The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Chapter Four

Mid August

Getting used to being alone again. First thought =alone solo just lonely and scared, but now I think I hate her. Hate that she wouldn’t stay with me. Hate that I wake up in the middle of the night looking for her. Not like she was with me forever. Not like I got used to her. Shouldn’t hurt me forever. Hate hurt hate. Fuck this and fuck you.

September

Hoping to make it into Colorado, but Utah is slowing me down. Everything = dry. Hasn’t rained in a long time here and I spend all my time raiding water. Coming near to Salt Lake and there is crazy shit painted on every billboard, every sign, every house I pass. The roads are haunted.

PERKINS-GATES FAMILY: HEAD FOR THE CAMPGROUNDS

STAY OUT OF PROVO- EDWARD TIMSON

THE TIME HAS COME

THE WHITE HORSE MUST GO TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS

HOWARD AND EMILY GRAY HAVE CLEAN WELL WATER, HEAD EAST ON 80

TOWARD JORDAN MEADOWS

Run of houses, marked with an X. Don’t need a key to translate. X = everyone inside = dead.

September 18 maybe just guessing at this point

Small town called Eden — what else? Everything in Utah has a weird bible vibe. Every building I scouted was empty. Every house and office and store. No live people, no dead people = rapture really happened. Raided the general store and walked straight through the center of town with a shopping cart. Population of this town < 500 before, no sign of anyone. For months. Dust is thick on everything.

Found a house with a pantry that was stocked with the idea of famine or siege. Enough here to keep a large family for years. Sealed drums of water, flour, sugar, Bisquick, and rice. Kits for 12 kinds of freeze-dried potatoes. Cans and cans of soup, fruit, veg, chocolate sauce. Lots of empty spaces on the shelves, but I could have skipped the store altogether. Whole place locks up tight, well out back, and three perfectly oiled rifles in a glass case. Five slots in the case stand empty. Drawer underneath is full of shells = home of a survivalist. Must have died in a hospital = there’s no sign of them here. Going to stay a while. Can’t carry three rifles but I can hold this place down. Wish Roxanne was here.

Still hurts. Starting to understand why she left me.

What happened with Roxanne was we were riding through the last bit of Idaho on a great day. Wasn’t too hot but the day was long and golden and we were laughing at some stupid story she had told. Looked over at her while she laughed, seeing the way she threw her head back and started feeling for her. Not falling in love or anything but just that first tenderness of liking, of really digging somebody’s details = way more than I used to feel about a coworker who showed up with donuts or somebody who waved me in when traffic was awful. Appreciation of niceness in another person. Sweet.

* * * * *

They came over a hill and there he was.

He sat astride a huge Harley, but it was perfectly in proportion with him. He was massive, with wide bulges of muscle in a black t-shirt under a black leather vest. His thinning dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. The legs in his jeans were wide and rock-hard, and his motorcycle boots were probably a size 13. He looked up at us rolling helplessly downhill toward him, his face breaking into a huge open smile. No sunglasses, Alex could see his brown eyes sparkle like the eyes of a puppy. He was so happy to see them.

Alex skidded and wobbled, trying to stop. Roxanne yelped a little and fell in the road, dumping her pack behind her. The huge guy got off his bike and loped toward her. Alex dropped her pack and drew one gun on him.

“Don’t move.”

He didn’t hear her or he didn’t care.

He got to Roxanne and she was already standing up, getting her bearings. He saw the gun at her waist and drew up short. He looked back at Alex and caught on.

“Hey,” he said, hands immediately up in the air. “Hey, it’s cool. I’m cool. We’re cool.”

“Who are you with?” Alex was trying to look everywhere at once while keeping her eyes on him, look for signs of a group, to see if someone was coming to join him.

“Nobody! It’s just me. I’ve been alone for a long time, that’s why I was so glad to see you.”

“You got a gun?”

“I got a toy gun in my saddlebags that I painted black, in case I need to scare somebody. Not a real one.”

Alex popped her chin at Roxanne to tell her to look. She pulled it right out. “Plastic.” She dropped it back in with some scorn. She rifled through the rest of his belongings. “Nothing.”

“Ok.” Alex lowered her gun “We are going to walk away, slowly. I’m going to be watching you. If you try any stupid shit, I’ll kill you. I’m not gonna take your motorcycle or shoot you just for fun, and you’re not gonna do anything dumb. Ok?”

“Wait! Shit, no please wait. I haven’t seen a single human being in months. Please just let’s talk for a little while. Please? Look, my name’s Duke. What’s your name?”

Alex didn’t answer, but Roxanne did. “I’m Roxanne.”

He turned toward her, beaming. “Like the song! You don’t have to put-“

“I hate that fucking song,” she cut him off. She lit a cigarette. “Come on, let’s take a break here and talk to him a little. What’s he gonna do?”

Alex fumed at her. That fucking gun. She thought she was invincible with it.

“Fine.” Alex dug in her bag and got out some oatmeal, her least favorite thing. She started a small fire on the roadside to heat it up and Duke hauled a can of sausages out of his bag. He roasted them over the small flames. When they were crackled, he offered them to the women. Roxanne took one but Alex turned him down to eat her shitty oatmeal. Roxanne gobbled up the smoked sausage and smiled at him.

I hate them both.

“So, where you from?” She asked him with her cocktail waitress charm turned on.

What does she expect for a tip?

He jumped right in. “Montana. I was on a run with a bunch of guys who got sick. When I headed back into Detroit, the city was burning down, so I just turned back out and kept going. I guess it got pretty bad and damned near everybody died. I’ve just been riding and looking for people. But there was hardly anyone in Montana before this plague. I know I saw some people outside Detroit, but they hid from me. I guess nobody trusts anybody these days. I get that. But I’m going crazy with nobody to talk to.”

Roxanne smiled at him and Alex knew right then. This was the end. She saw it coming.

“Where are you two headed?”

“North,” Alex said.

“Who knows?” Roxanne said at the exact same time.

“Well, I wanted to head out to California, maybe the cities where there used to be millions of people. The winter’ll be easy there and I’ll find somebody. Why don’t you come with me?”

“Nope,” Alex said. “We travel alone.”

“Well now wait a minute,” Roxanne said. “It might be nice to have a man around, just in case.”

Alex stared at her. She hadn’t changed her look at all. She was clearly still trying to pass as male. Roxanne had just done it to make her feel exposed.

Duke looked Alex up and down quickly but didn’t say anything. He wasn’t stupid.

“We’ve run into some trouble on the road,” she said.

She’s looking at him like a princess in a fucking tower.

“Rapists and murderers. I was thinking we could use some muscle, just in case we run into that kind of trouble again.”

“I would be happy to defend you ladies,” Duke said with a shine in his eyes. Every man on earth thinks his dick is magic. Alex could hear Roxanne saying it in her head the day they had met.

“I don’t need defense.” Alex stood up and kicked the empty can of oatmeal away. “I got it. Roxanne, let’s go. He’s had some conversation, we’re done here.”

Duke looked at her, his need plain on his face.

Now he’s the princess. Climb on up, Roxanne.

Roxanne looked back and Alex could see her sizing him up like a butcher looks at a cow.

She knows she has an opportunity to trade up. She’s not stupid. Or new at this.

“Let’s camp here for tonight.”

“It’s not even sundown yet.”

She made a little-girl face. “Yeah but I’m tired. And I want to talk with Duke some more.” She turned her eyes back to him and he smiled like an idiot.

Alex unrolled her sleeping bag and made camp. She did her best to ignore them. She wrote in her journal and refused conversation. She looked up at one point and saw him teaching her how to hold the gun. It was exactly the way Alex had shown her, but she was pretending not to know anything at all.

Next day

Alright, so he can hunt. He couldn’t have done it at all if she didn’t hand him he gun like she had no sense at all. He blew a goose out of the sky, first shot. Flying low anyway. Geese scattered, honking. Flopped down in the dirt, dead with almost nothing left above the neck. He says they’re all flying south and we should see a lot of them soon. Says you have to aim for the head, because hitting the body will destroy what you can eat on it.

Plucking the fucking thing now. Roxanne is so pleased she can’t sit still. She set up a rotisserie-rig made out of tent poles and a long stick. They’re going to roast it and eat it. I don’t want any.

Fresh goose is delicious. Going to shoot one the first chance I get.

* * * * *

Duke relaxed a great deal after dinner. He took one long drink from a bottle he drew from his saddlebag and offered it around. Both women refused.

Roxanne was the one to get him talking, but they both wanted to know.

“So, what did you hear about the plague?”

He leaned back and looked up at the sky, watching the smoke from their fire drift upward. “Not much, really. One of the guys on the run was worried on the first day, saying his kid sister was in the hospital. I had heard rumors about some kind of flu infecting nurseries and daycares and whatnot. He said she had gotten real sick at the school where she worked and spent a day at home before her roommate took her in to the ER. So this guy was checking his text messages constantly. The guys made fun of him for always being on his phone, but he never did it while riding, so I didn’t mind. Anyway, one day he said he can’t get his newsfeed to work. He had been telling us the news was weird and that there were maybe riots in L.A. or somewhere. But when he went back on when we stopped for the night, he couldn’t get anything.”

He shifted his position and realized they were both staring at him intently. “What’s the matter?”

“We just haven’t heard much of the news. Either one of us. We were both kinda out of the loop, you know?” Roxanne smiled at him in that helpless way.

“Alright. I guess that makes sense. I don’t know everything either, but maybe I heard different than you two. So, that same night one of the old guys on the run finally turns his phone back on. He was the kind of guy who had it for emergencies, but you could never get him to pick it up. He logs onto his Facebook and right away we can tell he’s upset. He dials up his voicemail and tells us his wife’s real sick and they’ve been looking for him. We tried to talk him out of riding home, but he lived in Indiana and he said he knew the way so well he could do it in his sleep. He took off right then.

“After that, every one of those guys and their old ladies checked in. They turned their phones on, made calls, listened to their voicemail. One after the other, they had to leave. Sick wife. Sick kid. Sick girlfriend. Dead girlfriend. After that night, there were only about ten of us left.”

“Didn’t you have anybody to worry about?”

Duke looked a little embarrassed. “My mom. I was never married. But I turned my phone on and… well… my mom wouldn’t have said shit if she had a mouthful. I thought about it, but I waited until morning. I didn’t want to believe the run was over, I look forward to it every year. But some shit was clearly going down. In the morning, even more guys were gone. The rest of us decided to call it and take off. The whole way to Detroit, I thought about my mom. She lived in a shitty little house in one of those neighborhoods they show on TV when they want to talk about what a shithole Detroit is. But I couldn’t even get close. I got close enough to see the fire and smell it. It smelled like gas and burning tires and hot paint. I knew there was nothing worth going in for. I still didn’t understand, I was pretty freaked out. I saw a group of guys on the road that day. They were just walking. I yelled at them and waved, trying to get them to talk to me. They turned and ran like they saw the devil. Man, Detroit could burn down and that wouldn’t surprise me, but I never saw that kind of fear from a bunch of men! Sometimes I know I scare women or little kids… I’m just big. But that freaked me more than anything. What did they think I was gonna do?

“So I got back on the road and got off in the first town I saw. I was having a hell of a time getting gas. I started refilling when my tank was only half empty, and I picked up that jerry can you see there. I had to siphon gas out of cars and tankers… and there just wasn’t anybody, anywhere. Cars stood open in some places, and every gas station was deserted. I started seeing dead people, here and there. That creeped me out so bad. I couldn’t stand it. If there was dead people, I’d leave and find gas or food elsewhere. I started to feel like a ghost.

“So I was stealing gas at this Shell, station, using a siphon to suck it out of the underground tank after I pried open the cover. I finished filling the bike and the canister and I went inside the station. Nobody was dead in there, so I washed my mouth out with half a warm coke and drank the rest.

“I walked over to the newsstand and there was hardly anything there. The Times was sold out, but the local paper had no stories, just a directory of where to go. Red Cross sites, schools turned into disaster shelters. And two places where you could take bodies. There was a box at the bottom talking about gloves and masks and communicability.”

He sounded this word slowly, one syllable at a time. He had struggled with it in the Shell station, knowing it was a word he had heard but had never had to read it to himself before. He knew its meaning from context, as we know all words, but he could not have defined it if asked.

“The one big paper they had left was the Washington Post. It had a picture of the president on the front page and the story said he was hiding in an underground bunker somewhere. They had pictures they said could prove it. The bottom half had an article about death toll in the major cities. The Post was always full of shit, but they were saying ninety eight percent fatality in men.”

Alex perked up at that, unable to maintain her stony silence. “Ninety-eight? You’re sure that’s what it said?”

“They used the number instead of the words, and it was on this huge pie graph. I’m sure.”

No way it was ninety-eight percent of men. That would mean it was more than ninety-nine percent of women. That’s insane.

“But women were dying way more than men in San Francisco.”

Duke was nodding solemnly. “The Post said that doctors were saying the plague was harder on women and girls than men and boys, but they didn’t put a number on that.”

Roxanne looked stunned. “That’s not… there’s no way. There would be almost no one left.”

“You see anyone around here?” Duke wouldn’t look at her. None of them could look at each other.

Alex thought about the number of people she had seen, dead and alive. She thought about the dead bodies piling up at the hospital. She added up impossible numbers and she could not make herself believe it.

Duke was looking down at the dirt. “I don’t know what the name of that town was, but when I was headed back out to the freeway, I went by the city dump. I could see huge piles of corpses. Burned. Black pyramids in the middle of all that garbage. I couldn’t look at that long. I stayed on the road until I ran out of gas, and then I used the tank to refill. I couldn’t go back into a city until I was bone-dry and had to walk the bike down an off-ramp. I felt like the last man on earth.”

They slept fitfully that night. He was not the last man on earth. They were not the last women. But the number was small and getting smaller every day.

One more god damned day

Told Roxanne it’s been three days and I’m done. They slept cuddled together last night, after Duke told his story. She waited a while, and then just picked up and laid down beside him. Spooning. Not fucking, but on their way. Remembered the way we slept in that den where we found her gun. Empty = lonely = haven’t eaten all day and starving but you don’t know it until someone brings it up.

Well fine. That’s fine.

* * * * *

Roxanne gave her companion a long look.

“You should come with us. We’ve come together this far.”

Duke spoke up from a few feet away, packing his saddlebags. “You ladies ready? We should cover some miles today, make up for lost time.”

Roxanne looked over her shoulder. “One second.”

He kept talking, mostly to himself. “Can’t cover much ground on bicycles. Gonna have to find motorcycles or one of those little scooters. The Euro jobs, like a Vesta or what the fuck ever. They’re easy to handle.”

Roxanne was already packed and ready to go. She made it seem like she was arguing, but she knew how this would end. “Come on, you can’t take off by yourself. Don’t end it like this.”

I can’t I just can’t and I don’t know why. But you shouldn’t go either.

Their eyes met. “Don’t go south. I don’t know what that broadcast is about, but I don’t think it’s good news. You might want to let him carry the gun. He’s a good shot. You haven’t learned to handle it yet. Convince him you two should hole up somewhere. Don’t risk another group of guys. It won’t end well.”

“You’re really not coming.”

“I can’t.”

Roxanne turned back to Duke. “Can I ride behind you?”

He lit up. “Yeah! Yeah, I’ve ridden with a passenger that way lots of times. No sweat. And we can find you a helmet and ride slow so your friend can follow.”

“Nope, you two go ahead.” Alex tried to sound sunny, just a change of plans. Not abandoned.

She picked up the bike and got ready to leave. Roxanne walked over to her and she waited, head down, for what she would hear.

“Come on, don’t be like that. We’re both safer traveling with a man. You know that. He’s harmless, look at him.”

Don’t do this. Don’t make me tell you how it will end. Stay with me.

“He is harmless. Like Melissa’s boyfriend was. You’re not safer just because he’s bigger with a dick. He can die like anyone else.”

“Yeah but the two of us are just sitting ducks.”

“With guns.”

She dropped a hand to the butt of her comically large firearm. Alex looked there and not at her face.

“You feel better with him because he’s a guy and you can probably get him to die for you. Fine. Best of luck to you both. Mazel tov. But I’m taking off.”

They both knew Duke could hear them. They didn’t care.

“You trusted me to watch you while you slept, to go with you. Why not him?”

“I don’t know. It’s a feeling. This doesn’t feel like a good idea.”

Roxanne shook her head, turning away. “You just can’t stand the idea that you might not always be in charge. Good luck, sweetheart. Be careful out there.”

For a moment, it looked like Roxanne might reach out and touch her, hug her, make one last gesture. Instead she just walked away, back toward Duke. “Let’s go,” she said to him.

Duke smiled and raised a hand. Alex gave them a half-wave and got on her bike, pedaling away against the rise of the hill, slowly and laboriously. As she sweated up the hill she hoped they weren’t watching. When she reached the top she heard the ripping sound of the Harley starting up. She looked back and saw them one last time. Roxanne sat behind him with her arms wrapped around his thick torso and her pack on her back. His ponytail whipped in the wind and picked up like a flag as they accelerated. They didn’t look back and after a minute even the sound of the motorcycle was lost to her.

October

Duke = probably a nice guy. Duke = probably will die for her. She’ll probably end up somewhere terrible. Never know.

Starting to snow.

Need to go out a few more times for supplies and then I’m going to hole up for the winter. Already way too cold. Going to build a fire and keep it going. Haven’t seen anyone since Roxanne left. Not a soul. Franklin stove in the kitchen that I can cook on and a fireplace in the main room. Going to lock up, string cans or whatever = alarm system, stay armed. Fuck it. Going to be warm.

Need to gather all the cut wood I can find at neighboring houses = walking and a lot of hauling, might take a couple days. Not worried about water = boil snow every day. Can’t get cleaner than that. Want to go to town once more and see about some serious weather gear. Need some gloves and I’d love to find snowshoes or just better boots than I’ve got. Feet = always cold.

Miss the weather guy. Hate to take off not knowing how bad it’s gonna be. Also need a map of town. Don’t know if I could find my way back and none of the maps I had went into Utah. Wasn’t planning to go into Utah. Where was I going? Don’t know that = could end up anywhere. Kind of stupid to keep anyplace off my list at this point. What’s to complain about? Politics. Blue laws. Price of real estate. No good schools here. Ha ha. Fuck.

Have to go soon. Even without a weather guy common sense = snow gets worse as the winter goes on. First thing = find house keys.