Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

“I found out what’s happening to the elephants,” she said to James. She grimaced. “Sort of.”

“How are you feeling?” James asked. “You look pale.”

She tried to smile at him. Just like James to worry about her more than the elephants. Though she knew he’d never really love her, that he couldn’t, he did care. That was enough. “You’re not going to believe this—well, maybe you will, things are crazy—but the elephants seem to be spontaneously combusting.”

He ignored her. “I’m serious, Liyana. Are you okay?”

“Did you hear me? They’re practically exploding. Fire everywhere. I saw it myself.” When he leaned forward, an expression of concern on his face, she waved him off. “I’m fine. My back hurts from crouching in the blind so long. It’s nothing.”

He leaned back, but his brow remained furrowed. “Okay then. The elephants are spontaneously combusting. Is it just happening? Or are they inducing it somehow?”

“Why would they do it on purpose? And how?”

James shrugged. “Why does anything happen anymore? A week ago, I saw a pack of hyenas surround a zebra. The hyenas melted into some sort of amoeba and absorbed the zebra. When it was gone, they reformed and took off running like it was the most natural thing in the world.”

“I guess it is, now.”

“My point is that the world is dangerous and unpredictable. You shouldn’t be trying to have a child at all, and you certainly shouldn’t be going out alone right now. Who knows how an animal would react if it could somehow tell you’re pregnant.”

“You’re sweet that you try to protect me,” Liyana said. “But I hate it.” She stood up. “Anyway, I’m going to lie down, but first I need to talk to—” Her voice snapped off into a sharp intake of breath as pain stabbed her stomach and she doubled over. In an instant, James was on his feet, his hands on her elbows. She couldn’t stay on her feet, so she let him guide her to the floor, first on her knees, but even that was too much, and she curled onto her side.

“Stay here, stay here,” he said, looking around frantically, though there was no one in the lounge. “I’m getting Charlotte.” For a moment, Liyana thought he would kiss her as he leaned forward, but he turned away and sprinted for the door, shouting already for the doctor, for help from anyone.

As Liyana lay on the floor, hands clutching her stomach, teeth gritted and eyes watering, she thought the same words over and over. Please. Please, not a miscarriage. Not again.

Before the world ended, she’d never actually been in a hospital for anything other than to visit a sick family member, hadn’t needed to. She had her tonsils, her appendix. Had never broken a bone or had a terrible fever. Now, as she lay sweating in bed in what had been a tastefully appointed hut for the tourists, Liyana was grateful for that. She had no idea what she was missing.

“You need to take better care of yourself,” Charlotte said, sitting next to her, stethoscope on Liyana’s belly, that barely-visible bump that said she was with child. She nodded, removed the cold scope. “Baby’s fine, though. Not to jinx anything, but…”

“Seventeen weeks. I’m farther along than I’ve ever been,” Liyana said.

“Well, now you’ve gone and done it,” Charlotte said, but she smiled. “Farther along than anyone since… you know.”

Liyana nodded. There was no name for it, not really, the thing that had ended the world. A war, some new weapon, bombs that ripped a hole right in reality. Some author had once said that any far-enough advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. Well, they’d gotten there. The little they’d seen before the internet and TV and radio all stopped working showed cities and people imploding, disintegrating, blinking away into air. Reporters just as mystified as everyone watching. Everything broke, the world became surreal. Nothing to do, Liyana thought, but to forge ahead, to will the world back to normalcy.

But most of humanity was dead, and the survivors couldn’t have babies, and the elephants were spontaneously combusting.

“You know this was your idea, you can’t pretend that it wasn’t,” James said. “Every time, I tell you that you shouldn’t do it, that it’s too dangerous, that you could die. Every time you ignore me.”

“I don’t ignore you,” Liyana said quietly. But she knew she did. “This is too important to stop. I could have a baby. Humanity could keep going.”

James shook his head. They’d had the argument so many times before, Liyana could predict each beat of it. Now would come the part about how they didn’t know that people couldn’t have babies, that it could just be them. It was too dangerous to really travel anymore; they never heard from anywhere more than a hundred miles away; maybe there were pockets in the world that weren’t as twisted and ruined as Amboseli.

Liyana wouldn’t say, but would think that James needed the delusional belief in those safe havens, needed to imagine that his wife—his love, lost when the war began while he was in Kenya with the Elephant Preservation Project—and children were safe. She wouldn’t say, but would think that San Francisco was surely gone completely. Like Mombasa, like Durban, where her parents had lived. She wouldn’t say, but would think that she wasn’t forcing James to be with her, after all, hadn’t forced him into sleeping with her. That she was the pregnant one. That all the risk was hers.

Instead, she said, “I can do both. I’m just watching the elephants, and now that I know where they go, I can get a spot farther away, somewhere comfortable.”

Sighing, rubbing his fists into his eyes, James said, “Fine. But I’m coming with you.”

Liyana knew that James was well aware he couldn’t make demands of her, that no one could. But just the fact that he knew that, the hitch in his voice when he said he would come along, softened her stance. She nodded.

There was affection between them, she thought, if not outright love. And he would make a good father, if anyone in the world became parents again. Four pregnancies, nothing to show but bloody and miscarried fetuses. Other women had gotten pregnant as well, but none with the determination of Liyana. She hadn’t seen any evidence that animals of any kind were breeding. The world was winding down, but she would bring it back. If need be, thrashing and squalling and fighting her the whole way.

Liyana’s cousin Nandi had been the first girl Liyana knew to have a baby. As Liyana held her cousin’s month-old daughter in her arms, cooing and making faces at her, she talked to Nandi about her upcoming trip to Kenya, her first time visiting Amboseli, a research trip for grad school, tracking elephants. She supported the baby’s head while chattering away about elephant social structures, the importance of the matriarch.

“That’s what you’re talking about?” Nandi asked. “Elephants? Look at the baby, Liyana. Pretty little Inyoni. You can’t say you don’t want one for yourself.”

“Sure, sure,” Liyana said. “Someday. But I have so much to do now. I can’t be tied down by a baby.” Immediately, she stumbled over her apology, but Nandi laughed it off.

“You’re too funny,” Nandi said. “Give it time.”

Inyoni began crying then, and Liyana handed her back to her cousin, her fingers lingering on the soft skin of the baby’s neck.

Durban was gone now. Nandi and Inyoni and everyone else, gone or warped beyond recognition by forces Liyana could never understand. But the elephants remained, at least for now. And Liyana’s baby was past what would have been the dangerous time before. But now, there was no longer any time that was safe. Not in this world.