The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

by Meg Elison

  Next day

  All right, so he can hunt. He couldn’t have done it at all if she didn’t hand him the gun like she had no sense at all. He blew a goose out of the sky, first shot. Flying low anyway. Geese scattered, honking. Flopped down in the dirt, dead with almost nothing left above the neck. He says they’re all flying south and we should see a lot of them soon. Says you have to aim for the head, because hitting the body will destroy what you can eat on it.

  Plucking the fucking thing now. Roxanne is so pleased she can’t sit still. She set up a rotisserie rig made out of tent poles and a long stick. They’re going to roast it and eat it. I don’t want any.

  Fresh goose is delicious. Going to shoot one the first chance I get.

  Duke relaxed a great deal after dinner. He took one long drink from a bottle he drew from his saddlebag and offered it around. Both women refused.

  Roxanne was the one to get him talking, but they both wanted to know.

  “So what did you hear about the plague?”

  He leaned back and looked up at the sky, watching the smoke from their fire drift upward. “Not much, really. One of the guys on the run was worried on the first day, saying his kid sister was in the hospital. I had heard rumors about some kind of flu infecting nurseries and daycares and whatnot. He said she had gotten real sick at the school where she worked and spent a day at home before her roommate took her in to the ER. So this guy was checking his text messages constantly. The guys made fun of him for always being on his phone, but he never did it while riding, so I didn’t mind. Anyway, one day he said he can’t get his newsfeed to work. He had been telling us the news was weird and that there were maybe riots in LA or somewhere. But when he went back on when we stopped for the night, he couldn’t get anything.”

  He shifted his position and realized they were both staring at him intently. “What’s the matter?”

  “We just haven’t heard much of the news. Either one of us. We were both kinda out of the loop, you know?” Roxanne smiled at him in that helpless way.

  “All right. I guess that makes sense. I don’t know everything, either, but maybe I heard different than you two. So that same night one of the old guys on the run finally turns his phone back on. He was the kind of guy who had it for emergencies, but you could never get him to pick it up. He logs on to his Facebook, and right away we can tell he’s upset. He dials up his voicemail and tells us his wife’s real sick and they’ve been looking for him. We tried to talk him out of riding home, but he lived in Indiana, and he said he knew the way so well he could do it in his sleep. He took off right then.

  “After that, every one of those guys and their old ladies checked in. They turned their phones on, made calls, listened to their voicemail. One after the other, they had to leave. Sick wife. Sick kid. Sick girlfriend. Dead girlfriend. After that night, there were only about ten of us left.”

  “Didn’t you have anybody to worry about?”

  Duke looked a little embarrassed. “My mom. I was never married. But I turned my phone on and . . . well . . . my mom wouldn’t have said shit if she had a mouthful. I thought about it, but I waited until morning. I didn’t want to believe the run was over; I look forward to it every year. But some shit was clearly going down. In the morning, even more guys were gone. The rest of us decided to call it and take off. The whole way to Detroit, I thought about my mom. She lived in a shitty little house in one of those neighborhoods they show on TV when they want to talk about what a shithole Detroit is. But I couldn’t even get close. I got close enough to see the fire and smell it. It smelled like gas and burning tires and hot paint. I knew there was nothing worth going in for. I still didn’t understand. I was pretty freaked out. I saw a group of guys on the road that day. They were just walking. I yelled at them and waved, trying to get them to talk to me. They turned and ran like they saw the devil. Man, Detroit could burn down and that wouldn’t surprise me, but I never saw that kind of fear from a bunch of men! Sometimes I know I scare women or little kids . . . I’m just big. But that freaked me out more than anything. What did they think I was gonna do?

  “So I got back on the road and got off in the first town I saw. I was having a hell of a time getting gas. I started refilling when my tank was only half-empty, and I picked up that jerrican you see there. I had to siphon gas out of cars and tankers . . . and there just wasn’t anybody anywhere. Cars stood open in some places, and every gas station was deserted. I started seeing dead people here and there. That creeped me out so bad. I couldn’t stand it. If there was dead people, I’d leave and find gas or food elsewhere. I started to feel like a ghost.

  “So I was stealing gas at this Shell station, using a siphon to suck it out of the underground tank after I pried open the cover. I finished filling the bike and the canister, and I went inside the station. Nobody was dead in there, so I washed my mouth out with half a warm Coke and drank the rest.

  “I walked over to the newsstand, and there was hardly anything there. The Times was sold out, but the local paper had no stories, just a directory of where to go. Red Cross sites, schools turned into disaster shelters. And two places where you could take bodies. There was a box at the bottom talking about gloves and masks and communicability.”

  He sounded this word slowly, one syllable at a time. He had struggled with it in the Shell station, knowing it was a word he had heard but had never had to read to himself before. He knew its meaning from context, as we know all words, but he could not have defined it if asked.

  “The one big paper they had left was the Washington Post. It had a picture of the president on the front page, and the story said he was hiding in an underground bunker somewhere. They had pictures they said could prove it. The bottom half had an article about death tolls in the major cities. The Post was always full of shit, but they were saying ninety-eight percent fatality in men.”

  Alex perked up at that, unable to maintain her stony silence. “Ninety-eight? You’re sure that’s what it said?”

  “They used the number instead of the words, and it was on this huge pie graph. I’m sure.”

  No way it was ninety-eight percent of men. That would mean it was more than ninety-nine percent of women. That’s insane.

  “But women were dying way more than men in San Francisco.”

  Duke was nodding solemnly. “The Post said that doctors were saying the plague was harder on women and girls than men and boys, but they didn’t put a number on that.”

  Roxanne looked stunned. “That’s not . . . there’s no way. There would be almost no one left.”

  “You see anyone around here?” Duke wouldn’t look at her. None of them could look at each other.

  Alex thought about the number of people she had seen, dead and alive. She thought about the dead bodies piling up at the hospital. She added up impossible numbers, and she could not make herself believe it.

  Duke was looking down at the dirt. “I don’t know what the name of that town was, but when I was headed back out to the freeway, I went by the city dump. I could see huge piles of corpses. Burned. Black pyramids in the middle of all that garbage. I couldn’t look at that long. I stayed on the road until I ran out of gas, and then I used the tank to refill. I couldn’t go back into a city until I was bone-dry and had to walk the bike down an off-ramp. I felt like the last man on Earth.”

  They slept fitfully that night. He was not the last man on Earth. They were not the last women.

  But the number was small and getting smaller every day.

  One more goddamned day

  Told Roxanne it’s been three days and I’m done. They slept cuddled together last night, after Duke told his story. She waited awhile, and then just picked up and laid down beside him. Spooning. Not fucking, but on their way. Remembered the way we slept in that den where we found her gun. Empty = lonely = haven’t eaten all day and starving, but you don’t know it until someone brings it up.

  Well fine. That’s fine.

  Roxanne gave her companion a long look
.

  “You should come with us. We’ve come together this far.”

  Duke spoke up from a few feet away, packing his saddlebags. “You ladies ready? We should cover some miles today, make up for lost time.”

  Roxanne looked over her shoulder. “One second.”

  He kept talking, mostly to himself. “Can’t cover much ground on bicycles. Gonna have to find motorcycles or one of those little scooters. The Euro jobs, like a Vesta or what the fuck ever. They’re easy to handle.”

  Roxanne was already packed and ready to go. She made it seem like she was arguing, but she knew how this would end. “Come on, you can’t take off by yourself. Don’t end it like this.”

  I can’t. I just can’t, and I don’t know why. But you shouldn’t go, either.

  Their eyes met. “Don’t go south. I don’t know what that broadcast is about, but I don’t think it’s good news. You might want to let him carry the gun. He’s a good shot. You haven’t learned to handle it yet. Convince him you two should hole up somewhere. Don’t risk another group of guys. It won’t end well.”

  “You’re really not coming.”

  “I can’t.”

  Roxanne turned back to Duke. “Can I ride behind you?”

  He lit up. “Yeah! Yeah, I’ve ridden with a passenger that way lots of times. No sweat. And we can find you a helmet and ride slow so your friend can follow.”

  “Nope, you two go ahead.” Alex tried to sound sunny, just a change of plans. Not abandoned. She picked up the bike and got ready to leave. Roxanne walked over to her, and she waited, head down, for what she would hear.

  “Come on, don’t be like that. We’re both safer traveling with a man. You know that. He’s harmless, look at him.”

  Don’t do this. Don’t make me tell you how it will end. Stay with me.

  “He is harmless. Like Melissa’s boyfriend was. You’re not safer just because he’s bigger with a dick. He can die like anyone else.”

  “Yeah but the two of us are just sitting ducks.”

  “With guns.”

  She dropped a hand to the butt of her comically large firearm. Alex looked there and not at her face.

  “You feel better with him because he’s a guy and you can probably get him to die for you. Fine. Best of luck to you both. Mazel tov. But I’m taking off.”

  They both knew Duke could hear them. They didn’t care.

  “You trusted me to watch you while you slept, to go with you. Why not him?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a feeling. This doesn’t feel like a good idea.”

  Roxanne shook her head, turning away. “You just can’t stand the idea that you might not always be in charge. Good luck, sweetheart. Be careful out there.”

  For a moment, it looked like Roxanne might reach out and touch her, hug her, make one last gesture. Instead she just walked away, back toward Duke. “Let’s go,” she said to him.

  Duke smiled and raised a hand. Alex gave them a half wave and got on her bike, pedaling away against the rise of the hill, slowly and laboriously. As she sweat up the hill, she hoped they weren’t watching. When she reached the top, she heard the ripping sound of the Harley starting up. She looked back and saw them one last time. Roxanne sat behind him with her arms wrapped around his thick torso and her pack on her back. His ponytail whipped in the wind and picked up like a flag as they accelerated. They didn’t look back, and after a minute even the sound of the motorcycle was lost to her.

  October

  Duke = probably a nice guy. Duke = probably will die for her. She’ll probably end up somewhere terrible. Never know.

  Starting to snow.

  Need to go out a few more times for supplies, and then I’m going to hole up for the winter.

  Already way too cold. Going to build a fire and keep it going. Haven’t seen anyone since Roxanne left. Not a soul. Franklin stove in the kitchen that I can cook on and a fireplace in the main room. Going to lock up, string cans or whatever = alarm system, stay armed. Fuck it.

  Going to be warm.

  Need to gather all the cut wood I can find at neighboring houses = walking and a lot of hauling, might take a couple days. Not worried about water = boil snow every day. Can’t get cleaner than that. Want to go to town once more and see about some serious weather gear. Need some gloves, and I’d love to find snowshoes or just better boots than I’ve got. Feet = always cold.

  Miss the weather guy. Hate to take off not knowing how bad it’s gonna be. Also need a map of town. Don’t know if I could find my way back, and none of the maps I had went into Utah. Wasn’t planning to go into Utah. Where was I going? Don’t know that = could end up anywhere. Kind of stupid to keep anyplace off my list at this point. What’s to complain about? Politics. Blue laws.

  Price of real estate. No good schools here. Ha-ha. Fuck.

  Have to go soon. Even without a weather guy, common sense = snow gets worse as the winter goes on. First thing = find house keys.

  CHAPTER 5

  Two days later she walked out into a light flurry of snow, headed back to town the way she had come. The day before, she had busily piled dry firewood into a wheelbarrow she found in a shed and trucked it to her assumed home, making piles inside and on the porch. The second day, she set out for town. The constant motion of the snow made her nervous, and her eyes tracked movement everywhere, her heart racing and slowing. She forced herself to get calm, but she had to put her hand on her gun to do it. She thought to herself of the way babies are soothed just being near the breast, just having the pacifier to comfort them. A gun certainly pacifies.

  The street turned onto the main drag of the little town. Flat storefronts faced the road like the set in a Western. She kept close to one side, glancing up to the windows every few steps. Nothing stirred. The unnatural calm and ringing silence of snow pleased her somewhat. She would hear something moving near her, she was sure of that.

  She saw the general store, and a small specialty shop that seemed to sell honey and bee-themed tchotchkes of the kind that would delight tourists. She found the post office, useless and littered with papers. She passed a drugstore without a thought. She was overprepared for medical emergency. She did not run into any store she thought would sell cold-weather gear. She doubled back to the post office to see if there was a map of town.

  There was a map, but it couldn’t be removed from the wall. For a moment habit took over, and she fished out the cellphone that hadn’t made a sound in over a year and went to take a picture of the map. She laughed softly when she caught herself. She put the phone back gently in her pocket.

  Studying the map on the wall, she made a note of the street where her little house stood at the end, separated from the main road and other houses by a considerable gap. She nodded at that gap. She loved it and believed in it. Space. Looking back up, she saw where she was and that there was a feed store a little less than a mile away. They might have farm equipment and items she could use. One more long look at the map and she was out the door.

  The feed store had recently had a fire. On one side of the building, hay was scattered around the blackened brick facade. It had obviously been put out before it had spread, but not cleaned up. She stood in the road, staring at that a long time. She knew hay was pretty flammable. She thought back to the fires and evidence of fires she had seen. In the cities, mishaps had turned to disaster, and there was no fire department to put things out. All of Oakland had burned down, it seemed. Duke had said the same thing about Detroit.

  But this place hadn’t burned down.

  Someone must have put it out.

  She went in through the huge open door. It was dark inside, with the only light coming through the open door. The windows were black with smoke on one side, and the others showed only the steel-gray sky that gave up snow. On the counter she saw what looked like a hurricane lamp. She pulled the chimney off, wound the wick upward, and lit it. It flamed high and fast, and she put the glass back on it. The smell was kerosene, but she wasn’t familiar enough
with that odor to recognize it. She left the lamp on the desk and moved around carefully. She walked up and down the rows, reading labels for chicken feed, pig feed, medicines for horse’s hooves, and long-rotted fifty-pound bags of carrots. Rolls of chicken wire stood up in a bay, and she thought about bringing some back to reinforce the house. She’d need to get a car running to carry it, but the roads in Eden were remarkably clear. She saw quickly that this was not the kind of place that would sell snowshoes or anything she needed. She went back for the hurricane lamp and picked it up gingerly, found the staircase that led up to the office.

  The office was a little messy, with a thousand notes tacked up on the walls and the dead computer. She found map books marked with delivery routes for hay and feed and stuffed two into her bag. The rest of the mess was invoices and phone numbers, nothing she could use. She headed back down.

  She sat on the counter and ate some sardines she had packed for the trip. She flipped pages in the map book until she found where she was. Scanning the grid, she looked for any town big enough to have a shopping mall, a camping goods store, anything. She thought Huntsville, about six miles away, looked promising. When she had finished and looked long and hard at the route, she carried the lamp outside with her. She blew a few times before she managed to put it out. She thought she should take it with her. She did not think to pick up kerosene.

  Around the back side of the store, a few cars sat parked. She knew cars that hadn’t been driven in a year or so didn’t start. One of these sat on clearly flat tires. Another had been a hay truck before, with tall guards on all sides to hold bales in. It looked too big to maneuver, and she decided against it. Parked closest to the wall was a little Honda. It was old, with manual locks and window cranks. She opened the passenger door and was stunned to see the keys in the ignition. She came around and let herself inside, setting the lamp carefully on the floor.