by J. Rudolph
There was so much blood pooling under her, more blood than there should be. Shayla was pale, and a sheen of sweat was on her face, making her look almost wax-like. Her eyes were wide in fear. I went into nurse mode and took her vitals, and I was not happy with the results.
"Cali. Something is wrong, really wrong. I'm scared." Shayla said before another contraction gripped her in pain. The pool of blood grew as I pulled on my gloves. I lifted her skirt to check her cervix.
A loop of umbilical cord was out; what a labor and delivery team would call a prolapsed cord. We learned about them in school when we did our obstetrics rotation. They said that this was an emergency and the first thing that we were supposed to do was to put our hand inside them and push the baby up and off the cervix then yell for help. But I was the help. I pushed the baby off the cervix and called for Trisha. When she came in I told her to glove up so she could take my place. When she was in position I took DaWayne out to the living room. I guided him to the couch and sat down with him.
"I've always been straight with you, right?" I asked, my eyes locked with his. He nodded slowly, his jaw tense and locked, bracing for the worst. "She has a prolapsed cord. That means part of the umbilical cord is out. Every time she has a contraction, the baby gets squeezed into the cord and that cuts off oxygen to the baby. Now, this is the really scary part. All that blood tells me that the placenta is low, which is common with prolapsed cords. I am worried about the placenta placement because that makes for much harder deliveries. The bigger problem with the placenta is that it is already beginning to detach. When it totally detaches, which often happens before the baby comes out, she has a huge risk of bleeding to death. She needs a c-section, but if I do it, I'm pretty sure that I'll kill her. My first fear is that she would go into shock with the surgery since I have no anesthesia. My next fear is that I don't know where the placenta is in this, because it isn't where it's supposed to be. If I cut it, that is very dangerous. I have no experience with doing this sort of thing, anything I do will be based on something I read in a book."
"So if you do nothing she dies, if you do something, she probably dies. What about the baby?"
"The baby is very early. I don't know if it will survive without super specialized stuff. I need a baby warmer, a ventilator, stuff like that."
DaWayne put his hands on his face and groaned. "How long do I have before I have to tell you what way to go?"
"Soon. There's not a lot of time."
"I need to talk to her." DaWayne pulled his hands from his face revealing that his chocolate brown eyes were surrounded with red as his tears irritated his eyes. I nodded and stood up to offer a hand. He took it and when he stood I gave him a hug that he fell into and started crying again.
After a moment, he stepped back and wiped his face. I followed him into the room he shared with his wife. I took her vitals and noted that her blood pressure was going down as well as her pulse. He laid down in the bed with her and told her what we had discussed.
"Save the baby. Please save him." She said weakly.
Another contraction hit and she cried out in pain as it ripped through her. She continued to whimper after the contraction was over. "I don't feel good." She whispered. She turned her head and looked at DaWayne, then in a soft voice said, "I love you." I cringed inwardly. I learned a long time ago that when a person said that they didn't feel good and followed that up with an I love you, they were in trouble.
Trisha looked up at me with wide eyes, her expression confirmed that I had reason to be worried. I leaned over to see what Trisha was reacting to. Blood was pouring from her.
"Shayla?" I called. I looked up at her face and saw her eyes roll back in her head as she passed out. I reached up to feel for a pulse and found a very weak one before it disappeared altogether. She wasn't breathing. She was losing her entire blood volume in front of me and I had nothing to replace it with. She was gone.
“Trisha! I need lights, now! DaWayne, out." I heard him start to protest and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Trisha grab her brother by the shoulders and push him to the door, then close it behind her.
I dumped my bag and found a scalpel that I packed, thinking she would need an episiotomy to deliver, at the bottom of my stash. As I pulled the wrapper off, I saw Trisha going for the lamp. I pulled Shayla's skirt all the way up and took the scalpel blade and ran it down her skin from her belly button to the pubic bone. I exposed the dark shell of muscle that was her uterus as Trisha took a lamp shade off the light by the bed and put it over the area that I was working. I cut gently into the uterine wall, scared that I would cut the baby. I pulled open the uterus and saw the squirming baby inside. Part of me wanted to just stand there, and admire the wonder of this baby still in her mother, wrapped up in the once safe and ideal location. I heard Trisha gasp in amazement, taken by the sight in front of us. I had Trisha hold open the uterine walls as I lifted the baby out. Trisha had a stunned look on her face, and murmured something about how unbelievably tiny she was.
She really was tiny. I had seen premature infants. I've toured the neonatal ICU at a medical school hospital. It somehow was so much different now that this teeny little person was in my hands. It was a girl, an infinitesimally small girl. I clamped the cord in two places and cut between them. The baby's chest fit in one hand and I held her face down with her head lower than the rest of her while I located my bulb syringe. I flipped her over in my other hand and suctioned her nose and mouth. I blew a couple of gentle puffs of air in her lungs and that triggered her breathing. I told Trisha to find towels or blankets so we could wrap her up. When she brought the towels I swaddled the baby and handed her to Trisha.
"Alright auntie, take her to meet her daddy. Keep an eye on her breathing, and if she needs help, just give her a couple of gentle puffs, mouth to mouth."
Trisha took the bundle of towels with a look of awe that someone so miniscule could be alive at all. I was worried that she wouldn't have long to live, so I wanted to make sure her dad saw her before she died.
With everyone out of the area, I looked over the room. It looked like a murder scene. I thought about the people who loved her and I didn't want anyone to see her like this. I felt horrible that Trisha had to be with me to see her sister-in-law die like this, but I had to have her there; no one else had as much training as she did.
I taped up her abdomen with my medical fabric tape, the kind that was super strong and held together like a dream, then found a dark quilt to cover her up, and placed dark towels and any thing else I could find to disguise the blood on the floor. I wiped off her face and brushed her hair. This is what I could do for her and her family. I fought the tears that threatened to form, knowing that this was not the time or place for a breakdown. I stepped into the living room, and looked at DaWayne holding his new baby.
"We were going to name her Charity." DaWayne said softly. "She is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen. She looks like a fairy. I always told her mom that that she was Tinkerbell, and now that I am holding this baby, I know what Tinkerbell really looks like." His eyes filled with tears and with a choked up and strained voice, he asked, "Can I see her? Can I tell my beautiful wife all about our daughter?"
"Yeah, you can."
Trisha was stumbling with words, and finally I understood that with her jumbled words she was asking if the room was acceptable. I nodded, silently letting her know that I took care of it. I looked up at Tyreese and Tanya who were sobbing in the corner. They didn't want to see their son in this much pain and they loved Shayla like a daughter, and there was no way to know how long they would have their granddaughter with them. I didn't know what to say. I was standing there covered in the blood of their daughter-in-law, and I wanted to help them but I was without words. Tanya came to me and wrapped her arms around my neck in a hug, and sobbed on my shoulder. I hugged her back, and that's how we stood for a while.
When DaWayne was done saying goodbye, he came out of the bedroom. Tanya and Tyreese went in to say goodbye.
I took the baby from DaWayne and checked her over. I put my pinkie in her mouth to see if she had a sucking reflex. She didn't try to suck on my finger. I decided to wait until I had a bottle to worry if she was struggling with a reflex issue. DaWayne asked me how Charity was doing. I was amazed by her strength. I told him that I was impressed with her, and he sighed.
"That's something at least. God, this wasn't what I thought would happen. We were supposed to be starting a family. Now I'm burying my wife." New tears sprung up in his eyes. "We were supposed to be safe here, Cali. We were supposed to be safe."
I was staring at the floor. I felt like shit that I couldn't save her. I kept thinking I failed them. I didn't know what else to do and she died because of my ineptitude.
"I gotta get some air. Hey, Cali, thanks for trying. And thanks for saving my daughter. I'm grateful I had the chance to meet her." My ears flushed. I still felt like I was a failure. As though he read my mind, he said "If you were gone, or whatever, I'd be burying them both right now. I'd never have held her. You gave me that." He stepped through the door and closed it behind him.
I sighed as I tried to process what he said when Trisha came in the room. I was feeling the weight of the day on me, and so was Trisha. When I looked up at her, a horrible realization wiped over me.
"Oh, no," I said, "I don't think Sawyer knows about this."
Trisha groaned. "He is going to go nuts. I would if it was DaWayne that died. Ugh. Cali, um, it might be better if I break the news. Sister factor, you know."
I looked down at the sleeping baby in my arms. "Take Trent with you."
Trisha nodded then started towards the door.
"Trish, let Trent know what happened, too." She nodded as she realized he was outside the whole time and didn't have a clue about what happened. She nodded solemnly.
When I was alone, I was still standing with this peanut of a baby. I was trying to disassociate from the waves of emotion that I was feeling, so I hid under the nurse hat. I pulled up a mental checklist of things that this baby was going to need to have a fighting chance. It occurred to me that babies are used to a super warm environment. Charity was super thin and didn't have a layer of fat to keep her warm. I piled wood left over from the cold winter into the fireplace and found a match. Once I had the fire burning, I sat on the hearth, rocking the baby back and forth trying to make sure she was warm enough. While I rocked her, my heart broke over and over again, all the people that we lost were circling my head and I was lost in the grief. Images of Shayla lying on the bed, wanting her baby to make it, accepting the end of her road-- all of it swirled through my head. It shouldn't have been over. This isn’t how it should have ended.
Great sobs racked through me, and I was consumed by my tears.
We needed to leave this place. We needed to go somewhere where pregnant people didn't die trying to bring a person into the world, where brothers didn't lose sisters, where husbands didn't lose wives to the hungry dead, where kids didn't have to wonder if they just saw their mom or dad for the last time. I couldn't bear the thought that this was the life Drew was destined to live.
We had to go.
The Flotilla
We buried Shayla under the tree where she and DaWayne had their first kiss. The little white flowers that blossomed on the branches let their petals fall on the breeze, coming to rest on the fresh mound of upturned dirt. Trent built a cross and carved Shayla's name in the horizontal part. DaWayne looped a necklace over the cross, and the crystal pendant swayed in the soft breeze, spraying rainbows when it swayed into the sunlight. It was a beautiful day, too nice to be burying someone. We lowered her simple wood casket into the hole in relative silence, with only the birds singing her off.
There was an amazing lack of words that described how we felt that day. Her eulogy was short, and the moment of silence was long, the lack of words lingering long after the funeral was over.
We buried Charity next to her mother two days later. Charity died in her father's arms after we did twenty minutes of CPR. I wanted to keep breathing for her forever, but her heart didn't seem to want to play along. Charity was our grasping at straws, our last ditch effort at making the tragedy of Shayla's death bearable. We all crumbled under the weight of her death. It amazed me that a person we had only known for a couple of days could make such an impact on everyone, and this person who was so tiny left such a major hole in our hearts. Seeing that miniature coffin, no bigger than a shoe box, going into the ground was close to unbearable and it shook me to the core. I thought that we were past deaths like these, but they kept coming. If we weren't being eaten, we were dying from stupid infections and childbirth.
Sawyer was devastated with the loss of his sister, his confidant, his best friend. He was withdrawn and miserable. When his sister got married, he moved in with Matt and after she was gone he felt lost and wasn't sure that he wanted to stay in our group anymore. He walked like a lost soul, the only survivor of his family, and he was unreachable in his grief. Erin tried to help, she understood what it was to lose people, but she couldn't reach him. People tried to help, from both groups, but it wasn't until Matt took him fishing that we saw any flicker that anyone broke through. I'll never know what they talked about on their trip to the creek, but they were gone for hours and when they returned, both of their eyes were red rimmed. I guess the talk helped though, because he did stay with us, but he wasn't the same. None of us were. There was no way to come back from that.
Trent worked harder to make the radio work. Anything he found that he thought could boost the signal he used. Trent spent every waking hour making small adjustments in his antennas and trying across all the bands again. He talked to many people in his search for the elusive New York group, and they all talked about their experiences in their camps, but they weren't New York. It helped a little to hear Trent tell me about the lives that the other people were living. Most of them were having a harder go of things than we were. Disease was turning out to be a bigger fight than anyone imagined it would be. It was funny how we were surviving the zombies that threatened to wipe out everyone, but were failing to survive the things we had survived before the start of this.
In the months following the deaths of Shayla and Charity, the town was struggling. The absence of hope was palpable. We tried to resurrect the enthusiasm we used to have to no avail. We felt like every day we were waiting for the pendulum to swing and take another person from us.
We tried to find distractions for our hurt. Tanya had rearranged a lot of the crops, and like in the complex, she planted a memorial garden to honor the lives that were lost. DaWayne donated the arbor from his wedding to the memorial garden and he and his mother often sat in silence on a stone bench that we found in one of the backyards. It was a peaceful place, but it didn't fill the void.
I was spending more time on the wall than I had before. Shooting zombies, while a nice distraction, didn't fill that space in my chest like I hoped it would. While sitting up there, I whittled new arrows from branches and became really good at making my arrows land exactly where I wanted them to. When the packs of zombies were thinned out, I would go and reclaim the arrows so we would be able to have a good cache of ammunition for the next round, because there were always going to be more. I wondered where they all came from; I was sure that our group alone had to have wiped out the population of the entire northwest, but it still never seemed like enough.
Nothing I did felt like enough.
Drew and I spent a fair amount of time with Trent in the radio room. Trent was much better at knowing where his signal would bounce, and had a good idea that if he used what he learned in all the other connections that he should be getting close to the New England area. It amazed me that angling an antenna in a certain way could bounce off some mountain that bounced off another thing until it landed where you wanted, like a bizarre game of billiards. Trent told me tales of people getting in contact with other people in Australia by bouncing signals off of the moon and stuff. It was a radio, and
it was weird to think of the radio waves being things that could be manipulated.
I learned how to crochet from Kristen, and I had been working on a huge granny square blanket that had all of the colors of the rainbow in it, in order of the color spectrum, with the purple in the center. I was on the yellow part of the blanket so I was feeling like I had actually made progress on this project. It felt quaint that we were back to the days where being able to crochet was a good skill to have. I listened to the endless buzz of static as I wound the colored yarn around the hook in careful stitches while Drew read another science fiction story. I wondered what it was that made him like the stories of the robots and space craft so much. I had a theory that he wanted to remember the way the future was heading before the zombie hiccup. I wanted to forget about the promise of surgical robots and other worlds, personally. I wanted to pretend that the idea of a robot apocalypse where the programming was suddenly self-aware was just as ludicrous as the idea of zombies.
We had been sitting in the radio room for a couple of hours when my eyes were feeling dry and heavy and my hands were cramping from holding the yarn just right. Drew was also growing restless in reading, so since we were both tired, I decided to wrap up the row I had been working on and call it a night. I had just completed my last stitch when the static noise changed.