funny,” she said, without heat. “It’s just true. In a hundred years this country has sent in teams with everything we know how to make, and we have never gotten one person back. Not one person, not one boat, not one radio call. That’s the whole record.”

Adrian turned his page when the room turned theirs. He was aware of the radiator, and of the girl on his left chewing the end of her pen, and of a fly working the window, and of the coffee ring on the corner of Mrs. Corrigan’s desk getting a second ring inside the first. He kept his hands still.

He had been in fog. In the other place, the one he went to when he slept, there had been fog with no edge to it, and he had walked in it, and it had not killed him. That was all he had. He was not going to raise his hand about it.

“Fog’s a word,” Mrs. Corrigan said, as if she had heard him, and he made himself not move. “It’s not smoke. It’s not weather. The book uses the word because a hundred years ago that’s what the first people at the Line called it, and nobody since has come up with anything better.”

A chair let its front legs down in the back row. “So is there anybody still out there?”

“That’s on ninety-two.”

The chair went quiet.

“Page ninety-two,” she said. “Then it stopped.”

She drew on the board, one vertical line, and wrote THE LINE beside it.

“Here. It stopped here. It runs north to south, a few hundred miles west of us, and it has not moved in a hundred years. No one knows why it stopped, and I want to be clear about that, because a great many people will tell you they know.” She capped the marker. “There are three things people say, and two of them are in the book. One: it’s alive, and it ate until it couldn’t eat, and ninety-eight percent of a planet is a lot of planet, so it stopped because it was full.”

“Like a bear,” Sean said.

“Like a bear,” Mrs. Corrigan agreed. “Two: there’s something under this ground it doesn’t like. The iron in the hills. The water table. Whatever the survey people look at. If that’s the answer, then the reason you’re sitting here is geology, and you can thank a rock.”

She picked the marker back up and didn’t write anything with it.

“Three. Three isn’t science. Three is what some people say, and some of them say it from a pulpit and some of them say it at the kitchen table, and they say we were kept. They say it stopped here because somebody meant it to stop here, and the reason was us.”

“All three are on the test,” she said, before anybody could ask. “The first two are in the book. The third one isn’t, and I’m telling you anyway, because you’re going to hear it, and I’d rather you heard it in a room with a page number in it.”

She switched off the front lights and started the projector, and the fan came on, and the picture landed on the wall above the board, crooked. She put a hand up and adjusted it and it stayed crooked.

“Fifty years ago we got a camera over the top of it. This is what came back.”

The Earth, grey-white, the color of a sidewalk in February, and one narrow band down the eastern side that was still the color a road atlas is.

“That band is us. Everything east of the Line.” She stepped away from the wall so they could look at it. “Which makes this country an island. There’s nothing on the other side of the water and nothing on the other side of the Line, and as far as anyone has been able to prove in a century, there is nothing else at all. Which makes you—“ she looked at the clock, and then at them— “possibly the last people on this planet. I want you to write that down exactly the way I said it.”

Sean raised his hand. “Is that on the test?”

The room laughed. Mrs. Corrigan let it run out.

“Page ninety-one is on the test,” she said. “March ninth is Survival Day. That’s the name. Don’t call it anything else.”

The bell went, and the room stood up into the noise of books and chair legs and three kids already at the door.

Lunch was at 11:42, which meant the cafeteria had been serving since 10:50 and the whole building smelled like ground beef and hot dishwater.

Adrian ate outside, on the low concrete wall at the back of the parking lot where the gym’s shadow came down at that hour. The mower had left long green stripes on the ball field. He took the napkin out of his jacket pocket and unfolded it and ate the other half of the cookie in four bites, and then he had nothing to do with his hands.

The wall took Bryce’s weight before the hello.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You’re not at the table.”

“Not today.”

“Tomorrow.”

“I’m on the 3:10 bus.”

Bryce was quiet. Out on the field the mower came around the far turn and started back up the long side.

“That’s after school,” he said. Not pushing. Just saying back what he’d heard.

“My aunt works second shift.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Bryce got up off the wall and his knees cracked. “The table’s still there. The one that wobbles. Somebody put a napkin under it, so now it doesn’t.” He went back across the lot with his shoes scuffing in the gravel. “See you in sixth.”

Adrian sat with the napkin in his hand. He had said the smallest piece of it out loud, and Bryce had taken that piece and gone, which was what he had wanted, and it had not felt like anything.

Sixth period, the last period, was eleven minutes of a film about the Erie Canal and nineteen minutes of the projector overheating, and then it was 2:52 and the hall filled up in a wave.

Adrian went with it. He had the shape of the crowd before it closed on him — where it thinned out at the trophy case, where two of the football players were coming through at a run and cutting around people — and he stepped left for a kid carrying a trumpet case, and the kid said “Sorry—“ a second after the fact, to the space where Adrian had been.

“—no, it was an accident,” the girl with the cello case was saying, nine feet in front of him. “That’s why the eyes. They’re doing the surgery in the spring, that’s what I heard.”

“They can do that?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I heard.”

By the trophy case, two boys, one of them talking with the flat certainty of somebody repeating the best thing he had heard all day: “—out by Pittsburgh, one of those special schools. He was the best student they ever had, and then he transferred here. That’s what I heard.”

At the water fountain a girl said, to nobody in particular, “His aunt’s saving up for it. My mom works with her. She’s got a thing going.”

Adrian kept walking. He could have said: I spent a year in a hospital out by Pittsburgh, and it wasn’t a school. He could have said: she works second shift, and the thing she has going is not the thing you think it is. Every version was better than the real one to hear and worse to live in, and he let all three of them go by.

The door bar was hot. He put his weight into it, and the doors let go, and the heat came over him — hot tar, cut grass, the buses already running at the curb — and he hiked his bag higher on his shoulder and went out with everybody else.