The men’s locker room was damp and dank; luxuriant growths of mold—green, black, yellow—spanned the walls. A varmint’s mummified corpse lay at the far end of the room, its legs stiff in the air, its face frozen in a savage death-gape, lips stretched away from rows of sharp teeth. Lila and Tiffany stood for a moment in silent contemplation of the first urinal in a row of six.
“Perfectly preserved,” said Lila.
Tiffany gave her a quizzical look. “That?” Pointing at the varmint.
“No. This.” Lila patted the top of the urinal, her wedding ring clicking against the porcelain. “We’ll want it for our museum. We can call it the Museum of Lost Men.”
“Ha,” Tiffany said. “Tell you what, this is a scary fuckin place. And believe me, that is sayin something because I have toured some real dungeons. I mean, I could write you a guidebook of the sweaty, drafty, fucked-up meth caves of Appalachia, but this is truly unpleasant. I knew men’s locker rooms were creepy places, but this is worse than I could ever have imagined.”
“It was probably better before it got old,” Lila said… but she wondered.
They used hammers and chisels to break the combination locks off the lockers. Lila found stopped watches, wallets full of useless green paper and useless plastic rectangles, dead smart phones thus rendered stupid, key rings, moth-eaten trousers, and a caved-in basketball. Tiffany’s haul wasn’t much better: an almost full box of Tic Tacs and a faded photograph of a bald man with a hairy chest standing on a beach with his little laughing daughter perched on his shoulders.
“Florida, I bet,” Tiffany said. “That’s where they go if they got the scratch.”
“Probably.” The photo made Lila think of her own son, which she increasingly felt was counterproductive—not that she could keep from doing it. Mary had filled her in on Clint, stalling to keep the officers at the prison, and Jared, hiding their bodies (our other bodies, she thought) in the attic of the show house up the street. Would she hear any more about either of them? A couple of other women had appeared since Mary, but none of them knew anything about her two guys, and why would they? Jared and Clint were on a spaceship and the spaceship was getting farther and farther away, so many light years, and eventually they’d slip from the galaxy entirely and that would be the end. Finito. When should she begin to mourn them? Had she already started?
“Aw,” said Tiffany. “Don’t.”
“What?”
But Tiffany had read her face somehow, seen right through to the hopelessness and the muddle. “Don’t let it get you.” Lila returned the photo to its locker and shut the door.
In the gymnasium upstairs, Tiffany challenged her to a game of H-O-R-S-E. The prize was the almost full box of Tic Tacs. They pumped up the basketball. Neither of them had any talent for the game. Clint’s daughter who had turned out to not be his daughter would have dispatched them both with ease. Tiffany shot everything granny-style, underhanded, which Lila found annoyingly girly but also cute. When she had her coat off, you could see her pregnant stomach protrude, a bulb at Tiffany’s waist.
“Why Dooling? Why us? Those are the questions, wouldn’t you say?” Lila trotted after the basketball. Tiffany had shot it into the dusty bleachers to the right of the court. “I’ve got a theory.”
“You do? Let’s have it.”
Lila hurled the basketball from the bleachers. It missed the basket by a couple of car lengths and bounced into the second row of the opposite set of bleachers.
“That was pathetic,” Tiffany said.
“You’re one to talk.”
“I’ll admit that.”
“We’ve got a couple of doctors and a few nurses. We’ve got a veterinarian. We’ve got a bunch of teachers. Kayleigh knew her way around a circuit, and although she’s gone, Magda isn’t bad. We’ve got a carpenter. We’ve got a couple of musicians. We’ve got a sociologist who’s already writing a book about the new society.”
“Yeah, and when it’s done, Molly can print it with her berry-juice ink.” Tiffany snickered.
“We’ve got that retired engineering professor from the university. We’ve got seamstresses and gardeners and cooks out the ying-yang. The book club ladies are running an encounter group so women can talk about the stuff they miss, and get out some of the sadness and grief. We’ve even got a horse whisperer. See?”
Tiffany retrieved the basketball. “See what?”
“We’re all we need,” Lila said. She had descended from the bleachers and stood with her arms crossed at the baseline of the court. “That’s why we were chosen. Every basic skill we need to survive is here.”
“Okay. Maybe. Could be. Sounds about right to me.” Tiffany took off her cowboy hat and fanned herself with it. She was plainly amused. “You are such a cop. Solving the mysteries.”
Lila wasn’t done, though. “So how do we keep things going? We’ve already got our first baby. And how many pregnant women are there? A dozen? Eight?”
“Could be as many as ten. That enough to jump-start a new world, you think, when half of em’s apt to be girls?”
“I don’t know.” Lila was riffing now, her face feeling hot as ideas came to her, “But it’s a start, and I bet you there’s cold storage facilities with generators that were programmed to run and run and are still running. You’d have to go to a city to find one, I’d guess, but I bet you could. And there would be frozen sperm samples there. And that would be enough to get a world—a new world—going.”
Tiffany stuck her hat on the back of her head and thumped the basketball off the floor a couple of times. “New world, huh?”
“She could have planned it this way. The woman. Eve. So we could start over again without men, at least at the beginning,” Lila said.
“Garden of Eden with no Adam, huh? Okay, Sheriff, let me ask you a question.”
“Sure.”
“Is it a good plan? What that woman’s set up for us?”
A fair question, Lila thought. The inhabitants of Our Place had discussed Eve Black endlessly; the rumors that had started in the old world had been carried into the new world; it was a rare Meeting when her name (if it was her name) did not come up. She was an extension, and a possible answer to the original questions, the great How and Why of their situation. They discussed the likelihood that she was something more than a woman—more than human—and there was increasing unity in the belief that she was the source of everything that had happened.
On the one hand, Lila mourned the lives that had been lost—Millie, Nell, Kayleigh, Jessica Elway before them, and how many others—as well as the histories and existences from which those that still lived had been separated. Their men and boys were gone. Yet most—Lila definitely among them—could not deny the renewal before them: Tiffany Jones with full cheeks and clean hair and a second heartbeat. In the old world, there were men who had hurt Tiff, and badly. In the old world, there were men who burned women, thus incinerating them in both realities. Blowtorch Brigades, Mary said they were being called. There were bad women and there were bad men; if anyone could claim the right to make that statement, Lila, who had arrested plenty of both, felt that she could. But men fought more; they killed more. That was one way in which the sexes had never been equal; they were not equally dangerous.
So, yes, Lila thought it was probably a good plan. Merciless, but very good. A world re-started by women had a chance to be safer and fairer. And yet…
“I don’t know.” Lila couldn’t say that an existence without her son was better. She could conceptualize the idea, but she couldn’t articulate it without feeling like a traitor to both Jared and to her old life.