My legs began to feel weak. “What complications?”
“Sir, you’re shaking. Please sit down.”
This time, I did as ordered. The doctor took a seat beside me, her eyes filled with genuine sympathy. “She was in labor for two hours. She delivered the baby, but suffered severe hemorrhaging in the process. We did everything we could for her, but … Mr. Hicks, I’m afraid she didn’t make it. She lost too much blood and passed away during surgery.”
The floor disappeared beneath my feet.
I knew it was there, but could not feel it. My ears rang, sounds coming to me as from a great distance. I broke out in a cold sweat. My hands went numb. A hot tingling roared around my cheeks and in my chest. I was not hearing this. This was not real. I was not in this hospital, this doctor was not talking to me, and none of this was happening. It was a nightmare, and I would wake up soon. Sophia would be beside me in bed, and Rojas would still be alive, and Lauren, and Dad, and Blake, and the living dead would never have devoured the world and destroyed everything and it just all had to stop.
Closing my eyes, I said, “Where is she now?”
“She’s in the morgue. I’ll need you to identify the body.”
I nodded numbly. “What about the baby?”
Some questions, you ask them and you already know the answer. It is intuition. It is instinct. It is the subtle inferences one can make in the course of conversation that reveal a truth without actually saying it. We convey these truths by tone, by body language, by the prerequisites of human experience, and by the things not said in their correct places. Such as telling a man the mother of his child died in childbirth and not immediately salving the wound by mentioning the child survived. So the next sentence out of her mouth was no surprise.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hicks.”
The doctor told me Sophia held her before she died. My daughter. Before the end, she had enough time to give her a name.
Lauren.
I leaned my head back against the wall, felt warmth pour down my cheeks, and remembered the picture in the locked chest in that shithole shipping container I lived in, and the beautiful blue-eyed blonde woman holding a wrinkled little baby, and her pale face, her blue lips, the sadness in her smile, and all the years of watching my father try to put himself back together.
My life had finally come full circle.
And now it was over.
FIFTY-NINE
Six weeks later, I woke up in the street.
It was night. I had no idea what time. A howling wind roared through the streets, hurling loose snow and ice like a frozen sandstorm. A hand shook my shoulder, trying to roll me over.
“Hey, mister, wake up. You can’t sleep out here.”
I rolled to my back. The sky above was black, starry, and clear, the streets and buildings around me illuminated by the full moon. I sat up and looked down at myself. My jacket was missing, as were my boots. Whoever robbed me had left my socks, although they weren’t doing me much good. I could not feel my feet.
I looked up at the person who woke me. He was a soldier about my age, maybe eighteen or nineteen, the visible part of his face ruddy and windblown. A scarf covered his mouth and nose.
“Sir, it’s freezing out here. We have to get you some place warm. Can you stand up?”
“I can try.”
The soldier wrinkled his nose as he helped me stand. I managed about four steps on the wooden blocks attached to my legs before the world began to spin and I went down to my knees and was violently sick. Not that there was much in my stomach to throw up. A few minutes of dry heaves later, I staggered up.
“Okay. I think I’m a little better now. Where are we going?”
“There’s a place up the street. You can warm up there for a while.”
“Where are we?”
He told me. I said, “Well, at least I’m not far from home. Must have been on the way there when I passed out.”
The place the soldier mentioned turned out to be a tavern built on the foundation of a building that burned down during the Outbreak. It looked like something out of the mid nineteenth century: plank floors, wooden tables and chairs, dark paneling on the walls, a long polished bar to the left of the door, and a roaring fireplace in a brick chimney on the far side of the dining room. Upstairs, a railed walkway encircled three sides of the tavern, doors spaced every eight feet or so. The soldier helping me eased me down into a chair near the fire.
“Wait here a minute,” he said.
I leaned against the table, laughing to myself. I could not have gone anywhere if I had wanted to. The fire was warm and inviting, and I turned so I could rest my feet on the hearth.
Looking across the room, I saw the soldier talking to the bartender. There were only a few other patrons scattered about, all of them staring at me. The noise was low enough I could hear the conversation.
“The hell you bring him in here for?” the bartender demanded. He was a stout man with thick arms, a shaven head, and a face like a bulldog.
“Found him in the street. If I’d left him out there he would have frozen to death.”
The bartender eyed me skeptically. “Probably would have been a kindness. Look at him, for Christ’s sake.”
There was a mirror on the wall at the coat rack. I turned and looked at myself and almost cringed at what I saw. The blond beard was so stained it was almost brown, matted and crusted with dried vomit. My eyes peered out from sunken sockets, ringed in black, the cheeks beneath them hollow, the bones of my face standing out sharply against dry, cracked skin. My lips looked like pink grub worms. My clothes were beyond filthy, stained so badly I could not tell what color they had originally been. There was a rip in my shirt at waist level through which I could see a long expanse of gaunt, scarred rib cage. It would not have surprised me if someone mistook me for a walker and put a bullet through my head. And honestly, I don’t think I would have tried to stop them.
“I know he looks bad, but he’s a human being, Dave,” the soldier said.
“Barely.”
“Can I get some water and a bowl of soup?”
The bartender, Dave, turned his big ball of a head my way, then looked back at the soldier. “You payin’? I don’t run no charity.”
“I can pay for my own food,” I said, raising my voice to be heard. The money belt beneath my pants was still in place. Whoever stole my jacket and boots must not have thought to look there. I dug a hand in it, came out with a small plastic zip-lock bag filled with sugar packets, and shook it where the bartender could see. A few sets of eyes focused greedily on the bag.
Money, or trade rather, was not a problem. I still had most of what I had earned with the militia in storage. But after Sophia died, I stopped showing up for work, and despite Tyrel’s best efforts, had no intention of going back. The only thing I cared about anymore was pouring as much alcohol down my throat as I could manage before passing out. Because when I drank, I forgot. I forgot the blue eyes, and the long blonde hair, and the soft skin, and the musical laughter, and the shared meals, and touches, and comforting each other when things looked bleak. Most importantly, I forgot the night I felt my daughter move in her stomach.
The daughter I would never know.
As I sat at the table, my eyes stung from the memories. My heart sped up, and I knew the withdrawal symptoms were coming. The speedy heartbeat would soon become a painful pounding, my hands would shake, there would be nausea, cold sweat, and labored breathing. If I waited too long, the auditory hallucinations would start. Better to order a drink, something strong to take the edge off, and then follow it up with as many as I could buy. And since I was paying with sugar, arguably the most valuable trade item next to toilet paper and feminine hygiene products, I could afford a lot.