Despite hours and years of training, I suddenly felt like a fraud, almost as if I had lied about my experience with the bow. As if I had made it all up.
What if it turned out that I couldn’t manage live, moving targets? What if I couldn’t bring myself to shoot infected people who I knew did nothing to deserve their fate?
Willing my hands not to start shaking, I let the first arrow fly in one tremendous moment.
I did not miss.
A fury in a frilly pink dress collapsed, the arrow neatly lodged in her eye socket. It was the perfect headshot.
I exhaled deeply. Grabbing another and then another arrow from the quiver, I nocked and released and nocked and released, starting with the infected running at the widest angle away from Josh and working my way to those closer to him as he got nearer. A corpulent, middle-aged man in overalls. A man in a suit, his hair still slick with pomade. A woman with a tiny, sharp face and a pixie cut. Another woman with a large mole above her upper lip.
The bow was marvellously light in my hands, yet solid, and holding it was like growing an extra appendage, an extension of my own body. My fingertips vibrated with each arrow I dispatched on its single-minded flight through the air towards its doomed destination. It was almost as if by my mere willpower that the infected dropped to the ground one after another. Josh reached the shattered display window just as I killed the last one.
I hit all but two of my targets on the first attempt.
I breathed a shaky sigh of relief and turned around to face the others, expecting to see amazement in their eyes, jubilation, anything but the kind of horrified awe I saw there instead.
“Have you done this before?” Dave was the first to break the charged silence.
“I told you I had plenty of practice?—”
“No. What I mean is, have you killed people this way before?”
I winced at his words as well as at the grave expression in his customarily merry face. Unable to bear his scrutiny, I glanced behind me with the pretence of checking that no other cannibals had emerged. My eyes landed on the dead. Myvictims. Blood trickled out of their fatal wounds, forming small pools around them. Finding that sight even more unbearable, I snapped my eyes forward again.
“I most certainly have not,” I replied with quiet indignation. “But I told you, the technique isn’t any different from shooting clay pigeons. And it’s not like I can allow myself to hesitate, not when all your lives depend on me!”
Noting my discomfort, Dave’s expression softened.
“I know, hun. It’s just that ... it’s one thing to hear you talk about it. Another to see you do it.”
The others only nodded in assent, eyes fixed on me with fearful intensity, almost as if they worried I might suddenly decide to shoot them, too. Fortunately, none of us had time to dwell on the tension, and it dissipated gradually as we started gathering equipment. Soon, nothing was left of it except a residue of guilty discomfort, like a bad taste in my mouth.
7
LEGACY LOST
Even though the journey back to the hotel, equipped with our newly acquired arsenal, was uneventful, I was to kill eight more infected in the course of the early afternoon alone.
Using my offline maps, we determined a promising route out of the city and tested it on foot as previously agreed.
Rounding the corner of the hotel, we began to witness ceaseless sights of destruction. There was trash in the streets, rubbish spilling from the overflowing bins. There were maimed carcasses whose rancid smell was so intense one could taste their rot, gagging on its tingly, metallic flavour. There were countless crashed or abandoned cars, though thankfully, none blocking the road completely.
Gradually nearing the city’s edge, we left the touristy area for a residential one, and a smell of frying onions suddenly reached us from inside one of the surrounding peach-coloured apartment buildings. Just as my mouth began to water, we heard the hard patter of feet against the tarmac from just around the corner, alerting us to their approach well in advance.
I fired arrows in a quick succession, killing the last, smallest fury when she was still a few yards away from us. I bit my lip and closed my eyes, going over a bundt cake recipe in mymind. Which may not seem a very useful thing to do in the circumstances, but it helped me avoid dwelling on the fact that I had just killed three children as well as their presumed parents.
I took a closer look at my victims, feeling that this was a necessary homage to them. The adults were in their late thirties. A man with a receding hairline and a large round gut. A curly-haired woman in a floral dress. A girl of around twelve. Dark-haired like her parents, a faint fuzz of moustache above her upper lip, glasses, and uneven teeth. A boy of perhaps eight. A cheeky face like a monkey’s, clad in a football jersey. A girl of no more than five years old. Same curls as the adult woman. A soft, angelic face. She would have grown up to be conventionally beautiful. Would her sister have resented her for it?
And for the more haunting question, had they stayed together merely by accident, or had they still been aware of being a family, their humanity only dimmed but not entirely eradicated by their disease?
I pondered all this as I pried the arrows out of their corpses, the squelching sounds accompanied by Monika’s dry heaving, and put them in a separate quiver, intended for sterilisation later on.
The other three victims met their demise later yet, after we had established our exit route. We picked the archery shop completely clean on my dogged insistence. Then we obtained backpacks, outdoor clothing, and equipment. And finally, we found a grocery shop that hadn’t been completely depleted and seemed deserted at first glance. But it was not so. Three lost souls had dwelt within, targets for three of my arrows.
An elderly man whose glasses were shattered, their shards making his eyes ooze bloody tears that dried on his cheeks in mournful streaks. A nimble Asian man with a camera still slung around his neck. And a darkly beautiful young woman whose arm had been torn off.
The roar of the SUV’s engine was loud in the eerily quiet streets as we drove away from the hotel many hours later. It had only gotten hotter during the day, and my skin was moist with perspiration. I shivered under the burst of cool air emitted by the AC and put on my new fleece jacket.
