Alone

by Jennifer Reynolds

  They usually refrained from sex a few days before and after her period, and during those times in-between periods they used protection to keep from getting pregnant. They had had a long discussion right after they were married about how they were going to wait until this was all over before they had kids. The moment she started having her normal symptoms of constant hunger and cramps they ceased having sex. Then he got sick, and she had gotten scared, and forgotten about everything until she saw the unopened pack of pads in the cabinet.

  Later that same day she had a bad dizzy spell that had caused her to have to lie down before she threw up. She decided then that something was wrong. Either she was pregnant or she was getting sick. Her brain told her it was option A. She knew it because she had never in her life been so much as a day late let alone missed an entire period.

  The next morning she took Caleb with her to the pharmacy to get Kyle some more medicine. She argued with herself about getting the test. But logic won and the test came home. She waited until Kyle was taking a nap to take it. Shock spread across her face when the digital readout had read, “pregnant.”

  That night Kyle came into the bathroom while she was brushing her teeth. He just sat on the toilet, watching her intently. “So I guess we are going to have a baby after all,” he said between coughs. Her hand froze mid-brush. After a few seconds she nodded, spit, and rinsed her mouth.

  “Yeah,” she whispered, reaching into the cabinet under the sink for the test. After handing it to him, she went back to the basin to wash her face. He sat there for almost a full minute staring at the second test she had gone out to get and the two tiny pink strips that indicated that she was indeed pregnant. The longer he stared the more nervous she got. When he finally looked up at her, he gave her a sad smile. He got up from the toilet to give her a soft kiss.

  “We will make it through this no matter what happens. You are a strong person. You will survive even if I don’t.” He broke off to start another long coughing fit.

  “I can’t. You have to get better. I can’t do this alone. I’m not that strong anymore.”

  He looked sadly into her face, and they both knew he was never going to make it.

  His fever got worse as the night went on. His cough sounding harsher and raspier. He fell asleep with a hand protectively covering her stomach. Once she knew he was sleeping deeply, she prayed. She prayed hard and long that God would give her the strength to do whatever she had to do.

  That was the night the dreams started—dreams that she was almost ashamed to think about. They all started the same way, well except for the one she had the night Kyle died; it didn’t start with him.

  The dream usually started out with Kyle lying in their bed coughing up blood and begging Eve to kill him. She was crying, sobbing out words of argument, saying that she couldn’t do it. That she wouldn’t do it. Him pleading with her to stop his pain, saying he was dying anyway, and that killing him would just be speeding up the process. His death would be ending his suffering. He could not take the agony anymore. His insides were bursting. Blood was everywhere. Coming from everywhere.

  Finally, he stopped coughing. Stopped crying. And looked sanely into her eyes, and asked her calmly to do one last thing for him. He said it as if it was the most normal request, and she did it as if it were the most normal action. She placed her hand over his mouth and nose. He didn’t fight. He didn’t move. He just accepted it and passed on. When it was over, she stood and stared in shock at what she had done.

  In an emotionless shocked daze, she walked into Caleb’s room. He was sleeping soundlessly in his crib. She reached down, grabbed his pillow, and gently placed it over his face. He whined for a second but then lay still.

  The next thing she did was go downstairs to the kitchen and grab the biggest knife she could find. She went into the family room where she stripped off all of her clothes and picked up one of Caleb’s blankets. She lay down on the big over-stuffed sofa and proceeded to slice open her stomach.

  She cut and pulled open her skin and felt around inside until she found her uterine sack. Once she located it, she cut it open. She could feel the pain. The constant flow of blood soaked her body. Her head spun from the loss of it. But still she continued butchering herself. Once she had the sack open, she reached inside and pulled her baby out. In reality, she was only a few weeks along. The baby was nothing more than a group of cells trying desperately to form a body, but in her dream, she was always near delivery. She used the same knife to cut the umbilical cord.

  The infant’s body was so tiny and perfect covered in whitish fluids and her blood. The baby didn’t cry. It didn’t even open its eyes to look at her. She held it to her chest, letting it hear her heart beat as it struggles to adapt to a world it wasn’t ready to enter. In less than a minute, it took its last breath, and shortly after so did Eve.

  The first night she had the dream, she woke up in the bathtub screaming with sweat and water soaking her body. Kyle told her that she had screamed so loud and for so long he had to carry her into the bathroom and stick her under a cold shower to bring her out of her dream. Poor Caleb, she had scared him so bad he’d never gone back to sleep that night. That was all right with her because neither had she. The nights following, she would wake with a jerk, go downstairs, pour herself a small glass of wine, and then go back to bed. She knew the alcohol wasn’t good for the baby but it was good for her nerves.

  Eve and Kyle didn’t talk about the baby after that first night. They got themselves in the habit of pretending that it didn’t exist. Kyle continued to get sicker, and Eve’s fear continued to grow. Caleb just continued to be his wonderful little self, learning how to crawl and trying to figure out how to walk.

  On the last day of the month, Kyle passed away. Eve had just put Caleb down for a nap when she heard a horrible raspy cough come from her bedroom. She walked to the doorway that joined Caleb’s room to theirs to see if Kyle was all right. He looked fine. He looked as if he was sleeping and having a very nice dream. But something felt off about the scene. A voice in her head told her that something was definitely wrong with what she was looking at. He was too still, too peaceful looking.

  She walked in what felt like slow motion over to the bed. He was still breathing, but very slowly, very softly. She checked his pulse; it was almost nonexistent. A little scared, she crawled up into bed with him. He didn’t move. He didn’t acknowledge her presence. She wrapped his arms around her, to give herself the illusion of him embracing her. She lay there waiting. Her eyes closed. Her body still. Her ears listening for that last breath, that last beat of his heart.

  Five minutes later, he took in that last breath. Tears fell, but she never made a sound. With his arms still wrapped around her, she cried herself to sleep.

  Noises made by Caleb moving around in his bed woke her sometime later. When she first tried to move, her body was stiff and unwilling to do what she wanted it to do. Kyle’s body had also started to stiffen, and the arm she had wrapped around her sent chills down her back as she pulled it off her. Once out of bed, she covered Kyle completely with a blanket before going to get Caleb.

  Shielding him as best as she could from what was in her bedroom, she took Caleb out of the room and out into the backyard so he could play a little. She set up his playpen right inside the back gate that way she would be able to see and hear him while she worked in the tiny cemetery right outside the backyard.

  She spent hours digging the hole as long and as deep as she could possibly dig it. She dug so deep she almost couldn’t get out of the hole when she was done. Caleb was a good boy nearly the entire time, only giving her slight trouble when he was hungry, wanted to be changed, or just simply needed a little attention.

  That night while Caleb slept, she sewed Kyle into a blanket, just as she had done to so many others. Very carefully and quietly, she half carried-half drug him out to the little makeshift cemetery. Not wanting to roll him into the hole, she jumped down into the newly dug grave and pulled him into
it.

  She laid him across the bottom, kissed his forehead, then turned to crawl back out. There was just one problem; she couldn’t get out of the grave. Every time she tried to get a hold onto something to pull herself out, she pulled dirt down on top of herself. She circled the hole numerous times trying to find a spot in the dark with good leverage, but every place she tried met with the same end, dirt in her face. Her heart raced in fear. There was no one left. No one to hear her cry. No one to hear her scream. No one to come to her aid.

  Minutes passed as she paced the grave. She was so tired she couldn’t remember how she had gotten out that first time right after she had dug the hole. All she could remember from the dig was that she had had the shovel and she didn’t have that now. Finally, after spending far too much time holding back screams of terror, fighting back the panic that threatened to overtake her, she dug out a series of tree roots that wouldn’t snap every time she pulled on them to use to pull herself up.

  Once she was out, she quickly covered him with dirt. At the head of his grave, she had dug a much smaller hole into which she poured cement. She staked the mixture with a wooden cross that bore Kyle’s name, date of birth, and death.

  That night there were no dreams, and she woke the next morning to find that she had over slept for the first time in months. Normally Caleb would have woken her early, but he seemed to sense that something was wrong with her because he didn’t wake her until it was nearly lunchtime. After changing him, feeding him some oatmeal, and giving him a glass of powdered milk to wash it all down with, she placed him in his play area and stepped outside her quiet home. Numerous times since they had gotten up, she had seen Caleb look around the house trying to find Kyle. She didn’t try to explain it to him. He would stop looking for him soon. Just as he had stopped looking for Andrea, Ty, and the others.

  Looking out over all the empty homes, all of the lifeless land, her body began to tremble and uneasy thoughts began to swim through her brain. These last few months had been like a very horrible dream, but that day was a Stephen King novel.

  “God, I’m never watching that movie again,” she murmured to herself. She listened as her words vibrated into the emptiness and died. No birds sang, no dogs barked. There was nothing. “Well, Robert Neville, it looks like I’m going to be the Legend,” she said, but this time in a voice so small she barely heard it and laughed a little hysterically.

  Fighting the urge to run down the street screaming is anyone out there; she went back inside only to sit on the couch and continue to look out the front window at the empty world. Caleb kept looking at her, then in the direction she was staring. She could see that in his own little way he was trying to figure out what it was she was looking so intently at.

  He doesn’t remember there ever being people, lots and lots of people. He has no memory of old man Lisby riding his riding lawnmower up and down his front yard, of all the women that used to gather at Mrs. Irene’s for tea and all the latest gossip. Nor does he remember the McCray twins riding their bicycles all over the neighborhood. Caleb had never once seen another child.

  “I think we should build a fence,” was all she said to him. He only smiled up at her, not understanding what she was saying, only caring that she was talking to him.

  III – The Unexpected

  As she lay across the family room sofa, coughing large chunks of greenish mucus into a tissue, Eve thought, Well, it looks as if my time on this planet has finally come to an end, then laughed at her over dramatic brain. She had assumed she would be scared when this moment came, but she wasn’t. At least, she wasn’t scared for herself. She was scared for her unborn child and for Caleb.

  Every day she prayed that God would let her live long enough for Caleb to die. His death was a horrible thing to pray for, and it was the last thing she would have ever thought she would be praying for. To pray for another person’s death was so unthinkable. To pray for the death of a child was even worse. That type of prayer should be on God’s top ten list—it was such a horrible thing to think.

  Not only did she pray that God would go ahead and take Caleb, but she prayed that God would give her the strength to… No, she wouldn’t let the reality of that thought come to fruition. The idea was there, and she knew how possible it was that she might have to follow through with it, but for the time being it would stay hidden until she needed to do it.

  “God have mercy on my soul. Have pity on my actions. And forgive me for the sins I may commit.” This, unfortunately, had become a daily prayer for her shortly after Kyle’s death, when her situation finally dawned on her. She shuttered to think that someone else might have done it with no problems, like the man Andrea and the others had found in the trailer park.

  Eve had awakened one day toward the end of November with a severe cough and a throat so sore she could barely sip a glass of warm water. Her body was weak, and she couldn’t seem to keep her eyes open. The fog in her head made everything hazy and set the world spinning when she tried to open her eyes.

  Very carefully, she carried Caleb down the stairs and into the family room. Slowly, she gathered some bottled water and some easy-to-open food that didn’t have to be cooked and stacked them on the end table at the head of the sofa.

  Since then, the two of them had been camped out in the family room. Being down there was easier than climbing two flights of stairs a hundred times a day.

  After Kyle passed, she barely left the house or the grounds surrounding it. She had started erecting a privacy fence around the house, but the weather eventually turned too cold to be outside for any long length of time. The world outside was too creepy, too dead for them to acknowledge that it was there. The power was still on which meant they still had heat. That was a blessing. Every day Eve expected it to go out, but the turbines were obviously still turning well enough to produce power for the few places still using electricity.

  Eve tried to keep as much noise around them as possible. The noise kept the nothingness out. She read aloud, a lot, mostly because she feared she would forget how to speak if she didn’t use her voice. You never realize how much the sound of your own voice means to you until you don’t hear it, she had said repeatedly when telling this part of the story.

  After going a whole day without saying a word, she knew she had to do something. Talking when there was no one to talk back to you was hard to do, so she began to read aloud and talk to Caleb as if he could understand and talk back to her. In his own way, Eve guessed he kind of did. Her audio and video entertainment collections rose because of this constant need for noise.

  So far that winter there had been no snow, not that Richardson had ever really seen that much snow in the past. Caleb had never seen real snow, though, and Eve was kind of hoping he would get to.

  Thanksgiving nearly came without her even knowing. The day before, she just happened to look up at the calendar, and there the words were. She cooked the biggest meal she could, and they, actually Eve more than Caleb, ate until she couldn’t move. Her mom always put her Christmas decorations up the day after Thanksgiving, so she decided to do the same. She had to dig the tree out of the farthest corner of the attic. Caleb watched her put the tree up and decorate it in stunned silence.

  Once Thanksgiving was over, her birthday and Christmas were just around the corner. She was praying to live long enough to see them both, along with Caleb’s birthday, the day that would mark the one year anniversary of the whole mess. Unfortunately, she didn’t feel as if she would make it until then.

  She truly felt as if she were dying. The worst part was that Caleb was as healthy as he could ever be. He hadn’t had the slightest bit of anything since he came into the world. The baby, yes she started calling it a baby once she thought she could feel it, also seemed to be doing fine. Her library was full of pregnancy books, and they said that everything from the sporadic mood changes to the constipation that she had been having was all normal. She had even been taking some over the counter prenatal vitamins and eating the best s
he could under the conditions.

  Back in January, when the sickness started, she was by no means an obese person, but as the months had passed, she had lost a considerable amount of weight. The end of the world was the perfect diet, she laughingly told Kyle one day shortly after they were married as she was showing him pictures of her old plump body.

  After seeing the pictures and noticing the date on the back was from the Christmas before, and seeing how scarily skinny she was getting compared to them, Kyle had begun to fuss a lot about how much weight she was losing. He would have been proud to know that she had gained fifteen pounds in those four months. Half of it was probably from the lack of exercise she had been getting because she had been keeping herself cooped up in the house; only a fourth of it was baby. She was trying to convince herself that when the weather turned warmer she was going to spend more time outside. Hoping that if she gave herself a future to look forward to she wouldn’t contemplate much on her upcoming death.

  Being pregnant had kept her from being able to take certain medications which in turn was probably why she kept getting worse. And what medications she did take didn’t do her any good. The longer she stayed sick, the worse she felt, and the more convinced she was that she was going to die.

  Because she didn’t know what else to do, the morning of the first of December, she moved all the foods that Caleb could open by himself, to the kitchen floor. She filled every bottle and sippy cup in the house with water, put them in the bottom of the refrigerator, and showed him where they were. Throughout the day, whenever he wanted something, she showed him how to go and get it.

  He mostly crawled, but he was beginning to walk a little, a few steps here and there, all of which landed him on his bottom. She didn’t know any other way to help him. There was no one else to take care of him, and she knew that she would be unable to take his life before she died. A part of her understood that it would be more humane for her to kill him, and her mind constantly showed her all of the worst-case scenarios that could happen to him after she was gone, but she still couldn’t bring herself to do it.