Page 52 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

“What now?” I asked a little breathlessly, my mounting lust reviving the interrupted pleasure of earlier with vengeance.

“That depends. Would you still be open to bending over something with your trousers off?”

He waggled his eyebrows at me with a scandalous smirk, and I laughed.

“Maybe. Depends on what you have in mind.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Make you come with my fingers until you can’t take it anymore?”

“Heh. Your fingers might fall off before that happens.”

He shrugged with a diabolical gleam in his eyes.

“A risk I’m willing to take.”

19

SALTED WOUNDS

One morning, I woke up and realised that the approaching autumn had become perceptible in the atmosphere. As we made our tenuous progress, the air around us smelled of school desks, new textbooks, chalk, and blackboards, now things of the past. The sun was losing its strength, its glow softer than in the preceding weeks, falling on us tentatively through the spiky conifer branches. As we trudged through forested areas redolent of resin, last year’s jettisoned needles and leaves crunched under our feet.

Advancing further south, we got accustomed to long days of crossing the mountains, resilient in the face of the dramatically changing altitudes. My body was growing thinner and firmer, the curves of my waist and hips more pronounced, the muscles in my thighs rounding visibly with strength. I felt younger and vigorously healthy; my appetite improved, and I slept well, waking up at sunrise, feeling refreshed and eager for the day ahead.

It was impossible to think that not even a year before, my life used to revolve around daily injections and ultrasound checks three times a week. The world of fertility clinics seemed but a distant nightmare.

I still yearned for a baby, but it helped that, as opposed to being a disadvantaged outlier in the world of the past, I was at the centre of the new one, better equipped for it than most. Female ego doesn’t have as bad a reputation as the male one, but my narcissistic pride at the shift into a position of advantage shows that perhaps it should. Harm a man’s ego and he will burn the world. Harm a woman’s and she will burn herself. The destructiveness is the same; the only difference is its target.

Hotel Castel was a building of uncharacteristically innovative architecture. It consisted of a central rust-red trapezoid with adjacent pale-yellow rectangles on each side, boasting balconies with wooden railings. We descended towards it through a densely forested valley that we had reached after crossing an enchanting region where the earth under our feet was tinged with red and the peaks above our heads were lined with boulders like balls of yarn, dropped at random in a sea of rust-coloured ferns and diminutive pine trees.

Still mesmerised by all the natural beauty we had seen that day, I would have walked straight into their line of view had Dave beside me not muttered: “Fuck, and now what?”

There were dozens of infected pressed into the large glass entrance to the hotel. They pushed hard, the ones in the front clawing into the glass, the ones more at the back pooling to the sides, pacing manically in a senseless rage. Like lions behind a barrier separating them from their feed.

We stood dumbstruck, concealed in a copse of tall, umbrella-shaped pines with broad crowns. A whispered murmur rippled through our group.

“Over a hundred,” I muttered to Einar. “Too many for us to take on.”

He frowned, gaze fixed solidly towards the mob.

“You managed half as many on your own,” he pointed out in an unyielding tone of voice, his expression severe.

“Yes, but because they were scattered through that little forest and came out in twos and threes. These will rush us all at once as soon as they spot us,” I explained with muted urgency, willing him to understand with my eyes.

“Humph.” His jaw was hard-set, and displeasure laced his sharp cheekbones with soft lines. “And here I was thinking that you’d have more gumption than to give up so easily.”

“Einar, please, be reasonable.”

“She’s right, mate,” Dave interjected, eliciting a very nasty look from Einar. “This is madness.”

A vein pulsated at the side of Einar’s temple, a sure sign of his agitation. Despite his best intentions, Dave probably only made the situation worse. Einar may have conceded to abandon the furies to their fate had only I suggested it. But he would not want to give in to Dave’s wholly unsolicited opinion.

“Too bad for the people inside.” Einar nodded towards the hotel with a cold smile.

He knew he had me then. With my heart rate accelerating, I scanned the scene again, focusing on the windows. And sure enough, there were faces there. Sane, uninfected, terrified faces. Close to forty of them.

“Oh no ...” I moaned.

Finlay, Russ, and Albert approached us, the disquiet in their faces varying by degrees, but neither’s energy matching Einar’s blithe eagerness.