Page 138 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

His eyes grew deeper and brighter, which scared me because I worried that it was a sign of his imminent departure. But it was tears that changed them so. Einar had never before cried in front of me in open daylight. Realising that, I could no longer hold off my own tears, letting them flow freely. I pressed my hand to my chest in a futile attempt to hold together my shattering heart. My stomach bulged underneath, and its small occupants moved languidly within, as if sensing my sorrow.

Take them instead,I thought savagely, take them! I don’t want them, not if this is the price I have to pay. Leave him to me in their stead,I argued a bargain that was too outrageous to ever say out loud. Let them die inside of me if it means that he will live.

I meant it and didn’t mean it at the same time. Now that they were finally in existence, I would rather have died a most gruesome death myself than lose my babies. Even just thinking such a horrifying thought made me superstitiously terrified of being punished for my unvoiced words.

And yet. I used to think that I was willing to do anything, give anything up, just to have them. Only to learn too late that there was, in fact, one sacrifice I had not been prepared to make.

“Don’t cry, my love,” Einar pleaded softly, but it was the direction my thoughts had taken that froze the sobs in my throat.

“I’m so sorry I got pregnant! So sorry I wanted to. None of this would have happened otherwise.”

“Don’t be. I’m not. Not even remotely. It wasn’t the Outbreak or the position it granted me.Youmade me the man I wasalways meant to be. And in turn, I gave you something you were always meant to have.” He ran a finger down my cheek, wiping my face dry despite the fatal trembling of his fingers. “Our story is complete. Everything is as it should be.”

Dark circles of mortal fatigue were emerging under his sunken eyes, and his lips barely moved when he spoke.

“And in all the reckoning that I could do now, looking back on all that I have done, the good against the bad against the inconsequential ... repenting my many crimes and rejoicing at my sparse achievements ... There is only the one scale with which I weigh my soul, the one Holy Judgement. You. My one salvation in a lifetime of solitude. It is only for you and no one else to say if a sinner like me, a man of vice and violence, was worthy of the heaven that I have found in you.”

His hands grasped mine, their grip only an echo of their evaporating power.

“Worthy of it?” I repeated it after him slowly with an exhale that was like the banishing of a part of me that I would never get back. “When you are gone, my memories of you will be the only heaven I’ll ever know again. In this life and beyond.”

He pulled me close to him then, laying me down along his body, my face next to his. Our tears mingled together, and the blood from his wounded belly swiftly covered the swell of my own, warm and slick on my skin. We stayed like so for an eternity that lasted shorter than a heartbeat. Einar’s body resisted death with the same vehemence with which it had fought, loved, and lived. And yet, words soon turned to a feeble whisper and then ran dry altogether. I had no idea how much time had passed when I became aware that his chest no longer moved up and down against my breasts and that his arm lay limp and lifeless around my hip.

Still, I stayed next to him. Long past the moment when his heart had stopped beating in the palm of my hand.

47

DELIVERANCE

It was the second anniversary of the Outbreak. May 13th, 2030. For weeks, I had lain in a hospital bed in a private room, as sterile and blank as my mind had become, the tentacles of various medical monitors having taken root on my grotesquely swollen body. Most of the time, I dwelt in a strange state between sleep and wakefulness, my lethargy a shield against being too acutely aware of Einar’s irrevocable absence. The lodgers in my womb didn’t share my numbness and moved actively around, pressing into my ribs and kicking my spleen, as if trying to alert me to the fact that, in them at least, something of Einar’s lived on.

I had been told they were two boys, each in their separate sac but with a shared placenta, indicating they were identical twins. That titbit of information had rather disrupted my plans for baby names. Had only one of them been a boy, I would have named him after his father. But as it were, I feared that doing so would have reeked of preferring one son over the other. And so, in my more lucid moments, I searched for names with concentration only possible for someone afraid of their thoughts straying.

It was just when I thought I had finally settled on two that the alarm blared from the hallway. And when it died down, panicked screams and tell-tale gnarls of infected followed, coming from somewhere beyond the doors.

It’s over, was my first thought, accompanied by a sensation of missing a step when running down the stairs.

And it clearly was. I was almost as wide as I was tall by then, painfully slow and unbalanced on my feet. What was worse, the hospital’s policy prohibited patients from keeping any weapons, which is why Dave and Kevin took my bow with them to their new apartment in town.

There was an active outbreak raging in the building, and I was completely unarmed. There was nothing to barricade the door with, nothing that I could manage to move on my own. We were done for. Einar’s death and my years of waging a war against my own body had been for nothing.

Then a second thought resonated firmly throughout the fatigued jumble of my mind.No.

I rolled off the bed, my knees nearly buckling underneath me as my feet touched the ground. I wrenched open the plywood dresser and pulled my overalls over the hospital gown, just about able to fasten the straps. The denim was very tight across my midriff, but that was less distracting than having to sneak through an infected building bare-assed. Like a frivolous butterfly, a thought flapped its wings around me briefly, making me wonder why even the hospital gowns seemed to be designed in a way that was degrading to the patients, as if all the rest of it wasn’t enough. I chortled quietly and stalked to the door.

Then, taking a ragged breath, panic carving a freezing hollow inside of me, I opened the door. Just a little bit. Just to peek into the corridor.

Two maimed nurses lay on the grey vinyl floor, their white uniforms turned crimson with blood that pooled from variousbites on their bodies. One of them had been bitten in the neck, and she gurgled as she struggled to breathe. The other’s face had been torn off, teeth and bone showing through the remnants of flesh. That one wore her chestnut hair in a French bob that looked terrifyingly like my mother’s.

They both thrashed feebly in the disorientation of their mute agony. With every ounce of my strength, I raised my sights up and away from them. There was nothing I could do for them.

I walked towards the stairs, stalking in my plush slippers, which would protect my feet but make no sound. There was a door open to my right, revealing a staff kitchen. Buff-coloured surfaces and white impersonal coffee mugs.

I hesitated.

Going inside an enclosed space with only one possible exit was such a terrible idea that there really was only one reasonable justification for it; obtaining a weapon.

I searched the drawers in a quiet frenzy until I found a large bread knife and a few smaller but sharper knives.