Page 24 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

“Very impressive.” He nodded, sounding as if he fully meant the compliment. “So, what will you do next?”

“Since you’re asking ... we’ve been looking for a settlement. More urgently now, since Kevin here hurt his ankle.” I swallowed, mustering my courage. “How about we join you? If you have a leader or leaders, would you ask them for us?”

“That would be me, love. I am the leader,” he said, and I thought I sensed a trace of annoyance in his tone, as if he couldn’t help but feel offended that I didn’t guess as much.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” I told him truthfully, but with the undisguised purpose of soothing his ego. “How about it then? I am quite good with the bow, and these four lads are medical students. I’m sure we can be useful.”

He smirked again, not taking his eyes off me.

“Love, I’ll gladly take you with me, and that bow has nothing to do with it.” He looked at my breasts pointedly, biting his lower lip, as if to make his meaning abundantly clear, and blood seeped hot into my face. “We have two doctors with us already, so I cannot really justify housing these four. But since you asked so very nicely, I will agree to accommodate the other girl too. Too many single men in our settlement who, I’m sure, would love to welcome her. What do you say?”

I blinked hard, my eyes popping out of their respective sockets. My mouth was dry and too slow to formulate some combination of words that would make him reconsider without annoying him enough to simply abandon us all to our fate.

“You must be making a joke!” Monika beat me to it, exclaiming with unbridled outrage. “Vat person suggests that in this situation?!”

“Any straight man with a pair of eyes, I’d say,” Einar deadpanned, winking at me.

Parting with my last shred of self-respect, I smiled back at him. As long as it got me what I wanted, I wasn’t above a healthy dose of pleading.

“I won’t abandon my friends. Take us all in,please. I promise, I’m really good with the bow ...”

For the time being, I chose not to address his other requirement, neither out loud nor in the privacy of my own mind.

“I am sure you are good, sweetheart. But no can do. No matter how pretty the wordpleasesounds coming out of your mouth,” he said, his tone carrying a deflating note of finality. “Shame, really ... I would have enjoyed hearing you say it in a different context. One where it would have been my pleasure to reward you for being so polite. Come find me if you change your mind, aye?”

I gasped audibly at his words, an unintended smile forming on my face. With a scandalous twinkle in his eyes, he touched my face briefly as if in farewell. Then he turned around and walked away, followed closely by his men. My skin tingled from his touch.

I recognised in a detached sort of way I should have considered his offer vulgar and offensive. But his words did nothing but make me burn like nobody else’s ever had. Such was his magnetic pull on me that for a brief moment I was none tooproud of, I did, in fact, consider leaving my companions to their own fate in favour of accepting, of letting him take me to my new home and his bed. But that lasted for only a few seconds before I decided resolutely that I would never do that.

“Terrible.” Monika shook her head, looking utterly scandalised. “Some people behave like animals.”

Wanting very much to behave like an animal myself, I chose not to comment.

“What now?” Dave asked. “Poor Kev here can’t walk far like this.”

“I say we don’t take no for an answer,” I declared, sincerely hoping that no one would guess my ulterior motives. “Convincing him to let us stay is our only option.”

“That’s all well, but how do you propose to do that?” Amit asked dubiously.

The copse teeming with idling infected was nearby and well visible from where we stood, its edge lining the nearest end of the meadowy clearing in front of us. Choked growls were occasionally carried on the wind towards us, making the back of my neck prickle in an instinctive reaction to danger.

Looking back, I could never tell how I got the idea because it felt rather as ifit got me, the unhinged scheme suddenly appearing at the forefront of my mind as if it had been there all along. We had to move fast, while Einar and his group were still in sight. I quickly explained what I intended to do to the others. Unsurprisingly, there were a few objections:

“What if you run out of arrows?”

“How is this self-defence?”

“What if there are more of them than you can handle?”

“How do you know this will convince him to let us in?”

“Are you insane?”

But there was little time to argue, and the very fact that I got my friends to agree spoke to our state of exhausted desperation even more than it did to their trust in my capabilities.

We placed the four spare quivers of arrows that we carried between us at the edge of the plain, further from the forest and nearer to the settlement, evenly spaced out.

I stood in the centre of the meadow with the fifth one on my back. Others were well behind, in relative safety.