Page 106 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

Somebody screamed.

“Oh my god,” many others exclaimed.

The Peugeot’s tyres screeched as the diminutive car climbed the serpentine road leading to the citadel. On its tail, dirty, moaning, drunkenly swaying bodies backed up the streets and pooled around the marina, skeletal and spectre-like.

“Make some noise!” Einar hollered. “Distract them!”

“Here, roamers, here!” The muscles stretched tautly in my face, and my lungs seared with pain as I yelled.

Others followed my suit, though some were admittedly less coherent and simply screamed without bothering to form any actual words. Somebody turned on Amit’s portable speaker, and music blared from it loudly, clashing in the air jarringly with the growls of the cannibals. The noise alone was enough to knock my thought processes entirely off the rails.

With the swarm far away enough and distracted, the Peugeot made its passage back towards the car park safely. From my corner station, I watched Josh dash out of the car and disappear behind the Genoa Gate. I exhaled deeply, a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. Then, I focused only on what lay ahead, the fastest of the hordes already creeping up the winding road towards the citadel.

My next distinct memory was the sound of Einar’s first command. I had been looking into the basin below, teemingwith a faceless mass of doom. Roamers, tangles of heads and limbs. Crawling over each other, fighting each other to get to the front lines. To get closer to us, their perceived prey, but in reality, their executioners. Some falling into the marina water with hydrophobic shrieks, some impaled on the stakes in the trenches, thrashing almost comically before going limp.

The music had long been switched off, and the air around us trembled only with the sound of fury.

“Archers, get ready,” Einar’s voice sounded over them all like a beacon of light in darkness. “Nock ... and fire!”

The rigorous training focused on long-distance shots from high angles that I had imposed on my trainees in the preceding weeks paid off. Most archers met their mark, and bodies in the furies’ front lines fell to the ground, others tripping over them in their mad run uphill, only to be then stomped to death by their indifferent peers.

It was wholly impossible to think that they had ever been people.

“Archers, nock again and standby. Snipers ... fire!”

Some time later I became aware of a sensation that I imagined was very much like being in an earthquake, the ground vibrating with the thump of countless feet and my inner tremors fusing with those of the world around, until I felt as if the instinctive, visceral fear that coursed through my veins overflowed out from within me.

The roamers reached the wall and, piling on top of each other, began their clawing, jerky efforts to climb up.

“Drop bombs now!” Calm and unperturbed, Einar himself leaned over the ledge and tossed hand grenades into the live soup below.

The sun shone from directly above us, reflecting on the glass of the bottles as Molotov cocktails rained down on ourfoes, explosions going off in a fast succession reminiscent of fireworks.

“More bombs!”

I watched in fascination as limbs flew in the air and blood pooled on the asphalt below. And yet, the destruction we had inflicted so far barely made a dent in the dark flood that continued flowing in from around the hilly bend of the basin below. My breath only came in short, panicked rasps at the sight.

“And they say hell isn’t real,” I heard Monika mutter behind me as she refilled my quiver.

I turned around briefly to thank her. Her hair hung around her fatigued face limply in damp strands, and she barely returned my feeble attempt at a smile.

“You bled through. You want me to bring you things to change and clean up?”

Only then did I realise that the crotch of my trousers was wet and stained with blood. Luckily, I had chosen to wear black, and as such, my bodily mess wouldn’t be visible from afar.

“No, not important now. Thanks, Mon.”

She dashed off.

“Napalm now!”

At Einar’s command, the roamers at the front were transformed into running fiery demons, charred spectres shrouded in flames, torches. Gagging, I bent over as the sharp smell of chemicals and barbecued meat reached my nostrils. I heard someone else vomit further down the line.

“Tie your scarf around your face!” Amit barked at me, well-meaningly but with agitated annoyance, his own face covered with black fabric.

The next I knew, the sloping ground below the citadel was littered with corpses, limbs, and guts, and the shore of the marina to the left had turned crimson with blood. But the perpetual stream of doom was yet to let up.

“Why the hell are they still coming?” Amit asked me accusingly as if it were my fault, his caramel face glowing with heat.