Not a Drop to Drink

Ten

Stebbs appeared a few hours later, at dusk. The reverberations of his awkward footfall on the basement steps caused Lucy to stir but not wake. Lynn lifted the edge of the sheet that hung drying from the rafters. “Shhh,” she admonished, gesturing toward the small form humped underneath the blankets. “Don’t wake her.”

“Sorry,” Stebbs whispered, then gestured for her to follow him.

Lynn grabbed her rifle and tucked a pistol into her belt. Aboveground, the sun was leaving the last hint of a pink stripe in the sky. Stebbs considered it while talking to Lynn. “Think she’ll sleep long?”

“Don’t know. Not around kids much.”

He grunted in response.

“She fell asleep right after her bath,” Lynn added. “I don’t imagine we’ll be long down at the stream anyway.”

The implied question was not answered, and she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “Sorry about last night,” she finally muttered. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”

“I shouldn’t have pushed you either,” he said.

It was her turn to grunt. They both watched the horizon for a few minutes, their gazes drawn to the south. “All right then,” she hoisted her rifle across her shoulder, “Let’s go and be done with it.”

They made their way to the creek, conscious of the rustling of nocturnal wildlife all around them. A raccoon lumbered across their path. He stood on his hind feet and studied them closely, his black nose wiggling while he tried to place their scent.

“Scat,” Stebbs hissed at him. The coon lowered himself and tumbled into the night, unconcerned by their presence. “Used to be we shot them that acted like that,” Stebbs said. “Meant they were sick with the distemper.”

“And he’s not?”

Stebbs shook his head. “Doubt it. Just doesn’t know what to think of people, is all. We’re not as common as we used to be.” They trudged on a few more minutes in silence.

“Almost there,” Lynn said when she spotted her own boot prints in the wet bank. They stood out black and hollow even in the dying light of dusk. “This is where I spotted the girl.”

“You should be the one to call to him,” Stebbs said. “Beings as he’ll know your voice.”

“We didn’t talk all that much,” Lynn said, then cupped her hands to her mouth. “Hello, the camp!”

The only answer was the rustle of falling beech leaves, and a frantic scurrying sound in the underbrush nearby. “Try again,” said Stebbs.

She shouted again, this time adding a high-pitched whistle on the end of her call. No response.

“How bad of shape were they in?” Stebbs asked.

Lynn’s eyebrows drew together in concern. “Not as bad as all that,” she said. “Unless someone—”

A piercing scream split the night air, dropping Stebbs and Lynn to the ground in an instant, their hands going to the pistols at their belts. It broke on a high note, followed by a screech and a howl of pain that dwindled into a racking sob.

“The woman,” Stebbs said soberly. “That’d be labor.”

“Labor?”

“The baby’s being born.”

Lynn’s hand tightened on her gun, for all the good that it would do her in that situation. “What do we do?”

Stebbs got to his feet awkwardly and brushed the dead leaves from his flannel shirt. “I know a thing or two about it,” he said. “If that boy is as green as you say, I doubt he’s much help.”

Lynn stayed on the ground, peering through the bracken as if for an enemy. “What do you want me to do?”

“Get up, for one.” He hauled her to her feet.

Lynn hallooed the camp when they were close enough to make out the feeble gray wisps of smoke climbing skyward from the fire. Eli burst out of the shelter, looking wildly in every direction. “Girl? Is that you?” He held a branch above his head in case it wasn’t her, but it didn’t look like he posed much of a threat. His weapon was thicker than his arm.

“Christ, he’s skinny,” Stebbs muttered.

“I’m coming in with a friend,” Lynn yelled toward the camp, pausing only slightly before using the word friend to describe Stebbs. They splashed across the stream to Eli, who lowered his club and squinted into the night.

“Hello, son,” Stebbs said as he emerged from the darkness. “Name’s Stebbs.” He held out a hand, and Eli shook it.

“Eli,” he said shortly.

“The girl here is Lynn, somehow I doubt she introduced herself properly when you met.” Lynn nodded to Eli across the fire.

“How’s Lucy?”

“The girl’s fine,” she said. “That her mother screaming?”

Eli nodded and gestured toward the shelter but came up with no words.

“She trying to be mother to another?” Stebbs asked gently.

“All day it’s been like this,” Eli said. “I don’t know what to do. The baby won’t come out, and Neva is exhausted.”

A cautious silence had emanated from the shelter since they’d converged onto the camp. Lynn had stalked a bobcat through the woods once. Mother had sent her out to find a turkey, but the unfamiliar flash of a feline coat had caught her attention and she’d taken it as a challenge. Bobcats weren’t common, and Lynn had known she was out of her league when she’d emerged into a clearing where she knew the cat should have been, but was out of sight. The same feeling was with her on the bank, the idea that she was being watched by unfriendly eyes attached to a body that was ready to pounce if it made up its mind to do so.

“We’re not here to bother,” she said loudly, hoping her voice carried to those perked ears. “Just wanted to let you know Lucy’s all right.”

Eli’s face fell. “You’re not leaving, are you?”

“Hold up now,” Stebbs said to Lynn. “If they need our help, we’re here to give it.” Lynn’s eyes cut uneasily to the shelter Eli had constructed, but she kept her mouth shut. “First off, why are you down here on the stream? There’s plenty of empty houses to put her up in to bear the child.”

“Neva says she won’t go. She’s heard too many stories, people’s faces turning black without water, their bodies shriveling up as they die slow.”

“It happens.”

“She won’t come away from the water. I set this up for a temporary camp, but she wouldn’t move from it.”

“It’s not so bad,” Stebbs reassured him. “Probably leaks like a bastard though.”

“It’s not waterproof, no,” Eli admitted.

“Can’t hold any heat either, I reckon.”

In the firelight, Lynn could make out a blush creeping up Eli’s sharp-boned cheeks. “No, it can’t.”

“So here you’ve got a pregnant woman and a child living under a bunch of dead twigs next to a stream when winter’s coming on?”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Eli said tightly, desperation making him bite off each word.

“How about not letting the most paranoid person in your bunch call the shots?” Lynn suggested, then fought down her own blush when Eli turned his angry glare on her.

Stebbs cleared his throat. “Water can be hauled. You get her set up in some real shelter with some heat in it and bring the water to her. Staying next to the stream in the summer and fall’s fine. But in the spring, it’ll drown ya, in the summer it could disappear altogether. You stay by it in the winter, one morning you’ll wander out to your precious water source to find out you froze to death in the night.”

Eli’s jawline was set tightly, and Lynn had lived long enough with a person who had a temper to know that the fuse was getting short. “I’m afraid your suggestions come a little late,” he said as another wrenching moan rose from the shelter behind him.

She’d been fighting it. Lynn could tell by the stifled sound of the cry that the sufferer did not want them made party to her pain. Stebbs flicked on a flashlight and moved to the mouth of the shelter. “I’m here to help you. I’m no doctor, but I’ve seen my share of goats born and helped a few of them along.”

He’d made it about a foot into the shelter when he came flying backward, landing in the mud.

“Keep away from me, you fucking perverted cripple!” The scream that followed Stebbs’ exit was shrill, laced with fear and pain. “Eli! Eli, where are you?”

Lynn helped Stebbs up as she listened to Eli trying to calm the panicked woman inside. She approached the entrance to have a clod of dirt smack her in the face.

“I’m done here,” she said to Stebbs. He grabbed her arm as she turned for home.

“She’s in labor—you don’t know what that’s like.”

“Don’t much care either,” Lynn said, rubbing the spot on her jaw where the dirt had hit her. But she stayed.

Eli emerged. “She said you can go in.” He pointed to Lynn. “But not Stebbs.”

“Stupid choice,” Lynn said. “I don’t know the first thing about this. At least he’s seen it.”

“With goats,” Eli countered.

“More than I got,” Lynn answered, but ducked her head and shuffled into the shelter.

The woman lay under a pile of clothes, writhing with pain. When she realized Lynn was there, she made a conscious effort to control it, but her hands dug deeply into the dirt on both sides of her hips. The repeated action had dug holes there as deep as her wrists.

“You don’t have to hide it,” Lynn said. “Pain is nothing to be ashamed of.”

Black eyes regarded her with contempt. “Pain isn’t the word,” she seethed, her perfectly symmetric white teeth biting off each syllable. Another contraction struck and she balled her fists into the earth. Cords stood out on her neck as she struggled against it, and her lips peeled back in a grimace. Lynn could only watch until it passed.

“Do something,” the woman spat at her. Sweat streaked her face even though the night was cold, her black hair was tangled in dark coils from tossing.

“I can’t,” Lynn said calmly. “I know nothing about it. Better off to let Stebbs in.”

“He won’t be touching me.”

The undeserved hatred directed at Stebbs made no sense to Lynn, so she sat quietly through another contraction that left Neva panting. “I’m wasting my time here with you,” Lynn informed her. “I’ve gotta get back.” She rose to leave.

“Wait! I’ll let him in,” Neva said as if granting a favor. “Just get it out of me.”

Lynn emerged into the darkness, handing the flashlight off to Stebbs. “Your turn.” He ducked into the shelter, and a murmured conversation followed, pausing whenever Neva suffered a contraction too painful to speak through.

“What do you think?” Eli asked, his gaze bouncing off Lynn’s when they met over the flickering fire. She lowered herself to the ground before answering.

“Don’t know. She’s worn out though, and that’s not good with the baby still on the way.”

Eli nodded and they sat in silence. He flinched when Neva’s cries came again, louder this time and more desperate. Lynn stared impassively into the fire, noticing that Stebbs had placed dead wood on it.

“You got to use the dead,” she said. Eli snapped out of his trance.

“What was that?”

“Dead wood.” She pointed to the fire. “You use the green, living stuff and you get more smoke than heat.”

“Okay.”

The silence fell again, but it felt awkward now that she had tried to break it unsuccessfully. “They take your blankets? Those men?”

“Yeah.” Eli’s voice caught in his throat from disuse. “Yeah,” he repeated more clearly. “Blankets and our food. I went to a house looking for more, but they’d all been stripped. Most of the clothes were gone too, except for some that were way too big for anybody I’ve ever seen. I took them to use for blankets for Neva and Lucy.”

Stebbs voice cut through the night. “Lynn, come here.”

She approached the entrance warily. “What is it?”

“Take this,” he handed her a bundle. “Bury it.”

Lynn gingerly took the dirty shirt, alarmed at the heat soaking through it. She shot Stebbs a questioning glance.

“Born dead.” He drew an arm around her shoulders, bringing her closer to him. “Take the little thing a bit aways and bury it. Mother’s not doing so well.”

“She going to make it?”

“Not doing so well up here.” Stebbs pointed to his temple, then his heart. “And here.”

Lynn tucked the small bundle under her arm. Eli followed her downstream, dazed and silent. She had no idea how she was supposed to dig a grave in frozen ground with no shovel, but Stebbs had his hands full with the mother. She climbed the bank when it rose to shoulder height and chose a small clearing enclosed by mountain ashes.

“This should be easy enough to find again, if she wants to come and see it,” she said to Eli, who only nodded. His fingers were clenched tightly around the flashlight Stebbs had handed off to him. “Plus the bank is high enough here, spring floods won’t wash it away.”

There was no response. Lynn sat the little bundle on the ground, ignoring the wetness that had soaked through the wrappings onto her clothes. “Find me a good-sized stick, pretty sharp.” Eli seemed grateful for direction; he disappeared into the darkness.

Lynn waited for her eyes to adjust to the moonlight, then went back to the streambed in search of rocks. They met again in the clearing and he began hacking at the ground with the stick, opening raw wounds in the earth. Once he had a furrow dug Lynn scraped away with a flat rock. “We won’t be able to get very deep,” she said. “But we’ll cover him with some good-sized rocks so nothing will bother him.”

“Him?”

“What’s that?”

“It was a boy?”

“Oh.” Lynn thought for a second. “I don’t really know. Stebbs didn’t say.”

Eli hesitated before unwinding the motionless bundle. Lynn looked away, intent on her task. “You were right,” he said after a moment. “It was a boy.”

She grunted in response, unsure what to say. Eli rewrapped the tiny body. “He’s cold already.” His hands hovered over the little bundle that had held warmth before the night wind had ripped it away. “My brother always wanted a son.”

“He can have more. Come help me.”

An hour later, Eli laid his nephew into the small hole they’d managed to scratch out, and they piled rocks on top of it.

“He can’t,” Eli said out of nowhere.

“Can’t what?”

“My brother, he can’t have more sons. He’s dead.”

“Oh,” Lynn said. “Sorry.”

They regarded the rocks together in silence. “I feel like we should say a prayer to God, or something,” Eli said after a moment.

“A what to who?”

“Never mind,” he said. “I just feel like I should say something, you know, over the grave.”

Lynn stood next to him in the dark, aware of the heat rolling off his body in contrast to the chill around them. “I can,” she said. “If you want.”

He nodded, and Lynn took a breath of cold air before the words spilled out.

“I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.”

Even in the dark of night she could feel him staring at her as she finished. “That’s William Butler Yeats,” Eli said. “How the hell do you know Yeats?”

“I can read, and I have books,” she said stiffly.

When they got back to the camp, Stebbs was sitting by the fire, warming some soup he had brought with him. “She’s all right,” he told Eli. “But you’ve got to get her some decent shelter. You two will die down here in a month.”

“What do you suggest?” Eli asked. “She won’t leave the stream, especially now.” The image of the small, lonely grave in the moonlight remained unspoken.

“Well, it’s not a bad site, really. You’ve got fresh water, and the bank is high enough that you should be safe from the spring thaw flow. It’s not something you’d know, but the stream does go dry from time to time, so a dry summer could put you in a pinch. But there’s plenty of game here, once you learn to hunt, and gathering wood’ll be a snap now you know to get the right kind.”

Lynn wondered who was going to teach Eli to hunt. She certainly didn’t have time, especially now that Lucy was her responsibility. She opened her mouth to say as much but the sight of Eli’s face—exhausted and blank—stopped her.

“Shelter’s the priority,” Stebbs continued. “As of now. She won’t move, and you won’t make her, which means bringing the shelter to you. We can throw up something quickly in a few days, get something better and more permanent for you later, if she still won’t see sense.”

Lynn shifted uneasily at Stebbs’ use of the word we, and the encompassing wave of his arm that included her.

“I’m already in your debt, both of you—deeply.” Eli looked intently across the fire at Lynn. “Anything you do for me, I can’t—there’s no way for me to return the favor.”

“You don’t worry about that right now,” Stebbs said, intervening easily when he saw Lynn about to open her mouth. “We’ll work things out as we go, right now keeping you and your woman alive is the priority.”

“She’s not my woman.”

Lynn felt an inexpressible bubble pop in her stomach. His inability should have filled her with contempt, but instead it made her want to help him. And the woman in the shelter was so sharp tongued, it didn’t take much imagination to picture him sliced to ribbons at her feet. For some reason, she didn’t think she wanted to see that.

Stebbs watched Eli closely for a moment before speaking. “She’s a good-looking woman, yours or not, you’ve got a duty to protect her now.”

“It’s been my job since Bradley died, my brother.”

“That was his baby?”

“Yeah, his son. Neva was his wife. He died as we were leaving Entargo. One of the guards shoved Neva. Usually she’s pretty light on her feet, but she was so big with the baby she lost her balance. Bradley lunged to catch her, and the guard shot him, said he was going for his gun.”

“Just like that?” Stebbs asked.

“Just like that. He bled out in the square with his kid and wife right there. Lucy had crawled up into my lap, bawling for someone to help her daddy, and Neva was on her hands and knees cradling his head against the baby. There was a crowd around us, and a few that I knew to be doctors, but nobody could help.”

“Why not?” Lynn’s question brought Eli’s attention back to her.

“Population schedules,” he said. “You’re only allowed one child per couple, and they already had Lucy.”

Stebbs sighed and tossed a stick into the fire. “I thought they would’ve lifted that ban by now. So that’s the deal still? You screw up and the entire family is out of the city?”

“They won’t waste water on lawbreakers. Sometimes they’ll keep older kids, males mostly, to help protect the city. Lucy not being a boy helped her out in that respect.”

“Won’t help her out here,” Stebbs said shortly, giving Eli a hard stare.

“Yeah, I know,” Eli said. “I guess we were lucky when those men came for our food, Neva being pregnant and Lucy being . . . well, none of them seemed to be of that persuasion.”

Lynn glanced from Stebbs to Eli, completely lost.

“Maybe so, but your lady isn’t pregnant anymore,” Stebbs said. “And like I said, she’s your responsibility.”

“Being good-looking doesn’t seem to drop the survival rate out here.” Eli darted a glance at Lynn, but she was still trying to puzzle out their earlier exchange.

“Being good-looking and a sharpshooter doesn’t hurt,” Stebbs said with a wry smile.

The mention of shooting brought Lynn to her feet. “I gotta get back, been here too long already.”

“True enough,” Stebbs said, struggling to rise. “We’ll get you squared away, son. There’s no point you dying here when we’ve got the means to help.”

Lynn chewed on her lip as she and Stebbs struck for home. His parting words to Eli had been meant to console him but also to let her know where Stebbs stood on the issue. She’d been reluctant to offer her help for the evening, and Stebbs had promised more without asking her. She wasn’t rooting for Eli and Neva to die of exposure, but she wasn’t against them figuring out the basics of survival on their own either.

Stebbs seemed to understand her mood and held his tongue. Early morning dew had fallen on the long grass, soaking their pants as they walked and chilling them to the bone. Lynn clicked off the flashlight to save batteries once a strip of gray appeared on the horizon. They were halfway to her house when Stebbs took a misstep that turned his good ankle and brought him to the ground with a crash.

Lynn helped him to his feet and he tested his good leg. He winced when he put weight on it. “You go on without me if you want,” he said. “I know you’re in a hurry to get back to—”

“Lucy,” Lynn said, snaking an arm under his. “Yeah, I am.”

Stebbs leaned against her for support. “I was going to say ‘the pond.’”

“Yeah, that too.” She ignored the curious look he shot her as she stepped back to give him some room. “Can you manage?”

“I just need to walk it off.”

Lynn was already backpedaling toward her house. “I’ll check on you,” she called over her shoulder and dove through the grass, suddenly anxious.

She’d been seven when Mother had gone on an overnight hunt, too young to help carry the large chunks of meat Mother would be bringing home. Mother had promised she would be back the next day, and she had appeared by mid evening, dragging a travois loaded with meat behind her. Lynn had put on a brave face and claimed everything had gone well, not wanting to admit to her rock of a mother that the nighttime hours had taught her the meaning of fear.

The basement was the only home she’d ever known, but waking in the middle of the night without hearing Mother’s rhythmic breathing had taken away her feeling of safety. Every dark corner held an unfamiliar noise, each soft rustling an unidentified threat. How would Lucy, a stranger to the darkness of their underground shelter react if she woke and found Lynn gone?

Lynn cracked the basement door and held her breath for a moment in order to make out the softer sounds of Lucy’s rhythmic breathing rising up from below. She was safe and sleeping. Lynn snatched her rifle and climbed to the roof to check on Stebbs.

A pang of guilt struck her when she saw him fumbling across the fields, a walking stick in hand. She should have helped him back to his shelter. She lowered the rifle once Stebbs made it to the rock, rested a moment, and continued toward home, picking his way through the field of coyotes that had been reduced to skeletons and drying sinews.

There was time for a few hours of sleep, at least. Lynn crept to her cot silently so as not to disturb Lucy and rolled to face the wall. Nightmares were nothing new to Lynn; her waking life was full of enough disturbing images, she didn’t think it was fair that some could snake into her dreams as well. Mother’s death plagued her every night, replayed in such detail that she could count Big Bastard’s teeth as they sunk into Mother’s neck.

Lynn closed her eyes, fully expecting to see blood spilling onto grass, or even the lonely little mound of mud she’d left behind her at the stream. Instead it was Eli’s face, flickering in the light of his badly made fire. She studied him as she drifted off to sleep, in a way that she never would have allowed herself in daylight.

She could see what Mother had meant about the dead boy whose boots she’d taken. Even starving, Eli had a sparkle of youth about him, though he lacked the paunchy cheeks of the boy she’d shot. Lynn balanced the two faces in her mind, trying to tack down what exactly made them so different. In the end, she decided Eli was just easier to look at.

For the first time since her death, Lynn dreamt of a face other than Mother’s.

Responsibility brought Lynn out of the light nap, and she went about her morning chores. Lack of sleep combined with unfamiliar emotions had her mind at a rolling boil, occupying every corner of thought. Which was a good way to get killed. Her empty buckets banged against her knees as she trudged to the pond, determined to nail down the slippery feelings so that she could concentrate on reality.

Guilt she’d known before, when she’d failed Mother in a simple task or taken an extra sip from the purified water. The crushing weight of her own role in Mother’s death was constant, a dark cloud that followed her waking thoughts that she knew would billow into a storm of a nightmare if she slept.

Smaller shards of guilt were starting to prick away at her. The image of Stebbs resting at the boulder in the field floated across her vision and she shook it off. His square trade of curing her venison in exchange for her scoping out the Streamers’ camp had turned into a mess that landed her with more work than she’d had before. She ended up on the sharp end of that stick, so why did she feel bad about him struggling home?

And she should be angry with him for volunteering both of them to help Eli and Neva, Lynn thought bitterly as she plunged her first bucket into the frigid morning water. Stebbs seemed to think that the Streamers had become their responsibility and she wasn’t sure she disagreed. Their complete inability to care for themselves would leave them dead before winter. She and Stebbs had the chance to prevent that.

Lynn’s stomach clenched as the first flickers of doubt swept through her. The dark, sacred confines of the barn calmed her, and she breathed it in deeply; must and moisture, spilled oil and the ghost of gasoline. Above it all, she could smell the water, straight through the plastic tanks her nose found the scent of survival. She knew what Mother would have done. Nothing. And there would be two large graves next to the small one under the ash trees.

Lynn quickly dumped her second bucket into the tank to chase that picture away. She stood motionless above the tank for so long that the ripples settled, and she regarded her own reflection in the water.

Lucy woke to find her new protector sitting in the other cot with her arms crossed defensively, her gaze unfocused. The little girl stretched luxuriously, reveling in the smell of her clean hair and the feel of the warm blankets on her back. The trapped warmth from her body lulled her back down into sleep, but not before her hands brushed against something unfamiliar. A stuffed red dog, worn from years of love, had been tucked under the blankets with her.

“What’s this?”

“Just something I got for you out of the attic,” Lynn said. “It’s no big deal.”

Lucy ran her fingers over the soft, red fur, the hard nubs of plastic that formed his little black nose and eyes. “Was he yours? What’s his name?”

“I just called him Dog.”

“Dog,” Lucy repeated, pinning back his floppy ears and releasing them to fall down into her face. “You’re not good at naming things.”

“I had a real dog once,” Lynn said. “He answered to ‘Dog’ just fine, and didn’t seem to mind it.”

Lucy tossed the stuffed animal into the air. “What happened to him?”

“That,” Lynn said, snapping her hand out neatly to snatch the dog before he landed, “is not a good story.”

Lucy stretched her thin arms out, fingers wiggling for her gift. “Can I call him Red Dog?”

“Call him what you want,” Lynn said, letting him fall to the little girl’s chest, where she grabbed him in a bear hug. “He’s yours now.”

Lucy snuggled back under the covers, taking the newly rechristened Red Dog with her. Two fingers pinched onto one ear and rubbed in an ever-slowing circle as she drifted back down into sleep.

“Can I ask you something?”

Lucy jerked awake. “Mmph?”

“Am I good-looking?”

The child nodded, her gold curls bobbing up and down on the pillow. “Verry purty,” she mumbled.

Minutes of silence filled the basement, broken only by the sound of Lucy’s even breathing. “Huh,” Lynn finally said to herself. “Who’d’ve guessed?”