The day after: An apocalyptic morning (175 page)

              "I'm in labor," she told them.

              "Labor?" Jack asked, his eyes widening. "Are you sure?"

              "I'm sure," she said. "My water broke and it just felt like someone was wrenching my guts out. We'd better get Paul over here."

              "Let me get dressed," Sara said, pulling herself out of bed. "I'll go get him."

              It had already been decided that in the cases of normal labor and delivery in Garden Hill, there was little point in flying the woman to El Dorado Hills to be with the doctor. Especially not at night when flying and landing were much more dangerous (particularly with Jack being the only available pilot at the moment). As such, Paul, who had already had three deliveries of babies under his belt before the comet, had been appointed the official town midwife. In addition to the training he already possessed, Renee had run him through an advanced course to make sure he knew how to deal with the un-routine as well as the routine and to recognize problems early in the process. She had also donated a considerable amount of obstetric supplies. He now was equipped to deal with everything from breach delivery to meconium aspiration to prolapsed umbilical cords. He could even - as a very last resort - perform a C-section if necessary, although that would only occur in the event of helicopter failure and impending death of the mother.

              Sara threw on a pair of jeans and a sweater, put some shoes on her feet, and then went racing out the door into the darkness, a flashlight in her hand and her rain slicker thrown carelessly over her clothing. In the ten minutes that she was gone, Stacy had two more contractions - a mild one that felt only a little worse than menstrual cramping, and a hideous, painful one that brought her to her knees and made her moan in pain.

              "Are you okay, Stace?" asked Jack, who was prepping the bed with towels and absorbent disposable linen as he had been previously briefed to do by Paul. He was playing the part of the nervous husband admirably well. The fact the baby was not his (although Sara was currently six weeks along with one that was) did not even enter into his equation.

              "Fuck you, Eve!" she cried as the pain started to fade away. "Fuck you and that Goddamn apple!"

              Jack, who had been raised with communistic atheism as his primary religion, only had a slight idea what the blasphemes she was shouting out meant. Instead of questioning her however, he helped her to the bed, lying her on the nest he had constructed.

              Paul arrived a minute later, having been dragged across town at top speed by Sara. He was panting and out of breath as he entered the bedroom and began ordering more lighting and unzipping his supply case. He pulled on a pair of gloves and told her to open wide. "Don't be modest," he assured her. "I'm a professional."

              He inserted his entire hand into her vagina and probed forward until he felt her cervix. The mucous plug was long since gone and he was able to push two of his fingers into the hard ring that led to her uterus. On the other side he could feel the spongy tissue of the baby's head.

              "Well, you're on your way," he announced, carefully working his hand free and stripping off the glove. "You're dilated to four centimeters. Only six to go."

              "Almost halfway there," she said, trying to relax between contractions. "How much longer?"

              "With a first baby," he said. "I'd say maybe six hours or so. I'm not an expert or anything though."

              "Six hours?" she cried. "Oh my God."

              It actually turned out to be closer to eight. Her contractions continued to build both in intensity and length throughout the earlier morning hours until she was screaming with each one. She cussed Adam, Eve, and the asshole that had knocked her up. She vowed several times that she was never going to do this shit again. At last the contractions became so close together that they never seemed to die away completely before the next one hit. They were now accompanied by an overwhelming urge to push. Paul, who had been checking her cervix every hour or so announced that she was now dilated to ten centimeters and that the baby's head was starting to move downward.

              She was placed into the delivery position with Paul positioned in the catcher's box and Jack and Sara to each side, holding her legs apart and back, spreading her open almost obscenely. Fluid tinged with blood gushed out of her with each contraction, soaking into the pads and towels. Soon the top of the baby's head became visible between the stretched vaginal lips.

              "Look, you can see the head now," said Paul, who was much more nervous than he was letting on. "It has red hair like you, Stacy."

              "Goddamn motherfuckin son of a bitch!" she screamed as the next contraction ripped into her.

              And finally, at 6:33 AM, the head forced its way out into the world. Jack and Sara, neither of whom had ever seen a baby delivered before, gasped as they saw how impossibly big the head looked sticking out of her body. Had it really just come through there?

              "Push," Paul said as he picked up a bulb syringe and suctioned out the mouth and nose. "Push. It's almost over."

              "Ahhhhh," Stacy cried, bearing down one more time. The rest of the baby came out with absurd ease into Paul's gloved hands - a wet, slippery, perfectly healthy baby. The first of Garden Hill's post comet period. Paul suctioned it one more time, clearing its lungs out and it hitched a little, seemingly in surprise, and then uttered a weak cry, drawing the first breath of what would hopefully be billions.

              "Oh my God," Stacy cried, craning forward and looking at the little alien that had been growing in her for the first time. "Oh... a baby. I did it. I had a baby!"

              "What is it?" Sara asked, finding tears in her eyes as she witnessed the miracle of birth.

              It was Paul, who was wiping the moisture off of the tiny body with a towel that spotted the identifying features. Nestled between the squalling infant's legs were a tiny penis and testicles. "It's a boy," he said, trying to choke back his own tears. "It looks like we gained another member of the club."

              Paul clamped and cut the umbilical cord and then handed the baby to its mother. While waiting for the placenta to deliver, Stacy brought the newborn infant to her breast allowing him to suckle. The baby boy stopped crying and sucked contentedly, unaware of the world he had just been brought into, unknowing of the challenges that would lie ahead for him and others of his generation.

              Epilogue

              October 17, Impact +370 days

              El Dorado Hills, California

              "Are you okay Skip?" asked Penny Wilson, the twenty-year-old wife of Pat. She was sitting on the left side of the helicopter as it idled on the ground, and had been most of the way through the pre-flight checklist when she noticed her instructor rubbing his knee and grimacing.

              "A little bit of an ache," he said dismissively, taking his hand away and shrugging her question off. "Nothing I can't handle. Now how about you finish up the pre-flight so we can get up in the air?"

              "Right," she said, her face a little concerned. She dutifully went back to work however and soon the checklist was complete. Penny was the fourth of his student pilots since the official merger of the Garden Hill and El Dorado Hills communities three months before. She had just finished ground school and this was to be her first trip up in the air where she would get some stick time.

              In truth, his left knee, the one injured in the Second Battle of Garden Hill (as Mick, their official historian called it), was throbbing painfully and had been all morning. It was the barometric pressure. Renee had told him and the others with bone injuries that many times. The weather was going through some changes as the cloud cover above was running out of precipitation to drop on them. Windstorms and rainstorms swept in and out now, sometimes with terrifying power, and the barometer rose and fell with the advance and decline of these systems, making everyone edgy and compressing nerve fibers in those that were vulnerable to such things. Currently the barometer was on the rise though the sky was just as cloudy as it had been since the impact. It was in fact one of the most rapid rises yet recorded and it was creating an ache unlike any he'd felt since the first post-operative weeks after the surgery. He tried his best to ignore it, for the most part successfully. "So," he asked Doreen, giving one more rub of the area. "I'm all set to take off then?"

              "Yes," she told him. "Everything checks out."

              "Are you sure?" he asked, deliberately injecting a note of skepticism into his tone.

              The old instructor's trick worked on her for only a second. She looked down at the checklist in her hand, trying frantically to spot something that she might have forgotten to check on it. Seeing it however, she knew that she had covered everything. Her face took on a more confident expression. "I'm sure," she told him. "You're ready to fly."

              He smiled. "Almost got you with that one, didn't I?"

              While she laughed he throttled up the engine and then lifted off, rising into the air. Penny was actually one of his better students and he thought she would have no trouble at all picking up the mechanics of flying. As his experiences with Jack had taught him, the younger members of society, those that had grown up with Nintendo and PlayStation, tended to be much easier taught. The two students that he had been forced to wash out so far had both been in their thirties.

              Skip brought them up to an altitude of 3000 feet, taking them well out over the Great Central Valley. Though the cloud cover was still with them and though monster storms sometimes rolled in and dumped inches of rain in little more than an hour, the constant fall of raindrops was now a thing of the past. The weather itself had grown steadily colder over the past few months - they were lucky if they reached 45 degrees during mid-afternoon these days - but the average day brought them nothing more than a light mist of drops. Sometimes they didn't even get that and it would be possible to go outside without rain gear on. The cessation of the rainfall - aside from creating problems gathering dishwashing water, laundry water, and bathing water - had had a dramatic effect on the view of the valley below them. Where once there had been a virtual sea of water more than a hundred feet deep, there was now endless swampland and wide, surging rivers running through mudflats and the mounds and mounds of debris left over from the initial flooding. Thankfully the millions of bodies had all decomposed by now, leaving nothing more than bones scattered among the remains of cars, the uprooted trees, and the piles of smashed concrete. The residents of Auburn had taken to picking through this debris in order to survive, at least that was what recon flights of the area had shown. What they were finding to eat in all of that was the subject of often intense speculation in the executive council meetings.

              "Let's head a little to the south," Skip told Doreen, "and then we'll have you take over and try some turns. Sound good?"

              "Uh... sure," she said a little nervously.

              "Relax," he told her. "You'll do fine."

              The aircraft they were in was not the MD-500 that had helped them win the war against the Auburnites. With its rotor blades failing, several major engine components well past their useful service life, and no replacement parts on the horizon, the machine had been honorably retired and relegated to museum status behind the El Dorado Hills elementary school buildings. In its place the merged communities now possessed a Bell JetRanger - the civilian model of the helicopter that Skip had flown for the Sheriff's Department - and an old Vietnam era Huey that had been refurbished and returned to service as a firefighting helicopter shortly before the comet impact. Both helicopters had been discovered by recon flights from the MD-500 - the Bell from a small municipal airport outside of Reno and the Huey from a National Forest station outside Angel's Camp. Both had been stored with a fairly good inventory of spare parts and components, enough to hopefully keep them in the air for as long as there was a fuel supply for them. Currently Skip was flying the Bell, which had dual controls for the ease and safety of teaching. It was the Bell that also was used for short-range recon missions and small lifting. The Huey, a large, maintenance intensive, dual engine job, was used only for heavy lifting or - if they were to go to war again - for transporting large numbers of troops. So far, the former job was all that had been required of it.

              Skip, as fond as he had become of the MD-500 during the Garden Hill days, loved the Bell almost physically. It was the aircraft that he was most familiar with, that he had accumulated the most hours in over the years. He liked the responsiveness of its controls and even the clattering racket caused by its tail rotor. The quiet that the MD-500 had produced with its NOTAR system had always seemed unnatural to him.

              "Okay, let's have you take the controls and take over straight and level flight for me," Skip said as they moved south over the flooded and smashed city of Sacramento.

              "All right," she said, putting her hands on the collective and cyclic and her feet on the pedals.