Meg Elison - The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

She came down on the other side of the hill to circle around to the lake. There was a bait and tackle store, she decided to check it out. She raided some chewing tobacco and gum. Signs hung askew and the cash register had been emptied. There was not much left inside but the bugs that had lived through it all, skittering over everything when the light fell upon them. She shivered, but looked anyway.

They had a couple of newspapers from last year. She glanced over the stories of “Lymphatic Fever” and “Women’s Plague.” There were awful pictures of hospitals in New York and Paris overflowing with the dead and dying. No cure in sight, ran one lede. Men recovering at ten times the rate of women, ran another. Nothing she didn’t know, but she stared.

How did it get so out of hand? How did it spread so fast? Why did I recover?

Her hospital in San Francisco had a great lab. Everyone who had any lab tech experience had been locked up in there, looking at this thing under a microscope. She wasn’t one of them, she worked in labor and delivery, trying to bring fevers down and watching women birth dead and dying babies. She recalled the pandemonium, when she tried to call it up and reason it out. She had never attended a stillbirth before. The first couple were solemn and chastened doctors struggled to explain dead babies patiently, compassionately. After a solid week of them and one hundred percent infant mortality, there was quarantine protocol and screaming, wailing, demanding answers. Parents and doctors alike were unhinged. She remembered putting a baby girl on a Japanese woman’s chest. The child lived long enough to curl her hand around her mother’s finger, and then she was gone. Limp and turning blue. They resuscitated, they injected, wheeled crash carts to every room. The girl’s mother died that day, on fire with a fever they couldn’t touch. Within hours, the baby’s father disappeared.

No cure in sight and the lab crew thinned out. Hospital staff died and disappeared as panic overtook them and mayhem took the city. Dead nurses lined the halls with dead patients and after a while, nobody was hauling them out anymore. She remembered staying so busy that she didn’t see what was happening until she couldn’t open a door. When she finally got sick there was nobody to look after her. Only Jack had come, and she believed he had come to say goodbye.

She could not get the memory to come clear. Her heart pounded and she could relive the terror, but she couldn’t tell the memory of one day in chaos from another. She could not sequence the events, or understand how something this sudden and final had come to be. She was sorry every time she looked back. She set herself up with tasks and focused on the present. Examining the timeline in any direction away from now profited her nothing.

September

Found a motorcycle. Really small, but in good shape. Boathouse=huge drum of gas. Covered it up with tarps. Hope it’s still there when ready to leave. Had one of those shitty multipacks of cheap fireworks for the 4th of July. Took it with me, but bet most are duds by now. Hiss boom fuck you.

* * * * *

The party of men arrived on the lake one day before sunset.

They were startlingly loud in the continuous quiet. She crept to the window to see how many. She counted ten for sure, but they weren’t still or close or easy to see. They settled into a house on the opposite side of the lake and fell to fishing and drinking. She knew they’d begin raiding the surrounding houses, just as she had done. She worried about possibilities in order: they would find her motorcycle, they would find her.

Two days passed and she watched the men ceaselessly, unable to sleep. Their constant drinking kept them slow and unambitious. Late on the third day, they finally started to venture around the lake. She had created a sniper’s perch where she could see out and shoot straight but would be difficult to spot from the ground.

When they came around to her house, they tried the door and couldn’t budge it. One of them picked up a rock to break a window and she took a deep breath and fired through her tiny slit in the window. She shot the ground beside him, but she could see his jeans darken where he pissed himself.

“This one’s taken,” she yelled down to them, gruffly. “We’re armed, and we’ll defend it. Fuck off.”

Get calm. Panic sounds like panic and any dog can hear it. Breathe deep. Remember you have the advantage. No one has seen you.

A few of them stepped back. All their eyes looked up. It wasn’t the whole party. She swept them in her sights. A few held weapons, one or two was swaying drunk.

One bearded face yelled up at her, she cringed at the sound of it. His voice was rough and low and slightly amused. “What have you got in there? Girls?”

She tried to change her voice to sound like another guy. “No girls. Just heroin. Lots of heroin. Fuck off.” Shit, that sounded really stupid. I suck at this.

A couple of them laughed. “Fucking junkie.”

The same one yelled up again. “We don’t want your drugs, man. We’re just looking for food and good stuff.”

“You’re not looking for it here,” she yelled back down. “Looks like we have guns and you don’t. We suggest you leave this lake.”

They talked to each other, low. They didn’t move off.

Please go please please please go and leave me alone.

She moved to the other window she had rigged and lit one of the strings of firecrackers she had found in the boathouse, praying that they were live. She tossed them overhand toward the men. They were live and utterly unexpected on the ground. Men jumped and flailed when the tiny crackers went off. A few ran back toward their camp, others took a long last look before following. She caught more than a few looking back and up at her. She took one more shot after them, just as a warning. Exhausted, she laid on the floor and slept until it was dark.

She woke up in perfect stillness and ate a jar of baby food bananas. She did some pushups and went back to her lookouts. There was no one outside. Across the lake, a fire burned in a pit. They had retreated but they had not left.

For a moment, she considered starting a fire in her own fireplace. She wasn’t hiding anymore; they knew she was in there. Dismay set in as she realized that their smoke would draw more people to the lake.

She nodded back off during the night. After a few bleary minutes, before she heard scraping sounds downstairs. She stumbled up and fell over herself trying to run. She got back up holding her guns, shaking.

Through the dark, she wove down to the window where the noise was coming from. She could hear someone on the other side, pulling at the boards. Then the scrape of a metal tool, prying.

“Get the fuck back!” She brought both guns up and waited. The prying sound stopped.

She stood for a minute, breathing hard. She thought they might have gone, but she couldn’t hear anything over her heart pounding. It was an hour before she sat down, but she fell asleep almost immediately when she did.

She slept for hours but it felt like an instant. She awoke to the sound of the kitchen windows being broken. The shattered glass fell into the stainless steel sink and she came to with a high, short scream. She scrambled up and ran toward the kitchen.

A tall man with a blond beard was halfway into the window. He had reached forward to grab the edge of the sink with both hands and pull himself forward, squeezing through. She brought up the gun. He was stuck. He looked up and she could see in his eyes that he knew it.

Both her hands shook. The shot was less than ten feet and she blew it anyway, putting a hole into the bowl of the sink. He jerked and screamed and tried to push backward.

Her nerves were shattered and she could feel herself tearing up. She widened her eyes, forcing them to focus and tried to breathe deep and steady herself.