Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

“We were sheltering in the office of the main hotel. There was a room there with no windows, my uncle said that was best. The other people got the regular rooms. No one wanted the cabanas. I mean, you’re in your own building, no one can help you, you know? The Beaters got Jillian-she was this woman my uncle was kind of with, sort of-anyway, they got her last week. When the Rebuilders came everyone thought it was the Beaters again. I mean, not the people on duty, I guess they knew what was happening because they saw the truck, but it was before dawn and there was a lot of screaming and that’s why people thought Beaters.”

“Oh,” Sammi said. How bad would it be to ask the girl to be quiet, she wondered.

“Don’t worry about them,” the girl said, misunderstanding her shortness, pointing at the front seat, where the man and woman were staring straight ahead, not speaking, not paying attention to anything but the road. “They haven’t said anything to me at all since they came to get me.”

Sammi knew she was supposed to talk next, to ask a question or say where she had come from. They passed playing fields on the left, and to the right was a woods. They were driving in a circle, weren’t they? But wait, there was the wall, the one she’d seen that they were building around the whole place. To keep out Beaters. To keep people like her locked in.

She and Jed used to watch Beaters out the windows of the middle school’s little fake lookout tower, their favorite place to hide out after their day care shift; they weren’t the only people who used it for privacy, so they couldn’t make out or anything, but they held hands and watched the little groups of Beaters bashing themselves against the walls surrounding the school, trying to get in. They always eventually wandered off.

Sammi and Jed amused themselves by trying to spot the repeaters. It was hard to do because of the way the Beaters deteriorated. The new ones-of which there were few these days, though there was a rumor that a new wave was beginning since people had started eating the blueleaf roots again-didn’t look too bad, mostly messy and scratched. The worst were the ones who’d been around since the beginning; whole big patches of skin would have fallen off, with the muscles and guts and bone showing through. They were missing teeth and even their lips, since they usually ended up chewing them off, and their arms and fingers were bony, red gooey messes, their hair pulled out and their scalps crusted and bruised. The old ones, you couldn’t even tell half the time if they’d been men or women.

Sometimes Sammi and Jed could make it out by the clothes. It was pretty rare for a Beater to put on new clothes, although they could always surprise you. They spent ninety percent of their time doing the same things over and over, picking and gnawing at themselves and each other and wandering around in their lurching, drunken little gangs, picking up anything shiny that caught their eyes. But once in a while they would do something, well, human, which was actually really freaky. Like last week, Jed had pointed out a short, heavy one-a man, they decided-who was trying to shove something into the heavy locked metal box that held the sprinkler system’s controls, out beyond the decorative benches on the parking lot side of the school. There was a narrow slot above the lock, and the Beater worked for a long time, pushing and jamming the object, and when it finally gave up and wandered off, they saw that it had been trying to push a magazine through the slot that was too small for it. Jed thought the Beater was trying to return a book, that it thought the school was a library. Sammi thought it was trying to mail a letter. The magazine flapped in the wind for a while, sodden and damp, and the next time they were up in the watchtower it was gone.

They never told anyone what they saw; they kept it to themselves. Somehow, when it was just the two of them, it could be funny, sometimes. If Sammi tried to tell her mom, she was likely to get started on one of her crying jags that ended with her pulling Sammi into her arms as though she wanted to just hold her forever. Sammi hated that; she always wanted her mom to let go, but that seemed rude, and she would just stare over her mother’s shoulder, smelling her body odor and feeling her tears falling on Sammi’s shoulder and wetting her shirt, waiting until her mother finally released her. It wasn’t like that with Jed.

But Jed was gone.

Sammi felt a sob fighting its way up from deep inside her and she didn’t want that, couldn’t deal with whatever this girl and the people in the front seat would do. She didn’t want their pity, and she sure as hell didn’t want anyone interrogating her. So she squeezed her teeth together and forced the sadness back down. There would be time-eventually-for that.

But just then the driver pulled into the parking lot in front of a C-shaped, concrete-sided building three or four stories tall. The car coasted to a stop in the entrance in the middle of the C. Sammi tried the door handle, but they had the child locks on.

Inside this building it was just a repeat of the morning. Rebuilders in army-type clothes with weapons, lots of paperwork everywhere-it was still a shock to see everyone with actual clipboards rather than ePads and smartphones. The man who’d driven them disappeared, but there were others. The older woman from the car ushered them here and there and then disappeared with the other girl, and Sammi didn’t see either of them again.

A plaque mounted near the front entrance said Genevieve Sanders College of Nursing. So it was a school for nurses. And come to think of it, the lobby reminded Sammi of the home where her mother’s mom, her grandma Beth, had lived until Sammi was eleven, when she’d died at the end of a long summer. Sammi and her mother visited a couple times near the end, when Grandma Beth was confined to her bed and not talking anymore, and Sammi always held tight to her mother’s hand as they went through the hushed lobby with its shuttered snack stand and the pretend beauty salon where volunteers did manicures during the day.

After the other girl was led off to some other part of the building, Sammi was taken up to the third floor by a woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Henderson. She was old enough to be her mom, but she seemed so tired and disinterested that Sammi wondered if she’d been woken from a deep sleep to tend to her. Only a few bulbs burned on the floor, but the floor was polished and clean, and the furniture in the sitting area was arranged neatly.

“Keep your voice down,” Mrs. Henderson said, not bothering to mask her irritation. “Everyone’s asleep. I’ll take you to your room but we’ll wait until morning to show you around.” Sammi followed silently, trying to tread softly so her footsteps didn’t echo in the hall. When they passed a bathroom they heard the sound of someone throwing up, moaning in between bouts of retching.

“Wait,” Sammi said, finally stirred to a reaction. “Shouldn’t we, like, check if she’s okay?”

“She’s fine,” Mrs. Henderson said impatiently, but Sammi remained rooted to the spot. All day she’d just stood by and done nothing as every person she’d ever known was taken from her, as she was finally taken herself. She’d thought she was done caring. But hearing someone’s misery like that…she couldn’t walk away.

“I could just check real quick,” she offered.

“It’s just morning sickness. Half the girls here have it, it’s nothing.”

Understanding dawned slowly on Sammi, chilling her to the core. This wasn’t just a dorm for girls-it was for pregnant girls.

“There’s been a mistake,” she said, her voice sounding strange and thin. “I’m not-I’m not pregnant. I shouldn’t be here.”