Page 14 of Chaos

“Brick, baby bear. Brick.” Renata smooths her daughter’s hair, such a portrait of maternal devotion you almost wouldn’t believe she’s capable of lying and underhanded backstabbing.

Though, what is it about motherhood that’s at odds with any of that? Maybe that’s how moms have to be now. Maybe that’s how moms always were—capable of anything to protect their children.

I scoot another step closer to her. That gun is only two and a half feet from me by now. There’s a strap that runs across the gun’s handle with a snap. I’d need to get it open and then pull the gun.

“You haven’t had your period since you came here,” she says, and I forget all about the gun.

She pulls out a handful of pills from her pocket and sets them next to my sandwiches, fat and shiny and huge. “I couldn’t find prenatals. These are just multis, but you’ll need them. Hide them somewhere. Two a day. It should be enough until they come for you.”

I stare blankly at her.

“You didn’t know?” She folds her arms, like she didn’t just throw a grenade at my whole life. “I hoped it was maybe an IUD, but from your silence …”

My vision narrows down on a wave of vertigo.

Flark, indeed.

“Breathe for god’s sake,” she hisses. “We don’t have time for you to panic.” Renata keeps talking, saying words about the White House and Lavinia Hope, and Charleston and the General, and the Gray Caps, and the Butcher. And later, I’m sure I’ll try and fail to recall them all.

Something about my necklace and a note, but I don’t hear. Blackness eats at the edges of my vision like storm clouds, sucking away color and air.

Pregnant? Like with a baby? A human child that will grow inside me so large I’ll have to push it from my insides amid blood and screaming without an OB/GYN or a hospital or an epidural? A hundred grunting women from a hundred TV shows and movies blast through my mind, angry and red-faced and screaming in hospital beds, shouting at panicky husbands who faint for comedic relief.

But this isn’t a sitcom with a laugh track.

This is the apocalypse.

Before modern medicine, death in childbirth was practically routine. And we’re back there now. There’s no hospital full of electricity and life-saving-machines and squads of doctors who’ve delivered hundreds to thousands of babies.

I’m in an underground hellhole surrounded by increasingly emboldened sadists and perverts and liars.

And if I do manage to escape and bring a baby healthily to term, deliver it safely, and we both survive, then what? I could be captured again, or the baby could, or I could be killed, and then what?

The baby could die, and what would be the effing awful point of any of this then?

And Yorke …

How will he feel?

I touch my belly.

It feels like a timebomb. A baby.

A human about to storm into this shitty world and take it over, takemeover, steal my every waking thought and worry and feeling.

I can’t be pregnant.

My throat closes up with a horrific need to climb the walls or try to rip apart the bricks, make a break for the stairs, never mind that Sebi is at the top.

I can’t breathe.

I need to get out of this horror pit.

I glance at Charlotte Rose and flinch away from the tender fragility of her face.

My hands are shaking.

It’s true though.

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