The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Chapter Three

October

Fucking cold. Started trying on the winter gear I found. Got good wool socks and boots, a couple of sweaters and a ski parka filled with down. Nixed the one that fit me better- it was pink. Pink = girl. Any kindergartner knows that. Everything is baggy except the boots. Was so relieved that they fit I haven’t had them off in days. Had to strip off my compression vest and wash it. Standing there, topless and scrubbing this thing felt so strange. Me = not me. My breasts for the first time in ages. Washed them up with my hands and got lost in the sensuousness of it. My tattoo. Like returning to an old lover I left years ago. Can’t feel like myself. Finally put it back on when it dried. Felt better dressed. Not me = me. Me not now me then me new. Trimmed my hair again, not shaving it in this cold. Combed it and looked in the mirror. Too clean. Thought about it. Tried to stick some of the hair clippings to my face = doesn’t work at all. Used some makeup I found in one of the bathrooms with a sponge to give myself a 5 o’clock shadow. Not gonna fool anyone up close. Distance + hat = maybe?

Bitch I am a man. Females. Talk too much. Quit crying. So emotional. Be a man. Man up. Nut up. Jumpshot gunshot cumshot moneyshot. Posing but not to be sexy. Scare me. Lean a little forward. Invade my space. Quit crying. Give you something to cry about.

Back to the map again today. Have to look seriously at staying here for the winter. Don’t want to try and fight my way through snow, but that’s a long time from now. Part of the problem = don’t know where I’m going. Or what the point is of going anywhere. Going north seems very safe, but only because of the exodus to the south. Colder still and up against the snow = keeps people away. Growing food if I ever get past raiding = all but impossible. Expiration date of body > expiration date of canned tuna. Know when I get there. Maybe just stay here.

December

Christmas used to be the best time. Didn’t celebrate it, but it cheered almost everyone up. People wore Christmas scrubs and the whole hospital was decorated- almost as much as the stores. Miss Christmas movies and the baked goods. Shit. Baked goods. Fudge and cookies and Christmas cake. Chocolate everything. Rice krispie treats. Nuts and rum balls and brittle and cinnamon rolls in the morning. Donuts. Lonely lonesome only solo alone.

Food holding out just fine, but it sure isn’t Christmas. Kill for two hours with a DVD player and a slice of cake. Five minutes of the internet. Boredom is the killing thing. Haven’t read all the books here yet, but the day will come. Need more candles. Or a lantern. Something. These tea lights are almost gone. Don’t want to raid in the cold, but there’s no other way. Need more light.

Three days later and found = shit. 0 lanterns, 0 candles 0 boxes of matches. Went as far as the house where the men were camped out. Lots of porn and food and good knives. Nothing for light, though. Exhausted cold desperately want a fire. A few of the houses = good wood piles.

December almost January winter solstice? Days so short

Broke down and started lighting fires. Put out at dawn BUT burn all night = make a difference to my sense of well-being that cannot be overrated. Light from fire = incredible to read by, sound of the crackle = voice. Sleeping in front of it like an old dog. Last lighter is holding out, but have to find a replacement soon.

Place feels almost like home. Got everything set up for me. Putting the garbage out back and pissing outside. Way those guys trashed that house they can’t have been meaning to stay.

At least they had each other.

Lone wolf. Lone ranger. Cowboy. Work alone. Great savior. Magic man. Got your magic right here. Don’t need anybody. Fine by me. Fine.

2 January

Somewhere around the first of the year. New Year’s, if anyone is keeping track. Clock calendar bullshit bullshit time. Punch the clock. Time to think about things.

Haven’t seen a live dog or cat since the city. Remember seeing cats eating the dead. No dogs. Everyone in the city had a stupid little pug or poodle or designer cross-breed. Saw none at all. Maybe they got the fever, too? Cats 1 Dogs 0.

Seen no deer. This seems like the kind of place that would have deer, but there’s no trace of them. Seen birds though. Thousands of birds. If I see geese when it warms up, going to try and shoot some. Fish in the lake. Coming this way = valley = should have seen cows, or smelled them. Didn’t, but maybe I just missed them? Raids = 0 rats. Bugs of all kinds no rodents. Maybe plague = most mammals?

Probably twenty five live men since the hospital. Mostly in groups. Three live women: that woman with her daughter in the city, and Jenna. Also me. News said women and children were much more susceptible to the disease, saw that with my own eyes. Didn’t put a number on it, but from the hospital = probably ten to one. Saw no children recover. Saw maybe one (?) woman get better before I got sick = Dr. Godey. Government started evacuating the ones that did get better. No live children born to women with the disease + children of uninfected women died within hours of birth=0 kids. Lot of talk about that with the lab crowd.

Have to face the possibility that almost everyone in this country died. Haven’t seen military, police, or any aircraft in more than a year. No law = no government anywhere. No power no water. Went to sleep and the world was dying >>> woke up and it was dead and gone. Remember turning on my phone when I came to. Told me there was no network, no hospital Wi-Fi, and its battery was almost dead. Had about a thousand text messages. Scrolled through looking for one from my family, from Jack, but most of them made no sense. Questions = can’t answer. Last few texts from Twitter were awful. Suicide tweets >>> broad accusations = conspiracy and germ warfare. Fucking civil defense message system notified = martial law in effect = stay indoors. White House tweeted: everyone should remain calm that help is on the way. My battery dead.

Still have it. Carrying a square chunk of glass and plastic = literally good for 00000. Don’t know why. Can’t leave it behind.

Remember living in San Francisco, the carnival feeling of FUCKING STOP FUCKING STOP THIS IS WORTHLESS.

Begin again.

Jack.

His name was John, but he was Jack to everybody but his mother. So pretentious. So silly. So much like me. Wish he was here with me. Wish I knew he lived through it. Maybe he’s out there somewhere in Texas, treating wounds. Jack = cowboy who lives forever.

Assume that a huge percentage of the population died off, then another percentage died off right after. People who were already too sick or injured to travel, people dying of injuries, infection, untreated cuts and broken bones. Whatever women are left out there having dead babies are probably dying too, from the fever, from lack of care and infection. Killed by the men who hold them, on whatever terms. Jenna made it through though. Maybe not too many are dying, but I don’t think there are a lot of women left. Have enough injections for a thousand women. If I ever see any.

So is that the mission now? Angel of birth control, out to stop the crop of dead babies before it starts? Got the morning after pill, but I doubt I’ll get to use it on anyone. Wish I could get some RU486. Have the tools to do a D&C if I meet anyone who needs to abort. Can implant an IUD, but passed them over at the university. Too risky without being able to sterilize. Guess this is what can I do. Can make it easier. Can’t fix it. Nobody can. Not that different from what I used to do. Every day I remember what Chicken said, = nothing to do now but survive. Doing that now, but it’s not the only thing. Can’t be. Just gotten to the point where it feels too hard to keep trying. Every woman in labor says she can’t do it. Couldn’t stop what was happening, but I could make it easier. All the same.

Still a midwife. Thing being born is the world. New ugly baby world.

Mission mission mission impossible so stupid FOR WHAT? Have a purpose. Guess that is the reason to go on. Pathetic. Define me. Always did always will. I AM I AM I AM MY JOB. Punch in punch out sign your name. THUMBPRINT here. Your name your name your name. Spin straw into gold bring babies back from the dead arise from the morgue and walk but never tell never tell never tell anything nothing and I am nobody. Nemo. Nothing. A name is what you have for other people. Have nothing be nothing call my name what is the echo of silence.

Get a hold get a hold get a hold right now. Find the center and hold. Hold.

* * * * *

She gave herself the luxury of a few days of madness. They were dark and deep and held in them the wreck of the entirety of civilization. It crumbles in the individual as it does in the world. There are battles and accidents, there are collapses and plagues. There is silence only when one side wins or everyone has died.

March around Equinox

Time to go. Winter spun out forever. Ate everything in the house down to the last box of stale graham crackers. Saved a few cans of soup and baby food for my pack before only the stuff I hate was left. Read every book in that neighborhood. Put on all the weight I can, and my biceps look so developed = wish I could go sleeveless to show everyone how manly I am. Remember the first lady used to have those incredible arms. Past that. Too big, too round for a sleeveless dress. Mannish. Perfect.

Bathed and slept. Rigged up a kind of holster system out of bed sheets. Hope to do better in a place where guns were a bigger deal. Know guns are cleaned out of every store, but maybe some leather holsters are still there. Cut my hair and brushed my beard on again. Early spring = tulips already out by the lake. Got the motorcycle out, oiled it up everywhere the pieces move, filled the gas tank and strapped a gas container to the back. Out in the driveway = can see it.

Place has been great. Holds part of me, now and always. Only had to kill. Didn’t have to. Did. Can’t think about that. Glad I waited through the winter. Feel strong and ready to travel. Picked out a route that I think won’t be too hard.

May

Exhausted. Wasted. Sick. Tired. Raining = nonstop. Seen no one for months. Rode the bike until I ran out of gas and couldn’t find any anywhere. Walked for miles and miles, had to raid new shoes twice. Haven’t been dry since I left the lake house. Haven’t eaten in two days = got an upper respiratory infection, won’t die. I live you die short lifespan motherfucker I outlive you. I win. In a barn now, as dry as I can get, taking antibiotics and drinking rainwater. Last entry is fucking sickening. Was so sunny side sure it was going to be a picnic out here. Hate everything. Can barely breathe. Going to sleep as long as I can and see if I can get better. Aspirin. Gun in my hand.

Don’t know how many days it’s been. Fever is gone = woke up starving and dehydrated. Drank all the water I could, but had to go raiding for something to eat. Old farmhouse next to this barn had a can of peeled tomatoes under the stairs of the cellar = delicious. Have a rash and a raging yeast infection = fucking antibiotics but bug is dead. Need a water filter. Water = probably how I got sick.

Map = I’m in Bumblefuck Nowhere, east Oregon. All scrub out here. Billion birds of prey but I don’t think they’re having a lot of luck besides lizards. Sat out in the sun for an hour, stacking up rocks like they teach boy scouts to do, except don’t know the code. She went thattaway. Tracker and tracked.

Walking for days. Wake up, walk all day. Eat what there is to eat. Lie down in the open and pass out at dusk. Haven’t seen a predator or a squirrel. Only the carrion birds and bugs. Not worried about an animal. Can’t give a shit about people. Too tired.

Walked for two weeks. Very hungry. Came to a road and followed it, probability be damned. Ran into a gas station, not cleaned out. Sat on the floor and ate about sixty-four handi snacks and drank a gallon of some sugary shit that still had a seal on it. Packed up all the jerky and chips and dried apricots my bag would hold. Gave myself another haircut in the bathroom after pulling a dead man off the toilet. Used his body to prop the door open. For light. Everything stinks, but at least I’m not starving anymore. The road signs say there’s a town up ahead. Going for it.

June

Town = McDermitt, apparently. Sort of a town. There’s an airport. Thought very seriously about trying to fly a plane. Terrible idea = die if I did it. But very tempting. Staying in a saloon. Eating a lot of nuts and pretzels = haven’t had good luck. Try houses later this week and see if I can scare up something better.

Turned down a lot of dented cans. Not worth getting sick over. Found dried soup mix, some MREs, and a lot of green beans. It’ll do. In one of the houses, found a note painted on the wall, in huge letters somebody did with a brush.

THE MESSAGE OF CARTER

THE YEAR OF THE DYING

AS SCRIBED BY THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE

HAVE GONE TO CALIFORNIA

TAKING RT 101 SOUTH THROUGH SF TO LA

THE BABY IS ALIVE AND WITH ME

FOLLOW US IF YOU CAN

MORE SIGNS ON THE WAY

CARTER

Stared at that for a long time. The baby is alive. With me. Alive. Carter. Wtf Carter? What if he left with a newborn in the short interim between birth and death? What if he didn’t know?

What if he actually has a live baby?

Upstairs = wreck of a bloody birth, but no body. Crusty scissors on the floor. Everything soaked with blood gone black. The baby is alive and with me. Ok.

Kitchen was bare except for a can of water chestnuts and another of beets. Packed up both and kept moving. Meet Carter = follow him? Take care of the baby? Figure me out?

Don’t know.

Late June

Barely got away that time. Met some people out in the road in McDermitt. I came around the corner and there they were, with hardly a second to react. Hands = free = on my guns= always. Fully dressed and dirty. Five men crouching in the street. Two women on leashes stood, staring. Never forget it as long as I live. As dirty as rescue dogs. Same look in the eye.

* * * * *

“What the fuck?” One man popped up, pulling a gun at his hip. She was just as fast and she had one on him.

A taller man stood up with a machete pulled out smoothly from a strap at his back. “Hey now. Hey now.”

“I don’t want any trouble,” she said loudly. She stared at the leashed women. One was about forty, topless and with a bad implant job. The other was in her twenties, naked, with scabby knees.

The tall guy stepped up to block her view of them. “Neither do we, stranger. Just passing through.”

“Me too,” she said. “Though, I’ll trade if you guys can be cool.”

The tall one put his machete back in its sheath and stepped up with his hand extended like he was gonna sell her a car. “I’m Aaron. These guys are Jimmy, Ethan, Manny, and Chuck.” They nodded to her. She looked around. White. Black. Asian. The rainbow fucking coalition. All bigger than me. One or two guns, lots of knives. One baseball bat that she could see. She sunk inside. She shouldn’t have offered to trade.

Too many. Shouldn’t be here and this is too many.

“I’m Carl.”

“Carl. What have you got to trade?” Aaron smiled a little and advanced on her.

She put her hand out and waited for Manny to holster his gun. She put hers away slowly. “Food. Medicine. A little booze. Stale cigarettes. Medical attention if any of you guys need it.”

“Guns?” That was from Manny.

She shook her head. “Just mine. Guns are hard to find these days. I know where there’s a bunch of antibiotics and basic medical supplies, though.”

The men exchanged a glance. Aaron spoke first. “What have you got?”

“Penicillin. Ampicillin. Erythromycin. Good stuff. Plus a wound care kit.” She waited a beat and watched their faces. “Codeine. Morphine. Fentanyl. Hard stuff.” She had more of it than she would ever use before it expired. She saw a few perk up at the mention of the opiates.

“And what do you want?”

“Your girls.” She said it flatly, without hesitation. They knew what she wanted. They weren’t showing anything else.

Ethan whined at Aaron. “Let him have the old one. Fucking Roxanne. Not Melissa.”

Roxanne, the older one, blanched.

Chains. Fuck me sideways. Jenna was one thing. I can’t walk away from this. Too many of them. Not a hero.

“I want both. Half an hour each, private. For that, you get a selection of everything.”

Aaron smiled a little. “Both is too much. You only need one to get the job done.”

She smiled back at him. “Maybe for you. But I haven’t seen a girl in a long while. I want both. You’ll get them back in one piece.”

Ethan again. “Shit we can find our own drugs. We did before, and this skinny fuck did. We don’t need this.”

“Well, if you’re not interested, I’ll be going.” She shouldered up her bag and made as if to leave.

Aaron took one more step. She was tense all over and trying not to show it. “You alone?”

“Nah.” She said it lightly, trying not to sound scared. “The other guys are back at the base, looking out. We just don’t have any women.”

“You gonna bring the other guys to the party?” He was watching her very closely.

Secure. Totally secure. A little selfish.

“No, fuck them. I don’t want a gang bang.”

“Why don’t you ditch them and come with us, then. We could use another armed man. And we’ve got two girls. You’re a good search man, obviously. You’ve got medical skills? His eyebrows went up.

“Army medic. Iraq. Four years.”

“See? You’d be a good member of our team.”

“Where you headed?” She knew the answer.

“South. We heard there was almost no plague death in Central America. Lots more women down there.”

Lots of women. Also milk and honey and the streets are paved with gold.

“Yeah, I heard that too. I like my group though. Thanks.”

“Suit yourself. So where’s this ton of drugs?”

“Back at camp. I’d have to go get it and come back and meet you here. Take me maybe an hour.”

“Alright. See you when you get back.”

She walked away slowly, not wanting to turn her back on them. They were silent while she left. She walked until she knew they couldn’t see her, then ran. She ran around blocks and zigzagged until she almost got lost. She found the saloon again and stood panting, gulping water. She went down into the cellar where she had stowed her pack. She had caught her breath and filled up a bag with a handful of everything. When she came up the ladder, the five men were there, with another guy she hadn’t seen.

Damn it.

Aaron looked at her like the devil with a soul to collect. “This is Archie. Our spotter. He was up on a rooftop when you split. Looks like you’re all alone after all.”

She stared him down. “They’re all out raiding,” she said.

Breathe slow, talk low. Don’t look around, stare right at Aaron. I can still get through this.

“Sure they are. So we’re gonna take what we want and then be on our way.”

A few beats of silence while she thought about it. Manny and Archie had guns drawn on her, but the two of them stood almost together and not ten feet away. Nobody else had shown a gun. If she let them get close to her, she knew what would happen. They’d take her guns and pat her down. They’d realize what she was and she’d end up on a leash. They wouldn’t kill her as long as they figured it out first. She held that thought up to the light and examined it.

Nope.

She dropped the bag to the floor and the sound was an anticlimactic thud. On the other side of the bar, inches away, Aaron pulled his machete. She drew both guns and fired, not really seeing, toward where the two armed men had been. She shot Aaron in the face, close up, as he tried to bring the machete down. She flinched back from the spray of blood, stumbling. She missed Chuck and hit his baseball bat, he dropped what was left of it and ran. She fired again and again, making holes in people, aiming without eyes. She hit one of them in the thigh and he went down, screaming. She winged and grazed and cut them up more than anything. Kept it up until nothing moved. The two who had guns had shot at her and missed, but she never knew it. Her ears rang. She went outside, deaf and still holding her guns up. Chuck was out there, trying to drag both women toward a bicycle, but they were both fighting him. He had his back to the door.

“Drop it.”

He looked over his shoulder at her, still holding both leashes. Up closer, she could see they were made of heavy chain with padlocks at the neck. The women looked chafed and sore where the chain rubbed. There was no way they’d get out of them.

“Fuck you.”

“I’m holding the gun, asshole. Drop it.” She cocked back the hammer on her revolver for good measure. Her hands were shaking. It was a punk line. She didn’t know why she said that, why she cocked it. She was going to kill him anyway. She drew it out for no reason.

He turned around and tensed up, to run or pull them in to shield him. She couldn’t tell what his plan was. She shot him in the back of the head with the newer gun. His skull caved in and blood came down between his shoulder blades. He collapsed forward with the chains wrapped around his forearms. Melissa, the younger one, fell back on her ass with the pull on her chain. Roxanne stayed upright, staring at the dead man.

They stayed like that for a minute. It was all so absurd that she couldn’t comprehend it. She had just shot six men in a saloon. She was a cowboy. She felt nothing. Not remorse, not elation. She was a little sick, a little shocked, but didn’t really feel bad. Her ears hurt, her heart did not. She put her guns away and walked forward to yank the chains out of the dead man’s hand. Once they were loose, she thought the two of them might run. They didn’t. They stood there dumbly.

She turned to Roxanne. “Do you know which one had the keys?”

The leashed woman looked at her as though she had to translate what had been said. “Aaron,” she said after a minute. “On his belt.”

She walked back into the saloon and found Aaron crumpled up on the floor. She reached into the crumple and felt around for a key ring. She found it, but it took her a minute to work the carabiner free and get them out. She walked back into the sunlight. Melissa was still sitting on the ground, but she had started to cry. The cowboy walked over to her first. Melissa flinched away from her, but she got the key into the lock. The chains slid off the girl and she sat there, naked. She walked over to Roxanne and did the same. She immediately rubbed her neck. They stood there for a minute, deciding.

“If you guys want to come inside, I’ve got food. And I bet we can find some clothes.”

Roxanne looked at her sharply. “So, what? We’re yours now?”

The cowboy kicked the chains at her feet and they rattled a little. “No. You’re free. You can go wherever you want. I just thought you’d have a better chance of getting somewhere if you ate and put some clothes on.”

Melissa still sat on the ground, crying. She walked over to face her.

“Hey. You hungry?”

Melissa shook her head.

“You want a shirt?

She nodded, sniffling.

She sat them down with bottles of water and went to the nearest houses where she had been raiding. She came back with a bottle of olives, a can of peaches, and a pile of women’s clothes. The women were exactly where she had left them. The water was gone. She laid everything in front of them and went in for more. The idea of staying in the saloon that night had just about died. She wasn’t going to haul the bodies out, and they couldn’t sleep with the bodies in there. She grabbed her gear and a case of water. She emerged again to find they had both gotten dressed. Melissa was trying on shoes.

Roxanne was sitting up with her arms crossed.

“I found the best I could. Some of it probably doesn’t fit well, but you can hope for better if you raid a store or a mall.” She looked at her under the brim of her hat. Roxanne had a stony quality about her face.

“Have you got any cigarettes?”

She rummaged in the outer pockets in her bag. She knew she still had some. “They’re gonna be stale as hell.”

“I don’t care.”

She handed Roxanne a book of matches from the saloon and she lit up a menthol and inhaled deeply like a lifelong smoker. She watched the cowboy the whole time.

Melissa finally spoke up. “Where are we?”

“In Oregon, right on the border with Nevada.”

“Wow.”

“Where did you come from? How did you guys get here?”

Melissa answered first. “I’m from Michigan. I was traveling with my boyfriend, just outside of Detroit. Aaron and some other guys shot him and came and took me. We mostly drove here, but we walked some and rode bikes. I’ve been on a leash since Vegas.”

“That’s where they found me.” Roxanne was smoking hard and fast now, lighting up a second one. “I was with Nettie. Annette. We worked together. She got away. I was tased and I woke up with the chains on and nothing else.”

“Are either one of you pregnant?”

The two freed women exchanged a glance. “No,” Roxanne said. “The other girl was. Shawna. She died during the birth and the baby didn’t make it. That was last winter.”

“Are you having regular periods?”

They both looked at her.

“You’re still gonna try and fuck one of us?” Melissa said it with utter disgust.

“Nope. I’m a doctor. I’m trying to help you out.”

“She said she had medical experience, Melissa, remember? When she was negotiating.” Roxanne looked at the other woman speculatively.

“Oh. You knew?”

Roxanne laughed a dry little laugh that was mostly smoke. “Working in Vegas I have seen every kind of impersonator on the planet, honey. I know a drag king when I see one. You’re good. I’m not surprised the guys bought it. But you don’t fool me.”

Her hat came off. Cowboy no longer. “Well, good. So, periods? Any infections? Injuries? Chance you’re pregnant now?”

Roxanne shook her head, inhaling. “Hysterectomy. It saved me a lot of trouble, back in the day. I got a constant UTI from that bunch of dicks that we were with. But I think that’s it.”

Melissa was thinking, with her brow scrunched up. “I think I had my period this month. Pretty recently. I’m all torn up, though. It burns when I pee. It aches all the time.”

After they ate, she dosed them both with antibiotics and painkillers. She explained the dosage to them and gave them each a full run.

“Whatever happens, where ever you go, make sure you take the whole run.” They finished off the night with a bottle of cranberry juice from the bar and laid down to sleep in an ugly tract house.

In the morning, she told them both to watch for a pack. Roxanne found hers right away, a high school kid’s backpack with a chest strap around the front. It spanned across her ridiculous implants, making them even more prominent.

Melissa searched listlessly, halfheartedly, before giving up.

When the three stopped to rest on an old porch swing and Roxanne had wandered away, she asked Melissa if she wanted a shot.

“Just in case you get… caught again. It’ll keep you from getting pregnant and going out like Shawna did.”

She stared with big dark eyes. They were empty.

“Have you got anything that will just kill me? Like a painless injection and I’ll go to sleep? Like a dog?”

“What?”

“I just want to die. I don’t want any more of this. I’ll just get caught by some other band of dicks who’ll use me as a human blowjob dispenser. Eventually they’ll kill me or I’ll starve to death. There’s no reason to continue with this. Like a lot of morphine, maybe? Something peaceful? I don’t want to be shot.”

“No… look… there’s no reason to die, either. You’re ok, in one piece, and you’re recovering from what was done to you. That won’t happen again.”

“It will. Yes it will. There are no women left. Maybe a handful of us. Eventually we’ll get used up. I’ll get captured again. It’s all men out there now.”

“Yeah, but they’re not all like that.”

“Maybe they didn’t used to be. What else is there, now?”

They sat in silence for a minute. “Look. I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want you to kill yourself. But it’s your choice. What I’m offering is a load off your mind, just in case… in case you meet a guy you like. Do you want it or not?”

“Sure,” she shrugged. She gave Melissa the shot, and a few morning after pills for her pack, when she found one.

Roxanne came back with a pack for Melissa. It was a hideous flowered backpack. Melissa put her pills in it, but wasn’t interested in gathering supplies. She ate diffidently and seemed eager to go to sleep.

* * * * *

Slept with my arms wrapped around my medkit. Could have killed herself with any number of things in it, but she didn’t. Morning = Melissa just gone. Now we are two. Swing swing bang bang drink poison = win the game.

* * * * *

Roxanne sat up, blinking. “Where the hell did she go?”

She had been up for a while, staring at Melissa’s abandoned pack and shoes. “I dunno, but I don’t think she’s coming back.” She didn’t want to look for Melissa. She didn’t want to find the girl hanging in a garage or slit open in a bathtub. Melissa had made her choice.

“So, do you want to come with me?”

Roxanne dragged on her cigarette. “Who the hell are you, drag king?”

“Call me Ishmael.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m Alex.”

“Where are you going, Alex?”

“North,” she said. “East. Away from where everyone else is heading.”

“They’re all following that radio broadcast.”

She looked up, her throat suddenly very tight. “What radio broadcast?”

“The one in Spanish. I didn’t understand it, but some of the guys did. You got a radio?”

She didn’t, but they found a car with enough battery left to turn one on. Roxanne sat in the passenger seat and tuned it in carefully, finding a very narrow signal.

“…of the Republic of Costa Rica. We have established a survivors colony in our sovereign nation where all those who lived through the plague may come to live in peace. Most of our women did not die, so it is safe to bring your women here. All women, come to the Republic of Costa Rica, where you will be cared for as the mothers of a new civilization.”

The message repeated.

Directions followed, complete with coordinates. Alex translated the Spanish Roxanne couldn’t make out.

Roxanne laughed her dry laugh. “Sure. Very safe. Bring all your women here. Heh.”

“Yeah.”

They sat for a little while, listening to the message loop. Roxanne left to pee after a while and Alex carefully dialed up and down the entire radio band, first AM then FM. The Costa Rican signal was the only thing she could find. She turned the car off. She thought about where they were.

* * * * *

No way that broadcast is from anywhere near Costa Rica. What would carry the signal? Somebody wants people to head south, especially women. She came back. Said she would go with me. Didn’t tell her what I thought about the radio, but couldn’t stop thinking it. Packed up and started off on bikes, to see where we could get.

July

Biking and hiking through the sharp rocky hills of Idaho. Some of them are too steep to bike, but we’ve been dragging them up. It helps speed things along and I know we’re making better time than we would on our feet.

* * * * *

They camped out one night in a huge luxury RV they found abandoned at a rest stop along a freeway. It had a glass bubble ceiling above the loft and they both lay on their backs, looking up at the stark and cloudless sky.

“So you’re a dyke, right?”

Alex thought for a while before answering. In the old days at nursing school, she had stretched this answer out in long sociological discussions of identity, fluidity, gender normative behavior in a heteronormative society.

Yes. No. Sometimes. Say yes, maybe she’ll want to sleep with me.

“I dated mostly women. In school. But my most serious long term relationship was with a man. Whatever you want to call that.”

Roxanne smoked and the long curls of it hit the glass and pooled. It smelled awful, but Alex wasn’t about to send her away. She cracked the roof hatch.

“I just figured.”

“I didn’t always dress like a dude. This is a safety measure.”

“Yeah but what if you found some people? A guy who could take care of you? He could defend you, hunt for food so you don’t have to? What are you gonna do when canned goods run out and you gotta shoot deer to live?”

I just shot six guys. Did she just forget that? Don’t fight. Talk easy.

Alex crossed her arms behind her head. “Shoot deer, I guess. Or fish. I haven’t seen any deer.”

Roxanne turned toward her, up on an elbow. She stubbed out her cigarette and automatically lit another. “We did, when we were in California for a bit. In the hills there were mule deer with huge ears and huge feet. I think you can eat them.”

“That’s good news. Anyway, why would I sell myself to a bunch of guys who keep me for somewhere to stick it? What kind of deal could I make?”

Roxanne smoked and sighed. “I would have talked myself off that chain. They were just scared we’d run. It wouldn’t have lasted.”

Alex didn’t answer.

“I know what guys are like. I worked the pole when I was younger, then retired into waitressing like everyone does. Guys think they’re always in charge, but you can manipulate the shit out of them. We hold all the cards.”

“Not anymore.”

“What, babies? They don’t give a shit. Besides, every man on earth thinks his dick is magic and he’ll be the one to turn it all around. You think they don’t? You should have seen them fight over Shawna, trying to guess who knocked her up. We still hold the cards.”

“If you say so.”

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“I believe I found you chained up and naked. I don’t think you held much then. Didn’t you say they tased you and kidnapped you? Didn’t I have to treat you for abrasions and infections in your vagina? That’s not a lot of cards, is it?”

She was quiet for a long time. “They didn’t have a taser.”

“So…?”

“Nettie had a taser. She kept it on her since she got raped back in ’05. Katrina. She moved to Vegas right after. I met her at a bar and we moved in together. I loved her so much. I didn’t have any idea I could love a girl like that.”

“I don’t understand.” Alex turned to look at her, finally. Roxanne’s face in the starlight and smoke was like a leather mask.

“Nettie had the taser. We could hear them coming. She gave it to me good right in the neck. To slow them down. So she could get away. I hope she still has it.”

Alex stayed awake long after she had fallen asleep. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamt she was an auctioneer, selling every girl she had ever loved to men with long knives. Her dream tasted like ash.

Let’s just say it’s the 4th of July

Fucking Idaho is nothing but hills. Up and down and can’t ever see what’s ahead. We walk the bikes half the time, but it’s still not as bad as walking. Long stretch of nothing so we’ve been sleeping in the open. Hate hate hate that = hardly sleep at all, but it’s what we’ve got.

Traveling with Roxanne = totally different than being alone. Just having someone to talk to = enormous relief. She’s asleep right now. Stars all out and the world is completely full of bugs. Twitches in her sleep when she gets bit, but doesn’t wake. Could sleep through anything. Doesn’t complain, got a sharp eye. Got to find a place to raid bug spray. Sign says there’s a town in 20 miles. Should make it there tomorrow. Hoping for good hunter’s bug spray, stacks of jerky, and new cotton underwear. Dreamworld. Really need water and a portable filter = can drink the water we find without worrying.

Of course she asked where I was when it all went down. Guess this is the new 9/11 for those who made it through to remember where we were. Wasn’t one day, it wasn’t like you were walking down the street and heard that the world was ending. Don’t want to do this over and over again. Started as unsettling pictures on the news and then people in some other city were dying. Fucking government closed stadiums and airports, people on the news in yellow suits. Dead people. People in your city, on your block. By the time it was on top of us it was too late to mark the time. Remember where I was, because I was always at the hospital. NO. On call and sleeping when I could, there. NO. Told her some about the deliveries, about the dead and dying women and babies, about getting sick myself and waking up dehydrated, confused, and alone. NO NO NO. Don’t want to ask back = polite to ask back. Are we very polite savages now? Gave her the book. Told her to write it down. Fresh page.

THE BOOK OF ROXANNE

I was living with Nettie in Vegas. She was younger and better looking than me, she was a cocktail waitress at Caesar’s. Good tips but she had to wear these killer heels. Her feet always hurt. I worked at Sam’s Town. Good crowd, but mostly older. I wore lower heels but balanced it out with this tit job. I made less in tips but more per hour. Neither of us drank, we belonged to the same gym, had a nice little place in Henderson. It was good.

So when the shit hit the fan, nothing really changed. Vegas is like its own planet. Nobody watches the news or wants to think about real life.

Tourists were still pouring in for a week or so, but then I started to see a change. One day it was like there were no Asians at all, and let me tell you, there are more Asians in Vegas than there are in Asia. I came home from work and told Nettie about it and she looked at me with her eyes big and said it was true on the strip, too. We were used to seeing a lot of foreigners but, all of a sudden there weren’t any. No Eurotrash, no beautiful black men so dark they were blurple with their strange accents and bright yellow gold jewelry. I couldn’t find anybody but drive-in tourists from California and Arizona. I started asking around, listening for New Yorkers or a dumbfuck with a southern accent. It was creepy, like the world was shrinking.

Then they shut down McCarran and everybody freaked. I saw people hitchhiking out of town, offering a thousand dollars for a ride in a minivan, trying to get home or get out. I started seeing sick people on the street. At first I thought I was seeing bad nighttime makeup in the daylight- bright red cheeks and eyes with too much black liner. But these girls had fever. You could feel it baking off of them. Some guys, too. I hit the grocery store in Henderson and it was a mob scene. I bought water and toilet paper and chocolate pudding, don’t know what I was thinking. I like pudding. I don’t know. I got home and found Nettie sick, laying on the couch, burning up. I took care of her for days. She burned so hot I thought she’d have brain damage. 911 was busy and stayed busy. I locked up the house and made soup and forced her to drink.

The phone lines went out, but I couldn’t get anyone to answer anyway. Then the power went off, and the water went with it. After about a week her fever broke. She was skinny and tired, but alive. We had to move to a house with a pool, a block down. It was empty. We stayed there until the water started to grow algae. We loaded up some bottled rich bitch fizzy water and drove to some condos we knew- high end with an indoor pool and all that shit. We stayed there until we got caught.

We were always hiding. We caught on slow that we didn’t see any women, and groups of men seemed to be roaming everywhere. The first night in the condos we stayed up on a top floor. We heard screaming outside and we peeked through the window, kneeling on the floor. We saw a gang of maybe ten guys run down this screaming lady- she was maybe thirty. Heavy. She couldn’t run for shit and they caught her and took turns at her. At first she screamed and fought and Nettie held her ears and sat down on the floor. Eventually though, she just laid there and took it. They turned her over and pinned her arms and it took them a while to run out of new ideas. When it was over, they had to carry her away. They went toward another high rise and we didn’t see them again. Nettie strapped her taser to her leg and told me she wasn’t going to get caught and raped. She would fight and she would kill. I nodded, but I didn’t know what the fuck we would do if we got caught by that many guys. Probably nothing.

It was maybe ten days later when we were found out. We were on the second floor of an office building, heating up some soup. They must have been watching us, because they came straight toward the building, along the back route we used to sneak in. We had broken some glass and thrown it all over the stairs so we could hear someone coming. They were quiet, but the glass crunching did it. Nettie looked at me with those huge wide eyes. She asked me how many. I couldn’t tell her by the sound. She got her taser in her hand and said she was ready. I stood up and faced the door, holding a pipe wrench I had found and thought I could swing. She jammed it into my neck from behind and when I woke up she was gone and Aaron and the guys had started the party without me. I stayed limp, made no noise at all. Manny ate our soup while he waited his turn. When they were done, they helped me up to my feet and said we had to hit the road. Aaron looked at me and said they’d protect me, because there were some terrible men out there these days. He really believed I was better off with them. I could see it.

I didn’t talk much. I started learning them the way I used to when I was stripping. Learn their needs, learn what they’re sensitive about, learn how to work’em. The key to stripping was never to fuck them, or at least not until they said the right number. I knew that chip was gone, but there were other things they wanted. Reassurance. Something like intimacy. Men don’t know how to ask for that, they think they can steal it. When they realize they can’t, they know they have no power. I didn’t tell anyone I’d had a hysterectomy, I let them argue over whether or not I was too old. The fairly constant gangbang kept me bleeding enough for the illusion to stand.

We were lost for a while. When we found Melissa, I hoped she’d make it. Her boyfriend fought like hell to protect them both but he didn’t have a gun. He must have known he would fail. In the end he told the girl to run and he tried to hold them off. He died for her, but he barely got a lick in. They shot him and then ran her down. She cried for weeks. She never stopped, she even cried in her sleep. She was the flavor of the week and I got a little time off. I got convinced I could run away while they were all drunk and I actually tried. That’s how we ended up chained. I could have gotten us unchained, eventually. The weather got warmer and we ended up naked almost all the time. Melissa ran blood down her legs seemed like every day. I started getting us small things, baths for instance. It’s so much more appealing to fuck a girl who’s bathed this week. I started insisting that we get fed the same, hinting about maybe getting pregnant and needing vitamins. And I started picking my favorites and being a little more cooperative with them. I tried to get Melissa to do it too, but she couldn’t. She had never turned a trick in her life. I never heard her story, but some things about her I could just tell.

They found Shawna all alone, not even hiding, just walking down the road one day. She was so young. At first I thought maybe sixteen, she was pretty well developed. But she would talk to me when they weren’t using her. She turned out to be fourteen. Her whole family had died and she had just been wandering since. She had no skills at all, she had been a good girl with good grades. I told the guys she needed aspirin or something for the UTI she was dealing with. She had been a virgin, she told me crying. They tore her the fuck up. But after a few weeks she was throwing up every morning and getting tired enough to crash in the early afternoon. Poor kid had no idea, she thought she had the fever after all. Chuck and Ethan raided a drug store and came back with a test. She peed on the stick and lo and behold.

The guys put their heads together about everything they had heard about babies and the fever. More than one of them had heard that all the kids born during the shitstorm had died. They all agreed that none of us had the fever so the kid couldn’t get it. So they took care of Shawna. They stopped fucking her, miracle of miracles. They raided everywhere to bring her canned fruit and pickles and asked her what she was craving. I encouraged her to tell them her favorites and mine too, and I used what I know about pregnancy from talking girls through abortions to help out and seem useful.

About the time she started to show, the fights began. At first it was just guessing whose kid it was. They talked every night about who fucked her first, last, longest, hardest. Then they got smart and tried to figure out who had fucked her after she last bled. Jimmy got ragged on pretty bad because he always preferred the asshole to the pussy, so it couldn’t be him. Aaron pretty much took for granted that the kid was his and refused to participate. He always acted like he was better than the others, like some kind of natural born leader. Shawna barely knew what it meant or what would happen. She had no kind of guess about the father, and she was afraid of all of them.

Aaron eventually spoke up. He told them the kid was his, Shawna was his, and would remain that way. He would have her and the baby to himself when it was all over, and anyone who had a problem with that could eat a bullet. He said mother and child needed protecting, and that he would protect what was his. That shut down conversation.

He was kind of tender with her. Started calling her “prized possession” or “pride and joy.” She didn’t see the good in it.

I didn’t know what to tell her. If she made some kind of alliance with Aaron, went along with his claim, the other guys might respect that like they respected him. If the kid was black or Asian, that’d make it clear and Aaron might give up. She had no preferences, just terror. She just wanted to eat and sleep with her thin little arms wrapped around her belly.

She was maybe six or seven months gone when shit got real. She started cramping up and bleeding first thing in the morning. I told Aaron to send the guys out for gauze and clean towels and all that stuff. They wanted to move her to a big hospital they had seen back down the road but she was twisted up in agony and we didn’t have a good way to carry her. I didn’t want to anyway, all the hospitals are full of the dead. We ended up inside a gas station with bottled water and a hunting knife and blue shop towels. Shawna cried and screamed and doubled up in pain. Everybody stared at her except Melissa, who sat down on one of the aisles and ate a couple cans of Pringles.

I got her shorts off and took a look. I don’t know fucking anything about birthing no babies, like the slave in that movie said, but neither did the guys. She was bleeding in trickles and gushes and I couldn’t see anything. Hours went by with me staring between her legs and telling her to breathe or push or whatever and giving her water. About sundown, she stopped bleeding for a while and just screamed. The guys lit candles and torches and whatever they could find, the place smelled like burning plastic and I wondered about gas or oil or whatever just blowing the station up.

Out of nowhere, Shawna heated up. It was like turning on an electric stove. Her face and joints were hot to the touch, the heat off her thighs was blistering as I sat there waiting. Finally, Shawna bore down and I saw the kid’s head. It was startlingly white through all the blood and I told her to push hard. She did, crying and obviously getting weaker. The kid came out all in a rush, like a popped cork. Blood spilled out in a wave behind the baby, soaking me and Aaron, who had come pretty close. He backed up quick to get out of it. The baby was in my hands, tiny and thin. He didn’t move or breathe. The cord reached back into her and I left it alone. I patted him, I smacked him, I tried to clear his mouth. He was blotchy and blue and never drew a breath. I told Aaron to hold him. I handed the kid off and Aaron wrapped him in shop towels and tried to stir him. The guys offered a few lame suggestions, but they petered out. None of us knew what to do.

Shawna lay limp on the floor, still bleeding out and turning white. I checked her pulse the way they do it in the movies. I felt something tiny tick under my fingers, like a bug under a picnic blanket. She was cooling off. I tried to hold her up and slapped her face a little. No reaction. I pulled at the cord and the placenta gushed out with another bucket load of blood behind it. How this skinny kid could have so much blood to give up, I don’t know. With it out, I could see that the kid had ripped her wide open. I couldn’t tell what was what down there, she was just shreds. I packed shop towels between her legs and laid them together to the side. There was nothing I could do.

I told Aaron she was going to die from blood loss. He looked at me, holding the baby that had never breathed. They all stood around, staring. Nobody knew what to do or say. After a while, Aaron laid the baby down in Shawna’s arms and we left them there together. Melissa got hauled up by her elbow, still holding two cans of those awful chips. The chains went back on. Nobody talked about Shawna or the baby. Two days later I got to wash the blood off me. Things were pretty much the same after that until we ran into you.”

Back to me

Wish I hadn’t read her story. Felt that sick rush I had always felt after a bad birth. Adrenaline and disappointment = sick. Pity. Held back a thousand medical questions about the birth. She probably wouldn’t know the answer and it’s not like it mattered. Couldn’t stop thinking about the hospital where I saw it all fall apart. Every baby dead. Almost every mother dead. Creeping fever that came from nowhere, we never even really figured out how it spread. No tourists from Asia or Europe. No planes overhead. Maybe not just this country, maybe everywhere. Maybe the world.

Almost dawn now. Going to sleep for a while. Morning I’m going to suggest we skip Pocatello, there’s likely people there. We should swing south and raid in the small towns, maybe head for Colorado. Lots of nice cabins that way to hide out in. Maybe make camp for a while.

Mid July

Hot as shit and sticky every day. Found a sporting goods store a few days back that had good bug spray. It smells like death and probably causes cancer but I don’t give a fuck. Mosquitos beware. Also found a couple of water filters and filtering canteens, small expensive ones. Incredible = not carrying gallons of bottled water. Just drop and filter in any lake or stream or puddle we find. Huge load off my mind. Filters won’t last forever, but at least now we know they work and how to find them.

* * * * *

Roxanne and Alex had some good nights. They played checkers in an old diner while they ate a whole can of strawberry pie topping, sugary glaze and all. They talked about where they would go, what they would look for in a place to make a stand. Alex sang a little and Roxanne said she missed the piped-in music of the casino. Roxanne read trashy romance novels that she found along the way, sometimes reading passages aloud.

“His throbbing member aroused her, though she had never known the touch of a man before!”

They giggled like girls and rode along an old highway, not another living thing in sight. Roxanne told terrible jokes she had learned from customers while she worked. Alex told her the standard nursing jokes and apocryphal stories of men with their dicks stuck in vacuum cleaners, in coke bottles, in improvised cock rings. The legendary drill to remove the champagne bottle from an unwise asshole.

They raided a little cul-de-sac of houses. Corpses were drying out all over. The smell wasn’t as bad as when they were wet, especially when they opened the windows. Alex found a full bottle of Oxycontin and kept it for trade. Roxanne looked for a gun of her own. She searched the hidden places in those houses, under beds and high in closets.

One house had a wall safe in an office and she was convinced there was a handgun in it. They slept in the den, on big soft couches laid out on a sunken floor. In the morning, Roxanne was in the office right at sunrise, searching. The office had a huge aquarium on one wall. The water had all evaporated and the room smelled like the rotting fish. Alex opened the window that faced the backyard, thinking it was safer than the one that faced the street. The air and light came streaming in and she helped Roxanne look.

The office was like a checklist of prestigious artifacts. Green glass banker s lamp with a brass body. Oak desk like an aircraft carrier. Large blotter and Mont Blanc pen lined up next to Franklin Covey day planner. The dead man in the bed upstairs had likely thought himself pretty important. A tiny blue book in one drawer held account numbers, passwords, credit cards numbers, and five crisp hundred dollar bills folded in half. Roxanne slipped the money into her bra without looking at it. Alex stared at her for a moment before they both burst out laughing. When the moment passed, Roxanne dug it back out and set it gently down on to the desk.

“Maybe he didn’t want to write it down,” Alex offered.

“He would. Thinks he’s fucking James Bond.” Roxanne went back to staring at the book, scowling. “He was the kind of guy who wrote down all his passwords, because he’s worried that he’d forget someday.”

Alex shrugged and let her obsess. An hour later Roxanne was still working. Alex checked the kitchen and found the pantry untouched. They feasted on tuna and tomatoes and beans and Alex ate a whole can of peaches while Roxanne turned the pages again and again.

Roxanne laughed abruptly. “Last page. In case of emergency, call 354–610. That’s only six numbers.”

She walked to the wall safe and dialed it in, 35-46-10. The door swung open and pulled it wide, excited and pleased with herself for figuring it out.

Stacked up inside the case was an obscene amount of cash. Banded perfectly pristine stacks of hundreds, from the bottom to the top. Roxanne clawed it out on to the floor, hoping for something else behind it. No luck. Bands of bills hit the floor and spread out, sliding against one another, whispering paper defeat. Nonplussed, Alex sat down again.

Roxanne stood there, looking at it.

“No way a guy has this much money and no gun. There’s a gun here.”

“Roxanne, maybe he was really anti-gun. Maybe he had hired goons. You don’t know that there’s a gun here.”

“There is. There is.”

By the third day, Alex wanted to leave. Roxanne would not be moved. Alex sat, frustrated. She read the magazines in the bathroom. She did inverted pushups on the stairs.

Roxanne did not give up until she found it. She had been right all along, and she found it. After several days, she was muttering, all day long.

“Little dicks. All little dicks have guns. He’s paranoid about the money. He was into something dirty. He thinks he can’t trust anyone so he needs serious firepower. Helps him sleep at night.”

Alex had stopped trying to talk to her. Roxanne was trying to get into a dead man’s head and it was starting to scare her. Roxanne didn’t eat for almost a day, pacing the bedroom with the corpse. She dragged the mattress off to one side, with his dried out body stuck to it. The gun was not underneath. The gun was not hidden in a flour canister or in the basement. She tore everything out of the linen closet, checked the freezer and ended up letting out an unbelievable enclosed stink of rotting meat. It was not on top of the high kitchen cabinets, where there was an inch of dust and dead bugs. The gun was not under the bathroom sink or the kitchen sink and there was not a single loose brick in the fireplace. They always went back into the office, where money carpeted the floor. She flopped down into the big leather chair and Alex sat on the desk.

“It’s ok,” Alex told her. “You’ll find one.”

“There’s one here,” she insisted again. “I can feel it. I know this guy. He has a big motherfucking gun in his house. Maybe his wife doesn’t know, but I know. He likes to hold it sometimes and repeat snappy one-liners from action movies. It’s here. He’s just got it hidden somewhere clever.”

The next night they slept on the same big couches. Alex fell asleep right away. She woke when she could hear Roxanne pacing and muttering.

“Roxanne. Come on, lay down and get some sleep. You can’t search for shit if you’re tired.”

“I’m cold.” She said it shortly, and Alex knew she was using it as an excuse to stay up and obsess.

She sat up and kicked the lid off the ottoman in front of her. She had seen a hundred like it at friends’ houses, especially the ones who had kids. Sometimes they were full of toys or junk hidden just before company arrived, but usually they were full of blankets. She pulled out a puffy comforter in melon green and held it out to her. Roxanne looked over at her, not understanding.

“Blankets. You’re cold, right?” Alex reached back into the ottoman to get another for herself, and as she picked it up something rattled underneath.

Roxanne perked up at the noise and crossed the room toward the ottoman. Where the blankets had been there was a folded white sheet, and she pulled it out as a bunched blur and threw it on the floor.

“I KNEW IT.” She screamed out the words and all her frustration from this week was in them. “I fucking knew, I FUCKING KNEW he had a gun.” Reaching in again, she pulled out a box of bullets. And then another. And another.

She opened a box and held up a fat slug. “There is a gun here. This proves it.”

“Alright. Yes. You were right. There’s a gun here. Now can you please fucking relax so that I can sleep?”

Roxanne smiled at Alex and sat down on the couch beside her. “Sorry,” she said. She pulled up the melon-colored blanket and laid Alex down, tenderly. Without any discussion, Roxanne laid down with her. The couch was long and deep and there had always been enough room, they just hadn’t done it before. Roxanne’s legs tucked neatly behind hers and she laid her head on the opposite armrest. With their bodies close together under one blanket, they were warm immediately and Alex drifted off fast. Alex slept deeply, sweetly, in the simple contact with Roxanne’s body.

She dreamt she was with Jack and when she woke up she had a ghost of grief beside her. She put the ghost away and looked over at Roxanne.

We should do this every night.

They packed up what they wanted to take. Alex searched the kitchen again and found a jar of instant coffee. Bliss. Roxanne was so focused on finding the gun and didn’t give a shit about the coffee. She turned down the expensive lotion and the jar of marshmallow fluff.

Out of things to do, Alex paced the living room. She stopped to check the side windows over and over again, to see if anyone was in the neighborhood. She saw nobody out on the street. She turned back to tell Roxanne and saw she was walking across the room to the mantel. It held an old wedding picture, a college grad photo and some small grandchildren in tasteful frames. In the middle there was an ugly little mantel clock, the kind that’s round in the middle with little wings off the sides.

She turned back to Alex suddenly. “What time is it on the clock in the study?”

“I dunno, like three thirty or something.”

“Right, and three thirty in the bedroom, too.” She looked back at the mantel clock. The hands on it pointed to dead midnight. She put both her hands on it, searching it all over. She pulled the plug out of the wall. On the back of it, she found the catch and the face of it dropped open like a drawbridge.

Inside was a.357 Magnum. A ridiculously large gun, a cannon. An expensive prop for an insecure man. Roxanne picked it up and held it.

“It’s so heavy.”

Alex watched her raise it in a two-handed grip toward the far wall, testing the weight of it. She looked at it through one eye, using the sight at the end of the barrel.

It’s loaded. Any asshole who owned Dirty Harry’s gun and kept it in a hokey little hideaway like that clock would be stupid enough to keep it loaded and ready to kill imaginary intruders.

It was on the tip of Alex’s tongue to tell her.

Before she could, it went off. Roxanne had squeezed the trigger just enough. The gun bucked hard and just missed her face, landing on her shoulder but she still held it in both hands. The sound of it was like an explosion. Alex crouched instinctively with her hands over her ears. The hole it put in the wall of the room was wide and jagged. Alex could see the pitted drywall and the stud underneath. She turned to Roxanne, furious.

She took one look at Roxanne’s face and the anger drained out of her. She looked terrified. Stricken. She had had no idea what would happen, or that the gun had been loaded at all.

“Have you ever shot a gun before?” Alex could hardly hear herself over the ringing in her ears.

She shook her head. Alex sighed and walked over to her. She looked so shaken Alex couldn’t help but hug her. Roxanne held on the gun but wrapped her arms around Alex anyway. Alex could feel her struggling to get control of her breath.

“Sorry.”

Alex pulled back to look at her. “It could have been worse.”

She nodded, and kept the gun carefully pointed at the floor.

“We’ll have to practice.”

“How did you learn it?”

Alex thought about all the time she had spent with her dad and the momentary lapse into nostalgia triggered an empty howling in her heart. His face was sharp in her mind and she ached with grief. He was holding her, he was holding his guns. Using the range at the station to practice with the little.9mm he let her use when she was small. She remembered the.22 she got for her sixteenth birthday and how much her mother had hated it. She called her husband a tea partier, a gun nut, a throwback. Nothing stuck. He didn’t care. He voted Democrat with the union, every time. He voted for gun control and the assault weapons ban and any move toward licensing or registration that came up. Alex had heard him say more times than she could remember that people who didn’t know how and when to use a gun had no business owning one.

He was a good man. Not the last one.

She looked back at Roxanne. Her face was so naked and lost that Roxanne was shocked for a moment, waiting for her to focus and toughen up.

“I learned from my dad. I’ll show you.”

In their last two days at the house, they worked on the gun. How to hold it, how to stand. How to use the safety. How to load it, clean it, carry it. Alex wished Dirty Harry had a pancake holster for this thing. Alex hated the gun in her waistband. It was too heavy, too bulky, and there was no hiding it. Roxanne didn’t care.

Both of them armed, they got back on the road. Alex was glad for her. Roxanne needed practice firing it, but so far she was still too scared of it. She walked taller, seemed happier just having it made her feel better.

August First

She’s gone.