Chapter 48 Last Rites #3
Isabella Moreno fixed me with a glare, and I resisted the urge to squirm or worry the frayed fabric of my sleeves.
“It is true that it has been ruled you did nothing illegal. But legal doesn’t necessarily make it right, wouldn’t you agree?”
I took a scalding sip of my coffee, intentionally letting the liquid burn the back of my throat before swallowing it. Then I leaned across the table, my face inching closer to my interrogator’s.
“What are you, twenty-three, twenty-five?”
“Twenty-two.”
“You are a child,” I told her plainly, with just enough scorn and spite in my voice to be unsettling without sounding unhinged.
“During the worst of the pandemic, you weren’t even ten years old.
And you lived here, in the country that had it much easier than the rest of the world.
” I straightened back up. “And you have the gall to come here and lecture me on what it was like back then?! Solidarity with the infected was a luxury we did not have, hard as it is for you to understand now.”
She shifted slightly in her seat but managed to maintain her impassive, smug smirk. I almost admired her.
“Do you have no regrets then?”
I laughed, hysteria creeping into my voice despite my best efforts.
“I have nothing but,” I told her with buoyant sincerity. “I have more regrets than most people alive, I dare say.”
“I believe you.” Her eyes flashed with an excited gleam in my direction as she paused in her furious scribbling. “Would partnering up with Einar Andersen be among those regrets?”
“No,” I forced through my clenched teeth, “it most certainly would not.”
The journalist’s features slackened for the first time in an expression of sincere surprise. But it passed quickly, and having composed herself, she arched her eyebrows at me questioningly.
“From what I understood, he was the main architect of your crimes, was he not?”
“For the last time, there were no crimes at the time—”
“It is my understanding that you were more or less forced to do his bidding—”
“No!”
My hands shook, and my face burned with an incoming rush of blood.
“Was he not the leader of all the partnered mountain settlements in Corsica? Were you not, as the captain of his archers, technically his subordinate?”
“Well ... yes, technically, but—”
“And is it not true that when you first met him, arriving at Corsica with a small party, he would only grant you shelter in exchange for your ... uhm, sexual services? Despite the fact that one of your members was injured, effectively leaving you no choice but to accept?”
Pen poised above the paper, she waited for my reaction. Her whole pose seemed similar to that of a snake, ready to lash out. Meanwhile, her companion observed us impassively, saying nothing. Blood drained out of my face.
“One of our sources told us that he beat you. Is that true?”
Damn you to hell and back, Monika.
“No, it is not. If I were you, I would dig a little deeper into the credibility of your source,” I replied coldly.
She bit her lip, blinking and still smiling nastily.
“Was he a good man in your opinion?”
“I don’t have an opinion on that because it makes no difference. He was good for me. This world has a way of teaching you not to care about anything else.”
I blinked away my tears a few seconds too late. The so far impassive Arnar managed to snatch a photo of me before I did. My hands itched with a desire to throw my coffee into his face.
“Are you telling me that you condoned his actions, fully? Including his needless extermination of all infected on the island?”
“Sure, why not. I’m glad that it got him what he wanted, a name that would go down in history. I couldn’t possibly care less otherwise.”
“Couldn’t possibly care less about thousands of human lives wasted?!” she exclaimed, sounding almost scandalised, if only her eyes didn’t gleam so excitedly as her pen raced across the page as if of its own accord.
“No. Just about the tired, old question of the morality of it.” I paused for a heartbeat, before adding in a quieter voice, “Do I keep seeing their faces in my sleep, is that what you are really asking? No, I do not. I rarely dream about them at all anymore. And when I do, they’re a ravenous, faceless mob of sub-human creatures come to hunt me down if I let them.
As for faces, I only ever see one in my dreams. His face.
And when I do, I’d give anything not to wake up. ”
I stood up abruptly, my chair scraping loudly on the floor.
“Time for you to leave,” I announced. “Get out of my house and off my land.”
Arnar did as he was told and headed straight for the door, but Isabella Moreno lingered, biting her lip. All of a sudden she looked as young as she was and vulnerable. That enraged me even further.
“Final question, please,” she said. “You are known to have no qualms about feeling nostalgic for the Carmine Plague years. Aside from Mr Andersen’s company, what is it you miss the most about those times?”
As I raised my eyes to stare hard into hers, I felt myself become the epicentre of a dark, brewing storm, the electrified clouds gathering volcanically around my head.
“That depends,” I told her, the tone of my voice sharp like a whip. “Right now, what I miss the most is being able to shoot you with my bow without the risk of consequences.”
It was rather anti-climactic when the article never came out.
I checked the online pages of the Reykjavik Gazette daily for almost a year, and was only ever met with the usual reports on rebuilding of societal structures and the odd sob story about someone who had perished in the pandemic.
Moreover, the young vixen’s name disappeared from the newspaper’s list of reporters.
Likely, her editors recognised that nothing valuable could be gained by stirring up an old controversy.
Isabella Moreno was nothing but a very young, very ambitious junior journalist, trying and failing to find her big scoop.
Oh, but how I had worried about the smear article coming out, terrible visions of renewed public outrage assaulting me at night.
I started keeping my old bow by the bed, and I dug out my two old pistols from the storage room where I had kept them safely locked.
Especially during the summer, I would get up at the faintest sound and wander around our land in the mellow midnight sun.
Iceland’s population was about 200,000 at that time.
It had never been a populous country, not even before the Outbreak, and certainly not after it.
In most places, there was a sense of community.
People knew each other and knew where everyone lived.
I feared we would have to move back to mainland Europe to avoid persecution.
Once again, I started having nightmares of ant-like, swarming crowds oozing over the peaceful, rolling hills surrounding our home, driven by a single-minded malice and only one thought in their collective mind: attack!
I never knew whether in those dreams the people were infected or not.
It made no difference.