Scarcity by R.W. Owen

The forest held its breath, and so did Amelia, as she crouched in its undergrowth, heart hammering and a lump rising in her throat. She silently swore off the next fiery ache that coiled in her thighs. She listened for the delicate puff of air that would bring the spores, echoing across the pines and oaks as they descended in a curtain of death that would fell the living, leaving in their wake only the eerie, absolute silence of death. 

Five steps back, she had spotted the large green pod in its gentle fog, the farthest north they had ever been sighted. The pods first evolved in the south, in the enigma of chemicals that swirled within the ocean waters that had flooded the cities past any futile help promised by the last generation of sea walls.

The pods grew within a few hundred feet of the brackish water that lapped at the remnants society had left behind, sometimes hurriedly, as the oceans swelled and washed over roads and buildings.

Their deadly translucent blossoms swelled on doomed trees like bloated orbs from a glassblower’s bubble. 

Amelia risked a glance at the pod, still dark and silent in its perch on the branch, and eased her breath from her body as the safety of new moments ticked closer.

She scanned the still murk that glossed the water’s surface for anything that might trip the pod, but found only a blaze someone had carved into the bark of a dying tree. Her heart sank. Another camp had found this pharmacy, the target of her mission.

But, she noted, they had left behind something worth marking the way to return, and perhaps worth protecting.

She scoured the water’s surface for traps as she stood slowly, willing her knees not to crack and steadying herself against the trunk of a tree. She stepped forward, watching the pod, praying it would not tremble, shake, and belch its toxic cloud.

She pressed on, for Saul, who had few moments left before a different poison born from this new earth, would claim him.

Saul had contracted the swelling sickness from the waters, searching for provisions too close to chemicals still leeching from land that had been a farm, before. The symptoms of the swelling sickness were always the same. Boils rose on the skin and then inside the body – a slow, suffocating death.

Saul, her paper-pushing boss from the insurance company, a corporate bureaucrat who had shed decades of ledgers and reports to mine his memory for his field training from Vietnam. He tried to save her baby, as the eternity of their workaday world sped away, becoming the before, even as they scoured its remains to cure the headaches surging in her temples, the swelling filling her shoes, the nagging pain that grew under her right breast.

“Difficult pregnancy,” Saul had huffed at her pain as it flashed to life on her face on the day the power in the insurance company’s high-rise office failed for the final time.

“Preeclampsia,” she had responded as if calling it by name might invoke a cure.  

He nodded. He was all she had left.   

They didn’t speak as they searched Boston for a remedy—garlic to reduce her blood pressure, dandelion leaf to stop her swelling. “It’s like long division,” he had said of the survivalist first aid as he recalled it from his youth, “learn it once and it just comes back.”

They had lingered too long in the city, waiting for this environmental apocalypse to pass—a salvation that never came. Amid the fading safety promised by the concrete blocks of office buildings turned mausoleums, the other office workers had already dwindled away to their excuses and reasons, as the city’s stores and restaurants were looted of the last comforts of their lost world.

The pods had already begun arriving in the city when they started north.

“It’s as if the world needed our silence so we could hear its screams,” Saul said, scanning for pods in the branches above Boston Common last fall, as he divided the long, narrow leaves of a garlic plant into clumps, pulling the bulbs from the trapped earth of an abandoned city flowerbox hung on a wrought-iron fence.

Amelia’s swollen hands had stopped working well by then.

With his homespun remedies, Saul had saved her life, bringing her and her baby north to the New Hampshire coast where the pods had not yet arrived. Until now.  

Saul was the last person alive who knew her before, her last link to a time and world still speeding away, receding further with each new wave of a hungry ocean. Saul’s death would be just one more claimed by a sick world systematically raising new defenses to fight its pathogens, humans. But this would be her fault. She could not live with that failure.  

On that morning, the water’s ripples spread outward, soundlessly, until they faded from view. The other woman—a teen, really—saw Amelia first.

The girl still wore old-style cloth sleeves that hung heavy with the damp. The cotton of her dress clung to her middle, protruding. Five months along, maybe six. Second trimester. That’s what caught Amelia’s attention first. She knew that swell. The girl was pregnant.

The girl was reaching her arms into the air as if to ask for help, right there, just feet from the pod.

It was going to be the last thing either of them would see.

Stop, Amelia told her, without words, raising her own arms. A puzzled look crossed the girl’s face until she followed Amelia’s finger to the pod. Her eyes widened, and she nodded, understanding blossoming in her eyes. She crouched in her coffin of reverie, pale with fear and rigid with panic. Her hands came to rest on her stomach.

Amelia studied the familiar reflex, this time in another woman.   

The seconds ticked by with the clap of the water against the trees. This pod was dead. They’d be dead too if they could have tripped its trigger.

Amelia nodded the all-clear to the girl and she stood straighter, one arm dropping slowly to her side. With the other, the girl pointed to the blaze and the flooded road that led to the pharmacy.

Amelia hesitated before she approached her.

“Are you looking for medicine too?” the girl asked and stole a glance at Amelia’s stomach, still swollen with baby weight she had not shed after the miscarriage.

“Oh, I’m not preg…” Amelia blurted out and the girl winced, her thoughts read.    

Amelia couldn’t find the words to send the girl away now, convince her that the medicine was gone or spoiled, if she had already come this far. So, she merely nodded, and didn’t give away her game.

“My friend is sick,” she said when the girl’s look of concern did not fade away.  

“Mine too,” the girl said. “Swelling sickness,” she added when Amelia kept watching. “We heard that the blazes mark the way to a pharmacy that used to be around here,” the girl volunteered what Amelia already knew, and then added, “my name is Maya.”

“I’m Amelia.” 

Neither asked about the other’s camp.

“Maybe we should team up,” Maya added. “You know, two sets of eyes are better than one.”

Amelia agreed. In a world of dangers, an ally was better than another foe.

“I heard that was near here, but they thought it was dead,” Maya said. She was looking at the pod again. “Are there more?” she asked before Amelia could say anything. Maya knew enough, at least, to keep her hands in plain view when she met strangers from different camps.  

“We would be dead if there were,” Amelia said and shrugged, leaning against the rough bark of an ancient and very dead oak. “It’d be a quick death,” she whispered and glanced at the pod. “You can’t trust what others tell you. Especially when it’s life or death,” she added, channeling Saul’s wartime advice for this girl just emerging from girlhood.   

Amelia watched Maya from the corner of her eye as scanned the trees for more pods.  

“We need to move,” Amelia said, taking Maya’s hand. “The swelling sickness moves fast.”

Maya followed. Amelia relaxed more than she should have, but she did not see anyone else with the girl and Saul had little time left.  

The seawater stretched still and calm to the ocean’s hungry shoreline. The waves here did not yet reach these buildings and trees and gates. Only ripples came this far inland. They passed a lemonade stand, a pizza place, a shuttered arcade with Skeeball lanes—remnants of a time lost to the shrugging away of ever longer summers, heavier rains, damper winters, deeper divisions between the people as they fought for one set of politics or the next while their world died around them.  

When the pods came, it was too late.

Amelia and Maya followed the walls of the buildings—brick, concrete, cinderblock. They waded deeper into the seawater of this new estuary and closed the distance with the pharmacy.

“The door is open,” Maya remarked when they had gotten close enough to see. She was running her fingers along some calligraphy carved into a brick wall, some code lost to whatever camp had been here before.

Amelia’s euphoria faded as she saw that the pharmacy’s door hung at an odd angle, its top hinge no longer attached to its frame.

That would’ve taken more than one man, she thought, and more than one man meant multiple people had sacked the pharmacy together for medicine. How much could be left?

Beside her, Maya gleefully waded through the seawater, chattering on about how the sunlight glinted across its ripples in the early morning breeze. Did she even remember before?

Who was her Saul? Who was she trying to save from the swelling sickness?

She’s smaller than me, Amelia thought with a pang of guilty relief, assessing the damp fabric of the girl’s shirt hanging loose on her slender shoulders, her swelling middle, her legs like a stick figure’s drawn by some teen in the study halls of her lost world. 

The knife at Amelia’s waistband poked the top of her thigh as she walked. Could it be quick? Would the seawater hide the body? She wondered what kind of weapon hid beneath this girl’s baggy, wet clothes. Surely her people wouldn’t have sent her unarmed.

Amelia left her fingers slip from the hilt of her knife when Maya vanished into the dark hole of the pharmacy’s doorway.

“Are you coming, Amelia?” she called from inside, over the sloshing of water. A small plastic click came next. It was just Maya’s flashlight, clicking on, its light flashing toward Amelia, exposing the soup of debris swirling in the water.

Amelia mumbled assent and studied the pharmacy’s sole intact window, papered over with a sign announcing a half-off sale for canisters of iced-tea powder, the kind Saul had kept in his office. Before.  

Amelia sighed and followed fate’s shadow through the doorway.

“This is pointless,” she said, her eyes still adjusting. “There’s nothing here.” An empty plastic box that once held first aid supplies floated against her thigh.

The metal shelves that once held the store’s supplies had been pushed into the water. She switched on her pen light and saw they were brown with rust.

“We’ve come this far,” Maya was saying from the waist-high water of a middle aisle. A trail of brightly colored debris swirled in the eddies she left in her wake. Sunglasses maybe. Or cheap beach pails and shovel sets. This water held secrets. 

Dim sunlight broke the clouds outside, and streamed through the pharmacy’s broken windows, glinting off the faded letters that once announced the sections of the store.

“We keep looking,” Amelia felt herself say, even if she didn’t mean it. Giving up meant Saul’s death. Finding medicine would almost certainly mean Maya’s. “Look for anything that might help us find whatever’s left here.” 

Maya nodded, her gaze never leaving the water’s surface.

Amelia prayed for mercy to the God that had wrought all this upon them, mercy in whatever form. She returned to searching the wreckage of the pharmacy.

She kept glancing at the dark, dead security camera still fastened to the wall, convincing herself that no one was left to watch them. Like Boston, anything and anyone of value had left long ago.  

Amelia hopped onto the pharmacy’s counter at the back of the store, and let the seawater drain from her clothes.

About half of the drawers above water hadn’t yet been ripped open. Half might still have medicine. She had pried opened five when Maya’s voice pierced the din.

“Did you hear something?” she whispered, and Amelia froze, focusing on the tremble rising in her voice.

“Hear what?” she lied, and pulled open a drawer that had been underwater not long before. Dark, brown water sluiced out and mixed with the currents swirling around Amelia’s waist.

“Never mind,” Maya said sheepishly. “Let’s just get what we need and get out.” 

A light on the camera blinked. Maya saw it too.

“How …”. Maya asked, watching the steady blinking of the green light. “That’s not possible.” 

“Come on … we should go,” Amelia said. Just because a camera had powered on did not mean someone was left to watch it.    

“Wait, what’s this?” Maya’s hand emerged from a drawer an inch above the water. She held a box with a water-stained lid. “There’s something inside,” she said, shaking it.

Amelia read the bright red letters on the box. It was the medicine for the swelling sickness.

“Are there more?” Amelia asked, but Maya was already shaking her head.

“Just this box,” Maya said.

It wasn’t going to be enough.

Amelia’s stomach clenched as the box vanished into Maya’s pocket. She moved her thigh, waiting for her knife to brush her skin.   

“Amelia…” Maya stood next to her. “We did it, and together.”

Amelia nodded and smiled. She steeled herself for what would come next.

Maya was pointing to the front of the store.

A large male shadow was blocking the light coming from the door.

“Run,” Amelia said. She pushed through the knee-high water and reached the pharmacy’s emergency exit door.  

“But what if he’s not here to hurt us?” Maya asked and joined Amelia in pushing against the door. Sunlight blasted in, blinding them. The man was wading toward them, but when Amelia turned back, she saw only darkness. 

“Trust me, no one is coming to help us,” Amelia said. “They want the medicine. He’ll take it.”  

“Where do we go?” Maya asked. Panic rose in her eyes.

“Outside,” Amelia said and kept pushing against the emergency exit door. “First outside, and then away,” she grunted.   

“Stop. Don’t go out there,” the man’s voice croaked. He himself might have had the swelling sickness. He probably wanted the medicine too. “It’s not safe. Stop,” he said, coughing.

He had closed most of the distance between them.    

“Push,” Amelia said to Maya, pressing her into the door. It began to budge open and the water around their legs rushed through the crack. The man was nearly upon them.

“Stop,” he was saying.

Amelia pushed the thin wisp of a girl, and the medicine, through the door. She reached for her knife. It slid from its holster smooth and clean.

The man’s hand was on her shoulder, pulling her into the darkness.

“No,” he was saying, urgently, but Amelia reached back and sliced a fresh gash into his hand. He swore at her as he fell backward into the water, dividing it into two waves that rocked against the shelves.

He fell easier than he should have, Amelia was thinking, turning to the door and a blast of sunlight that blinded her. One down and one to go, she thought as she heard the puff of air outside.

Maya’s thin form, floating face down in the water, came into Amelia’s view right before she herself fell hard and splashed into the water’s surface. Sticky hot drops speckled onto Amelia’s forehead.

The rippling water raced up to crash into Amelia’s face as her knees buckled and she sank under the water.

Its warm embrace pushed every thought from her mind.

R.W. Owen

Image: closeup of an old manual typewriter from the author