Those Lucky Few

“What do you think he’s going to be like? The baby, I mean?”
“Shit Jess, I don’t know. Why would ask me a question like that?” said Kevin Jameson gravely.
Jessica laughed. Kevin remembered the days when her laughter was contagious, bringing smiles to the faces of everyone that heard it. This wasn’t one of those laughs.
“Your not making this any easier you know.”
Kevin, who thought this all seemed far to easy for Jessica already, simply said “Then why did you ask?”
In spite of all that had happened in the last two days, Kevin found himself starting to hate his wife.
“I just thought…”
“No. Shut the fuck up. You stupid whore, look at yourself. Sitting there laughing, twirling your hair while were talking about…. What we’re talking about. I swear to God, you make me sick.”
“Hey! Don’t you talk to me like that. You act like this wasn’t your idea in the first place. You’re the one that woke me up and dragged me in here to tell me about your brilliant fucking plan, you act like you think I want to do this. You…”
“My idea !?” Kevin’s eyes suddenly exploded with intensity.
“This isn’t an idea. This isn’t something I’ve decided to do. This is just something that has to be done. Plain and simple. Sad but true. And I’d appreciate it if you’d at least pretend you felt bad about this. Looking at you with that awful grin on your face…. it makes me want to vomit. You know I can’t afford to empty my stomach right now.”
“Don’t complain about your stomach to me, you selfish bastard.” Jess snorted. “I think we both know that my stomach takes precedence over yours.”
“The last thing I am is selfish. If it were just me and you down here, I would have just slit my throat yesterday and have been done with it. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance I’m still going to do that.”
“I know” Jess said quietly.
Kevin couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he said nothing.
Jessica’s face was sunken and pallid, but her eyes were hungry. The truth was, so were Kevin’s. Neither of them had eaten since before they’d entered the shelter, and there wasn’t a bit of food anywhere inside.
The expecting father stared across the room at his wife’s swollen midsection. The baby would be coming any day now. When it did, it would have to eat. So would his wife. But then, so would he. The baby was perhaps the most important child ever born as far as Kevin knew. He might be the first child born since the onset of the disease. He might be the only one.
The people had started falling the day before, entire nations were wiped out in a matter of hours. The sickness spread so fast that it hadn’t even been given a proper name. No one knew anything about it, there just wasn’t enough time. It was a miracle that the couple had survived, a shear stroke of luck that they were inside the hermetically sealed chamber. Kevin’s uncle had been a rich but paranoid man. When he died a week before he left his estate, fallout shelter included, to his only nephew. Kevin and his wife had gone out to see it for the first time, and wound up the luckiest people on the planet.
The television they were trapped inside with broadcast the same message on every channel.
“Disease decimates globe, no hope in sight.”
Unfortunately there was no way to know when it would be safe to open the shelter up again. Their only choice was to hold out as long as possible, and hope for the best. But the baby wouldn’t survive long on an empty stomach, and neither would the two of them.
Jessica closed her eyes tight and tried to wish herself out of the horrible situation. She tried to will the rest of the world alive again, she tried to will herself out of her prison. She tried not to think about what her husband had said to her only minutes earlier, but the words repeated themselves in an endless loop inside her mind
“Ok Jess, so we’ve really only got three options…”
Jessica opened her eyes to see her husband staring back at her. She thought she felt the baby kick, or maybe it was her stomach growling.