While Ramola checks her phone for return texts or calls (there are none) Natalie shouts and her heavy stomps are accompanied by small smashes and crashes, the breaking of little things.
Ramola says, “Are you all right? Stay where you are. I’m coming to you.”
She walks through the other end of the kitchen to the hallway and its beige peeling wallpaper. She passes the stairs and portals to other darkened rooms on the way to a spare room at the rear of the house turned makeshift bedroom. Perhaps the home’s owner preferred sleeping here instead of relying on the chairlift each night to get to the master bedroom on the second floor. The doorframe outlined in molding has no door. A queen-size unmade bed claims most of the space in the square-shaped room. The wooden headboard has ornate bedposts as thick as elephant tusks, tapering to oval, egg-shaped knobs. Along the opposite wall are a box-furniture-store armoire and another rocking chair, this one buried under a mound of clothes. Natalie is a silhouette across from the foot of the bed, standing in front of a dresser that partially blocks the room’s only window, the gray outside light further dimmed by lace curtains.
Natalie stands in profile. Her respirator mask is gone. She spits out random, monosyllabic vowel-based sounds. She paws through the dresser’s dwindling set of knickknacks, small porcelain animals and dolls, and she smashes them into the walls and floor.
Ramola turns on the ceiling light; only one bulb of the two within the domed fixture works. She nearly tiptoes into the room while saying, “Natalie, let’s get you in bed, all right? Have a lie-down. You need rest.”
Natalie pushes and rocks the dresser front to back, front to back, spilling the remaining figurines. The top drawers slide open and closed like loose, wagging tongues.
Natalie turns toward the doorway, toward Ramola. Saliva drools in a thick line from her bottom lip and chin. Above her top lip is a mustache of accumulated white foam. Her eyes go lidless they open so wide. They are the glistening, reasonless eyes of lunacy, of vacancy and the transformed, of the werewolf and the vampire and the zombie and all the other monsters centuries of folklore and myth have attempted to ascribe to the rabid human face.
Natalie exclaims, “Oh!” and smiles, but it’s not a smile. Her head tilts forward, pulled by the same new gravity drooping her shoulders and pulling her chest into kyphosis. Her facial muscles spasm and quake, her lips fissure, upper lip lifting into a V over an exposed canine. She rushes at Ramola, angrily shouting.
Ramola holds up her hands and drifts backward toward the doorway. Before she can say anything more than her name, Natalie is on top of her. She grabs a fistful of Ramola’s left sleeve and pulls her arm toward her open mouth. Ramola bends her knees, dropping her weight, which straightens her arm and allows her to squirm it out of the coat. She pops back up and spins, attempting to free her other arm as well. Caught mid-turn, Natalie two-handed shoves her between the shoulder blades. Outsized and outweighed, Ramola is sent tumbling into the hallway, careening into the wall and landing awkwardly on her right side. Her shoulder absorbs the brunt of the collision with a spike of bright pain.
Natalie lumbers into the hallway and kicks Ramola’s left leg, mid-thigh, a direct hit but on the muscle and without much leverage behind it. Next, she tries to stomp down on Ramola’s knees but misfires, throwing herself off-balance, tilting her weight. Forced to put her hands on the wall to catch herself and recalibrate, Natalie gives Ramola an opening.
Ramola scrabbles onto her feet and sprints down the hallway, to its other end. She pauses in the entryway at the chairlift and bottom of the stairs where most of the contents of Josh’s pack remain on the floor. Natalie gives chase but she is breathing heavily and moving slower, her quick-burst attack already depleting her body’s energy and strength reserves. At least, Ramola hopes that’s the case.
Ramola briefly considers running upstairs, but without knowing the layout she fears being trapped. She also doesn’t want Natalie falling or hurting herself or the baby climbing up and down the stairs. Instead she hangs the loop of rope off her barking right shoulder and grabs the roll of duct tape. She waves her hand in a come-here gesture and she talks in the calmest voice she can manage, telling Natalie it’s time to go to bed, time for rest.
The sound of Ramola’s voice has the opposite of the intended effect. Natalie clambers down the hallway that is either shrinking or she is filling, roaring more nonsense, the nonwords an aural virus, infecting Ramola’s head with a near-blinding fear. Moving too slowly initially, Ramola bumbles into the kitchen, her feet sputtering on the linoleum. Regaining some of her composure, she darts through the room and into the hallway. Backtracking to the rear of the house, Ramola runs at full throttle to expand the distance between her and Natalie.
Returning to the bedroom, Ramola leaps onto the bed and crab-crawls into its middle, crouched but with her legs coiled under her. Her first attempt at opening the duct tape goes awry as the tape sticks to her latex gloves. She tears off a strip and the gloves, tosses them into a dark corner. She rips open another length of tape, leaving one end attached to the roll.
Natalie billows into the room, screaming between gasping breaths. She knocks into the bed with both legs, as though not realizing she can’t pass right through it. She leans and stretches and reaches for Ramola, opening and closing her mouth.
Ramola ducks and pivots, avoiding Natalie’s grasping hands, scooting back toward the far side of the bed, but hoping to stay close enough to lure Natalie to lean and extend further.
Softly, Ramola says Natalie’s name again and tells her to lie down. Natalie snarls, shouts, “Never leave!” and lunges with her right arm. She falls onto the bed, hands first, holding her torso up as though preparing to do a modified push-up. Ramola slaps and sticks the tape to the back of Natalie’s right wrist and then quickly slides backward and off the bed. She sprints around the perimeter of the frame to the other side, coaxing herself to move faster. While Natalie is distracted by the tape and still bent forward, Ramola lowers her left shoulder and slams into Natalie’s backside.
Natalie pitches onto the mattress, landing on her left shoulder, and rolls onto her back. Her lower legs dangle off the bed. Ramola is fortunate that Natalie went left instead of right, as the duct tape is not trapped under Natalie’s body and is still attached to her wrist. Ramola quickly cocoons Natalie’s wrists and hands together. Natalie kicks out at Ramola but doesn’t land a solid blow. When she tries to sit up without the aid of her hands, she falls back to the bed with the slightest nudge. Ramola ties off one end of the rope between and around Natalie’s taped wrists. She loops the rest of the rope around the closest bedpost, making a pulley, and hauls in rope until Natalie’s arms are hoisted over her head, then she ties it off.
Ramola next fights with Natalie’s feet and legs, absorbing kicks to her thighs and one breath-stealing shot to the gut. In a war of attrition that leaves both women exhausted and gasping for air, Ramola wins the battle. She muscles Natalie’s legs onto the mattress and builds a complex web of tape from ankle to ankle and tethers each to the lower bedframe. Battered and bruised, Ramola returns to the entryway, retrieves the collection of bungee cords, and uses them to buttress the arm and leg restraints. Natalie wriggles against the makeshift but effective shackles. Her back arches and her swollen belly rises with her manic efforts at escape. She screams and shouts and cries and laughs.
Ramola whispers, “I’m not leaving—I’ll be right back,” and flees the room.
Natalie’s unhinged wails chase her down the hallway, out the front door, onto the porch, her feet drumming on the plywood, finally sputtering to a stop on the grass, bent over, gasping for air, hands on knees. The distance is not enough. Natalie is there next to her, screaming into her ear. She needs more distance, to be farther away, maybe walk down to the road to wait for a rescue, or maybe walk to the next house to ask for help and the one after that and the one after that. Would she still be able to hear Natalie? Would she be able to unsee her tied-up form and her heaving, pregn
ant belly?
Natalie’s shouting mercifully ebbs. Ramola straightens and her breathing slows. From the vantage of the set-back, elevated front yard the road is a thin sliver, an ebbing brook between fields. The wind blows and the grass obeys, summoning a phantom in a blue-and-white ankle-length nightgown.
Ramola does not believe in ghosts, but she believes in this one. The phantom is slight, diminutive, as wispy as the bristles attached to a dandelion seed. Her arms are long and thin, built for reaching, tapping, touching. On the other side of the road, she floats through the field of yellow and brown. Her path is chaotic, without direction. Her hidden legs piston, expanding and retracting the bottom of the nightgown as though it is a bellows. She slows to jerking stops that seem permanent until there’s a sudden, automatonic restart. Her face is not visible, not even when she looks up across the fields at Ramola standing in front of the house.
Ramola should go inside and lock the doors and windows, draw the curtains, turn off any unnecessary lights. There’s a part of her that wants to wave at the phantom, to walk through the fields, to welcome her home.
Ramola remains in the front yard with the wind still blowing, the grass still obeying.
The infected woman either does not see Ramola or is too ill to cross the road and approach the house. She stays in her field and slow dances to a song all of us will one day hear.
The overhead light fixture in the kitchen doubles as a ceiling fan. Its base droops away from the ceiling plaster, exposing wires. Only two of the three bulbs work.
Ramola sits in an unsteady chair at the small table and inspects Josh’s hunting knife. The nylon sheath includes a pocket with a sharpening stone the size of her thumb. The handle is hard rubber and the blade is black, curved, and smooth, coming to an exaggerated tip. She sets it next to a spare collection of knives she harvested from the drawers. Most are old, serrated, and have rust spots on their blades, though she did find one paring knife that appears to be in good condition.
After checking and rechecking and dialing and redialing and texting and retexting, Ramola creeps down the hallway to the back room. A pungent ammonia smell of urine hits her a few strides from the doorway. When she enters the room, Natalie reanimates, growling, yelping, and whimpering in pain. The whimpering is hardest to take because she sounds like the real her.
Natalie writhes against her restraints. She lifts and drops her head. Her mouth is fully ringed in foam so thick as to appear fake, sloppy makeup in a cheap horror movie. Her eyes don’t focus as much as they roll and spin.
Ramola wants to put a hand on Natalie’s abdomen to feel for the child’s movements, but as she approaches the bed, Natalie nearly levitates trying to break free. Ramola retreats from the room, to the kitchen, and to her phone. No messages. She slumps back into the chair with warped, uneven legs. It teeters front to back. She covers her face with her hands, rubbing and pushing against her eyes until the dark goes purple.
Ramola transfers items one at a time from the kitchen table and front entryway to the bedroom, placing them on the dresser. With each pass, Natalie calls out in her new language.
When they were inside Norwood Hospital, Dr. Awolesi explained the virus was not blood-borne and would not pass through the placenta to the baby while Natalie wasn’t showing signs of infection. She said the post-exposure vaccine Natalie received was safe for both mother and fetus, but there wasn’t a lot of medical literature out there regarding what would happen if a woman at her stage of pregnancy succumbed to rabies infection.
She said they would still perform the cesarean section even if Natalie were presenting clear symptoms. Dr. Awolesi was reasonably confident the baby would not be infected.
Ramola remembers the last line clearly, perseverates on it, inspects it from every angle available.
She also remembers Natalie volleying back a quip: Reasonably confident? Is that like a medical shrug?
Ramola dumps the clothes off the chair and sits.
Natalie continues to babble and growl and writhe, though her strength appears to be waning.
How long can Ramola wait before she is forced to attempt a hackneyed C-section?
With each second that passes it’s likely the risk of infection or illness to the child increases. However, she cannot and will not perform surgery on Natalie while she’s awake, feeling pain, and thrashing about. Ramola would most certainly injure or cut the baby. Unfortunately, there is nothing with which to anesthetize Natalie. Ramola is not going to whack her on the head like in a dime-store thriller where one swipe of the butt end of a gun handle conveniently knocks the hero out cold until the opening of the next chapter.
Killing Natalie and then performing the procedure is not an option. A mother cannot be oxygen-dead for more than four minutes or the child will not survive. Those four minutes cannot be negotiated or bargained with. C-section births normally take ten to fifteen minutes in ideal conditions. Given she doesn’t have to worry about Natalie surviving the procedure, Ramola should be able to decrease the timeline, but there’s no way she can perform it in less than four minutes.
Ramola will wait for help or—if she has no choice but to attempt the procedure herself—wait until Natalie slips into a coma.
Still, while the virus’s incubation period and post-infection timeline have exponentially sped up, Ramola does not know how long it will take for Natalie to pass into deep unconsciousness. In addition, she does not know how long her body’s basic functions will continue while comatose. What if Natalie were to die in the middle of the procedure, a distinct possibility whether or not she is in a coma? That four-minute clock would again be ticking for the baby.
Ramola leaves the chair, walks to the bed, and says, “Reasonably confident. A medical shrug.”
Natalie howls.
Ramola’s body is in the chair in the bedroom that is attached to the hallway that is in the house that someone else built.
Inside Ramola’s head, she is on the bus to the clinic sitting next to Natalie. There are other people in the seats near them but they are blurry, indistinct, and she doesn’t think about them. Ramola is in the aisle seat, facing the window. Natalie leans against the window, gapes at her phone, finger dangling above the screen. Ramola stares at the reflection in the window.
After pacing the length of the hallway with her phone, Ramola goes to the bedroom. To drown out Natalie’s cries and the groaning mattress upon which she struggles, Ramola recites a version of the fairy tale “Fundevogel.” While she has retained certain key lines, she hasn’t committed the entire story to memory as with “The Wedding of Mrs. Fox.”
“A forester on his rounds found a child on top of a high tree. She had been snatched out of her mother’s arms by a large bird. The forester took the rescued child home to live with him and his daughter, Nats. She named the found child Rams. Nats and Rams got along quite well and loved each other very much. One morning the forester left for a three-day trip. The nasty old cook then pulled Nats aside and told her he was going to boil and eat poor little Rams. Well, Nats wasn’t standing for any of that, so she told Rams about the cook’s scheme and they ran away and hid in the forest. The old cook sent a group of terrible men after them and they quickly caught up. Only moments before capture, Nats said to Rams, ‘Never leave me and I will never leave you.’ Rams said, ‘Neither now, nor ever.’ Then Nats said, ‘Do you become a rose tree, and I the rose upon it?’ When the terrible men arrived they found only a rose tree and one rose on it. The children were gone. The men went back to the cook and reported finding nothing. Outraged at the men’s stupidity, the old cook went out into the woods himself. The children saw him coming. Nats said, ‘Rams, never leave me, and I will never leave you.’ Rams said, ‘Neither now, nor ever.’ Nats then said, ‘Be a fishpond, and I will be the duck upon it.’ The old bumbling cook nearly ran into the pond. Tired and despairing, he lay down at the shore to drink it up but the duck swam to the cook, grabbed his head with her beak, and dragged him into the deep water, drowning him. N
ats and Rams went home together, their laughter echoing through the forest, and if they have not died, they are living together still.”
Ramola retells the fairy tale from the beginning to keep from crying.
Natalie is tiring, losing to the infection. Her shouts have become the mumbles of a person talking in her sleep. Her eyelids flicker but do not remain open. Ramola wonders if her fading consciousness is the sole work of the virus or of possible aortocaval compression syndrome as a result of her lying on her back for an extended period. Such a position is not advisable for even healthy patients and could be placing stress on the baby, but Ramola cannot safely move Natalie onto her left side.
Ramola places two hands on Natalie’s abdomen. The baby moves and lashes out. She says, “I don’t know if I can do it.”
She thinks, but doesn’t say: I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this. I won’t do this.
Natalie squirms under her hands. Ramola lifts them away as though she touched a hot stove.
As a medical student, Ramola assisted with more than a half dozen C-sections during her six-week OB/GYN rotation. For most of the procedure she simply observed the attending obstetrician and a resident perform the surgery. She was often tasked with retracting the abdominal wall to give the obstetrician a clear view of the surgical field. The abdominal rectus muscles are generally not cut during the procedure and are instead separated and moved to the side. During her final C-section as a medical student, they allowed Ramola to tie three sutures as the uterus was being closed up.
Survivor Song Page 22