Chapter 5 A New Dawn Rises
A NEW DAWN RISES
Two days had passed before we saw Delphine again. Despite her astonishing beauty, her presence was always like the ticking of a clock, only noticeable upon first entering a room and soon forgotten about. Perhaps that was why everyone but me seemed oblivious to her absence.
I thought about bringing some food to her room numerous times over those days. On each of those occasions, I stopped myself from doing so only to question my motives anew, incessantly arguing with myself.
How can she be so irresponsible?
She’s grieving. You can at least tell yourself that whatever happened to Francois took place after Petr had separated from him. That he’s alive and well and en route to Prague.
But she’s starving her baby.
It’s none of your business. Neither is it your place to judge.
When Delphine finally appeared in the common room again, her eyes were swollen, and she looked depleted and haggard. Before I had a chance to say anything, to suggest perhaps that she help herself to some of our meagre supplies, a loud bang sounded just outside the back window.
I crouched instinctively.
“That was a gunshot,” silver fox Henry said in his upper-class New York accent, putting down his old newspaper. “And it was damn close.”
Another shot reverberated seemingly all around us.
We all got up and rushed to the dining room window, guided by where the sound had come from.
Looking out into the cobbled street, which was narrower than the one in front of our little hotel, we identified the source of the noise immediately.
There was a man, between forty and fifty, his dark hair peppered with grey.
At his feet lay a fury—as we had taken to calling the infected—who used to be a young pale man.
He was still twitching and bleeding from two gunshot wounds in his chest. Blood pooled between the cobblestones.
“Mon Dieu,” Delphine exclaimed, covering her mouth with both hands in shock.
But her source of distress probably wasn’t the dying infected.
Seemingly out of nowhere, ten more cannibals appeared and approached the healthy man with the velocity of a bullet.
Even through the shut window, we could hear their growling.
The man fired and fired at them, but missed each time, and then threw the gun to the ground, clearly having run out of bullets.
“Maybe we can open ze window so he can climb in, non?” Delphine suggested.
“He’d never make it.” Dave shook his head regretfully.
“The roamers might, though. Not to mention, we have no idea what sort of person he is,” Henry added. “We cannot risk it.”
“I cannot watch.” Delphine left without arguing.
Henry, Dave, Kevin and I stayed. I watched in morbid fascination, the thrum of my heart resounding in my ears. The furies reached the man in the blink of an eye and bore down on him like a pack of lions.
Horrible screams.
More blood pooling from underneath the mass of tangled limbs.
“Jesus,” muttered Kevin.
The roamers fought each other for access to the uninfected body, pushing each other aside.
One of them was no more than a child. A dark Italian boy of about nine who stood no chance against the stronger, adult cannibals, and could do nothing but claw agitatedly at their backs in an effort to get closer to their collective prey.
His soft features were painted in smears of blood and his eyes glowed blackly with senseless rage.
“I’ve seen enough.” Henry turned resolutely around and marched back to the common area.
“Why are we still watching?” Kevin asked, sounding like he was on the verge of throwing up.
“You don’t have to. But I will, until the end.” I was barely aware of replying to him, my own voice sounding perversely raptured even to myself.
Petr had always said that I had a disturbing penchant for violence whenever we watched horror or action movies, and my eyes would be glued to the screen, my breathing shallow, my thighs squeezed together.
I had often wondered whether I would be as enthralled by similar scenes of brutality in real life.
I supposed that question had been answered at last. Much as I wanted to, much as I felt sick to my stomach, I couldn’t look away.
The screams ceased. As if on a cue, all the furies straightened up and dispersed around the street, affording us a full view of what remained of their victim.
It was a horrible sight. The infected had gnawed flesh off the extremities almost completely, leaving the bones exposed and looking strangely fragile amongst the mess of torn clothes, skin, and meat.
The face was the least affected, with only a few gashes across the cheeks.
Lifeless eyes gazed in our direction as if in reprimand.
The stomach was ripped open below the ribcage, and guts spilled out onto the road.
Inappropriately, I imagined them sizzling on the sun-warmed, dusty stone like on a grill and stifled an unhinged impulse to giggle.
It was better than imagining that Petr may have been met with a similar fate, but I did that next and my head swam with the vision. I had to hold on to Dave not to crash into the ground. As sobs tore their way out of my throat, I became aware of calling his name over and over.
“Petr, oh god, Petr, no ...”
“It’s not him, hun. We don’t know what happened to him,” Dave kept repeating patiently as I leaned into him.
But what he said didn’t matter. Because even if Petr was indeed well and on his way home, someone else I had known was sure to have become a maimed carcass in a manner like what we had just witnessed.
And several someones were sure to have been stripped of their humanity, their dignity, driven not by their hearts and their minds, not even by their instincts, but by the bloodthirsty disease in their bloodstream.
By the next morning, all the infected were gone from the back street. Only the mutilated cadaver remained in the rising heat.
By all measures, our situation was beyond dire.
We were almost out of food supplies; only some breakfast cereals and dried fruits remained.
By some miracle, we still had running water, which was unlikely to last much longer.
With each passing day, it became clearer and clearer that if help were ever coming at all, it would come too late for us.
That unreal moment was drawing near when we would have to go out and face the new world that had emerged in our absence.
The moment that would likely bring us much closer to our demise.
And yet, despair was the last thing that I felt.
Imperceptibly at first, a hot air balloon had begun swelling in my chest. The feeling was akin to clouds gathering and warm winds rising, heralding a much-anticipated summer storm after weeks of drought.
And then, at long last, raindrops at first with the bursting of the skies, turning quickly into a veritable downpour, revitalising the parched, cracked earth. Infusing it with life.
For years, I was like a dandelion seed, tossed around in the wind, helpless and without aim.
But over those weeks following the Outbreak, I had managed at long last to take root in the conviction that there was something I could do with my life.
Something that fit so perfectly that suddenly it felt like the only possible answer to the question I had been asking over and over.
The notion that, perhaps, if my own life were indeed without much hope for the future, I could help achieve the survival of those whose lives were not.
My coach had always said that I had a rare talent for archery.
He even tried to talk me into competing professionally, but I wanted a different kind of life.
Still, I won every amateur competition I had ever attended.
Long before it became a question of life and death, I had mastered the use of a bow—the most perfect, silent weapon there was in the circumstances.
My life could have a purpose after all, and that knowledge was like a lifeline, pulling me out of the depths of my desolation.
“It’s time to make a plan,” I addressed the others during breakfast, which consisted of a handful of dry cornflakes. “We don’t have much time left before we’ll have to choose between starving to death or risking a rendezvous with the furies. Personally, I choose the latter.”
The clinking of spoons against bowls ceased, and too many eyes fixated on me with attention. I stood near a window from which the corpse was visible, the gun near it glinting in the sun.
“I couldn’t agree more.” Dave nodded gravely. “At this point, I don’t think help is coming. We ought to figure out what to do.”
I smiled at him gratefully.
“Well,” I said, “we’ll need weapons, that’s for sure.”
I then explained about my aptitude for archery.
“If I can shoot clay pigeons, then I can shoot the infected too, I’m sure of it,” I told them in what I hoped was a confident tone of voice. “I may be your best chance of getting out of this city.”
“My dear girl, the mechanics of it are not the only consideration,” Henry spoke to the stunned silence that ensued. “Are you telling me you are prepared to kill people?”
Despite the trembling of my fingers and my shallow breathing, I felt a vague stirring of lust in my abdomen at the sight of him.
Tall, easily twice my age, his hair more salt than pepper, he was soft-spoken and commanded the kind of stately elegance that one associated with class.
Had his wife not been by his side, I might have considered christening my newly acquired freedom with him, involuntary though it was. Would he have let me seduce him?
I pushed all such thoughts aside as I replied to him levelly,
“For self-defence and in an us-versus-them scenario? Yes. Not without regret, but without guilt or hesitation.”
Henry looked at me in a way that I was very familiar with.
The creased line between his brows and the tautness around his severe lips told me plainly that he felt as if he had truly seen me for the first time.
Seen a side of me that was utterly incompatible with the image he had had of me, incompatible with my petite size, my attractive body, and my young face.
Realising that my soft harmlessness was but an illusion.
“Where do you propose to go?” Kevin asked me, pushing his spectacles higher up the bridge of his nose, which was shiny with perspiration.
I told him about the archery shop a few blocks away that I had looked up while we still had internet connection.
“And after?” he prompted me.
I answered honestly that I did not know, but that I reckoned leaving the city for a less densely populated area would likely be a smart thing to do.
“See, I was thinking that reaching an island might be a good idea,” Kevin said.
“They’re contained territories with lower population headcount and better border control.
Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, island nations generally fared better than continental countries.
We’re close to the coast here, and we could take a boat and hopefully make it to either Elba, Corsica, or Sardinia.
I can sail. If you get me to a boat, I will get you to an island. ”
“Sounds good,” I agreed, the sunlight pouring in through the window warm on my back.
“No,” Henry countered vehemently. “It sounds like a nice fairy tale. Nothing else.”
“What could possibly go wrong, right?” I nodded at him, attempting a rueful smile. “I realise well enough that it’s a far-fetched plan. So is any other plan right now. But sitting here and waiting for help that isn’t coming means certain starvation.”
“We could always just go out for food and come back ’ere, non?” Delphine suggested carefully.
“That sounds more reasonable to me,” said Henry.
“Sure, it may seem safer at first glance. But what is your long-term outlook? Sneaking out every few days for supplies through a dense population of infected? Holed up in here for years to come? When you think about it, mad as my proposal may sound, it is in fact the saner of the two. Think about it, please.”
Cawing reached us from the outside. I turned around to discover that crows had arrived to feast on the abandoned corpse.