Page 136 of What Blooms in Barren Lands
Einar shouted at the same time, whipping around upon regaining his balance.
“Drive!” His voice was clear, commanding, devoid of fear. “Drive before they block you in! David,get her away NOW!”
He brandished his gun in a concise movement, his face set grimly. Then he fired three shots into the crowd of about fifteen infected, all closing in on him with outstretched hands. Their postures were eerily reverent, like those of disciples surroundingtheir prophet, hoping to touch his divine body. Bile rose up my throat.
Dave stepped on the gas pedal, causing us to lurch forward, the bodies of two infected crunching underneath our wheels, and more chasing after us.
“NOOO!”
I couldn’t let him go on. Einar would have no light if we drove any further away. He would have to fight for his life in the dark.
I lunged at Dave. Not minding something solid that pressed itself painfully into my belly, I bit his ear, tasting his blood in my mouth, distracting him enough to pry the wheel from his hands. I swerved right sharply, crashing into the lorry’s cabin. Fortunately, the impact wasn’t severe enough to trigger the airbags.
Encouraged to still be hearing shots, I kicked the door open and jumped out with a speed I would not have thought possible. Tossing the quiver on my back, I was already nocking an arrow. Kevin and Dave followed me out, Dave swearing and calling me a lot of things I knew he would not have called me under any other circumstances.
Visibility was terrible in the red taillights, but the shooting range was short enough for me not to miss my mark, despite my recent struggles with stance. I fired arrows with very poor aim but in rapid succession. I was blinded by a furious single-mindedness that overpowered all reason, reducing me to a mental state not at all different from that of my adversaries.
The command of the heart breaking in my chest, overriding all instincts, including that of self-preservation, was not necessarily to kill the infected. It was to get them away from Einar. By drawing them to me if needs be.
One of Einar’s guns lay abandoned on the ground, its cartridge exhausted. Einar himself was still standing despite the odds, grappling with a pack of three male and two femalefuries. Another three were approaching in the unnatural, jerky movements of those infected months and years before. I paid them no heed, focusing only on Einar’s immediate foes.
Let him last, I pleaded, unknown with whom,please, just a little longer.
Shots echoed as Dave and Kevin killed the three roamers nearer to me. Einar stabbed one of the two still attacking him. There was blood on him everywhere. Ugly gashes on his shoulders and a deep scratch on his face. But all that could be fixed. He was immune after all.
As long as they don’t tear him apart. Please, oh please, do not let them tear him apart.
Only one infected was left, engaged in a mad dance with Einar, their arms locked around each other in a semblance of an embrace. They grappled with each other, neither able to win an advantage over the other.
None of us could get a clean shot. There was only one thing to do. I walked forward, ready in my reckless despair to tear the fury off Einar with my bare hands. The roamer looked demonic in the shadowy red light.
And yet his posture, the slope of his shoulders, the dark receding hairline, the snub nose, and warm hazel eyes were all strangely and grotesquely familiar. How could they not be? When they belonged to a man whose roof I had once shared? A man who used to kiss me and hold me. A man whose baby I once wanted to bear.
“No,” I gasped as the air in my lungs evaporated. “Petr! It cannot be!”
My cry distracted the fury, rage further contorting his already distorted features. And Einar managed to finally steady him, hold him long enough for me to shoot. Except I couldn’t possibly think of shooting Petr, never. Such a staggering deed could only be conquered by being split apart into smaller tasksthat in themselves had nothing to do with killing someone I used to live with. I reached back to my quiver for an arrow. I nocked. The bow string cut into my fingers as I pulled it back. I aimed at a target which happened to be the centre of a human’s back. And then I jerked my fingers to the side. Off the taut string. Only because the slight movement in itself had nothing to do with the much grander, sinister purpose of ending the life of a man whose name I used to wish to take for mine.
The arrow pierced Petr’s spine. He crumpled to the ground instantly, before I could fully comprehend the destination to which all those small, harmless, inconspicuous steps had led.
“Jesus,” Dave muttered, striding over, and he shot the twitching thing that used to be Petr in the forehead. “He certainly looks worse for wear.”
I couldn’t possibly look on. But the act I had just committed incited self-loathing in me so intense that I only allowed myself to avert my gaze to the only thing around that was even more terrifying, more world-crushing and universe-destroying than my ex-partner’s blood and brain matter spattered on the asphalt. I made myself inspect Einar for injuries.
He was still standing, his chest heaving with pained rasps, his face pale beneath the various rivulets of blood.
He is alright, I thought at first, and my legs nearly collapsed under the sheer weight of my relief, a bit battered perhaps, but he is going to live.
Only then did my eyes fall on the dark bloom on Einar’s abdomen. The handle of his large, hunting knife half protruded from it at a skewed angle. White as a sheet and with the unthinking air of a child about to lodge a screwdriver into an electric socket, Einar pulled it out before gasping and going whiter still.
And yet, my overwrought mind refused to acknowledge what my eyes were plainly telling me.
That is no big issue, surely,it said stubbornly,we are going to a hospital after all.
With unhinged cruelty, I felt almost annoyed at Einar as he grasped the site of his injury and collapsed to the ground with a grimace of pain. And with a horrifying, anguished cry I had never heard him make before.I was almost angry at him for not complying with my distressed insistence that everythinghad tobe alright.
I watched impassively as Dave put rubber gloves on and, with a significant risk to his own uninfected status, and despite Kevin’s vehement protests, he cut Einar out of the bloodied T-shirt. I barely resisted the impulse to cover my ears as Dave poured two bottles of antiseptic solution over Einar’s body, making my husband, a giant among men, no less, elicit a high-pitched, undignified scream. The last sound I would have ever imagined him making. Dave then did his best to put pressure on the wound, wrapping gauze around Einar’s torso as the latter resisted with feebleness that was even more concerning than his pained cries.
It was only when Dave walked away from Einar to push the little purple Toyota out of the way that my disjointed thoughts connected into a semblance of sane order. Einar lay crumpled on the ground, moaning and gasping with agony that I had so meanly begrudged him. For accepting the fact that hecouldbe mortally wounded was simply unthinkable. Not Einar with his steadfast, unwavering strength of a pillar surviving through millennia. When the realisation of what was happening arrived to me at last, I thought that the tunnel was caving in because I crashed into the ground under the impact of immense weight. I reached Einar on my knees, half-choked with sobs of my own and no less anguished.