After the incident with the weeper in the glasshouse, the farming sickle that had saved my life never left my side. When we found it I had been all in favour of trading it later on, but now it was going nowhere. It had proved its worth a million ways. However, our next encounter with the weepers wasn't as unexpected as it was deeply disturbing.

We'd moved closer to the city centre to flog the fruits of our scavenging to a few survivors, and hopefully find more whilst we were at it. The City Watch were keeping up regular patrols, which half terrified, half reassured me. Regular gunshots could be heard; weepers, presumably. Things were bad, and whole areas were starting to be cleared, although the bodies of the dead were still piled high in the streets. If you wanted a proper burial for a member of your family, you did it yourself.

We were checking out an apartment block close to sundown, not long before curfew. Apartment blocks were risky- you had to break into each unit and there was no guarantee that the inhabitants were quite dead yet. We'd been lucky today though, and had worked our way down from the top systematically, finding nothing more threatening than a rat or two and picking up a decent haul of food.

It was on the first floor that we heard the unmistakable cry of a child, and my blood ran cold. It would attract any hungry weeper in the vicinity who would then inevitably tear the kid apart. Perhaps it was maternal instinct, but I kicked down the door with enough force to tear it off the hinges and send it halfway across the room. I gave a cursory scan of the apartment, feeling my lover covering my back, before stepping into the front room where the cries were coming from.

The place was a complete mess- someone had obviously left in a hurry, not even bothering to close the window where curtains fluttered in the breeze. The cries came from a basket near the sofa, and I stepped over there to check it out.

"Oh, shit," I whispered as my eyes fell on the cradle. I covered my mouth with my hand to try and avoid losing whatever I'd last eaten.

"What is it?"

"It's vile," I replied, moving over to the window to try and suck some fresh air into my suffocated lungs. I heard my lover move over to the cradle and he gave a sharp intake of breath.

"He's..."

"Infected." I finished, spinning around. "We should kill it."

"It? For fuck's sake, it's a baby boy! We should at least try to save him, perhaps elixir...?"

"Have you ever seen elixir work on a weeper?"

"No, but..."

"Then do the kind thing and snap its neck!" I shouted, brandishing my weapon at the cradle. The baby thrashed and writhed as it sensed humans near, its horrid eyes bloody with disease and its clothes and face covered in the green fluid humans threw up in the advanced stages of the plague. It gargled and moaned and I turned away, not bearing to look at it any longer. At least it explained why there were no hungry weepers around- they did not attack their own.

"This was someone's son," my lover said quietly. "Would you have killed our son?"

I ignored him and stared out of the window. "It's nearly sundown," I said. "We have to leave. Kill it or leave it, it's up to you. The plague will finish it off soon enough either way if the eyes are bleeding."

I left, not wanting to see which choice my lover made. As I reached the street I heard strangled sobbing coming from the upstairs window and I shook my head. It seemed my lover had learned a lesson about what kindness truly was in these times of war and plague.

OOO

We headed back out to the countryside. The city was as good as dead, and it was too dangerous to stay whilst there were still so many weepers. I made plans for us to travel to my grandfather's farm- it seems I'd inherited my stubborn streak from him, as he'd refused to leave the place when the rest of my family had fled. I hadn't seen him since the start of the plague, but I felt sure news would have reached me of his demise if it had come to that.

The City Watch were reluctant, but eventually they had to let us leave, and we managed to hitch a ride on one of the trains out to the countryside. We were well aware that half the carriages were filled with the bodies of the dead. The other half was filled with empty whale oil tanks. It was becoming a commodity, and Dunwall was running out of it.

We hitched as far as the trains would allow us, then walked the rest of the way to my grandfather's farm. It was a quiet journey- eerily quiet. We didn't see a soul, weeper or otherwise, on the way. Most of the houses were abandoned but I resisted the temptation to raid them just yet- it was getting close to nightfall and I wanted to arrive in once piece.

My grandfather wasn't in the least bit surprised to see me, and I wasn't surprised to see him in one piece either. He'd been a seaman before his retirement, out on the whaling ships in all weathers, and it had made him a survivor. He'd hoarded an impressive amount of potted whale meat, jellied eels and other tinned goods, and that first night we had a feast the likes of which we hadn't seen since the plague began. I slept better than I had in weeks.

OOO

The next day I climbed the winding stairs of the house many times to get into the roof space and fetch down many items from where my grandfather had hidden them. Amongst them were a surprising amount of whale oil tanks. He certainly wasn't rich enough to have so many, but I guess he still had some contacts from his days on the ships who could hook him up and keep him in power.

My lover was making himself useful as well, moving between us both to offer a hand with chores. In the late afternoon, I yelled for him to give me a hand with the tank I was fetching down, only to receive no response. I lugged it down the stairs myself to find him standing in the front room, eyes glued to the window with a look of utter horror on his face.

"Didn't you hear me shouting?" I asked irritably.

"They're here." His face was bloodless.

I looked impatiently out of the window to see what had captured his undivided attention only to be rooted to the spot myself. I couldn't speak for a moment until I started screaming for my grandfather to come and take a look, NOW.

He shuffled in, holding another huge tin of eels, and we three stood at the window and watched the weepers come towards the house. They were still quite a way off, but their strength lay in their numbers. It could only be described as a horde, and with the noise we had been making, there was no way they couldn't have heard it. They were coming straight for us.

My grandfather was the first to react, snapping to attention and giving us orders, all whilst standing in his carpet slippers and still holding the can. "We may be able to hold them off long enough to escape, but there's no way we can fight them all," he declared. I believed him- killing the one in the glasshouse had taken enough strength out of me before.

"If you have elixir, take it," he continued, never taking his eyes off the window. "They'll be here soon. Once they sense life, they'll run."

OOO

He wasn't wrong. When the first weeper smashed its arm through the window, and I heard another at the back of the house, I shoved my lover towards the stairs. "Up." I instructed. "It's safer."

I backed towards the stairs myself, wondering what was taking my grandfather so long. He appeared in the hall, dragging the whale oil canister behind him and with that damn tin still under his arm. We could hear the weepers now, hear them in the house, and their groans struck fear into the centre of my heart. He looked me dead in the face.

"Go." He said. "I'll hold them off."

"No, you can't!" I shouted, feeling my lover tug on my arm to get me to go. "We've survived this long, this can't be it!"

"Go, right now, and don't you dare look back." He ordered. "GO!"

Weepers were flooding the hallway, squealing triumphantly at finding the life they so craved. My lover all but dragged me up the stairs as the horde surrounded my grandfather, the ones at the back pushing those at the front over, the hallway becoming a sea of disease, weepers crawling all over each other, and all over my grandfather, covered in blood. I saw him lift the can high above his head, and make eye contact with me one last time before he nodded and I was lifted off my feet by my lover. The last thing I saw was my grandfather swinging the can down onto the canister of whale oil.

The explosion rocked the whole house and dust rained down from the ceiling. I could hear bricks and wood falling, and a screaming that was probably more weepers but could just have easily been me. We went right up to the top of the house and backed into the master bedroom. I could see more hands clawing at the base of the stairs. The explosion had cleared a good load out, but they were a horde, and it was never going to get them all. I heard my lover fumble for the window behind me and slide it up.

"Come on!" He shouted. "We can climb onto the roof."

A weariness swept over me. I was tired of the plague, tired of running, and tired of scavenging. What sort of life was this? Ruled by the iron fist of the City Watch, about to be blockaded to die as vessels of plague, and for what? A life of running away, running towards a home that we'd never have again.

I reached out and gave my lover a leg up from the windowsill until I could hear his hands scrabble and grab a hold on the roof. Then I took my last vial of elixir from my pocket and stared at it. It meant survival, but for what? My grandfather was dead, and the rest of my family could have been any one of those weepers that had killed him.

I suddenly stuffed the elixir into my lovers pocket, and with one last shove, pushed him all the way up and onto the roof.

"What are you doing?!" He was panicked. "Give me your hand, quickly, I can pull you up!"

"No." I told him, quite calmly. "Run, whilst you have the chance. Live."

The time had come. The weepers had made it into the bedroom. I climbed up on the windowsill, and roared at my lover to leave. I could hear him sobbing, scrabbling away over the roof, but he never took his eyes off me. The first weeper I hit with the scythe went down like a sack of bricks, and I managed to take two more with me before they swarmed me and I teetered on the edge of the window.

I felt the air rushing past me, but it didn't matter anymore. I'd escaped the weepers, escaped the bleeding from the eyes and the throwing up of my insides, escaped the plague. I was a survivor.

I was flying, I was falling.

I was free.