A Highway with No Traffic

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Highway with No Traffic

Not a single star pierced the night. Quinn had been walking since before sunrise, his pack digging harder into his shoulders with every mile. The high-voltage lines hummed overhead, occasionally hissing at him.

Desert dust coated his throat, turning every breath shallow and raw. Smoke burned his eyes and nose and turned the desert gray. The moon hung red behind the smoke.

Quinn followed the high-voltage lines south.

He had spent most of his life running cable through walls and conduit, joining one end of a system to another. Breakers, switches, outlets—small points of connection leading back to a source no one ever thought about until it disappeared.

Now most of the lights were gone. Yet current still moved through the lines above him. Damaged conductors arced in the wind, dropping sparks into the dry brush.

Quinn had once imagined buying a farmhouse where he and Rebecca could build a life away from everything. Rebecca had always treated her own life as something that could wait. Each morning, she woke impatient to return to the laboratory, convinced the answer was somewhere beneath her microscope.

Quinn wondered whether she had ever stopped to ask what saving the world would cost her.

Cabeza Prieta lay nearly five hundred miles from Las Vegas. Rebecca would be heading there too.

At the rate he was going, the journey would take two weeks. He walked into the night, trading sleep for miles.

The headlamp cast a single spot on the ground before him. After three hours in darkness, Quinn began falling asleep on his feet, weaving beneath the lines.

Unable to go any farther, Quinn found a patch of open ground and sat down on a wool blanket. Utterly alone. The katydids still sang. Coyotes argued across the canyon. Bats stitched loops through the darkness.

Nature hadn’t noticed humanity was ending.

***

The day Quinn left Vegas, he stood in line at a roadside produce stand outside Henderson, waiting to barter for whatever remained.

The stand had once sold peaches, local honey, and baskets of tomatoes to tourists driving toward Lake Mead. Now the plywood shelves held dented cans, bruised vegetables, and cartons of unrefrigerated eggs.

A handwritten sign had been nailed above the counter.

CASH. SILVER. GAS. MEDICINE. AMMUNITION.

NO CARDS.

Twenty people waited beneath a faded canvas awning. Most held something they hoped could still be traded. Jewelry. Tools. One man carried three rolls of copper wire over his shoulder.

Quinn had brought a cordless drill and a half bottle of bourbon. An old .38 waited in the glove box in case barter failed.

He needed water more than food.

Rebecca would have laughed at the bourbon.

You finally found something useful to do with it.

He had not heard from her since the cell phones went dead months earlier. The woman ahead of him traded a wedding ring for two gallons of water, six eggs, and a can of peaches. She held the eggs against her chest as though someone might take them.

The man running the stand inspected Quinn’s drill and placed it beneath the counter.

“I can give you canned beans and a gallon of water.”

“That drill cost three hundred dollars.”

“Then you should have sold it when dollars were worth something.”

Quinn looked past him at the remaining supplies.

Two plastic gas cans sat beside a stack of empty milk crates.

“How much for the gas?”

“Not for sale.”

“I’ve got bourbon.”

A low concussion rolled across the valley.

The jars on the shelves rattled.

Everyone turned toward Vegas.

For a moment, nothing changed. Then a column of black smoke rose behind them. A second explosion followed. Closer this time. The ground trembled beneath Quinn’s boots. Car alarms began sounding in the parking lot. One after another, then all at once. A fire alarm shrieked from the motel across the highway. Sirens started somewhere to the north.

Hands reached over the counter. Someone seized a case of water. Another person grabbed both cartons of eggs and ran.

The man behind the stand shouted and pulled a shotgun from beneath the register.

A third explosion rolled through the valley. Far across Henderson, the power went out in sections. Traffic signals died. Storefronts went dark. A transmission line flashed white against the mountains, followed by a burst of orange fire.

Smoke swept across the highway in a single dark wall. Within seconds, the sun became a red coin behind it. Quinn wrapped his shirt across his nose. People screamed without knowing why. Cars backed into one another as drivers fought to leave the lot. Someone fired a gun. The shotgun answered.

The gas cans were still beside the milk crates. Quinn moved toward them. So did a man in a camouflage jacket. They reached the nearest can at the same time. The man caught the handle first. Quinn grabbed the bottom.

“Let go.”

“I need it.”

“So do I.”

Quinn drove his shoulder into the man’s chest. He seized the can and ran.

Behind him, the shotgun fired again. The radio came on when he started the engine. Every station carried a different version of the same ending. An attack on a switching station. A military strike. A coordinated uprising. The federal emergency network instructed residents to remain indoors. Then static swallowed the radio lines.

For days, the country had been coming apart. Federal troops had fought civilians for control of East Coast fuel terminals. Armed coalitions in California had seized reservoirs, ports, warehouses, and substations.

Quinn pulled onto the highway. Traffic had already stopped. Cars filled every lane, some facing south, others north, others abandoned at angles between them. People ran along the shoulders carrying children, bags, rifles, and plastic containers.

Quinn drove onto the shoulder, crossed a drainage ditch, and pushed through a break in a chain-link fence. The truck bounced over hard desert ground. He headed for the transmission corridor south of the highway. The towers were easy to follow, dark steel frames marching through the smoke.

The road disappeared behind him.

The track narrowed between exposed rock and a dry wash. The rear tires spun in loose sand. The truck sank to its axle. He sat behind the wheel while the engine idled. He poured in the stolen gas and tried once more. The tires only buried themselves deeper. His knuckles were split from fighting for fuel that had carried him less than six miles. Night came without a sunset.

Quinn locked the doors and climbed into the back seat. He rested the .38 revolver between his legs, both hands wrapped around the grip.

Outside, the transmission lines hummed in the darkness.

In the morning, Quinn turned south and began walking beneath the power lines.

***

The verdict had been delivered years earlier. Quinn could not pinpoint the moment people finally accepted it. Four years ago, there had still been baby showers, the occasional baby sprinkle, and over-the-top gender reveals. Then all at once, everything changed.

Three years, six months, and twelve days ago, the Director-General of the World Health Organization had looked into a camera and pronounced civilization’s death sentence. “No human pregnancies have been confirmed for ninety days.” No explanation was given. No one had found one since.

Now the playgrounds were empty. For nearly three years people pretended life would continue. They went to work. They voted. They planned vacations. They fought in wars. Then they stopped pretending.

Scientists blamed endocrine disruptors, unidentified viruses, even divine judgment. Every week another certainty replaced the last. People divided into camps. Protests erupted over theories no one could prove and cures no one could produce.

Professor Konstantin Orlov claimed a child was never made from DNA alone. Every child began as hope shared by two people.

Rebecca saw it differently.

The answer, she insisted, was in the blood.

***

One Friday afternoon, Quinn and Rebecca had driven south from Las Vegas on a highway that should have been crowded.

Instead, all three lanes were empty.

No tractor-trailers. No commuters. No families heading out for the weekend. Their car moved alone beneath the signs and overpasses while the desert stretched outward on both sides.

Quinn looked across the vacant lanes.

“It’s a highway with no traffic.”

Rebecca turned toward him. “What did you say?”

“A highway with no traffic.”

She stared through the windshield.

“That’s what the blood looks like,” she said.

Quinn glanced at her. “What does?”

“The signals that tell the immune system to tolerate pregnancy are missing.”

“What signals?”

“The immune system has to protect the mother without attacking the life taking root inside her.”

She pulled an old receipt from the cup holder and began writing across the back.

Quinn watched her fill the paper with arrows, abbreviations, and circles.

“The Torah calls blood the life of the flesh,” she said.

“You’re quoting scripture now?”

“I’m saying people always knew blood was more than plumbing.”

She underlined something twice. “And ours has changed.”

“But why?”

Rebecca kept writing.

“I know what changed,” she said. “I don’t know what changed it.”

By the time they reached Henderson, the receipt was full.

Months later, on the morning Rebecca left for the Antares Project, Quinn handed her a folded map.

“What is this?” she asked.

“The Devil’s Highway.”

She opened it across her suitcase. A route had been marked through Cabeza Prieta in red ink.

“And what am I supposed to do with it? Hang it on my wall?”

“If things get bad and we get separated, you meet me there.”

“Things are already bad.”

“They’re going to get worse.”

Rebecca folded the map along its original creases.

“Why there?”

“It’s wilderness. People will stay away.”

“People die out there.”

“People die everywhere.”

She looked toward the platform where the train was waiting.

Quinn caught her hand before she could turn away.

“If everything falls apart,” he said, “where do you go?”

Rebecca looked down at the map.

“A highway with no traffic.”

“That’s right.”

Then she nodded once, placed the map inside her bag, and boarded the train.

Quinn had stopped trying to decide who was right. He shouldered his pack and stepped beneath the power lines again.

Whether humanity deserved saving no longer mattered.

Rebecca did.

***

The day after Rebecca arrived at Kitt Peak, she climbed the steel stairs to the Mayall Telescope. The Antares Project had assembled astronomers, reproductive biologists, and hematologists to search for a cause no single field could explain.

Rebecca had expected the first answer to come from the blood. Instead, it appeared in the sky.

By the time darkness settled over the Quinlan Mountains, the white dome had rotated toward another carefully selected patch of sky. From Kitt Peak, the desert unfolded in gold and rust beneath a smoldering western horizon.

The observatory domes stood in silent vigil above the mountains, waiting for darkness the way cathedrals wait for prayer. The sky did not merely grow dark. It awakened. As the last crimson faded from the west, one star became ten. Then hundreds. The Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon until the mountains themselves glowed silver beneath it.

That first night, the spaces between the stars had seemed larger than she remembered. She blamed insomnia and caffeine.

The first absence Rebecca found lay near the Witch’s Head Nebula beneath the cold blue light of Rigel, where young T Tauri stars were still being born.

The star should have been there. V222 Ori appeared in every archived image and none of the current ones. Rebecca checked the optics and detector, then compared observations from telescopes across the globe. Each showed the same empty patch of sky.

V222 Ori was gone.

Two days later, Rebecca watched another star vanish.

Stars did not simply disappear. They swelled, faded, collapsed, or exploded across immense spans of time. They did not blink out between observations.

Satellite streaks, debris, and atmospheric distortion could corrupt an image. None could erase the same star from every telescope across the globe.

Rebecca logged the discovery, reported it to headquarters, and returned to the pre-collapse and post-collapse blood samples.

The cactus wrens woke her before sunrise, scolding from the ridge with their mechanical char-char-char. Rebecca watched birds for the same reason she studied blood. A flock revealed changes no individual creature could. When conditions failed, migratory birds left.

Maybe the stars were migrating too.

Months later, they ate breakfast beside the overlook. The overlook had once been crowded with tourists. Now only Rebecca, Orlov, and a handful of cactus wrens remained.

The wrens gathered along the overlook fence.

Rebecca lowered her coffee. “They don’t migrate.”

Orlov watched them lift from the ridge together.

“They do now.”

The flock wheeled and streamed south, gliding with the terrain, until they disappeared from view.

Orlov turned and looked at Rebecca.

“You keep saying the stars disappeared,” Orlov said.

“They did.”

“No. You measured their absence.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The stars may still be there.”

“Then where is their light?”

Orlov looked toward the empty sky. “Perhaps they aren’t sending it here anymore.”

“Light doesn’t choose.”

“They were never merely lights. They were witnesses.”

“To what?”

“Us.”

“And now?”

“Now they’ve looked away.”

She began printing the star maps and laying transparent overlays across them. Each morning, she circled another missing point of light in red ink. Soon the maps were crowded with red circles.

The WHO had estimated the date of the last known conception. V222 Ori had vanished within forty-eight hours of it. She checked the timeline three times.

Rebecca leaned back from the screen.

The missing stars did not frighten her nearly as much as the possibility that they were keeping count.

***

When smoke climbed the mountain and fire appeared below the overlook, Orlov emerged carrying his stainless-steel thermos.

“It’s time, Rebecca.”

“But we haven’t finished.”

“If we are here when the fires reach us, we’ll be finished.”

“We’ll never find Quinn out there.”

“Have some faith, Rebecca.”

“You know I’m not that kind of girl.”

***

The old Ford rattled along the Devil’s Highway, pulling smoke behind it through the broken rear window. Quinn had found the truck abandoned beside a dry wash and jumped the ignition with wire from his pack. The fuel gauge had not moved in twenty miles.

Ahead, an old gas station emerged from the haze.

One pump leaned sideways beneath the collapsed canopy. Sand had blown across the asphalt and gathered against the doors of the convenience store. The windows were dark.

Quinn saw something orange move behind the glass.

He hit the brakes.

The truck skidded to a stop fifty yards beyond the station.

A faint light flickered inside the store. Not electric. A candle.

He left the engine running and stepped down with the .38 in his hand. Wind pushed dust across the lot. Thunder rolled somewhere beyond the mountains.

The store’s glass door was locked.

Quinn looked through it. Empty shelves. An overturned rack of postcards.

“Rebecca?”

He struck the door with the side of his fist.

“Rebecca!”

Something moved behind the counter. A figure stood slowly.

The orange gaiter covered the lower half of her face. It was the ugly orange gaiter she always wore in the desert, the one Quinn remembered from every trail where she stopped to watch cactus wrens.

She pulled it down.

For a moment, Quinn could not speak. He had imagined her face too many times beneath the power lines. He no longer trusted the sight of it.

Rebecca crossed the store and unlocked the door.

Neither of them moved.

“You’re late,” she said.

Quinn lowered the revolver.

“I drove as fast as this thing would let me.”

A drop of rain struck the pavement between them. Then another.

Rebecca stepped outside.

Quinn touched her cheek as if he still needed to be sure.

“You found me,” she said.

“No.” He looked at the orange gaiter around her neck. “You made it difficult to miss you.”

The wind lifted behind them, carrying the smell of rain into the smoke.

Then Rebecca put her arms around him.

“Where’s Orlov?”

“Looking for fuel. Our truck died half a mile back.”

Quinn looked her in the eye.

“Did you find it?” Quinn asked.

“Part of it.”

Inside the store, Rebecca spread several folded pages across the counter.

“The regulatory T cells and uterine natural killer cells are no longer balancing the immune response. The body never receives the signal to prepare for pregnancy. The highway is intact, but nothing travels it.”

“A highway with no traffic.”

She nodded. “I found where it fails. Not why.”

“And the stars?”

“That’s the part I can’t explain. The blood, the birds, the stars—something changed all of them.”

“Then we keep looking.”

Rebecca studied him. “You wanted me to leave all this behind.”

“I wanted you safe.”

“In your farmhouse?”

Quinn nodded. “I kept trying to decide what our life should look like before we had one.”

Rebecca looked down at the papers. “And I kept acting like ours could wait until I finished this.”

“It can’t.”

“No.”

Quinn nodded toward the papers. “But neither can this.”

She looked up at him.

“So, we do both,” he said.

The door opened behind them. Orlov entered carrying his thermos and a red plastic fuel can.

“There is a federal field laboratory near Mount Elden,” he said. “Equipment, housing, and perhaps enough power to continue.”

“How far?” Quinn asked.

Orlov looked toward the Ford. “It only has to carry us far enough.”

The Ford coughed twice before the engine caught. Rebecca climbed in beside Quinn. Orlov settled into the back with his thermos.

They pulled away beneath the gathering storm.

For the first time in days, the highway carried traffic.