Chapter 47 Deliverance
DELIVERANCE
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 various bites 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.
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 none of 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 rebellion against 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.