The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Chapter One

Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Volume One

The Book of the Dying

15 January

Patient that I was seeing earlier this week with the fever thing was transferred out. Team of guys with all the protocol bells and whistles. Heard there were a couple of cases on the same floor, but I didn’t hang out with anyone this weekend so I didn’t hear. Was supposed to meet Karen for drinks but all she does is complain. She should just dump him and get it over with. Hate the sound of his name, especially when she’s drunk. Gerry=shit. I got it = we all got it.

30 January

More fever patients, but almost all women. For a while they were saying it was some kind of widespread food poisoning thing but >>> Dallas, so it’s not just us. Jack’s been in the lab with it for days and I’ve been sleeping in the call room and barely seen him. Exhausted. Worked doubles all this week, half the nurses are sick. Haven’t attended a delivery in ten days. Fever 1, Babies 0. Losing team.

31 January

Called Laura in Conn. Talked shop. Miss her and told her to kiss her kids for me. Sounds like I feel. Asked her about how they’re doing. Small town=better odds but the odds sound bad even there. Starting to freak out. Wtf is going on?

2 February

Shit I missed deliveries but not like this.

Don’t even know what to say about the rate of infection. Can’t even put the rate of stillbirth or basically stillbirth into words. What. The. Fuck. Whole hospital under quarantine, but what good is that? Got texts from over at the Mission clinic from Pilar and she says the homeless have got it just as bad. Out in the street. Fucking everywhere but the lab has nothing.

4 February

CDC is all over SF. News is terrible. What they were showing from New York can’t really be happening. BART stopped running. Not like I’m going anywhere but damn. Preachers outside with megaphones. Hate to wish them death while so many are dying, but better them than every neonate.

Jack says it’s auto-immune. Almost wish I hadn’t asked, he looked so scared when he said it. Think that was more because he doesn’t know. No antibiotic. No interferon. No anti-inflammatory, no sedative, no emetic, nothing. Nothing touches this once it starts. We’re all wrapped in plastic but it doesn’t seem to matter. Marianne went down with it two days ago. Shirley’s looking like shit so they sent her home. Dr. Kaufmann just DFOd in the middle of a consult. Wake up and hear the shouting, the sound of flat-lining.

6 February

Feel like shit. Fever 1, Me 0.

7 February

Know I’m getting sick but no one gives a single solitary fuck. Everyone is sick. Jack came and sat down with me, felt my fever. Looked like he wanted to die. Said that some men are recovering, but not women and not children. Told me that the fever skyrocketed in pregnant women and we were at one hundred percent fetal mortality in delivery, nearly as high maternal death. Fell asleep with him holding me. Don’t think I can work tomorrow. Don’t think it will matter.

* * * * *

In the days when the world had not yet fallen, the screaming of sirens was constant. The structures that still held were the ones designed to cope with emergency and disaster, but none of them could work indefinitely. Desperation moved block by block, and people fought and fled. They died of the plague and they died of proximity to each other. When there weren’t enough people in charge of keeping the lights on, the cities went dark. When the sirens quit, the rules gave out. Some people had been waiting their whole lives to live lawlessly, and they were the first to take to the streets. Some people knew that would happen; they knew better than to open their doors when they heard cries of help. Others didn’t. What disease cannot do, people accomplish with astonishing ease.

* * * * *

She awoke in the hospital, on a cot in the nurse’s break room. There was no chart on her bed and her nametag was missing. The woman knew who she was and where she was, but everything else was gone.

Her mouth and throat felt like she hadn’t had a drink of water in days. It took her a while to get her bearings. She tried light switches and stared at machines that wouldn’t turn on, stupefied by their disobedience. She stopped at the first body she saw, checking for a pulse. She stopped at the second and the third before she got the idea. She ran out of the building, blundering into an emergency exit. No alarm sounded.

The sun was bright and bouncing off the fog that had just begun to rise over the bay. She walked in stark and rising panic out the door and over the blocks between the hospital and her apartment. She saw no one. No busses ran, no cars moved on the streets. The stop lights were dark. She remembered treating plague victims, hearing impossible rumors. She remembered her friends dying before she got sick. She knew what had happened, but it still made no sense to her.

She made it to her apartment and stripped off her scrubs. They were dirty, always dirty after a shift with blood and amniotic fluid and urine and everything the body can leak. These were stiff with filth, and she couldn’t remember how long she had been in them. She got out of her bra and underwear and climbed into the shower, trying to think straight. The water shot out of the showerhead ice-cold, and she frantically clawed at the knob to warm it up. The water lost pressure, then stopped running. She pushed and pulled, twisted every direction. She tried the tap in the sink. Nothing came.

Cold and naked, she walked to her kitchen. The bananas were black and the bread was green. She found a box of crackers and sat on the couch. She hit the button on the remote to try her TV, but it didn’t turn on. She sat staring at it anyway, shoveling crackers until the salt was too much. In the warm fridge she found a bottle of Gatorade and drained it, standing there with bare feet.

Her feet led her from the kitchen and stood in her living room. Her apartment was mostly below ground level and weak sunlight came streaming down from the long skinny windows above. She stood dumbly, looking at the floor, the silence pressing in on her ears.

“What the fuck? What the fuck?”

The question repeated quietly for a long time. The answer did not come.

She put on a pair of panties and an old t-shirt and climbed into bed. She burrowed down into her own smell, the most familiar and comforting place in the world, and she refused to think.

She slept for nearly a day. It was an hour or two before dawn when he woke her. He was in bed with her, his weight pushing down on the edges of the mattress and shifting her side to side. She stirred for a second and thought it was Jack, come home to her. She sat up, smiling, the whole thing forgotten for that one golden second before full consciousness took hold.

He pushed her back down by her shoulders and he was breathing hard. She knew everything at once, every awful thing.

Everyone was dead. This was not Jack. She was alone.

He let go of one shoulder to reach down and unzip. He moved the hand holding her down to her neck and pushed the crotch of her panties to one side with the other. He was crushing her throat, using his weight above her to keep her from rising or getting her breath. She kicked once, twice, and her ankles caught in her sheet. She knew that was wasted effort. She was clawing at his face with her hands and he barely seemed to notice. She couldn’t see him in the semidarkness. He was a shape, a weight, an intrusion she couldn’t do anything about.

He pushed against her, trying to force his way in. She turned her hips, pulling them back, twisting right and left, drawing her knees together. He swore and wrestled with her, pushing her legs back with his knees and leaning down more heavily on to her neck. Her vision was darkness and explosions as she gasped. She let go of his face and felt how weak her arms were getting as they fell. She bucked with her whole body, trying to twist sideways, get her knees under her. He felt her flexing and struggling like a cat and worked with her suddenly, turning her over on her belly and pushing down on the middle of her back.

He switched his legs to outside of hers in one jump, came down hard on her, and pushed against her again. She felt his breath on the back of her neck and his half-erection frustrating him. He pushed his uselessness against her dry, closed lips. He took his hands off her back to reach down to her ass to force her cheeks apart.

As soon as his weight was off her, she clawed desperately to her nightstand. She ripped the drawer open to the stop and banged her wrist against the side of it, reaching in. Her right hand found her pocketknife. She thumbed it open and flicked it full while he tried to pull her thighs back toward him. She pushed off the nightstand and knocked it over. Half-facing him, she swiped the knife in a full arc at arm’s length, still not really seeing. Shaking with panic and still starry-eyed from choking, she missed what she’d aimed for and caught his chin, slicing it open.

His hands flew to the wound, she could see a little of the whiteness of him with his face and hands together in the darkness. He made a strangled sound and swung at her suddenly with his right hand, punching her on her cheekbone. The punch only glanced, but her head still rocked back with it. He saw it and reached for her with both hands, his chin dribbling blood in a thin line. With both his hands down, she struck out again with the knife and this time she did not miss. The hook of the blade caught in his neck and she pulled it savagely across him with a huge angle at her shoulder. The knife cut through the skin, catching and ripping as she yanked it. His hands flew to his neck and she saw his blood, black in the low light, pumping out over his fingers.

He gurgled. She watched.

When he was no longer attacking her, her training took over. She pushed him back and applied pressure to his hands with her own. She thought about tying up the wound with a sheet as the blood washed over her hands and his together in rhythm. His face was all round black holes, staring up at her. The dark blood rushed out of him, staining her bed. She was covered in it. Her knife had fallen to the floor. She thought about her phone, realizing she had knocked it across the room when she’d sent the nightstand tipping over. Then she remembered it was useless.

She looked back at him, and the coursing of blood was getting weaker. His arms were growing slack and his choking sounds were fading. She pushed harder against the wound and remembered how he had held her down, just like this.

It was over quickly. His hands relaxed and slid away from his neck. She let go when he did, watched him go limp all over. She saw the gap in his throat, a ragged trench that leaked out slow blackness.

Her feet tangled when she tried to get out of the bed and she fell out of it instead. She tried to stand and her knee found her still-open knife on the floor. It made a tiny cut in her skin and she mechanically walked into the bathroom and found the peroxide in the cabinet by feel. She opened the white cap of the brown bottle and poured it out over the tiny cut in her knee until the bottle was empty. The bubbling, cold liquid ran down her leg on to the tile floor.

“Blood borne pathogens,” she said in a completely neutral tone of voice.

She found another bottle under the sink, casually knocking unwanted things out on to the floor. When she found it, she opened it and upended it over her chest. She had forgotten the tamper seal, and nothing came out.

“Oh.” She pinched the plastic half-circle with her right hand and pulled. Peroxide poured out and she ran it over her arms and neck, washing blood off her body. She poured it over her panties, soaking the crotch. It puddled pink and foaming on the floor. It soaked the carpet at the bathroom door. When she was finished, she put the cap back on the bottle and dropped it neatly into the bathroom trash.

Cold and dazed, she walked back out into her bedroom and tried not to look at the body. She slipped into a pair of jeans she found draped over a chair. She threw the wet shirt she had been wearing on the floor and pulled another from her closet. She put on a hoodie over it, then found a pair of socks and tied up her shoes. She walked back to her bed and pulled the sheet over the face she had never really seen.

Her hands found her cellphone on the floor and slipped it into the tight back pocket of her jeans. She closed her knife carefully and slipped it into a front pocket. She picked up her journal out of the wreck of her nightstand and shoved it down the front of her hoodie. She locked the door to her apartment and left with nothing in her hands.

The lone woman walked out onto the street and saw the orangey-pink in the east that meant the sun would rise soon. She walked up and down the hilly streets of San Francisco, not precisely in herself and not thinking. She came to a place she knew. It was a café she had come to a few times. She walked in, numb and cold, and sat on an old leather couch.

There was no one on the streets to hear her wailing. She sobbed and shook so hard she thought she would break. Her head throbbed and her throat ached and she pounded herself in the chest with both fists. She held her face and screamed and asked questions with no answers. She begged and apologized and raged.

When there was nothing left to say, she got quiet and pushed herself into the corner of the couch. She pulled her legs up close to her, knees tight together. She wrapped her arms around herself and pulled the hood over her face. She thought she might fall asleep, but she watched the sun rise, husked-out and raw. When it was full light, she got up stiffly and walked out the door.

She wandered into the Mission District without any idea where she was headed. The sidewalks were covered with broken glass and garbage, single shoes and the usual piles of city junk. In the street, cars were parked neatly in some places and rose up on the sidewalks in others. The road was choked here and there with accidents both minor and severe. She saw that some of the wrecked cars had corpses in them, including one pinned to a motorcycle trapped between two small cars. She tried to stop looking after that.

The Mission was always dirty, it was always derelict, but it had formerly been teeming with life. Alarming and empty now. The windows of the stores and restaurants were broken and there was no movement. Above the stores, windows to flats were hung with blankets and flags rather than curtains, looking as unkempt as ever but deadly silent. The only thing she could hear in the cold morning air was the flapping and cooing of pigeons, with the occasional shrill seagull. The city was without streetcars or hordes of people, without dogs barking or music pouring out of windows and the small radios carried by the homeless.

She smelled the sea and the sweet odor of rot from both food and dead bodies all around. The corners and alleys smelled like piss, maybe they always would. Block after block went by and she hesitated, thinking of traffic and signals and safety. She had to force herself to stop worrying about being hit by a car and start thinking what she should do if she saw another person. This was the first walk she had ever taken in this neighborhood that had not brought with it the smell of a dozen people smoking weed, the haze drifting from windows and bold passerby. Her senses were ringing the bell; the city was dead.

A different smell was beckoning to her. As she came to a corner, she could hear a little noise and she hid in the eave of a theatre, under the marquis, listening. Somewhere on the other side of the intersection, someone was cooking. And singing.

She stayed there as the smell grew stronger. She could smell garlic and mushrooms, she was sure. She heard the singing only in snatches, but the voice sounded high. She thought she should turn around and go the other way, and she fought with herself on that for a long time. In the end, hunger and simple curiosity won out. She came out cautiously and walked into the intersection. With a glance in all directions, she crossed diagonally away from a liquor store that stank like someone had smashed every bottle inside. The wind shifted and the aroma came again. Garlic and corn and cheese. Her stomach growled.

She came to the busted-out windows of an old Mexican restaurant with faded signs. The door stood open. She didn’t see anyone. She walked through, craning her neck toward the sound. The song was clearer now; it was old with lyrics in Spanish. The person singing was doing a pretty good impression of the dead singer. She came through a short door into the kitchen.

A tall dark-skinned man stood at a gas grill, cooking an assortment of pupusas and sweating. He turned toward her with a smile, then goggled at her with his mouth open.

“Who the hell are you?” His accent made the last word joo.

“I’m… I’m… that smells amazing. I didn’t mean to bust in on you. Are you…?” She stood half in the doorway, deciding whether to run. She didn’t know what she should ask. Are you dangerous? Are you gonna eat that? Terror and curiosity fought hunger and disorientation. She stood, unable to obey any of them.

He put the spatula down slowly. “Look, I just wanted to make some food. I don’t want any trouble. I’m waiting for my friend, Chicken. If this is your place, I’m sorry.”

“No, no it’s not my place. I’m from across town. I haven’t seen anybody else on the street.”

“You and me both, girl. Me and Chicken thought we were the last two motherfuckers on earth.”

She watched him closely. She knew he was gay. It was in everything, the way he stood in a long curve with his hips forward at the stove, the way he held his mouth when he called her ‘girl.’ It was in his delicate but deft hand as he flipped the pupusas. It was in the way he didn’t look her up and down or linger anywhere but her face. She knew and she knew him immediately. It was a snap judgment to make, but she had lived and worked with gay men in San Francisco her whole life. Most of her best friends had been gay men, especially since after twenty-five most of her female friends had disappeared down the rabbit hole of marriage and come out mothers on the other side. She relaxed a little and came all the way through the door.

“You don’t look like a looter,” he told her, turning his attention back to the food.

“I’m not. I was sick with whatever the fuck everyone had and woke up at UCSF. Where did everybody go?”

“You were at UCSF, you tell me. The news said everyone was dying, especially the ladies. Some pundit asshole was saying it was an extinction event and all the women would die.”

She leaned against the wall, staring at the food. “It was really contagious. Airborne. It appeared everywhere at once. I knew it was deadly, but there is nobody anywhere. I can’t get over it.”

He switched the gas off and piled pupusas on to paper plates. The plates were the cheap kind, so he stacked up four or five to support the weight of the food. “I’m Joe. My friend Chicken is out getting us water. The water is off everywhere. I can’t believe the fucking gas is still on.” He carried the plates out into the dining room and swept glass and balled-up napkins off the table.

“Might as well sit down, have something to eat.”

She sat opposite him in one of the mismatched chairs. “I’m Karen,” she said as she moved pupusas on to her plate with a plastic fork. He hadn’t offered his hand and neither did she. He went back to the kitchen and came back with four different kinds of hot sauce.

They skipped the rest of the introduction because they both wanted to eat. She was starving, her mouth flooding at the sight of hot food on her plate. She shoveled in huge bites, the melted cheese scalding the roof of her mouth.

She was not Karen. Karen had died a week ago, still wearing her nametag. He wasn’t going to ask for ID. She decided to be Karen for now.

He poured out dots of bright red sauce on to his own pile of food and shoveled just as fast. When they’d both finished a plate full, they slowed down. She took one more, he took two.

She poured green sauce over the pancake-like pupusa in front of her. “I can’t believe this is all still good. All the fresh food I had had gone bad. I think I was at the hospital for ten days, maybe more.”

He talked with his mouth full, but held his right hand in front of his face as he spoke. “Almost everything here was bad. All the meat was rotten and most of the cheese. I used to work here. There’s an old icebox they store the mushrooms and onions and garlic in and it seals tight. I thought it might be ok, but there was wrapped up masa and some cheese in there, too. Still good, ‘cause the cheese is dry. It’s my lucky day. I knew the gas was on, ‘cause we passed a couple gas leaks over on Van Ness.”

“My lucky day, too. I’m alive.” It hurt to swallow, but she meant it.

There was a sound of commotion in the back of the kitchen, and Joe popped up out of his chair.

“Chicken?”

“Joe, help me! I got caught!”

Joe ran to the back and Karen followed. Chicken turned out to be a tall scared-looking black kid, no more than twenty years old. His eyes were huge and rolling and his broad hands seemed to be holding him up in the doorway. His left leg was wrapped in razor wire. It wound in and out of his jeans and the denim was purple with blood in a couple of places.

“Shit,” Joe said as he stared.

Karen pushed him out of the way. She put her shoulder against Chicken’s body and pulled his long muscular arm over her shoulder. Together, they hobbled out of the kitchen out into the dining room. She helped him ease down onto the counter and pull his legs up after him. He reached for his injured leg and she caught his hands.

“Don’t pull, you might make it worse. Let me help you.”

“You a nurse? Who is this chick, Joe?”

“Karen. She just showed up.”

“I am a nurse, I worked at the medical center. I can help you.” She turned to Joe. “There’s a drug store on this block, isn’t there?”

He looked out the door, unsure. “I think so?”

She looked back at Chicken. “Is it safe to go out?”

“Nobody is after me.” He gritted his teeth and looked at his leg.

“Ok. Joe, run to that drug store, and I mean run. Bring me back peroxide, in the brown bottle. You know that, right?”

“I know what peroxide is, Jesus.” He looked more annoyed than scared.

“Okay, peroxide and gauze and an ace bandage. Go quick.”

He was out the door without another word.

She pulled her knife out of her pocket and opened without looking at it. She couldn’t remember if she had cleaned it or not. She decided it didn’t matter and started cutting at Chicken’s jeans. She thought to try to cut the wire out but realized it was a waste and cut the jeans around below the knee. She pulled at the hem and watched him. If the razor wire was caught in his skin, any movement would make him jump. He didn’t, so she pulled straight down.

There was a lot of blood, but the damage wasn’t that bad. He had a few deep cuts in the belly of his calf and one spot in his shin with a long slice of skin taken off, still hanging by a shred at the bottom. She pulled at it decisively and it popped off. Chicken yelped.

“Sorry, something was stuck to you.” In her experience, it was always better not to say that skin was what had been ripped off. “Where were you?”

“I was up in some apartments like a mile away. I was looking for water.”

She pulled his bloody sock and shoe off. “Joe told me. So what happened?”

“I was in this building with a bunch of flats and I was checking each one for bottled water. I got to this one in the middle and the door was open. I went straight for the kitchen and I found some glass bottles of Pellegrino and I started to load them up. This guy came screaming out of the bedroom. He covered in blood and looking real fucked up. He was holding like a shovel or like a little spade or something, I don’t know what it was but he scared the everfucking shit out of me. He block the door so I went out the window. I was hanging off a window ac, trying to drop to the awning underneath. I missed and hit the windowsill and got tangled up in this shit here. I roll down the awning and hit the ground running. Fucking like going to the gym in hell. Ran all the way back.”

Joe came pounding back in the door. “Here, I got it I got it I got it.” He swung a plastic shopping bag on to the counter where it banged. She pulled the peroxide out of it and opened it up.

“He’s ok, Joe,” she said evenly. It looks bad but most of the cuts are superficial. As long as it doesn’t get infected, he’ll be ok.” She poured peroxide over the skinned chunk of shin and he screeched through clenched teeth. Joe came around and grabbed his hand.

“I know it stings, I know.” She poured more over his leg, pushing the calf muscle to one side to make the cuts gap open and poured again. “Just remember, that sting is the shit that wants to kill you dying off. The sting is good. The sting will save you.”

Chicken gripped Joe’s hand tight.

“So you didn’t get any water?”

“No I didn’t get any water, bitch. I got back alive. Fuck.”

“Ok, sorry. Just checking. We’ll get some.”

“I want some new jeans, too. And shoes. And FUCK that hurts.”

“I know, I know. Almost done.” She flushed the cuts again and opened a package of gauze and used it to blot the wounds. Then she unrolled another and started to wrap it tight enough to hold but not too tight to walk in. When it was done up, she wrapped again with the ace bandage and used the tiny teeth in the closure butterflies to hold the whole thing together.

Chicken swung his legs off the counter. “Girl, you better be ready to feed me.” Karen stiffened but Joe ran to the table and brought back a stack of cooled pupusas and a bottle of hot sauce. Chicken held it in his lap and started to eat.

They stood around while he ate. Joe watched Chicken. Karen stared out the front door, thinking.

Chicken finished and set his plate aside. “Thank you, baby.” He snaked his neck around and kissed Joe on the cheek. Joe smiled. “We need to find a place with water and stay there for the night. And get some clothes. You coming?”

They both looked at her.

“Sure,” she said. She was better off with them than on her own, she decided. “Take it easy on that leg,” she said to Chicken. “We can walk slow.”

He rolled his eyes and hopped off the counter, then winced. “Ok,” he said warily. “We go slow for now.”

They walked at his pace, away from the direction that Karen had come. They checked out the drugstore Joe had been in and had a soda each, but the water was gone. They tried a boba shop and a row of restaurants. Syrups and toppings, bottles of ketchup and soy sauce. No water. By noon the fog had cleared and they were very thirsty.

“How the hell is there no water anywhere?” She was starting to feel crabby.

“The panic,” Joe said simply.

“The panic?”

“Yeah,” Chicken broke in. “Bad news freak people out, they panicking. They at the store, buying up toilet paper and water and guns, except they hardly any guns in San Francisco. Since the water been off, we been looking for water. Every day.”

She tried to do the math. How many days in the hospital? How many days sick and unconscious? How many days until the city fell into panic? How long since the power and water died? The last day she could remember waking up in her apartment with lights on, catching the bus, and going to work was back in January.

“What’s today?”

“Huh?” Joe looked at her like she was crazy.

“Do you guys know what today is? Like the date?”

Chicken snorted. “You gotta be somewhere? Come on, let’s try in here.”

They were at the door of an office building. The front door stood slightly ajar.

“Why here?” she asked.

“I got an idea.”

They went up the stairs, which were windowless and dark. They came out on to the second floor into a huge room full of cubicles. Sunlight flooded in from the glass walls. Chicken went to one end of the room, Joe and Karen followed his lead and spread out. Karen looked at desks she passed, hoping for a water bottle at a workstation. She saw dead plants hanging over the sides of their pots and pictures of children. She came to a dead end. From the other side, she heard Joe yelling.

“I got it!”

She jogged in the direction of his voice. Joe stood beside the office bathrooms. Standing between them was a nearly full water cooler, with a fat, upright blue five-gallon bottle. Joe had sunk to the floor and was filling a paper cup. Karen grabbed one right after him and got out of Chicken’s way when he hobbled around the nearest cubicle. They sat and drank cup after cup.

“Why are you called Chicken?” she asked when the silence had gone too long.

“I won a game once,” he said.

“A game of chicken?”

“Yeah.” He stared into his cup.

“Did the other guy die?”

His head snapped up. “No! He swerve out the way. I won his car. Did that a couple times and sold the cars. Made some money that way.”

“Oh. What did you do for a living, Joe?”

“Mostly I worked in restaurants. Cooking and cleaning type of shit. Sometimes I worked lights in theaters for shows. That’s where I met Chicken.”

“Yeah, I ran soundboards. We been dating like maybe three months before all the theaters were closed. Shit, I was pissed. But everybody was too sick to go on anyway.”

She remembered the theaters closing about a month ago. A temporary measure, the city said, to combat the worst flu season on record. It was hard to think that she hadn’t seen it coming then, but no one had.

“Have you guys seen many people since the panic died down? Besides shovel-man?”

“Some,” Joe said. “Seems like everybody died or left the city. But everybody is like, crazy.”

Chicken was nodding. “Every motherfucker got a gun or some shit. Everybody either act like they wanna kill you, or you gonna kill them. I couldn’t believe Joe let you in.” He wasn’t smiling.

“Yeah, but…” Joe looked guilty.

“Yeah but what,” she pressed him.

“I haven’t seen no girls. No women. No ladies. Cero mujeres. You the first woman I seen alive since I left my mama, and I know she was dying. I left her in Sac while I could still get home. I needed to find Chicken.” He leaned his head on Chicken’s shoulder.

“Are you guys going to stay in the city? Keep searching for water?”

Chicken shrugged and Joe got off him. “Why not? It’s our city. It’s mostly empty. Maybe we get a big house and all the water and food in the world.”

“Then what?”

“What do you mean?” Chicken looked at her blankly.

“No other people. No kids. No work to do. Just, what? Surviving?”

Chicken laughed a little and filled up another cup. “We don’t need other people. We were never gonna have kids. Living is work enough. And all we’ve ever done is survive. It might look different if you go to college and buy a house and do all that shit, but all we do is survive. Ain’t nothing changed. Just now there’s less competition.” He drained his cup.

She nodded. Yes, that’s true. No it isn’t. Wasn’t. Won’t be. Won’t be enough. Could I stay here? With them, or near them? Stay home, Jack might find me.

They fell asleep as soon as the sun started to set, curled up on the hard office carpeting, their bellies sloshing and full of water.

In the morning, they climbed to the next floor. One office had a kitchen full of shelf-stable snacks, all bright colors and preservatives. They ate these for breakfast and drank half the contents of another water cooler.

Even without working plumbing, they all felt compelled to use the bathrooms for their intended purpose. Karen sat in a stall with the weak diffused light from the open door slanting in under the stall dividers and pooling around her feet. She thought she’d never have to stand in line to do this again, and the feeling was emptiness.

Clumsily, they filled empty juice bottles and a handful of thermoses with the clean water from the cooler and left the office building in the afternoon. They all needed a change of clothes but couldn’t decide where to go.

“There’s a mall like ten blocks that way. We can just follow the tracks,” Karen said, pointing.

“There’s all the Chinese knockoff stores like right here,” said Joe, pointing away.

“Yeah but they might not have everything we need.”

“They’ll have everything we need,” Chicken said.

There’s me and there’s them. Don’t need them, but still…

“Fine,” Karen said turning away. “Guess we can meet-“

The explosion knocked them all flat down. Chicken had fallen almost on his face and came up with his lips bloody. Joe was scratched up and down both arms from grinding against the pavement. Karen pushed up on her palms and felt the wave of heat on her face.

Joe was screaming but she heard nothing but a high-pitched whine.

“THE FUCKING GAS!” He was screaming it over and over, but she had to read his lips to know it. Chicken grabbed Joe and ran, pulling him along, stumbling in huge strides away from the blast.

Karen looked back over her shoulder and saw a wall of flame covering one of the buildings facing her, with gouts of fire spilling out of the lower windows where gas must have pooled before a spark ignited it. She scrambled up and ran after the men, grabbing her water bottle at the last second. She found them sheltering on the cool side of a shaded brick building. She leaned her back against the wall and drank long and deep from her bottle. When she brought it back down, she could see they were trying to talk but nobody could hear. Gesturing gave way to scratching the brick surface of the wall with a pebble.

They argued whether they were safer indoors or outdoors, whether to head for the waterfront or continue north of the peninsula. Chicken wrote out that GAS STINKS twice and then underlined it. He was sure they’d be safe if they didn’t smell it. But they hadn’t smelled it back in the street.

Karen scratched out INSIDE BETTER and then MALL?? PROB NO GAS IN MALL.

They shrugged and followed her. They walked the whole way deaf and shell-shocked, unable to hear one another.

The mall had been boarded up against looters, but the boards had been pulled loose by someone before them. It was lit inside by the skylights, but the light didn’t reach into the stores. They split up to find clothes, frustrated and tired of screaming and gesturing at each other.

DON’T GET LOST, Joe scratched into a movie poster on the wall. She gave him a thumbs-up and walked away.

Karen got a sturdy backpack at a store that sold clothes for teenage girls. She passed by the mannequins with their high, small breasts and exposed stretches of belly and thigh and felt a pang of something. Loss or disappointment, she couldn’t tell. She left that store and headed to another. None of the women’s clothes she looked at seemed durable enough. She didn’t care how she looked, she just wanted clean clothes that would stand up to what she would have to do. She thought back to her stack of scrubs, always ready to go, but they weren’t for all terrain travel, either. She loaded up wads of clean underwear in her size and got a couple of sports bras. She put one on and stuck the rest in the bag. She hadn’t had a bra on in days and she welcomed the feeling of containment and protection.

She ended up at a store for young men and found pants and shirts that fit. She put her own hoodie back on, then decided against it and pulled a thicker one off a wall display. She sat down and brushed out her hair at the accessories table before braiding it into a long plait that hung down her back. She had always worn her hair in braids at work, so much that when work friends saw her at a party she knew they’d be shocked to see it down. It was long and dark and always wavy, curly on a humid day. She pulled on a baseball cap and threaded her braid through the space above the snaps in the back. She looked in the mirror and cringed a little.

Her reflection looked alarmingly tired. Her collarbones stood up and the skin under her eyes looked too thin. She touched the spot where she’d been punched, thinking it looked a little puffy. It was sore, but not bruised. She hadn’t had makeup on in a long time and she was shocked at how unfeminine she appeared. Dehydration showed itself in her lips and she stuffed a pocket full of chapstick at the counter. The thing that bothered her most was her eyes. Her small brown eyes, where she always believed people could see who she really was if they looked close enough. They looked afraid. She looked pale, sick, hurt, and afraid. She squared her shoulders and stood up straight. She watched her reflection do it, and she tried a smile. It didn’t come together the way it should have. She looked like prey, like a mark. She’d seen that look before on women who came to the ER, bleeding from one end or the other. Nobody chooses to be a victim, but after a lifetime of practice it just happens. She wanted that look off her, now. She’d have to work on it. For a half a second, she thought of her daily professional look; a quick dash of mascara and concealer, but she couldn’t face the absurdity of it. She applied a thick coat of chapstick, working it in, stretching her lips over her teeth to crack the dry places and let the moisture in.

She came out feeling better, slinging the pack over her shoulder. She walked down toward the end of the building and saw there was a Starbucks near the boarded-up door. As she walked toward it, she tried snapping her fingers beside her ears. The right side heard nothing, but the left picked up the snap as though it was happening under water. She hoped the damage was temporary.

The coffee shop cold case was all but untouched. She sat down and drank a whole bottle of water and one of the shelf-stable coffee drinks. It was room temperature, but tasted great to her. They hadn’t agreed on a place to meet up again so she waited. When a little time had passed, she loaded up all of the fruit and nut bars and cookies from the register in her bag, took all the water and another coffee and started back. She stopped at the central staircase and looked around. She was thinking about loading her bag with the basics for first aid when she saw them.

Out of the corner of her eye, they might have been Joe and Chicken. She turned to look and saw they were four instead of two. She froze when they spotted her. One of them pointed at her and got the attention of the man next to him by swatting him backhanded on the chest. She couldn’t hear a word, but their mouths were moving. One of them dropped a length of chain he had coiled around his hand. They broke into a run headed straight toward her.

She didn’t understand what she was seeing, but instinct made her run. She was on the bottom level of the mall where the doors lead into the subway. The ground was two floors up. She took the spiral stairs two and three at a time, not stopping to look back. At the third level, she tore around a kiosk toward the door. She knew she’d have to stop to claw her way out past the boards. She looked over her shoulder and saw Joe and Chicken just steps behind. She half-heard them screaming, “GO! GO!”

She thumped the plywood with her shoulder twice before the nails popped out. The three of them slid through and the other four men followed. They ran around the corner together and Chicken flipped open a dumpster. Joe and Karen jumped in and Chicken followed nimbly, pulling the lid down on them. They waited.

Trying to breathe silently without being able to hear yourself is impossible. Karen stifled the urge to wipe the sweat off her face or change her position at all. Chicken held on to Joe with both hands, as if to hold him still. Joe held his own mouth.

They crouched there, not daring to move, for a long time. Chicken finally came up a tiny bit, pushing the lid of the dumpster with his head. He turned his neck slowly, checking both directions. Finally he stood up and flung the lid back.

“They gone. They ain’t nobody out here.” They couldn’t hear him, but they saw it in his shoulder dropping down.

Joe trembled all over from the adrenaline. When he stood up his knees creaked. He came out and stood beside Chicken. Karen climbed out on her own.

“What in the hell was that all about,” she bellowed toward them, raising both hands and looking bewildered.

Chicken’s head swiveled around to face her, ugly with rage. “That was about YOU. They wanted YOU. They saw you a girl and they decided they want to take you with them, so they run you down. We heard the noise and came running out and they decided we’re defending you, so they gonna kill us. We don’t need this shit.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Joe started to speak, but Chicken cut him off. “Fucking gas explodes whatever, that ain’t your fault. And it ain’t your fault you a female. But you are gonna make trouble for us, and we don’t need you. I seen this shit coming when I seen no women. We ain’t gonna die defending you. You gotta go.”

“Look, I can defend myself. You won’t have to-“

“Those guys would have acted tough, maybe made us leave the mall. They would have had no fight if they didn’t see you. You too rare. We can’t do this. I’m sorry. You gotta go. We gotta go. This ain’t gonna work.”

Only just met them so how can they break my heart? How does this ache like an abandoned child?

“Chicken, I probably saved your life. If that cut had gotten infected—“

“And we probably saved yours. We’re even.” He was already turning away.

Joe shrugged in that way that meant it wasn’t up to him. He turned with Chicken’s arm around his neck and they walked away.

Alone, she looked around in every direction and there was no reason to go in any of them. No one waited at the end of any road, no purpose or burden came with any choice. It was like falling through something with no bottom.

In the end, she picked a street and started to walk. She strained her ringing ears to hear anyone coming behind her, but she looked over her shoulder every few paces. She thought about how Joe and Chicken had looked in their clothes, and how she looked different. Simple differences, small changes. It was the beginning of a plan.