Then the Mercedes exploded, followed shortly after by the Beetle. The world shook and our car swerved, but Dave managed to keep control of the wheel. Car parts and severed extremities alike fell on the road we had left behind, and no more furies followed us.
“That was about the most badass thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” Josh whooped excitedly, and others agreed with no less vehemence.
I smiled and took a few deep breaths in an effort to convince my wildly beating heart that the danger was over.
“Where did you get the lighter?” I asked. “I haven’t seen any of you smoke.”
“Uhm, I do. Just sometimes,” Monika admitted in a small voice, as if she feared I would tell her mother on her. “Just ven I go out vith friends.”
I nodded.
“Good thing you do, too,” I told her. “You never know which one of your vices may save your life.”
The journey to the Pisa marina took less than half an hour. The mostly deserted road stretched ahead through fields of yellowing acorns. To all appearances, the marina itself seemed deserted, too, but I knew better than to trust this first impression.
We parked right by the pier, and Dave shut the engine off. Before we could say a word to one another, infected began emerging from nearby cafés, flanked by white gastro-umbrellas and lines of white-clothed tables, the fabric swaying in the seaside breeze.
“Stay in the car,” I instructed the others firmly as I opened the door. “If I get crowded, drive away.”
I saw them exchange horrified looks but pretended not to notice as I shot my first eight victims. I grabbed an additional quiver of arrows from the boot in the hiatus and then shot twelve others that had appeared in the meantime. Bow at the ready, I stood waiting for more and asked myself grimly in the meantime whether I could be considered a mass-murderess. Prepared though I had been for the necessity of shooting some roamers, I had hardly expected my kill count to reach nearly forty in just one day.
There were no more.
When that became clear, the others got out and stretched their limbs, squinting into the sunlight.
“It’s like a ghost town,” Amit remarked with a shudder. “Where is everyone?”
“They may all be dead already.”
Kevin’s statement hung between us like a spider web, invisible and vaguely repulsive. The few boats left on the pier swayed sadly on the gentle waves. Wind chimes hung from a window nearby, ringing melancholily in the breeze.
After a while, I registered a new sound in the balmy air. It had a whirring quality, almost like the buzzing of insects. Even before I looked up to locate the source of the mechanicalhum, I envisioned a dark swarm of hornets and shuddered with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Using my hand, I sheltered my eyes from the sharp sunlight as I raised my sight towards the sky. Military planes flew toward Pisa, darkly ominous against the powder blue skies.
The bird-like formation split, the planes presumably spreading evenly over the ancient city. The bombs were released almost simultaneously, whirling in the air as they descended heavily to the ground. There was an angry rumble, and the earth trembled beneath our feet. We couldn’t see the explosions from where we stood, but I noted an almost imperceptible change in the atmosphere, a fiery, red-tinged haze above where I knew the city lay.
It didn’t take me long to realise that Pisa wasn’t very large. If it was being bombarded, it was so because other places were being blown out of existence, too. Perhaps across the whole continent. Possibly across the whole world. Humanity’s desperate attempt at survival, like a drowning man’s impulse to grasp at straws.
Faces flashed through my mind. Poor Delphine with her dead child inside of her. Henry, the silver fox. Petr, somewhere on the way home. My mother and my five half-siblings.
Places too weaved themselves through my scattered thoughts: the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Colosseum, the Prague Astronomical Clock, the Eiffel Tower, the Sagrada Familia, the Big Ben.
A horrible kind of silence ensued. The one that comes as an empire burns.
PART II
8
A DANCE OF DEATH AND DESIRE
Iknew very little about Corsica when we first landed there. I knew it was Napoleon Bonaparte’s birthplace and the most mountainous of the Mediterranean islands. I remembered that GR20, Europe’s most challenging long-distance hiking trail, traversed through its mountains. I vaguely recalled that it was under French rule, and that Corsicans weren’t entirely happy about it. From the last titbit of knowledge, I assumed that French was spoken there. And that was all.
Due to strong winds, we veered off course and ended up landing on the Northwestern coast, on a beautiful beach with white-sand dunes, surrounded by greenery.
We spent the night there after burying all the spare bows in the sand far enough away from the coastline, wrapped in plastic to prevent corrosion.
In the morning, we followed a path that led away from the southern tip of the beach and disappeared into a forest of broadleaf trees before crossing a pond. Having passed through some fields, we came upon a camping village consisting of little wooden huts and a pool glistening in their midst.
An ominous chorus of guttural growling made us break out running, heading down an asphalt road that led towards the coast. I had to shoot the fifteen infected who wouldn’t abandon the chase, and the air smelled of blood and hot tarmac.
