After Christmas, the Guard dropped Mandy at my house. They did that during the holidays—found orphaned children or displaced young adults who tested negative and sent them to live with relatives.
“So,” Mandy says, picking up her toast. “When you go to the store tomorrow, can you get those granola bars? The ones with the chocolate chips. We’re out.”
I had gotten a box of eighteen last week. Eighteen.
After breakfast, she goes to her room. Ten minutes later, she appears, a little makeup on her face, and she announces she’s going for a walk. “Do you think they picked up the bodies?” she asks. “From last night?”
“I didn’t see the truck this morning.”
“Are you going to tell them?”
I say no.
She understands. We’re all leaving the Kolbert house open for a day or two so we can go in and take things—food, shampoo, toothpaste, paper products, liquor… whatever we need.
“Okay.” She leaves through the front door.
As I do the dishes, I see her walk down the street in the late morning sun. Her hair is flying in the breeze, a backpack hanging on her shoulders. She’s wearing her favorite jeans—the tight dark ones that show off her figure. She’ll stop at the suicide house first. She’ll step over Dan Kolbert, she’ll wince at Erin Kolbert’s body, and she’ll probably cry when she sees the boy. But it won’t stop her from taking what she can find. It never stops any of us.
That afternoon, I walk over to Lou Becker’s house. He’s in the garage, fixing a vacuum cleaner. Lou is about fifty and fixes things for those of us who are still around.
“Who’s that for?” I ask.
“Gina Keane. You know what a clean freak she is.”
Last fall, Gina lost her husband and two sons. Only she and the cat survived, but her mind is good, and she still smiles and says hello. We sometimes talk about the old days.
Lou stands up and stretches. “You hear about Dan?”
“I heard the shots last night. I figured it was him.”
“It was Erin. She came by last week, talking all sorts of crazy. Religious stuff. How we needed to make peace with God. And she was holding the gun.”
I frown and the baby moves.
“Hmm,” Lou says, licking his lips. His hands are shaking a bit. His skin is thick and worn.
“So, you did go over to Dan’s?” I ask.
Lou nods. “They didn’t drink. I took a can of chicken soup.”
I smile. When we raid a suicide, we’re all fair. We only take what we need.
“I’m going to the store tomorrow,” I say.
He nods. His eyes are crystal blue. It’s unnerving to look at him. I bet he was once a good-looking man, back in the old days.
But he wants alcohol.
“You want vodka or whiskey?” I ask.
His strange eyes drift away before returning to me again. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” I say.
“That’s good,” he answers. “Vodka will do.”
Even though I am pregnant, Lou will let me use one allotment to buy liquor—that’s the deal for his friendship. People his age aren’t given many allotments. I’m pregnant so I get more, but the Guard doesn’t judge what you buy. They don’t care if pregnant women buy liquor.
I hesitate before I leave. “Mandy’s stealing from me.”
Lou nods. “She brings whatever she’s taking from you to the Martin house.”
The Martin family died from the virus except for the father. He committed suicide in January.
“But I thought they were…” I trail off.
“Someone is there now. Sean Strout said he noticed a kayak hidden under the Martins’ deck.” Sean is about twenty-nine, his wife dead and gone. He lives alone in a blue house two blocks away.
Lou continues to speak: “It’s a young guy, a boy. Must’ve come by river, probably a couple weeks ago. He’s probably camping out in the basement.”
“Did Sean see him?” I ask.
Lou picks up a screwdriver from his work bench. “We know he’s there.”
The baby moves around and around.
Lou says, “Your niece has formed an attachment.” He points to my stomach with the tool. “You need to take care of that baby.”
“I know,” I say.
“I’ve got a few extra bullets, if you need them.”
My husband left me extra bullets. “I’m fine,” I say.
“All right.”
I return to my house, understanding fully what I am expected to do, but it’s difficult to square with. Mandy is my brother’s daughter. Yet, we’re loyal to each other in this neighborhood. We have to be to survive.
Mandy is home for dinner. We eat rice and beans because we’re out of meat, something else she’s stolen from me. I pretend I don’t notice. She thinks I’m grief-stricken because my husband died. She thinks I’m too old to catch onto her scheme, even though I’m only thirty-two. She thinks I don’t know that a bottle of orange juice went missing the other day, as did some bread, some ham, a few slices of American cheese. In the beginning, she was sneakier, taking just a little bit. In the beginning I thought it was me, that I was the crazy one. But then I caught her wrapping a sandwich in aluminum foil, and I knew. I wanted to follow her, but it’s difficult to trail someone on these empty streets without being noticed. But I figured it was a boy, I just didn’t know where. Or I didn’t want to know where.
But now I’ve been told.
After dinner, Mandy and I sit on the couch together. She watches Friends on her iPod with her earbuds on. She chuckles and smiles as the episode goes on. She looks like my brother, who was good-looking: pale white skin, dimples when he smiled, large dark eyes.
I read my book. It’s something I’ve read before, back in the old days. It’s a silly mystery, but it takes my mind away for a bit. When I get to a part about a missing ring, it makes me think. I get up and go to my room. I open the bottom dresser drawer where my husband kept his t-shirts. Several are gone. I look in another drawer: several jeans are gone. In my husband’s small closet, a pair of brown hiking boots are gone. I kept his things because if my child is a boy, I plan to give him his father’s clothes.
And Mandy has given them to some boy.
I can feel myself wanting to scream but I don’t. I don’t know why I am angrier at the stolen clothes than I am the stolen food. I wonder if she understands how much danger she has put us in. I am the “head of household” so if she is caught harboring a transient, I will take the fall. And what about the virus danger? This boy is obviously not immune to the virus. He could be asymptomatic, someone who carries the virus and never gets sick but still doesn’t have immunity. If my baby is born without immunity, and Mandy carries the virus home on her clothes, that could kill my child. They promise us that we can keep our babies if they are born without immunity—it’s a one saving grace. They are sure a vaccine will be created soon.
The next morning is Shopping Day. The Guard picks me up in a van and I sit quietly near the window as we retrieve the other pregnant women in the area. I am the second to be picked up and there are five in our designated area. During the drive, I get to see other neighborhoods, other roads, other houses. It all looks the same, but it doesn’t matter. I love the ride anyway.
The “store” is in a former strip mall. I go through a checkpoint and then enter the supermarket. The shelves are sparse with supplies. I’m allowed fifteen allotments a week. I buy eggs, meat, more ham, bread, cheese, and shampoo. To my surprise, there is a small stand of oranges!
A young Guardsman smiles at me. “It’s our turn to get them,” he says. “You can take two.” He gestures toward my stomach. “It will be good for the baby.”
He picks them up and places them in my cart. I thank him.
“You take care,” he says, nodding, his smile fading because he’s not supposed to show emotion. He’s supposed to scare us by his silence.
When I get back into the van, I hold my sho
pping bags close to me like all the pregnant women do. Two of them chatter happily to each other, excited about the oranges, but I keep my mouth closed. I am the second woman to be dropped off. The Guard is fair. They know our trip in the van is special and the ride makes it even more special, so the first ones picked up are the first ones dropped off.
At home, Mandy isn’t there. I put the food away and hide the oranges under my bed. Hours go by and she doesn’t return.
In the closet, I see my husband’s rain jacket is gone.
I find my gun. It’s a small revolver, like a child’s toy.
It’s dark when I start walking. A bright full moon illuminates my walk. The streetlamps aren’t lit anymore—this is to save energy. I hold a small flashlight in one pocket and my gun in the other. I walk and walk, smelling the salty water from the river.
The baby is motionless as I walk and remains motionless as I approach the old Martin house, a narrow two-story structure with long windows and white siding. It has a finished basement and a huge deck in the back that overlooks the river. In the old days, the Martins would throw wonderful parties—Christmas, New Year’s, St. Patrick’s Day, Fourth of July, Halloween—so I know the house well. Eileen Martin was a natural entertainer, gracious and sweet; a few drinks in, she could have you laughing until your stomach hurt. Her husband, Tom, adored her. He adored his two sons, too. I can imagine how difficult it must’ve been, sitting in his empty house at Christmas, his wife dead, his sons dead, most of his neighbors dead or rounded up. He had no reason to live anymore.
I am lucky. I have the baby to keep me hopeful.
I make my way to the back of the house, down a path and then quietly up the steps to the deck. I am wearing my old yoga sneakers, flat and smooth, so my footfalls barely register on the wooden planks. The river glows in the light of the moon. The stars are bright, and I can hear the lapping of the water along the shore. I stand near the slider and pull on it gently. It’s open—Mandy forgot to lock it. Inside, the kitchen is dark, so I use my flashlight to light my way. I travel down a hall, catching glimpses of family photos: the Martins on a trip to Hawaii; a graduation picture of the older son; a baseball picture of the younger son; a wedding picture of Tom and Eileen. I take the gun out of my pocket.
There is no light along the stairwell as I descend. The basement is large, and I am guessing Mandy and her boy are near the far corner, sitting on the couch. A small camp-light glows, and Mandy has her iPad playing music.
They notice me.
They notice the gun.
“Whoa!” the boy says. I can barely make him out, but I can tell he is tall, lanky, twenty pounds too light, and his messy hair needs a cut.
Mandy stands up. “Wait! He’s my friend.”
I don’t put the gun down. I keep it pointed at them. My husband taught me to use it after the first wave. “You’ll need this one day,” he said to me. He never thought the reopening was safe. He always told me to stay inside, to stay away from people. And when the second wave emerged, after I told him I was pregnant, he refused to stop working at his job. “We need the money.” Within weeks, he was sick and then dead.
The boy holds his hands up, as you would in the old days to the police. “Hey, I don’t know who you are…”
I stare at Mandy, her hair wild and her eyes frightened. “He’s a good guy.”
“You’re stealing from me,” I say to her.
The boy says, “I’m just trying to get by. Like everyone is.”
The Guard has killed transients like him, and they toss them in the river to remind other transients what will become of them. To warn families who are hiding the unimmune what will happen.
I don’t know where this boy came from. But he can’t stay. And I can tell by his eyes, he’ll abandon Mandy if things get dicey—if she gets pregnant, or if I cause trouble. He’ll get in his kayak and go down the river. Find a new girl to lie to and get what he needs.
“Don’t...” Mandy begs.
But I do. My heart is battering, and my breath is shallow, yet the baby is still. It’s my job to rid our neighborhood of this danger. I pull the trigger. I’m close enough to not miss. He seems to die instantly and Mandy screams: “What! Why?”
The baby flips around in my stomach and settles.
I look at her. “You were stealing.”
I am supposed to spare her. She’s my brother’s child, but what will she do to my baby? Girls like her, at this age, lovesick and starry-eyed, are foolish and dumb. When I was nineteen, I also fell hard for a bad boy and nobody could tell me otherwise. I blamed my mother for the breakup. She kicked him out of the house because she caught us smoking weed and he never came around again; he stopped calling, just sent me a text saying he was sorry but it wasn’t going to work out. I turned my rage on my mother. I refused to speak to her for weeks and I deliberately pulled out a bunch of tulips and daffodils and ripped them to shreds. It was ridiculous and stupid, but that’s what this type of love does to you: It makes you silly and stupid, but more importantly, it makes you untrustworthy and disloyal to the people who care about you the most.
There’s too much at stake for me to deal with Mandy. There might not be a vaccine for years. I might fall asleep and then wake up and find my baby dead because she wanted revenge.
Or none of that might happen. It might be all in my mind, which is squirrely at times. It goes straight to the worst possible scenario. But history has proven, at least for me, that the worst possible scenario is always in the cards.
“Please,” Mandy begs.
This virus, the roundups, the containment, the Guard, the suicides, the allotments—it all messes with your brain. Makes you crazy, makes you scared, makes you cruel, makes you disloyal to your own family.
“He wasn’t going to hurt anyone,” Mandy cries. “He was waiting out for the vaccine.”
I can take Mandy home, attempt to talk some sense into her, hope that she grows up quickly and will help me raise my baby.
“I loved him,” she says, whimpering. “You killed someone I love.” She straightens up and pulls her wild hair behind her. “I can tell the Guard what you did. I can tell them you murdered him.”
Like the Guard will care. Mandy’s boy was a transient. I will have done them a favor.
“I’ll tell,” she whines. “I will.”
I know I can never trust her.
I shoot my niece, killing my brother’s child.
I leave the gun in the boy’s lap. Like I said, the Guard doesn’t solve mysteries. Especially mysteries of dead transients and silly lovesick girls. They only pick up the bodies.
The next morning, I stop over at Lou’s. Sean and Gina are there, along with an older couple who live three blocks away, and a mother with two little girls, and a man with his son. We are all in the garage. We listen as Lou calls the Guard about Dan Kolbert and his family, but he doesn’t mention the boy and Mandy. Later, after the neighbors leave, he informs me that he and Sean plan to let Mandy and the boy rot in that basement for a while. “We’ll get them out of there eventually. Put them in the river.”
“Fish food,” I say.
He agrees.
I take an orange out my pocket and hand it to him. “Hm,” he says, placing it on the floor next to the vodka bottle.
He points to a chair in the corner. “Rest,” he orders.
I take a seat and watch Lou work on the vacuum cleaner, my baby swirling around my stomach, reminding me it’s unhappy that I’m not moving, but also reminding me it’s alive. I wear one of my husband’s t-shirts, one that Mandy didn’t take for the boy. I left the clothes she stole in the basement with their bodies. They were infected.
My husband’s shirt is red. For love. For spilled blood.
I won’t wear it again. All of my husband’s clothes are for our baby.
For my baby.
By Johnny Shaw
She sounded like a seagull. He sounded like a hog.
Seagull.
Hog.
S
eagull.
Hog.
Seagull.
Hog.
The seesaw back-and-forth of their barnyard coitus sounded rehearsed, a perfected and practiced predilection. The syncopation was maddening. The two of them went at it for twenty-eight minutes, timed. Three sessions a day. The same starting times, the same ending flourish. Their climax was a haunting cacophony of animal noises. A zoo in an earthquake, finishing with what sounded like Eeyore holding back a sneeze harmonizing with the Doppler screech of a receding French ambulance.
Renato stared at the shared wall and wondered if they had a schedule taped to the fridge: Wake up, breakfast, Seagull-Hog, shower, emails, check the radio for emergency announcements, lunch, Seagull-Hog, three hours of Netflix, Seagull-Hog.
Through the thin walls, Renato heard every movement, thrust, and moan. He could hear the sound of their skin slapping together, disturbingly similar to the taffy machine down at the boardwalk. In a moment of desperation, he had tried to jerk off to the couple’s impromptu radio play, but between the taffy sound and the seagull sound, it had reminded Renato too much of the times he spent with his grandfather down by the pier. Any chance of using the neighbors’ sex concert for his own personal gratification died on those rocks. Nothing like pleasant memories of dead Grandpa Bill to wilt his celery.
It hadn’t bothered him the first week. He could pop on his headphones and drown it out with his own pornography preferences. Renato had been on a retro Christy Canyon film jag lately. But when his phone shit the bed two weeks earlier, he was without any visual aids to offset the thrice-daily audio assault. He could turn on the radio, but there was nothing sexy about the voice of the Emergency Broadcast announcer. Too robotic and the mortality count was a bummer.
Renato was trapped in his apartment, ball-hurtingly horny and anxious about the situation outside. His chest hurt, his stomach was oogy, and he had constant headaches from the stress. A quick hand-shandy would have relieved some of the symptoms, but he was left with the cruelest torture. To stare at the bare wall and listen to the couple next door bang their way through the apocalypse, while he had to rely on his unimaginative imagination and scattered youthful memories to try to get some pants action.
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