The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

by Meg Elison

  “The gasoline in this station is property of the military garrison of Los Angeles, under the command of General Hertz. I’m placing you under arrest for stealing.”

  Duke rose slowly, his hands out. “Look, I didn’t know. We can just go. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t work.” A tall Mexican man in an LAPD uniform in good condition stepped forward. “The theft has already taken place, you’ll have to appear before the general.”

  Roxanne didn’t speak. She watched. Nearly every man spread out around the gas station was staring at her, except for the ones who were speaking to Duke. Guys in charge, she thought. She was right.

  Military man was a short, square, career sort. He wore chevrons on his shoulders and mirrored sunglasses over his eyes, even at night. “Those are the rules.”

  Duke looked at Roxanne. She did not look back. She watched the army they faced.

  Chevrons finally looked at her, seeming to follow Duke’s gaze as if he hadn’t noticed her before. “Ma’am. We have a female barracks back at our base. We’d be happy to put you up there while your man here stands trial.”

  Roxanne drilled him hard with her eyes. She couldn’t see past his asshole glasses, but she was pretty sure he was lying.

  She looked back and forth between him and the cop, deciding. Eventually, she turned her eyes back to the glasses, seeing only her own blazing black ghost in the diffuse light.

  “If you let him go without hurting him, I’ll go back with you.”

  Chevrons flinched. The cop next to him shifted uneasily, and the ripple went through the ranks.

  She could hear some whispering and a few low laughs.

  “Now what makes you think that’s how we do things? We’re just trying to keep law and order, ma’am.”

  Roxanne lifted her chin a little. “So, since I didn’t steal any gas, I’ll just be on my way then. You can take Duke to the general alone.”

  He grinned beneath his glasses, and she saw his sadism in it.

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “Accomplice,” muttered the cop negligently, looking away. “You’ll have to come in for questioning, too.”

  She tried the cop this time. “How many women in your ‘female barracks’? One? Two, maybe?”

  One of the ones in a FEMA suit came forward. “No, ma’am. Lots of women survived the fever with proper care. There are thousands of women alive in LA, and about a hundred live in our barracks.”

  Roxanne watched the crowd. That was a lie, too. She wasn’t sure by how much, but it wasn’t right.

  “That’s great! Where I was in Vegas, there were hardly any girls at all who came through. My best friend even got sick.” She spoke up loud, so the crowd could hear her. “I bet a lot of you fellows saw your wives and girlfriends through the fever, too, right? Daughters? Mothers? Wasn’t that fever a bitch, though?”

  A few of them looked away.

  The cop came forward, pulling the cuffs off his belt. He came to Duke’s elbow.

  “Sir, you’re under arrest for stealing from the garrison. You and your female are ordered to come in for questioning.”

  He snicked one cuff around Duke’s wrist, then the other. Duke had been arrested before. He looked around and knew himself outnumbered. He thought if he went along, the two of them might come through this. He trusted. He did not resist.

  Roxanne felt her heart in her eyes and throat, beating in all the wrong places and too hard. She still had her gun in her hand. They walked Duke away, and as he passed he wouldn’t look at her. There had been no fight. There was no try-anything last-minute bravado. He had obediently bent to a symbol of authority and left her on her own.

  Chevrons walked toward her slowly. “You’ll like it in the barracks. You and the other girls can paint each other’s toenails and catch up on all that girl talk. Haven’t you missed that?”

  Her eyes were hot, and she could feel angry tears coming.

  He kept his eyes on hers and walked toward her slowly, slowly. She knew he was coming in to disarm her. It was time to make a decision.

  “How many?” she asked it again, strangling. “How many? I’ve seen three women in six months. How many are there?”

  “Too many to count.” He kept advancing.

  “What are their names? The ones you know. Your friends. The ones you like.” She wanted him to be telling the truth. Even if it meant living in a military harem, she wanted there to be a bunch of women laughing together somewhere. Someone to read romance novels aloud to, to not be the last one on Earth. She could survive that. She could survive anything and come out all right. She thought of the drag king midwife. And of Nettie. She smashed her eyes closed to squeeze the tears out.

  “Terri. Mary. Sherry. Carrie. Snow White and Cinderella are there, too. Don’t worry about it. You’ll see them soon. Come on now.”

  His voice was low, sweet, cozening. It was the voice she had heard a thousand times before.

  Come on and do it now. Come on and just give me a little. Come on now. Come on.

  She didn’t trust herself to bring the gun up. She shot it where it was, with her elbow locked, and the bullet hit him in the thigh. He gripped it with both hands and went down. His leg was rigid, and he was braying through clenched teeth.

  “Fuck you,” she said clearly. Some of them started toward her; the others just stared. She had a split second to make the decision, but everything seemed to move very slowly.

  Under my chin or into the pumps. Under my chin or into the pumps.

  A young-looking guy was almost upon her. She decided there was time for both. She took a shot at the pump farthest from her. She hit it dead on, but it had been too long since it had been in service. It flamed, but it didn’t explode. The action-movie boom never came. She stared at failure a beat too long, and the kid tackled her. They both slammed into the bike, and they went down on top of it. He pinned her, and another guy walked up and calmly kicked her in the side of the head. She blacked out. Duke separated his shoulder struggling against the men who held him. It was the last thing she saw.

  Roxanne woke up in the garrison two days later. Her vision was doubled, and the only other person there was a girl. The kid was young and developmentally disabled. She couldn’t speak, so Roxanne never learned her name. The kid signed constantly, frantically, but the only sign language Roxanne had ever learned was please and thank you and a few obscenities. The deaf girl was dead in a year. Roxanne lived a long time, but she never saw Duke again. The garrison’s radio broadcast kept people coming down I-5, but it didn’t always work. When she died, she was still the only woman there.

  Dusty woke up a few mornings after she had taken the diary to the sound of Jodi and Honus arguing in the kitchen.

  “I don’t care! It’s too long.”

  “Sweetheart, I’ll be fine. I promise.”

  “It’s two days! Like, two whole days! No way!”

  Dusty walked out of her bedroom, rubbing her head. They turned to face her when she made it into the kitchen.

  “Breakfast is almost ready,” Jodi said, turning away.

  “Dusty.” Honus pulled a kitchen chair around backward and sat facing the table, his legs split around it.

  “Mm-hmm.” Dusty opened the window to fill a pan with snow to make coffee.

  “I want to go on a two-day raid. Into Ogden. I can make it there and back in two days. There’s some stuff we need that I’m not going to find in houses here in Eden. It has to be done.”

  Jodi did not turn from the stove. “Anything could happen to you. You could crash your snowmobile. Or get lost. Or, like, murdered by crazy people.”

  Honus sighed. Jodi walked over and laid a plate in front of Dusty. More powdered eggs. Dusty sighed, then dug in anyway. She got up when the pot on the fire steamed. She made a cup of coffee and sat back down, sipping.

  Jodi laid breakfast for herself and Honus. Honus said a blessing, and they began to eat in terse silence.

  After a little wh
ile, Dusty spoke up. “I could go with you.”

  Honus looked up. Jodi looked at Honus.

  “It’d be safer than you going alone. We could look out for each other. I need to try to find another binder, if I can. And there are some things I’d like to have for the birth that we don’t have here.” She sipped her coffee.

  Honus argued first. “We’d have to leave Jodi alone. What if something happened to her? What if the baby . . .”

  Jodi stared at him. “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Would you feel better if Dusty went with me?”

  Jodi bit her lower lip, and the effect of it was devastating.

  “You’d have to stay pretty quiet. And I’ve been meaning to teach you to use a rifle anyway. It’s only two days.” Dusty watched them both. She had cabin fever pretty bad but hadn’t considered going that far away.

  “Two days at the most. How about it, honey?”

  Jodi looked back and forth between the two of them. “Not today, right?”

  “No,” Honus said brightly. “Maybe in a day or two.”

  Dusty did show Jodi how to fire a rifle, but she doubted the girl would ever do it. She was too awkward with it, too afraid. Her heart wasn’t in it. Dusty thought that if her life were in danger, she might get used to it, but mostly she gave up.

  For his part, Honus was very loving toward Jodi before their departure. She ate it up like a lifelong daddy’s girl, and Dusty tried to spend her time chopping wood or reading in her bedroom. At night, she waited to see if the Obermeyers would share a bedroom, but they didn’t.

  On the day they had chosen to depart, they got up before dawn. Jodi had drawn all the shutters and shades, as she had been instructed. She would only light the fire at night, and she would sleep with a rifle in her bedroom. She trembled and cried as Honus hugged her good-bye. He tried to kiss her with a little more passion than usual, but she pushed him away after a brushing of lips. Dusty ran through symptoms for Jodi to watch for and told her to take it easy as much as possible.

  “There’s no one to cook for, and the place is spotless. Relax.”

  Jodi pouted. “But there’s nothing to doooo,” she whined.

  “Read a book.”

  Jodi made a face.

  She locked the door behind them, and they took off just as the day started to turn light. Dusty rode behind Honus, with her hands planted behind her on the block of the seat. When that got uncomfortable, she wrapped her arms around his middle. She tried not to think about their contact and to focus on the road. She did not entirely succeed.

  The snowmobile was the best possible method of travel. No plows had been out, and the road was all but invisible. An equal blanket of snow covered everything, and they cut across yards and intersections and fields. They vaguely followed highway signs. Ogden was not far away, and the snowmobile was fast. They made it in no time at all.

  They pulled up beside the Ogden mall, and Dusty dismounted. “Why did you tell Jodi it would be two days? We could be back tonight.”

  Honus grinned at her. “I’m working on a project. Also there’s a lot here we can load up. Come on, I have so much to show you!”

  As Honus slogged through the snow to the main mall entrance, Dusty realized he must have been here before. Recently.

  Honus had made a list. He didn’t show Dusty, but they talked about it. He thought she should get her own snowmobile. She didn’t think they would find any, but Honus said there were some inside that no one had been able to drag out.

  “They’re really heavy, but I think we can do it together,” he told her excitedly.

  He led her forward. The inside of the mall was dark except the middle, where a huge skylight had fallen in under the weight of the snow. Gray daylight shone on the inert escalators.

  Dusty shivered a little, both from the cold and from the memory of another mall. “I don’t like this,” she said.

  Honus looked back at her. “Why not?”

  “We’re trapped inside. And this is a good place to raid. Anyone might come in. Or already be in.”

  He grinned. “But the missionaries brought everyone who was left in Ogden back to Huntsville.”

  “Anyone might have come along since.”

  “Did you see any tracks in the snow at the entrance?”

  Snow just keeps coming down. They’d be covered by now. Probably fine. I hope.

  She looked behind her, uneasily. “I see your point. I still don’t like this.” She touched both guns in her waistband.

  They walked up the escalators together.

  Honus had been right about the snowmobiles. The dealer was upstairs and had two floor models in the store. He told her that anyone who bought one there would have had it shipped to them from the stockyard and these were just for show.

  “Still, they’re all here. They’ll run. And I’ve got extra gas in my can outside.” The thing was a beast. They pushed it, grunting, onto a wide plastic sled they had gotten at a kid’s store. When it finally thumped off its display pedestal, they both lay down on the floor, panting.

  They shoved it out onto the main concourse of the upper floor and wheezed while pushing it to the escalator.

  “We don’t want to push it too hard,” Honus said as it slid away from them, down the escalator on its plastic sled. Only a moment and it banged noisily to the floor. Honus gritted his teeth.

  “Well, shit.” Dusty was disgusted and very tired. The snowmobile lay on its side.

  “Let’s come back to that,” Honus said amiably. “I’m going to go and find some things I wanted for Jodi and for the baby. Will you be ok? Stay on this floor.”

  “Yeah, I’m ok.”

  “Yell if you need me.” He was already jogging away.

  Dusty wandered a little before getting down to business. She missed San Francisco. Everything in this mall and in Utah had a broad, plain-folk feeling. The consumer goods she saw were like the decorations in the house in Eden: folksy, kitschy, cute. She felt stupid missing the big city, but most of what made up the weird heart of her town was the people now missing from it.

  She thought of Jack and the places they had gone on dates. She thought of dark absinthe bars and museums and galleries. She thought about restaurants in the city, and her stomach cramped on itself though she wasn’t hungry. She remembered the rarified tastes, the roasted bone marrow and local vegetables. The artisan cocktails and small-batch cheeses. It all came back in a rush of her former privileged, moneyed life. She remembered how they’d talk about literature and music and hospital politics. They guessed at when their friends would start having kids and disappear from their lives.

  She stared at a male mannequin wearing a flannel shirt turned back at the elbows and a low-slung pair of jeans.

  “Jack.”

  She didn’t know she had spoken out loud.

  More than food or drink, more than hot showers springing miraculously from the wall in the bathroom, more than television and Internet and the buzz of strangers, almost more than the feeling of safety and not having to constantly be on guard, she missed conversation. That moment of connection, of being understood that passed easily between equals. She felt her eyes pricking at the thought.

  Books in, books out. Read novels, write a diary. Paper in your hands and silence in your mouth.

  It’s not enough.

  She turned the corner and found a big corporate bookstore. The gate was down.

  Honus whistled a short, high note some time later that startled her. She poked her head out of the game store she was in.

  “You ok?”

  “I’m good. You good?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dusty looked back at the shelf in front of her and chose two wooden games she thought might be fun. She moved on to the next store. She really didn’t need anything. She had plenty of clothes; they had raided a lot of food. She might try finding some tools at one of the anchor stores downstairs to open or cut a hole in the bookstore gate. Mostly she browsed m
orosely, feeling an aching nostalgia for a world that seemed very long ago, and utterly absurd in its existence.

  In the late afternoon, Honus found her.

  “There’s a Hickory Farms downstairs that still has a bunch of food. And I think I know where we can sleep.” He was grinning broadly.

  “What are you so happy about?”

  “I found some really neat things for Jodi. But don’t tell her! I’m working on a surprise.”

  On the lower level, Honus had found a store that sold enormous beanbag chairs, big enough to sleep on. They took comforters from a linen store and set up their nests for the night. Then they had dinner at Hickory Farms. Everything was deadly salty, but delicious. Dusty sliced summer sausage with her pocket knife, and Honus cut through cheese logs with a piece of string. They put all of it on crackers and watched snow drift in through the hole in the ceiling.

  “So how many people do you think are left?” he asked her.

  “I’m not sure. I’ve seen so few it’s hard to extrapolate a number. Not many.”

  “When you were working at the hospital, did you guys know what it was?”

  “Not really. We knew what it did, and that we couldn’t stop it. Jack, my partner, he had some ideas. He was working in the lab. But nothing they tried worked, and a lot of people died.”

  Honus was quiet for a minute. “A lot of women died in childbirth, didn’t they?”

  “Yes,” she said cautiously. “A lot did.”

  “Were they already sick?”

  She sighed. “Some were. Some seemed to get sick all of a sudden. What I remember of that time is horror, and I don’t know if the plague is even still active anywhere.”

  Honus ate another cracker. Dusty cracked open a soda.

  “So, your partner. Like, your partner at the hospital, or . . . ?”

  “My boyfriend, but that word always made me feel like I was in high school again. We lived together. We were partners.”

  “Oh. Was he a doctor?”