Page 108 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

After what felt like thousands of steps, a last, lone rambler was left, limping towards us further down the road. Old and dried up, the aged body naked, ribs showing through the sagging yellow skin, bones protruding. I could not tell its sex, that knowledge being obscured by the loose skin flap of the lower belly.

“Do you want to do the honours?” I turned to Einar, the rising evening winds whipping the hair away from his face like a lion’s mane.

“All yours, my girl.” He grinned at me with a flash of his teeth. “You earned the last shot.”

I would have pointed out that he did, too, except I was too drained for even that much conversation.

I fired an arrow and missed. Nocked and fired another, which also flew wide off its mark. The third arrow was final. The fury fell to the ground in a twitch of its wasted muscles.

Only a few of us were left standing. Einar and I, Josh, Russ, Cyril, Mickey, Louis, Jules, and the unbreakable Jean-Luc. And Emma, who had turned out to be a lot like her sister Lena after all.

The sun hung low above the horizon to the west, and the citadel behind us cast a long shadow, obscuring Einar’s face as he gazed down upon the hell of his own making.

“And so, I forge my legacy of doom,” he spoke quietly, abstractedly, almost as if talking to someone that only he could see. “Destruction is my destiny. Annihilation is my art. Death is my dominion.”

“Some sense of triumph, huh?” I said to him, mainly to prevent his head from growing so big that his neck would no longer be able to support it.

“It’ll come, Ren.” His voice was no more than a broken whisper.

“What are your orders now,capt’n?” Russ gave Einar a friendly slap on the back.

“First one is don’t ever call me that again. The second is that I’ll take the first watch and you all go and get some rest.”

Not needing to be told twice, they all walked away, and Einar sat down on the steps with a grunt, not taking his eyes off the grotesque carnage beyond the wall. I stayed too, unsure whether I was actually swaying on my feet or whether it was just my head that was dizzy and spinning in slow circles.

“Come here, my girl.” Einar pulled me next to him gently.

I practically collapsed onto him. I threw the quiver and my bow onto the ground and lay down in his lap as he stroked my forehead, smoothing loose hair away from it.

“What about you?” I asked, but I never knew what the answer was because a soothing dimness already filled me from head to toe, covering me like a warm blanket and obscuring my senses, and I slept oblivious to the world around me.

38

SHIFTING WINDS

Iwoke up feeling like a puzzle piece forced into the wrong place. My head was pounding, my trousers were soaked with blood, my joints ached, and my muscles throbbed, making even the simple task of lifting my head from Einar’s lap a chore I wasn’t quite feeling up to yet.

My throat and lungs burned with the horrid smell of smoke, blood, and charred meat. The air was notably cooler than during the day and there was the characteristically autumnal moist quality to it. I realised that I felt chilled to the bone.

It had fallen dark, and a lit petroleum lamp was in the wall’s niche. Russ stood above Einar, talking to him in a quiet voice, his stubbled face only partially illuminated by the lamp’s light.

“Time to wake up, sweetheart.” Einar pushed a strand of hair off my face. “Russ is here for the next watch. We can go home.”

“Oww,” I groaned in an attempt to achieve a more vertical position.

“I’m sorry, love.” Einar helped prop me up. “I wish I could have just carried you to bed, but to be honest, I don’t know if I have it in me.”

He didn’t look like he did, either. Face grooved with fatigue, his skin seemed sallow even in the gentle light, and there weredark, swollen circles like bruises underneath his eyes. His voice sounded as though someone had hacked his vocal cords to pieces with a machete, and just hearing it made me wince with pain.

“As long as I don’t have to carry you, I think we’ll be fine,” I told him, straightening up, earning a chuckle from Russ and a tortured rasp from him.

“Right.” Einar stood up. “I heard a few of them still groan about an hour ago,” he told Russ, “but it’s all been quiet since. I expect no issues.”

He wrapped an arm around me and, leaning into each other for warmth and support, we walked to our townhouse with its bed of silk sheets.

Einar had been right about the sense of triumph. It came belatedly but come it did as we gathered in the hall for a late breakfast the next morning. We were all achy and tired, but conversation around the table was livelier than ever before, and there was a singular feeling in the air—one which signalled that fated moment when we sensed the turning of the tide at last. Humanity would not just survive, but it would reign again. For the first time in ages, I overheard many a conversation that morning about people’s plans and dreams for after the pandemic; some wanted to start a family, others hoped to build a house or return to their profession.

And I realised what our victory gave back to us: in one simple word, a future. We had all been robbed of our vision of the future by the Outbreak. The pandemic kept us narrow-sighted as far as our prospects went. We had plans for the next day or perhapsthe next week, the next season at best, but nobody looked further than that because it had been impossible to do so with any degree of certainty. Until we defeated that first swarm and saw our future expand before us anew.