Eve by Anna Carey
Prologue
May 23, 2025
My sweet Eve,
As I drove back from the market today, you humming in your car seat and our trunk filled with powdered milk and rice, I saw the San Gabriel Mountains—really saw them for the first time. I’d taken that road before, but this was different. There they were beyond the windshield: their blue-green peaks still and silent, watching over the city, so close I felt like I could touch them. I pulled over just to look.
I know I will die soon. The plague is taking everyone who was given the vaccine. There are no more flights. There are no more trains. They’ve barricaded the roads outside of town and now we all must wait. The phones and internet have long since gone out. The faucets are dry and cities are losing power, one by one. Soon the entire world will be dark.
But right now we are still alive. Perhaps more alive than we’ve ever been. You’re sleeping in the next room. From this chair I can hear the sounds of your music box—the one with the tiny ballerina—playing its last few tinkling notes.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
Mom
Chapter One
BY THE TIME THE SUN SET OVER THE FIFTY-FOOT PERIMETER wall, the School lawn was covered with twelfth-year students. The younger girls leaned out of the dormitory windows, waving their New American flags as we sang and danced. I grabbed Pip’s arm and spun her around when the band played a faster number. Her short, staccato laugh rose above the music.
It was the night before our graduation and we were celebrating. We’d spent most of our lives inside the compound walls, never knowing the forest beyond it, and this was the grandest party we’d ever been given. A band was set up by the lake—a group of eleventh-year girls who’d volunteered—and the guards had lit torches to keep the hawks away. Laid out on a table were all of my favorite foods: leg of deer, roast wild boar, candied plums, and bowls overflowing with jungle berries.
Headmistress Burns, a doughy woman with a face like a feral dog, was manning the table, encouraging everyone to eat more. “Come on! We don’t want to let this go to waste. I want my girls like plump little pigs!” The fat on her arms swung back and forth as she gestured at the spread.
The music slowed and I pulled Pip closer, leading her in a waltz. “I think you make a very good man,” she said, as we glided toward the lakefront. Her red hair clung to her sweaty face.
“I am handsome,” I laughed, furrowing my brow to feign manliness. It was a joke at School, for it had been over a decade since any of us had seen a boy or man, unless you counted the photos of the King that were displayed in the main hall. We begged the teachers to tell us of the time before the plague, when girls and boys attended Schools together, but they only said that the new system was for our own protection. Men could be manipulative, conniving, and dangerous. The one exception was the King. Only he was to be trusted and obeyed.
“Eve, it’s time,” Teacher Florence called. She stood by the lakefront, a gold medal in her aged, weathered hands. The standard teacher’s uniform, a red blouse with blue pants, hung loose on her petite frame. “Gather around, girls!”
The band stopped playing and the air was filled with the sounds of the outside forest. I felt the metal whistle around my neck, thankful to have it should any creature broach the compound wall. Even after all these years at School, I never got used to hearing the dogfights, the distant rat-tat-tat-tat of machine guns, the horrible whining of deer being eaten alive.