Dancing his perilous dance of life or death, he turned his back to us, and I watched entranced as the firm ropes of tendons pulled on the sculpted mass of his flesh. The wide-set shoulder blades strained against the thin white fabric of his T-shirt, making me think vaguely of something grand and prehistoric like the shifting of tectonic plates.
God, what a magnificent beast, I thought, and to my utter bewilderment, I felt a visceral desire for him like I had never felt for anyone in my life. It was as if the societal collapse had given way to something dormant inside me, something I had always suspected was there but never dared acknowledge fully.
The man had a large hunting knife fastened to his belt, and an axe lay in the grass near his companions. Even from a relative distance, I could discern the breathless smile on his face and the rapture in his eyes. He had weapons. Ergo, he didn’t have to fight the cannibal with only his bare hands—hewantedto. And what hands they were, with long competent fingers and sizeable palms, reaching out in unhesitating confidence towards their victim. I nearly crashed to my knees, the solidness of my bones melting like the wax of a lit candle.
I shuddered at the sight, wanting those powerful hands to reach out to me. Not to caress me, no, but to hold me down. To hurt me. I wanted to feel his brutish strength, the thrill of knowing that he could do with me as he pleased. For a minute, I could barely breathe, choked by my own imagination of our bodies intertwined, my legs wrapped around his strong hips, his fingers running through my hair, tugging at it. A needy ache stirred and throbbed deep inside me, and I had to bite back a moan.
He succeeded in getting hold of the cannibal’s overgrown hair. With one strong kick, he knocked his legs from under him. As the infected toppled to the ground, the man grabbed his head with both hands and, with one determined twist, broke his neck. Monika and I gasped, but I was sure her impulse for doing so was wholly different from mine, and a lot more appropriate to the situation.
The man straightened up. Applying what I assumed was a disinfectant to them, he then wiped those tantalising hands of his on his trousers and pushed strands of fair hair from his face, which glistened with a sheen of sweat. He walked towards the rest of his group with his back and shoulders straight, his powerful stride reminding me of an ox with its alluring interplay of muscles.
Perhaps he sensed my captivated gaze because he turned and looked directly at me. My heart raced in panic, and I suddenly felt very small and afraid my thoughts would be visible to everyone around me, and especially to him. He said something to the others, and they all set off towards us.
“How about you get that bow ready, hun?” Dave suggested, tension pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“What, why?” I asked stupidly.
“We just saw him kill someone with his bare hands,” Joshua pointed out. “He is dangerous.”
Yes, he is,I thought, suppressing a giggle, but did as they asked of me.
“Hey, trouble,” the beautiful monster greeted me, taking long strides towards us. “Hold your fire.” He raised his hands in mock surrender and smiled at me as they all came within a few metres of us.
He was not just ruggedly, devastatingly handsome, if in an unconventional way, but charisma surrounded him like an aura, a force field. He was ruin and salvation, entwined and made flesh.
His eyes were glacially blue and had a sharp, penetrating quality, making me feel as if he could use them to sink hooks into my very soul. His nose had an uneven bridge, as if from being broken in the past and not just the one time. His smile was charming with an undercurrent of simpering sexual ferocity. Rich and wavy hair lined his prominent cheekbones and hard jawline. Although from afar his features seemed sharp and somehow roughly cut, from a lesser distance I noticed in them certain smooth boyishness, the kind that would make him look youthful at sixty. I estimated him to be somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. I couldn’t place his speech. His accent was largely characteristic of Northern Britain but also bore Nordic traces. Likely a Norden expat who had lived north of Manchester for quite some time.
Needless to say, I noticed nothing—absolutely nothing—about his companions.
“I mean it, love, lower it.” His expression grew more serious, but a trace of a smile remained in it nonetheless. “Unless you want to make me angry.”
“I guess I don’t,” I said, complying with his demand. “Not after what I just saw you do down there.”
He smirked.
“Aye, well, the cannibal started it.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “The lot of them in the thicket over there arrived about three days ago and have been a bloody nuisance since.”
As if in an afterthought, he then reached out his hand to shake mine.
“I’m Einar,” he introduced himself, pronouncing his name as ‘Aye-nar’.
“Renata.”
A shiver ran down my spine as his fingers grasped mine, powerfully yet not crushingly so. He made no attempt to introduce himself to my friends, and neither did I to his.
“How do you know you didn’t get infected yourself?” Dave asked. “You’ve got a scratch there on your shoulder, you know?” He pointed to a small bloody gash, showing through torn fabric.
“I’m immune,” Einar replied matter-of-factly. “I was bitten by one of them right after the Outbreak and didn’t turn. I have fought quite a few of them since then, too, and have never gotten ill.”
Despite his evident mastery of English, obvious from the almost flawless affectation as well as from the effortless spontaneity with which he spoke the language, there was just the tiniest hesitation, a pause no longer than a fraction of a second preceding some of his words. Far from making him appear less fluent than a native, this tendency lent him the statesmanlike gravitas of someone choosing his words with deliberate caution, of someone who spoke unhurriedly with the clear intent of impressing his message upon others. Coupled with his height, the final effect was one of staggering dignity that could not but command respect.
“Seriously? So we know it’s possible to be immune?” Kevin asked excitedly, as if he had completely forgotten where he was and why.
“Aye,” one of Einar’s companions replied, “but it’s rare. Fer some reason happens much more in them really cold countries, Norway, Iceland and the like. Was on the news here when there still was news.”
“This is our settlement.” Einar pointed to the mountain resort. “There are about fifty of us. Most were hiking the GR20 route when the Pandemic hit. What about yourselves, how did you come to be here?”
I briefly recounted our journey to him, choosing to omit any mention of our sand-buried treasure.
