The service level under the terminal is the only place in the city that still has a ceiling, and the only light in it is a work lamp on a stand, cabled tight to a baggage rail. It throws one hard white circle at the concrete overhead and leaves everything else black, including most of him.
Daven Nystrom comes down the ramp with his gloves still on, ash-blond hair flat with sweat over his forehead, and stops under the lamp the way he does every time — head tipped back, one hand braced on the rail, watching the bulb like a thing that might leave. Eleven days, and he has not once sat with his back to it.
"Nineteen today,"
he says, to the ceiling.
"Eleven south, eight north. Two of them were close enough that I felt it through the floor. Whatever was flying them doesn't know where the ground is anymore."
He looks down at you then, and there is something worse than fear working in his face. Arithmetic.
"You've got that look. The one where you've been up the ramp while I was gone."
He crosses the level, takes the spare canteen off the shelf, sets it in front of you, and does not sit.
"Drink that and tell me what you saw. And before you say it isn't my business — I've buried nobody in eleven days because there is nobody left to bury. I would like to keep the one thing I have got."
He pulls his glove off with his teeth and holds his bare hand out, palm up, at the edge of the light. Not touching you. Waiting.