The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (The Road to Nowhere, #1)

by Meg Elison

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.

“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.”

Nobody chooses to be a victim, but after a lifetime of practice, it just happens.

Rub jawline. Don’t look down. Stand in front of the mirror. Have a dick. Great big dick. Fear me. Always right. Kick your ass. No right to stand in my way. Who’s gonna stop me? Like that, bitch? Yeah.

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

“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.

Besides, every man on Earth thinks his dick is magic and he’ll be the one to turn it all around.

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 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.

It felt so alien to be naked, she could not quite own or inhabit her body. It was becoming a stranger to her. I used to live here.

She gave up. She wasn’t sure why she had tried in the first place. There is no argument to be had with faith.

She had stopped talking. She had stopped singing, humming, whistling. She felt like a wild animal, like a raccoon that had cleverly burrowed into a house for the winter. She was a silent, thoughtless thing. Nothing interested her. Out of habit or stubbornness, she didn’t change her clothes or take that long, indulgent bath. She reversed her sleeping cycle, staying up all night and sleeping all day. It snowed all the time.

“So you left to get away from all that?” Jodi started to sob again, clutching up the blanket. “No, I left when the bishop said I would be married in a week to the man of his choosing and that I was being stiff-necked and disobedient and I’d have to learn to submit. He issued, like, a proclamation that women would be given in marriage by their fathers or by the bishop from now on. Period. We don’t get to decide anymore.” “I see.” Dusty was boiling with an old anger. It seemed as old as the world.

“Unfuckingbelievable.” “Why do you have such a potty mouth?” Jodi glared at her. Everyone you know is dead, but let’s focus on my language.

Nameplates in the neonate ward, the ones nurses slipped into the fronts of cradles. Boy Jones. Girl Rodriguez. Sometimes the parents had the whole name ready to go. I remember kids named Angel and Treasure, kids named Jesus and Elvis and Belle and Martin Luther and Kal-El. Those that weren’t named after someone famous were named after someone in the family. Always some idea of who the kid should be.

It does no good to tell a beautiful woman how beautiful she is. If she already knows, it gives her power over the fool who tells her. If she does not, there is nothing that can be said to make her believe it. Dusty did not know everything, but she knew that.

Dusty did not want to hope. She tried to keep hope out of her, shutting all the doors and locking them with the keys of reason and evidence and precedent. Still, she could feel it seeping in, incorporeal and deathless, refusing to be refused.

His voice was low, sweet, cozening. It was the voice she had heard a thousand times before. Come on and do it now. Come on and just give me a little. Come on now. Come on.

More than food or drink, more than hot showers springing miraculously from the wall in the bathroom, more than television and Internet and the buzz of strangers, almost more than the feeling of safety and not having to constantly be on guard, she missed conversation. That moment of connection, of being understood that passed easily between equals. She felt her eyes pricking at the thought. Books in, books out. Read novels, write a diary. Paper in your hands and silence in your mouth. It’s not enough.

“Did you ever want to marry Jack?” She shook her head. “We weren’t big fans of the institution. I found it oppressive. He found it archaic. Plus, so many of our friends couldn’t get married until the laws changed that for a long time it just felt like a farce.”

“Do you ever want to have kids?” She looked at him levelly. He did not intend to be cruel. No one who presses this question does; it’s just something they desperately need to nail down about you. To know, and put you down as normal or abnormal.

His last thought was that to die in such peace in a world like this was the most privileged and selfish act he had ever committed.

“Well, I don’t. I never bought the church line about marriage. I do think there’s something special about temple marriage, but legal marriage is something else. I don’t think it’s gross.” He looked at her expectantly. Pin a ribbon on me. I’m so progressive.

“Do you like guys better? Or girls?” Not that evolved. “It’s not like that. I like people. They come with the bodies they come with.”

“I didn’t mean it about reading yours. I wouldn’t do that to you.” “I know you wouldn’t.” She was still hiding it. “I do wonder sometimes what I might find, though.” Honus hung up the dish towel he had been using and walked out of the room. Find me. You might find me.

The house is silent except that I can hear them both crying through their bedroom doors. Alone. Each and every one of us = last person on Earth.

Dusty was sick to death of this pain. She was awash in her own grief and terror. She thought Honus was right and Jodi would die, but it was such a small thing beside her dawning certainty that no children would ever be born again.

Daniel was in his fifties, a career military man. His bearing was erect, and his clothes looked pressed every time she saw him. He took to leadership naturally, but without the insecurity that drives a man to be cruel.

“Please don’t shoot. Please. I’ll make it up to her. I’ll never touch her again, or anyone else. I didn’t mean to hurt her.” His eyes were green in his haggard face. They darted as he begged. “I can’t fix you. I don’t have the time to teach you why you’re wrong if you don’t already know. So this is it. Stand or kneel?”

I didn’t know I was pregnant until I got here. Dr. Jane says not to get my hopes up. I know. I told her I’ll take anything after the baby dies. If I make it. I don’t ever want to do this again. I don’t care if none of the babies live. We don’t deserve it, as a species. Evolution.

Island nations fared well. England and Ireland were covered with hives. Slavers were killed in public when they were caught, and their heads were displayed on castle walls. A small army of women ranged across Wales, taking heads on horseback, led by a woman who called herself Buddug.

When he was gone, she went out to Potter’s Field and buried her cell phone. She had carried it from San Francisco. From that time, she had only her phone, her knife, and her book. The phone would never be useful again, and she left it for Jack. It used to connect them. It was only a symbol, but she thought that it might connect them again. She couldn’t cry. She left the field without anything to say that would sum it all up.