Beyond Green Fields #4 - The Ballad of Sadie & Bates: A post-apocalyptic anthology by Adrienne Lecter

Author:Adrienne Lecter [Lecter, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-06T08:00:00+00:00

The next morning dawns bright and early—for this time of the year at least—and I manage to make it to my job with a smile on my face. It quickly disappears when Mrs. Walters tells me, tears in her eyes, that the catatonic woman hanged herself in the middle of the night. I don’t know how to react to the news, but I’m crying and sobbing with her before I fully realize what’s going on. Tanisha finds us on the porch like that and leaves us to our grief after murmuring to Mrs. Walters that, of course, her results came back clean and it must have been a fluke. Tanisha goes to check on the other woman and Mrs. Walters leaves to water her garden—completely unnecessary, but I can tell she needs something that gives her comfort—which leaves me standing on my own in the triage station since I insisted that work would do the trick for me. The test results from the latest gel thingie are on Tanisha’s desk, and I can’t help but sidle over and look at them. It’s silly to be sneaky about it as I’m sure that if I asked, Tanisha would freely explain. Except that she didn’t, last time, which still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t quite remember how the splotches looked last time but of the four samples, two look virtually identical, and the third kind of similar. I strain my ears, trying to pick up voices—and yup, Tanisha is talking in gentle tones to the woman in the adjacent house. Open windows can be useful sometimes. So I open the drawer of the desk where I know she keeps her files and rifle through it until I find those from the routine physicals.

And, sure enough, the sample that I know is mine looks just like the two identical new ones.

Exactly like them.

My pulse skyrockets and my thoughts go haywire for a moment, but I force myself into action and put the papers where I found them, making sure that everything is in order. And not a moment too soon, as Tanisha walks in before I have a chance to start hyperventilating. She must take my weird behavior as aftershocks of the news—and few things have ever been truer—and gives me some menial labeling task until the first patients of the day come in.

I’m not really registering much for the rest of the day, but the first chance I get to excuse myself to the bathroom—well, outhouse, really—I bolt. Rather than pee, I wrench my pants down and push my sweater and shirt up, first staring down at my stomach and then push and prod—gently, of course, but with rising trepidation. My body doesn’t really feel much different but I have noticed my pants getting a little tight. I chalked that up to the massive increase in baked goods that our new town lifestyle has brought with it. Also, my boobs are a bit sensitive. Can that even be

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