A Land of Ash

LET IT CONTINUE by David Dalglish

“Just a few more steps,” John told his wife. “We’re almost there.”

Susan took his outstretched hand into her own.

“Thank God,” she said, forcing a weary smile. “My feet feel ready to fall off.”

John pulled her up the final flight of stairs to the third floor of what had once been an apartment complex in the northern stretches of Maine. The ash had fallen light there, so far to the east, and the building remained structurally sound. Rows of doors remained opened, broken by looters or left unlocked by former inhabitants as they’d fled. John couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t stayed. Of all the United States, Maine was the one state that had gone almost completely unscathed.

A bit of smoke trailed out from the second door to their right, and John led them just to the side. He let go of Susan’s hand so he could grip his gun in both. His bullets were few, but he had enough to kill a man. He’d never been a good shot, not until the ash fell. Over the months since the ash fell, he’d learned quick.

“Hello?” John called, knocking on the wall beside the door. “My name’s John Crawford, and I’m with my wife, Susan. We’re looking for Faye.”

He held his breath and listened for the telltale sounds of ammo clips and shotgun pumps. Nothing, only labored footsteps toward the door. He dared a glance around the corner.

“Julie send you?” a rail-thin black woman asked, her eyes large walnuts, her hair tied back in a ponytail. She stood in the center of the room, bundled in a multitude of coats and hats. In one corner was a pile of wood, broken and ready for burning. Where the stove used to be was a fire, its smoke billowing out a small hole in the roof. In the kitchen was a mini-fridge, its handle gray and smeared with dirt and ash.

“She did,” John said, stepping full before the doorway. The woman’s eyes flared at the sight of his gun, and with a subtle shift, she revealed a similar pistol clipped to her belt.

“I have no food to spare,” the woman insisted. “Julie should have told you that. I help out when I can, but this ain’t one of those…”

Faye stopped when Susan joined her husband’s side. Her walnut eyes looked to Susan’s swollen belly.

“Jesus,” she said. “No wonder Julie sent you. Come on in, girl. The cold’s no place for a pregnant woman.”

“Thanks,” Susan said. Because of her weight and the thick coats she wore, she waddled toward the small fire. Grunting with pleasure, she sat down before it and removed one of her coats.

“Benefits of being pregnant,” Faye said as she hurried into her kitchen and started scrounging for food. “It’s like having a little furnace in your belly. Keeps you nice and warm. Me, however…”

She laughed as she gestured to her thin frame, her eyes sunken into her face, her cheeks stretched, and her neck a thin piece of bone and veins.

“I take it you sleep close to the fire at night,” John said, trying to make light of things.

“In the damn fire, and still not always warm,” Faye said, laughing.

John sat beside his wife and removed two of his coats. The fire had a musty smell to it, but it was warm. He held his hands over it, closing his eyes and trying to relax. He clicked on the safety to his pistol as Faye sat a small plate of mixed vegetables from a can beside each of them.

“Heat it over the fire if you must,” Faye said as she ate directly from the can with a spoon. “I’ve gotten used to it cold, though. Winter in Maine was never easy, but lately…I swear, it’s like the ash blocked out the sun. What I’d give to be in South America right now, hell even Africa. Some days I think I’m hungry enough to wrestle a meal away from a lion.”

She watched the couple eat while she sucked on the spoon.

“I know Julie sent you,” she finally said. “But did she tell you why she was sending you my way?”

John removed his wife’s second coat, pushed her long blond hair to the side of her neck, and then began massaging her shoulders.

“You’re a nurse,” he said.

“I was,” Faye said. “Damn good one, too. Don’t you have any worry, Mrs. Crawford. I’ve performed hundreds of these procedures, and I’ll make sure nothing happens to you while I’m removing the fetus.”

“Removing the…?” Susan pulled away from her husband.

“You said we were coming here for my labor,” she said.

“I said we should be here before your labor starts,” John said, but his words sounded like the words of a lawyer, not a husband.

“Is that what Julie said? That why she sent us here?”

“This is no world for a child,” Faye said, her voice calm in the face of their anger. She’d seen a thousand arguments so very similar, and she knew how to let them roll over her without upsetting her. “You know this as well as I. There’s no food, not for a baby.”

“I’ll have milk,” said Susan.

“Milk ain’t free,” Faye said, shaking her head. “It’s coming from you, and my old jackass of a boss wouldn’t have been happy with how little weight you’ve gained during your pregnancy.”

Susan stood. When she waivered unsteadily on her feet, John was there to help her. She pushed him away with a choked sob.

“Let go of me,” she said. “I didn’t carry this child for nine months just to give up.”

She put on one of her coats and stormed out the door. John watched her go, a mixture of anger and helplessness on his face.

“She’ll come around,” he said, trying to force a smile. He did a poor job of it.

Faye shook her head and finished the last of her meal.

“Don’t force her,” she said. “You do, she’ll hate you until she dies. I want you to remember something, John. I’ve done plenty of procedures, but I’ve helped deliver as well. I won’t tell you what to do. You both have a decision to make. I won’t say it’s just hers, because she’s got to rely on you for everything afterward in a world like this. Keep or not. Up to you. But if you do decide to keep it, you better be damn sure you know why.”

John put on his coat and turned away.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

He went to his wife.

They slept beside the fire, doing their best to pretend Faye wasn’t there. Susan lay curled into her husband’s arms, his hands resting comfortable atop her breasts. His forehead pressed against her hair, and when he whispered, his breath warmed her ear.

“It wouldn’t be right,” he said.

“Like hell it wouldn’t.”

He kissed her neck.

“I don’t want to,” he said. “But what choice do we have? How many times have we nearly starved? Think of how bleak a future we’d give him. Or her. You remember the rapes? The riots?”

He quieted.

“I’ve forgiven you,” she whispered.

“I haven’t,” he said. “Nine men, and one woman. That’s how many I’ve killed to keep us together. To keep us alive. To bring a child into this godforsaken world would be cruel. Damn it all, there’s sick fucks out there that would eat our baby if they had the chance.”

She shivered in his arms, and he quieted when he realized she was crying. Feeling like an ass, he held her tight and kissed her neck.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

For many long moments they lay silent, him grinding his teeth because he was upset and nervous, her sniffling and struggling to get her wild emotions under control. Susan had always considered herself a tough, logical woman. Being pregnant had taken that part of her and flung it into a blender, then pounded it with a thousand tons of ash.

“Is that what you really want?” she asked.

He bit down his initial response and gave it a moment of honest thought.

“No,” he finally said. “I don’t. But I’m scared to death of what could happen to our child. I don’t see any reason for hope. None. How do I give life up to that?”

“But I can feel it move,” she whispered. “You have, too. You’ve felt it kick.”

This time it was his turn to fight the sniffles.

“I hate this,” he said. “I fucking hate this.”

It took several hours before they fell asleep, light and restless and without dreams.

When John awoke, his wife was gone. He bolted to his feet, staggering about the room collecting his coat and hat. Faye stirred, then covered her face as a slice of light met her eye from him opening the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Susan,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“She’s probably out taking a piss,” Faye said.

John shook his head and left the warmth for the frozen outside. He had a feeling in his gut, too strong to ignore. Something was wrong. Susan had left him, but why? As he climbed down the stairs, he shook his head. No, that was a dumb question to ask himself. He knew why. Of course he knew why. The better question now was where?

Out from the cover of the building he felt the first touches of a snow falling lightly against his cheek. The touch immediately sent shivers up his shoulders and across his neck. He hated snow, had for months now. It reminded him too much of that first blizzard of ash. They’d piled into their car, just him and Susan, and fled their Kentucky home. He thought of all the horrors he’d seen, driven through, even driver over…

“Susan?” he called out, trying to break himself free of his own thoughts. “Susan, where are you babe?”

The apartment complex had been built on the edge of town, and stretching out across it was a long field, fenced in with barbed wire. The snow was light, but he could see feint depressions that might have been footsteps. Pulling his gloves tighter against his fingers, he ducked underneath and followed. The further he followed her into the field, the more certain he became of her passing. Worse, though, was how he also saw the field stretching on and on for seemingly endless miles, yet no sign of his wife.

Suddenly this was no temper tantrum, no whim of a pregnant lady enslaved to her hormones. This wasn’t a marital spat. The wind was biting, the snow gradually thickening in ferocity. Feeling a moment of panic, he looked back to ensure the apartment remained, still visible in the white. Snow and ash had buried half the world, but at least Faye and her warm shelter were still there, still standing. He almost thought he could see the yellow glow of a fire.

“Susan!” he shouted. “Where are you?”

He trudged on, following the footprints. At first he thought he might lose sight of them completely, but then Susan must have reached a place of thicker snow, the depressions too thick to be buried just yet. John’s pace quickened, first to a brisk pace, then a jog. His breath burst out of him in white wisps of frost. He quit yelling. His mind was too occupied with horrific images of his wife lying in the snow, her limbs frozen, her eyes waxy and unblinking.

And then he did find her, hidden behind a small drift built up against a row of bushes. She sat with her legs to her chest, her face pressed against her knees. To John’s horror, she’d cast off both her coats.

“Please, no, go away,” she sobbed as he flung his arms around her. She shrieked and flailed against his touch, and so shocked was he that when her fingernails drew blood from his cheek, he didn’t even feel it.

“Susan, babe… what’s wrong. What’s going…”

Her coats were already covered in snow, their heat long gone. Braving her fury, he opened his own coats and tried to envelop her again. Her face was a frightening shade of gray, her lips quivering and blue. She moved to fight him, but he only shushed her with a kiss against her forehead. She broke down sobbing in his arms, curling into him to share his warmth.

As she cried, he surveyed the area. He could think of only one reason she’d come out into the middle of nowhere and cast off both her coats. Just one reason. And it scared him more than he’d ever been since that first storm of ash.

“Why?” he asked once her sobs had settled down to sniffles. “Why’d you do this? How could you?”

“Because you’re right,” she said through chattering teeth. “You’re right, but I can’t do it. You’d convince me. You always do. But I’d rather die than lose our child. Either way, our baby’s dead. At least she’d die in me. She’d die warm and whole, and I wouldn’t have to try sleeping at night thinking of…thinking of…”

And then she was crying again. John felt tears trying to build in his own eyes, but the sharp wind stole them away.

“Never,” he said. “I could never live without you. You’re all I have. Can’t you see that? You’re why I’ve survived since this whole shitstorm started.”

He chuckled, forced and bitter.

“You can’t imagine how many horrible thoughts went through my head. What I was worried I might find. If you were…you know…I think I’d have laid down right there next to you. All I’ve got is my love for you, and no matter what, I can’t let go of that.”

He kissed her forehead and sniffed. She looked up at him, her eyes red and puffy.

“And that’s what I feel for our baby. That’s what I was doing. You love me? Then let it continue. Let it grow.”

They stood, her wrapping an arm around his waist as he kept his coats tight about her. Together they made the march back toward the complex even as the snow and wind and cold did its best to slow them.

They stepped into the apartment room, Susan still pale from the chill. Faye stirred from her rest beside the fire.

“She all right?” Faye asked.

John nodded.

“Faye,” he said. “We have our decision.”

“And what is that?”

Susan clutched her husband as if afraid she’d lose him.

“It has to continue,” she said. “Life. Love. It can’t stop. It’s all we have. It’s all we’ve ever had.”

Faye ran a hand through her hair.

“You’re sure?” she asked.

They nodded, both of them. Faye smiled.

“All right, then,” she said. “We’ll let it continue.”