Page 132 of What Blooms in Barren Lands
“I’m not hurt. I just ... hate it. This. Being pregnant.” My voice came in shaky gasps as sobs tore at my throat. “I-I wished for nothing else for so long ... b-but I f-feel u-useless and I’m s-scared all the time! And I f-feel guilty for being s-so un-ungrateful ...”
“Renny,” Dave told me with a heavy sigh, “that’s the last thing you are. You don’t have to like something to be grateful for it.”
A seagull flew nearby, flapping its wings and emitting a squall that resonated across the rubble-strewn plain of desolation.
“I-I k-keep waiting for i-it to g-go wrong! S-sometimes I-I almost w-wish it w-would already ...” I whispered into the turtleneck of Dave’s sweater, quietly enough to hope that he might not have heard me.
Despite the multitude of assurances from Dave and Einar’s arm wrapped comfortingly around my shoulders, my murky feeling of failure persisted even as we reached the Genoa colony about an hour later. It was a walled-in structure that had emerged in the undestroyed suburbs of the erstwhile city. Tall concrete slabs lined it all around, adorned with coils of barbed wire at their top. The cement was stained brown with old blood that all the winter rain had not managed to wash off.
The only entrance was a gate of solid iron panels. Beyond it stood two spindly lifeguard chairs, a man with a semi-automatic gun perched on each. The gate opened as we approached it, and a third armed man stepped outside.
“Buongiorno,” he drawled in a bored voice, not meeting our eyes.
He was slender and dark, around twenty. He brandished an infrared thermometer from the pocket of his oversized trousers, and he pointed it at the forehead of each one of us in turn, dissecting us with his eyes to detect any signs of illness. Satisfied that we all seemed in good health, he asked in English what our business was.
Einar told him simply that we wanted three portable radios. We had learnt from Paoli’s expedition that these were available to anyone for free in most colonies. The broadcast consisted exclusively of swarm warnings, informing colonists and travellers alike which areas to avoid and which areas to evacuate.
“Can’t you share?” the man asked rather unpleasantly. “We’re short.”
“Going separate ways soon,” Einar said as a matter of explanation. “We’ll also need three vehicles.”
The young man smirked and raised his arms to indicate the array of different cars in various states of abandonment, parked randomly throughout the streets.
“I doubt these will start after years of being stationary,” Einar protested reasonably, but with the distinctly threatening undertone of someone whose patience was starting to run thin. “At the very least, they’ll need new batteries. Possibly tyres. Not to mention oil and fuel.”
“Sure, would you like some leather seats and a new coat of paint whilst we’re at it?” the man scoffed. “Where do you think you are?”
A vein began pulsating in Einar’s temple. Yet those who didn’t know him could hardly read from the impassive, almost pleasant, expression in his face that he likely not only wanted to but was wholly capable of slamming the youngster hard against the wall before throttling him.
For once, I wouldn’t have protested had he chosen to do so. The young Italian stood between me and being finally able to sit down after the long walk. If he had to go, he had to go for all I would have cared.
“Well, I know for a fact that there is a man here who can fix us up with vehicles. For the right price,” Einar said in a voice that could have caused frostbite.
Taking the duffel bag down from his shoulder, he showed the young man its contents, and the latter’s face darkened, his former bravado evaporating from it at once.
“Now, would you be kind enough to point us to this man, this Ninotti, or would you prefer that we take our business elsewhere?”
Straightening up to his full height, Einar’s fingers rounded an ominous dark object, and my knees went weak at the sight. He tossed it up lightly and caught it repeatedly, toying with the grenade, just as one would with a tennis ball.
Upon entering the colony, I almost lost balance and fell face-first onto the nauseating pink tiles during obligatory full-body checks for bites and injuries, which did nothing to improve my mood, already filthier than said tiles.
Once we had passed the checks, we were directed obsequiously towards a line of garages. We found Signor Ninotti at last after wandering through the once suburban streets under the scrutiny of onlookers who leaned eagerly from the windows of houses that were set in neat lines of overgrown gardens with abandoned, dirty pools.
Money had all but lost its value in most of the world, re-emerging from the pandemic. Precious stones and metals were met with the same fate, designated as nothing but worthless trinkets, no matter the number of their carats. The one commodity that grew scarce and therefore valuable, because everyone left alive needed it and there wasn’t nearly enough of it to inherit from the vanished world, was weapons. Which, given the number of them he had brought alongside grenades and ammunition, made Einar the richest man the people of Genoa had ever seen.
We left the colony in three slick black Audis, all equipped with motors that rumbled smoothly and melodically and with blissfully comfortable seats that, as if to get back at the young guard for his earlier barb, were in fact leather.
We were speeding away from what was left of Turin. We had parted there with the rest of our company; Einar, Dave, Kevin, and I were to head north through Annecy and Geneva towardsLausanne, whilst our companions were to carry on further west. Until Cyril and his group would leave the rest of them to drive south to his native France with Helga and Emma, whilst Russ, Julia, Laura, and Mickey would continue towards the French coast, hoping to board a ship to England. The fresh memory of saying goodbye to them all was already sending heart-wrenching waves of sorrow through my whole body, and the view on our way did nothing to lift my spirits.
Almost two years after the Outbreak, desolation was still everywhere. It was an overcast, depressing kind of a day, clouds forever threatening rain without actually granting one the satisfaction of saying ‘There! It’s started to pour down finally!’
Turin had looked like a crater of rubble and ruin, the earth around it still blackened with its ashes. Fields on its outskirts lay in waste, bare and uncultivated, weeds spreading over them. Pastures and meadows were scattered with gleaming white skeletons of cattle, nothing remaining of them but bones.
We drove through small towns of long-abandoned dwellings, crumbling sadly in their solitude. We passed through villages that must have been inhabited until quite recently, for they bore marks of having recently been flooded by death itself. Corpses lay on the cracked roads through which weeds were beginning to grow. Bodies often gnawed down to the bloodied bone. Tell-tale dark puddles on the pale paving stones of the small square. Stench that crept into the car and stayed in one’s nose for hours.
I shifted in the seat uncomfortably to ease the various cramps in the lower half of my body.
“I don’t suppose there’s a chance that we could stop to find a place to stay the night?” I asked tentatively, already knowing the answer