Damage in an Undead Age

by A. M. Geever

  “That was your fault.”

  She elbowed his ribs lightly. “After that. You were laser-focused then.”

  “We’ve hit a roadblock,” he said, his amusement at her teasing at odds with how frustrated thinking about the delay usually made him feel. “I’m not sure what the problem is yet.”

  Miranda sat up. “I’m cold. Let’s go.” As they scrambled to their feet, she said, “It’s not a different strain of virus, is it? Not that I know if that makes a difference.”

  “Maybe, but there’s something weird going on. Which makes sense because Jeremiah repels zombies. Alicia leans toward a different strain and a mutation, so that’s probably what it is.”

  “Deferring to Alicia’s assessment? That’s high praise, coming from you,” Miranda said.

  They entered the thin strip of woods, Miranda leading the way along a path she was obviously familiar with. Mario could see one or two lights from the housing plan through the trees.

  “Alicia is a talented virologist. She made the shift from epidemiology to vaccine development without missing a beat. She’ll probably figure out what this hitch is before I do.”

  He could see better as they neared the tree line and the little housing plan. Miranda turned to stand in front of him, her face in shadow.

  “So you’re here to clear your head for a few days and go back to it fresh.”

  She reached for his hands. Hers were like ice again.

  “And to see you.”

  He couldn’t see her smile but could hear it in her voice when she said, “So I’m a distraction.”

  “My one and only.”

  She laughed, then leaned close. Her lips were cool, but her kiss crackled with heat. He tugged her to him, the fullness of her breasts pressing against him through her jacket. Her icy hands found their way inside his unbuttoned coat. She slipped them down and inside the back of his jeans, her thumbs anchoring over the waistband.

  When their lips parted, she said, “Your one and only, huh?”

  Mario said, “You know you are.”

  16

  Miranda stared at River, dumbfounded.

  “That’s impossible,” she said.

  “The rabbit died, Miranda, metaphorically speaking. You are definitely pregnant, about eleven or twelve weeks.”

  “But my tubes are tied!” she protested. “I can’t get pregnant!”

  River’s mouth twisted in a frown. She pushed a lock of glossy black hair behind her ear.

  “Yeah, you told me. A tubal ligation makes it highly unlikely that you’ll get pregnant, but not impossible. When did you have it done?”

  River’s face was a study in professional sympathy. It made Miranda want to punch LO’s doctor in her face.

  “What difference does that make?” she snapped, her temper flaring. “The whole point of permanent contraception is that it’s permanent!”

  “Okay,” River said, beginning to look determined to get the information she sought. “I’m assuming you had this done after zombies, so within the last ten years.”

  Miranda tried to think, but her mind was whirring like one of those cheap metallic pinwheels little kids play with.

  Pinwheels.

  Little kids.

  “Michael’s birthday,” she said. “I did it right after my godson’s third birthday, so seven years.”

  “Okay,” River said, nodding. “That makes sense. The failure rate for tubal ligations is two percent in the first ten years.”

  “But two percent, that’s practically zero. It’s supposed to be permanent,” she insisted.

  River sighed. “Unfortunately, you are not the first person I have had this conversation with. I’m assuming someone qualified did the procedure?”

  Miranda nodded.

  “You would have been better off with an IUD. You have to replace them periodically, but they’re more effective. Someone who can do a tubal ligation should have been able to do an IUD insertion. I’m surprised you weren’t steered in that direction.”

  “But it’s supposed to be permanent,” Miranda repeated, her voice softer than before.

  “Have your breasts been sore lately?”

  Miranda thought for a moment. “Yeah, but my bras have been tight… Oh my God.”

  “Your womb is already expanding, Miranda, and your cervix has softened. You’re tired all the time, which is common during the first trimester. So are appetite changes. And you missed your last period.”

  Like an automaton, Miranda nodded. She never gave the missed period a second thought because her tubes were tied. And with having been seasick and losing so much weight on the journey here, and the stress of being out in the wilderness…

  “Even if there was no test to confirm it, I would feel confident in this diagnosis,” River added.

  “Wait a minute,” Miranda said. “You aren’t a gynecologist. You could be wrong.”

  River sat down on the other end of the exam table.

  “I’m a medical doctor, Miranda,” she said gently. “Every M.D. gets the same foundation, the same education and training. Or we used to. I’ve had to do everything the last ten years, including obstetrics. I am one hundred percent sure that you are pregnant. I was sure during the exam, but just on the off chance, I wanted to do a test.”

  “What if the test is wrong? It must be expired by now.”

  But she was tired all the time, and irritable. Well, more than usual. Her appetite had changed. Some foods tasted funny now. She knew that she was grasping at straws, but she couldn’t help it. This could not be true.

  “I did a blood test, Miranda. And I’m an endocrinologist. Testing for elevated human growth hormone is not difficult.”

  “Fuck,” Miranda said softly. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking Mario.”

  River half-smiled and shrugged. “It’s not entirely his fault.”

  “Not that,” she said. “Going behind my back and tricking me into seeing you. He comes to visit, and then a week later I’m pregnant?”

  “That’s not the right math, Miranda. He was worried about you. He thought you had mono.”

  “Mono,” Miranda muttered. “I fucking wish. You can do an abortion, right?”

  River nodded. “Sure.”

  “And then I can get an IUD.”

  “Yeah, that’s not a problem.” She paused. “Don’t you want to talk to Mario first?”

  “Talking to Mario is not going to change anything. I am not bringing a kid into this,” she said, gesturing out the window to the world at large—zombies, disease, assholes run rampant. “That’s why I got my tubes tied in the first place.”

  River nodded. “Look, it’s not my job to tell you what to do, but for what it’s worth, I think you should talk to him.”

  Miranda wanted to scream. At River, at Mario, at everything.

  “I don’t need his permission, and you should mind your own fucking business.”

  “Okay,” River said, nodding. She slipped off the exam table. Silence filled the room, disturbed only by a riffling of papers as River stuffed her notes into a file.

  “I’m sorry,” Miranda said. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just—”

  Just what, she thought. Unexpected? Unwelcome? Completely fucked?

  River set the file folder down.

  “No offense taken. This is obviously the last thing you expected me to tell you today. I think you should talk to Mario because then he can be there for you. I know he’s gone back to the Institute, but he can come here and at least be with you for the procedure. I don’t know him well, but he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’s going to be an asshole.”

  Miranda’s mouth pursed into a scowl. River was right, of course. Mario wouldn’t be an asshole. He’d be great.

  And he missed his kids, felt guilty about leaving them. If she told him she was getting an abortion, and she was, he would never say he wanted her to do otherwise, but she would know some part of him would want it. He’d never want her to do anything other than what
she had already decided. He was too practical to entertain impossible scenarios, and a baby was as impossible a scenario as it got. Even if she wanted to, they were unsettled and far from home and their mission was not over. If they did something that used to be normal, like have a kid, they were stuck here for at least a few years and—

  She gave herself a mental shake. What anyone may or may not want was beside the point. What you wanted and what you got were very different things. She had learned that a long time ago. And there was no way she was bringing a kid into this. No fucking way. She had never understood why people felt the need to bring totally helpless, vulnerable children into the clusterfuck the world had become. She had sworn to herself that she would never be so selfish and irresponsible.

  River said, “What are you plans right now? I cleared my schedule in case you wanted some company.”

  Miranda gave the doctor a weak smile. “That was really thoughtful of you, but I think I’d rather just hang out with Delilah.”

  “Okay. But if you change your mind, I’ll be here.”

  Miranda nodded to River and got down from the exam table. She felt like she was floating above her body as it walked out of River’s office, crossed the street, and entered her townhouse. Delilah thumped down the stairs, all tail wags and wiggles, and Miranda felt herself being sucked back into her body. Into boobs that felt one thousand percent more sore than they had before her appointment. Into a waist that felt thicker and jeans that were snugger, even though she had not noticed before. Into a body that felt exhausted and ravenous and hijacked.

  She stepped outside with Delilah so that the dog could take a pee. Miranda realized that she had been peeing more, now that she thought about it. That was probably a pregnancy symptom, too.

  “Motherfucker.”

  She bit her lip while she did the math. She must have conceived right around the time they got to Seattle, or not long after. After a five-year separation, she and Mario had a lot of sex while they were on the yacht—a lot of unprotected sex. While they were having sex was pretty much the only time she hadn’t felt ill. Neither one of them thought about birth control because she’d had her fucking tubes tied.

  She did the math again. It had definitely been seasickness during the journey, and after Seattle she had the prescription Dramamine. If she’d also had morning sickness, she wouldn’t have noticed it.

  Christ, she thought. What a clusterfuck.

  “Coppertop!”

  Miranda looked down the street. Doug strode toward her, his never needing to think about getting pregnant male insouciance surrounding him like a cloud. The nickname, which she secretly liked, set her nerves on edge today. She did not want to deal with anyone just now, even her best friend in the world.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked when he reached the walk in front of the townhouse.

  “Again with the warm welcome. I’m beginning to feel unwanted,” Doug said, but he grinned. “But since you asked, I haven’t seen you in three weeks and I am bored out of my skull at the Institute. Apart from monkey watching, they’re pretty entertaining. But when I started giving them names, I realized I needed a change of scenery. You were right to come here. There’s a lot more going on.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure there is,” Miranda said, thinking of Skye. She leaned into the escape from her own problems that Doug’s presence gave her. Hard. “Any reason you didn’t come sooner? Anyone you’ve been avoiding?”

  Guilt flashed across Doug’s face for a split second, like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, though. I don’t think you need to worry about a less-than-warm welcome.”

  Doug began to blush rather spectacularly, which was not his usual modus operandi. She opened her mouth to really lay it on thick, then stopped. She cocked her head, suddenly aware of a buzz of background noise.

  “What is that?” Doug said, turning around to look in the direction the buzz seemed to be coming from.

  “Zombie moans,” Miranda said, already walking past Doug and into the street.

  A siren blasted. Once it faded, Miranda took a moment to orient herself to the noise. It was louder to the east. She took off for that side of the housing plan, Doug on one side, Delilah on the other. Small observation platforms were built into the palisade at regular intervals, which was where Miranda was headed. In the two minutes it took them to reach the closest one on the southern palisade, someone had already climbed up. Miranda started up the ladder.

  “How many?” she asked as she neared the top of the ladder.

  The woman already on the platform turned toward her. It was her next-door neighbor, whose name Miranda could never remember. She looked pale and scared.

  “A lot,” she said.

  Miranda stepped onto the platform, now able to see over the top of the palisade. “Whoa,” she said.

  The scent of decay wafted over them. Perhaps a quarter of a mile away she could see zombies. Tens, maybe hundreds, of them tripped through the overgrown trees and disintegrating parking lots and roads. Accurate numbers were impossible to estimate in the overgrown greenery of the Northwest, but even so, Miranda could see that it was a lot more zombies than usually wandered outside of LO’s immediate defenses.

  She looked down at the trench on the other side of the palisade. How deep had Smith said it was? Ten feet? Fifteen? She couldn’t remember. An emerald ribbon of grassy earth made a twenty-foot buffer between the palisade and the chain-link fence. The trench was on the outer side of the fence, lined by another strip of ground between the fence and trench. Both sides of the fence were kept clear of brush and trees, but the far side of the trench was as overgrown as everything else. That was one thing they had going for and against them. Unlike the first few years after zombies appeared, the overgrowth of trees and scrub was a natural impediment for zombies. Much more so here than at home on account of the wetter climate. But it was impossible to tell exactly how many zombies there were based on sight. Sound was often a more reliable indicator.

  “Damn,” Doug said, stepping next to Miranda. “Good thing I was traveling here from the north.”

  Her neighbor said, “The sound defenses must be malfunctioning.”

  No shit, Miranda thought, looking at the woman askance.

  The siren wailed again. Miranda’s neighbor whimpered, her hand leaping to her mouth. “I can’t believe this. I’ve got to get back to Gemma.”

  So that was the kid’s name, Miranda thought, a little confused by the woman’s reaction. Being unable to grasp that she herself was pregnant after taking steps to ensure it would never happen? Sure. Being unable to believe zombies might get close to your fortified community after the undead had roamed the planet for ten years? That she did not understand. The unbelievable part was that it did not happen more often.

  Miranda turned to Doug to suggest that they get back to the ground and find out how they could pitch in, but he had already stepped onto the ladder.

  “I’m going to head up to the Nature Center to see what’s going on,” he said.

  Miranda waited for him to start down, then stepped on the ladder to follow.

  The jog through the Big Woods was creepy as fuck when you could hear zombie moans. Miranda began to revise her reaction to her neighbor’s disbelief after realizing she had gotten used to these woods being quiet and safe. She and Doug, with Delilah following, emerged into a crowd of people milling outside the Nature Center under the awnings of the covered sidewalk. They threaded their way through them to the main doors just as Skye emerged.

  “What the hell are you all doing here?” Skye demanded. “Get to your posts!”

  Immediately, a babble of protests and questions—was this a drill, what had happened to their defenses—erupted. Skye used her thumb and middle finger at the corners of her mouth to produce a piercing whistle.

  “It’s real, and you are end
angering all of us by not being at your posts! Get going right now, or I will make sure you’re all thrown in the brig when this is over.”

  Eyes widened, and a ripple of fearful electricity zipped through the small crowd. They quickly dispersed, and Skye turned back to Miranda and Doug.

  “I didn’t know you pulled that much weight,” Miranda said, impressed at how quickly Skye had whipped everyone in line.

  “I don’t.” Skye looked to Doug. “When did you get here?”

  “About ten minutes ago,” he said.

  This time, Skye’s smile was shy as she glanced down at her feet and then back up at him. She looked relieved that Doug was here. Doug looked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t get it together enough to formulate a sentence.

  Oh, for Pete’s sake, these two are in trou-ble, Miranda thought.

  “How can we help?” Miranda said.

  Skye took a step back. “Uh, well, the commander asked me to go to the control shack and find out what’s going on. Why don’t you come with me?”

  Ten minutes later, they were inside a small outbuilding that maybe once had been a storage shed. All except Delilah, whom Miranda had ordered outside because she got underfoot. The shack might still pass for a storage shed if not for the high pole behind it with a crazy number of cables that ran from the shed to the pole. The pole also had small boxes with blinking lights and something that looked like a speaker near the top. Skye and a red-faced, middle-aged man named Larry were hunched over a control panel console that looked as state-of-the-art as the shed did not. Larry kept stabbing at two readouts on a map, one to the south, the other to the west.

  “I don’t know, Skye.” He shook his head, beads of sweat glistening on his bare pate. “It’s showing an intermittent disruption at Station Eight, which must have caused a cascade through at least part of the system. It’s still showing Station Six is online, but that’s the direction the zombies are coming from, so it’s got to be off-line. Everything was okay when we went to Eight this morning,” he said, looking to Skye for confirmation.