Those Who Must Survive

The woman wailed, piercing the near perfect silence of the early hours of the morning. The cry reverberated through the hollow of a burnt out building, echoing its way to empty, broken streets. Two women were jammed into a makeshift partus nest tucked into the corner of a closet on the second floor. Sprawling urbana and a whistling breeze bore through the eroded cement wall, giving them an oddly beautiful vistal view of the remains of a once thriving city while also whisking away the smells of effort, blood, and shit. The chill of Autumn kept the air refreshing—or as refreshing as it could be under the circumstances. Rot had taken anything even remotely organic. Freshness was a memory at best, and even then, only for those old enough and resilient enough to remember. A microbiome built on death and decay scented the air with microscopic excrement, debris, and miasma.

The woman and her midwife had scouted their location with the expertise of those who must survive. They’d carved out a path, literally in some cases, winding their way through the wreckage of a building that was otherwise stable enough. Steel and cement had gnarled their way into an almost organic stronghold that took both expertise and a little intuition to navigate. The best part was that it had obviously been picked clean, so there was little risk of encountering opportunists or ne'er-do-wells. A huge glass sign, now in shards outside the blast-worn entrance, declared this to be some sort of multi-use, communal office building and workspace of yore. The directory in the lobby had remained mostly intact and displayed no recognizable companies, organizations, or businesses of interest. There were no indications of food or useful materials. This was practical and worrisome. Ideally, they’d have found a hospital or clinic to get the business done, where they’d have access to at least some beds and linens they could boil and sterilise. Here, there was no such luxury, though the walls offered unparalelled safety. They were stuffed into what had clearly been a supply closet and it had already been picked clean of useful chemicals and materials. Less seasoned wanderers might have moved on, but they’d both known, instinctively, that this was the safest place to be for the work that needed doing. So, like explorers in the Amazon, they cut and thrashed their way through the building, forging secret paths and traps to dead ends. The only way to get to them now would be to scale a sheer face or suss out the solution to their labyrinthian maze. Both possible, but highly improbable, at least for other humans who might instantly recognize their vulnerability and their value.

But still, safe as they were, the labour was hard—harder than anything the woman had ever experienced, and in the end, a challenge she wouldn’t overcome.

"Better to die a mother than a splat under a slab of glass or at the end of a scavver’s pole or heaven forbid, mauled by some unmentionable thing while picking through an old grocery," the midwife whispered these sweet, supposedly soothing coos to the waning woman. The woman's eyes fluttered. She seemed lost in the ideas of death.

The midwife saw her losing her grip on the now and took the opportunity to slit open the bolus belly containing the infant. The woman had never looked very pregnant, carrying small and low and to the back of hips thanks to a diet of scavenged junk, gnarled, wild roughage, and an intermittent supply of dirty water. In part, that's how they'd managed to escape. It's easy to conceal a pregnancy that doesn't quite show, even if it's because you're nearly dying yourself.

The woman screeched as her skin split and her blood spilled onto the linoleum beneath them. The midwife didn’t stop. She didn't even hesitate. She was practiced and she was owed for her knowledge. The baby had to live and it had to be healthy, come what may, and it seemed like the mother was in no condition to make it through. All the better anyway. Less messy. Fewer strings to tie up in the end. So, the midwife continued to slice through skin and fat and fascia until the womb was exposed. The placenta, now open to the air, pulsed in arrhythmia, the two heartbeats diverging, separating mother and infant forever. The infant’s hand pushed through the gore and found the hilt of the midwife’s knife for just an instant before slipping off and splashing back into the blood of its own bearing. The midwife grinned. The infant was healthy. Meanwhile, frenzied wisps of life escaped the mother in gasps, fits, and sighs. She was wholly unaware of the new life being extracted from her dying body. There was too much blood on the floor. There was too little blood left in her. The mother was mist and haze and sweat and exhaustion.

“Water,” she slurred through determined lips.

The midwife ignored her and instead reached into the wound-turned-portal to free the infant. Now stagnant blood spilled over all three of them and steamed against the cool of the early morning. The sun had begun to peak over the horizon, casting flesh-pink light over the city and obscuring the true horror of the scene. The child was perfect. The coral pink of the world surrounded and engulfed them. There were no bloody hands. There were no pools of viscera, tainted with pain and death. There was only the new pink of the new day and the new baby. The infant’s skin was soft, perfect, beautifully pastel—the perfect palette for any nursery.

The infant bellowed her cry of life, unprompted. The air was cold and she could feel it. She would never remember this trauma but it would shape her in ways she'd never trace or understand. She’d never recall the harrowed smell of the ends of procreation, laborious and important and mundane and a strain on the efforts of survival but all at once necessary and instinctual and essential to being. So fervently wanted and needed.

The mother’s eyes lolled. She saw a purple-pink cloud of flesh and reached for it feebly. The midwife tied and cut the cord, then quickly wiped, wrapped, and whisked the infant away. The child would neither recall her mother, having never felt her touch or smelled her. The woman’s arms fell to her side. She was weak. She was tired. She was spent.

“It’s a girl,” the midwife said to herself. Girls went for even more, and as healthy as she was, this was a boon. The babe's lungs were strong. The mother lay there, no longer bleeding because the bleeding was done, but all the same covered in it, soaked in it. She couldn’t focus. She couldn’t remember why she was here. She’d never fully experience her child and though she didn’t understand why, she knew she’d made a mistake.

The next night the midwife met with two men, not scavvers, but not much better, and collected her bounty.