Page 100 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

“I’m glad they didn’t. Because now I get to play with them.” He rubbed his hands before fixing his sight on me, the look in his eyes instantly mellowing out. “I wish I could kiss you right now.”

“So do I. Too bad you’ve decided to go into full psycho mode ...”

Some time later, just after dusk had set in, I found myself walking aimlessly towards the edge of the little peninsula. I strolled between white mausoleums in the marine cemetery, the tombstones gleaming ominously like teeth protruding from the earth, softly moist due to the close presence of the sea. There was a large ruin of a house that had perhaps served as an office for the cemetery at one point. Right then, it seemed to have a different purpose altogether.

Multitudes of army green petrol cans littered the clearing at its front, and its door was open. I entered cautiously, bow at the ready, and the fuel’s smell was sharp in my nose. I froze as soon as I saw the person inside. It was Albert, surrounded by a dozen or so canisters. I had a nasty, dropping sensation in my gut for a reason I could not quite put my finger on.

“Renny!” He smiled at me, looking me unsuspectingly in the face. “This will last us forever.” He spread his arms to indicate the bounty of our loot. “I take back all I said. This plan was genius. I can’t believe it’s gone off without a hitch.”

Anger bubbled up inside of me. How could he even say such a thing? How could he not even think of Lena, cold and pale with death, wrapped in a sheet and hidden away back at the campsite? But that was Albert, compartmentalising so efficiently that it made him wholly oblivious and often inconsistent.

I said nothing and only nodded, paralysed with dread, which I was refusing to address.

“Will you help me carry some of these out or are they too heavy for you?” he asked, sizing me up. “They probably are, actually. Don’t bother. I always forget how small you are.”

He pronouncedsmallwith his characteristic hard, rounded ‘o’, and he smiled at me good-naturedly, in a way that perhaps suggested he found me cute and endearing, much like a kitten. There was nothing sexual or even remotely aggressive in the way he stared at me, and for the first time ever, I very much wished that there were.

My terror bloomed like frost on a windowpane. Fragile, disorderly, beautiful in obscuring my clear view.

“Albert ...” I rasped.

“What? What is it?” He stopped to put down the canister he had just picked up.

He turned to face me, the urgency of my voice not lost on him.

In my mind’s eye, I saw his bow, propped outside against a wall. Albert was unarmed. And yet I had never known true fear until I lifted my own weapon and aimed at him.

“What are you doing?” he exhaled incredulously, and even in the dim light of the shed, I saw the blood drain out of his face until he was white like the polished stone of the tombstones outside.

I was looking right at him, but it was Monika’s face that gazed back at me instead of his. Monika’s tender, young face, bruised by his hand, her front tooth split in half, the salt of her own tears burning her wounds.

“I think you already know the answer to that,” I whispered, my heart hammering hard against my ribcage

“You can’t!”

“Why not?” The pressure in my neck and my head increased from the onrush of boiling blood. “Given the circumstances, whycouldn’t I?” I echoed words spoken once a lifetime ago on a distant plain.

“You’d get lynched for this! You’d split up the colony! You’d start a war!”

The colour was returning to his face, and his forehead glistened. That alone made it so much easier.

“Only if someone finds out I did this,” I pointed out, hardness creeping into my voice.

Albert heard it, and his breathing got louder and shallower.

“Who do you think they’ll blame first when they find me shot?” His voice shook, and his eyes darted around in panic.

“They’re not going to find you shot.”

My eyes must have inadvertently darted towards the canisters because Albert glanced at them too and whimpered, wobbling as if his legs were about to give out. Liquid trickled down his leg and pooled yellow around his left shoe. I tried my best to ignore the sharp stench of ammonia.

“Renny, don’t,” he pleaded, his hard accent more pronounced than usual. “You don’t want to do this. I’ll not be so hard on Monika anymore. I’ll let her live on her own. Come on, you’re not this kind of person.”

His face crumbled into a wet heap.

“Oh, but I am, Albert. You said so yourself, remember? You called me a psycho. For once, you weren’t wrong.”

And then there he was, just as I was starting to think that I couldn’t go through with it. The angry Albert, the one with his ovoid face red like a baboon’s ass. And I knew then that we had reached a point of no return.