In the end, they had packed up their trailers, one by one, driving them along backroads and parking them around the abandoned ranger station. They had built a life out there, the men hunting, the women cooking. They spent their nights trying to get pregnant. It was a good time, but it didn't fulfill her.
She placed a hand on her belly. The baby inside had been more active lately. Those movements kept her from going crazy. Liz and Tammy were fine folk, decent, if a little dull, but it was the baby that kept her company at night. In the darkness of the trailer with the muffled snores of Liz and Tammy in the other room, she would lay on her bed, the palm of her hand on her belly. She would imagine what type of child grew inside her. Who would that baby be in this new world? Would they be a leader? A survivor? A hunter?
Then sometimes her mind would wander, and she would wonder what would have happened to that baby in the old world. What would that baby's life have been like growing up in a trailer park with a single mom who worked at Appleby's and occasionally liked to get rip-roaring drunk? Ok, not occasionally. Theresa liked to think she would have been able to put the drinking to the side if she had a baby, but she knew that wasn't entirely true.
Her drinking was the entire reason she was a waitress at Appleby's who lived in a trailer park. She had her first sip in middle school with Sarah, her longtime friend. After that, she would steal from her parents and get drunk with Sarah every weekend. When they caught her with vodka in her water bottle at school, everyone told her she had a problem. But she was a teenager; she didn't listen.
As Theresa got older and more out of control, her parents had basically given up on her. She flunked out of high school. She was too busy with boys and booze, and weed had become sort of fun to smoke as well. Most of her money from her waitressing gig went to alcohol. Most of her tips went towards buying weed. A trailer was all she could afford. But she lied to herself; she lied and made herself believe she was happy.
The first few weeks at the ranger station hadn't been so bad. There had still been beer then. There had still been some hard alcohol too, a couple fifths of whiskey and vodka. But when the liquor dried up, that's when life had gotten harder. She had become ill with alcohol withdrawal symptoms. She liked to think of those times as the time she had enrolled in AA, Apocalypse Anonymous, where there was only one-step to quitting– not having anything to drink. It was a hell of a way to quit drinking.
The throwing up was the worst. Being stone-cold sober and throwing up was not a fun deal. She had thrown up plenty of times over the course of her life, and while it was never fun, the haze of alcohol made it tolerable somehow. Throwing up while sober and nauseous with a headache and hands so shaky that you couldn't even hold a lighter to light your cigarette, well, that was torture.
When Chad had proposed his plan to knock up everyone at the ranger station, she had gone right along with it, even convincing Tammy and a couple of other girls, who were dead now, to get on board. She would do anything to take her mind off of just how terrible she felt.
She had only slept with Chad a couple of times, but he had been such a gentleman about it. He had made her feel wanted, desired, though she was covered in her own sweat and shaking from alcohol withdrawal. She was sad when the sessions stopped, when she had discovered she was pregnant, but she would share a smile every now and then with Chad. He was a good person, in her opinion, and he shouldn't have been taken out the way he was.
But he had left her a gift, the child in her belly, a child who would never know alcohol, who would never know its father.
Theresa smiled, thinking of who the child would become. Then she placed her hand on her belly, waiting to feel the baby move. The fire crackled in the pit as the sun turned orange and the shadows grew.
She could overlook what those women had done to Chad and the other men… for a while. But sooner or later, someone was going to have to pay for the fact that her baby would grow up without a dad. The thought cheered her up, and it flooded through her chest like the warmth from a shot of vodka.
"What are you smiling about?" Tammy asked.
"Nothing… just smiling," she said.
Chapter 6: I'm Too Old for This Shit
They walked down the middle of the snow-blanketed street. They couldn't afford to twist an ankle by stepping off the road around the edges. There were no more snow-plows, no more de-icer, no salt. The roads were thick with snow, and it still fell from the sky.
The snow came up to Epps' shin now. Bill Epps hated cold weather with a passion. He hated being so cold
