Lord, Let Me Bury Her

Forty years after nuclear war, the last Christian missionary carries the body of humanity’s last other survivor through a flooded underground seed vault, stopping at fourteen doorways to recite the Stations of the Cross. For decades he tended this refuge, but its bean plants now flower without setting pods, and the ventilation fans have fallen silent. He has promised his companion a burial beneath the vault’s single living olive tree rather than leaving her among the drowned bunks, where rising water knocks the bodies against their bedframes. With twelve minutes left in his breathing cylinder, he reaches a ladder too narrow for the stretcher: he must leave her below or climb with her strapped to his back before the water seals the shaft.