by Sean Little
It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to arrive, of course, it’s just that I was worrying about what kind of future he would have. I wanted everything to be perfect, and despite all our advancements in the past year, we were still a long way from perfect. The lion attack was certainly an exclamation point on that statement, but it was far more than that. I worried about our food levels, especially after we lost so much of the garden in the hurricane. Some of it had recovered to a degree, but was it enough? Could we have done more? I wanted to find canning supplies. I wanted a quarter-ton of mason jars and lids so I could make mountains of berry preserves and cucumber pickles and all that sort of long-lasting, easy-storing things that would sustain us if we hit lean times. I wanted to plant groves of fruit trees. I wanted to practice hunting. If Twist got hurt or incapacitated in some way, I knew I would have to pick up that slack. I wanted to get more animals. I wanted to get more fences around the house. I wanted that stockade wall. What if that lion had come during the day, and what if it had taken a precocious toddler instead of a pig? That thought, horrific was it was, played on a constant loop in my head. It felt like I would have to defend this child from the entirety of the world, and I was not mentally ready to do that. There was an old saying, It takes a village to raise a child. Well, what happens when there are no more villages, and everyone else is dead?
That first night in the house alone was the toughest. Twist and I had not been apart at night since the day we met. We slept in separate beds for a long time, but they were in the back of an RV and we were less than fifteen feet from each other. I could hear him snoring and felt the truck rock when he rolled over. When we finally broke down and began sharing a bed, I think it was more out of a need to know we were no longer alone than any sort of romantic desperation.
I hoped that Twist would be home by dark, but I knew in my heart that he wouldn’t be. The ride to Houston was long. He needed to gather a bunch of supplies, and he didn’t have any maps. It would be a long, difficult trek back. I don’t care who you are—seventy or eighty miles on horseback in a single day was asking a lot. I had known he would have to camp somewhere. Luckily, camping was not all that difficult now. I did not figure he was on the plains huddled next to a campfire. He probably found a house, put Hera in the garage for the night, and slept on a couch or a bed. Knowing him, he would not have stayed in a house with corpses, so he might have had to search a bit, but there were plenty of houses out there. I did fear for his safety, though. How could I not? If something did happen to him, I would not know. If he died, I would only know because he would never come back. I might never know how or where he died. I would be left to agonize over that alone forever. That thought is what would keep me from sleeping.
The lower the sun got in the sky that day, the more apprehension welled up in my chest. I did not feel safe in the yard near the fire. I banked the coals for the night and retreated behind walls before it was even close to sunset. I secured all the animals in the barn to prevent the lion from getting another easy snack. I locked all the doors to the house and double-checked them to make sure they were really locked. I closed all the windows on the first floor. I brought a shotgun out from the gun safe and set it near the couch. I put my Sig on the end table next to the couch.
Fester curled up in my lap for attention, and I tried to watch a DVD to distract myself, but my heart and mind were not in it. I was too anxious to read. I suddenly felt old and very tired. The baby decided that he would try to cheer me up by doing a few dozen cartwheels. The little kicks on my stomach and bladder were annoying. It only soured my mood. I was too hot, too scared, and too uncomfortable.
I ended up wandering the upstairs hallway like some old sea captain’s wife stalking the Widow’s Walk. I kept looking out the windows that faced south, looking for any shadow that might be a horse and cart. I squinted out the window into the dark looking for a bobbing flashlight. I listened hard through the screen, trying to wade through the symphony of crickets, night bugs, and chirping frogs, for the sound of hooves on gravel or the squeak of the cart’s wheels.
When I was fairly confident that it was after midnight and Twist had not returned, I tried to sleep. I lay in bed and rubbed my expansive belly with my fingertips. I tried to change my mindset and think of the positive experiences this child would have instead of dwelling so hard on the negative aspects. This baby would be the first child in generations to be raised completely free of the influence of television and mass media. Sure, he might watch a movie or a DVD of cartoons occasionally, but he would not be bombarded with advertising. He would not be subjected to nightly newscasts preaching doom and gloom. He would be free to learn to from books at his own speed. I would teach him math, science, and nursing. Twist could teach him…whatever he knows, I guess. Twist reads a lot; he can teach him literature and writing. The kid won’t ever go to a “normal” school. He’ll learn through books and experience, and he will be completely free of societal norms. No one will ever bully him. No one will ever make him feel less than.
Every time I start to build up that sort of rah-rah positivity in my head, my brain immediately chips in the negatives, too. This kid will never know romantic love. He’ll never marry. He’ll never have children of his own. He’ll never have friends. He’ll never play team sports. His whole life will be a struggle I’ve never known until I was in my twenties.
But, then I trumped that negativity by telling myself that I was still looking at this kid’s future through my own eyes. I was used to being spoiled by modern society. I was used to cell phones, constant entertainment, and grocery stores. This world is a hardship on me because everything I used to have, I took for granted. This world is a hardship on me because I was not prepared for it, and I have had to play everything by ear since the moment I realized that I was not going to be dying by the wicked hands of the Flu. This child would only know the world he knew. He would have no memories of how easy we had it. He would accept everything as it was and adapt to it, the same way our ancestors did. They carved a life out of barren nature, and made it work for them. This child would not look at daily farm chores as a hindrance, but rather as something that we just did. He would see hunting as the only way to get fresh meat. He would know that farming was the only way to have a consistent source of vegetables and fruits. His world was going to be a wholly different experience than my world, and he would simply accept it as being the way it was.
I thought about telling the boy stories of “the good old days” when he was older. We had stores with moving staircases! There were massive, tall buildings with boxes on cables that could take you from the first floor to the seventieth in only a few seconds! We used to have over three hundred channels of television, and the audacity to complain that there was nothing to watch! It made me smile to think that my equivalent of the old “uphill both ways in the snow” adage would be things like, Once, at a party, I ran out of battery power on my cell phone and couldn’t take all the pictures I wanted!
I thought about how hard my dad worked so my sister and I could have a decent life, and how much my mother struggled to make ends meet on my dad’s meager income. We had a really nice life compared to some of our neighbors because both my parents worked so hard. My child would have a really nice life because hard work was the only way to live now. He would have everything he needed and nothing he didn’t. The more I thought about that, the more it made me feel content. I was going to have a happy, healthy child. He was going to live, laugh, and work with us. He might struggle at times, but in the end, he would live and be alive. I knew in my heart that there were more people out there in the world. I knew there were was a colony in New York, and even though that colony was filled with psychos, I knew there had to be others out there in the world. Who could know what might happen in the future? Maybe the world would rebound somewhat. Maybe my boy would find a wife of his own someday and have a family. Maybe there would be actual villages once again, and his children, or his children’s children would establish new gove
rnments, new sources of power, and new civilized cities. The blueprints were already established; it’s not like they would have to be figuring out everything as they went along, they could just do it better. I just had to keep him alive, and keep trying. Anything was possible.
The world was illuminated by the light of a nearly full moon. It cast a pale glow across the landscape and I could see every inch of the bedroom in the gloom. For that, I was grateful. I did not want to wimp out and flip on my flashlight for any suspicious sound, nor did I want to plug in a night-light like a child scared of the dark. I was an adult. I was used to being alone at night. I was not going to break down and go into panic mode, but the fact that the moonlight was bright enough to read by made me feel immensely better.
In the distance, I could hear the yips of coyotes, and occasionally one of their thin, high-pitched howls would rise above the standard din of the late summer nights. I have not seen a coyote since I moved to Texas, but I had seen a couple of them in New York. I know they’re mostly harmless, more scared of me than I am of them, but the sound of their howls in the dark never failed to raise the hairs on my arms and neck. There was something mournful about that noise. It was nothing compared to the long, low wails of wolves—I’d heard a couple of them in New York after the Flu—but it was still enough to make me go hyper-alert for a few moments afterward. Most of the time, when the coyotes called out, their calls would be answered with barks and howls from some of the dog packs that roamed the area. After the Flu, all the dogs that were freed by their owners, or were able to escape from their homes, merged into odd, mixed-breed packs for safety. Those packs quickly reverted to a semi-feral existence. I say semi-feral because sometimes, when I’m out scavenging homes, I’ll see one of those packs. I know they’re dangerous, but when they see me, there is always a faint look of recognition in their eyes, almost as if they are conflicted: do they keep roaming with their pack and enjoy freedom, or do they go back to the cushy life of regular meals and belly rubs? I would not mind having a dog around the farm. Especially now. I would love a pair of mastiffs or maybe a couple of Rhodesian Ridgebacks—something that would be willing to challenge or fight a lion. I know the expense would be high. Keeping a dog fed would require a lot of work. Most of the bagged dog food in the world has been destroyed by rats and raccoons. There were plenty of cans of dog food, and we would have meat scraps or maybe a full cut of meat for it, but still. Maybe someday Twist or I will come across a pup we can take home and domesticate.
I listened hard to the sounds of the dogs answering the coyotes. I could tell from the distance and direction that there were at least two packs of dogs within a mile of the farm. They weren’t so close that I worried, but it was enough to keep me thinking. Twist insisted I carry a gun anytime I went scavenging. There were days I did not want to, but I always did. Hearing those dog packs was a good reminder of why I had to carry a weapon.
When I was in nursing school, I had to do an observation rotation at a hospital in my last semester of school. It was mostly hanging out and doing scut work, but occasionally interesting things happened. When I hit my rotation in the ER, I got to see a lot of gunshot wounds, or GSWs, as the doctors and paramedics called them. Seeing shot-up kid after shot-up kid, victims of gang violence all of them, made me hate guns. Now, I still hated guns, but the world was too dangerous not to have them. Running out of ammunition was always a concern in the back of my head.
A sudden howl rose up near the house. Very near. It made me pop out of bed like a ninja, pregnant though I am. My hand when to the gun on my bedside table, and I thumbed off the safety. It was a silly reaction. The animals were all safe inside. The windows and doors were locked. There was no way for the thing to get into the second story, but the nearness of the animal’s howl scared me. It reminded me that there were things creeping around outside, and I had no way to track them at all times. They came and went when it pleased them, and I was not privy to their thoughts and movements.
Glancing out the window into the yard, I could see a single, large dog. It looked wolfish, maybe a husky, maybe a malamute. It was just sniffing around the yard, looking for scraps. It probably smelled the remnants of the chicken we had slaughtered a few days ago.
I watched the dog curiously. Why wasn’t it in a pack? It did not look scrawny or unhealthy. In fact, it looked strangely well-fed. It walked over to the pasture where the pigs were kept in the daytime. It sniffed around the corner where the lion had taken our pig. It marked the area twice with urine, and then disappeared into the shadows, never to be seen again.
The next morning, when I went out to inspect the animals and get them into their pens and paddocks for the day, I noticed fresh tracks around the pen, big, fat paw prints of a large cat. The lion had been back. Twist was right; any animal that knows of easy food would be back to exploit it. I would have to stay around the farm as long as the animals were out. I had planned on doing some scavenging, but I would have to go more than a mile from the house. That idea went out the window. I wondered if the husky had scared off the lion, or if the lion might have been tracking the husky.
I went back into the house and resumed my nesting cleanse. I found myself watching the paddocks far too often. If something was prowling around, the Things would probably react, and the pigs would start sounding alarms. My excessive watch was gratuitous and unnecessary, but I could not put the thought of a prowling lion out of my head. It made me very concerned for the baby in my belly. The Mama Bear in me wanted the lion dead. The nature lover in me wanted the lion to go away and never come back so I wouldn’t have to shoot it. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, we only had to watch out for cars in the streets and the occasional gangbanger or crackhead. That seemed so much easier than dealing with rogue lions.
As the day progressed, I became more and more agitated. I would occasionally look out the south-facing windows, expecting to see Twist coming down the road with a loaded wagon, but the road stayed empty. By the time midday rolled around, I forced myself to eat some lunch, but I was not hungry. Even my beloved Swiss Cake Rolls tasted like sawdust. I tried not to think of worst-case scenarios, but my hormone-addled brain could not help but leap to wild, horrible conclusions. He’s dead, said my brain. You’re alone. I had to remind myself that Twist was a strong, capable young man. He’d been alone in the wilds of the world long before he met me, and he faced them without fear.
But, here’s the thing: He should have been back by midday, at the very least. If he got to Houston yesterday morning and spent all afternoon securing his supplies, and even if he camped in Houston all night, if he started back on the road this morning, he should have arrived home. I started getting worried and angry. Fester noticed my mood and tried to cheer me up by rubbing his head on my shins in an attempt to curry attention from me, but I had no time for him. Something was wrong. I could feel it.
I spent the afternoon pacing the house. The sky was dark with clouds. The longer the day went on, the darker the clouds became. A storm was coming. Judging from the way the sky looked, it was going to be a bad storm and Twist and Hera would be stuck in it, somewhere. The longer the day wore on, the more my level of worry increase. The baby knew something was up. He got active. Really active. It was like my worrying was making him worry. I felt a wrenching pain low in my abdomen, like lightning across my pelvic bone. It was so great, it dropped me to my knees and made it hard to breathe. Message received, baby. Message received. I retreated to our bed, despite it still being very light out. I propped up pillows behind my back and tried to reduce my stress through meditative breathing. Twist was fine, I told myself. You will be fine. You will be fine. You will be fine. I recited my mantra on a loop in my brain. Deep breath in, hold it, deep breath out.
The afterimage of that blast of pain lingered, though. I could not concentrate it away. It felt too low to be a contraction, but I wasn’t sure. This baby arriving early would be part of a worst-case scenario. Prior to the development of NICUs, premature birth mortality was over
95 percent. I wasn’t sure this baby had cooked long enough. He might have. It was so hard to keep track of the days, especially in Texas where the spring, summer, and fall all looked pretty damn similar to this northern girl who was used to snow melting, April rain, July heat, and the leaves changing in September to signify seasonal transitions. As a nurse and someone who knew something about emergency medicine, my mind involuntarily went through the Rolodex of symptoms and potential disasters that could befall a pregnant woman.
Stop it! I had to scream at my brain. Panic and worry would not help. I went back to meditation, but I could not clear my thoughts. I wanted Twist to be home. I wanted the stockade walls built. I wanted the lion dead. I wanted the feral dogs to go away. I wanted everything at once, and it began to overwhelm me. My pulse elevated. My mind raced. The apocalypse was no place for a baby. Why did I think I could do this?
As if to punctuate that thought, a clap of thunder snapped out of the sky, harsh and crisp. It sounded like lightning hit the window, it was so loud. I felt my stomach twinge again. The darkening sky, after threatening all day, became intense and violent. I looked out at the sky to the west and saw a massive wall of black clouds rolling toward the house. Lightning was spitting from the front, and a curtain of heavy black rain fell beneath the leading edge. The storm was going to be bad. Very bad.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Houston
The Flu was something of an enigma to me. By the time the newspapers and cable news channels realized it was a problem, there was only about a week of actual reporting on the situation before the electrical grids went dark and all communication was blacked out. Most people were dead or dying by that point. The last image on TV was the President telling everyone that we were pretty much doomed, but if anyone survived we should continue on in the best traditions of America.
