Hidden (Final Dawn) (6 page)

     “Very well, the motion carries unanimously to leave the restriction as is. Is there any other new business, or anything else anyone wants to discuss?”

     There was no other business. The group as a whole were content with their lives in the mine. They could see on the television how difficult life was on the outside, and they knew they were luckier than most. To complain about their living conditions would be very small minded under the circumstances.

     They all knew they were lucky to be alive.

Chapter 8

     Mark looked through squinted eyes at the alarm clock. It was just after three a.m.

     He was never one who awakened easily in the middle of the night. Even when his body moved that early, it did so by rote. His mind was always in a fog that time of morning, a step or two behind his movements.

     So when Hannah nudged him awake and said, “Honey, it’s time,” it took him a few seconds to comprehend. Time for what? Time for sleep? Sure. Good night, my love.

     No, wait, time for… “Oh, my God!”

     He was suddenly wide awake, and moving, his mind going from zero to sixty like a souped up Camaro.

     But Hannah was the one carrying the baby. And she was the one who’d taken the courses on midwifery. She knew exactly what to do and when to do it. And she knew that the best course of action in this stage of the process was to remain calm.

     Mark was in full panic mode. “Okay, is it coming now? I mean, right now? Can you stop it until everybody is up? I mean, how much time do we have? Does it hurt? Can I get you something? Should I go get Karen and Sarah?”

     Hannah smiled the same beautiful smile that had won his heart the day they met so long before.

     “Relax, sailor boy. We have plenty of time.” She reached out to him and held him against her breasts and brushed her fingers through his hair. “We need to do this thing methodically, and carefully, and I’m going to need you to not panic. Are you with me on this part?”

     Mark’s mind was racing a hundred miles an hour, but she was right. He needed to be calm or he was no good use to her. And they needed to go through this together.

     “My water broke an hour ago. It made a big mess on the bed, but we can deal with that later. I’ve been timing my contractions, and they’re about twelve minutes apart now. So we’ve got plenty of time.”

     “What do you need for me to do, honey?”

     “The first thing I need from you is to remain calm. I need to move over to the clinic. Karen and I set up everything we’ll need over there two days ago when I told her I felt close.”

     “Should I wake Karen up?”

     “No, let her sleep. We’ve got at least a couple of hours to go. We’ll wake her when I’m five or six minutes apart. What we need now is to move over to the clinic and just let nature take its course.”

     “Wait here, I’ll get you a wheelchair.”

     “No, I’d rather walk. But I’ll move slowly, and I probably won’t make it there in twelve minutes. So I’ll need you to walk with me and support me when I have a contraction, or if I get dizzy or weak.”

     “Okay, let’s go.”

     “Hold your horses, sailor. Wait until after my next contraction.”

     He held her hand and looked into her deep brown eyes.

     “Have I told you that you are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen you? I mean, I’ve always heard that women are most beautiful when they’re carrying a child, but now I believe it’s really true.”

     “Thank you, honey. Will you still feel that way in four hours, when I’m covered with sweat and cursing your very existence for doing this to me?”

     “Yes, my love, even then.”

     She smiled and said, “Well, at least in a few hours I won’t be as big as a house any more.”

     He leaned over and kissed her.

     “Honey, you’re not as big as a house.”

     He could have left it at that, but he couldn’t resist.

     “A two car garage, maybe, but not a house.”

     It was his turn to smile, and Hannah laughed.

     “Wanna guess who’s not getting lucky tonight?”

     Then her smile went away and her face contorted into one of pain. Mark squeezed both her hands and held her close, but he knew that’s all he could do. She shuddered and whimpered like a small puppy in pain, waiting for the cramps to subside.

     Once they were gone, she took a deep breath and said, “Okay, my love, let’s go. But we’ll go slowly. There’s no rush.”

     They were within sight of the small clinic, perhaps fifty feet away, when the next wave came. It was a little bit harder than the one before it. Hannah assumed it was because she was on her feet and moving. She stood, slightly stooped over, and held her belly with both hands as she leaned into Mark. He steadied her while she rode out the contraction. Once it passed, she drew a deep breath and looked around, making sure she wasn’t too dizzy or weak to proceed.

     When she was ready, she moved on, holding onto her husband for support.

     Once inside the clinic, Mark helped her up on the table, and they timed the next three contractions. They were now just over eleven minutes apart, and almost perfectly spaced.

     From the patient’s table, Hannah very calmly instructed Mark on the preparations to make. She told him how to scrub up, then to glove his hands and get out the towels and instruments they’d sterilized ahead of time just for the event.

     Once he had everything laid out, he sat next to her, holding her hand, as they cycled together through the pain and laughter. They talked of their hopes and their dreams and their plans for this little boy, or girl, whichever God chose to give them. They agreed that this was a night that would stay with them forever. Mark offered to run to his small television studio in the back of Bay 8 to get a digital camcorder. “So we can capture it all for posterity,” he said.

     She smiled, but was very firm: “Don’t you dare.”

     When the contractions were six minutes apart, she said, “Okay. Now you can go wake up the girls. I need for you to be strong so they don’t panic. You have to tell them that everything is going according to plan, and they’re all going to deliver their first baby soon. Go now, and don’t dally.”

     Mark dutifully gathered up Sarah, Karen and Sami and led them all back to the clinic. There were equal parts joy, excitement and stress in the room. Everyone present was nervous but trying not to show it. And everyone in the room loved Hannah enough to not let her down.

     The first thing Karen did was take charge of the room. She took out her carefully written notes and laid them to the side of the exam chair. Hannah was the experienced midwife. She would guide them, unless she passed out or there were complications. If there were complications, someone would run to get Debbie. Debbie was a trained medic and EMT, and would know what to do.

     Silently, Karen said a prayer. Then she carefully took a measurement to see how much Hannah had dilated, and compared the number to the chart in her notes. Everything appeared to be going well.

     When the contractions were three minutes apart Mark lightened the mood by telling his wife the faces she was making looked just like the face she made during an orgasm. Hannah came back with, “Don’t make me come off this table…” and for a few brief moments it seemed everyone was having fun.

     At just before noon, the baby crowned and Hannah began pushing. She squeezed Mark’s hands until they were purple. He didn’t care, and actually barely felt it. He was busy wiping the sweat from Hannah’s face and telling her how gorgeous she was.

     When the time came, Karen handed him the baby to hold while she severed the umbilical cord and gathered up what was left of the birth sac. She bundled the waste up into a bloody sheet for disposal while Mark bathed his newborn son for the first time.

     Hannah was beaming. The tears on her cheeks were tears of happiness. And as she held little Markie for the first time, he looked at her and smiled. The whole room cried. Karen said, “It’s just gas,” and Hannah countered, “Na-uh. He just wanted to let his mommy know he’s happy to be here.”

     For the rest of the day it was just Hannah, Mark and the baby in the small clinic. The girls had helped Hannah transfer to the hospital bed, so she’d be more comfortable. The baby took to the nipple with no problem, prompting Hannah to comment he was just like his father, and Mark stood by with a bottle of newborn formula in case it was needed.

     In late afternoon, when Hannah’s exhaustion caught up with her, Mark rocked the baby while she slept, amazed at how lucky he was to have the two of them. The world had changed dramatically in the previous few months. The next years would bring even more drastic changes. But the one constant, the one thing that would help them survive, was the bond they had between the three of them. They had gone from being a couple to being a family. And despite all the chaos that was going on in the world, Mark considered himself the luckiest man on earth.

Chapter 9

     On Buena Vista Drive, the snow was accumulating quickly. The drifts were over three feet high now. Frank was on the roof of his house, shoveling off the excess snow. He knew that snow was incredibly heavy, and he couldn’t afford to let it collect more than a few inches high. The roofs had already collapsed on a couple of the vacant houses on the block, but that was okay. Those were the houses that Frank would slowly knock into pieces over the next few years anyway. A collapsed roof would just lesson the chances of it falling on him while he was gathering firewood.

     The accumulating snow was both a blessing and a curse. It made movement more difficult, and Frank saw fewer and fewer strangers’ footsteps in the snow when he made his daily surveillance walks.

     But it also made getting out more difficult for him. And getting out was essential for survival.

     Frank was lucky in that his wife Eva was way more brilliant than he’d ever be. Three years before, people around the world were going crazy convincing themselves that the Mayans’ doomsday prediction would mean the end of the world would occur on December 21, 2012. Eva had taken notice. For several months prior to that date, she had very quietly stocked up on non-perishable dry goods. In the back bedroom of their home were stacks of spaghetti and egg noodles, bags of rice, beans and dry soup, as well as two hundred boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and cases of Cup O’ Soup and Ramen noodles. There were also forty cases of drinking water. They were frozen solid now, of course. But the bottles were made to expand without breaking, so most of them were intact. Would it be enough for the two of them for seven years? No. But it would keep them for awhile. When they ran low Frank would start scavenging for food at the abandoned homes, and in a pinch he’d bring home meat from the dog, cat and squirrel carcasses lying frozen around the neighborhood. But that would be a last resort.

     As for the water, that wouldn’t be a problem as long as it was snowing. Frank gathered enough lumber to keep the fireplace burning twenty four hours a day. Perched on a pot hanger above the fire was an old stew pot. Twice a day, Frank took the pot out into the yard and heaped it full of snow, then returned it to the fire.

     The snow only took a couple of minutes to melt, but they boiled it for ten additional minutes, just to kill any parasites. Then they filtered the water through a cotton sock to catch any dirt particles or debris that might be in it, and poured it into empty drinking water bottles.

     On the days when they just didn’t feel like boiling water, they fell back on the bottled water from their spare bedroom. Leaned up against the brick wall of their fireplace, the heat from the burning wood would thaw out the frozen water bottles within twenty minutes or so.

     For entertainment, Frank would pour one cup of gasoline into the small gas generator they kept in the garage. It only put out two thousand watts, but it was enough to run three appliances: an old twenty inch television, a DVD player, and a microwave.

     Frank and Eva had developed a habit of cranking up the  generator each day at lunchtime. While their Ramen noodles were cooking in the microwave, they would watch movies as a brief respite from the chaos and misery that their world had become.

     So for the two hours or so each day that the generator would run before running out of fuel, the Woodards would have a hot meal and relax while watching actors who were more than likely dead, and pretending that the world was sane again.

     The irony of it was, they weren’t big movie watchers before Saris 7 hit. They had a handful of videos, mostly old John Wayne westerns. But the Castro house, because they had children, had literally hundreds of DVDs.

     Frank made a deal with Julio Castro the day Julio and his wife decided to kill themselves and their children. They were a good catholic family and followed the path that God set out for them. But Julio and Nancy couldn’t bear to think of the life their children would have to endure without their parents if they didn’t survive. They figured death with dignity was better than a life of suffering.