Nine years

Nine years is the measure Hig gives for life after the flu: long enough for the first catastrophe and the blood disease that followed to kill almost everyone, but not long enough for their effects to become safely past. The interval shapes his daily defenses and his memories alike. It also measures losses that cannot be reduced to human survival, as streams warm, species disappear, and familiar places become unrecognizable.

The Nine-Year Measure

The count is explicit: Hig says that nine years have passed. The flu killed nearly everyone; the blood disease killed more. The survivors left behind are, in his judgment, mostly dangerous, which is why he and Bangley live on the plain and why Hig patrols every day. The duration is therefore not a settled aftermath but a prolonged condition of vigilance.

The crisis began with illness and fear. Hig recalls two straight weeks of fever, including three days at 104 to 105 degrees, followed by thoughts that could feel displaced and difficult to trust, especially under stress. Nine years out, the bodily emergency has passed, but the account does not present time as a clean cure: fear and mental unease remain part of how he understands survival.

Survival as Routine

At the airport, years of danger have become practical habits. After intruders began coming at night, alone or in groups and carrying weapons, Hig started sleeping on the ground. He keeps the Beast running, maintains fuel, and patrols the open ground between the airport and the first trees. The perimeter is eight miles of exposed country; Bangley can direct his firepower west, while Hig supplies the view from the air. Their division of work turns the long aftermath into a daily system of watchfulness.

The system depends on modest infrastructure that still works. Four sixty-watt panels power a single LED through the night in the house where Hig does not sleep. The airport’s facilities had been designed around solar panels and wind power, resources that matter more after the collapse than their original planners could have anticipated. Even the Garmin GPS continues to receive satellite signals and warn Hig when the plane approaches high ground. These surviving technologies do not restore the old world; they keep a narrow pocket of it usable.

Ecological Loss and Remembered Places

Nine years also makes environmental decline visible as a sequence of absences. Hig grieves the disappearance of trout, naming brook, rainbow, brown, cutthroat, and cutbow varieties among those gone. The streams have warmed, and even the mountains have lost reliable snow: in two successive winters, the peaks held almost none. The possibility of losing the creeks themselves frightens him more than attacks or disease because the damage reaches beyond a single species to the places and practices that gave his life shape.

Fishing remains both sustenance and a way of returning to those places. When deer, rabbits, and sunfish grow tiresome, Hig hunts in the mountains, where the dead forest and recovering green stands frame the creeks he remembers. With the trout gone, he fishes for suckers and carp, adapting his techniques and his palate to what remains. He sometimes uses dry flies as carp begin feeding nearer the surface, but does not bring the catch home for Bangley, who regards recreation as a distraction from survival. For Hig, time on the water has a different necessity: it is a way to breathe, attend, and feel connected to a country that is changing around him.

That connection is made tangible by his Sage pack rod, a four-piece rod his father gave him for his sixteenth birthday, shortly after Hig came to live with him. His father died of pancreatic cancer the following year, before teaching him to use it; Hig taught himself and learned from Uncle Pete. The rod carries a personal history into a diminished landscape, while his remembered creeks bind private loss to ecological loss. When he thinks of waking in tears over vanished trout, the grief is not merely nostalgia for a hobby: it registers a world becoming less habitable and less familiar.

Cities, Displacement, and the Long Aftermath

The nine-year span contains more than Hig’s life at the airport. St. Vincent’s Hospital stood across the lake, where orange helicopters landed; when the situation worsened, Hig and Melissa went there, to a building taken over and filling with the dead. The memory sets institutional collapse beside the daily routines that followed: a hospital became a place of mass loss, while the airport became a defended home.

The flight over Grand Junction later reveals another scale of the aftermath. Cottonwoods still shade the river parks, though drought has left some of the oldest trees only half alive. Across the city, fire has marked every district: cars are scorched, neighborhoods have burned, and human remains lie among the ruins. The view makes the passage of years legible not as recovery but as a landscape in which some life persists amid damage that has not been repaired.

Pops and Cima had left their ranch during the collapse, traveling with livestock and supplies toward the canyon. Their departure came amid barricaded ambushes on the road; after reaching the canyon, Pops destroyed the ford with dynamite, leaving passage possible only on foot or horseback and only when the water was low. Their choices show how the old routes and ordinary assumptions about travel had become untenable within the same broad period Hig counts as nine years.

News After Silence

Near the end of the account, two 747s pass over Erie. Hig runs to the Beast, turns on the radio, and scans through static until he hears a conversation in Arabic. The aircraft are heading west at thirty thousand feet; he calls repeatedly, identifying Erie, but receives no reply. A week later two more pass, and another pair follows the next week. In the fourth week, none appear.

The encounter does not establish who is aboard, where the planes came from, or whether anyone has heard Hig. Its force lies in the contrast: after almost a decade without real news, voices from the air briefly interrupt the silence, then the pattern ends. Nine years is thus both a boundary around remembered catastrophe and an open question about what, if anything, remains connected beyond it.