Famine: The Quiet Apocalypse

by T M Edwards

  Tears stung my eyes and threatened to roll down my face despite how hard I tried to hold them back. “We can’t just let them die. Sam.” I put my hand on his arm, pleading with him. “Zena, Sam. She wanted to come. We should have let her come…”

  In Sam’s haunted eyes I could see his pain. “There’s nothing we can do, Deidre.”

  “There has to be!”

  Mankato reached across the table as if he wanted to touch me, to calm me down, his hand stopping just short of my arm. “I am very sorry. There is nothing to be done except hope they are able to find a way to survive.

  “No.” One tear escaped and traced a warm track down my cheek. Angry at my body’s betrayal, I scrubbed it away with my hand. “I won’t accept that.”

  “Deidre…”

  “No!” I was shouting now, and people were turning to stare. I stood so abruptly my chair skidded back across the concrete. Unable to formulate more words beyond my vehement denial, I ran for the little room Mankato had assigned us, where I threw myself on the lower bunk and sobbed until my head ached.

  21: Maybe...

  “Are you okay?”

  I slid down the wall to sit on the floor next to the bathroom doorway, groaning. “Do I look okay?”

  “Not remotely.” Sam sat next to me. He had something in his hands. It looked like a small box wrapped in a brown paper drug store bag.

  “This can’t just be stress.” I let my head fall back against the wall and turned it to look at him. “Feeling like crap is one thing...performing a rendition of the Exorcist two mornings in a row is something else entirely.

  Sam clutched the bag between his hands, sighed, then handed it to me. “I’ve spent a lot of time wondering whether I should even give this to you...but I think it’s time.”

  Now thoroughly confused, I took the bag and opened it to peer inside. The early morning light was too dim to read what the box said, so I pulled it out. Then, just as abruptly, shoved it back inside and pushed the parcel into Sam’s hands. “You’re crazy.”

  “Am I?”

  I drew up my knees and hugged them to my chest, fighting the horror now racing through my mind. “No. It’s not possible.”

  “Deidre, you forget I have a daughter. I know what the first symptoms look like.” As I shook my head in increasingly distressed denial, he rattled off a list. “Mood swings. Fatigue. Nausea. Food and smell aversions. Changes in how things smell or taste.”

  He didn’t stop until I burst into tears and buried my head in my arms.

  “Hey. Come here.” He put his arm around my shoulders and drew me closer to him. “I could be wrong, but there’s only one way to know. Either way, we’ll figure it out. We always do, right? It’s going to be okay.”

  “No it’s not!” Nausea was rising in waves again, this time due to fear more than anything else. “It’s not going to be okay! Nothing is okay, Sam! We can’t get home, It’s the middle of winter, and I might be…” I choked on the word, unable to say it out loud.

  “Just take it.” He put the box back in my hands. “We need to know. Either way, you’re not going to be able to relax until you know for sure.”

  I grimaced at him. “I might have, if you hadn’t said anything.”

  Sam gave me a wry little smile and leaned forward to kiss my forehead. “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “Ugh.” I pushed myself to my feet and waited for a wave of dizziness to pass. “I hate how you can always talk me down. Just once, I’d like to have a good freak out without anybody fixing it.”

  “No you don’t.” Sam laughed as he jumped up. “If I just let you freak out, you’d freak out again afterward because you felt so bad about freaking out in the first place.”

  I watched him walk away, watched his face fall as soon as he thought I wasn’t looking, and it hit me how hard he was trying to distract me from our situation. I looked down at my hands and found he’d managed to give the pregnancy test back to me.

  Damn you, Sam, for this. All of this. I should have stayed far away from you. I shouldn’t have fallen in love with you. I knew better. But you had to go and be so damaged, so vulnerable, and God knows I can’t resist helping anyone who needs help.

  After throwing one last half-hearted glare at Sam’s retreating back, I resigned myself to the inevitable and retreated to the bathroom. I took the stall in the corner, farthest from the door, and tore the box open.

  Perhaps a minute later, I sat holding the stick and feeling so sick from stress I wondered if the rest of my time waiting for the results was going to be spent puking up what little remained in my stomach.

  One line… I took a breath. One line. I checked the box. One line was what I wanted.

  But just as I was starting to relax, I took another look at the stick.

  Slowly, as if taunting me, another pink line faded into existence.

  ***

  Throughout the store, I could hear the rattle of carts echoing through the dim, chill air. Without the everpresent hum of electronics and humanity, I could pick out the sound of every other cart in the building.

  I turned a corner and emerged into the vitamin aisle. That was my mission for today. I couldn’t handle even looking at most food at the moment, so vitamins it was. Then medications and other health-related items, if I had room.

  Once my cart was piled high with as many things as I could stuff into it, I leaned on it to take the weight off of my injured leg as I pushed it back toward the front of the store. The group this time was much larger than the seven people we’d originally met here. They had been more of a scouting party. Now it was time to do the real work...and just like back home, people who lived in the Minot bunker all pitched in to help.

  “Deidre.” I could hear the rattle of Sam’s cart as he trotted up behind me. I ignored him and merged into the group that was heading for the bus.

  “Deidre...excuse me.” Apparently he wasn’t giving up. Sighing, I spun to face him as he pulled his cart up next to mine. He took my arm and tried to steer me away from the people packing things in bags and boxes, but I held on stubbornly to my cart’s handlebar.

  “I’m busy, Sam.”

  “It’s been a week. How long are you going to pretend like this isn’t happening? I don’t understand why you’re mad at me. I’m the one who…”

  Ripping my arm out of his grasp, I gave him my most penetrating glare. “Not now, Sam!”

  “Then when?” His desperate, pleading eyes came dangerously close to breaking through the walls I’d spent the past few days building around myself. “It’s never the right time. You’re always busy or tired. When are we going to talk about this?”

  “Not now, that’s when.” I turned away from his sad face and pushed my cart toward the long folding tables where people were packaging up our supplies. I tried to lose myself in the mundane repetition of it all, the mindless shifting of boxes and bags. I listened to the chatter around me, felt the edge in the voices as the spores started taking hold of the minds that weren’t resistant. Thanks to the smaller size of this town, when any significant amount of supplies was found, everyone could come out in force and comb through it within the space of a couple hours to hurry back before they were too badly affected. It just wasn’t possible in Vegas, with a massive city and much longer drive to get into town.

  Unfortunately for this group of people, those facts also meant this store was one of the last. Once it was depleted, they faced the prospect of a bitter North Dakota winter with only the things they’d managed to gather. They’d been lucky. By whatever combination of factors, they’d ended up with mostly blue-collar folks--the exact ones who could keep a bunker in working condition and vehicles operational. Unlike ours, where the majority of the inhabitants’ previous careers had something to do with office work or retail.

  I just barely managed to make it back in the crowded bus without puking, though by the time I stepped off, it took me a long moment of breathing in the cold air to make my stomach settle.

  When I ope
ned my eyes, I found Mankato standing off to the side of the main group now gathered near the back of the bus for unloading. His eyes were fixed on me, and he beckoned to me when my gaze met his.

  “You should not exhaust yourself, young one. A new life is too valuable to risk, when the others are capable of finishing the work.”

  I crossed my arms over my stomach, suddenly self-conscious. It wasn’t like I was showing yet, or would for weeks. “How do you know? How did you know before I did?” In retrospect I’d come to understand his earlier words to me.

  His thin, chapped lips split in a weary smile. I realized then how careworn he looked, how his weathered appearance was more due to weight of responsibility than age. “I have lived many years, and seen many things. The glow of a woman carrying a child is obvious, when you know how to see it. You could not be expected to know, with no experience in the matter.”

  Sighing, I relaxed my arms and pressed my hands to my roiling stomach. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  Mankato clasped his hands behind his back and turned to watch the people unloading supplies. “Young one, none of us could have predicted any of this. It was not in the natural order of things to release such a weapon, to destroy so much life. They have destroyed the world’s balance.” He shifted to face me. “New life is a step toward restoring that balance. If the voices on the radio are right, if children are the key to stopping this tribulation, perhaps your child is part of the Earth’s plan to heal herself.”

  Tears stung my eyes as I watched Sam, the man I loved and father of the tiny life growing inside me, sling boxes from bus to utility carts. “I’m scared.”

  “I think you will find you are not alone in that sentiment. We are all frightened, young one, resistant or not. The only difference between us now is that the rest of the world has been given the opportunity to understand the daily torture endured by an ill or injured mind.” Mankato sighed.

  So is he a Resistant, or someone affected by the spores? These people, they all worked so hard that I had a hard time telling who was naturally anxious or fearful, and who had become so because of the spores.

  “Young one, I called you over here because I must propose something to you. You know I cannot spare people or vehicles to send you home. But I may have another solution that would put you closer to saving your people. The group I spoke of earlier, in Atlanta, they said to tell them if we ever found any pregnant women. They promised to transport these women to their facility, where each would be well cared-for until she gave birth. The only thing they ask in return is the ability to take small samples of the infants’ blood, not enough to cause harm, and study that blood. The more babies they can study, the faster they can end this apocalypse.”

  My immediate response was to recoil from the very thought. We’d be lab rats. Poked and prodded until we gave up our secrets. But then Zena’s face intruded on my musing, with her crazy hair and her dark, expressive eyes. You didn’t let her come. You condemned her to starvation. This would be the least you can do to save her life. “But my baby won’t be born for months...if it even makes it that far.” All this stress...you never know. Miscarriages happen.

  “I understand. The group in Atlanta believes the sooner they can begin caring for a pregnant woman, the higher her chance of carrying to term. They asked us to inform them of all such women, regardless of how far they are on their journey to motherhood.”

  Fingers of cold traced down my spine as I came to a realization. “You didn’t already tell them, did you?”

  “No. I wished to give you a chance to make that choice.” His deep, dark eyes bored into mine. “But you must understand, young one, that what I said before was true. I will protect my people, at all costs. If this is what is needed to save them from the spores, then I will do it. Their lives, as much as I am loath to make the distinction, are worth more than one young mother’s comfort.”

  I gaped at him in shock as he nodded to me and walked away. Did he just… Surely I’d misheard. Would he really turn me over to these people against my will? Would he really let them take me on the off chance it helps his people survive?

  Surely he isn’t that far gone.

  ***

  When I entered our little lean-to room that evening, which was lit only by the flickering light of a single candle, I found Sam sitting on the lower bunk. He had scooted back into the corner, so at first, all I could see was his feet.

  “Deidre, we need to talk.” He shifted forward until he was sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor.

  “I know.” A deep sigh of exhaustion escaped me as I sat on the other end of the bed and leaned back against the metal pole.

  Sam seemed taken aback by my acquiescence, but soon recovered. “You’ve barely spoken to me since I gave you the pregnancy test. I know it had to be positive, because you wouldn’t be avoiding me otherwise. Was it?”

  I blinked bleary eyes at him. “Was it what?”

  “Positive.”

  “Oh.” I ran my hand down my face. “Yes.”

  For a second, a look of pure joy crossed his features, and even that flicker of happiness was enough to make me want to cry. But he controlled it so quickly I wasn’t sure I’d seen it at all. “I’m not going to abandon you, if that’s what you think. I never abandoned Caroline, even when she wouldn’t let me see my daughter. Even if you do the same, I won’t abandon you, either.”

  That did it. The thought of Sam spending the last two days thinking I was going to treat him like his ex did, probably wondering what was wrong with him that these women got pregnant and then started avoiding him...I couldn’t bear to cause him that kind of pain. I burst into tears and collapsed to the mattress, sobbing.

  “Hey, don’t cry.” Sam laid down in front of me and brushed my hair out of my eyes. “I was trying to make you feel better, not make you cry.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to leave me.” Out of all the thoughts that had spun through my head the last couple days, Sam abandoning me had never crossed my mind. Had I considered never speaking to him again, or punching him in a sensitive region? Absolutely. But every one of those thoughts had been related to my confusion and anxiety about navigating the apocalypse while pregnant, not about Sam suddenly becoming the kind of man who ditches his responsibilities.

  “It’s just…” I drew in a deep breath, trying to calm the spasms. It was only moderately successful. “It’s just everything, Sam. It’s too much. I don’t know…” I looked up into his face, which was thrown into shadow by the candle behind him. “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “I don’t either. Hell, Deidre, now I’ve got three sets of people I owe allegiance to. The other bunker, Caroline and Isla, and now you. I don’t know how to save any of you, but I’ll be damned if I won’t keep trying as long as I’m still breathing.”

  Sniffling, I reached out and put a hand on his chest. “I’m so scared, Sam. Mankato said the group in Atlanta wants people like me, so they can study our babies and find a cure. But…” I shuddered, and closed my eyes when Sam reached up to wipe my tears away. “But we don’t know who they are. The alternative is to stay here...if Mankato will let us…”

  “Mankato said we are welcome here as long as we wish to stay. You don’t have to worry about that. Even if I have to leave you here and go back home by myself, you’ll be safe here. These are good people, Deidre.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Sam’s finger under my chin tilted my head up. I opened my eyes to look into his concerned face. “What does that mean?”

  When I relayed the content of my earlier conversation with Mankato, Sam bolted upright.

  “Um, Sam, where are you going?” I pushed myself up, wiping my nose on my shirt sleeve as I watched Sam grab his shoes.

  “To give that man a piece of my mind, that’s what. Forcing you into the hands of God-only-knows…” he sat on the bed to tie his shoes, and I grabbed his arm.

  “No, Sam. You’re not going to change his mind
. He’s made it clear he’ll do anything to protect his people. I don’t think you arguing with him is going to make him change. Sam!” Sam had launched himself from the bed and was heading toward the door. “Please, Sam! What if you confront him and he decides to send us away sooner? Maybe if we just keep quiet, he’ll forget about it. Stay out of the way, don’t make a scene. Mankato’s a good man...I know he doesn’t want to do this.”

  Sam groaned in frustration, but at least he stopped trying to leave. “Good men don’t do this kind of thing, Deidre. Good men don’t send unarmed people out to the front lines of battle without their consent.”