The Post

by Kevin A. Muñoz

  Echevarria is inspecting the girl’s scalp with a magnet-powered flashlight. Every once in a while, he gives it a few good shakes to keep the light on. The hospital is one of the only places where solar- and bicycle-generated power stays on twenty-four hours a day. A few floor lamps add to the morning glow through the restaurant windows, but that isn’t enough light to do a proper inspection for ticks and lice.

  Marilyn comes to us at the door, her long black dreadlocks swaying against her back. They draw me in, as they always have, like the tendrils of a dream from which I never want to wake. “Good morning, Chief,” she says, making it sound like she never knew me. “And you must be Owen.” She takes Owen’s arm and ushers him farther into the room with enough confidence that he doesn’t object when she sits him down a table away from Abigail.

  The pregnant young woman lifts her head when she sees him. “Owen?” she says, her voice soft and high.

  “I told you the chief would bring him ’round,” Trainor says. “But right now we have to give him a checkup like we gave you. William?”

  Echevarria moves to the other table, talking to Owen while Marilyn brings me closer to the front window. She says, “The girl is in good health, and I think the baby is fine. Best guess, she’s about eight months along. I’m concerned about the preeclampsia, though. There’s not too much we can do about it, to be honest, except watch and wait.”

  Luther says, “She hasn’t said anything about where they came from or why they were out on the road. I’d say she’s in shock, except the doc doesn’t agree.”

  “It’s not shock,” Marilyn says. “Shock implies a recent thing. Something that just happened. This behavior is more long term.”

  She hesitates to continue, but I need information. “What aren’t you telling me, doctor?”

  “It’s complicated. Let’s go outside.” She ushers the two of us out onto the empty sidewalk, in front of the windows so that she can still keep an eye on Abigail.

  “There’s a question of privacy,” she continues. “So I’m sorry, Adelaide, that I didn’t tell you about it, but—”

  “It’s fine,” Luther says, though her tone suggests otherwise.

  “It’s important,” I say. “You said she’s in good health. So if she’s not sick—”

  “She has scars,” Marilyn says, quickly enough, I reason, to keep herself from changing her mind. “On her back and legs. The marks suggest multiple, probably repeated whippings.” As she continues, her tone becomes increasingly clinical. “There is evidence of past sexual trauma. Burn marks, and what I believe may be vaginal scarring, suggestive of forced penetration. I don’t have experience with those wounds, so I’m not certain.”

  I look through the glass at the girl sipping on her tomato juice, her eyes wide and fixed on us. Inside my head I hear the echoes of her screaming, crying out, sobbing for relief or rescue. Her current quiet, the bulge of her belly that makes her look more fragile than she is, only makes the contrast worse. The echoes, louder. The child within her perpetuates the violation, whether or not she has chosen on her own to keep it. I have not felt this mixture of anger and impotence in a long time.

  “Do you think it was Owen?” Luther asks.

  “No,” I say. “I interviewed him. My sense is he brought her down here to rescue her from her situation.” I can’t even bring myself to name it.

  When Luther glances at me skeptically, Marilyn says, “Men who beat women aren’t keen on letting doctors examine them. And survivors resist examination, for fear of being blamed for revealing the secret. You saw the way she responded to him when he got here. He’s probably the only thing keeping her going right now.”

  “She’s going to need more than medicine,” I say.

  “I know,” Marilyn says. “She’s going to need people who understand. Maybe not all of it. But more than most of us. Owen got her out, but he can’t get her through.”

  I once found strength in the knowledge that one day I would live beyond the reach of my tormentor, that my bruises and broken ribs would heal and be no more. But I believe these other violations will last longer. And they press against my heart in more demanding ways. They remind me that to save myself I had to leave my mother behind. My mother, who suffered more than I.

  Maybe I can do for Abigail what I couldn’t do for her.

  “She’s going to be okay,” Marilyn says with a softness intended for me. “As much as she can be. We’ll take care of her. She’s safe here.”

  I know this. And I am determined to make sure it’s true. Owen says she just needs one good thing. But we can do more. One can’t be enough. We need to offer her a place for a better life than the one that she fled, until her wounds heal in body and mind and only the scars remain.

  But I can’t stop any of it or erase it. I can’t change her past. And Dahlonega is seventy miles away. It operates by its own laws and enforcement, if such things even exist there. I can help Abigail to be comfortable here, but I will not be able to force her abusers to account for their crimes. I will not be able to give her what I have: the satisfaction of knowing, with absolute certainty, that she has outlasted them.

  DAY FOUR, 9:00 A.M.

  It’s been three days since Owen and Abigail arrived in the Little Five, and at last there is an apartment ready for them. A handful of volunteers spent most of the morning moving boxes out of and furniture into a second-floor apartment above Cassidy’s Bar in the center of town. Owen asked me why they were being given such prime real estate, and I pointed out that there’s really no such thing in the Little Five. Besides, at night, it can get a bit loud downstairs.

  Luther was concerned for a time about letting the young girl live in the same apartment as her much older guardian, considering they aren’t related, but it’s clear that she needs him nearby. I have seen the two of them out in the streets a few times in the last couple of days, and Owen’s confidence is a stark contrast to the mouse-like behavior of his charge. She speaks very little, and never above a whisper, though I have seen her smile when she receives a kind word or some treat from one of the vendors.

  Still, the relationship between the two strangers baffles me in some ways. It’s not as if Owen has an outsized care for the girl, as far as I can tell. He keeps her at arm’s length, without much more tenderness than two traveling companions might share, yet she clings to him like an older brother. And he doesn’t seem to mind. So, who is Abigail to him? Why did he take her from that place? What made him care?

  I haven’t tried to speak to Abigail since the morning they arrived. She doesn’t need my interference now. She needs a routine, a safe space to build up around her, before I can think of approaching her. To ask questions too soon, to demand that she remember the life she’s left behind, would only be another assault, and it would gain her nothing. I am grateful to see that the girl is coming out of her shell just a little on her own. While the adults travel up and down the stairs to the apartment, she watches from the street with the mayor’s stepdaughter, Phoebe, at her side. They are not the same age—Phoebe is a few years older—but they are becoming friends. Abigail’s smile is lingering longer.

  I should have expected it, of course. Phoebe has her parents’ easy grace and likability. In another world, another time, she would have been more than a handful for Regina and Aloysius. Boys and cliques and all the trouble that a typical teenage girl can get into—but those days are gone, replaced with a throwback world where a person is thrust into adulthood much sooner.

  I turn away at the sound of my name, called out by one of the sweep team members down by the wall.

  “Scouts coming in,” she adds, pointing out beyond our boundary. “Olsen and Lukacs.”

  I join her at the wall to welcome the two scouts back home. The men are both members of the sweep team, but they like to range more widely than the rest, and sometimes we don’t see them for weeks. This time their excursion was brief: only eight days.

  Olsen, a tall, thin man with
black-rimmed glasses, is the first to the door. He is naturally dour, but the tension in his jaw is especially strong today. I only need to glance beyond him to know what happened. His scouting partner, Gabor Lukacs, has been bitten or scratched by a hollow-head or suffered some other injury that led to sepsis and fever.

  Lukacs, staying back from the wall, shows me his left palm. In the afternoon light that shines through the door, a bite mark is clearly visible on the meat of his thumb. There are telltale signs of earlier swelling in his hand and forearm. Neither he nor Olsen need to tell me more. I have seen this before. We all have. Our losses exceed our successes, and we no longer have room for individual miseries. With time, each pain mixes indistinctly with all the others, and we tell ourselves we are hardened. Then fresh hurts remind us that the steel in our nerves is only fragile glass.

  I send for a doctor and for Gabor’s wife before turning back to the two scouts. “How long?” I ask.

  Olsen says, “Yesterday morning. We got caught between two groups on our way back.”

  Lukacs calls across the divide between us, “The swelling went down three hours ago. The fever stopped right after. So we’re looking at maybe four hours.” His rational calm is not uncommon. If there is one good thing to come from all of this, it’s that we pass on with much more dignity now.

  “We left a cache of tools and supplies about ten miles south,” Olsen adds. “I can go collect it—after. We wanted to hurry.”

  “Of course,” I mutter, then beckon for Lukacs to come to the wall. “You’re not staying out there.”

  In the beginning, when we were still raw with panic and misinformation, we made every effort to separate out the so-called “infected” from the rest of the community, thinking that they could harm us by way of proximity. But a man who is succumbing to the disease is no more dangerous than anyone else, and a single hollow-head is a manageable threat. If Gabor wants to spend his last hours under the canopy of his community, with his wife, no one here will stop him.

  Marilyn arrives first, with her medical bag. She ushers Lukacs through after Olsen, then the sweep team locks the door behind us. She sits Lukacs on a bench at the end of the tunnel to examine him.

  Word is already getting out that the scouts have returned and that one of them has been “converted” by hollow-heads. He isn’t dying, but his life is ending, and by the time Marilyn has confirmed what we know, the man’s friends have already gathered to greet him. To pay their respects. The crowd that is forming at the wall has come to say goodbye.

  Lukacs’s wife arrives at the same time that Owen catches my attention with a quick wave from across the wide street. I’m grateful for the distraction. I don’t like seeing this part of it. It has been years since I could pretend to accept graciously the sympathy of others, even when it is not directed at me. Even when it is sincere, as it always is: everyone has been in those shoes, a hundred times or more.

  “What’s happening?” Owen asks once I come within easy speaking distance.

  “Was there something you wanted?” I ask in return, not wanting to be dismissive but also not in any mood for idle conversation. But another part of me welcomed the distraction. “Sorry. One of our scouts is—”

  When I hesitate, Owen says, “Oh. I understand. You let them through the wall? What I mean is: not everyone does that.” He looks toward the building where his new apartment is being filled with furniture, as if to say that not everyone does a lot of things.

  “Is Abigail settling in?” I ask to keep the momentum of the conversation.

  “I think so. I’m sure she will.”

  “You could stay,” I tell him. “I know you mentioned Macon, but that’s a long way out.”

  “If I do, I’ll have to earn my keep somehow. Back in Dahlonega I was—well, let’s put it this way. I had advantages. My brother—” Owen stops, shrugs. When he continues, his tone has shifted away from the bitterness I began to hear. “I saw you have a crew that works on cars.”

  I have to laugh at that. “Not a crew so much as one man. If you’re any good with that sort of thing, I’m sure he could use the help.”

  “I’ve changed a battery or two in my day.” There is some levity in his voice again. “Back before, I was stationed at Fort Stewart, in the motor pool. I was there for all of a minute and a half, but I know my way around a diesel.”

  “Were you there when—?” I begin.

  “Yeah,” he interrupts. “I’m not really sure what the point was, but I was there even after the oil turned sour. We managed to put together a few technicals toward the end. You know what a technical is?”

  I nod. “A jury-rigged gun truck.” I tug on the lapel of my overcoat.

  “Oh, yeah. You were Coast Guard? I thought maybe you found that coat. Anyway, we figured it was a terrorist attack, like poisoning the water supply. We got a hold of a few converted pickups and secured machine guns to the beds and thought we were going to rip the bad guys to shreds. Whoever they turned out to be. But they turned out to be us, after everyone got sick. Then Savannah happened. I know Savannah was near the end of it, but for us it was like—”

  “Apocalypse,” I suggest.

  Owen continues as if he hasn’t heard me. “We had eight technicals with three-man teams. That’s all we had left, of trucks and people. Can you imagine that? Something like fifteen thousand people on that base, and at the end there was just the handful of us left. But we wanted to do some good. So we got in those technicals and rode hell-bent for leather to Savannah.”

  Savannah. The city that used to be my home, when I had a wife, and when I had a child. The city that introduced me to the new brutality and forced me to reckon with the person I needed to become. Perhaps Owen went to Savannah with the heart of a hero. For my part, I remember only the fear and the desperation, and the people who sacrificed themselves to get my daughter one more mile down the road. One more block. One more doorway. Until there were no more people left, and that last doorway was here.

  We are interrupted by the arrival of Abigail and Phoebe. Phoebe gives me a long, piercing glance, as if to tell me that she knows about Lukacs but doesn’t want to trouble the younger girl. Abigail, though not exactly cheerful, is at least nearly smiling.

  Phoebe approaches Owen first. “I was going to show Abby the north fields. The chickens and the pigs. If that’s all right.”

  “Yes, that’s fine,” Owen says. “You want me to come with you?” he asks Abigail.

  Her expression becomes even more difficult to read.

  “Then go on,” he says. “It’s all right.”

  As the two girls walk away, Phoebe making an attempt at conspiratorial banter, Owen sucks air through his teeth. “Some things you can’t make right,” he says. “Like Savannah. We got there, and it was too late, and it was a killing field. So when you can make something right, you have to, don’t you?”

  “Tell me about Dahlonega,” I say by way of a reply.

  “There’s nothing for me to tell. They did all right by me for a while. But it’s not the same anymore. You don’t ever want to go to Dahlonega. Stay here, where it’s good.”

  Owen leaves me to inspect his new apartment, and I am forced to confront the earlier development again. By now the crowd has thinned, most of Lukacs’s acquaintances moving back to their routines. Only his closest friends will remain with him. The rest of us can’t afford to spend all our pain on something that’s a part of the new natural order.

  Lukacs and Olsen have gone with Marilyn to the hospital, where I find them in the company of a few others, all of them in solemn silence. Gabor’s wife is with him, crying into his shoulder and making Marilyn wait to speak. Gabor is consoling Cathy as well as he can, but I can see his strain. Though he must feel incredibly well in most respects—a mixed blessing from the disease that is taking him away—his brain is already beginning to dissolve into slush. This is making it difficult for him to form coherent thoughts.

  We have seen this ha
ppen too many times.

  “We need to make some decisions,” Marilyn says when I enter, barely acknowledging my presence.

  “I know,” Lukacs says, gesturing to Olsen. “We already talked about it.”

  “He wants to go outside the wall,” Olsen answers for him. “I can get Ernesto to let us borrow one of the cars. We’ll go to the cache we left behind. I’ll bring it back.”

  Cathy launches into a series of objections, each more frantic than the last, demanding that her husband stay in the Little Five.

  “No,” he insists. “I’m not going to make anyone go through that.”

  “I offered,” Olsen says. “I said I would.”

  They are speaking around the harsh truth. If Lukacs stays in the Little Five until the end, someone is going to have to put him down after the change. Or he’s going to have to kill himself, before it gets that far. Instead he is proposing to be left outside the community, to become a hollow-head and join another tribe. To be cast to whatever fate nature will provide.

  Gabor sits down to take a few deep breaths. I can see the strain of concentration on his face. “I want this to be on my terms,” he says, mainly to his wife. “I don’t want to argue the time I have left.”

  “I’m coming with you, then,” Cathy says. “I’ll be with you at the end.” Over the objections that Lukacs is about to make, she adds, “I’ll keep safe. Olsen will be there.”

  They argue for a few more minutes while I watch, uncomfortable, but the compromise is a foregone conclusion. Lukacs simply hasn’t the energy left to fight this last battle, and he agrees to let Cathy be with him until he is no longer conscious. He must know, surely, that she won’t keep to that deal and will stay with him until he awakens in his new existence.