People left Li food, refilled the water bottles she left outside the tent – Sanaa and Amin, Abraham, a few others she’d shared kill with or patched for on the quiet, building up credit against exactly this kind of contingency.
Sanaa stayed to give her news through the nylon shell – her family had survived the flu already. She said bodies had been removed from the camp and burned within sight in the No Go. The people who did it weren’t relief, they were outsiders in hazard suits and masks. They agreed that wasn’t good. It meant makecamp was on someone’s radar, Sumud or Port Howell authorities getting nervous about an epidemic on their doorstep.
The Med Tent had run out of antivirals and disposable masks, they were waiting on a new aid dump. Li breathed Matti’s air and willed herself not to get sick until Matti got through it.
Now her daughter lay still and glassy, and Li watched the work of her breathing. Counted through the pauses to the restarts, held her own breath, watching that thin chest as if the act of witness alone could keep Matti’s lungs working. The first time Li knew she was pregnant what she’d thought was, I’m going to fuck it up. And she did, her body did, over and over. The surprising part came later. Inside her another heart started pumping fluid, exchanges were made across the border between her blood and the blood of this creature taking form. She churned and swelled up again, aching to the touch. Lead in her bones. But this time it kept happening instead of tearing up and bleeding out of her piece by piece. And she didn’t know if she wanted it, she just knew that Frank did. Week after week, she watched his happiness as a kind of certainty settled on this thing she hadn’t decided not to do. Carefully, then recklessly, Frank expanded.
Matti’s hair was even shorter since the last outbreak of lice, and streaky with sweat, making her unfamiliar. She’d lost another tooth and a big one was already coming, it had changed her face again. She kept changing. Li saw how beautiful she was. She looked and looked. It was so easy to love Matti when she was still like this, when the furious concentration of her self made no demands, resisted nothing, insisted on nothing.
On the third morning she cooled and her breathing became easier. She drank, then slept again but quietly. The heaviness Li felt was barely recognisable as relief. She let it pull her down beside her child and slept with her.
Late in the day, Matti sat up and asked for food. There was almost nothing left. Whatever Li had caught would be rotting in the snares – she needed to get out there to empty and reset them, so they would have something to trade in the coming days. If she left now she could be back soon after dark.
She explained this to Matti while she lined up the water bottles and the two cans of beans within reach.
Matti said, Don’t go tonight, Mum.
I won’t be long. You just need to drink water and go to sleep. I’ll ask Sanaa to check on you.
What if you are long?
Then you wait for me at the Kids’ Tent.
Matti kept shaking her head. Li could feel a kind of lethargy coming on that would make it too hard to do anything but lie down beside her, and so she was hard on Matti. Her strong child who had survived. She thought it would make her angry and the anger would make her turn away, make leaving easy. But Matti followed her all the way to the fence.
The duster came up fast, late afternoon of the eight day. Li had only just started walking. She’d seen dust inland in West but nothing like this. Wasn’t prepared for the ferocity, the sting, the way it snuck into her lungs. She tied the thermal leggings around her nose and mouth, pulled her cap down low, but there was nothing she could do about her eyes. Dust masked the sun and shrank the world to a swirling red mass that she moved through as good as blind.
Within minutes she’d lost the road. She blundered through choking, whistling air with her arms out in front of her. Her eyes wept and burned. Then she was on her hands and knees, with the idea of finding some bushes to shelter in, turning her back to the wind until this passed. But already she was losing the idea of time.
The railing reared up so suddenly she almost crashed into it. Ran her hands along the rough, gappy wood and stood up. It was a porch. She felt her way over missing planks to the door. The effort of breathing made her desperate, uncaring of the risks.
She pulled it shut behind her and got her back to it, knife in one hand, fumbling for the gun with the other. In the dim light she saw a hall with doorways either side and another one at the end. A layout like hundreds of farmhouses she’d been in, except in this one all the doors had been salvaged, along with some of the floorboards in the hall. She pulled the leggings from her face to breathe more easily, listened, heard nothing.
Li moved through the house, stepping over gaps, checking the rooms. All empty and stripped bare, but someone had been in the middle bedroom recently; the air felt disturbed and there were scuffmarks on the dusty floor. It was the room she would have chosen, midway between the front and back doors. The window was boarded
