Page 139 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

Someone rushed by the door, and I froze. A person or a fury? No matter, they were gone.

I approached the door warily and looked outside. All seemed clear, and so I stepped out to make for the stairs once again.

The cannibal rushed me before I could reach the staircase and slammed me into the wall with a ferocity that knocked the breath out of me. He pushed painfully into my bulging stomach, whose occupants protested this intrusion by moving hectically around.

He was freshly infected. His movements hadn’t yet lost their healthy, fluid speed. His hair and facial hair were short, and though his breath smelled very badly, it still smelled like a person’s, like the breath of someone who liked to smoke and didn’t brush their teeth often. It didn’t smell of rotting decay, characteristic of those infected a long time ago.

Noting all this about my mindless assailant, I also noticed that there was a yellow-hilted knife protruding from his eye socket, blood and something else oozing from it. Only as he collapsed to the ground did I realise that I had jammed it there.

Whilst on the subject of jamming things, I stuffed a fist into my mouth to prevent myself from screaming in sheer terror. A small leak of urine burned on my left leg as it ran down it in a thin rivulet.

The urge to sit down and wait for the end without prolonging the inevitable was the strongest thing I had felt since the day at St Bernand tunnel. The horror of having to wander through a hospital, no less, not knowing where the danger lurked, actively walking towards possible death by being torn apart or worse, that was all to fiercely battle an instinct that lived in every cell of my body, telling me to hunker down, back against the wall.

I nearly let myself be seduced by that instinct to swap the chance to survive for the illusion of immediate safety.

No!The voice within said again, strong and loud like a bell.

I made it down the stairs and to the ground-floor reception. The exit, a revolving glass door, was in sight. I bristled like a cat, shivering under the phantom gaze of a thousand blazing eyes. A lone man limped towards the way out, his hair but a snow-white fuzz above the creased skin of his neck, sunken folds of frail buttocks showing through the parted hospital gown. I hesitated. His movements were slow and painfully jerky. Impossible to tell from where I stood whether that was due to his age or a possible infection.

Another man came in sight from the opposite side of the corridor and hobbled through the door as fast as his leg in a cast would allow. That was a very promising sign. Not only because the elder paid him no heed, his disinterest reassuring as far as his infection status went. But also because it showed that noneof the staff had managed to follow the standard procedure of disabling the door, locking us all in to contain the outbreak.

“Monsieur,” I whispered once I caught up with the old man.

He didn’t hear me.

“Monsieur, to your right,” I said a little louder, “don’t be alarmed.”

He turned to me. His tear-streaked face was contorted with the helpless disorientation of the very old. His sunken eyes were baby blue, and the skin that stretched over his sharp cheekbones seemed paper-thin and transparent. There is something inherently touching about people on the brink of death, their heart-fluttering preciousness much like that of a newborn. Perhaps it has to do with being on one of the two points that determine a line of life, and it matters not which one, because from a purely geometrical perspective, they are interchangeable. We may reverse the line, and it will look the same. We may bend it in half, and the points will touch and fuse with each other. Birth and death are nothing but each other’s mirrors. As are the sentiments their proximity evokes.

“Oh mon Dieu, mademoiselle! Vous êtes enceinte,” the old man exclaimed once I reached him.

He held on to my arm weakly in a gallant yet utterly pointless attempt to help me reach the door. He was slower than I but not slow enough for me to gain sufficient distance from him if necessary. And necessary it was.

Bloodthirsty snarls sounded behind us, and I turned around to see three furies rushing toward us.

I told myself that I could see in his face the realisation of what he had to do. I wished desperately he would do it himself.

But he didn’t.

The Carmine Plague had long ago made me abandon the misguided notion that any two lives carry the same importance. That had never been anything but a luxurious lie, a rebellionagainst nature afforded to us by the safety of a bygone era. One that our trained minds may have once condoned, perhaps, but that our dormant instincts had always denied. A lowlife criminal’s life carries less weight in a society than an upstanding citizen’s. An uninfected life aids humanity more than an infected one. The life of a woman in the bloom of her days is to be prioritised over that of a dying old man. And to a mother, her sons’ lives are rightfully worth more than all the other human lives in the world.

In saving my sons, in saving Einar’s sons, I could do no wrong.

My synapses sizzled angrily with a single roaring thought:NO.

Whipping around, I drove my fist into the old man’s nose, feeling the delicate crunch of his feeble bones against the hardness of my own. He let go of my arm to cover his dripping face with his hands, yelping with surprise. I grabbed his shoulders and pushed him to the ground with all my might, nearly toppling over myself.

Supporting my belly with my hands, I ran. Telling myself that I was deaf to the agonised cries and the wet tearing of flesh behind me.

I lost myself in the maze of the university hospital buildings just as armed units began arriving in their heavy vehicles. Instinctively, I willed my feet to move faster yet again, seeking cover in the narrow nooks and crannies of the winding streets. I wouldn’t risk quarantine with other, potentially infected, survivors.

After much wandering through the unfamiliar city, I reached Dave and Kevin’s art nouveau apartment building near Lake Geneva. As I pressed the doorbell, I realised that the trousers of my overalls were completely soaked. At first, I attributed that to likely having voided my bladder without noticing.

I became aware of the contractions shortly after Kevin opened the door. I stumbled inside, collapsing onto a rug as a searing wire closed like a noose around my abdominal organs, pressing them impossibly close together, pulling them lower, the infernal coil stretching ever tighter. Yet unwinding very suddenly, setting my innards free.

I let out a yelp that was disproportionately small for the pain that caused it and likely drowned out by the shriek of sirens coming from outside, reminding me of that distant night two years prior. Much like then, these sirens sounded to impose a strict quarantine on all inhabitants of Lausanne until further notice, issuing an uncompromising warning in several languages that anyone to break the quarantine would be shot on sight.

“Oh thank Christ, Renny!” Dave and Kevin were on their knees, bumping into each other as they hugged me both at the same time. “How on earth did you manage to get out?”