“A, b, c, d, e, f, g,” she sings softly, like she always does when the pain is bad. She’s staring up at a row of paper letters draped over the chalkboard. It’s been more than a decade since the flesh-eaters came, but the letters still shine bright with primary colors, maybe because that wall never got direct sunlight. It’s why we chose this particular classroom for our infirmary. We all needed a bit of color.
There’s nothing I can give Eileen for the pain. The only supplies we have left—expired ibuprofen, Min’s bathtub gin—make her stomach hurt worse.
I open my mouth to tell Eileen it’s fine, that I won’t force her to drink, but Marisol bursts in. She’s sucking air, her black skin sheened with sweat. She must have sprinted all the way from the watchtower.
“The baby’s coming?” Marisol gasps out.
“Yeah, how did you—? Just mild contractions so far. There’s plenty of time—”
She’s shaking her head. “They’ve scented you. We’re going.”
“My water hasn’t even broken!”
“Flesh-eaters are massing at the gate.”
“Shit.”
The undead are like sharks, drawn to blood, but they’re drawn to birth even more, and they seem to have favorites. I guess I’m a favorite.
Which means we must run before the flesh-eaters trample the gate. My go-bag has been ready for weeks, for exactly this moment, but I’m frozen in place because Eileen can no longer drink water.
“Eileen…” She might not be here when I get back. If I get back.
Her bony, paper-skin hand grasps mine in a show of strength she hasn’t displayed in weeks. “Honey, it’s okay to let me go,” she says. “Because I win. I win at everything.” At my puzzled look she adds, “I get to die an old woman. Who does that these days? A badass motherfucker, that’s who.”
“You’ve got five minutes!” someone calls from the hallway.
“Brit,” Marisol urges.
“Tell you what,” Eileen says. “I’ll hang on for you. I’ll drink every day until you get back. You hear me, girl? I want to see that baby.”
I lean down and press my lips to her forehead. Then Marisol grabs my arm and yanks me away, through the door, down the hallway lined with old lockers toward the room we share.
Our go-bags lean against the door. Mari grabs them both, since I don’t bend over so good these days, and we hitch them over our shoulders. They contain water, food, needle and thread, flashlights and candles, ammunition, rope, a sealing container for the afterbirth, and all the rags we could scavenge during the last eight months.
Marisol grabs her shotgun. We both carry knives at our hips already; no one goes anywhere without her knife.
Another contraction takes my breath away.
“You okay, baby?” Mari says.
I’m leaning against the doorframe, and I can’t speak, but I manage a nod. The contraction lingers, getting tight, tight, tighter, and when it releases sweet air rushes into my lungs.
“Brit?”
“It’s fine,” I manage. “Like period cramps, just more intense.”
“Eileen says you’re supposed to breathe through that.”
“I forgot.” I’m staring at our bed. It’s just a mattress on the floor, but it’s covered in an old patchwork quilt, neatly made. Mari always insists on having a made bed. Beside the mattress sits a fruit crate, which Marisol painted with vines and flowers. A yellow blanket is folded inside the crate, a gift from Eileen, before she got so sick.
Marisol notes my gaze and says, “We’re coming back.” She takes my face in her hands, forces me to look at her, plants a kiss on my lips. “We are coming back,” she says again.
“We are coming back,” I echo, and I make myself waddle after her out the door, but even if we return the world will be different, and it’s like I’m turning my back to everything—warmth, love, safety, a whole era of self. How do you say goodbye to yourself? You don’t, I suppose. You pretend it isn’t happening.
We hurry past the sanctum—formerly the boys’ locker room—where members of the enclave go to menstruate, and take the concrete steps down to the old boiler room and our hidden exit. In the basement, a gauntlet of women awaits us.
“Go with God,” says Rebekah, her hand grasping my shoulder as if to lay down a blessing. Even after everything that’s happened, Rebekah has faith.
“Eyes up, knives ready,” says Min.
“Eyes up, knives ready,” Stacy echoes.
“Selfish bitch,” someone whispers. Liz’s voice. Our leader thinks that by choosing to get pregnant, I risked two of the enclave’s most valuable members.
She’s right. I’m selfish.
They usher us into the tunnel. The gate before us squeals open, and we pass through. The sentry says, “Eyes up, knives ready,” before she swings it closed at our backs and slams the padlock home.
The tunnel grows dark, and Marisol flicks on her flashlight. Our path is half an inch deep in rain run-off, turned to shiny black tar by Mari’s light, and we splash along, not speaking but listening instead. Eyes up, we always say, but the truth is our ears do just as much labor.
We pass another gate, another sentry. “A murder of flesh-eaters passed by an hour ago,” she says, this time in a whisper because we’re almost outside. “Move fast, or they’ll trace your scent back here.”
The tunnel brightens. We reach a curtain of trumpet creeper vines, carefully cultivated to camouflage this exit. We push it aside and find ourselves in ratty, new growth forest with branches as sharp and stark as bones. Lazy winter light from a low sun makes me squint. Our breaths frost the air.
After pausing to listen, Marisol whispers, “This way.”
I know where to go, but Mari likes to lead and I like to let her. Our footsteps seem too loud, crunching over fallen autumn leaves, half frozen from the night’s cold snap. They smell of rot, but it’s the good kind of rot, loamy and alive.
We pass an old farmhouse, the porch caved in, the walls half devoured by kudzu and poison ivy still in autumn colors. Down the rise is a brackish pond limned with ice. Something long and bloated floats near the edge, partly camouflaged with arrowhead leaves. Marisol spots it the same moment I do. We freeze.
It’s either dead or undead, a decomposing body or a flesh-eater in a state of dormancy until sound or scent alerts it to a nearby meal.
“It’s dead,” Marisol says at last.
“You’re sure?”
“Brain stem’s been severed.”
Mari’s always had better eyesight than me. My glasses got busted three years ago, and we haven’t been able to scavenge a decent replacement. “Good. That’s good.”
We continue on, but I steal a glance backward at the bloating, floating body. That’s how Eileen’s daughter died. Eileen says she probably dove in, thinking the water would mask her scent. When Eileen found her, she had to drive her own dagger into her daughter’s brain.
I put my hand to my giant belly. Is it horrible to bring a person into the world, knowing you might have to send them right back out of it before they’ve hardly lived? Maybe that’s what Liz meant when she called me selfish.
We reach the train tracks. They’re on a graveled rise, and my swollen ankles appreciate the firmer ground, but I hate being out in the open. At least we’ll be able to see them coming.
We round a bend, and I glimpse a line of rusty shipping containers through a break in the trees. “Almost there,” Mari whispers.
But I grab her hand as another contraction takes me. “Holy shit,” I say. My water doesn’t burst and rush out of me in a flood like all the stories I’ve heard; instead it leaks out, dribbles down my legs.
“Sshh, honey, I know it’s hard,” she says, soft and low. “But you cannot yell or grunt or moan or anything. You hear me? Just breathe. Here, I’ll do it with you.” She inhales through her nose, counting, “One, two, three, four. Now out for one, two…”
I breathe with Marisol. Breathe and breathe even though my insides have tur
ned to fire. When the contraction releases, she says, “See? Not so bad.” But she’s glancing everywhere but at me. Eyes up.
“Mari, it’s getting pretty bad.”
“I know how tough my baby is. Remember when you came out to your Baptist preacher dad while holding the hand of the most beautiful Black woman in the world?”
“Yes.”
“This is not harder than that.”
“No.”
“Remember when you fucked that trader silly, faking the big O night after night until you were good and sure he’d given us a baby?”
“Yeah.”
“This is not harder than that.”
“Not even close.”
“You got this.”
“I think my water broke.”
Her breath hitches. “Let’s keep moving.”
We angle toward the shipping containers. We’ve been whispering, sure, walking soft like rabbits with a hawk overhead, but if my birthing scent is strong enough to bring flesh-eaters to our gate early, it’s only a matter of time before they find us here.
The tracks open onto a huge, overgrown train yard, scattered with sleeping locomotives and tankers and shipping containers. A few lie on their sides, and others are riddled with rust holes, but many seem intact. Marisol leads us through, weaving around containers until we reach one near the center, untouched by forest overhang, sheltered from wind by the containers around it. It’s a faded green color, with the words “Smith-Patel” in huge lettering on the side. We reach the end, and Marisol raises her hand to the latch. A caution sign screams down at us, still in bright yellow.
“I oiled these hinges to get the door open, but they still squeal,” she warns. “Be ready to move fast.”
I nod. She yanks the latch, the door shrieks open, and I practically leap into the container’s black belly. Mari jumps in beside me, heaves the door closed and drops a two-by-four to bar us in. I spare a thought to the enterprising survivor of long ago, who welded brackets to the inside of this container so it could be barred from the inside. Women from our enclave have been using this birthing hideout for years, though fewer than half ever return.
The darkness is nearly total. My eyes adjust, enough to note a tiny bit of light coming from a rust hole in ceiling. That tiny hole is essential. Smith-Patel was an international shipping company, and many of these containers are still air- and watertight.
Brightness sears my vision. Mari uses her flashlight to rummage through her pack, retrieve a scented votive candle and some matches. She lights the candle, flicks off the flashlight. The air begins to smell of lavender.
We have light. Air. Shelter from wind and rain and flesh-eaters. This will be our home for the next several days.
Something bangs against the wall; I feel its echo all the way down to my toes.
“We barely got here in time,” I say.
“We knew they’d find us.”
We are silent a long moment. Another bang, then a slick whisper of a sound as something slides along the wall. I hardly dare to breathe.
“The container will hold,” Mari says.
“I know.”
“They’ll mass while you push that baby out, and for a day or two after. But we’ll keep quiet, and the birthing scent will fade, and they’ll eventually give up.”
“I know.”
“We’ll go back to the enclave with a brand new baby for everyone to love on.”
“I know.”
“They’ll be so glad we did this.”
“Except Liz.”
“Huh?”
“She called me a selfish bitch. As we were leaving.”
Mari chuckles. “Easy for her to say. She already has a daughter almost full-grown.”
The door rattles. Flesh-eaters don’t manipulate physical objects well, but it seems to me that some memory of their lives before must remain because they’re always fussing at doors and windows, massing at gates, worrying doorknobs and latches.
“The container will hold,” Mari repeats. “But it’s a good idea for us to be quiet a while. Maybe get some rest?”
My lower back is killing me. “Yeah, okay.”
We already prepped the place with piss buckets, water jugs, and all the blankets we could find, so it’s just a matter of stretching out and pillowing my head on my pack. It’s not so bad, I tell myself. I have food, water, shelter, and Marisol. Everything I need.
The flesh-eaters continue to knock and pound and side-swipe the walls. Their peculiar shuffling gait crunches through the gravel outside. It’s hard to tell through cold, corrugated steel, but my best guess is we’ve attracted at least seven of them, with more on the way. A whole murder.
The container will hold.
At Mari’s and my continued silence, they settle a bit. More contractions take hold of my body, and they are terrible but Mari is right; my life has been full of way harder things. I manage to doze off between them.
Hours pass. Mari’s lavender candle winks out, and she replaces it with another. We’re not sure whether it helps to mask the birthing scent, but we both love lavender. The rusty air hole goes dark with night. The flesh-eaters slow with the night’s cold. There are twelve at least now, drawn by movement and the smell of new life.
My contractions get fiercer as night deepens, coming minutes apart. Mari gnaws on a bit of jerky, offers me some, but I shake my head. She stretches out behind me on the blanket so she can press her palm against my lower back, as if to push away the pressure of labor. It helps. Between contractions, she kisses the back of my neck, tells me how great I’m doing, asks if I need food or water, and I can’t imagine how anyone gets through something like this without a sweet, beautiful, perfect Marisol at her side.
I’m no longer forgetting to breathe. My panting comes naturally, demandingly, primevally. Eileen said that would be a sign my cervix was dilating. It’s making me want to push. Wait, Eileen said. Resist pushing as long as you can, and you’ll need fewer stitches after.
“It’s coming, Mari,” I whisper. “Soon.” So many things could go wrong. We’ve discussed all of them. Like billions of child-bearers who came before us, we’re counting on a little luck.
She kisses my cheek, gets up and grabs the flashlight.
Something crashes against the container wall.
We ignore it. Marisol aims the flashlight at my legs. “Spread ‘em. I’m going to take a look.”
I oblige, and she sticks her head between my bare legs. “Oh,” she says. “Oh.”
“Oh, what?” I prop myself up on my elbows.
Another crash, followed by that unmistakable hiss from undead lungs. A flesh-eater is right at my head; we are separated by mere millimeters of steel.
“Our baby,” Marisol says. “It has hair.”
Oh. “I think I need that mouthguard now.”
Mari grabs it from her pack, a wobbly plastic thing we scavenged from a sporting goods store. I shove it into my mouth just in time.
Pain rips down my spine, into my hips and thighs. It’s the most intense pressure I’ve ever felt, like I’m going to explode with diarrhea or vomit or both or maybe just burst like a huge bloody balloon.
I pant through my nose. Pant, pant, pant, but instead of relaxing the contraction gets tight, tight, tighter and when I can’t possibly take any more, it gets worse. Tears leak from my eyes. My breath wheezes as I try to suck more air past the guard clenched in my teeth.
The pressure fades, and I almost sob with relief. But I don’t even catch my breath before the next contraction possesses me and I’m blind with pain, but not deaf because I hear the door of our container rattling like a castanet.
Suddenly the mouthguard is gone, maybe I spit it out, I don’t know but air rushes into my lungs just as something in my abdomen ruptures, and I yell, “FUCK!”
The contraction releases. I sink into the blankets and my eyes start to drift closed but horror is blossoming on Mari’s flashlit face, because something did rupture and now I’m broken… No, it’s b
ecause I just yelled fuck at the top of my lungs without even thinking about it.
Banging comes from all sides now, random and startling and echoing. It’s so loud it’s likely to draw every flesh eater within twenty miles.
“Shit,” I whisper.
“Shit,” she agrees, hefting her shotgun, checking the chamber. The two-by-four is moving, shivering in its brackets. They shouldn’t be able to get in. They shouldn’t be able to manipulate the door at all.
Or maybe they could. All it would take is an unlucky accident of physics.
“Oh, god, here comes another,” I say, clutching handfuls of blanket.
Our container rocks on its foundation as pure, white-hot pain stabs deep in my gut. The thing inside me wants out, and more than anything in the world, I want to push it out. “Mari?”
Marisol looks at the shivering bar, back at me, to the bar again. Defend or support? I see the exact moment she decides.
She sets down the gun, crouches beside me, grabs my slick hand, and says, “Baby, you can say fuck as loud as you want.”
“FUCK!” I yell.
“FUCK!” she yells back. “FUCK THE FLESH-EATERS!”
The floor rocks violently.
“FUCK THEM IN THE BRAINSTEM,” I scream.
“FUCK LIZ.”
“FUCK THAT FUCKING STUPID-ASS TRADER.”
“FUCK YOUR DAD.”
The airless hissing of hungry flesh-eaters is all around us.
“FUCK THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD—OH, GOD IT’S COMING.”
Marisol shoves the flashlight into her mouth and practically leaps between my thighs. She’s just in time; something roughly the size of a melon slips out of me, and I hope Mari is catching it.
The pressure in my back is instantly gone, and the contraction evaporates to nothing. It’s too dark to see anything, though I hear the susurrus of wiping rags and a squelch of wetness. “Is it okay? Is it alive?”
Wailing pierces the night, echoes around us, magnifies until it fills my soul. I am buoyant, I am life, I am weeping, and I hardly notice when a final, stabbing contraction pushes out the afterbirth because Mari has placed a warm, wet, wriggling bundle against my chest, saying, “Sweetheart, we tentatively have a son.”
Uncanny Magazine Issue 32 Page 2
