Everything Will Be Fine

Iowa Hill: Episode Eleven

Kailani was annoyed. The end of the world had come and went, but she was still here. Typical. Even the Apocalypse was disappointing. Kailani had always lived her life as if someday soon life as we knew it would fold up shop and disappear. The Great Yellowstone Super Caldera; Ebola; The Sun’s Dark Companion Star; Magnetic Pole Reversal; The Kali Yuga; Monkey Pox; Nuclear Winter; The Greenhouse Effect Syndrome… you name it, she had planned to die in it. As her mother had said when she was growing up, “Kay, baby, who wants to live through that bullshit? I’m heading straight for Ground Zero.” But here she was, alive and well and staring out the window at a complete dumpster fire of a city. And now she had to go to work on top of it.

Living with Austin since F-Day had made it just barely bearable, but even his dorky ass couldn’t rescue her from how bullshit it all was becoming, little by freaking little. She knew he sometimes referred to her as his “flexible little grunge brat from some club or other” when he was talking to his gear-head pals. But after the mess of days trapped in his swanky loft together while the world crumbled in 3-D out the picture windows on the world, she was inclined to give him a pass on stupid bullshit like his weird boy ego. Something like that tends to bond people who would otherwise remain just tiny little tugboats passing each other in the vast, darkened port of their screwed-up lives. I guess when you're thrown in with someone like that, one of two things are likely to happen. Either you will stick for good or hate each other to the core. Flip of the coin, really. But you can tell which was the way this golden nugget fell.

Unfortunately, after the mist settled and they emerged to rejoin what was left of the world, Mark had a plan for not just Austin and the other brogrammers, Kailani had now been roped in as handmaiden to the Termite Queen. It was hard to describe just how truly grotesque of a job it became.

Kailani had spent years bringing up her younger siblings while her mother worked two jobs to keep a roof over their heads, and then stints with the elderly in poor neighborhoods, ER nurse, rehab specialist in head injury wards… she thought she was immune to whatever bodily fluids and moving mammal parts might conjure in most other people. She was a health care ninja. But this scene with Rimona and what was being birthed, it was a whole other level of nightmare. It was a job most people would never have had the stomach for. Kailani wasn’t sure she did either. But there seemed to be no real choice.

She refrained from relating in detail too much of what she underwent up in the Pereira Tower to Austin for quite some time. He was already handling enough with the coding side of their group nightmare. The pressure the keep the city running was immense, and Mark wasn’t an easy-going type, to say the least. She was used to absorbing the ravages of humanity and then silently transmuting them into nothingness while she slept. Kailani was a secret alchemist. She had a tattoo of an Ouroborous on her left forearm, etched into the softest part of her inner arm at the crook. Getting it done had hurt like hell, and she had almost blacked out, but then she saw stars and felt that rush of endorphins kick in. She’d always had a high tolerance for discomfort, you might almost say she was wired for it. And the back side of it had become a whole habit. It felt so good when it stopped. But this job was a whole new level. There was no payoff in the end. Just a pervasive nausea, and a feeling that she couldn’t get clean.

Kailani’s job was simple, on the face of it. Feed Rimona, bathe Rimona, midwife her births. Oh yes and administer unguents. It was the unguents part that got to her first. Massaging various concoctions into the folds of Rimona’s body was not what Kailani had had on her Apocalypse Bingo Card.

At first the births were more or less normal. Rimona gave birth easily, which was one of the features for which she was anointed Termite Queen to begin with. The fact that she was birthing an urchin a day was definitely disturbing, but Rimona barely seemed to notice, so Kailani just rolled with it, and kept up with the pace of the unreal like a duck paddling to Point Nemo, which Austin had told her was the farthest place from land on planet Earth. Kailani had argued that technically there was land everywhere, it was just underwater. Austin then tackled her and kissed her until she laughed so hard she peed her pants. Moments like that were getting her through.

But the pace of insemination, gestation, then birth wasn’t falling fast enough to feed the demands of energy powering the seas gates of the city, and whatever else Mark deemed necessary. A bunch of bio-nerds were herded into the facility and told to come up with a new solution. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley had been the scene of the forefront of these kinds of medical “advances”. There were plenty of pinheads to pick from. It wasn’t long before they proudly emerged with a concoction to cook a clutch of cherubs much quicker. They were going to start hatching batches from her.

Kailani attended the team meeting in silence. She was part of a small group of midwives tasked with this “exciting new frontier”. They were going to be given special badges and t-shirts. Champagne was poured and their team leader lead a round of applause and fist pumping in the stale, medical air.

Later that night Austin came home to her listening to Adagio Sostenuto from Moonlight Sonata and drinking the worst bathtub gin in history. She was writing a suicide note on the inside of the windows with a dry erase marker. Actually, later when she sobered up Austin told her it was really more like a grocery list of complaints and things she would never see again:

… episodes of Sea Hunt; fresh blueberries; the duck at Gary Danko; vintage IWC watches; skinny-dipping; riding a snowmobile; Orangina; following the Milwaukee Brewers just to gloat; that blond Les Paul guitar she was gonna buy from a shop on Howard Street; Howard Street; the crappy apartment she lived in on Dolores; The Cliff House; her mom's fresh baked cookies; her mom…

He said when he got to the part about her mom he just couldn't read anymore. He tucked her into bed and stroked her hair while he sang quietly an a cappella version of Barbed Wire Love by Stiff Little Fingers until she fell asleep.

I met you in No Man's Land

Across the wire we were holding hands

Hearts a-bubble in the rubble

It was love at bomb site

Then he hid all the sharp objects, wiped off the windows, and poured out the gin. While she slept, he read through the documentation they had sent home with her with new instructions for ministering to the Termite Queen. The hairs started to rise on his arms in foreboding. Something very, very bad was coming. He found himself muttering in the dark while he sipped on the last of the Napa Zinfandel in their stash.

“Everything will be fine,” he said in the dark to himself. “Every goddamn thing will be fine.”

In the distance, a small light on Treasure Island blinked off and on. Austin closed his eyes and hoped he’d dream of nothing much at all.

In honor of boycotting the oligarchy, the eleventh episode of my novel in progress is open source today! If you are enjoying my writing, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber. Completing this novel which has been in planning and progress over the past decade and a half is my ardent goal this spring. Join the rag tag band of survivors to see what a future without fascism might look like. Just one of many!