The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (12 page)

They found Shawna all alone, not even hiding, just walking down the road one day. She was so young. At first I thought maybe sixteen, she was pretty well developed. But she would talk to me when they weren’t using her. She turned out to be fourteen. Her whole family had died and she had just been wandering since. She had no skills at all, she had been a good girl with good grades. I told the guys she needed aspirin or something for the UTI she was dealing with. She had been a virgin, she told me crying. They tore her the fuck up. But after a few weeks she was throwing up every morning and getting tired enough to crash in the early afternoon. Poor kid had no idea, she thought she had the fever after all. Chuck and Ethan raided a drug store and came back with a test. She peed on the stick and lo and behold.

The guys put their heads together about everything they had heard about babies and the fever. More than one of them had heard that all the kids born during the shitstorm had died. They all agreed that none of us had the fever so the kid couldn’t get it. So they took care of Shawna. They stopped fucking her, miracle of miracles. They raided everywhere to bring her canned fruit and pickles and asked her what she was craving. I encouraged her to tell them her favorites and mine too, and I used what I know about pregnancy from talking girls through abortions to help out and seem useful.

About the time she started to show, the fights began. At first it was just guessing whose kid it was. They talked every night about who fucked her first, last, longest, hardest. Then they got smart and tried to figure out who had fucked her after she last bled. Jimmy got ragged on pretty bad because he always preferred the asshole to the pussy, so it couldn’t be him. Aaron pretty much took for granted that the kid was his and refused to participate. He always acted like he was better than the others, like some kind of natural born leader. Shawna barely knew what it meant or what would happen. She had no kind of guess about the father, and she was afraid of all of them.

Aaron eventually spoke up. He told them the kid was his, Shawna was his, and would remain that way. He would have her and the baby to himself when it was all over, and anyone who had a problem with that could eat a bullet. He said mother and child needed protecting, and that he would protect what was his. That shut down conversation.

He was kind of tender with her. Started calling her “prized possession” or “pride and joy.” She didn’t see the good in it.

I didn’t know what to tell her. If she made some kind of alliance with Aaron, went along with his claim, the other guys might respect that like they respected him. If the kid was black or Asian, that’d make it clear and Aaron might give up. She had no preferences, just terror. She just wanted to eat and sleep with her thin little arms wrapped around her belly.

She was maybe six or seven months gone when shit got real. She started cramping up and bleeding first thing in the morning. I told Aaron to send the guys out for gauze and clean towels and all that stuff. They wanted to move her to a big hospital they had seen back down the road but she was twisted up in agony and we didn’t have a good way to carry her. I didn’t want to anyway, all the hospitals are full of the dead. We ended up inside a gas station with bottled water and a hunting knife and blue shop towels. Shawna cried and screamed and doubled up in pain. Everybody stared at her except Melissa, who sat down on one of the aisles and ate a couple cans of Pringles.

I got her shorts off and took a look. I don’t know fucking anything about birthing no babies, like the slave in that movie said, but neither did the guys. She was bleeding in trickles and gushes and I couldn’t see anything. Hours went by with me staring between her legs and telling her to breathe or push or whatever and giving her water. About sundown, she stopped bleeding for a while and just screamed. The guys lit candles and torches and whatever they could find, the place smelled like burning plastic and I wondered about gas or oil or whatever just blowing the station up.

Out of nowhere, Shawna heated up. It was like turning on an electric stove. Her face and joints were hot to the touch, the heat off her thighs was blistering as I sat there waiting. Finally, Shawna bore down and I saw the kid’s head. It was startlingly white through all the blood and I told her to push hard. She did, crying and obviously getting weaker. The kid came out all in a rush, like a popped cork. Blood spilled out in a wave behind the baby, soaking me and Aaron, who had come pretty close. He backed up quick to get out of it. The baby was in my hands, tiny and thin. He didn’t move or breathe. The cord reached back into her and I left it alone. I patted him, I smacked him, I tried to clear his mouth. He was blotchy and blue and never drew a breath. I told Aaron to hold him. I handed the kid off and Aaron wrapped him in shop towels and tried to stir him. The guys offered a few lame suggestions, but they petered out. None of us knew what to do.

Shawna lay limp on the floor, still bleeding out and turning white. I checked her pulse the way they do it in the movies. I felt something tiny tick under my fingers, like a bug under a picnic blanket. She was cooling off. I tried to hold her up and slapped her face a little. No reaction. I pulled at the cord and the placenta gushed out with another bucket load of blood behind it. How this skinny kid could have so much blood to give up, I don’t know. With it out, I could see that the kid had ripped her wide open. I couldn’t tell what was what down there, she was just shreds. I packed shop towels between her legs and laid them together to the side. There was nothing I could do.

I told Aaron she was going to die from blood loss. He looked at me, holding the baby that had never breathed. They all stood around, staring. Nobody knew what to do or say. After a while, Aaron laid the baby down in Shawna’s arms and we left them there together. Melissa got hauled up by her elbow, still holding two cans of those awful chips. The chains went back on. Nobody talked about Shawna or the baby. Two days later I got to wash the blood off me. Things were pretty much the same after that until we ran into you.”

Back to me

Wish I hadn’t read her story. Felt that sick rush I had always felt after a bad birth. Adrenaline and disappointment = sick. Pity. Held back a thousand medical questions about the birth. She probably wouldn’t know the answer and it’s not like it mattered. Couldn’t stop thinking about the hospital where I saw it all fall apart. Every baby dead. Almost every mother dead. Creeping fever that came from nowhere, we never even really figured out how it spread. No tourists from Asia or Europe. No planes overhead. Maybe not just this country, maybe everywhere. Maybe the world.

Almost dawn now. Going to sleep for a while. Morning I’m going to suggest we skip Pocatello, there’s likely people there. We should swing south and raid in the small towns, maybe head for Colorado. Lots of nice cabins that way to hide out in. Maybe make camp for a while.

Mid July

Hot as shit and sticky every day. Found a sporting goods store a few days back that had good bug spray. It smells like death and probably causes cancer but I don’t give a fuck. Mosquitos beware. Also found a couple of water filters and filtering canteens, small expensive ones. Incredible = not carrying gallons of bottled water. Just drop and filter in any lake or stream or puddle we find. Huge load off my mind. Filters won’t last forever, but at least now we know they work and how to find them.

* * * * *

Roxanne and Alex had some good nights. They played checkers in an old diner while they ate a whole can of strawberry pie topping, sugary glaze and all. They talked about where they would go, what they would look for in a place to make a stand. Alex sang a little and Roxanne said she missed the piped-in music of the casino. Roxanne read trashy romance novels that she found along the way, sometimes reading passages aloud.

“His throbbing member aroused her, though she had never known the touch of a man before!”

They giggled like girls and rode along an old highway, not another living thing in sight. Roxanne told terrible jokes she had learned from customers while she worked. Alex told her the standard nursing jokes and apocryphal stories of men with their dicks stuck in vacuum cleaners, in coke bottles, in improvised cock rings. The legendary drill to remove the champagne bottle from an unwise asshole.

They raided a little cul-de-sac of houses. Corpses were drying out all over. The smell wasn’t as bad as when they were wet, especially when they opened the windows. Alex found a full bottle of Oxycontin and kept it for trade. Roxanne looked for a gun of her own. She searched the hidden places in those houses, under beds and high in closets.

One house had a wall safe in an office and she was convinced there was a handgun in it. They slept in the den, on big soft couches laid out on a sunken floor. In the morning, Roxanne was in the office right at sunrise, searching. The office had a huge aquarium on one wall. The water had all evaporated and the room smelled like the rotting fish. Alex opened the window that faced the backyard, thinking it was safer than the one that faced the street. The air and light came streaming in and she helped Roxanne look.

The office was like a checklist of prestigious artifacts. Green glass banker s lamp with a brass body. Oak desk like an aircraft carrier. Large blotter and Mont Blanc pen lined up next to Franklin Covey day planner. The dead man in the bed upstairs had likely thought himself pretty important. A tiny blue book in one drawer held account numbers, passwords, credit cards numbers, and five crisp hundred dollar bills folded in half. Roxanne slipped the money into her bra without looking at it. Alex stared at her for a moment before they both burst out laughing. When the moment passed, Roxanne dug it back out and set it gently down on to the desk.

“Maybe he didn’t want to write it down,” Alex offered.

 
“He would. Thinks he’s fucking James Bond.” Roxanne went back to staring at the book, scowling. “He was the kind of guy who wrote down all his passwords, because he’s worried that he’d forget someday.”

Alex shrugged and let her obsess. An hour later Roxanne was still working. Alex checked the kitchen and found the pantry untouched. They feasted on tuna and tomatoes and beans and Alex ate a whole can of peaches while Roxanne turned the pages again and again.

Roxanne laughed abruptly. “Last page. In case of emergency, call 354-610. That’s only six numbers.”

She walked to the wall safe and dialed it in, 35-46-10. The door swung open and pulled it wide, excited and pleased with herself for figuring it out.

Stacked up inside the case was an obscene amount of cash. Banded perfectly pristine stacks of hundreds, from the bottom to the top. Roxanne clawed it out on to the floor, hoping for something else behind it. No luck. Bands of bills hit the floor and spread out, sliding against one another, whispering paper defeat. Nonplussed, Alex sat down again.

Roxanne stood there, looking at it.

“No way a guy has this much money and no gun. There’s a gun here.”

“Roxanne, maybe he was really anti-gun. Maybe he had hired goons. You don’t know that there’s a gun here.”

“There is. There is.”

By the third day, Alex wanted to leave. Roxanne would not be moved. Alex sat, frustrated. She read the magazines in the bathroom. She did inverted pushups on the stairs.

Roxanne did not give up until she found it. She had been right all along, and she found it. After several days, she was muttering, all day long.

“Little dicks. All little dicks have guns. He’s paranoid about the money. He was into something dirty. He thinks he can’t trust anyone so he needs serious firepower. Helps him sleep at night.”

Alex had stopped trying to talk to her. Roxanne was trying to get into a dead man’s head and it was starting to scare her. Roxanne didn’t eat for almost a day, pacing the bedroom with the corpse. She dragged the mattress off to one side, with his dried out body stuck to it. The gun was not underneath. The gun was not hidden in a flour canister or in the basement. She tore everything out of the linen closet, checked the freezer and ended up letting out an unbelievable enclosed stink of rotting meat. It was not on top of the high kitchen cabinets, where there was an inch of dust and dead bugs. The gun was not under the bathroom sink or the kitchen sink and there was not a single loose brick in the fireplace. They always went back into the office, where money carpeted the floor. She flopped down into the big leather chair and Alex sat on the desk.