Work Text:
Through the car’s rear window, the baby watches the distant flames lick the sky above Columbus. The receding orange glow reflects in her eyes until her mother takes a hard turn south onto Mink Street. By the time the car turns towards the east again on Broad, the baby has fallen asleep, her carseat gently swaying between the cardboard boxes filled with clothes and food. While the baby sleeps, her mother drives through the night with the radio on at a low volume, playing the same message over and over again.
“This is a message from the Central Ohio Emergency Alert System. All residents of the Central Ohio area are encouraged to remain in their homes at this time. If you must travel on foot, do not approach other pedestrians. If you must travel by vehicle, keep windows rolled up and avoid interstates and major state routes. More information to follow. This is a message from...”
Hunger and a wet diaper wake the baby. She strains against her carseat straps and cries. Early morning sun shines through the car windows and over the cornfields on both sides of the road where the car is parked, driver’s seat leaned back as far as it will go against the cardboard boxes behind it. The baby reaches for her mother, one hand batting against her mother’s forehead and snagging a handful of long, dark hair.
The baby’s mother mumbles something, turning her face side to side before opening her eyes, then she repositions the driver’s seat to upright again. She reaches back and unfastens the carseat, pulling the baby up into her lap.
“You’re wet,” the baby’s mother says. “Let’s get you changed.”
The baby pats her mother’s face, trying for a smile, but her mother doesn’t smile. She changes the baby’s diaper and pops the top on a can of fruit, handing pieces to the baby until the can is empty, and then she straps the baby into the carseat. As the car starts again, continuing its eastward journey, the baby fusses and watches the cornfields through the windows. They stop a few times, the mother quickly pumping gas into the small car’s tank. The baby’s mother has barely locked the door again at the last stop when hands begin to claw at the windows. The baby waves bye-bye as they speed down the road, leaving the clawing hands behind them.
“That’s right, baby,” the baby’s mother says, her voice artificially bright as they keep driving towards the east. “Bye-bye. Bye-bye, scary monsters.”
They don’t have to keep driving forever. After several days on the road, they finally stop. Behind Langley’s barbed wire and chain link, the first thing the baby learns is silence. Even in the secured military base, crying gets her a quick hand over her mouth and a soft, fierce shhh from the nearest adult. The baby learns silence so well that her second birthday passes—marked only with a slightly increased ration for one meal—without her saying a single word. Her mother and other people at the base worry that the baby can’t talk, but she could, if she wanted to. She just knows that silence is life, and she very much wants to live.
The baby—now a little girl who runs and plays and still doesn’t speak—is so good at being quiet that she doesn’t make a noise when the fence is breached and the base is overrun. She’s silent as her mother holds her and runs, silent as her mother trips and falls and is swarmed, silent as she runs and hides under an abandoned Jeep, clutching the wristband that broke away from her mother’s wrist as she fell. She’s silent as she continues hiding under the Jeep through the rest of the day and night and into the following morning, when a tall man in a soldier’s uniform pulls her out from her hiding spot. She speaks her first words to him as he carries her towards the waiting C-130.
“They ate mommy.”
The little girl gets strapped into a seat between what’s left of the base’s civilians, across from a line of grim-faced soldiers in bloody fatigues. The plane lifts off. A teenage boy three seats down from the girl retches, and someone quickly hands him a plastic bag. He vomits into it several times over the next eight hours. Other people, including some of the soldiers, sleep, but the little girl stays awake, watching and listening.
“It’s the best manifest we can put together,” the tall man who pulled her out from under the Jeep tells a uniformed woman, handing her a clipboard.
“You don’t have the kids’ names?” the woman asks.
“Nothing from the boy,” the tall man says. “Shock, I think, and he wasn’t wearing his info tag. We’ll get someone to look at him when we land.”
“What about the little girl?”
The tall man shakes his head. “The girl’s from B Group. Had the mother’s info tag in her hand, so we’ve got the last name, at least. Everybody else here’s E Group, though, so nobody knows her first name.”
“Did you try asking her?” the woman says.
“Yeah, but all she’ll tell me is ‘they ate mommy’.”
“Ouch,” the woman says. “Okay. I’ll just mark her group designation after her last name, and let them figure it out at Croughton.”
“It’ll have to do until she tells us anything else,” the tall man agrees.
They don’t talk about the little girl for the rest of the flight. After they land, the tall man holds her hand and stands with her in the line with the rest of the civilians to get processed. They stand in line for a long time as each person presents paperwork, and as some are taken into a small room to the side for examination. The little girl needs to pee, and shifts restlessly from foot to foot while they wait, but she doesn’t complain. She doesn’t say anything at all.
“Name?” the woman at the processing table says, as the little girl and the tall man approach.
“Can you tell her your name, sweetheart?” the tall man asks the little girl. The little girl shakes her head.
“We don’t have her info tag,” the tall man explains. “She wasn’t wearing it when—well, when she got separated from her mother. We do have the mother’s tag and group designation.”
He hands a stack of papers over to the woman, who reads through everything several times before nodding and typing information into her computer, then directs them to the side to wait for the little girl’s new ID. They wait for about fifteen minutes, then the tall man attaches a new plastic bracelet to the girl’s wrist. She can’t read it, but if she could, she would see that it has her last name and her group designation: Corcoran, B.