He carried the same equipment as Einar but looked distinctly less at ease. He was pale, and his brown ferret eyes were wide with fear.
“You can go back to the car if you’d like. I’ve got this,” I told him in an attempt at kindness, but he just scowled at me in reply.
“I’m going to draw them out,” I said to Einar, and once he nodded curtly in assent, I yelled from the bottom of my lungs: “Come out, come out, my furious friends! Fresh meat calling!”
Albert whimpered but stood his ground.
They came slowly. All were women and children clad in dirty rags, injured, exhausted and near death, their skin taut and grey, their limbs fractured, and their heads caked with dry blood from wounds. They sauntered towards us, and I picked them off with ease, nauseated by my own lack of hesitation. Taking human lives was no longer the terrible, monumental thing it used tobe, separated from my existence by a barrier that was no less concrete for being made of invisible morals instead of bricks. It was becoming ... a routine.
Albert remained behind to watch, but Einar marched forward and killed a few furies in his own manner, which generally meant knocking them to the ground and splitting their heads open with an axe, an act that bore a repulsive resemblance to the cracking of a nut. Whilst the day before it aroused me to watch his determined movements as he wrestled the male cannibal to death, this was different. The furies were much smaller than he was, feeble and almost helpless, which underlined the practised brutality of his actions. He wasn’t doing any worse than I was, but my kills were clean and detached, whilst his seemed hands-on and intimate. And despite telling myself that I didn’t care, that it made no difference, I had to ask myself: who the hell was this man?
We walked on through the maze of little wooden huts on paths made of circular stepping stones, olive and mastic trees forming a whispering canopy over our heads. All was quiet around us. We occasionally looked inside the huts through the windows and saw the remnants of a lifestyle lost there. Folded pyjamas on the pillows. Cosmetic supplies scattered around the bathroom sink. A sizeable onyx vibrator on a gleaming white bedside table.
“I can’t anymore,” I groaned as we got closer to the swimming pool central to the campsite.
I slung my bow across my shoulder and swiftly pressed both hands to my face to stop myself from gagging. The sweetly acrid smell of decay became so thick that it felt like a putrid syrup seeping through my nose and airways, a spray of nauseating taste inside my mouth.
Its primary source was the pool. Or rather, the bloated corpses of a woman and two small children floating in it. The water had a nasty yellow tinge, like chicken broth.
“No injuries. They weren’t infected,” I pointed out, forcing the words out through my clenched teeth. “They likely got trapped in the pool and drowned.”
“Not the best way to go,” Einar remarked stoically, holding the collar of his tee against his own face.
Albert elected to vomit into a large vase of dry oleanders instead of commenting on our macabre discovery.
14
BATHING IN THE SUN’S BLOOD
“Did it not occur to you to mention that a shovel may come in handy, princess?” Einar asked me wryly, delving into the sand with his bare hands.
“We didn’t have one coming here.” I smiled at him apologetically, a little stung by the note of reproach in his voice.
The small grains irritated my hands, and I rubbed them together to ease their itching.
“I swear if this is the wrong place and we’re digging here for nothing ...” Albert grumbled and shot a dark look in my direction.
“It’s not, I promise. We marked it with these three stones.”
I had wondered just what would happen if we had found the hiding spot ransacked, and was extremely relieved at seeing it undisturbed. Tension was still palpable in the air, though, owing to the approaching moment of truth—the moment that would show whether I could be trusted. Einar seemed the most agitated of us all, working with fast, relentless movements. With a warm tug at my heart, I realised he likely dreaded the possibility of not finding the promised treasure even more than I did. And not because of the bows themselves, but because he would beobliged to ascertain whether I had lied about their existence or merely about their location.
And it was quite obvious that if I would have disliked his methods of enquiry, he would have abhorred inflicting them upon me even more.
“I can zee plastic,” Jean-Luc announced abruptly to the silence punctuated only by the whoosh of the distant waves and the soft hiss of shifting sand.
Our pace became frantic, and not long after, we could tug at the plastic, unwrapping it. Loud whoops of almost boyish joy pierced the air. A pair of very large hands grabbed me in a hug and spun me around, all in such a quick succession that it took me a few seconds to realise just why I had suddenly found myself airborne.
“And you just brought all these over here from bloody Pisa? Just like that?” Einar asked incredulously once he set me back on the ground, his eyes shining.
I shrugged in reply, clearly succeeding in my attempted cocky grimace, for he laughed and muttered something that sounded markedly like ‘absolute legend’.
“I’d been so sure you were taking the piss when you said seventy!” Albert chipped in with a similar tone of excited disbelief mingled with an unvoiced apology.
“I wasn’t,” I told him lightly. “Now, would you all like to worship me some more, or shall we get those into the jeep before dark? I’m personally fine with either option ...”
The sun was setting in earnest, and the trees cast long shadows across the dusty parking lot by the time there were no more than a few pieces still left in the sand, and the jeep’s boot was nearly full.
“Renata and I will manage the last load.” Einar turned to Jean-Luc and Albert. “You two take some rest and then scavenge what you can from the campsite ...”
