He reached for his daughter with a shaking hand. He felt himself saying her name aloud, the name soft and sweet on his cracked lips. Bell. Bell. It was a chant from some long-forgotten and godless vigil. Tainted by long nights spent holding his crying wife and wondering if he would ever see his daughter's face just one more time. Bell. Bell. Bell. The name rose in his throat like bile, like a sick song that he could only sing to her. He felt it was a dream and yet it wasn't. Her name there, tolling from his lips, crisp and new and blackened with the ashes of their travels. Bell. A last time and he could see her freckled cheeks, her light wisps of hair. Walking in the back door smelling of grass and chocolate chip cookies from his mother's house. Ten years old again. A soccer uniform. Smiling.
"Bell—" he choked with a gasp, nearly throwing himself off the bed in his haste, held down only by his shoulders. Tess stared down at him, waiting for him to surface from the murky depths of his dream again and return to reality.
"Wake up," she hissed, shaking him though his eyes are already open. "Joel, please."
He raised his weeping eyes to meet hers, feeling the weight of mucus and ash in his lungs. His vision blurred, bringing her pressed expression in and out of focus. He began to sob, the small noises accompanied by convulsions that shook her with him. "Oh, my baby, my baby," he wept, looking up at the ceiling. Tess still had two fistfuls of his shirt, shaking him silently, trying to coax him into not crying. "My baby, oh, no…"
"Stop it. Stop it." She leaned close to him, teeth gritted. "Stop it. This won't fix anything. Stop crying."
"Bell, oh, Bell," he cried, letting her shake him by the shirt. "What if they hurt her? What if they took her and they—"
"Stop! Stop," she commanded, shoving him hard onto the mat beneath him. He rolled over, forcing her away from him. He curled into himself like an animal retreating, playing dead like it would make the predatory dreams fall away from his aching head.
He forced himself up, stumbling past her on the floor of the small church they'd been holed up in for the last week. Moving slowing into the next room, he wheezed and released a heaving cough that had been building up in his sleep. The waste in his lungs shifted as though he'd awoken a great beast to come lumbering from his ribcage. He coughed again, the thunderous sound echoing through the rafters of the church and bouncing off the grimy stained glass. He fell to his knees before the baptismal font, heaving and coughing until a fine mist of blood covered the floor beneath him.
"No," he whispered, feeling the weights of each blood cell he'd just shed coming down on his shoulders. "Oh, God, please… no." He raised his eyes as if to ask for mercy on his soul, on his aching lungs, but found himself gazing at the surviving half of Saint Peter's face, not yet chipped away in the lavish mural on the ceiling. He started to weep.
Her footsteps were soft behind him. "How long?" He had no answer that would change the fact that he was dying. "How long, Joel?"
"A week." He wiped the blood from his lips with a shaking hand. His mouth tasted of rusted iron and something dirty. "Maybe longer."
She was silent. If the gravity of it all hadn't been hitting her too, she would have been furious with him. But no lover can be furious with a walking corpse, not one that they have shared a bed with. She walked to him and fell to her knees beside him, offering him the small amount of clean water left in the bottle in her hands. He took it like a sacred chalice and drank it down, the sweet taste almost washing away the rusted taste of blood. His former self would have offered some to her, but he did not.
"What are we gonna do?" she asked in a whisper, like she was afraid God would hear her. He leaned down slowly into her lap. Rested his head on her thigh as she buried her bony fingers in his hair. "Joel, Joel…" It was her turn to chant his name like some abandoned prayer. The saints watched them from the ceiling, their eyes relentless and unmoving, damning them both to hell on earth before they could put a gun in either of their mouths. "I don't know what to do."
He laid there, his chest heavy with disease and a burden he didn't know how to carry. His silence was her answer. It always was. He didn't know either.
She sniffed. "You're all I have left."
"You have her."
"Our daughter is gone, Joel." A stern correction hissing from between her teeth. He thumbed the ripped hole in the knee of her jeans.
"You have her."