Rebirth

by Sophie Littlefield

  The guards took them to some sort of medical building where they had checkups. Nurses, or doctors, Sammi didn’t know, combed through her hair and her pubic hair and examined her all over and drew her blood. A rude woman with an accent gave her an exam-on the inside-and told Sammi that she wasn’t pregnant and Sammi barely listened. She was taken to an outdoor shower and the water was freezing cold and the soap was handmade and scratchy. She was given new clothes-the old ones were filthy, covered with ash and the dirt of the truck and the journey-and they were soft and worn in and because they weren’t the khaki and camo that everyone else seemed to be wearing, Sammi supposed she was not yet a Rebuilder.

  Kathy and Mr. Jayaraman from the library tried to talk to her. A few of the others tried, too. But Sammi didn’t answer and after a while they stopped and then everyone was quiet. In this way the day passed by, the library shelterers being taken away one by one and returning with their new clothes. Sammi dozed, lying on the carpeted floor. It did not occur to her to wonder what sort of building they were in until the room grew dark with the approach of night. Then she looked around at the others, some crying, some staring, and realized that none of them cared.

  It was almost dark when a tall, thick-limbed older woman and a young man in soldier clothes came for her. Sammi had followed them out of the room, down stairs she didn’t remember climbing, into a parking lot before she realized she hadn’t said goodbye to anyone. Something told her she was not going to see them again and she wondered why she didn’t feel worse about that. But then the soldier opened the passenger door of a compact car and Sammi got in the backseat, and the soldier and the woman got in the front seat, and it was the cleanest car Sammi had seen since everything happened Before, it even smelled kind of new-and that was something she didn’t expect to ever smell again-and the soldier drove slowly out of the parking lot and onto a road that wound through campus, the headlights illuminating pavement ahead that was free of wrecks and skeletons and downed trees. It looked seriously like Before, which was kind of interesting-it was almost like watching a movie, like none of this was happening to her-when she realized there was someone else in the backseat with her.

  “Uh,” she said, surprised, and instantly regretted it, because she didn’t feel like making conversation, not even with this girl who looked like she was only a couple years older than Sammi. In the library-as happy as she was to have Jed, as nice as his older brothers were to her, as cool as it was to be in charge of the child care-she had often wished there was a girl near her age. Just to hang out, just to talk about the things that you didn’t talk to your boyfriend about, and you really didn’t talk to your mom about. But that was then. And this was now.

  “Do you know where they’re taking us?” the girl whispered. In the dim light inside the car, she looked pale, with a long face and small features. Badly cut hair ended just below her earlobes. She smelled like mothballs and medicine and sweat. “No one will tell me.”

  “No.” Sammi knew she should say more, but couldn’t think of anything worth the effort.

  “How long have you been here?”

  Sammi sighed, and on the exhale said, “I got here this morning.” She hoped there would be no more questions.

  “I’ve been here four days. They treated us-me and my uncle-for scabies. I didn’t have scabies, I kept telling them that. I don’t know…maybe mosquitoes. Or probably a spider bite. I don’t know where they took my uncle.”

  Sammi felt mildly disgusted and moved farther away from the girl, jamming herself into the car door. She didn’t know what scabies were, but they sounded nasty. Maybe they were an STD. Probably.

  “I didn’t eat dinner,” the girl continued. “I haven’t been eating much lately. We were living over in Brill-do you know Brill?-it used to be a resort.” She didn’t wait for Sammi to answer. It was like she was just talking to hear a voice. Sammi thought that if she could just get back into herself she would feel sorry for the girl, but she felt outside, and above, anchored to her body only by the unfurling thread of red energy that leaked out from inside it.

  “We were sheltering in the office of the main hotel. There was a room there with no windows, my uncle said that was best. The other people got the regular rooms. No one wanted the cabanas. I mean, you’re in your own building, no one can help you, you know? The Beaters got Jillian-she was this woman my uncle was kind of with, sort of-anyway, they got her last week. When the Rebuilders came everyone thought it was the Beaters again. I mean, not the people on duty, I guess they knew what was happening because they saw the truck, but it was before dawn and there was a lot of screaming and that’s why people thought Beaters.”

  “Oh,” Sammi said. How bad would it be to ask the girl to be quiet, she wondered.

  “Don’t worry about them,” the girl said, misunderstanding her shortness, pointing at the front seat, where the man and woman were staring straight ahead, not speaking, not paying attention to anything but the road. “They haven’t said anything to me at all since they came to get me.”

  Sammi knew she was supposed to talk next, to ask a question or say where she had come from. They passed playing fields on the left, and to the right was a woods. They were driving in a circle, weren’t they? But wait, there was the wall, the one she’d seen that they were building around the whole place. To keep out Beaters. To keep people like her locked in.

  She and Jed used to watch Beaters out the windows of the middle school’s little fake lookout tower, their favorite place to hide out after their day care shift; they weren’t the only people who used it for privacy, so they couldn’t make out or anything, but they held hands and watched the little groups of Beaters bashing themselves against the walls surrounding the school, trying to get in. They always eventually wandered off.

  Sammi and Jed amused themselves by trying to spot the repeaters. It was hard to do because of the way the Beaters deteriorated. The new ones-of which there were few these days, though there was a rumor that a new wave was beginning since people had started eating the blueleaf roots again-didn’t look too bad, mostly messy and scratched. The worst were the ones who’d been around since the beginning; whole big patches of skin would have fallen off, with the muscles and guts and bone showing through. They were missing teeth and even their lips, since they usually ended up chewing them off, and their arms and fingers were bony, red gooey messes, their hair pulled out and their scalps crusted and bruised. The old ones, you couldn’t even tell half the time if they’d been men or women.

  Sometimes Sammi and Jed could make it out by the clothes. It was pretty rare for a Beater to put on new clothes, although they could always surprise you. They spent ninety percent of their time doing the same things over and over, picking and gnawing at themselves and each other and wandering around in their lurching, drunken little gangs, picking up anything shiny that caught their eyes. But once in a while they would do something, well, human, which was actually really freaky. Like last week, Jed had pointed out a short, heavy one-a man, they decided-who was trying to shove something into the heavy locked metal box that held the sprinkler system’s controls, out beyond the decorative benches on the parking lot side of the school. There was a narrow slot above the lock, and the Beater worked for a long time, pushing and jamming the object, and when it finally gave up and wandered off, they saw that it had been trying to push a magazine through the slot that was too small for it. Jed thought the Beater was trying to return a book, that it thought the school was a library. Sammi thought it was trying to mail a letter. The magazine flapped in the wind for a while, sodden and damp, and the next time they were up in the watchtower it was gone.

  They never told anyone what they saw; they kept it to themselves. Somehow, when it was just the two of them, it could be funny, sometimes. If Sammi tried to tell her mom, she was likely to get started on one of her crying jags that ended with her pulling Sammi into her arms as though she wanted to just hold her forever. Sammi hated that; she always wanted her mom to let go, but that s
eemed rude, and she would just stare over her mother’s shoulder, smelling her body odor and feeling her tears falling on Sammi’s shoulder and wetting her shirt, waiting until her mother finally released her. It wasn’t like that with Jed.

  But Jed was gone.

  Sammi felt a sob fighting its way up from deep inside her and she didn’t want that, couldn’t deal with whatever this girl and the people in the front seat would do. She didn’t want their pity, and she sure as hell didn’t want anyone interrogating her. So she squeezed her teeth together and forced the sadness back down. There would be time-eventually-for that.

  But just then the driver pulled into the parking lot in front of a C-shaped, concrete-sided building three or four stories tall. The car coasted to a stop in the entrance in the middle of the C. Sammi tried the door handle, but they had the child locks on.

  Inside this building it was just a repeat of the morning. Rebuilders in army-type clothes with weapons, lots of paperwork everywhere-it was still a shock to see everyone with actual clipboards rather than ePads and smartphones. The man who’d driven them disappeared, but there were others. The older woman from the car ushered them here and there and then disappeared with the other girl, and Sammi didn’t see either of them again.

  A plaque mounted near the front entrance said Genevieve Sanders College of Nursing. So it was a school for nurses. And come to think of it, the lobby reminded Sammi of the home where her mother’s mom, her grandma Beth, had lived until Sammi was eleven, when she’d died at the end of a long summer. Sammi and her mother visited a couple times near the end, when Grandma Beth was confined to her bed and not talking anymore, and Sammi always held tight to her mother’s hand as they went through the hushed lobby with its shuttered snack stand and the pretend beauty salon where volunteers did manicures during the day.

  After the other girl was led off to some other part of the building, Sammi was taken up to the third floor by a woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Henderson. She was old enough to be her mom, but she seemed so tired and disinterested that Sammi wondered if she’d been woken from a deep sleep to tend to her. Only a few bulbs burned on the floor, but the floor was polished and clean, and the furniture in the sitting area was arranged neatly.

  “Keep your voice down,” Mrs. Henderson said, not bothering to mask her irritation. “Everyone’s asleep. I’ll take you to your room but we’ll wait until morning to show you around.” Sammi followed silently, trying to tread softly so her footsteps didn’t echo in the hall. When they passed a bathroom they heard the sound of someone throwing up, moaning in between bouts of retching.

  “Wait,” Sammi said, finally stirred to a reaction. “Shouldn’t we, like, check if she’s okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Mrs. Henderson said impatiently, but Sammi remained rooted to the spot. All day she’d just stood by and done nothing as every person she’d ever known was taken from her, as she was finally taken herself. She’d thought she was done caring. But hearing someone’s misery like that…she couldn’t walk away.

  “I could just check real quick,” she offered.

  “It’s just morning sickness. Half the girls here have it, it’s nothing.”

  Understanding dawned slowly on Sammi, chilling her to the core. This wasn’t just a dorm for girls-it was for pregnant girls.

  “There’s been a mistake,” she said, her voice sounding strange and thin. “I’m not-I’m not pregnant. I shouldn’t be here.”

  The woman finally looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time. In her expression Sammi saw a combination of pity and contempt. “Not right now,” she muttered, “but a month or two from now, you’ll be in there with her tossing your cookies like all the rest of them.”

  It was only when Mrs. Henderson opened the door to Sammi’s new room that she noticed what she’d missed before: that spiral tattoo on the woman’s wrist, the same one the guards had who’d attacked the library, the ones who’d burned the place down and killed everyone.

  What the hell kind of place was this? Sammi had started to shake right after Mrs. Henderson said the thing about getting pregnant, but she’d tried to hide it. Every time she thought things couldn’t get any worse, it somehow got worse. She wanted answers, but she wouldn’t get them from this woman. Maybe, in the morning, she could ask her roommate.

  Mrs. Henderson gave her a tiny flashlight, the kind you’d get on a key chain at the dollar store. Sammi swept it across the objects in the room: two twin beds, a single dresser, drapes drawn tight. A pair of flip-flops tucked neatly under the other bed, where a sleeping figure lay facing the wall. Mrs. Henderson pointed to the towels folded neatly on a chair, to the plastic bucket that she called a “potty,” and told her not to sleep through the breakfast bell because there wouldn’t be a second one.

  Then she told Sammi not to wake her new roommate, whose name was Roan.

  R-O-A-N-she spelled it before she left.

  Sammi went to her new bed, suddenly more exhausted than she ever remembered being, and ran a hand over the blanket. Cotton, rough-knit-like the cheap ones they had back at the Grosbeck Academy in the nurse’s office, where Sammi had gone only once, when she got her first period in the middle of Spanish and she had to wait for her mom to come with a change of clothes and a sanitary pad. Her mom had surprised her by taking her out of class for the rest of the day, and they’d gone to the best restaurant in town and her mother had ordered Sammi one Shirley Temple after another and a glass of pinot blanc for herself, twisting it by the stem rather wistfully.

  Go with them, Sammi.

  Sammi shut down the thought as fast as she could but it hadn’t been fast enough. A little had gotten in, the memory that could only lead to others and, inevitably, make her face the loss that was bigger than her whole life. Her mother in the nice restaurant that day, after the lunch crowd had come and gone, bars of sunlight making their slow way across the white tablecloth. Her mother smelled of Kenzo Flower, her favorite perfume, and she’d worn a soft green jacket and one of the silver necklaces that her friend Dulcette was always making after her husband ran off. She had carefully lined her eyes with a deep shade of purple-on another woman it might have been garish but on her beautiful auburn-haired mother it was just right, exotic without being too out-there. Men noticed her mother. Even her father-Sammi had memories from when she was really little, back when they were still getting along, her father catching her mother reaching into the tall cabinets for a platter or a cookbook, up on her toes, and he would run his big hands over her waist, her hips and pull her to him like he couldn’t believe his luck.

  But that had been a lot of years ago. They hadn’t been in love for a long time. Her dad was in the office most nights, and he left before she got up in the morning. Honestly, when he moved away, it wasn’t like she saw him much less. Those weekends at his place-the giant charred burgers he made for her, “Sammi style” he called them, dripping with provolone and crisscrossed with bacon, even though she hadn’t eaten anything like that since she got to high school and had to force herself to eat even half…the awful pink satin comforter he’d bought for her even though pink hadn’t been her favorite color since she kindergarten-those had been awkward, for sure.

  But what she wouldn’t give for one more.

  28

  CASS RUBBED AT HER EYES. IN THE DARK NO ONE could see the way her face got blotchy when she cried. No one would be able to tell that her fine pale hair was matted to her forehead with sweat, or that she scratched long furrows in the tender skin of her wrists, a nervous habit that summoned just enough pain to keep her mind from spinning out of control.

  Ruthie had wedged herself in the crook of Cass’s arm. The bed was narrow, but usually she could sleep easily with Ruthie next to her. Tonight was different. Tonight, Ruthie was restless and couldn’t seem to get close enough. As Cass lay awake trying not to cry, Ruthie burrowed and flailed and sighed and whispered half words, caught between sleep and waking.

  Just as Cass had decided that she might
as well get up, maybe sit in the straight-backed desk chair pulled up to the window and stare out at the moon for a while, she felt Ruthie’s eyelashes flutter against her neck.

  “Shh, shh,” she whispered automatically, wrapping Ruthie in her arms and rubbing her back. She’d always been able to soothe Ruthie back to sleep, but now her daughter fought her, wiggling and pushing her away. “Mama.”

  Cass froze, then leaned up on her elbow so she could look at her daughter’s face in the moonlight. Ruthie’s voice, even though she’d heard it now half a dozen times, even though she rejoiced at its return, still seemed fraught with dark enchantment. Ruthie’s eyes were open but unfocused, and she reached for Cass’s arm and held on, her little fingers digging in tight. Cass stroked her cheek, and found it hot and damp.

  “What is it, Babygirl?”

  “Help Smoke.” Ruthie’s eyelids fluttered shut and she rolled over and pushed her fist against her mouth, but when Cass grabbed her hands she came willingly, burrowing back into Cass’s arms.

  Cass barely dared speak, her heart thudding and her mouth suddenly dry. “What did you say, Ruthie?”

  “Help him, Mama.”

  Then she seemed to relax, her body going limp. After a moment she yawned, a long, luxurious yawn, and in seconds she was asleep again, tucked up against Cass. It was almost as though the words had fought their way out and, now that Ruthie had finally spoken them, she was able to rest.