A Gift Upon the Shore (8 page)

“What's Lassa fever?” Isaac asks.

Stephen is quick with a reply. “I think that's what Jeremiah called the great plague.”

No doubt that came from one of Jerry's sermons, secondhand from sermons he heard as a child. He has no more comprehension of Lassa than Miriam does of the California earthquake. Those events are part of our mythos now.

“Yes, Lassa was a plague of sorts, Isaac. It was a contagious, viral disease. At first, people called it L-flu. But it wasn't flu. Connie Acres showed us a bulletin from the Center for Disease Control. It wasn't even the original Lassa fever. That was first identified years before in Africa, and it was spread by infected rats. The mutant originated in Africa, too, and by the time I read the CDC bulletin, millions of people had already died of Lassa there. In this country—we were so smug. There'd been around ten thousand deaths here from Lassa, but we thought we had the best medical system in the world. Hadn't we finally developed a vaccine for AIDS? But this new Lassa fever wasn't only transmitted by rats. Once it infected a human being, it could be transmitted just by personal contact, and it was almost always fatal.”

Stephen leans forward. “But Bernadette said she had the great—Lassa fever, I mean, and she lived through it.”

“Yes, some of the people who contracted it lived,
if
they got good care. But without hospitalization, the symptoms were lethal. Hemorrhaging, for instance. Bleeding that can't be stopped, Isaac. Anyway, Lassa seemed to explode after the California quake. In the epidemic areas, it disrupted everything. In some of the cities, it was like a return to the dark ages. By late summer it was totally out of control. I made a note in my diary. . . .” I pause to flip through the pages. “Here—on September first. Twenty million people had died of Lassa in the United States.” Stephen and Isaac gaze at me in awe, yet they can grasp only a minute fraction of the hopeless terror underlying that figure.

Not that I could grasp it any better at the time. I take a deep breath. “Lassa wasn't the only apocalyptic plague humankind was suffering. There were the constant small wars, of course, but the other plague—and it was more deadly than Lassa, really—was starvation. I remember seeing a television news feature that showed a food drop at a camp near Mexico City. Big helicopters with bales of food spilling out into a whirlwind of dust. And the people—they looked like dry sticks hung with rags, and it seemed impossible that they could even walk. Yet they all got up and began running toward the whirlwind, toward the food. There were so many of them, they were like a dark tide. I remember Rachel said, ‘
There is the future.'
And she was crying.” I clear my throat of the huskiness in my voice. “We stopped watching the television for a while after that. We closed our window to the world. But eventually we opened it again. In June the president was killed. Someone bombed the White House.”

“What white house?” Isaac asks.

“That was what they called the big house where the president of the United States lived. There's a picture of it in the encyclopedia. Anyway, they never found out who did it, but the Bill of Rights was suspended, and the Apies rounded up tens of thousands of ‘suspected terrorists'—most of them guilty of nothing more than having no home or job—and threw them in detention camps, which were perfect breeding grounds for Lassa. The rampant stupidity! That was the real epidemic. Pandemic. What was happening in this country was happening all over the world.” I close my eyes, wondering how the frustration can still sting me like a thicket of thorns even after all these years. I call up a smile for Isaac and Stephen, to whom so much of this is meaningless. Yet they must understand what they can. At least, Stephen must.

I go on, “But here at Amarna the weather was ideal, the garden flourished, and I'd become very fond of goat's milk and learned to look a rabbit in the eye and slit its throat—
and
gut, skin, and dismember it. Isaac, don't laugh. That was a real accomplishment for a city girl.”

Of course, he does laugh, then he asks, “Who was a city girl? What does that mean?”

“
I
was a city girl. I came from a city, and I was—loosely speaking—a girl.” His smile is edged with uncertainty at that. No doubt he can't imagine me as a girl. “Yes, I was young then, but the world was still falling apart. We could close our window to it, but one day it came crashing through our front door. Not literally, Isaac. That's just a way of saying something . . . terrible happened.”

Stephen's breath catches, and Isaac looks up at him, blue eyes wide. Stephen asks, “Was it Armageddon?”

He persists in calling it that because he hears the adults use that term. Yet our Elder, the arbiter of all things religious and moral here, declares that the true Armageddon, the one prophesied in such lurid detail by Saint John, is yet to come. Jerry denies the End as Armageddon because his father denied it. Finally.

“No, Stephen, not Armageddon. Rovers.”

“What's a Rover?” Isaac asks.

“They were road gangs, Isaac. Groups of people—most of them young and into heavy drugs—who lived along the highways and attacked cars, trucks, or buses. They usually killed the people in them.”

Isaac stares at me, aghast. “Why did they do that?”

“I don't know. Maybe because they were insane. Insanity is one of the symptoms of too many. Anyway, the gang that attacked my bus stayed in the area all spring. The Apies sent reinforcements, and that kept them under control, but by late June the extra Apies were needed elsewhere, and the Rovers came out of hiding.” I look down at the diary, turn the pages back to June, but I'm not really seeing the writing that on these pages has become so cramped, nearly illegible.

“It was the day before the summer solstice. A grocery day. Food deliveries had been erratic for months, but usually a Safeway convoy came in Thursday night, and everyone in Shiloh did their shopping on Friday. Rachel and I always drove down to the mall with Connie and Jim, but that Friday morning Jim phoned and said there'd be no grocery run. The night before, the Rovers hit the supermarket just as the convoy arrived. There was a small, bloody battle—Jim rather bitterly called it the battle of the mall—and a lot of people were killed or hurt, including four of Captain Berden's officers. The Rovers blew up all three trucks. That was typical of them with cars or trucks. They just kept shooting until the gas tanks exploded. We didn't see Jim and Connie that day. They were both busy at the clinic with the casualties. Rachel and I worked in the garden and walked on the beach, just like any other day. That night Jim called and said everything was under control in Shiloh, and another Safeway convoy would arrive Monday. So we went to bed.”

And slept the peaceful sleep of the muscle-weary, slept in the bliss of ignorance.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,
“
THE SECOND COMING
” (1921)

A
s befitted the first day of summer, the sky was clear, the sun hot, and it was on this day that Josie Pearl, the white-and-tan Nubian doe, chose to go into labor. But Rachel didn't discover that fact until noon.

Mary had called Connie and Jim after breakfast and gotten a busy signal. There was an implied assurance in that, and she and Rachel went about the morning's work, feeding and watering the animals, weeding the garden, cleaning the chicken house, and collecting eggs. The hens were producing extravagantly with the long summer days. It was when Rachel went to the bam to get fresh straw for the nests that she discovered Josie Pearl's plight.

And again Mary found herself an assistant midwife.

The impending nativity attracted an audience. Rachel always left the barn door open during the day so the goats could come into its shade. Now they all gathered, drawn by the insatiable curiosity of their kind. Pan—black as night, silky beard bearing stars of dandelion seeds, the noble, fecund lord of this small harem—loudly demanded a rail position, but Rachel asked Mary to take him to his shed north of the barn. When she returned, Rachel had Josie inside the stall in the corner of the barn, while Persephone, her kid, and the three remaining does peered through the slats.

Persephone's delivery had been so easy, but Josie was having a hard time of it, since she had, with typical perversity, initiated herself into motherhood with twins. Once the necessary preparations were made, Rachel and Mary settled into the stall, Rachel constantly talking to Josie, stroking her head, giving her something to brace against when the contractions came. Josie, between contractions, crooned softly, talking to her kids.

The alternating contractions and crooning continued for over an hour before the front hooves of one of the kids appeared in the vulva, then retreated, while Josie stood panting, gray tongue hanging. As the afternoon stretched on, the kid made its teasing appearance, only to retreat, again and again, and as inexperienced as Mary was as a midwife, she knew Josie was weakening, her kids' chance at life dwindling. At length Rachel had to offer more than reassurance.

“Mary, hold her head for me. Just keep talking to her.”

Mary knelt in front of Josie, stroking her rough coat, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice as she murmured reassurances. Rachel moved around to the doe's hindquarters, and when Josie began straining with another contraction, Rachel said, “I can see the head!” She grasped the protruding legs with one hand, worked the other slowly, gently into the birth canal, while Josie panted and heaved, and finally on the surge of a last contraction, Rachel pulled the kid out.

A double handful of wet hair slicked in the remains of its embryonic sac, and Mary's pent breath came out in a sigh of relief. Rachel shouted, “Give me a towel, Mary—hurry!” And when Mary brought a terrycloth towel from the shelf on the wall, Rachel cleared the kid's throat and nose with her finger and toweled it vigorously, smiling at its outraged bleating. Then she laid the kid under Josie's nose, and the doe began licking it. It was a black buck, so small and shaky Mary couldn't believe it might survive. Yet second by second it drew strength from its mother's tongue, and soon it was staggering to its feet. Rachel cleared Josie's teat with a few pulls, then squeezed the first drops of thick colostrum into the kid's mouth.

The second kid, a doe, came with relative ease, and Mary was ready with a clean towel. Rachel surrendered the kid to her, and Mary rubbed it, laughing at the novel sensation of this new life warm and vital in her hands. It was entirely perfect, black like its sibling, its exotic, horizontal-pupiled eyes bright and strangely knowing. Almost reluctantly, Mary offered the kid to its mother.

A few minutes later Josie rid herself of the placentas, and Rachel wrapped the pink-gray masses in newspaper and took them outside to bury them. Mary stayed in the stall, watched Josie licking, nudging, crooning to her newborn, while they wobbled about on fragile legs. So natural and inevitable, this age-old cycle of birth, and Mary knew she must one day take part in it. These infant animals were exquisitely beautiful in some sense that transcended aesthetics, and her yearning for that beauty was at this moment intense and undeniable.

She looked up, distracted by a rustling in the straw on the earth floor of the barn. Rachel had returned and stood leaning on the stall's gate. She said, “Josie, you did yourself proud.” The doe was too occupied with her offspring even to look up. Rachel took her watch out of her jeans pocket where she had put it for safekeeping during the birthing. It was a mechanical watch with a dial on which the date was revealed in a tiny window. She insisted she liked to see time in a circle; it reflected the realities of existence on a spherical, rotating world. Now, as she buckled the strap to her wrist, she frowned. “Damn, it's nearly three. We'd better try Connie and Jim again.”

On their way to the house, they were joined by Topaz and Shadow, who had kept their distance from the barn for the last few hours. Goats had no tolerance for dogs, nor any compunction about butting or trampling them. Once inside the house, Rachel washed her hands and put fresh water down for the dogs, then went to the telephone in the north studio. Within a minute, she returned to the kitchen, where Mary was at the sink downing a glass of water.

“Still busy. Damn phones are probably out of order again.” She took the glass Mary offered and drank half of it, then went back to the telephone.

Mary felt her mood of quiet elation undermined by a whisper of apprehension as she followed Rachel into the studio. She listened to Rachel's end of the conversation, heard the name Joanie. One of the nurses at the clinic. When Rachel hung up, her eyes were narrowed, focused inward. “Joanie hasn't heard from Connie today, but she didn't expect to. It's Connie's day off. I think . . . maybe we'd better walk down to their house.”

“But if you got a busy signal . . .” Yet Mary could find no assurance in that to dispel the fear taking root in her mind.

“It probably means Connie or Jim were on the phone when we called.” She mustered a smile as she added: “We'll just go check on them, and if everything's okay, they can give us a cup of coffee.”

Mary heard the dry, gravel crunch of their footfalls as she looked south at the distant, silent blocks of houses. They might all have been empty for any sign of life in them. She turned, stared up at the Acres house, and stopped, realizing she was holding her breath at the same moment she realized what sound she was listening for and not hearing: Sparky's bark. They were close enough to the house for Sparky to be aware of them and raise his usual strident alarm. She glanced at Rachel, who had stopped with her. She seemed to be listening, too. Then, as if Mary had asked a question, she nodded and continued toward the house.

Jim's brown van was gone. There was no garage, so if the van wasn't in the driveway, it wasn't here. The dogs paused a few yards ahead in the driveway, sniffing the wind. Then Topaz curled her lips to show her teeth, Shadow retreated toward Rachel with an uncertain whine. And Mary felt her skin crawl with dread. She shivered as she walked with Rachel along the tree-shadowed path to the south side of the house. The front door was open a few inches. She thought,
I don't want to go in there
.

Rachel ordered the dogs to stay, then: “Mary, wait here. I'll go in.”

Mary shook her head. “No. We'll go in together.”

Inside the door was a small foyer. On the wall opposite the door, Connie had proudly hung a painting, one of Rachel's encaustics. Now it lay on the floor, its frame splintered, bone white gesso ground exposed in a hectic pattern of crisscross streaks.

On the wall where the painting had hung was a huge hieroglyphic of a skull executed in spray paint in black and blood red.

Mary pressed a hand to her mouth, gasping for breath, eyes closed to shut out that monstrous image, but the skull icon was limned in memory with a night of terrified flight.

Rachel turned away, crossed to the double doors on the left that opened into the living room, and Mary swallowed at the constriction in her throat, fighting the resistance of her muscles. But again, she followed Rachel.

Some maniacal beast had been unleashed in this room: furniture was overturned, smashed, slashed; bookshelves toppled; the white walls hideously muraled with obscene, spray-painted graffiti and stitchings of bullet holes; the cabinets where Connie kept her china and crystal empty, doors ripped off; the floor graveled with shattered glass and porcelain.

Rachel's whispered “
No
. . .” echoed in the silence, and the sheer agony in her eyes made Mary want to cry out. Then it was gone, and nothing took its place. Nothing.

And where was Connie? Where was Jim?

There on the far wall—that wasn't just more demented graffiti. Spattered red brown and a curving, downward smear. Mary couldn't see the bottom of the smear; the overturned couch blocked her view. She made her way toward the wall, glass grinding under her soles.

Jim lay with his back against the wall, and he looked like something old and tattered that had been tossed away, his clothing and flesh riddled with bullet holes, caked with dried blood. Even his face had been smashed by craters of bullets.

For a long time Rachel stood motionless, staring at Jim's body, then without a word, she turned away, walked slowly toward the kitchen.

Rachel, don't go
in
there. Don't go
. . .

Mary followed her. And they found Connie.

On her back on the floor, naked from the waist down, legs splayed, cold, dusky skin smeared with blood. Around her neck, the telephone cord cut deep into swollen flesh. Her face was bloated and purpled, tongue protruding, open eyes filmed like acid-dipped glass.

Mary felt darkness suffocating her, and perhaps she screamed, but she didn't hear it; she didn't hear or see anything until finally she recognized Rachel's face only inches away, felt the hard grip of her hands on her arms. But Rachel's eyes were as devoid of life as Connie's.

She said, “Mary, we have to go back to Amarna to get the van.”

And Mary accepted that not because she understood it—she understood nothing at this moment—but because it imposed some semblance of structure on the chaos in her mind.

She didn't remember the walk to Amarna. She was only vaguely aware that Rachel left the dogs there, vaguely aware after a passage of ambiguous time of Rachel backing the VW into the driveway at the Acres house.

Rachel took the machete from the van, and Mary followed her to the back of the house and watched with neither comprehension nor curiosity while she hacked at the blackberry vines shrouding a mound of earth. Beneath the camouflage of vines, a metal door lay at an angle in the earth, brown paint rotten with rust. Rachel had a key for the lock. Together they pulled the heavy door back, hinges wailing. Under it, nine cement steps, another door. Rachel found the kerosene lamp and matches in the niche at the foot of the stairs. The yellow light went before them into a cell of a room. Jim's radiation shelter. Shelves filled with boxes, jars, canisters lined the walls. The air was chill and sterile.

Rachel went directly to a cabinet by the door, and it was then that Mary realized that all this had been rehearsed in a sense. Rachel had been
told
what she must do in case . . .

Mary couldn't hold on to that train of thought. Rachel opened the cabinet. A gun rack. Two rifles, a shotgun, three handguns. Two slots were empty. She thrust a rifle into Mary's hands. It was heavier than she expected, black metal, polished wood, the lens of the telescopic sight all gleaming with exquisite menace. In front of the trigger guard was mounted a flat, curved magazine, its steel dull and gray.

Rachel's voice was as dull and gray as the steel. “It's semiautomatic. That's the safety there. You have thirty cartridges in the clip.”

Mary nodded, accepting those terse instructions as if this weren't the first time she'd handled such a weapon. Yet its lethal potential didn't take shape in her mind. She saw Rachel pull another rifle out of the cabinet, put the sling over her head, and shift the gun so that it angled across her back. Mary followed her example.

Then together they set to work.

Rachel and Mary became looters—purposeful, conscienceless, and guiltless—programmed by imperatives Mary still didn't understand.

We'll need these things
.

Perhaps Rachel actually put it into words. Mary was sure she didn't add:
to survive
.

Through the summer afternoon under a blue sky dappled with opaline mackerel clouds, they looted the shelter and house, loaded the van time and again, drove to Amarna, emptied their plunder into the garage, then returned for more. They didn't touch the bodies except to cover them with sheets. And Rachel didn't shed a tear, didn't speak an unnecessary word. She moved, as she always did, at a deliberate pace, but she didn't once stop moving. Her eyes remained lifeless, and sometimes Mary was convinced she'd been struck blind by shock. Yet it was obvious that her eyes did at least register the images necessary to her. Her whole body seemed to function on that basic level. No doubt her heart still beat. She still breathed. Mary could see that: shallow breaths through parted lips.