Minutes to Burn

Chapter 48

Floreana woke up screaming.

Ramon was on his feet instantly, as if he'd levitated out of bed. Floreana's screams had a different timbre to them, high-pitched and lined with panic. Her thighs were wet and sticky; her water had broken.

She was gasping for breath, the large sphere of her belly heaving with her respiration. Crying her husband's name over and over, she tore at the sheets, balling them in her fists. Ramon knelt beside her, resting his fore-head on her sweaty temple, trying to soothe her with his voice.

"Already, carinito?" he asked, his voice shaking. "How close? How close?" He took her hand and her nails left red lines down his palm.

The sheets around her had darkened with sweat. He spread her legs and looked, but he couldn't see the baby's head. He wanted to be pre-pared when it first showed so that he could support its neck and squeeze below his wife's vagina to make sure her flesh didn't tear.

"The blanket," Floreana gasped. "Do you have the blanket?"

Ramon held up the soft blue quilt she had finished the day before. "Right here, carinito. Right here."

Floreana arched her back and shrieked. Her elbows were shoved back hard into the mattress, her hands gnarled, dangling from her limp wrists like claws. "It's not right," she groaned. "This is not right."

"It's okay," he said. "Everything's okay." He hoped she wouldn't notice the panic lurking beneath his eyes, the rush of blood in his cheeks.

Her eyes rolled back until he saw just moon slivers of brown beneath her upper lids. She began to seize.

Ramon fell on her, careful to keep his weight off her belly. She bucked and jerked, thrashing violently. One of her knees popped up and caught him on the side of the head, and his vision went momentarily blurry. He rose and took a step back. Her face was a mask stretched tight across her skull. Her arms rattled beside her like snakes.

He'd need to get help.

He backed up, knocking over a bucket with a clang. Grabbing the ax, he stumbled outside. Even with the sound of his wife's thrashing urging him on, he was afraid to venture into the dark. The sky was pricked through with pinholes, stars colored yellow like the soft licks of a flame. His wife's moaning followed him out into the night.

He'd need to find the woman soldier. She would help. His wife's cries propelled him, but he stopped about fifty meters from the row of balsas. The soldiers' base camp was far away-across the road and well into the grassy fields to the northeast. He might not have time to reach them.

He paused, trying to fight away fear and frustration, his eyes moistening. He peered in the direction of the soldiers' camp, then headed back to the rectangular block of light that filled the window of his house. Turning again, he stared at the road, spilling tears.

He did not know what to do and did not have any time to make up his mind.

Floreana's scream rent the night, startling him into action. He ran off into his field, toward his supply shed at the edge of the plantains. A rope could tie Floreana to the bed, then he'd do his best to deliver the baby alone. As soon as the baby was safely wrapped in the quilt, he'd go find the blonde soldier and she'd know what to do.

His hands shook so badly it took him three tries to get the little key in the shed's lock. Floreana's screams crashed down on him like waves, and he cursed the southeast winds, sweeping the screams west across the uninhabited pahoehoe plains instead of east to the soldiers' camp. He swung the door open and staggered inside, knocking over supplies on the thin wooden shelves.

He groped in the dark for a length of rope, his cheeks damp as he tried to block out the sound of his wife's cries. Finally, he felt the coarse fibers against his palm. He yanked the rope from under a bag of fertil-izer and draped it around his neck. The door had swung shut behind him, and he kicked it open, leaving it crooked on its hinges.

Another scream, this one impossibly high and protracted.

I'm coming, mi vida, he thought. I'm coming.

He stepped through the narrow door frame into the night. The cry stopped, cut off mid-scream. He froze, breathing hard, lips trembling. Even from across the field, he could make out a stillness in the block of light from the window. The wind blew hot and lazy across his face, carrying with it the smells of moss and decomposing wood from the forest. He tried desperately to slow his breathing but could not.

He called his wife's name, just once. His voice sounded hollow and weak in the night.

The air reverberated with silence. He was filled with a sudden and unde-niable dread. The ax slid from his hand, disappearing into the tall grass.

His eyes fixed on the window, he trudged toward his house, his boots dragging reluctantly across the furrowed soil and damp grass. The rope was slick in his hands, a rough-skinned eel.

After an eternity, he reached the side of the house. He headed for the door, leaning weakly against the wall. Bloque scraped against his bare shoulder, drawing blood.

He tried to call Floreana's name again, but his throat was too raspy and the sound came out a hoarse whisper. He paused just beside the doorway, gathering the threads of his fear. The silence unrolled around him like a black sea, endless and unremitting.

His teeth chattering, he stepped into the single room of his house. The rope slid from his hand to the floor.

His wife lay on the mattress, her lower body a muddle of flesh and blood. She'd been torn open from the inside. A splatter of blood ran up the wall beside the mattress, nearly four feet away. Her body was stiff and twisted, her back still arched.

On the floor lay a tangle of limbs and claws and half-shaped organs laid open to the outside air. The fetus. His child. A gnarled, cursed crea-ture that looked as though it had been forged in some hell's oven-a col-lection of viscera and tissue, only some of it human.

It had expired before ever drawing air, and it lay, dead, beside its dead mother. Ramon's wife.

His skin felt intensely hot, as if it were burning off his bones. With slow, drugged movements, he walked to the mattress and straightened his wife's limbs, trying his best to lay her arms by her sides so that she looked relaxed. He pulled the thin, stained blanket across her lower body, thumbed her eyes closed, kissed her still-moist forehead.

He dragged a chair from the table over to the fireplace, above which some bloque had fallen away to reveal a brief stretch of rafter.

He fetched the rope from the doorway.