Suddenly I felt so unprepared for this event that had happened to my body.
I was in labor. Labor!
I was about to deliver this baby on a stage in front of all of these men and I didn’t even have a blanket to wrap this child in.
That was my biggest concern. I didn’t have a blanket for him.
I couldn’t gather all of the other details or think about them because there were just too many. If I acknowledged that this place was too dirty to deliver a baby I would breakdown. Or if I thought about all of the things that could go wrong I would probably have an aneurysm. And the thought of publically going through this…? Yeah, I couldn’t even entertain the thoughts.
I read a prenatal book that we had found in a Texas library, but it had done nothing but scare me.
There were so many things that could go wrong in birth. There were so many possibilities where the baby could die or the mother could bleed to death.
And I was already in the worst possible place I could be in!
Oh, god, I did not want to do this.
I didn’t. I would rather face the auction than go through this right now.
I knew I wasn’t going to live through this. I just knew it. A clarity so heavy and drugging settled over me that I thought I would pass out again.
I couldn’t live through this. It wasn’t just that I didn’t think I could; there was actually no way for me to survive this. And that was when I finally felt the blazing determination to fight.
I sucked in a breath and it was as if it was my first. In some ways maybe it was.
I didn’t breathe as Haley Gable, I breathed in life, in stabilizing oxygen as a mother. For the first time since I had conceived this child, I finally realized that I was a mother. This baby wasn’t an extension of me or a replica of me. This baby was me.
My flesh. My blood.
This baby was Life. This baby was mine.
I clenched my teeth together so tightly I was confident I would shatter a tooth. My hands balled into fists and I pressed them against my rock hard belly. I would live through this.
And I would make sure my baby lived through this.
Everything else faded away and I funneled my thoughts into one goal and one goal only- make it through this contraction.
And then, my next goal would be to make it through that next contraction.
And so forth until I had to switch goals.
But one thing at a time.
Finally the shouting overhead stopped and all of the men looked back down at me. They seemed resigned. Whatever they decided, it was final.
Strong, cruel hands reached for me and I closed my eyes, shaking through another long breath. I chose to ignore their hands and focus on breathing. That was all that filled my head. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The men picked me up, several of them supporting my body. They started moving me through the crowd. People pushed in around us, desperate to see what was wrong with me.
Sweat poured from my forehead and drenched my shirt. I heard a familiar voice rip through the murmuring crowd, demanding to be taken with me.
Nelson.
My heart broke when I couldn’t call back to him. Another contraction came and my body convulsed with the need to curl into myself. Not expecting for me to move so quickly, the men nearly dropped me.
I screamed through this one, forgetting about my determination to breathe steadily. I couldn’t think about breathing when my insides were tearing apart and my spine was threatening to break in half.
When the pain finally ebbed, I found myself in the backseat of a car. The heat thickened the air and landed heavily on my skin. Springs cut into my sides and I looked up to find three of the four windows cracked badly.
Was this a dream?
The edges of my vision started to darken. I had never been so exhausted in my entire life. My eyelids fluttered but I struggled to keep them open. Another contraction would come soon. I wanted to prepare for it.
American voices talked to each other, but they might as well have been Spanish. They argued about something. About me, I thought. One of them wanted to take me home now and the other wanted to go back for the others.
Yes. I willed the second voice, the deeper voice, to win. Go back for my friends. I didn’t matter. I didn’t matter without them.
Go back for them. Please. Please. Please.
Another contraction and I lost the conversation. It hit me fiercely, as if it wanted to kill me. My eyes had been shut for minutes now… hours maybe? Everything was black. There was nothing in this world except pain.
There was nothing for me except pain.
Something was wrong.
Something was terribly wrong. I was helpless and alone. I had nothing and no one left. I had lost everything except this baby and now I might lose the baby, too.
A sob exploded out of me, shaking my entire body. I couldn’t think through the pain. I couldn’t put my thoughts together or breathe or live.
I couldn’t do anything but pray. That was the only thing I had left.
Please don’t take my baby from me, I begged. Please don’t let him become another victim of this ugly world. Please let me survive this. Please let Nelson survive this. And Page. And Miller. And Reagan. And Vaughan, Tyler, Hendrix, Harrison and King. Please, please let us survive this. Please let us find each other again.
And please, please let my baby live.
A great bang burst from beneath me and the car jerked to life. The lively rumble of the crowd became an angry entity of shouting and panic.
A gun shot went off. And then another.
I curled into myself and tried to live through this contraction.
A woman started screaming in the car, shouting for someone to hurry… to run.
More gun shots. More screaming. The sound of a stampede echoed around the car. A thousand footsteps pounded the earth, nearly cracking it in half, splintering the empty shell that housed all of this death.
Metal screeched and a gust of cooler air floated over my skin. It should have brought relief, but I was beyond that.
Something slammed into my feet, something landed on the floor in front of me.
“My sister!” a voice like I had never heard before screamed through the interior. The sound of it reached inside of me and wrapped around my heart, squeezing until it threatened to burst. “My sister!” the voice screamed. “We have to get to my sister!”
“We will go back for her!” a second voice shouted. “We have to!”
“No! Now!”
A calmer, maternal voice spoke to the furious men, “This woman is going to have a baby unless I can do something to stop it. You have to make a choice.”
I expected more shouting, but inside the car the air stilled and silence descended. The silence was an answer in itself. A crushing, life-sucking silence that squeezed my ribs until I had to gasp for breath.
“We’ll go back for her,” someone said. “We will find her.”
Nobody answered. Instead, whatever sat near my feet started trembling. It started trembling so violently that I thought at first it was an earthquake.
And that was how I finally lost consciousness, on top of an earthquake and in the middle of a war.
----
Pain brought me back to life.
If I were honest with myself, I could never truly lose reality. The pain was always there. Sharp. Biting. Searing through my insides and turning my stomach to rock one fiber at a time.
I was convinced I couldn’t have lost much time because I remembered the contractions acutely, but when my eyes fluttered open, I was laying on a bed- a real bed.
A soft mattress lay beneath me with clean sheets. I smelled lemon and oranges. A breeze ruffled over my face and the shwoop-shwoop-shwoop of a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead.
My neck was supported by a feathery pillow. When I managed to lift my right hand I stared at the clean skin and trimmed nails.
&
nbsp; Was I dreaming?
Had I died?
Another contraction hit me and I buckled beneath the severity of it. This couldn’t be the afterlife.
Unless it was hell…
Oh, shit. I was in hell.
Apparently it wasn’t the fire and brimstone furnace we thought it was. Instead, hell was nothing more than fake luxury while I endured never-ending labor.
This could not be my eternity.
Nelson’s face appeared over mine. His brows were furrowed deeply and his beautiful blue eyes shone with something that looked like tears.
Okay, this couldn’t be hell if Nelson was here.
Right?
“Are you real?” I croaked. Tears leaked from my eyes and his face became a blur above me.
“I’m real,” he confirmed. His hand landed on my cheek and I pushed into it, nuzzling against his skin. He smelled like lemons too. His skin had been scrubbed clean and he had changed into a new shirt.
“You’re not filthy,” I told him.
He shot a glare over his shoulder. “They wouldn’t let me in here until I showered. They refused to let me by your side because they thought I would give the baby a disease. They made me do it.”
Despite my agony, despite my fear and my perpetual heartbreak, I smiled. “You poor thing.”
“They cleaned you too,” he said. “Or rather she did. She said if the baby comes, at least it won’t be born dirty.”
It was my turn to furrow my brows. “Who’s she?”
“Joy,” he said as if that explained it.
“Joy?”
“He means me.” A woman stepped to my other side.
I nearly jumped when she appeared. Her tall, fit frame was a shocking contrast to her peppered hair and severe wrinkles. I couldn’t guess her age. She looked both too old and too young.
She wore a button up khaki shirt and as she inspected my face, she tied a scarf around her hair. She pulled latex gloves from a side table and slapped them on.
“Wh-who are you?” I stuttered.
“I’m Joy. My husband Andy is the one that bought you.” She grinned at me as if that was a perfectly normal thing to say. “I heard he got a steal of a deal too. That was smart of you to announce that you were dying. Nobody wants a slave that is half-dead.”
I looked up at the ceiling and tried to remember doing that. The memory wasn’t exactly clear, but definitely plausible. I still felt like I was dying.
I had more questions to ask, but another contraction came on and I did my best to stay conscious through it.
“I need to check you,” Joy said. “I need to see if you’re dilated.”
I pressed my lips together and shook my head. I didn’t know this woman. I didn’t know anything about her. I didn’t want her checking anything on me, especially that.
Also I wanted to live in whatever little denial I had left. I wasn’t ready for this baby. Not yet.
Every motherly instinct inside of me screamed that it wasn’t the right time. I didn’t have a calendar to work with or a doctor to give me my exact due date, but I had my gut… my instinct. I knew this was too early.
Nelson held my hand while Joy went to work. I stared into his eyes and looked nowhere else. He was my rock, my center. Fresh tears dripped down my cheeks as I said silent prayers of thanksgiving. I couldn’t do this without him.
“How are you here?” I sniffled. “Did you tell them you were dying too?”
His lips twitched, but his eyes stayed somber. “You didn’t really think I’d let you leave without me, did you? You’re stuck with me, Haley. For now. Forever.”
“What did you do?” I remembered the sounds of all those feet running. The gunshots. The shouting.
“What I had to do. They can’t keep me from you. Nobody can.” The promise in his steely voice rang with truth.
I closed my eyes and let it sink into my skin. Those words were beautiful. They were my hope when everything else was hopeless. My truth when I was surrounded by liars and manipulators.
My salvation when everything else was death.
“So you just walked out of there?” I half-smiled at him.
“He started a riot is what he did.” Andy appeared at my side just after Joy had replaced the sheet that covered my naked lower half. “How he didn’t get shot is a miracle in itself.”
“Obi Wan.” His hooded cape was gone and he was, admittedly, much too smiley to be the Jedi master, but it was definitely the guy from the auction.
Divine providence.
Maybe he was right.
He grinned at me. “Glad you’re not really dying. That would have been a disappointing rescue.”
“Andy,” Joy hissed. “You’ll have to forgive my husband. He has a macabre sense of humor.”
“Is this really a rescue?” I whispered, afraid to believe something good could have happened to us. Of course, it was on the heels of decidedly the worst day of my life. But at least I hadn’t died on the middle of that stage as I tried to deliver my own baby.
“It is,” Andy assured me. “Does it not look like one?”
Nelson’s hand landed heavily on my shoulder. “We’ve been through some rough times recently.”
Andy quirked a thick brow. “Hasn’t everyone?”
Nelson cleared his throat and said, “Even for the Zombie Apocalypse our circumstances have been… tougher than most. We can’t seem to catch a break.”
“Slavery can… break people. We’ve seen it before,” Andy said somberly, some of the light in his eyes faded. “We’ve rescued others that… well, they were never the same.”
Nelson cleared his throat again, “Slavery is new for us. We were only captured in the last few days. But before that it was cannibals. And then, er, before that, we were imprisoned in a territory run by a man named Diego. We just barely managed to escape that.”
Andy’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline. “Diego? And you escaped?”
“Cannibals?” Joy hissed.
“And before that, well, have you heard of a man named Matthias? He’s trying to reorganize America. He calls it the Colony.”
“We’ve heard of him,” Andy whispered. “You’ve been through all of that?”
“You’re not progressing,” Joy announced with evident relief. “You might just survive the day after all. I’m going to make you some more tea.”
Some more tea?
A contraction erupted and I hunched forward, struggling to breathe through the slice of discomfort. My hands landed on the top of my rounded belly and felt the muscle harden. The cramping twisted my insides and caused a fresh sheen of sweat to pebble over my face and back. My eyes closed and I willed my breaths to even out and become controlled.
“Is it any better?” Joy asked, reappearing at my side.
I thought about it. That one was painful, but I managed to stay conscious. I didn’t feel as if my body was going to explode into pieces.
I survived it.
“It was better,” I said with awe. “It wasn’t nearly as intense.” Nelson’s hand slid down my side until he found my hand. He entwined our fingers, holding my hand tightly in his.
Joy nodded as if she understood completely. “They were pretty bad in the car. I thought we were going to have to pull over and deliver on the side of the road. But I started timing them and they never regulated. I think the dehydration played a big part in starting the labor. And probably the stress. Do you know how far along you are?”
I shook my head slowly and looked at Nelson for courage, “We think close to eight months. But we’re not sure.”
“So, if we have to deliver, you and the baby have good chances. It won’t be so bad.”
She sounded so confident, but I couldn’t believe her. Once I delivered the baby I would then have a baby. How could I bring a child into this world? How could I keep a baby alive in this version of hell when my own life was threatened on a daily basis?
I had just been sold at a slave auction for goodness sakes!
/> “Don’t you worry about a thing,” Andy added. “Joy is the best midwife there is. I’ve lost count of the number of babies she’s delivered.”
“Midwife?” I heard Nelson grunt. “You’re a midwife?”
Joy smiled at us. “And Andy here is a doctor. You couldn’t have picked a better slave auction if you tried.”
Neither Nelson nor I laughed at that. We were too stunned.
“How is that possible,” I finally demanded. This was too good to be true. Way way way too good to be true. And in my very excessive experience, good things didn’t happen to us.
Only bad things. Awful things.
The things that nightmares were made of.
“Medical missionaries,” Andy explained. “We were in the process of building a hospital when the world fell apart.”
Nelson and I just stared at them.
Andy cleared his throat and went on, “We stayed here at first because we thought we could help. Government and structure just disintegrated and the people quickly divided. We thought we could help restore this country, keep the territory leaders around these parts from turning the people that trusted them into slaves. We’ve had… less than stellar results.” He chuckled darkly. “Actually, it was very reflective of what our mission was like down here.”
“Andy,” Joy gasped. “Don’t say that.” She shook her head at her husband, but her eyes twinkled. She pressed a warm cup into my hands. “Drink this. It will help. But I have to warn you, it will probably knock you out too.”
I stared at the murky liquid and pressed my lips together. No way.
“Tea,” she coaxed. “I’ve mixed some herbs into it to help your muscles relax and the labor to slow. It’s safe, I promise.”
The teacup wobbled in my shaking hands. Tea that would knock me out from a complete stranger? I’ll pass.
Nelson nudged my temple with his nose. “She gave some to you earlier, Hales. It helped calm you. I’ll keep you safe.”
I turned my face to press a kiss to his lips. “Don’t drink anything while I’m asleep,” I told him.
“I won’t,” he swore. “Get better, Hales. We have to get Page. I need you to help me.”
“Page?” Dread curled around my insides and Nelson had to grab the teacup while I gritted through another contraction.