Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 104157 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104157 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Until now.
“Someone give me a cigarette.”
“You quit,” Alejandro said.
“For Natalia. For my future. I have neither now.” My palms sweat. I ached to hold Natalia. It would be the last time. How could it be that I wouldn’t be able to touch her when I pleased, take comfort in her presence, her love? I turned my back to her body, glowing in the candle light as it waited for me at the end of the aisle. “Let me kill myself as slowly or as quickly as I see fit. Give me a fucking cigarette.”
Eduardo offered one up with a lighter. He’d always been a man of vice. I lit the thing and took a comforting drag. “You know the exit plan,” I said to them.
“It’s already in motion,” Max replied.
I nodded. For them to begin evacuations without consulting me had to mean it was truly the end. We’d always been prepared to die for this. And for the possibility that there’d come a time to leave the Badlands behind.
I exhaled a cloud of smoke. “The fleet is ready?”
“We’ve already sounded the alarms. People are boarding. They’ll have food, water, and money—enough to get them on their feet wherever each person settles.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. This was where it ended.
“You have served them well,” Alejo said. “And you’ve equipped them. Everyone in these walls will survive outside of them because of you. Many of them are only alive because of you.”
I nodded once. “Time’s not on our side—go.”
“And you?” Max asked.
I looked at the cigarette in my hand. It should’ve been a cigar enjoyed in celebration of good news. Of my first child on the way. Of the goodwill God had placed upon my wife and me.
Instead, I raised it toward the heavens before ashing it out on a pew. My life had been taken from me. There was nothing more for me here. “Once everyone is out safely, meet me back here,” I said to Max. “And bring Barto. Just the two of you. Until then, I’ll be alone with my wife.”
28
Cristiano
Dressed in a white nightgown, Natalia glowed at the end of the aisle in the dim chapel. Flickering candles made shadows of her body on the wall behind the altar. I walked toward her and ascended the steps to where she’d been laid on a bed of handmade blankets and cream silk sheets and pillows. The candle light brought color to her cheeks, creating a painful illusion of warmth and life.
I looked down on her. Hands folded over her stomach. Her dark thicket of hair around her pale face, arranged by Pilar to fall in curls over her slender shoulders.
I touched her cheek. Impossibly soft and smooth. Thumbing the corner of her mouth, I bent over to press my lips to hers—and stayed there. I couldn’t bear to pull away.
Wetness dripped from my eyes to her cheeks. What was this? The last time I’d cried, I’d shed one tear for Bianca’s death, and then I’d had to run for my life. Now, tears flowed down my cheeks, dropping onto Natalia’s lifeless lips.
I gripped the sides of her face, kissing her forehead, the corners of her mouth, remembering how they’d twitched early on when she’d fought her feelings for me. I sat on the makeshift bed and touched her hair. The tattoo on the back of her shoulder. I took her hands from her sides to bring them to my mouth, breathing on them long enough to warm them.
My mind played tricks on me. I was going mad. Perhaps I’d already gone. There was no question—I couldn’t go on without her, or my mind would surely go.
“I love you, Natalia Lourdes,” I said. “Mariposita. I love you.”
I lowered her hands and kissed her stomach. An all-too familiar metallic smell filled my nostrils. I pulled up her dress to find blood between her legs.
Fuck. I fisted the fabric.
Was it not enough to lose her? I had to witness my dead wife’s miscarriage?
I no longer wished for Natalia’s life but for my own death. And I couldn’t rely on anyone but myself to grant that wish. I buried my head against Natalia’s womb, gripping her sides as a sob wracked my body.
There was no God. No Virgin. They would not take my wife from me, and let me glimpse for a moment the family I could’ve had. They would not show me pure love only to sever it from me so suddenly and viciously—no higher power could be so brutal, not even to punish a man like myself.
Exhausted and emotionally wrung out, I drifted in and out of consciousness. This was where it would end, and I had no strength to fight it.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d slept when the click of the chapel’s heavy front door roused me. Max and Barto stood at the entrance. I pressed a kiss to Natalia’s cheek and rose to meet them halfway down the aisle.