The Girl at the End of the World

by Richard Levesque

  Dolores gave her only a few seconds to deal with the pain and then began nudging her forward, gently pulling at her arm to lead her toward the door. Of course, the store’s lights were out, but Alex had several flashlights burning. They didn’t make it bright inside, but as our shoes crunched across the broken glass, I could make out the counter with the registers and the make-up aisle to my right. The pharmacy would be in back, but Alex had set up a little area near the front of the store where she’d planned to have her baby; now I was going to have to help, and I found myself shaking at the thought.

  It wasn’t the little kind of drug store that just sold things related to health and hygiene. It had a bit of everything. And far enough from the smashed door to be sheltered from the rain and the breeze outside, but not so far in as to be swallowed in the dark, Alex had arranged orthopedic pillows and some cushions from a cheap display of patio furniture. She had gathered several bottles of rubbing alcohol, towels, blankets, medical tape, a first aid kit, cotton pads, scissors, and several other things I couldn’t identify at first glance.

  “Siéntate,” Dolores said as we approached the makeshift delivery room.

  That was a word I knew, and so I followed suit, encouraging Alex to sit down on the cushions. The photo counter was right behind her, and now Dolores arranged pillows so Alex could lean against it.

  “Just try to relax,” I said.

  Dolores put her hands on Alex’s stomach, feeling the baby.

  “Have you ever done this before?” Alex asked, apprehension in her voice.

  Dolores didn’t reply, just looked at me and said, “Ir a buscar unos guantes.”

  I had no idea what that meant and gave her a quizzical look, hoping my cluelessness didn’t scare Alex.

  She took her hands off Alex and mimicked putting on a pair of gloves, repeating, “Guantes, guantes.”

  “Gloves,” I said. “Gloves?”

  Dolores nodded, “Si.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Taking one of the flashlights with me, I went back to the first aid aisle and looked for Latex gloves. They were easy enough to find, and I went back to the makeshift delivery room. In my absence, Dolores had removed Alex’s pants and underwear and now had her covered with a blanket. I watched as the older woman put on the gloves, prodded Alex to bend her knees, and then she pulled back the blanket.

  At that point, I didn’t want to watch any more, and so shifted my position. Kneeling closer to Alex’s upper body, I reached for her hand, and when she squeezed back, it made me feel glad to be there for her, scary as it was.

  “Has she ever done this before?” Alex asked again.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Oh God,” Alex said, tears not far behind.

  “It’s okay. I think…I’m pretty sure she knows what she’s doing. At least you’re not alone.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

  “Do you know if it’s a boy or girl?”

  She shook her head. “We didn’t want to know.”

  I didn’t want to ask who the other half of we was.

  Then another contraction hit, a bigger one, and she tried to writhe with the pain, but Dolores held her knees and kept saying, “No se mueven.”

  “Hold still,” I translated. “Try not to move around so much.” And I put my hands on her shoulders, hoping to encourage her to be still without actually pinning her down. I didn’t think I was strong enough to force her.

  It took several seconds for the contraction to pass. When Alex stopped gasping and grunting through it, Dolores sat back and smiled. “Pronto,” she said.

  “Soon,” I translated.

  “Okay.”

  Sweat beaded on Alex’s forehead. I found a small towel among the supplies she’d gathered and used it to mop her brow and wipe at the tears running down her cheeks. She smiled a little at that.

  The contractions came and went, maybe for an hour. I tried talking to Alex, first telling about when my brothers had been born and how I’d gotten to hold them as babies, and then just moving on to things about my family, anything to keep her focused on something other than the pain and what I was sure must be her fear over something going wrong.

  At one point, she said, “Do you think the baby’ll be okay?”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said. “I really think Dolores knows what she’s doing.”

  She shook her head. “No, I mean after. What if it…gets sick? You know?”

  She meant the fungus. What if the baby didn’t share her immunity? I hadn’t even considered the horrible possibility. To carry her child all this time, to go through the pain and risk of labor, to hold the new baby and love it…only to lose it in a day’s time if it breathed in the spores and they infected it. I didn’t want to think of an infant suffering the death I’d seen thousands afflicted with in the past weeks, but even so the image popped into my head, and it was hard to get it out.

  “You just have to hope,” I said after a few seconds. “Maybe it’ll have your immunity. Or…who knows? Maybe the danger is passed. Maybe all the spores are out and gone and floated away. There may not be anything left to make the baby sick.”

  She nodded and gave a feeble smile, but I knew she was still worried.

  The contractions got closer, and Alex’s reactions to them more dramatic. She squeezed my hand to the point I thought it would break and then apologized when the pain had passed.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m tough.”

  She smiled, not so weakly this time.

  “Have you ever taken care of a baby?” she asked.

  “Not really. My brothers a little. Well…half-brothers. I wasn’t around them that much.”

  She nodded. “Listen. Kayla if it’s a girl. Okay? Michael if it’s a boy. Michael Ramos.” A distant look overcame her.

  I almost asked why she was telling me this now, but then I understood. She wasn’t just worried about the baby not surviving.

  “That was…the dad?” I asked.

  She nodded again, and then another contraction started. Alex writhed and cried out and at one point moaned in desperation, “I can’t do this.”

  “You can,” I said, still holding her hand. “You are. You’re doing it.”

  When that contraction passed, Dolores got a pleased, almost beatific look and said, “La cabeza.”

  She leaned back and waved me toward her. I was scared to look, expecting to see the baby’s whole head sticking out, but when I leaned over the edge of the blanket, all I saw was Alex, her legs open. Dolores must have known what she was looking at, but I couldn’t tell and didn’t want to stare. I leaned back and forced a smile at Alex.

  “Can you see?” she asked, tears and sweat running down her cheeks.

  “I think so.”

  The next contraction started almost right away, and Alex screamed as she clutched my hand in one of hers and clawed at the floor with the other.

  “No gritar!” Dolores said. “Empujar! Empujar!”

  I didn’t know what that meant and looked with panic first at Dolores and then at Alex, feeling completely useless.

  Then Dolores made a pushing motion with her hands. “Empujar. Empujar,” she said again. She waved her hands in front of her mouth, opening it wide and making a face as though she was screaming with the same force as Alex. “No gritar!”

  I got it. “Don’t scream,” I said to Alex, raising my voice to be heard above hers. “You need to push. You can’t scream and push at the same time!”

  She tried, putting her energy into pushing, but I could see she still wanted to cry out. And then the contraction passed, and she was left panting and crying.

  “I can’t,” she kept repeating.

  I bent down close to her. “You’re exhausted. You’re exhausted. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. The baby, too. You just have to push a little more when the next one hits, okay?” She made no reply. “Okay?” I said more forcefully.

  A feeble nod and then, “
Okay.”

  I exhaled, feeling relieved, like I’d actually done something. “Okay,” I echoed.

  Alex pushed on the next contraction, straining the muscles in her neck and squeezing my hand, holding her breath and pushing as long as she could before gasping in more air to push again.

  And then baby was out. All I saw was Dolores leaning in quickly and then backing away again, and she held the tiny pink baby in her hands, all covered in fluids that matted its hair and stuck to its skin. Already, Dolores was wiping at the baby’s skin with one of the towels she’d kept nearby, and then it started to cry.

  Alex was crying, too, and still breathing hard.

  And I won’t say I wasn’t a teary mess myself. It was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen, following a time when all I’d seen were horrible things, when I thought I’d never see anything amazing again.

  “Una niña,” Dolores said. “Girl.”

  “It’s a girl,” I repeated through my tears.

  “Ayúdame,” Dolores said, tipping her head to indicate I should come closer. She handed me a towel and then put the little baby in my arms. She wiggled a bit, and her arms and legs twitched.

  Dolores grabbed scissors, poured alcohol over them, and cut the cord. She held it for a moment to stop the flow of blood and then turned back to Alex.

  I moved closer to Alex, thinking I’d hand her the baby. But then there was one more contraction, and the placenta came out. And with it a lot of blood.

  “Dios mio,” Dolores said, grabbing for cotton pads and pushing them up against Alex. I looked at her face, and saw fear there. She looked pale, like someone about to throw up from motion sickness.

  “Ayúdame! Ayúdame!” Dolores shouted.

  “What do I do?” I yelled back.

  Alex moaned, and the baby cried.

  I felt everything coming apart.

  And I got a look at how much blood was pouring out of Alex. If she’d been in a hospital with doctors and nurses and all the right equipment…if she’d just had the baby a month before, she would have been fine. But with just me and Dolores there to help her on the floor of an abandoned drugstore, with no more doctors or nurses alive anywhere, and with all that blood…

  Dolores tried. I can’t imagine anything she could have done differently or better with the limited resources she had. But after an endless minute or two, Alex was gone. She never even got to hold her baby.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  Dolores and I just sat there, both of us weeping along with the little orphan baby in my arms. I tried not to look at Alex’s face, her eyes open and staring up into the dark ceiling of the store. I knew that image would haunt me, and it did. I’d seen so much death in the last month, had reached a point where it had stopped bothering me. But this was something new, and it took me a long time to shake it.

  After a few minutes, Dolores covered Alex with a blanket and got up from the floor. Then she put out a hand to help me up and took the baby from my arms.

  “Kayla,” I said, glad Alex had thought to tell me, wondering if the poor woman had really known something was going to go wrong or if it had just been worry.

  Dolores barely nodded. There was a package of diapers for newborns and she put one on the baby; then she used some medical tape on the end of the umbilical cord before beginning to wrap Kayla in a towel.

  “La leche,” she said.

  Milk. Without her mother, the baby was going to need formula, bottles, all sorts of things. I nodded, took a lantern, and found a shopping cart, wiping at my tears with the back of my hand and moving into the dark of the store in total disbelief.

  *****

  The rain had stopped by the time Dolores and I walked outside with the baby and our cart full of supplies. I don’t think I considered running from Donovan for even a second the whole time we were in the store. Yes, I still wanted to get away from him, and I still wouldn’t have minded seeing him dead or hurt in the process, but for now we needed him, needed his bus and his resources and whatever else he had in Riverside that had allowed him to beat the fungus for as long as he had.

  When he saw just Dolores and me coming out of the store, he stood up inside the bus, opening the door and coming down the steps. He still held his gun and waved it at us now. I could hear him mumbling something inside his suit and guessed at what he was saying. But I didn’t feel like putting forth the effort it would take to yell an answer across the parking lot.

  “She’s dead,” I said simply and directly when we got closer. “No thanks to you.”

  Then I walked past him and let Dolores hand the baby to me once I was halfway up the steps into the bus. We ignored Donovan, loading the supplies from the shopping cart once I’d handed Chad the baby and told him unceremoniously to be careful. My tone must have told him everything he needed to know, because he didn’t ask a single question, just took the little bundle from me and watched in silence as I helped Dolores.

  Donovan waited outside, also watching, not doing anything to help. When we had everything inside, he followed us in and got Dolores and me locked in to our restraints again with Dolores holding the baby.

  “What happened?” he finally said once the last lock had clicked into place.

  “She bled to death,” I answered.

  He just stood there for a moment, thinking about it, probably trying to ferret out any trickery that Dolores and I or maybe even Alex had cooked up. He must not have thought of any, just nodded. Then he went to check for himself, or at least that was what I assumed. He left the bus and walked away only to come back a few minutes later and climb the steps to the driver’s seat without saying a word.

  And then we were off again, continuing east, with one more survivor as part of Donovan’s herd.

  Chapter Ten

  Donovan drove the bus straight through the night, but with stops along the way. He let us out of the bus to relieve ourselves behind cars, always with the threat that he’d start shooting the others if one of us didn’t come back.

  I could only guess that he was taking care of his own business inside that suit he wore, probably wearing an adult diaper. During the breaks in driving, I watched him, seeing that his protective suit fit loosely enough to enable him to pull an arm out of his sleeve and move it around inside the suit. He must have had inner pockets with supplies of some kind inside, as I saw him drinking something from a straw, maybe a protein drink or something else to keep him hydrated and energized. If he’d been on just liquids since he’d started his trip from Riverside, there might have been some way he’d been urinating into a bag or something. Even so, he was probably ready to get out of that suit, as his impatience with our stops suggested.

  The first time the baby needed feeding, it was quite a production with all the packaging that needed to be opened and instructions that needed to be read. And then the baby needed changing and cleaning and swaddling, and Dolores couldn’t do it all with her hands chained. Finally Donovan gave up in disgust and let her ride unbound, probably reasoning that she wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the baby while we were driving. That meant she handed Kayla to me several times while she got up and rummaged through the supplies we’d brought onboard. I remember holding her that night, worried that the swaddling cloth was too tight, amazed at this warm little package on my lap, and haunted by the image of her dead mother and the fear that the baby wouldn’t have inherited Alex’s immunity. I kept looking at her nose for signs of bleeding; finding none, I’d relax for a minute and then be forced to look again.

  We reached Donovan’s compound just after sunrise. A large, open piece of land off the beaten track, it didn’t look like much. I could see only a bit of it through the bus’s windshield: dry grass and old cars and an older house on the other side of a chain link fence.

  Donovan opened the gate with a remote control, and the bus rolled into the compound, driving past the house to stop in front of a small outbuilding made entirely of gray cinder blocks. It had a single door and no windows that
I could see; from its roof a huge antenna sprouted, the kind I’d seen before on the homes of ham radio operators. When I saw it, I immediately thought of the Australian TV station I’d been so desperate to reach when I’d gone to the solar house.

  Donovan killed the engine and turned in his seat. “You’re going in one at a time. I’m telling you right now, this was a good trip for me. I got more of you than I needed, so if I need to hurt one of you, or worse, it’s still good for me. I don’t want to have to, but don’t push me.”

  I tried to figure out what he meant, but there wasn’t much point. What he claimed to have needed was beyond me, and how he could now have more than he needed was also confusing. I was convinced that he was his own kind of crazy, had been before the fungus hit and now had found a way to bend what was left of the world to fit his twisted vision.

  He said nothing more, just exited the bus, closing the door behind him. I moved as far forward in my seat as I could so I could watch him go.

  He disappeared from my line of sight for several minutes. If I’d been fully able to trust Chad, I would have used this time to talk about escape or working together to trap or trick Donovan, maybe even hurt or kill him, so we could escape with Dolores and the baby. But I couldn’t be sure of him. Not after what he’d done to me at the observatory. So I just sat still and waited.

  Craning my neck, I felt relieved to see Donovan finally returning. He approached the metal door of the block building. With his back between the bus and the door, I couldn’t see how he opened it, but seconds later the door swung inward, and he disappeared inside.

  This time, he wasn’t gone long. He came back and pulled us out of the bus one at a time, Dolores and the baby first, me last. Getting out of the bus, the first thing I noticed was the rumble of a motor, a generator I realized, guessing that Donovan had fired it up when he’d first gotten out of the bus. When he shoved me through the doorway into the little building, I saw it was lit with fluorescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Chad and Dolores sat against the wall—Chad with his arms bound behind him, Dolores connected to Chad with leg shackles but with her hands still free so she could hold Kayla.