The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

by Meg Elison

  Traveling with Roxanne = totally different than being alone. Just having someone to talk to = enormous relief. She’s asleep right now. Stars all out and the world is completely full of bugs.

  Twitches in her sleep when she gets bit, but doesn’t wake. Could sleep through anything. Doesn’t complain, got a sharp eye. Got to find a place to raid bug spray. Sign says there’s a town in 20 miles. Should make it there tomorrow. Hoping for good hunter’s bug spray, stacks of jerky, and new cotton underwear. Dreamworld. Really need water and a portable filter = can drink the water we find without worrying.

  Of course she asked where I was when it all went down. Guess this is the new 9/11 for those who made it through to remember where we were. Wasn’t one day, it wasn’t like you were walking down the street and heard that the world was ending. Don’t want to do this over and over again.

  Started as unsettling pictures on the news, and then people in some other city were dying. Fucking government closed stadiums and airports, people on the news in yellow suits. Dead people. People in your city, on your block. By the time it was on top of us, it was too late to mark the time. Remember where I was, because I was always at the hospital. NO. On call and sleeping when I could, there. NO. Told her some about the deliveries, about the dead and dying women and babies, about getting sick myself and waking up dehydrated, confused, and alone. NO, NO, NO. Don’t want to ask back = polite to ask back. Are we very polite savages now? Gave her the book. Told her to write it down. Fresh page.

  The Book of Roxanne

  I was living with Nettie in Vegas. She was younger and better looking than me, she was a cocktail waitress at Caesar’s. Good tips but she had to wear these killer heels. Her feet always hurt. I worked at Sam’s Town. Good crowd, but mostly older. I wore lower heels but balanced it out with this tit job. I made less in tips but more per hour. Neither of us drank, we belonged to the same gym, had a nice little place in Henderson. It was good.

  So when the shit hit the fan, nothing really changed. Vegas is like its own planet. Nobody watches the news or wants to think about real life.

  Tourists were still pouring in for a week or so, but then I started to see a change. One day it was like there were no Asians at all, and let me tell you, there are more Asians in Vegas than there are in Asia. I came home from work and told Nettie about it, and she looked at me with her eyes big and said it was true on the strip, too. We were used to seeing a lot of foreigners, but all of a sudden there weren’t any. No Eurotrash, no beautiful black men so dark they were blurple with their strange accents and bright-yellow gold jewelry. I couldn’t find anybody but drive-in tourists from California and Arizona. I started asking around, listening for New Yorkers or a dumbfuck with a southern accent. It was creepy, like the world was shrinking.

  Then they shut down McCarran, and everybody freaked. I saw people hitchhiking out of town, offering a thousand dollars for a ride in a minivan, trying to get home or get out. I started seeing sick people on the street. At first I thought I was seeing bad nighttime makeup in the daylight—bright-red cheeks and eyes with too much black liner. But these girls had fever. You could feel it baking off of them. Some guys, too. I hit the grocery store in Henderson, and it was a mob scene.

  I bought water and toilet paper and chocolate pudding, don’t know what I was thinking. I like pudding. I don’t know. I got home and found Nettie sick, laying on the couch, burning up. I took care of her for days. She burned so hot I thought she’d have brain damage. 911 was busy and stayed busy. I locked up the house and made soup and forced her to drink.

  The phone lines went out, but I couldn’t get anyone to answer anyway. Then the power went off, and the water went with it. After about a week, her fever broke. She was skinny and tired, but alive. We had to move to a house with a pool, a block down. It was empty. We stayed there until the water started to grow algae. We loaded up some bottled rich-bitch fizzy water and drove to some condos we knew—high-end with an indoor pool and all that shit. We stayed there until we got caught.

  We were always hiding. We caught on slow that we didn’t see any women, and groups of men seemed to be roaming everywhere. The first night in the condos, we stayed up on a top floor. We heard screaming outside, and we peeked through the window, kneeling on the floor. We saw a gang of maybe ten guys run down this screaming lady—she was maybe thirty. Heavy. She couldn’t run for shit, and they caught her and took turns at her. At first she screamed and fought, and Nettie held her ears and sat down on the floor. Eventually though, she just laid there and took it. They turned her over and pinned her arms, and it took them a while to run out of new ideas. When it was over, they had to carry her away. They went toward another high-rise, and we didn’t see them again. Nettie strapped her Taser to her leg and told me she wasn’t going to get caught and raped. She would fight and she would kill. I nodded, but I didn’t know what the fuck we would do if we got caught by that many guys. Probably nothing.

  It was maybe ten days later when we were found out. We were on the second floor of an office building, heating up some soup. They must have been watching us, because they came straight toward the building, along the back route we used to sneak in. We had broken some glass and thrown it all over the stairs so we could hear someone coming. They were quiet, but the glass crunching did it. Nettie looked at me with those huge, wide eyes. She asked me how many. I couldn’t tell her by the sound. She got her Taser in her hand and said she was ready. I stood up and faced the door, holding a pipe wrench I had found and thought I could swing. She jammed it into my neck from behind, and when I woke up, she was gone and Aaron and the guys had started the party without me. I stayed limp, made no noise at all. Manny ate our soup while he waited his turn. When they were done, they helped me up to my feet and said we had to hit the road. Aaron looked at me and said they’d protect me, because there were some terrible men out there these days. He really believed I was better off with them. I could see it.

  I didn’t talk much. I started learning them the way I used to when I was stripping. Learn their needs, learn what they’re sensitive about, learn how to work ’em. The key to stripping was never to fuck them, or at least not until they said the right number. I knew that chip was gone, but there were other things they wanted. Reassurance. Something like intimacy. Men don’t know how to ask for that, they think they can steal it. When they realize they can’t, they know they have no power. I didn’t tell anyone I’d had a hysterectomy, I let them argue over whether or not I was too old. The fairly constant gangbang kept me bleeding enough for the illusion to stand.

  We were lost for a while. When we found Melissa, I hoped she’d make it. Her boyfriend fought like hell to protect them both, but he didn’t have a gun. He must have known he would fail. In the end he told the girl to run and he tried to hold them off. He died for her, but he barely got a lick in. They shot him and then ran her down. She cried for weeks. She never stopped, she even cried in her sleep. She was the flavor of the week, and I got a little time off. I got convinced I could run away while they were all drunk, and I actually tried. That’s how we ended up chained. I could have gotten us unchained, eventually. The weather got warmer, and we ended up naked almost all the time. Melissa ran blood down her legs seemed like every day. I started getting us small things, baths for instance. It’s so much more appealing to fuck a girl who’s bathed this week. I started insisting that we get fed the same, hinting about maybe getting pregnant and needing vitamins. And I started picking my favorites and being a little more cooperative with them. I tried to get Melissa to do it, too, but she couldn’t. She had never turned a trick in her life. I never heard her story, but some things about her I could just tell.

  They found Shawna all alone, not even hiding, just walking down the road one day. She was so young. At first I thought maybe sixteen, she was pretty well developed. But she would talk to me when they weren’t using her. She turned out to be fourteen. Her whole family had died, and she had just been wandering since. She had no skills at all. Sh
e had been a good girl with good grades. I told the guys she needed aspirin or something for the UTI she was dealing with. She had been a virgin, she told me, crying. They tore her the fuck up. But after a few weeks, she was throwing up every morning and getting tired enough to crash in the early afternoon. Poor kid had no idea. She thought she had the fever after all. Chuck and Ethan raided a drugstore and came back with a test. She peed on the stick, and lo and behold.

  The guys put their heads together about everything they had heard about babies and the fever. More than one of them had heard that all the kids born during the shitstorm had died. They all agreed that none of us had the fever, so the kid couldn’t get it. So they took care of Shawna. They stopped fucking her, miracle of miracles. They raided everywhere to bring her canned fruit and pickles and asked her what she was craving. I encouraged her to tell them her favorites and mine, too, and I used what I know about pregnancy from talking girls through abortions to help out and seem useful.

  About the time she started to show, the fights began. At first it was just guessing whose kid it was. They talked every night about who fucked her first, last, longest, hardest. Then they got smart and tried to figure out who had fucked her after she last bled. Jimmy got ragged on pretty bad because he always preferred the asshole to the pussy, so it couldn’t be him. Aaron pretty much took for granted that the kid was his and refused to participate. He always acted like he was better than the others, like some kind of natural-born leader. Shawna barely knew what it meant or what would happen. She had no kind of guess about the father, and she was afraid of all of them.

  Aaron eventually spoke up. He told them the kid was his, Shawna was his, and would remain that way. He would have her and the baby to himself when it was all over, and anyone who had a problem with that could eat a bullet. He said mother and child needed protecting and that he would protect what was his. That shut down conversation.

  He was kind of tender with her. Started calling her “prized possession” or “pride and joy.” She didn’t see the good in it.

  I didn’t know what to tell her. If she made some kind of alliance with Aaron, went along with his claim, the other guys might respect that like they respected him. If the kid was black or Asian, that’d make it clear, and Aaron might give up. She had no preferences, just terror. She just wanted to eat and sleep with her thin little arms wrapped around her belly.

  She was maybe six or seven months gone when shit got real. She started cramping up and bleeding first thing in the morning. I told Aaron to send the guys out for gauze and clean towels and all that stuff. They wanted to move her to a big hospital they had seen back down the road, but she was twisted up in agony, and we didn’t have a good way to carry her. I didn’t want to anyway, all the hospitals are full of the dead. We ended up inside a gas station with bottled water and a hunting knife and blue shop towels. Shawna cried and screamed and doubled up in pain. Everybody stared at her except Melissa, who sat down in one of the aisles and ate a couple cans of Pringles.

  I got her shorts off and took a look. I don’t know fucking anything about birthing no babies, like the slave in that movie said, but neither did the guys. She was bleeding in trickles and gushes, and I couldn’t see anything. Hours went by with me staring between her legs and telling her to breathe or push or whatever and giving her water. About sundown, she stopped bleeding for a while and just screamed. The guys lit candles and torches and whatever they could find, the place smelled like burning plastic, and I wondered about gas or oil or whatever just blowing the station up.

  Out of nowhere, Shawna heated up. It was like turning on an electric stove. Her face and joints were hot to the touch. The heat off her thighs was blistering as I sat there waiting. Finally, Shawna bore down, and I saw the kid’s head. It was startlingly white through all the blood, and I told her to push hard. She did, crying and obviously getting weaker. The kid came out all in a rush, like a popped cork. Blood spilled out in a wave behind the baby, soaking me and Aaron, who had come pretty close. He backed up quick to get out of it. The baby was in my hands, tiny and thin. He didn’t move or breathe. The cord reached back into her, and I left it alone. I patted him, I smacked him, I tried to clear his mouth. He was blotchy and blue and never drew a breath. I told Aaron to hold him. I handed the kid off, and Aaron wrapped him in shop towels and tried to stir him. The guys offered a few lame suggestions, but they petered out. None of us knew what to do.

  Shawna lay limp on the floor, still bleeding out and turning white. I checked her pulse the way they do it in the movies. I felt something tiny tick under my fingers, like a bug under a picnic blanket. She was cooling off. I tried to hold her up and slapped her face a little. No reaction. I pulled at the cord, and the placenta gushed out with another bucket load of blood behind it. How this skinny kid could have so much blood to give up, I don’t know. With it out, I could see that the kid had ripped her wide open. I couldn’t tell what was what down there, she was just shreds. I packed shop towels between her legs and laid them together to the side. There was nothing I could do.

  I told Aaron she was going to die from blood loss. He looked at me, holding the baby that had never breathed. They all stood around, staring. Nobody knew what to do or say. After a while, Aaron laid the baby down in Shawna’s arms, and we left them there together. Melissa got hauled up by her elbow, still holding two cans of those awful chips. The chains went back on. Nobody talked about Shawna or the baby. Two days later, I got to wash the blood off me. Things were pretty much the same after that until we ran into you.

  Back to me

  Wish I hadn’t read her story. Felt that sick rush I had always felt after a bad birth. Adrenaline and disappointment = sick. Pity. Held back a thousand medical questions about the birth. She probably wouldn’t know the answer, and it’s not like it mattered. Couldn’t stop thinking about the hospital where I saw it all fall apart. Every baby dead. Almost every mother dead. Creeping fever that came from nowhere. We never even really figured out how it spread. No tourists from Asia or Europe. No planes overhead. Maybe not just this country, maybe everywhere. Maybe the world.

  Almost dawn now. Going to sleep for a while. Morning I’m going to suggest we skip Pocatello, there’s likely people there. We should swing south and raid in the small towns, maybe head for Colorado. Lots of nice cabins that way to hide out in. Maybe make camp for a while.

  Mid-July

  Hot as shit and sticky every day. Found a sporting goods store a few days back that had good bug spray. It smells like death and probably causes cancer, but I don’t give a fuck. Mosquitoes beware. Also found a couple of water filters and filtering canteens, small expensive ones. Incredible = not carrying gallons of bottled water. Just drop and filter in any lake or stream or puddle we find. Huge load off my mind. Filters won’t last forever, but at least now we know they work and how to find them.

  Roxanne and Alex had some good nights. They played checkers in an old diner while they ate a whole can of strawberry pie topping, sugary glaze and all. They talked about where they would go, what they would look for in a place to make a stand. Alex sang a little, and Roxanne said she missed the piped-in music of the casino. Roxanne read trashy romance novels that she found along the way, sometimes reading passages aloud.

  “His throbbing member aroused her, though she had never known the touch of a man before!”

  They giggled like girls and rode along an old highway, not another living thing in sight. Roxanne told terrible jokes she had learned from customers while she worked. Alex told her the standard nursing jokes and apocryphal stories of men with their dicks stuck in vacuum cleaners, in Coke bottles, in improvised cock rings. The legendary drill to remove the champagne bottle from an unwise asshole.

  They raided a little cul-de-sac of houses. Corpses were drying out all over. The smell wasn’t as bad as when they were wet, especially when they opened the windows. Alex found a full bottle of Oxycontin and kept it for trade. Roxanne looked for a gun of her own. She searched the hidden pl
aces in those houses, under beds and high in closets.

  One house had a wall safe in an office and she was convinced there was a handgun in it. They slept in the den, on big, soft couches laid out on a sunken floor. In the morning, Roxanne was in the office right at sunrise, searching. The office had a huge aquarium on one wall. The water had all evaporated and the room smelled like the rotting fish. Alex opened the window that faced the backyard, thinking it was safer than the one that faced the street. The air and light came streaming in, and she helped Roxanne look.

  The office was like a checklist of prestigious artifacts. Green glass banker’s lamp with a brass body. Oak desk like an aircraft carrier. Large blotter and Montblanc pen lined up next to FranklinCovey day planner. The dead man in the bed upstairs had likely thought himself pretty important. A tiny blue book in one drawer held account numbers, passwords, credit card numbers, and five crisp hundred-dollar bills folded in half. Roxanne slipped the money into her bra without looking at it. Alex stared at her for a moment before they both burst out laughing.

  When the moment passed, Roxanne dug it back out and set it gently down on the desk.

  “Maybe he didn’t want to write it down,” Alex offered.

  “He would. Thinks he’s fucking James Bond.” Roxanne went back to staring at the book, scowling. “He was the kind of guy who wrote down all his passwords, because he’s worried that he’d forget someday.”

  Alex shrugged and let her obsess. An hour later, Roxanne was still working. Alex checked the kitchen and found the pantry untouched. They feasted on tuna and tomatoes and beans, and Alex ate a whole can of peaches while Roxanne turned the pages again and again.