“No deal then,” Einar told Raphael gravely. “Until you come to your senses.”
With a sad nod, Raphael walked us back uphill towards the rest of our group.
30
GATHERING CLOUDS
“Is it just me, or have we been expecting this to be much harder?” Dave asked incredulously, his low, tanned brow creased as he squinted in the bright sunlight. He was looking at the sizeable central street in front of us, lined by light granite houses with red clay roofs. It was littered with corpses in various states of decay but otherwise deserted.
Devoid of any live people, infected or not.
“Definitely not just you,” Einar answered, his voice full of the same notes of unhappy disbelief. “I don’t like this at all. Wherethe hellare they?”
We scoured the whole town of Solenzara—the first actual town since Corte—all the way to its heart-shaped marina at the coast, checking most houses along the way. It was a scathingly hot June day and sweat poured down my back and between my breasts. It was cooler inside the stone houses, though not by much, and those perched on top of the slope offered a splendid view of the dark blue Tyrrhenian sea. The romance of the town was ruined by the omnipresent, sepulchral stench of death and rot, a sickly sweet, pungent odour that reached my nostrils even through the rag tied tightly around my mouth and nose. I could smell it even when I tried to breathe only through my mouth,and I felt polluted by it, unable to stop imagining the little particles of the dead entering my body with every breath.
Our band scavenged whatever was possible from the town before squeezing back into our vehicles. Our own collective smell of sweat and hot bodies filled the interior almost instantly, impossible to dispel with air-conditioning. We had no room left for any additional supplies but still drove south to the smaller towns of Cala d’Oru, Cannella, and Favone to satisfy our curiosity. We had hoped to find people alive there, infected or uninfected, to reassure ourselves that Solenzara was nothing but a fluke. But that wasn’t the case. These smaller towns were just as deserted. Overall, we encountered eight furies that day, but all were either crippled or weak, on the verge of death.
“What the hell is going on?” Einar muttered as we drove on, gripping the wheel so tightly that his fingertips turned white.
“I don’t like this one bit,” he repeated. “It can’t mean anything good, that’s for sure.”
“Perhaps they all died already,” Anna suggested hopefully from her seat beside me.
“Unlikely.” Einar shook his head. “Not all of them. Solenzara’s supposed to have a population of at least one and a half thousand. We counted eight hundred bodies altogether, give or take. Dead or alive, where are the rest of them?”
The sun hung low above the mountains to the west, and it had gotten cooler outside, but Einar decided to drive through Conca before turning our convoy around to return to Vizzavona. Conca was a town set between trees on a slope at the southernmost end of the GR20 trail. We drove along the serpentine road lined by more granite houses, occasionally obliged to drive over corpses that splashed and crunched under our wheels unpleasantly.
“Einar, mate, we made it to the fookin’ end of GR20!” Russ hollered from the front seat. “It only took us what, a year and two months?”
“Can’t believe it’s been more than a year since the Outbreak.” I shook my head.
We reached the flatter part of the town, a road lined with restaurants and shops, the cooling tarmac littered with yet more bodies. The last rays of sunshine barely reached us over the ragged peaks of the mountains above. Our convoy drove on until we arrived at a serene, spacious campsite, surrounded by tall trees with wide, leafy branches, casting shadows on the lush grass on the ground. We stopped, the road leading nowhere further. About to turn around, I spotted a caravan door opening across the lawn from us.
“Wait, stop,” I almost shouted, excited.
A man and a woman in their fifties stepped outside. He was tall and pale, with barely any hair left, while she was short, plump, and with rich dark curls.
“Hello there.”
Einar got out of the car, and the rest of us followed his lead. The evening air was fresh and crisp, smelling of moisture and greenery. Not a trace of the stench of rotting bodies from before. I breathed in deeply, closing my eyes, feeling purified.
“What do you want?” the man approached us cautiously, his voice full of apprehension.
I could not quite place his accent. German perhaps?
“Nothing but information.” Einar raised both his hands in a gesture of surrender, his tone mild and words deliberately slow. “We’ve been driving around the whole day. All along the coast. And all we’ve seen were dead bodies and a handful of roamers on the brink of death. Would you know why that is? Where are the rest of them? We expected it to be swarmed with infected around here ...”
“Oh, it’s swarmed alright,” the man snorted sarcastically, then looked directly at us. “Are you all with Bastia then?”
“No ... What do you mean, with Bastia?”
“New Corsica?”
Seeing our uncomprehending expressions, the man then elaborated,
“New self-appointed government, declared by prior separatists. They drove through here a few times. Apparently, they’re hunkered down in Bastia for now, waiting for the worst of this to pass. Nasty pieces of work, some of them. Bragged about hanging some French officials during the post-Outbreak chaos.”
I saw Einar exchange potent looks with Russ and Albert. I raised my eyebrows at him, and he shook his head imperceptibly.
