Survivor Song(69)
Ramola next fights with Natalie’s feet and legs, absorbing kicks to her thighs and one breath-stealing shot to the gut. In a war of attrition that leaves both women exhausted and gasping for air, Ramola wins the battle. She muscles Natalie’s legs onto the mattress and builds a complex web of tape from ankle to ankle and tethers each to the lower bedframe. Battered and bruised, Ramola returns to the entryway, retrieves the collection of bungee cords, and uses them to buttress the arm and leg restraints. Natalie wriggles against the makeshift but effective shackles. Her back arches and her swollen belly rises with her manic efforts at escape. She screams and shouts and cries and laughs.
Ramola whispers, “I’m not leaving—I’ll be right back,” and flees the room.
Natalie’s unhinged wails chase her down the hallway, out the front door, onto the porch, her feet drumming on the plywood, finally sputtering to a stop on the grass, bent over, gasping for air, hands on knees. The distance is not enough. Natalie is there next to her, screaming into her ear. She needs more distance, to be farther away, maybe walk down to the road to wait for a rescue, or maybe walk to the next house to ask for help and the one after that and the one after that. Would she still be able to hear Natalie? Would she be able to unsee her tied-up form and her heaving, pregnant belly?
Natalie’s shouting mercifully ebbs. Ramola straightens and her breathing slows. From the vantage of the set-back, elevated front yard the road is a thin sliver, an ebbing brook between fields. The wind blows and the grass obeys, summoning a phantom in a blue-and-white ankle-length nightgown.
Ramola does not believe in ghosts, but she believes in this one. The phantom is slight, diminutive, as wispy as the bristles attached to a dandelion seed. Her arms are long and thin, built for reaching, tapping, touching. On the other side of the road, she floats through the field of yellow and brown. Her path is chaotic, without direction. Her hidden legs piston, expanding and retracting the bottom of the nightgown as though it is a bellows. She slows to jerking stops that seem permanent until there’s a sudden, automatonic restart. Her face is not visible, not even when she looks up across the fields at Ramola standing in front of the house.
Ramola should go inside and lock the doors and windows, draw the curtains, turn off any unnecessary lights. There’s a part of her that wants to wave at the phantom, to walk through the fields, to welcome her home.
Ramola remains in the front yard with the wind still blowing, the grass still obeying.
The infected woman either does not see Ramola or is too ill to cross the road and approach the house. She stays in her field and slow dances to a song all of us will one day hear.
The overhead light fixture in the kitchen doubles as a ceiling fan. Its base droops away from the ceiling plaster, exposing wires. Only two of the three bulbs work.
Ramola sits in an unsteady chair at the small table and inspects Josh’s hunting knife. The nylon sheath includes a pocket with a sharpening stone the size of her thumb. The handle is hard rubber and the blade is black, curved, and smooth, coming to an exaggerated tip. She sets it next to a spare collection of knives she harvested from the drawers. Most are old, serrated, and have rust spots on their blades, though she did find one paring knife that appears to be in good condition.
After checking and rechecking and dialing and redialing and texting and retexting, Ramola creeps down the hallway to the back room. A pungent ammonia smell of urine hits her a few strides from the doorway. When she enters the room, Natalie reanimates, growling, yelping, and whimpering in pain. The whimpering is hardest to take because she sounds like the real her.
Natalie writhes against her restraints. She lifts and drops her head. Her mouth is fully ringed in foam so thick as to appear fake, sloppy makeup in a cheap horror movie. Her eyes don’t focus as much as they roll and spin.
Ramola wants to put a hand on Natalie’s abdomen to feel for the child’s movements, but as she approaches the bed, Natalie nearly levitates trying to break free. Ramola retreats from the room, to the kitchen, and to her phone. No messages. She slumps back into the chair with warped, uneven legs. It teeters front to back. She covers her face with her hands, rubbing and pushing against her eyes until the dark goes purple.
Ramola transfers items one at a time from the kitchen table and front entryway to the bedroom, placing them on the dresser. With each pass, Natalie calls out in her new language.
When they were inside Norwood Hospital, Dr. Awolesi explained the virus was not blood-borne and would not pass through the placenta to the baby while Natalie wasn’t showing signs of infection. She said the post-exposure vaccine Natalie received was safe for both mother and fetus, but there wasn’t a lot of medical literature out there regarding what would happen if a woman at her stage of pregnancy succumbed to rabies infection.
She said they would still perform the cesarean section even if Natalie were presenting clear symptoms. Dr. Awolesi was reasonably confident the baby would not be infected.
Ramola remembers the last line clearly, perseverates on it, inspects it from every angle available.
She also remembers Natalie volleying back a quip: Reasonably confident? Is that like a medical shrug?
Ramola dumps the clothes off the chair and sits.
Natalie continues to babble and growl and writhe, though her strength appears to be waning.
How long can Ramola wait before she is forced to attempt a hackneyed C-section?
With each second that passes it’s likely the risk of infection or illness to the child increases. However, she cannot and will not perform surgery on Natalie while she’s awake, feeling pain, and thrashing about. Ramola would most certainly injure or cut the baby. Unfortunately, there is nothing with which to anesthetize Natalie. Ramola is not going to whack her on the head like in a dime-store thriller where one swipe of the butt end of a gun handle conveniently knocks the hero out cold until the opening of the next chapter.