Chapter 6 Killer Instinct #2
A beautiful, onyx black beast of a carbon bow was laid out in the display window.
It had a boost stabiliser and rotating modules to adjust the draw length.
My heart sped up at the sight of it, and my fingertips tingled with the desire to hold it in my hands.
The way it was beckoning me, I felt it wanted to be mine just as much as I wanted to wield it.
“How the hell do we get in?” Amit asked in a low, whining tone. “You saw that street right around the corner. Breaking the glass is going to make noise. And they’ll come running ...”
“I don’t suppose any of us know how to pick locks?” Kevin enquired.
We all shook our heads. I did so without taking my eyes off my new love.
“Vat do ve do?” Monika lamented with an edge of helpless hysteria in her quiet voice.
“I have an idea,” Joshua spoke, and I could tell from his breathlessness that said idea unnerved him to no end. “A crazy one, but it can work. The way we came here, right, that street runs parallel to the one with the furies. A short alley connects the two about a quarter of a mile from here.”
We all nodded in assent, yes, that was the area’s layout.
“I’ll go to that connecting alley and make a lot of noise to draw the cannibals away. One of you will be watching from around the corner over there.”
He pointed to it.
“As soon as the furies take off after me, you break the glass and get in. Meanwhile, I’ll run back here. I’ll probably lead the cannibals here with me, that can’t be avoided. But, if all goes well, Renata will be armed by then and so can do her thing ...”
“Shoot them?” Monika asked, her lower lip quivering.
“Well ... yeah,” Joshua confirmed regretfully. “If she’s willing to? I know it’s not exactly direct self-defence but ... we do need those weapons to survive, so I’d say it is indirect self-defence.”
It didn’t take me long to reach the same conclusion. We did need to get armed, and even if we managed to locate and safely reach another archery shop somewhere within the city, there was no guarantee that we could loot it without having to make similar sacrifices.
“I’m willing.” I nodded.
“And you’re positive you can get them?” Dave turned to me with a nervous frown.
“Yes.”
“But, babe, it’s much too dangerous,” Amit protested, grasping Joshua’s hand in both his.
“So is anything.” Josh shrugged, but with poorly concealed trepidation. “What did I run all these marathons for? Unless one of them is an Olympic sprinter or something, I know I can be faster than them.”
Amit groaned, shaking his head. But Joshua declared resolutely,
“Let’s do it, before I change my mind. Y’all get ready.”
We each picked up a loose cobblestone from the side of the pavement.
Having volunteered to watch the furies from beyond the corner, it wasn’t long after Josh disappeared into the street we had come from that Amit was rushing back towards us, waving his arms up and down like a bat to signal the cannibals’ departure.
Surprisingly, the plan worked like a charm. We threw the cobblestones at the shop window, and the glass shattered loudly and abruptly, tiny shards falling to the ground like snow.
I lunged inside, my fingers closing around my carbon beauty. I threw the adjacent quiver of arrows onto my shoulder, shortened its strap, pulled an arrow, nocked, and waited at the ready. Others took their place behind me, trusting me to shield them.
Not a minute later, Josh reappeared at the crossroads opposite the shop, well ahead of the ten roamers that followed him.
Tall and gangly, with an unkempt cinnamon afro and a marked overbite, Joshua was usually anything but elegant.
Except for when he ran, because then his long limbs moved in a perfect harmony, and his body seemed to glide through the air as if his feet barely had to touch the ground to propel him forward.
Yet I had no attention to spare for the transformation. The utter terror of self-doubt gripped me in its unforgiving grasp.
What if I couldn’t do it? What if I kept missing and couldn’t keep my companions safe?
Despite hours and years of training, I suddenly felt like a fraud, almost as if I had lied about my experience with the bow. As if I had made it all up.
What if it turned out that I couldn’t manage live, moving targets? What if I couldn’t bring myself to shoot infected people who I knew did nothing to deserve their fate?
Willing my hands not to start shaking, I let the first arrow fly in one tremendous moment.
I did not miss.
A fury in a frilly pink dress collapsed, the arrow neatly lodged in her eye socket. It was the perfect headshot.
I exhaled deeply. Grabbing another and then another arrow from the quiver, I nocked and released and nocked and released, starting with the infected running at the widest angle away from Josh and working my way to those closer to him as he got nearer.
A corpulent, middle-aged man in overalls.
A man in a suit, his hair still slick with pomade.
A woman with a tiny, sharp face and a pixie cut.
Another woman with a large mole above her upper lip.
The bow was marvellously light in my hands, yet solid, and holding it was like growing an extra appendage, an extension of my own body.
My fingertips vibrated with each arrow I dispatched on its single-minded flight through the air towards its doomed destination.
It was almost as if by my mere willpower that the infected dropped to the ground one after another.
Josh reached the shattered display window just as I killed the last one.
I hit all but two of my targets on the first attempt.
I breathed a shaky sigh of relief and turned around to face the others, expecting to see amazement in their eyes, jubilation, anything but the kind of horrified awe I saw there instead.
“Have you done this before?” Dave was the first to break the charged silence.
“I told you I had plenty of practice—”
“No. What I mean is, have you killed people this way before?”
I winced at his words as well as at the grave expression in his customarily merry face.
Unable to bear his scrutiny, I glanced behind me with the pretence of checking that no other cannibals had emerged.
My eyes landed on the dead. My victims. Blood trickled out of their fatal wounds, forming small pools around them.
Finding that sight even more unbearable, I snapped my eyes forward again.
“I most certainly have not,” I replied with quiet indignation. “But I told you, the technique isn’t any different from shooting clay pigeons. And it’s not like I can allow myself to hesitate, not when all your lives depend on me!”
Noting my discomfort, Dave’s expression softened.
“I know, hun. It’s just that ... it’s one thing to hear you talk about it. Another to see you do it.”
The others only nodded in assent, eyes fixed on me with fearful intensity, almost as if they worried I might suddenly decide to shoot them, too.
Fortunately, none of us had time to dwell on the tension, and it dissipated gradually as we started gathering equipment.
Soon, nothing was left of it except a residue of guilty discomfort, like a bad taste in my mouth.