Survivors

by Margaret Ball

  Where you’d find such a thing...

  Jillian stood up so suddenly that Tomi hiccupped and stopped crying for an instant. “Here,” she said, transferring him to Merdis’ arms. “I’ll be back.”

  “Wait for one of the men!”

  “No time. Anyway I’m not going far… and everybody on the street is too hungry to bother me.”

  Jillian walked the three blocks to the hospital with long, brisk strides, went past the people waiting in the hall, and barged straight into the doctor’s office.

  “That baby you delivered is going to die,” she said. “His mother didn’t get enough to eat, and now her milk’s dried up. You have to help me.”

  “Miracles,” the doctor said. “Every day, they all want me to do miracles. Is it true the baby’s second name is Mirez?”

  Jillian stared.

  “After me. She did say… but probably she didn’t mean it. After all, I’m a sadist who likes painful contractions and crying babies.”

  Trisha had evidently made an impression. “Yes,” Jillian said. “Tomas Mirez Lisadel. It’s a name I don’t want to put on a coffin.”

  The doctor rummaged in a dusty cabinet and pulled out a bottle and two odd-looking rubber things like tiny hats. Not only that; he gave her a bag to carry them in, and stuffed packets of instant formula around the bottle.

  “What were you planning to feed him?” he asked when she turned a packet over and read the label.

  “We’ve got some powdered milk…”

  “Milk’s good, as long as you remember to boil the water first. This is better – scientifically formulated – all the right vitamins and nutrients…”

  “In short,” Jillian said with a smile, “liquid sludge.”

  The doctor actually laughed. “Never thought of it that way. But it must taste better than sludge, or the babies wouldn’t take it. Here, go out the back way. We don’t want all those people in line thinking that you’re stealing hospital supplies.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  By the end of winter, the Esilian Assembly’s debates had shifted from complaints about the refugees to other matters, and Jef took up listening to the debates whenever it was his turn to choose the channel. It was probably just as well that the assemblymen were so wordy and repeated themselves so much, because he missed half the debates. He’d actually learned something about their computer support service by then. Chaco started letting him field what looked like the easy calls, and gave him a raise. The raise was timely; his family had almost used up their ninety days of free housing, and he did not want to join his parents in the place they’d found, in a near-slum that would mean a two-hour commute to the Chop Shop. With the raise he could – just – pay for a bed in one of the dorms that were going up all over the city to accommodate the new workers in the boom town, and still have almost enough left for food. At least as long as Ma Manalang kept inviting him to dinner twice a week and sending him home with leftovers.

  A lot of those “easy” support calls were from bewildered citizens who needed to be shown how to connect to a power supply, or how to turn the new gadget on, or how to get it to display their favorite holoshows at a size they could see. Many of them were old ladies whose customer satisfaction surveys were heavy on compliments for the tech who’d taken care of them.

  “Jef was quick and efficient in solving my problem. He treated me like an intelligent person! Good-looking young man, too.” Chuy read one of the survey responses out loud in the Chop Shop. Jef’s ears turned red.

  “It’s those upper-caste Harmony ways they like,” Chaco said. “Study at night, Jef. The more of this side of the business we can turn over to you, the better off we’ll all be. Just – don’t encourage the nice old ladies to introduce you to their granddaughters, ‘kay?”

  Jef’s face and neck turned as red as his ears, and he cursed his fair skin. And Krisi was watching!

  During a lull in mid-afternoon she slipped over to his work station. Jef dropped the component he’d been holding. Way to go, clumsy idiot!

  But Krisi didn’t laugh at him. She murmured, “Don’t mind Chuy and Chaco, they’re just teasing.”

  “Yeah,” Jef said gruffly. “And I’m just blushing. They can do that to me every time!”

  “Well, I think it’s rather sweet to find a guy with some sensitivity. But Chaco’s right about one thing. Don’t go messing about with their granddaughters, because… well. Just don’t, you hear?”

  The entire parts tray fell off Jef’s lap. And just when he really needed something on there, too.

  Krisi zipped back to her desk while Chaco yelled at her “for lollygagging around there where the boy is!” and Chuy helped Jef pick up the parts so he could sort them again.

  The task took him forever, because his eyes kept drifting to the back of Krisi’s head. Was she really ‘lollygagging’? What does that mean, anyway? The way Chaco said it, sounded almost like ‘flirting.’ Then his mind would drift back to the way she’d told him to lay off the customers’ granddaughters, and what that might mean, and he’d drop a part into the wrong bin.

  But in between calls on customers and daydreaming about Krisi, he did take in the gist of the Assembly’s debates. Stories from the last refugees to reach Esilia were alarming. They talked about the breakdown of civil order, about people so hungry they went through garbage to find something to eat, about gangs who demanded payment for the right to pass through their improvised roadblocks. Two of the departing ships had been fired on from the docks. All of the merchant fleet’s captains refused to go back.

  “It’s our duty to restore order.”

  “Why should we clean up their mess?”

  “We don’t even have an army.”

  “They should organize and deal with the gangs themselves.”

  “We can’t stand by and just watch our fellow human beings suffer like this.”

  “No? Watch me!”

  The arguments were loud, unruly, and often just went round and round in circles with all parties shouting past each other. But over the months, some sort of consensus was reached that Esilia ought to do something, and that something – whatever it was – would involve sending Esilians to Harmony.

  Very well-armed Esilians, and very organized.

  Chaco laughed out loud at the last bit. “Organized Esilians? That’s like saying you’re going to herd well-trained cats. My Grandfather Manalang told me his father’s stories about the war. If our people considered chain of command merely a polite suggestion when they were fighting an actual war, how organized do you think a police action is going to be?”

  “I expect the prospect of being shot concentrates the mind wonderfully,” Jef suggested. “Oh, I wish I could join up!”

  Chuy stared at him. “Are you nuts? You got out of that place once already. It’s simply begging the Black Gods for trouble if you go back.”

  “It was my home,” Jef said. “My country. I’d like to be part of the rescue effort.”

  By that time Jef and Krisi had formed the habit of taking their lunch break together, carrying their sandwiches anywhere that was reasonably comfortable to sit and that was different from the ordered chaos of the shop. So Krisi didn’t have to maneuver for a chance to talk to him.

  “I thought what you said was rather wonderful. Just because you’re Esilian now doesn’t mean you should forget the place where you grew up.”

  Technically, Jef wasn’t Esilian yet; he had a lot of history and civics to study before he’d even be eligible for the citizenship test. But he knew what Krisi meant. He hadn’t just fled Harmony; he’d chosen to become part of Esilia. Unlike his parents, who were still sitting in kahve shops – rather run-down ones, in their new neighborhood – and moaning about all they’d lost.

  “It doesn’t mean anything, though,” Jef said now. “They’d never let me join. I’m too young.” He kicked the wall they were sitting on. “I’m too young to be allowed to do anything that matters! Even if I pass the citizenship test, I’ll be too
young to vote.”

  “How old are you, anyway? I don’t think you ever said.”

  No way was he going to admit to Krisi that he was only fifteen. “Sixteen.”

  “Yes, well, the assembly probably won’t decide what to do for months. It’ll be a year before they start raising a force. And by then you’ll be old enough to volunteer.”

  “They take people at seventeen?”

  Krisi shrugged. “So you lie a little. It’s not like they have your birth records on file, and what’s a little thing like adding a year to your age? You’re tall, broad shouldered… You look like a man already.”

  She looked at him and nodded, once, as if she’d inspected him and found him fitting. Jef’s spirits soared.

  After all, what was a little thing like adding two years to his age?

  ***

  Jillian, like most of the people living in Harmony City, had thought that if they could just make it through the winter things would get better. Instead, spring brought worse troubles and more starvation. The politicians who had a stake in keeping the city going had mostly fled to Esilia. Hungry people had already looted the food stashes that refugees abandoned, and some that hadn’t been abandoned – yet. City workers, unpaid and unfed, abandoned their jobs to join everyone else in the search for food. The water system failed. The sanitation system died with it. And, inevitably, disease swept through the city.

  It might have been brought in from up-river, or it might have mutated from something as innocuous as a common cold. By the time the scattered, hiding groups of people realized that too many of their number were sniffling and coughing, it had become something much worse than a cold. There would be arguments later on whether it had been flu or epidemic bronchitis that devastated the city; when it was happening, there’d been no one capable of analyzing the infection, far less developing a vaccine. There was no government left to write directions for washing hands, wearing face masks, and so forth; if anyone had written instructions for avoiding infection, there was no broadcasting system to disseminate them; even if every surviving inhabitant of the city had owned a personal copy of the guidelines tattooed on their arms, nobody would have followed them.

  Wear a face mask? The hospitals might have some, but all the hospitals were either protected by armed guards, or had already been looted. Wash your hands with soap and water every time you turned around? When water had to be hauled out of the river, one bucket at a time, and then boiled, you didn’t waste it on hand-washing.

  Many groups had no fuel to waste on boiling their water. These people died first, many of diseases nastier than flu. Epidemic dysentery made the entire city smell like an open sewer.

  The next to go were the very old, the very young, and those already weakened by severe malnourishment. Jillian drew on reserves she hadn’t known she possessed to help Merdis battle for the life of old Mariya Yair. It was not a protracted battle, but at least Mariya’s last words were, “Don’t worry, I’m too mean to die!”

  Jillian reeled away from Mariya’s deathbed to check on Trisha and Tomi. She found Ruven already in the room, gently jiggling a crying Tomi. Then, behind him, she heard the deep racking cough that she’d been hearing from Mariya.

  “Trisha!” Her sister-in-law was dead white, except for the spot of red burning on each cheek. “It’s just that fever you got in the hospital,” Jillian said, “you never have quite gotten over it, have you? Well, we’re going to deal with it now!” Trisha couldn’t have caught this killing infection. Where would she catch it? She never went anywhere.

  Where had Mariya Yair caught it? It was all around them.

  “You take Tomi,” Trisha whispered. “Stay with Ruven. Stay out of here.”

  “No!” Trisha was not going to die of this – this little cough. It would be too cruel. After she’d lived through the terrible winter, after she’d survived giving birth on a blanket on the floor, she couldn’t die now.

  “You have to live – to take care of Tomi,” Trisha insisted.

  “You are going to live! Tomi needs his mother!”

  But she did send Ruven away with Tomi, with the bottle and a supply of smart diapers and a can of powdered milk. She wouldn’t have time to care for the baby while she fought for Trisha’s life, and she didn’t want to risk passing the infection on to him.

  She went into this battle with no weapons but boiled water, weak soup, and a furious determination to save Tomas’ young wife.

  It wasn’t enough.

  She was used to bullying Trisha out of her fits of depression or hysteria, but she couldn’t bully her out of the infinite weariness that was sucking her down now. Oh, she tried. She slapped Trisha’s cheeks to make her wake up and drink her soup. She told Trisha that Tomas would have been ashamed of her, giving up so easily. She painted a glowing picture of a future in which they all went up the river to Ruven’s cooperative and entered on a pastoral life of plenty and harmony.

  And none of it had any effect on the pale, quiet girl who woke only to cough and cough and struggle for breath. After each coughing fit she would fall asleep, and after a while Jillian began to fall asleep too. She remembered the doctor who had been afraid sleep would catch him if he leaned against the wall, and marched up and down the room until Trisha complained that the noise hurt her head. Then she positioned herself on a hard chair where she couldn’t possibly fall asleep… and wakened with a start, to see a candle moving in the darkness.

  “I can sit with her a while,” said Merdis, “I’ve had a nap, you should take one now.”

  Dizzy with fatigue, Jillian stumbled into the next-door room they used for storage and fell onto the thin layer of clothes and blankets they had not yet sold.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  There was a hot darkness all around her. When she tried to breathe, it got into her body until a series of deep, painful coughs forced it out again. Then she gasped for air and it started all over again: dark, hot, burning, cough, gasp. Once she saw Ruven, looking worried. She tried to ask him to make it stop, to bring her some cool air, but talking was too difficult, and then she fell back into the darkness. Faces came and went, flickering in the shadows: Ruven, Merdis, Sheri or Stayci. Never Trisha. Once she managed to croak, “Where’s Trisha?” or thought she did, but maybe she hadn’t actually spoken out loud, because Sheri didn’t answer her. Finally there was real sleep, without dreams of demons drawing red-hot rakes through her lungs. She fell into that deep restfulness, slightly annoyed by the sound of a man crying somewhere close by, but too tired to complain.

  Daylight was slanting through the windows when she woke up. Not the first time, she thought; there’d been light and dark changing places while she dreamed. But now she could see the windows clearly, though she was too weak to move. Suddenly Merdis was there, holding a cup to her lips, and Jillian discovered that she was desperately thirsty. She drank so greedily that water ran down her chin and into the blanket that covered her, but it didn’t seem to matter. Her eyes hurt; she closed them and went back to sleep.

  That was repeated several times, with some inconsistencies that she didn’t care enough to resolve. Sometimes it was Ruven giving her water. Sometimes it wasn’t water, but bitter soup. She made a face and closed her lips against Merdis’ urging. But when Ruven came and told her, very gently, that she must drink the soup because he needed her to get stronger, she swallowed the lukewarm brew without complaint.

  And then, finally, there was the day when she woke with a clear head and tangled memories. Trisha had been ill. She’d asked Ruven to take Tomi away. And then… what? She sorted through dreams and demons and worked it out. “I’ve been sick?”

  “You have,” said Merdis. “For a while we thought we were going to lose you too.”

  Too.

  “Trisha?”

  Merdis shook her head. “She didn’t make it.”

  Jillian felt she had known that already, but the confirmation hurt. The easy tears of weakness trickled down her face. “The baby?”

  �
��Healthy – and loud! Good lungs on that kid.”

  Now that she was no longer dangerously ill, Jillian had long hours on her own to accommodate herself to a world without Trisha. The girl she’d first seen only as Tomas’ spoiled child bride had become so much more to her: a companion, a co-conspirator, a friend. She never had conquered her proclivity to hysterical upsets, but in between times she’d risen to the occasion. Giving haircuts for food, conspiring with Jillian to overcome Ruven’s reticence, insulting the doctor…

  She would have risen to meet Tomi’s need too. She would have been a good mother.

  Jillian was unsure about her own capacities in that line. They’d all been spoiled, hadn’t they? She had certainly been shallow. Taking the city and its luxuries for granted, wasting money and energy on silly social games, thinking it actually mattered what happened in the next episode of the holodrama! Could somebody who’d been so easily immersed in that world possibly raise a child?

  And what about the past winter? Hardship certainly hadn’t brought out a better side to her nature, had it? She’d become a thief, a screaming harridan who forced a doctor to see Trisha, a woman who would refuse food to a starving man. Didn’t sound exactly motherly, did it?

  When Ruven brought Tomi for her to see him, she looked guiltily into a face that was beginning to show Tomas’ smile, Trisha’s big dark eyes. His father hadn’t even lived to see him, and she had failed to keep his mother alive.

  “Sorry, kid,” she whispered once when Ruven had left him napping beside her. “It’s just you and me now.” It didn’t really matter how unsure she felt about the arrangement; Tomi had nobody but her now. She would just have to be the best mother she could be.

  “What are you talking about?” Ruven demanded when she voiced some of her insecurities to him. “You’ve already been brilliant. That powdered milk you got when Trisha was pregnant, that you kept aside all this time, that’s saved Tomi’s life. And the supply of smartcloth diapers and wipes probably saved my life.”