“Right, DJ,” I called to Amit. “Turn it up. Let’s draw them out here.”
Pop music blasted from the portable speaker that Amit had picked up from the cabin the night before. I had argued with him about the usefulness of carrying such a thing with us and was now grateful that I had lost that particular argument.
“Come, my furious friends, come!” I yelled, spreading my arms out in a welcoming gesture. “Come and rage with me!”
I bobbed to the rhythm, then turned around to look. Einar and his group stood unmoving near their settlements’ gate, close enough to disappear behind it if they needed to. I couldn’t see their faces clearly, but I took pleasure in picturing their baffled expressions. I smiled and waved in their direction, imagining Einar’s eyes on me, and to show him just howblaséI was about all this, I started dancing. I swayed and turned to the melody, feeling awkward. And likely looking it, too, since I never was much of a dancer. Not that it mattered. I didn’t need to look good. I needed to look unafraid.
Roamers began emerging from the forest, at first trickling in slowly like a dried-up stream, but gradually increasing in number. I dispatched the first few quickly. While waiting for more, I kept on dancing for my audience.
I shot the next few incoming cannibals neatly through the eye socket. And then I just got into what I called the ‘zone’, and the shooting became wholly effortless, my concentration so absolutethat a meteorite could have crashed nearby and I would not have noticed it. More and more infected were coming, and I picked them off with accelerating speed.
I ran out of arrows and signalled to Amit. Holding the speaker in his hands, he ran in the direction of my next quiver whilst keeping a safe distance from it, helping me redirect the horde to where I needed it. And then again and again and once more after that until I was on my last quiver.
That was no issue since only the last few stragglers rushed towards us across the plain that was darkly littered with corpses of their peers.
Adrenalin coursed through my veins like a drug, tasting irresistibly of power. The bow had become an extension of my own body, the arrows a lethal manifestation of my will. Nothing else existed.
My breathing gradually slowed down after my final kill, and I looked around in kind of a horrified awe. There were so many more than I had anticipated, and now they all lay at my feet, lifeless in an oddly neat carnage.
9
A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
Still somewhat dazed, I dropped my bow and quiver to the ground and rushed towards my loudly whooping friends for a victorious hug. Not realising that I had made an unforgivable mistake in doing so.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” A voice sounded behind me, characteristic of its mixture of Nordic and British accents. “You’re probably not the world’s best dancer, you know? But youareone hell of an archer.”
Einar stood right behind me. One of his companions had my bow in his hands. Dave and Josh left theirs too far away. I cursed myself internally but tried not to panic about being unarmed until they gave us a reason to.
I turned around and stared into Einar’s icy eyes. Still holding his gaze, I made a small curtsy with what I hoped was a confident, mocking grin.
“I took care of your little nuisance for you,” I said sweetly.
Unfazed, he smiled back at me pleasantly but with an imperceptible motion of his eyes that seemed to hint at a significantly less compact movement of the thought processes behind them.
“Indeed, you did. When you said you were good with the bow, I never even considered you meantthisgood.” He spread his arms to indicate the scene of destruction on the plain. “You can only imagine how much I don’t want to let you go after seeingthat.”He looked me over with predatory intensity, and a chill ran through me. “I’m sorry I didn’t take you seriously enough at first. I was only blinded by your beauty.”
I tried not to blush or look away, wanting to seem like I was in any way used to commanding respect. Trying not to show just how flattered I was, how vainly pleased by such a superficial compliment. How deeply unsettled.
I was far from unaccustomed to men taking interest in me, their eyes ever trailing towards the bountiful bulge of my breasts, their hands tingling almost visibly with desire to embrace the sharp narrowing of my waist above the swell of my hips. It was not rare that I sensed a man leaning closer to me in that unmistakable pull of attraction, towed by the instinctive belief embedded in his very cells that my figure promised I would be plentiful and push out strong young ones.
Whenever it happened, I felt compelled to shout from the bottom of my lungs: “It’s a sham! A lie! Nothing but false advertising!”
It made no sense for me to be attractive at all, much less the way I admittedly was. Just another of nature’s jokes, turning me into an involuntary fraud. A caramel-coated apple that was rotten inside.
Not at liberty to put any of this in words, I only raised my eyebrows in reply.
“I still can’t take you and five other people in,” Einar said, almost regretfully.
Dave, Josh, and Amit groaned in unison, and Monika resorted to protesting in Polish. Einar shot them all a brief, impatient look but otherwise ignored them.
“Food is worse than scarce right now. Until we can rely on our own farming, and we’re months away from that, it’s scavenging we depend on. And yes, that would get a lot easier with you in our midst. And a bit easier still with a few presumably inexperienced archers. But it wouldn’t make a difference enough to compensate for feeding six more people in total. Can’t do it, love.”
He shook his head.
“He’s right ‘bout the food, lassie,” one of his companions interjected in a Scottish accent, “ye shuid’ve seen yon fooker before. Lost like two stone, hev ye no? CanLys turned ye into a right fit bastard. Rest of us are just plain starved, ken.”
“Ah well, thanks for that little anecdote, Finlay,” Einar said with marked sarcasm. “Though I think the point I was trying to make was clear without your contribution.”
