by Sam Sisavath
Then another one, and another…
What the hell is going on here?
They were everywhere. Two pregnant women came out of a beige canvas tent talking and laughing about something. They saw him and nodded, continuing on their way. One of the women looked further along in her pregnancy, while the other had a barely-there bump.
He walked on, doing his best not to stray, not to stop and stare, but feeling dazed by what he was seeing. There was something wrong here. Something not right. One pregnant woman would have been extraordinary, but two, or three, or a dozen?
What the hell is going on here?
He must have been walking in a fog, trying to process the incongruous appearances of the pregnant women around him, because suddenly he had arrived at the blue tent and didn’t recall how he had actually gotten there.
The tent was octagonal, the flat sides extending eight meters high all around and held in place by thick beams of extruded aluminum alloy. He eyeballed the structure’s span at sixty meters, held together by PVC-coated polyester textiles. It looked very much like a mini version of a sports dome, with multiple, unguarded tunnel entrances/exits jutting out along the sides.
He watched people moving in and out of those tunnels for a moment, before slipping in among one of the lines going in. Like with the rest of the camp, the sight of men in hazmat suits around the blue tent was apparently so common that no one gave him more than a couple of glances, if they even bothered at all.
Alarm bells went off when he spotted the shoulder of a man in a hazmat suit standing guard at the end of the tunnel.
Will kept walking, moving steadily but in no hurry. He casually lowered one hand toward his holstered Glock, then moved forward until he was walking behind a pregnant woman who was waddling more than she was actually walking. By the size of her bump, he guessed she was even further along in her pregnancy than the ones he had seen outside. She was leaning on a young woman’s arm as they moved through the length of the tunnel, which extended for about five meters. The women were talking about clothes.
The three of them finally reached the end and stepped out into the main housing area. As he expected, the hazmat suit standing guard was just for show; the man was reading a magazine, paying zero attention to anyone coming or going. His rifle was slung over his shoulder, and his gas mask hung loosely around his neck.
Will let the women continue on, then he turned left and continued walking for a bit. He finally stopped and took a moment to orient himself with the scope of the blue tent’s interior.
There was really just one vast, open room. The height of the tent, with its upwardly extended middle, gave the place the feel of being cavernous. Hundreds of civilians took up space among the grass floor, which was divided into two sections—a smaller area filled with cots, the type he had slept on in the Army, with the bigger area dotted with mats. The cots looked as if they were reserved almost exclusively for the women.
More pregnant women.
If he thought there were a lot of them outside, there were even more of them in here. There were, as far as he could tell, about one hundred cots, though only half of them were filled at the moment. The others, he assumed, were outside the camp walking around.
The mats were occupied by a more varied group of people: girls, women, men, and boys. There didn’t seem to be any real organization to where they sat, though they all looked as if they were resting. There had to be over 300 mats spread out around the tent, almost all of them occupied with a warm body either lying down or sitting and chatting casually with the person next to them.
Will started moving through the tent, ignoring the voices buzzing and overlapping all around him. Hundreds of people talking at once, without a care in the world.
As with the campers outside, the ones in here barely gave him a second look. Their acceptance of his presence—or more specifically, the hazmat suit he wore—bothered him tremendously.
There were others moving through the tent—men and women in blue, green, and white hospital scrubs. He counted two, maybe three dozen in all. They were moving efficiently through the throng of bodies, dispensing everything from water to pills to medical advice. The bits and pieces of conversation he could overhear were overwhelmingly about the pregnancies.
Jesus Christ. This is a maternity ward.
“You,” a female voice said behind him.
Will looked back at a woman in her early thirties, wearing a white doctor’s coat. She had long blonde hair in a ponytail and was eyeing him with light green eyes. She had one of those envelope labels over her right breast pocket, with the name “Zoe” written on it. A stethoscope was draped around her neck, and she was holding a young pregnant woman’s arm, apparently taking readings while talking to him.
“What are you doing, Givens?” the woman asked.
“Givens?”
Right. Givens. The dead guy.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“You’re just walking around. Is that in your job description? Walking around?”
Will didn’t quite know how to answer that, and felt a little bit like a kid who just got caught in the hallways trying to skip school.
“Well?” she said.
“Well what? You need something?”
“Yes, I do. Where are my cots? I have more patients than I have cots.”
Cots. Right.
“Who did you talk to about that?” he asked.
“How the hell should I know. Half of you guys don’t even wear name tags. I can’t keep track of how many of you breeze through this camp in a given day.”
Kellerson and how many others?
“How many more cots do you need?” he asked.
“Eleven—” She stopped, then corrected herself. “Twelve, since this morning. You wanted preggos, you got preggos.”
Preggos?
“Right. I’ll see what’s keeping the cots,” he said.
“You do that.”
He turned and started to walk away.
“Givens,” Zoe called after him.
He looked back. “Yeah?”
She gave him a pursed smile. “I didn’t mean to put it all on you. We’re both just trying to doing our parts here, right?”
“Right,” Will said, and gave her a smile back behind the gas mask, before realizing she probably couldn’t see it since his mouth was entirely hidden. He said instead, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“You in a hurry?”
“No, why?”
“I got that list your boss wanted.”
“Okay…”
Zoe turned to the young pregnant woman whose hand she had been holding, and gave her a friendly, reassuring smile. “You’re coming along just fine, Anne. Just keep doing what we discussed, okay? No deviating.”
Anne, the young woman, nodded gratefully. “Thanks, doc.”
“Lay down and rest.”
Anne did as she was instructed. Will thought she couldn’t have been older than seventeen.
Zoe stood up and began walking off.
Will briefly considered continuing on and ignoring her, but thought better of it and followed her instead.
“Where’s your boss?” Zoe asked. “I haven’t seen him all day, and he promised to come talk to me before we start the next transport.”
“What are we transporting?”
She stopped and looked back at him, eyes narrowing a bit. “What is this, some kind of game to you, Givens?”
She doesn’t know who Givens is. Use that.
“I’m new here,” Will said. “I’m just trying to get caught up.”
She chewed on his excuse for a moment, then continued leading him through the blue tent. “The next transport scheduled to leave for the town. This new group is further along than the last one, so you guys need to bend over backward to make them more comfortable.”
She led him to a small grouping of tents near the back. There were a dozen lined up. She slipped inside one of them and he followed. Inside was a small cot
next to a portable fold-out desk and a stack of worn clothes.
Zoe walked over to her fold-out table, picked up a piece of paper, and handed it to him. “Here’s the list your boss wanted.”
“What’s it for?” he asked, taking the list.
“The names of everyone that’ll be on the next transport, organized by need.”
Will unfolded the paper and glanced at it. It was a long, handwritten list of about 200 names, some with a check mark next to them. “What’re the check marks?”
“The pregnant ones,” Zoe said. “You guys need to put them in their own separate trucks and not stuff them in with everybody else like the last few times. You need to keep in mind you’re dealing with pregnant women here. They’re fragile.”
He pocketed the paper. “Is that all?”
“How long have you been here?”
“Just a few days.”
“I didn’t know they were still bringing in new people.” He heard the suspicion in her voice. “Is Givens your first or last name?”
“Does it matter?”
She shrugged. “Just curious.”
“You’re a doctor, right?”
She smiled. “Lucky guess.” She walked over to a cot and sat down heavily. “Can I ask you a question?”
Why the hell not, it’s not like I can stop you.
“Sure,” he said instead.
“What’s with the gas mask? I know, you wear it at night so the creatures steer clear of you. But why do you guys insist on wearing it in the daytime, too? I’ve always been curious.”
He couldn’t tell from the sound of her voice if it was just curiosity or something more.
“Habit,” he said.
“It can’t possibly be comfortable.”
“You get used to it.”
That seemed to strike a chord with her. “I guess we’ve all had to learn to get used to things, haven’t we?”
He wondered if she was still talking to him or herself. Zoe was kneading her forehead with her fingers, like someone with the weight of the world on her shoulders.
“You okay, doc?” he asked.
She glanced up. “Yeah, why?”
“You look tired.”
“How could you tell? Is it the wrinkles or the crow’s feet? I’m pretty sure I’ve aged a year for every week I’ve been in this place.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
Damn. Did I just say that?
Instead of flashing him another one of her suspicious glances, she smirked at him instead. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“I’m just a grunt. I follow orders.”
“Isn’t that what the Nazis said during World War II?”
“We all do what we have to in order to survive.”
“I guess so.” She sighed and stretched out on the cot, putting her hands on top of her forehead and closing her eyes. “Sorry about shitting all over you, Givens. That was unfair.”
“No worries.”
She smiled at nothing in particular. “You can go now.”
“Right.”
He stepped out of Zoe’s tent and kept walking, glad to be out of there.
One thing she had said stuck in his head: “The next transport scheduled to leave for the town.”
He was right, after all. The camp was just a way station to someplace else—a final destination.
“The town.”
People were being relocated there from here, including the pregnant women. Especially the pregnant women. So what were the people sitting on the mats, the men and boys and women who weren’t pregnant, doing inside the big tent?
He walked past young men and women—teenagers—pushing carts through the mats and cots, offering up fruits and vegetables, but also more meat and venison on cheap plastic plates. Everyone seemed to be doing their part, though it was obvious the doctors—or the ones in the scrubs, anyway—were paying more attention to the pregnant women.
It didn’t escape him that he hadn’t seen a single baby, toddler, or infant. That told him all these pregnancies had occurred after The Purge. The furthest along, as far as he could tell, was six months. He wasn’t entirely sure what that told him, if anything. For the most part, the majority of the women looked newly pregnant.
By the time he reached the end of the tent, he had walked the entire length of the place and there wasn’t a whole lot more to see, except for an entrance tunnel that joined another, smaller tent on the other side. But this entrance had two hazmat suits guarding it, and unlike the others, these looked alert. He glimpsed people lying down in cots inside the connecting tent, their arms hooked up to tubes that were connected to red bags.
No, not red bags. Clear bags with red liquid inside.
Blood. They’re drawing blood.
He had trouble making out the size of the second tent through the tight opening. It looked big, though of course nowhere near as large as the blue tent. There were nurses inside, walking along the cots and checking the tubes connecting the arms and blood bags. People who were coming out of the tent looked noticeably tired and dazed, some moving on wobbly feet. Almost all of them went straight to the mats to sit or lie down.
Will thought about getting a better look at the other tent, maybe even trying to access it, but he decided against it. It was too risky, and the two men standing guard were too alert. Right now, his greatest asset was his ability to go everywhere as long as no one paid attention to his face. All it took was one hazmat suit to realize he wasn’t Givens, and he was screwed. The prospect of having to shoot his way out of the camp, with its large population of pregnant women, made him queasy.
He walked on through the tent instead, slipping into a line of people exiting out a tunnel that didn’t have any guards in front of it.
He stepped back outside and blinked in the sun, before glancing down at his watch: 2:11 P.M.
Plenty of time.
Will walked through the camp again, passing a group of men laughing around chunks of freshly killed deer meat sizzling on a grill. The rest of the animal was in a cooler, one man tasked with fanning it to scatter the flies every time they opened it for another piece of meat. The men were drinking beer. Warm beer, but he guessed they had gotten used to that from the sounds of the drunken voices.
One of the men noticed Will and speared a thick piece of meat with a cooking fork, then got up and walked over. “Wanna grab a piece of this? We have plenty to go around. More than plenty, actually.”
“Where’d you get it?” Will asked, remembering the dearth of deer—or any animal life moving on the ground at all—that had crossed his path as he moved through the woods.
The man looked confused by the question. He was in his early forties, with a thick brown beard, and had the type of world-weary eyes Will would expect from a resistance fighter, not someone enjoying the company of his captors.
“Your buddies bring them over every morning,” the man said, “for old farts like me who can’t stand to eat out of cans anymore. You new to this camp?” he asked, switching topics with surprising dexterity. “I haven’t seen you around before.”
“You know everyone in camp?”
“Not everyone, but most of you guys. It’s not like there’s a lot of you.”
Will nodded. “I just came over a few days ago.”
“Ah, that explains it.” The man offered up his hand. “I’m Jenkins.”
Will shook it. “Givens.”
“I know, it says so on your label thingie there,” Jenkins grinned. Then he nodded at the campfire. “You wanna join us? Plenty of room. I’ve never been much of a deer man myself, but it’s surprisingly good.”
“How long have you been here, Jenkins?”
“You mean this camp?”
“Yeah.”
“Just a little over a week now.” He glanced around. “It’s a lot bigger than the last camp I was in, and also a lot more organized.”
“How many camps have you been in?”
“Counting this one? Three.”
You really have been busy, Kate.
“All in Louisiana?” Will asked.
“Yup. Though I hear there’s one in Texas that’s four times the size of this one. You seen it?”
“No. Just the Louisiana camps so far.”
Then Jenkins leaned in a bit, as if he was going to say something important that he didn’t want anyone else to overhear. “The guys and I were wondering. You know when they’re gonna relocate us to the towns?”
Again with the towns.
“The next transport leaves tomorrow,” Will said. “Why, you anxious to get there?”
“Sure, why not. I mean, I don’t mind living out of a tent and eating deer meat, but it’d be nice to get back to civilization. Or as close to one as you’ll get these days, anyway.”
“How long have you been going from camp to camp, Jenkins?”
“Ever since I knew there was a choice.”
“What choice is that?”
“You know, run around out there, or come here.”
He means surrendering. Giving up.
Jenkins gave him a half-hearted smile. “You can only fight for so long, you know? And I’m getting old.” He glanced around the camp. “It’s good here. I think I made the right decision. Still, it would be nice to finally get to one of these towns I keep hearing about. Get on with living.”
“You’ve never been to one of these towns before?”
“Nah. I’ve just been shuffling from camp to camp. Sure are a lot of pregnant women here.” He whistled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many pregnant women in one place in my life.”
“Neither have I.”
“By the way, you know anything about all the shooting in the woods? You guys having trouble or something? There are plenty of boys here who wouldn’t mind lending a hand if you need it.”
Will shook his head. “We’re fine.”
“What was all that shooting about?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ve dealt with it.”
Jenkins was about to ask something else—the man had a thousand questions, apparently—when he stopped and stared over Will’s shoulder instead. He followed the older man’s gaze and saw a group of six hazmat suits moving through the camp. They had two figures between them, leaning against each other.