Chapter 7 Legacy Lost
LEGACY LOST
Even though the journey back to the hotel, equipped with our newly acquired arsenal, was uneventful, I was to kill eight more infected in the course of the early afternoon alone.
Using my offline maps, we determined a promising route out of the city and tested it on foot as previously agreed.
Rounding the corner of the hotel, we began to witness ceaseless sights of destruction.
There was trash in the streets, rubbish spilling from the overflowing bins.
There were maimed carcasses whose rancid smell was so intense one could taste their rot, gagging on its tingly, metallic flavour.
There were countless crashed or abandoned cars, though thankfully, none blocking the road completely.
Gradually nearing the city’s edge, we left the touristy area for a residential one, and a smell of frying onions suddenly reached us from inside one of the surrounding peach-coloured apartment buildings.
Just as my mouth began to water, we heard the hard patter of feet against the tarmac from just around the corner, alerting us to their approach well in advance.
I fired arrows in a quick succession, killing the last, smallest fury when she was still a few yards away from us.
I bit my lip and closed my eyes, going over a bundt cake recipe in my mind.
Which may not seem a very useful thing to do in the circumstances, but it helped me avoid dwelling on the fact that I had just killed three children as well as their presumed parents.
I took a closer look at my victims, feeling that this was a necessary homage to them.
The adults were in their late thirties. A man with a receding hairline and a large round gut.
A curly-haired woman in a floral dress. A girl of around twelve.
Dark-haired like her parents, a faint fuzz of moustache above her upper lip, glasses, and uneven teeth.
A boy of perhaps eight. A cheeky face like a monkey’s, clad in a football jersey.
A girl of no more than five years old. Same curls as the adult woman.
A soft, angelic face. She would have grown up to be conventionally beautiful.
Would her sister have resented her for it?
And for the more haunting question, had they stayed together merely by accident, or had they still been aware of being a family, their humanity only dimmed but not entirely eradicated by their disease?
I pondered all this as I pried the arrows out of their corpses, the squelching sounds accompanied by Monika’s dry heaving, and put them in a separate quiver, intended for sterilisation later on.
The other three victims met their demise later yet, after we had established our exit route.
We picked the archery shop completely clean on my dogged insistence.
Then we obtained backpacks, outdoor clothing, and equipment.
And finally, we found a grocery shop that hadn’t been completely depleted and seemed deserted at first glance.
But it was not so. Three lost souls had dwelt within, targets for three of my arrows.
An elderly man whose glasses were shattered, their shards making his eyes ooze bloody tears that dried on his cheeks in mournful streaks. A nimble Asian man with a camera still slung around his neck. And a darkly beautiful young woman whose arm had been torn off.
The roar of the SUV’s engine was loud in the eerily quiet streets as we drove away from the hotel many hours later. It had only gotten hotter during the day, and my skin was moist with perspiration. I shivered under the burst of cool air emitted by the AC and put on my new fleece jacket.
Our exit route avoided the presumably fury-crowded centre and would have been perfect were it not for one small snag, discovered at the very edge of the city during our preliminary exploration.
There was a road bridge above a railway line.
A train had derailed directly below it, its overturned wagons red with rust. And all around it and around the nearby train station building were hundreds of infected that spilled across the tracks like a river of still, dark water.
Some were already dead, sprawled on the ground, trampled on by their peers, and I felt inappropriately reassured by the proof that they would die on their own eventually, even without direct intervention.
Yet the very air around us vibrated with collective growls of the live furies.
Since the road beyond the bridge looked clear, meaning that we likely could get out of the city that way, we quite literally decided to cross that bridge when we came to it. Hoping to be able to outdrive the cannibals that would inevitably chase after us.
We held our breaths collectively as we passed over it, Dave skilfully manoeuvring between the cars, bodies, and debris on the road. The snarls were audible even over the car’s purring motor.
The road sloped down, levelling out with the rails, and the station building with marble-coloured pillars partially obscured our view of the infected.
But soon the pursuing cannibals came into our view.
Dashing between the marble arches, climbing over the abandoned cars, swerving around lamp posts.
Their dark multitudes filled every inch of the street’s space in their pursuit of us.
Bulging eyes and teeth, white in their blood-stained faces.
Hands like claws outstretched towards our vehicle.
Joshua swore.
“Drive faster, bruv,” Amit urged Dave, his voice shrill.
Dave looked into his rear-view mirror and nearly hit a van blocking the road before us, only narrowly avoiding it.
“Keep calm, everyone,” I said loudly, deliberately focusing on mimicking the British accent—however badly—to force myself to speak calmly and unhurriedly. “We expected this to happen, remember? Everything is going according to our plan. They will not catch up to us.”
“And if they do, then what?!”
“Amit, you’re not helping. Eyes on the road, Dave.”
“Yeah ...” Dave exhaled absent-mindedly, but gripped the wheel tighter with both hands.
The road widened as we reached an airport on our left and rectangular, industrial buildings on our right. There was a crashed airplane on the runway parallel to our road, its cockpit scrunched up and burned, faint wisps of smoke still rising towards the cloudless sky.
The infected were visibly getting tired, some even collapsing to the ground.
Yet their more relentless peers rushed over them and were slowly gaining advantage on us as it was more congested there with wreckage.
Dave was forced to nearly drive off the road to avoid it, our car tilting dangerously towards the grassy roadside ditch.
There were bodies scattered among the debris.
Some had been infected, some had not. In some places, the people had been caught in fire trying to climb out of their crashed vehicles, and their heads were hairless, and their skin was charred and cracked.
The smell of smoke and burnt meat stung in my nostrils despite the closed windows.
When we could not but drive over them, we felt the crunch of their skeletons in our own bones, the contact with the bodies reverberating through the car.
“They’re getting tired, Dave. You’ll lose them soon.” I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder encouragingly. “You’re doing great. Just keep going like you have.”
Looking ahead, I saw a silver Mercedes backed into a black Volkswagen Beetle. A pool of liquid spread around in an uneven circle.
“Petrol,” I whispered more to myself than to the others.
Time to think was a luxury I didn’t have. Otherwise, I may have never dared do what I did. I unzipped the fleece jacket and took it off. Goosebumps erupted all over my arms and bare shoulders. I pulled an arrow from the quiver lodged between my knees, and I wrapped the jacket tightly around it.
“What are you doing?” Kevin asked.
“Give me a lighter, now!” was the only reply he got from me.
I rolled down my window and leaned out with the prepared torch in my outstretched hand.
The smell of petrol and burning chemicals was powerful, and I choked and coughed, my throat burning.
The arrow’s impact against the road as I dipped it in the petrol was more substantial than anticipated, jarring every bone in my arm.
Had we driven any faster, it would have been knocked out of my hand, but as it was, I just barely managed to hold on to it.
“Lighter,” I yelled at the others maniacally, grabbing my bow and holding firmly onto it so as not to drop it to the ground.
It was a most uncomfortable position. Hair flying madly all around my face in the wind, I was kneeling on my seat, struggling against the seat belt, my feet pressed against Monika.
“Here, take it.” She handed me a lighter just as I managed to nock the arrow.
Struggling, I lit the fleece jacket on the seventh try. The wad caught aflame abruptly with a scary ‘whoosh’ and its heat licked against my face and hands.
Leaning further out yet, I held my breath, my heart thrumming in my ears and the edge of the window pressing painfully into my lower ribs.
I released the shot just as the roamers reached the pool of petrol.
The puddle burst into flames, and the infected burned and dropped to the ground en masse. Lacking any self-preservation instinct, they kept running to their demise through the wall of fire.
Then the Mercedes exploded, followed shortly after by the Beetle. The world shook and our car swerved, but Dave managed to keep control of the wheel. Car parts and severed extremities alike fell on the road we had left behind, and no more furies followed us.
“That was about the most badass thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” Josh whooped excitedly, and others agreed with no less vehemence.
I smiled and took a few deep breaths in an effort to convince my wildly beating heart that the danger was over.
“Where did you get the lighter?” I asked. “I haven’t seen any of you smoke.”
“Uhm, I do. Just sometimes,” Monika admitted in a small voice, as if she feared I would tell her mother on her. “Just ven I go out vith friends.”
I nodded.
“Good thing you do, too,” I told her. “You never know which one of your vices may save your life.”
The journey to the Pisa marina took less than half an hour. The mostly deserted road stretched ahead through fields of yellowing acorns. To all appearances, the marina itself seemed deserted, too, but I knew better than to trust this first impression.
We parked right by the pier, and Dave shut the engine off. Before we could say a word to one another, infected began emerging from nearby cafés, flanked by white gastro-umbrellas and lines of white-clothed tables, the fabric swaying in the seaside breeze.
“Stay in the car,” I instructed the others firmly as I opened the door. “If I get crowded, drive away.”
I saw them exchange horrified looks but pretended not to notice as I shot my first eight victims. I grabbed an additional quiver of arrows from the boot in the hiatus and then shot twelve others that had appeared in the meantime.
Bow at the ready, I stood waiting for more and asked myself grimly in the meantime whether I could be considered a mass-murderess.
Prepared though I had been for the necessity of shooting some roamers, I had hardly expected my kill count to reach nearly forty in just one day.
There were no more.
When that became clear, the others got out and stretched their limbs, squinting into the sunlight.
“It’s like a ghost town,” Amit remarked with a shudder. “Where is everyone?”
“They may all be dead already.”
Kevin’s statement hung between us like a spider web, invisible and vaguely repulsive. The few boats left on the pier swayed sadly on the gentle waves. Wind chimes hung from a window nearby, ringing melancholily in the breeze.
After a while, I registered a new sound in the balmy air.
It had a whirring quality, almost like the buzzing of insects.
Even before I looked up to locate the source of the mechanical hum, I envisioned a dark swarm of hornets and shuddered with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Using my hand, I sheltered my eyes from the sharp sunlight as I raised my sight towards the sky.
Military planes flew toward Pisa, darkly ominous against the powder blue skies.
The bird-like formation split, the planes presumably spreading evenly over the ancient city.
The bombs were released almost simultaneously, whirling in the air as they descended heavily to the ground.
There was an angry rumble, and the earth trembled beneath our feet.
We couldn’t see the explosions from where we stood, but I noted an almost imperceptible change in the atmosphere, a fiery, red-tinged haze above where I knew the city lay.
It didn’t take me long to realise that Pisa wasn’t very large.
If it was being bombarded, it was so because other places were being blown out of existence, too.
Perhaps across the whole continent. Possibly across the whole world.
Humanity’s desperate attempt at survival, like a drowning man’s impulse to grasp at straws.
Faces flashed through my mind. Poor Delphine with her dead child inside of her. Henry, the silver fox. Petr, somewhere on the way home. My mother and my five half-siblings.
Places too weaved themselves through my scattered thoughts: the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Colosseum, the Prague Astronomical Clock, the Eiffel Tower, the Sagrada Familia, the Big Ben.
A horrible kind of silence ensued. The one that comes as an empire burns.