“World?” Charlotte asks, confused, then her face clears. After all, they live in Virginia. One hour to the east of them begin the sprawling suburbs of the nation’s capital city. Her blood feels like it suddenly cools in her veins. Bad things sometimes happen in places like that. “Terrorists?”
There’s uncertainty on her mother’s face, but she answers. “I don’t know. It might be terrorists. Or maybe it’s a virus. Or maybe it’s a virus spread by terrorists.” She pauses again, looking at the covered window over the kitchen sink. “But it’s everywhere, so I don’t know.”
“What is?”
Her mother examines her face, as if trying to judge how much she can say.
“What is?” Charlotte asks again, this time more firmly.
“Honey. Charlie, something is happening to women. They’re…” She trails off, unable to continue.
“They’re what?”
With a deep breath, Tabitha pushes out the words. “They’re dropping dead. No reason, no sickness, no warning. They’re just dropping dead.”
Charlotte shakes her head. “No, that can’t be true.”
“I’m sorry, but yes, it is.” She glances at the TV on the wall in the kitchen. “We’re going to stay inside until they figure it out. That’s all. That’s what I know. Stay inside is what I heard on the radio while I was driving home.”
Fumbling in the basket on the island where they keep the remote control, Charlotte hands it to her mother and says, “I want to see what’s happening.”
They turn on the television. They watch the world begin to die. Outside, the dog barks in delight at the spilled crate, then drags a toy around the yard.
Wilhelmina
Wilhelmina’s concentration is broken by a sharp pain in her left thumb. She’s bitten it to the quick and the taste of blood fills her mouth. “Dammit,” she says, then presses her thumb into the hem of her t-shirt. She hasn’t bitten her fingernails since she was a girl, but old habits could apparently be picked right back up under stress. The end of the world is, in fact, very stressful.
Returning her attention to the TV, she listens carefully, but also watches for clues. The manner in which people spoke often said more than their words.
“…received the video report from a doctor. Diplomatic channels remain closed, so this is the first real on-the-ground report we’ve gotten from the U.A.E. since The Dying began.”
The news anchor finishes his introduction and the screen shifts to a less professional image. It’s the kind of footage one gets from an older phone in a poorly lit space. The face of a youngish man wearing a white coat fills the screen. He’s holding the phone too close to his face, and there are racks of what look like medical supplies in the background, as if he were recording in a closet.
He speaks in some fluid language she doesn’t know, but the sound is suppressed somewhat and a translation comes through over his words.
“Internally, it is being reported that we have lost ninety-four percent. That is almost all of them. That is millions of them. We here at the hospital have been tasked to discover the reason for this dying, but we can find nothing. There is no disease, no biological agent. The government does not believe us and we are instructed to keep looking for a cause. They are bringing us so many dead women that we cannot store them anymore. I don’t know if this is truth, but the soldiers say that only some of the smaller girl children are still alive, that almost all grown women have died.”
The man stops and rubs a hand down his face, making the phone in his other hand jerk and the picture with it. His eyes are red and swollen.
He takes a deep breath, then continues. “I have taken this phone, given to me by a friend. He has told me it will send my message even though our cell network here has been closed. I can only hope someone out there receives this message. We here at the hospital understand that this was not an attack on our women and children, but the government will not believe us. They will retaliate.”
He stops suddenly, going entirely still and silent, his eyes shifting to the side as if looking at a door. The phone jerks away. There’s a small clatter of noise, then the view stabilizes. The camera is now pointed at a stack of tightly folded linen in hospital blue.
Light brightens the space, and the harsh voice of a different man comes through, translated as, “What are you doing in here?”
The same man from before answers, “I am mourning. I want to be alone.”
A grunt sounds out, then the clip ends.
The newscaster is back in a flash, his face grim. “If that number is true, then it will be the first real proof we have that some countries are being more significantly impacted that others. And that means there must be something causing The Dying, something that can be found and treated.”
Wilhelmina jabs at the button on the remote and the TV darkens. She can’t watch anymore. That’s all she does now. That’s all she’s done for the past week. She steps over to the floor length windows of her high-rise apartment, the best parts of Seattle spread out before her like a gift. The day is gray, but the world below is even grayer.
The bustling activity on the streets has always seemed distant from up here, but now, it’s absent. It’s not easy to tell from this height who is male or female, but she knows that the few figures she sees moving are all male now. All the women are somewhere else. All of them dead or hidden.
The percentages for the United States are only guestimates, a fact now finally being shared on the news. At first, they’d tried to minimize it, but that only works as long as people aren’t faced with dead women and girls lying all over the place.
Except.
Except some of them
