Survivors

by Margaret Ball

  Jillian followed him out into the hall. “Can’t you do anything for her? Drugs – ”

  He turned on her angrily. “Drugs? Do I look as if I had drugs to spare? We don’t even have basic antibiotics. No gloves, no scrubs… You know what the electricity supply is like? The surgeons are operating by the lights from their CodeXes.” He calmed himself down with a visible effort. “Sorry. I know it’s not your fault. It’s just – I’ve not slept for two days. And I hate losing patients who could have lived if we had even a few medical supplies. Your sister’s young, she’ll probably be all right. If she starts bleeding heavily, or if you see that the baby’s crowning, send for me and I’ll do – what I can.”

  He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes briefly. His head started to nod and he jerked awake. “Discord! Can’t do that – I’ll fall asleep.”

  “Jilli, Jilli, I need you!” Trisha called, and Jillian hurried back to kneel by Trisha’s bedside and hold her hand. Trisha squeezed until both their hands went white and then relaxed with a groan.

  Ruven started taking off his jacket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Putting something between you and that floor. Have you looked at it?”

  “What’s wrong with the floor?” Trisha demanded.

  “Nothing – nothing at all. Ruven was making a joke.” She handed him back his jacket. Her skirt was already soiled beyond redemption.

  He beckoned her out into the hall. “I’m not sure we should have come here. It’s a terrible place. If I’d realized it was this bad, I’d not have carried her here – no matter what Merdis said.”

  Jillian looked down the dim hallway. A shoulder-high streak of grime discolored the walls on each side. Halfway down the hallway, a line of patients waited silently outside a closed door. Pieces of rusted bed frames were stacked on the floor – which, as Ruven had noted, was unspeakable.

  She sighed. “Well, we’re here now, and it’s not like Trisha is going to notice how bad it is. And at least there is a doctor to call if anything goes wrong.”

  Ruven tilted her face up and ran one broad finger down her cheek. “Brave girl. I have to take my turn patrolling, but I’ll be back later.”

  When he returned, Trisha was asleep. He brought a bucket holding a splash of the thin soup from Merdis’ kitchen, and mugs to drink it out of. “I – have to take the bucket back,” he said apologetically. “You should drink the soup now while it’s – well, before it gets any colder. But should we wake Trisha?”

  “She’ll wake up in a moment,” Jillian said. “She’s so tired she’s started falling asleep between contractions.” She didn’t say how much that worried her. She wanted Ruven to go home and get some sleep.

  The doctor came by briefly at dawn. “Make her walk,” he told Jillian. “She needs to have that baby before she’s totally exhausted.” He glared at Jillian. “She needs food – good, nourishing food. I don’t like her looks.”

  Jillian shrugged hopelessly. “You’ll come back?”

  “If I can.”

  Then began the long nightmare of cajoling and bullying Trisha into walking up and down the dark hallway. Jillian invoked Tomas, called Trisha a weakling and a coward, did everything short of pinching her. And it finally worked; Trisha’s contractions grew stronger until she could no longer weather them while leaning on Jillian, until she screamed with real pain.

  “Good! Good!” the doctor said at mid-day. “Nice healthy strong contractions. That’s what we like to see.”

  “Nice healthy my —— —— —— !” said Trisha, employing words Jillian would never have guessed she knew.

  “That’s right, keep your spirits up.” He seemed almost jaunty compared with his previous visits.

  “Got three hours’ sleep after dawn,” he confided in Jillian. “Got my second wind now – good for days. Well. Hours anyway.”

  In mid-afternoon Trisha’s screams rose higher, until Jillian thought the remaining windows must shatter. She ran to the door where she’d seen people waiting, interrupted the doctor in the midst of telling a gaunt man that his best medicine would be food, and dragged him back to Trisha’s side in time to catch a red-faced, howling infant and cut the cord.

  “That’s right, cry! It’s not much of a world we’re bringing you into, is it, son? Cry more, get those lungs working!” He pushed on Trisha’s belly. “And you, get the afterbirth out.”

  “Sadist,” Trisha muttered. “Don’t you like anything but horrible painful contractions and crying children?”

  “Living patients,” the doctor said. “That’s what I like.”

  He disappeared again and Trisha asked, “What was his name?”

  “What, you want to name your baby after the sadist?” Jillian was holding her new nephew, wrapped in her patchwork jacket and temporarily not crying.

  “Tomas, after his father. Middle name after the doctor, maybe, to remind me never to do this again.” A flicker of her old humor appeared in Trisha’s eyes.

  Jillian wanted nothing more than to get them and the baby out of this place, but when she realized that the color in Trisha’s face was due to fever, she was afraid to move her. She confided her fears to Ruven when he came with his daily offering of soup.

  “Maybe let her rest a day or two?” He looked into Jillian’s eyes. “And when do you rest, my dear girl? I don’t like the way you look.”

  “That’s a nice thing to say to your girlfriend!” Jillian said, almost gaily. Trisha was alive; baby Tomas was alive and eating lustily; everybody was still alive, and spring was coming. She felt as though she could climb mountains.

  “Walk with me,” Ruven proposed.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I just want some time with my skinny girlfriend. And maybe we can find something for you to sleep on.” He bent and touched baby Tomas on the cheek.

  “Trisha, can I trust you to keep this young man from wandering off while we’re gone?”

  Trisha’s laugh was too bright, too brittle. Jillian kissed Trisha on the cheek – too warm – and walked down the hall with Ruven.

  “You should get outside more,” he said.

  Jillian laughed. “Have you seen ‘outside’?”

  A partially glassed-in door at the end of the hall offered a hint of pallid light. Jillian leaned on the door to push it open. The window half was broken.

  The door led to a syncrete walkway with a roof but no walls; when the wind blew, the light spring rain fell on the people encamped there. The syncrete was completely covered by mattresses, boxes, bags, and patient, silent people. A small mountain of garbage was growing in the space between the walkway and the hospital wall.

  “Who are these people?”

  “Sick people waiting to see a doctor. Their families, who come along to take care of them and feed them – concord knows the hospital won’t do that.”

  Ruven grasped Jillian’s arm above the elbow and pulled her back inside. “All right, I’ve seen enough. The sick and the well crowded together, no medicine for them, no sanitation, not even shelter – why don’t they at least sleep in the halls?”

  “The staff chases them out. If they’re not inside, the hospital’s not responsible.”

  “Discord and dissonance. If I wanted to start an epidemic, I couldn’t devise better conditions. That does it. We’re taking Trisha home.”

  “Her fever- “

  “Jillian. Do you really think she has a better chance here than she would there?”

  “Being outside, the shock, moving her…”

  “All better than waiting to die like those poor souls outside,” Ruven said brutally. “Woman, she’s not going to die of having a baby. It’s done all the time. But I wouldn’t give a half mark for her chances of getting over that fever if she stays here. Now stop dithering and let’s collect her.”

  “I don’t dither!” Jillian said indignantly.

  Ruven’s eyes creased and his lips twitched upward. “No? You’re a better actress than I thought, then, becaus
e you’re giving a discording good imitation of it.”

  And with that, he returned to the room to scoop up Trisha, blankets and all. Jillian carried the baby.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d held her nephew, but this walk through the damp spring air was different from picking up the baby to give him to Trisha, or putting him in his nest of blankets afterwards. Under the high grey sky she felt a terrifying sense of his fragility and her responsibility. He was so small. He couldn’t even hold his head up. If she held him the wrong way, or tripped and fell, he might die.

  “I’ll never drop you, Tomi,” she whispered into one tightly curled ear. “I’ll never let you go.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  After they brought Trisha home, Jillian discovered that she had lost her second job. Not for failure to show up; when she let herself into the apartment, she found a neatly lettered note left for her. It seemed Denis and Elen had decided to take the chance of paying the Discorders to smuggle them onto a ship that would take them to Esilia. Jillian didn’t know who the Discorders were; another criminal gang, most likely. She hoped the family would fare well; she’d never met anybody less fitted to deal with rough men than the balding civil servant and his sickly young wife. To say nothing of the baby!

  She sat for a moment after reading the note; her head was still swimming from the climb up five flights of stairs. They really needed food, all of them.

  Would her employers have taken the contents of their pantry with them, or given it to friends who weren’t – yet – ready to flee the city? Jillian flew to the kitchen, pried the locked cupboard open with a table knife, and began laughing weakly. Here was wealth – packets of soup, cans of cooked beef and chicken, dried peas, unopened jars of preserves and more.

  She went back to the apartment, demanded bags from every resident, drafted Danyel and Kris to carry groceries and Ruven to defend them on the way back with their precious goods. Andru Abadi mourned the loss of three men from the defense patrol, but conceded when Jillian told him of her find.

  “Lucky the place hadn’t been looted already,” Ruven commented while they were filling bags.

  “They hadn’t reset the door sensor. It still recognizes my ID chip.”

  “A lot of places, they wreck the door first thing.”

  Kris nodded. “He told us never to go alone into an apartment where the door had been broken down,” he told Jillian.

  Jillian recalled that the men had already been out foraging many times. They knew all the possibilities – and all the dangers – of deserted apartments.

  There was so much food that all four of them were burdened on the return journey. Ruven took a large box packed with things that wouldn’t break or spill. “See, if anybody gives us trouble I’ll just drop my load and kill them, then we can pick up the stuff afterwards.”

  Jillian wasn’t sure he was joking. She was extremely relieved when they reached the Donteven without trouble. That wouldn’t have been possible a couple of months ago; even the gangs must be leaving town. All the same, she asked Kris to escort her when she went back the next day.

  “Why? We cleared out everything,” the boy said.

  “We took all the food,” Jillian corrected him. “But I’ve been thinking. Denis was just crazy about Elen, he was always giving her presents. Mostly jewelry. And she had a closet full of fantastic clothes, smartsilk with shifting colors and – there was one dress with the sleeves made entirely of antique handmade lace, and – ”

  Kris’ eyes were glazing over. “Let’s just say she always had the latest fashions,” Jillian condensed her narrative.

  “And she was your size?”

  “No, a head shorter than me and more…” Jillian made a gesture with her cupped hands in front of her chest. “Especially after having a baby! But I don’t want her clothes to wear, Kris. I want them to sell. I sold off my good dresses and most of my costumes before; I know where I can take this stuff and get money or food for it.”

  “Oh!” Once awakened to the possibilities, Kris was fully engaged. “Y’know, maybe you should’ve come foraging with us. We never even thought about taking anything but food.”

  “It would only be worthwhile on the Hill,” Jillian said reflectively. “Other neighborhoods, people wouldn’t have that much that’s worth taking.”

  “You didn’t live on the Hill,” Kris said, “and you just said you sold your clothes.”

  “Yes,” Jillian said. “I didn’t live on the Hill, but I was a silly little actress who thought she’d always be paid well, and who spent too much trying to dress like an Inner Circle type. Anyway,” she concluded, “it doesn’t matter, because my ID chip won’t open any doors except Denis and Elen’s.”

  “I could break into other places,” Kris boasted, and then after a moment’s thought, “Well, anyway, Ruven or my dad could.”

  “That would be stealing!” Jillian didn’t think she had stooped that low yet.

  “It’s still stealing if you take Elen’s dresses,” Kris said with the relentless logic of youth. “Just because you don’t have to break in doesn’t make them yours.”

  Oh. She already had stooped that low.

  But at least her assessment had been correct; Elen hadn’t packed her entire wardrobe for the flight from Harmony. The closet was full of glorious dresses and suits that Elen still hadn’t been able to fit into, four months after the baby was born. Rejoicing, Jillian took one fine dress after another, rolled it tight, and stuffed it into her backpack.

  “I don’t get it,” said Kris, who was hanging about watching and fidgeting with things on the dressing table. “Most of her outfits are smartcloth, right? So why couldn’t she just stretch them out?”

  “With designer dresses,” Jillian explained, “they’re carefully cut to fit and drape just so. If you stretch them out, they won’t look right. In fact, a lot of the designers work in what they call ‘stable smartcloth,’ where the nanos that make it stretchable have been inactivated.”

  “Oh.” That was more fashion information than Kris was prepared to absorb. He went back to fidgeting, and exclaimed when a narrow drawer popped out of the dressing table.

  “Cool, a secret drawer!” and then, in a different tone of voice, “Jilli, you need to look at this.”

  The drawer was filled with a tumble of fine chains and sparkling stones. “Prob’ly just costume stuff, right?” he said in a voice that yearned for it to be treasure in a secret drawer.

  “I don’t think so,” said Jillian slowly. She lifted a tangled mass of chains and looked closely at the pendant on one of them. “I don’t think Elen had costume jewelry… and if she did, why put it in a secret drawer? I think she was rummaging through her jewelry, picking the best pieces to take and sell, and these are her… leftovers.”

  “My dad knows someone who can tell us what’s real.”

  “How very convenient,” said Jillian. Her hands shook a little, but she lifted the jewelry out of the drawer and tucked it into an inner pocket of her backpack.

  Thief.

  Somehow this felt worse than taking dresses Elen couldn’t wear anyway, much worse than taking food she’d abandoned.

  Thief.

  Jillian shook her head. “Survivor,” she told the voice.

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, nothing. We’d better go.”

  Jillian was furious to discover how little her haul bought her on the black market. “You gave me more than twice that before, for similar dresses.”

  “That was before.” He shrugged. “Not too much market for frills now, is there? I’m only taking these things off your hands because I’m a family man, and I understand how it is when you got a baby to feed.”

  “Practically an act of charity,” Jillian said.

  “That’s so.”

  “I wonder if any of your competitors are feeling… charitable.”

  “Wouldn’t advise checking it out. Way things are going, your pretty dresses will be worth less tomorrow and practically nothing by th
e end of the week.”

  Another shock was how little food her money bought. She’d brought one of Elen’s titanium chains with a diamond pendant, but the slob who was giving her less than one day’s supply of food for the Donteven shook his head. “Save it,” he advised her. “Might be worth something… some day.” He stared into the distance and sighed. “Remember beef and raisin pastries? Hot out of the oven, so’s they’d warm your hands while you walked. Maybe we’ll see those days again.”

  “You seem to be making a good living out of these bad times,” Jillian said coolly.

  “Yes, but I don’t like it,” he said. “You think I want to see little kids crying with hunger, men and women passing out on the street? I hate everything about this – but I’ve got a family too. So… I’ll use my sources to find where food’s hidden, and you’ll steal to buy it – don’t try to kid me those dresses were yours, you’re too tall and not… well, you wouldn’t exactly fill ‘em out, would you now? You can’t afford to despise me,” he finished. “We’re both just…”

  “Surviving,” Jillian said.

  It was hardly worth going out foraging with Ruven or Andru for so little return, but what else was there to do? Andru was good at spotting deserted apartments that hadn’t been looted yet. Jillian picked the ones most likely to contain valuables, and learned to watch out in case the sounds of breaking in attracted unwelcome attention. She told herself that people who’d selfishly fled, abandoning the rest of them, didn’t deserve any better than to have their possessions riffled through. But she knew that even if she personally knew the inhabitants to have been paragons of virtue, that wouldn’t have stopped her. Trisha needed feeding up… They all needed the food.

  For all her efforts, though, and despite other residents stinting themselves for the sake of the new mother and baby, she couldn’t get Trisha enough calories to keep her milk from drying up. Jillian stared at the two precious cans of powdered milk that she’d been hoarding all this time, and wondered how to get them into a crying baby. She tried dripping the mix of milk and boiled water into his mouth, and nearly choked him; tried offering him a rag dipped into milk, and he rejected it. Even Merdis couldn’t help. “What you need is a proper baby bottle, and I don’t know where you’d find such a thing.”