The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

by Meg Elison

  August

  Getting close to Oregon border? Found tiny lake = beautiful vacation houses lined up around it.

  Staked out for a day until thunderstorm hit. Just broke into one = gun in hand. Nobody.

  First two had nothing, not even furniture. Third was fully stocked for a family with a lot of kids. Shut the flue, blocked most of the doors, made a camp on the sofa backed up against the fireplace. Must have been a winter lodge for them. Closets are full of down comforters and parkas and big coats. Can outfit myself for heading north here.

  Been here two weeks. There’s a huge stash of baby food, and I almost cried when I saw the strained peas. Fruits and vegetables. Been too long. Lot of canned soup with meat in it and plenty of dry goods. Putting some weight back on. Working out every day = build muscle = pass time. Full bookshelves. Classics, popular novels, some nonfiction. Some stuff I had on my list from way back but never had time. Like vacation, like a retreat. Could stay here forever. Boarded the windows with furniture pieces. Not great = better than nothing. Glass.

  Rub jawline. Don’t look down. Stand in front of the mirror. Have a dick. Great big dick. Fear me. Always right. Kick your ass. No right to stand in my way. Who’s gonna stop me? Like that, bitch? Yeah.

  No candles except a bag of tea lights in a bathroom. Made do. Resisted the urge to start a fire and boil water for a bath in one of the huge tubs. Too easy for the smoke to get spotted. Too risky to be caught naked. Basic hygiene = water from the lake warmed up over a can of Sterno. That’s it.

  Debated how long I can stay here. Enough food for me to get through the winter, maybe. Sleeping pretty well here = keep my back to the wall and my gun in my hand. Maintain, maintain, find a spot and hold it, make a stand.

  August maybe September?

  Still here. Thunderstorms are intense. Reinforced the windows with the bed slats from upstairs, but left slits to see through. Clouds slide over the lake and sink there like water pooling before a drain. Rains and rains and rains and rains, never hear anyone coming. Thinking about finding some bells or something and setting up trip wires, just to hear someone coming. Haven’t seen or heard anyone in ages, though.

  Not quite true. Raided one of the houses on the far side of the lake yesterday that turned out to be full of the dead. Must have fled the cities and died here. Maybe fifteen people, too decomposed for me to really tell, but long hair = maybe women. Mostly died in bed. Place stays wet and the summer was warm = smell the stink from outside. Door was unlocked. Tied a bandana around my face and went in. Opened the curtains for light. Two of them were laid out on sofas, faces covered. Must have gone first. Loaded pack with the soup and canned fish from their cabinets, trying not to breathe through my nose.

  Upstairs, found a little jar of Vicks and smeared it on my bandana for the smell. Went into my pocket, never know when you might need Vicks = breathing. One bedroom, a dead guy in a flannel jacket sat propped up next to a dead woman in bed. Fancy nightgown, and her jaw was wide open. Rosary beads in bed with her. Turned to the guy and gloved up. I searched his pockets and found a wad of cash, threw it on the floor. ID said he was from Las Vegas. Tried not to look at his name or his age. Didn’t matter. Waistband = gun = jackpot = small semiautomatic pistol all but glued to what was left of his hand. Ripped it off, and the sound was like tearing through the skin on a roast turkey. Got over that, found the box of bullets in his jacket pocket. Raid was worth it.

  Could make a huge difference.

  Another room had three dead children. Two little boys and one older girl. Stood in the doorway long enough to name them.

  John.

  Michael.

  Wendy.

  Shut it. Nothing, nothing, and nothing in there I want.

  Another long-haired corpse in a dry bathtub. Two more in another big bed, together. Ornate jewelry box in the corner and looked. Good stuff. Fingered the diamonds shiny bright. Anyone trade for them? Decided no. Left it open full of treasure.

  Last bedroom kept me for a while. Empty but = looked tossed and lived-in. Bed unmade, drawers half-empty. Completely empty box of chocolates sat on the floor, a good pair of heels. Searched the whole thing = nothing of value. On the bureau a letter in a sealed envelope next to pair of emerald earrings. Addressed to Tamara. Opened it.

  Letter from Andrea to Tamara

  The Year of the Dying

  As Scribed by the Unnamed Midwife

  Dear Tam,

  I’m taking off. I feel so much better, and I know I’ll be ok. I tried to pack up everything useful, but who knows what I forgot. I am so sorry about the children, and about you and Dick. I really thought getting us out of Vegas was the answer. I guess I was wrong.

  Please forgive me for not burying any of you. When Maryanne and Lucia died, we debated it.

  Ryan said he would help, but in the end none of us could face it. I can’t face it alone, I know that. We don’t even have a shovel. I thought about burning the house down to take care of everybody, but it might take the whole lake and the woods. I’m going to leave you all as you are. I’m sorry.

  You know I slept with Dick. It was years ago, and we were so drunk and so stupid. I swear it never meant anything, it just happened. I’m so sorry I hurt you, and I hope you two are in heaven together and that you can forgive him. You might be able to forgive me soon, too.

  I’m going to head south toward Mexico. Before the news stopped, they were saying it was better down there. I’ll head straight down the 5, maybe steal a car. Wish me luck.

  I don’t know why I’m writing this. I had to say something. I was so sick that when I woke up I didn’t know where I was. I found you dead and there was nothing I could do. I’m sorry.

  Please forgive me. I love you both. I’ll see you when I get to where you are.

  Always,

  Andrea

  Balled it up and threw it on the floor. Andrea had gotten out. Wished her well.

  Brought everything I found back here. Think I know how to use this gun. Found the safety and I can load the clip. Good to have another one. Wish I could practice with it.

  On a clear day, she climbed the tallest hill to get a better sense of where she was. She saw Mount Shasta in the distance and thought she could identify it on the map. She was close to Oregon then. She could see small fires south of her, probably campfires. She heard nothing.

  She took two practice shots with the new gun, aiming at a tree at a distance from the house. The gun popped like a toy, and there was almost no recoil. Compared to her revolver, it barely felt real. It was light and accurate. She liked it, and fingered it constantly.

  She came down on the other side of the hill to circle around to the lake. There was a bait-and-tackle store; she decided to check it out. She raided some chewing tobacco and gum. Signs hung askew, and the cash register had been emptied. There was not much left inside but the bugs that had lived through it all, skittering over everything when the light fell upon them. She shivered, but looked anyway.

  They had a couple of newspapers from last year. She glanced over the stories of “lymphatic fever” and “women’s plague.” There were awful pictures of hospitals in New York and Paris overflowing with the dead and dying. No cure in sight, ran one lede. Men recovering at ten times the rate of women, ran another. Nothing she didn’t know, but she stared.

  How did it get so out of hand? How did it spread so fast? Why did I recover?

  Her hospital in San Francisco had a great lab. Everyone who had any lab-tech experience had been locked up in there, looking at this thing under a microscope. She wasn’t one of them; she worked in labor and delivery, trying to bring fevers down and watching women birth dead and dying babies. She recalled the pandemonium when she tried to call it up and reason it out. She had never attended a stillbirth before. The first couple was solemn, and chastened doctors struggled to explain dead babies patiently, compassionately. After a solid week of them and one hundred percent infant mortality, there was quarantine protocol and screaming, wailing, dem
anding of answers. Parents and doctors alike were unhinged. She remembered putting a baby girl on a Japanese woman’s chest. The child lived long enough to curl her hand around her mother’s finger, and then she was gone. Limp and turning blue. They resuscitated, they injected, wheeled crash carts to every room. The girl’s mother died that day, on fire with a fever they couldn’t touch. Within hours, the baby’s father disappeared.

  No cure in sight and the lab crew thinned out. Hospital staff died and disappeared as panic overtook them and mayhem wrung the city. Dead nurses lined the halls with dead patients, and after a while, nobody was hauling them out anymore. She remembered staying so busy that she didn’t see what was happening until she couldn’t open a door. When she finally got sick, there was nobody to look after her. Only Jack had come, and she believed he had come to say good-bye.

  She could not get the memory to come clear. Her heart pounded, and she could relive the terror, but she couldn’t tell the memory of one day in chaos from another. She could not sequence the events or understand how something this sudden and final had come to be. She was sorry every time she looked back. She set herself up with tasks and focused on the present. Examining the timeline in any direction away from now profited her nothing.

  September

  Found a motorcycle. Really small, but in good shape. Boathouse = huge drum of gas. Covered it up with tarps. Hope it’s still there when ready to leave. Had one of those shitty multipacks of cheap fireworks for the Fourth of July. Took it with me, but bet most are duds by now. Hiss boom fuck you.

  The party of men arrived on the lake one day before sunset.

  They were startlingly loud in the continuous quiet. She crept to the window to see how many.

  She counted ten for sure, but they weren’t still or close or easy to see. They settled into a house on the opposite side of the lake and fell to fishing and drinking. She knew they’d begin raiding the surrounding houses, just as she had done. She worried about possibilities in order: they would find her motorcycle, they would find her.

  Two days passed, and she watched the men ceaselessly, unable to sleep. Their constant drinking kept them slow and unambitious. Late on the third day, they finally started to venture around the lake. She had created a sniper’s perch where she could see out and shoot straight but would be difficult to spot from the ground.

  When they came around to her house, they tried the door and couldn’t budge it. One of them picked up a rock to break a window, and she took a deep breath and fired through the tiny opening. She shot the ground beside him, but she could see his jeans darken where he pissed himself.

  “This one’s taken,” she yelled down to them gruffly. “We’re armed, and we’ll defend it. Fuck off.”

  Get calm. Panic sounds like panic, and any dog can hear it. Breathe deep. Remember you have the advantage. No one has seen you.

  A few of them stepped back. All their eyes looked up. It wasn’t the whole party. She swept them in her sights. A few held weapons, one or two was swaying drunk.

  One bearded face yelled up at her, she cringed at the sound of it. His voice was rough and low and slightly amused. “What have you got in there? Girls?”

  She tried to change her voice to sound like another guy. “No girls. Just heroin. Lots of heroin. Fuck off.” Shit, that sounded really stupid. I suck at this.

  A couple of them laughed. “Fucking junkie.”

  The same one yelled up again. “We don’t want your drugs, man. We’re just looking for food and good stuff.”

  “You’re not looking for it here,” she yelled back down. “Looks like we have guns and you don’t. We suggest you leave this lake.”

  They talked to each other, low. They didn’t move off.

  Please go, please, please, please go and leave me alone.

  She moved to the other window she had rigged and lit one of the strings of firecrackers she had found in the boathouse, praying that they were live. She tossed them overhand toward the men. They were live and utterly unexpected on the ground. Men jumped and flailed when the tiny crackers went off. A few ran back toward their camp, others took a long last look before following. She caught more than a few looking back and up at her. She took one more shot after them, just as a warning. Exhausted, she lay on the floor and slept until it was dark.

  She woke up in perfect stillness and ate a jar of baby-food bananas. She did some push-ups and went back to her lookouts. There was no one outside. Across the lake, a fire burned in a pit. They had retreated, but they had not left.

  For a moment, she considered starting a fire in her own fireplace. She wasn’t hiding anymore; they knew she was in there. Dismay set in as she realized that their smoke would draw more people to the lake.

  She nodded back off during the night. After a few bleary minutes, she heard scraping sounds downstairs. She stumbled and fell over herself trying to run. She got back up holding her guns, shaking.

  Through the dark, she wove down to the window where the noise was coming from. She could hear someone on the other side, pulling at the boards. Then the scrape of a metal tool, prying.

  “Get the fuck back!” She brought both guns up and waited. The prying sound stopped.

  She stood for a minute, breathing hard. She thought they might have gone, but she couldn’t hear anything over her heart pounding. It was an hour before she sat down, but she fell asleep almost immediately when she did.

  She slept for hours, but it felt like an instant. She awoke to the sound of the kitchen windows being broken. The shattered glass fell into the stainless-steel sink, and she came to with a high, short scream. She scrambled up and ran toward the kitchen.

  A tall man with a blond beard was halfway into the window. He had reached forward to grab the edge of the sink with both hands and pull himself forward, squeezing through. She brought up the gun. He was stuck. He looked up, and she could see in his eyes that he knew it.

  Both her hands shook. The shot was less than ten feet, and she blew it anyway, putting a hole into the bowl of the sink. He jerked and screamed and tried to push backward.

  Her nerves were shattered, and she could feel herself tearing up. She widened her eyes, forcing them to focus, and tried to breathe deeply and steady herself.

  The blond man came free with a jerk, and she saw the two others outside who had hauled him back. Two dark-haired men, also bearded. They goggled at her.

  She cleared her throat. “I told you fuckers this place was mine.” Her voice broke, and she shook all over. They knew her then. It was all over their faces with shock and hunger, and one of the dark-bearded ones made to try his luck with the window.

  Dead now for sure. Dead.

  She opened fire, both guns blazing, not caring how many rounds she lost. She didn’t hit any of them, but they ran. She stood in the kitchen, waiting. She was making a high, keening sound. She wasn’t conscious of it, and when she heard it, she didn’t know where it was coming from.

  After a few minutes, she quieted down. She didn’t have anything to block the kitchen windows. She closed the door and blocked it with the china hutch. The heavy unit scraped the wood floor as she shoved it in front. When it was there, she went and sat on the couch in front of the fireplace. She waited.

  She nodded off, but woke every time her chin came down. She began to feel as if she were hallucinating. Dark shapes darted in her peripheral vision. She woke up swearing, she fell asleep muttering.

  Just before sunset, someone slid into the kitchen. In an instant she was awake. She thought she heard two sets of boots hit the floor, but it had been three. The door she had blocked was the only way from the kitchen into the rest of the house.

  They pushed against the door, but the hutch was heavy. A long, sustained push might have moved it, but the man on the other side rammed it with his shoulder. The hutch rocked.

  She couldn’t get her eyes to focus. Terror fought exhaustion, and she was ready to kill.

  The door thudded against the hutch again. The hutch rocked. Th
e banging grew louder as she assumed the other one had joined him. One became four became five in her frenzied imagination and she checked her clip. She had enough to kill ten, if she could hit them. She tried to steady herself.

  I can still get out. I can still get out.

  A few seconds of silence.

  A splintering crash as the hutch fell facedown into the living room. The base of it was inches from the door. Hands worked their way into the opening and she could hear them straining. The top of the hutch was wedged against the corner of the staircase. She knew it wouldn’t move.

  She waited. The straining stopped.

  One of them spoke into the crack, his mouth pressed into the opening. “We’ll be back, sweetheart. All of us. Get ready to come along. There’s no other choice.”

  Bullshit. Let me show you some choices. I’ve got a clip full of choices.

  She heard them scrape through the window to leave her. She went upstairs to the window where she could see their place. She sat on the floor with her chin on the windowsill, watching as they went back into their house.

  They waited for morning. She watched.

  When the sun rose, she could pick out the shapes of a couple of them standing around their fire pit. They had knives and pipes and other improvised weapons. She knelt on the floor looking at the two guns, deciding. In the end, she chose the new one. She thought it was slightly more accurate at a distance. The shot was a hundred feet, easy. She lined it up slow, breathing deeply. She took the shot. She did not know to account for the drop as gravity acted on the bullet. She had been aiming for his torso, but she could see his kneecap explode when the bullet hit. The morning was still; she could definitely hear the screaming. It scattered the rest of them, and she took three more shots, wildly, heart pounding too hard to aim. One man dropped outright, and she assumed she had killed him. The other bent over, holding on to himself and screaming.

  She got down below the window and waited for return fire, for the sound of someone breaking in downstairs. After a few minutes passed, she was sure that there were no guns among them. She waited. No sound. When she dared to look again, they were leaving. They left the dead one where he lay.