Final Call

They all stare at it for a moment. It rings again. A third time. Malorie is about to suggest that they just let it go when Olympia pushes past her and hits the speakerphone button. "H-hello," she says.

"This is the Tom House, yes?" Deadman's oddly cheerful voice fills the silence. "I was calling with an update for Olympia…"

"I've decided," Olympia says, her voice quavering. "I'm going to leave the house and walk to the nearest prepper facility with my baby."

"Olympia…!" Tom hisses.

"…there's no need for that," Deadman's voice is suddenly a lot more subdued. "As it happens, I was calling because Tom asked me to see if there were any other options available. And one just opened up." An intake of breath. "One of the more elderly women at our nursery facility has passed away. Heart attack. That means that we're looking for someone to come in and help look after all the children there. Director Strand herself suggested we offer it to you, saying that it'd give you a chance to be with your child."

"Oh!" Olympia's breath goes out of her in a wild gulp of air.

"So… if you're interested…"

"Yes." Olympia nods, as the rest of the house looks at each other in collective relief. "Yes. I'll take it."

Sam comes a few days later, with some sort of covered rickshaw for Olympia to ride in. It's completely enclosed, so there's no possibility of anyone inside seeing outside. Malorie finds herself wondering why it would have been so impossible for Sam to simply take Olympia to a different house in it.

There are hugs and goodbyes, though not as many as Malorie would have expected for someone they'll never see again. Everyone is too exhausted for goodbyes.

As Sam is leading the blindfolded Olympia to the outer airlock, he stops, as if he has something more to say. Malorie knows, immediately, what it is. "I haven't decided yet," she says. "But I will. Before the end of the week."

"I brought this, just in case," Sam says, and puts a bottle on the counter. "Drinking it should induce blindness in the fetus. If that doesn't work… you guys got paint thinner?"

"Yes," Don says.

"All right then," says Sam, and leaves.

One thing to thank Olympia for—she crystalized the issue. Talking about it, having it all out in the open, makes Malorie feel she's aware, for the first time of everything involved. She knows, now, all of what's at stake. She knows where everyone stands. She even has a pretty good idea of what she'll feel like once the baby is born, given how Olympia reacted.

All she needs to do is decide, and decide now. There's not going to be a right moment for it, or some time where things magically make sense. So Malorie decides to do something she hasn't pulled since her college days.

She decides to pull an all-nighter. Not, really, because she needs to think a lot out, but just because that will make her sure that she has thought it out. When this child is several years old, she wants to be able to say that at least she thought it out and gave it time.

And so, while everyone is asleep, upstairs, she walks the carpet and stares at the wall and doodles small things on a piece of paper like that's going to change anything. Logically, Don's argument—and Amelia's—is irrefutable. A few times, Malorie feels it's so irrefutable, she goes right to the bottle that Same left and unscrews the top. But always, every time, she screws the top right back on.

Tom's words keep coming back to her. It feels too much like giving up. Like cutting off an entire world from her children, before they even have the chance to find a solution. And sure, right now it seems like there is no possible other way, but maybe somehow, someway, in the future…

She picks up the phone.

"I'm giving my child to the Nursery," Malorie tells the others.

She's not sure what she expects—cries of condemnation, tears of relief, words of approval. All she gets is silence, and a few muted nods.

She still feels the need to explain herself. "It feels… different, now that I know Olympia is going to be there," she says. "She's a good person. She'll look after them and take care of them. They'll be safer there than they would be here."

"True." "True." Even the agreement, from Cheryl and Felix, is still very muted.

"So." She swallows. "That's my decision. No one needs to worry about being put in the basement for my sake."

Don just grunts. The housemates break up with little fanfare, and everyone silently, awkwardly, moves to their chores. All except Tom, who grabs her as she gets up to move away.

"Are you fine with this? Really?" he asks her.

She blinks at him and tries to smile. "I never really… planned on having this baby in the first place," she says. "Certainly not under these circumstances. I don't think I'd make a good mother."

Tom looks down, and she realizes with a start that her free hand is caressing her belly. The child inside her gives a kick.

"I'm fine with it," she tells Tom.

Her decision seems to help the others to crystallize what they want. Tom begins talking with Deadman about turning the basement into a bunker—not for him, so much, as for Felix and Cheryl, who seem to have come to some kind of understanding while no one was paying attention. Don doesn't like the idea, but they're talking him around to it. Tom, it seems, is waffling between going to The Nursery to be an English teacher, or becoming a Porter like Sam.

"It'd be good work," he tells her one night. "Getting out, talking to people, seeing what's left of the world. Well, not really seeing, I guess." He offers a lopsided grin.

"You're an English teacher," she says, rubbing her aching belly with her hands. "Wouldn't you miss the words?"

He shrugs, but she senses that that carries greater weight than he wants to pretend. "There's always audiobooks and things," he says. But he still hesitates. "Are you going to go into the bunker?"

"Probably," she says. There's not many other options. Though if she's going to anyway, why is she giving up her child at all?

Workmen arrive—or at least, so the housemates assume. Sam and Fragile are the only ones who actually come inside. The rest, they hear of through the sounds of massive machinery rumbling vaguely around and across the house. The men hover near the covered windows with a wistful sense of anticipation, and Malorie is constantly seized with the irrational fear that one of them will open the window just to watch the construction. At least on days when Sam and Fragile are present, they can occupy themselves with helping to dig out the space in the basement and carry the dirt out to the entryway. Sam brings a cement mixer, which makes the most tremendous rattling noise that Malorie has ever heard, but Don and Felix seem to find it almost cheering, somehow. They stand around and laugh at it. It's the best entertainment they've had since the dancing night.

Sam says something odd, then. "Did you know someone's set up a tent outside here?" he asks them, one day, after a long day of working. "Like in your neighborhood. There's a tent, just sitting in the middle of the road."

Tom pauses, spoon of beans halfway to his mouth. "You mean… you found a survivor outside?"

"No. That's the weirder part." Sam chews his lip. "It's a recent camp—I'm almost certain it was set up in the last week—but Fragile and the BRIDGES team and I have searched all around and haven't found a camper—or even a body."

"What does that mean, then?" Don asks.

"I don't know." Sam is still chewing his lip. "I don't like it, though. There's too much going on for something weird like that."

"Could just be a random crazy," Fragile suggests. "Someone who saw us coming and ran and hid. They'd be able to dodge the searchers if they weren't blindfolded."

"Could be," Sam agrees, in his gravelly undertone. But he doesn't sound happy about it. And Malorie feels uncomfortably confident that Fragile didn't trust her own theory. She remembers what Fragile said about the scavengers, the smart ones are blindfolded. What would that make this person?

All too soon, they get their answer. Not that they realize it, at first, when Gary comes knocking, and they have another crisis about whether to open the door up. Nor even for some time after that, as Malory becomes more and more unsettled with Gary's presence and Don's new strange behavior. She does her best to shut down any conversation about Bridges—something about Gary makes her certain he must not be told.

Then comes the night. When Cheryl starts talking about what she saw in Gary's bag. When Gary rises up and strikes her. When Felix lunges at him, and Don grabs him around the throat. She and Tom grab Cheryl as Jules grapples with Gary, and help her limp body down the steps to the bunker.

"Is she still breathing?" Malorie asks.

"I can't tell," Tom says, setting Cheryl's body down on the floor. "Watch her. I need to…" He turns to go up the step and freezes.

Felix's bloody form is half-sitting in a crumpled heap at the top of the staircase. His eyes are fixed at something else, though, something in the living room. Somewhere up above, Jules's voice is screaming. "You'll let them in, Gary, stop!"

Tom steps forward. "Felix…"

With a horrific wrench of his body, Felix slams the door shut. Tom takes the steps two at a time. "Felix, hang on!"

"Tom, I…" Malorie never knows what she is intending to say, because the next second her whole body gives a spasm that's unmistakeable, that sends every other thought out of her head.

The baby is coming. Now.

Tom looks at her. He sees, in her face, the thing she's too scared to say. And without a word, he flings the locks shut on the bunker door and then runs down the stairs back to her, as above them a horrific cacophony of noises unfolds.

Tom is there for her, for what feels like hours. He helps her keep time through the strange creakings from above, the startlingly loud hammering on the bunker door, Gary's cursing over the intercom. He holds her gaze so she doesn't have to stare into Cheryl's lifeless eyes, still lying on the floor. And when it's all done, he's the one who hands the new child to her and offers congratulations.

Sometime later that night, he seals up the door. There's no leaving for either of them now.

Three days later, Sam arrives, with backup from Bridges, signaled via the satellite connection in the basement. There are signs, he tells them over the intercom, that Gary tried to destroy it—also that he tried to destroy the water supply. No sign of Gary himself, unfortunately.

"The others?" Tom asks, even though they both know the answer.

"Dead," is all Sam says. "We'll do what we can for what's left."

Malorie doesn't ask for more details. They found a free spot of dirt to bury Cheryl in, but it's too much to hope for a burial for the others. The house above is tainted, now. There's no passing through it.

They start bottling water, as promised. They charge batteries, too, with a kit that Sam sends down via the bunker delivery system. Tom teaches English via the internet connection, and at night they video chat with the few people across the world-play games, even, like euchre, Monopoly, and Fortnite. They raise her son, and they comfort each other.

And then one day, Malorie wakes up next to Tom, with a suddenly acute sense of smell, and she realizes it's about to begin all over again.

I should probably call Deadman.

fin

A/N: Ha, you probably thought this story was dead, didn't you? Nearly. I started it, honestly, before I got to all the stuff with Gary in the book, and then I had no idea how to incorporate him. I probably should write out a whole chapter of him being sneaky and devious except, well, I don't want to. It'd make for a better story, but at this point it's either end the story like this or not end it at all.

The story was always going to end with Tom and Malorie in the bunker. Honestly it's what got me writing-I sort of like the fantasy of living in a solitary room with a sure supply of food and a stable internet connection. As unhealthy and unsustainable as the pandemic was, it was also kind of relaxing.

Well. Story done now.