The Doomsday Librarian

Before the Variant came, Christina Morrel had only succumbed to thievery once. She had been nine years old, and she had been standing behind her mother in the grocery checkout queue when she slipped a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar into the pocket of her sunflower dress. She hooked her thumb over the bottom edge of her pocket, trying to pull the folds of the skirt away from the warmth of her body. It would all be for nothing if she got home and it had melted. “Tina’s good”, she’d overheard her mother brag to a friend over the phone earlier, “Clean room. Good grades. You know Tina. Nothing unpredictable”. She’d bristled inwardly at those words, a miniscule hurricane of rebellion picking up speed deep inside her. It wasn’t bank robbery or arson, just a ninety seven cent candy bar, but she relished the feeling of it. She’d done something bad. Something unpredictable. 

The secreted glorious feeling of insubordination lasted until they arrived at home, but an hour later when she stole away to her closet to enjoy her plunder alongside a new library book, she found that it didn’t taste as good as she’d imagined the whole way home. Guilt had gnawed at her since they walked out of the grocery store, the white receipt fluttering like a kite-tail in the wind. As she broke off the first piece and closed her lips around it, she was dismayed to find it didn’t taste like she’d expected. It didn’t melt away, velvet on the warm surface of her tongue, and there was something disappointing in the flavor. Something artificial. At that moment she had decided that the old idiom was true: crime really doesn’t pay. But that was before. 

These were different times. The constant, though, was that now she always looked for a Hershey bar when she happened upon a grocery store or gas station that hadn’t been thoroughly ransacked when the world turned upside down.

According to the calendar on the wall of the kitchen, it had been eleven months and four days since Eli had called off their engagement, and therefore eleven months and three days since she had packed her work laptop, a suitcase of clothes, and as many boxes of her books as she could cram into the backseat and trunk of her old silver Civic. She’d driven the route so many times before, and she had emerged from the fog of highway hypnosis as she pulled up in front of her mother’s double-wide trailer, disturbing the quiet pecking of the hens scattered across the sun-dappled grass.

It might as well have been a lifetime ago, and her daily practice of crossing off a square on the calendar was one of the only things that kept the days from blurring together, the end of Wednesday bleeding into the morning of Thursday. At least she had her routine: wake up, check for eggs, go to the well to get water for the garden, then plot her thievery for the day. 

According to the calendar, it had been nine months and fourteen days since the sickness started spreading like wildfire all over the country. The sickness had actually landed the year before, of course, but just as things started to calm, as everyone was resuming their normal rhythms, the Variant came out of nowhere and blazed like napalm across the country, scorching whole cities with death and chaos that trickled out to the suburbs and rural towns. The big cities had been hit first, and as her mother lay feverish in the back bedroom of the trailer, the last thing Tina watched on the small television before all broadcasting halted was live coverage from San Francisco. The news crew was perhaps a mile away from the Golden Gate, too aghast to pan away from what their cameras were capturing. It had taken Tina the full span of a minute to realize that the small things dropping from the red railings were people. The first thought Tina had, watching gravity drag the bodies down into the water, was the first line of a poem she had memorized in high school. 

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky

It was a John Masefield poem, she recalled, and after the broadcast cut abruptly, she traipsed back to her bedroom, scanning her bookshelf for the paperback poetry anthology in an effort to jog her memory. She checked the shelves again, the sound of her mother’s weak coughing from down the hall. She grabbed a notebook from her night stand and scribbled a few words in her loopy cursive. She would find a new copy next time she went to the library, she decided, as she felt a dull ache settle in her muscles. 

The fever had found her that night as the sunset painted the horizon, and when it finally broke, she woke up parched and drenched in sweat. She pulled the notepad from underneath her, John Masefield Poetry Anthology blurred in blue ink on the paper where her bare leg had rubbed up against it as she tossed and turned. She fumbled on the night stand for her phone, noting that despite being plugged in, the battery was at two percent, and that she had been asleep for three days. The hens clucked contentedly in the yard outside her window, but the distant sound of wet coughing that punctuated her fever dreams had fallen silent. 

According to the calendar, it had been six months and twenty days since she started stealing. It was still, she supposed, considered stealing, though she didn’t see another living soul on her ride into town. Nobody had stopped her when she pried open the now-dead automatic doors at the Piggly-Wiggly, stepping into the dark aisles, pausing to let her eyes adjust in the dimness. She had filled a large backpack with dried pasta and canned beans, taking the long way out to avoid passing the meat and dairy coolers where the smell of decay was strongest. 

She had been on her way out of town, steering the front wheel of her bike between the double yellow lines in the middle of the road, when she saw it in the distance. A red box on top of a black pole, a small glass door on the front with the sign that read “Little Free Library. Take a book or leave a book.” She was peering through the glass, the laden backpack straps heavy on her shoulders, when she remembered the commercial that played incessantly in the final days before the news stopped broadcasting. 

“In the midst of uncertainty, what are you doing to protect what matters most?” the voice had said as an array of vaults and safes zoomed across the screen. 

According to the calendar on the wall, that had been six months and twenty days ago. Things looked different now. She had pedaled home that day twirling the words around in her head. 

“What matters most?” she said to the chickens as she propped her bike up against the porch railing. They clucked indifferently at her as she slid the backpack off her shoulders. 

What mattered to anyone anymore? That was the real question, she supposed. It was impossible to say for sure, but she strongly suspected that she was the last person alive in Warm Springs. Maybe even the last person in Meriwether County. After she’d pedaled away from the Little Free Library, she’d peeked over her shoulder at the sign that read “Welcome to Warm Springs. Pop. 525.” She made a mental note to scratch out the now-outdated number and write a large “1” in its place. 

Was anybody else out there? She thought fleetingly of Eli, and wondered if he was still alive. She wondered if he was dead, too, and if someone had buried his body in a shallow grave of red Georgia clay the way she had done for her mother. 

Maybe it’s just me now, she thought. What’s important to me?

Her brain had snapped right back to the Little Free Library, all those books lined up waiting for someone to take them; to choose them. To give them a home. As a kid she’d used all her pocket money to buy books, and when she’d left Eli behind, her books had eaten up most of the free space in her car. 

According to the calendar on the wall it had been six months and eighteen days since she’d executed her first book heist, filling her Civic with all the siphoned gas she could gather from abandoned vehicles nearby, and set out. She had headed east at first, stopping at the library in Manchester. It was one of the few buildings in town with no broken windows, and she felt a little pang of guilt as the window shattered at her feet as she climbed into the building. 

It had felt like an embarrassment of riches as she stood in the stifling stillness, the packed shelves around her. 

“What do I save?” she wondered aloud to nobody. 

“I guess I get to pick.” she thought, a little shiver running up her spine. “I’m the doomsday librarian. I get to decide.”

The choices had overwhelmed her, and on her first run she’d only brought home about a hundred books. She’d grabbed the essentials; the Proust, the Melville, the Dickens. She stacked a few more practical tomes on top; Essentials of Gardening. Chicken Care and Breeding for Beginners. If she was the last person on earth she supposed she should include Tolstoy in her Library, but her disdain for Anna Karenina, memories of slogging through the thick volume in college - found her sliding it back on the shelf next to War and Peace. There was little to entertain her now, so she plucked a few Stephen Kings (she perused the back cover of The Stand, and put it back, reaching for Billy Summers and The Green Mile instead) and John Grishams for her collection. She prayed they’d be better companions than the hens when the days started to run together. She should secure some of the old standards, too, she figured. There would be plenty of Salinger, Steinbeck, and Vonnegut in the high school. 

According to the calendar on the wall, it had been five months and eight days since she ran out of space for books in her bedroom. She took to reading to the chickens in the evening, curling up in a hammock she’d pilfered from a yard in town, and was in the process of conducting a causal experiment wherein she tracked the hens laying habits in conjunction with the reading material. There was no noticeable change in laying habits the day after they’d finished The Wind in the Willows. She cried through much of Atonement, and woke the next morning to find that the Welsummer hen had lain an especially large and speckled egg. The day after they finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, half the hens hadn’t produced anything at all. She closed the cover on The Midnight Library and found that the eggs produced in the following days were almost all double-yolked specimens. Curious. 

According to the calendar on the wall, it had been a month and twenty-four days since she had stacked books the full height and width of two walls in the living room. A day later she had dragged a large board from behind the shed, and painted “Welcome to the Doomsday Library” on it in tidy red letters. It hung cheerfully from the porch railing, swinging from the eye hooks in the breeze and creaking a little when the days got shorter and the sun set earlier. 

As strange as it all had been, today was different. Tina had felt it earlier, a small shiver along her spine as she loaded empty milk crates in her car. A sound behind her made her jump, but the only eyes on her were from the hens, lined up along the edge of the coop, their glossy heads twitching. She’d shaken the feeling off, but when she’d returned a few hours later, her front seat laden with dry goods, mason jars, and seeds she’d found at the nursery, everything looked normal, except for the box. 

It wasn’t large; maybe the size of a shoebox. The side of the box read FRESH GEORGIA PEACHES in large green capital letters. She sat behind the wheel, staring at it, perfectly still and watching for movement. Curiosity nibbled at her, and she stepped out, crossing the yard slowly. 

She got close, and lifted one of the cardboard flaps. It was books. A whole trove of books. More importantly, she realized, they were books she hadn’t tracked down yet. Each one a conspicuous gap in her collection. Middlemarch by George Eliot. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. A handful of poetry anthologies and a thick battered book on canning vegetables. Finally her eye fell on the book tucked away, almost missed under the cardboard lip. Sea Fever: Selected Poems of John Masefield, and wedged into the middle like a bookmark, glossy in it’s wrapper, a Hershey bar.