Chapter 8 A Dance of Death and Desire #2
I shuddered at the sight, wanting those powerful hands to reach out to me.
Not to caress me, no, but to hold me down.
To hurt me. I wanted to feel his brutish strength, the thrill of knowing that he could do with me as he pleased.
For a minute, I could barely breathe, choked by my own imagination of our bodies intertwined, my legs wrapped around his strong hips, his fingers running through my hair, tugging at it.
A needy ache stirred and throbbed deep inside me, and I had to bite back a moan.
He succeeded in getting hold of the cannibal’s overgrown hair.
With one strong kick, he knocked his legs from under him.
As the infected toppled to the ground, the man grabbed his head with both hands and, with one determined twist, broke his neck.
Monika and I gasped, but I was sure her impulse for doing so was wholly different from mine, and a lot more appropriate to the situation.
The man straightened up. Applying what I assumed was a disinfectant to them, he then wiped those tantalising hands of his on his trousers and pushed strands of fair hair from his face, which glistened with a sheen of sweat.
He walked towards the rest of his group with his back and shoulders straight, his powerful stride reminding me of an ox with its alluring interplay of muscles.
Perhaps he sensed my captivated gaze because he turned and looked directly at me. My heart raced in panic, and I suddenly felt very small and afraid my thoughts would be visible to everyone around me, and especially to him. He said something to the others, and they all set off towards us.
“How about you get that bow ready, hun?” Dave suggested, tension pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“What, why?” I asked stupidly.
“We just saw him kill someone with his bare hands,” Joshua pointed out. “He is dangerous.”
Yes, he is, I thought, suppressing a giggle, but did as they asked of me.
“Hey, trouble,” the beautiful monster greeted me, taking long strides towards us. “Hold your fire.” He raised his hands in mock surrender and smiled at me as they all came within a few metres of us.
He was not just ruggedly, devastatingly handsome, if in an unconventional way, but charisma surrounded him like an aura, a force field. He was ruin and salvation, entwined and made flesh.
His eyes were glacially blue and had a sharp, penetrating quality, making me feel as if he could use them to sink hooks into my very soul.
His nose had an uneven bridge, as if from being broken in the past and not just the one time.
His smile was charming with an undercurrent of simpering sexual ferocity.
Rich and wavy hair lined his prominent cheekbones and hard jawline.
Although from afar his features seemed sharp and somehow roughly cut, from a lesser distance I noticed in them certain smooth boyishness, the kind that would make him look youthful at sixty.
I estimated him to be somewhere between thirty and thirty-five.
I couldn’t place his speech. His accent was largely characteristic of Northern Britain but also bore Nordic traces.
Likely a Norden expat who had lived north of Manchester for quite some time.
Needless to say, I noticed nothing—absolutely nothing—about his companions.
“I mean it, love, lower it.” His expression grew more serious, but a trace of a smile remained in it nonetheless. “Unless you want to make me angry.”
“I guess I don’t,” I said, complying with his demand. “Not after what I just saw you do down there.”
He smirked.
“Aye, well, the cannibal started it.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “The lot of them in the thicket over there arrived about three days ago and have been a bloody nuisance since.”
As if in an afterthought, he then reached out his hand to shake mine.
“I’m Einar,” he introduced himself, pronouncing his name as ‘Aye-nar’.
“Renata.”
A shiver ran down my spine as his fingers grasped mine, powerfully yet not crushingly so. He made no attempt to introduce himself to my friends, and neither did I to his.
“How do you know you didn’t get infected yourself?” Dave asked. “You’ve got a scratch there on your shoulder, you know?” He pointed to a small bloody gash, showing through torn fabric.
“I’m immune,” Einar replied matter-of-factly. “I was bitten by one of them right after the Outbreak and didn’t turn. I have fought quite a few of them since then, too, and have never gotten ill.”
Despite his evident mastery of English, obvious from the almost flawless affectation as well as from the effortless spontaneity with which he spoke the language, there was just the tiniest hesitation, a pause no longer than a fraction of a second preceding some of his words.
Far from making him appear less fluent than a native, this tendency lent him the statesmanlike gravitas of someone choosing his words with deliberate caution, of someone who spoke unhurriedly with the clear intent of impressing his message upon others.
Coupled with his height, the final effect was one of staggering dignity that could not but command respect.
“Seriously? So we know it’s possible to be immune?” Kevin asked excitedly, as if he had completely forgotten where he was and why.
“Aye,” one of Einar’s companions replied, “but it’s rare. Fer some reason happens much more in them really cold countries, Norway, Iceland and the like. Was on the news here when there still was news.”
“This is our settlement.” Einar pointed to the mountain resort. “There are about fifty of us. Most were hiking the GR20 route when the Pandemic hit. What about yourselves, how did you come to be here?”
I briefly recounted our journey to him, choosing to omit any mention of our sand-buried treasure.
“Very impressive.” He nodded, sounding as if he fully meant the compliment. “So, what will you do next?”
“Since you’re asking ... we’ve been looking for a settlement. More urgently now, since Kevin here hurt his ankle.” I swallowed, mustering my courage. “How about we join you? If you have a leader or leaders, would you ask them for us?”
“That would be me, love. I am the leader,” he said, and I thought I sensed a trace of annoyance in his tone, as if he couldn’t help but feel offended that I didn’t guess as much.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I told him truthfully, but with the undisguised purpose of soothing his ego. “How about it then? I am quite good with the bow, and these four lads are medical students. I’m sure we can be useful.”
He smirked again, not taking his eyes off me.
“Love, I’ll gladly take you with me, and that bow has nothing to do with it.
” He looked at my breasts pointedly, biting his lower lip, as if to make his meaning abundantly clear, and blood seeped hot into my face.
“We have two doctors with us already, so I cannot really justify housing these four. But since you asked so very nicely, I will agree to accommodate the other girl too. Too many single men in our settlement who, I’m sure, would love to welcome her. What do you say?”
I blinked hard, my eyes popping out of their respective sockets. My mouth was dry and too slow to formulate some combination of words that would make him reconsider without annoying him enough to simply abandon us all to our fate.
“You must be making a joke!” Monika beat me to it, exclaiming with unbridled outrage. “Vat person suggests that in this situation?!”
“Any straight man with a pair of eyes, I’d say,” Einar deadpanned, winking at me.
Parting with my last shred of self-respect, I smiled back at him. As long as it got me what I wanted, I wasn’t above a healthy dose of pleading.
“I won’t abandon my friends. Take us all in, please. I promise, I’m really good with the bow ...”
For the time being, I chose not to address his other requirement, neither out loud nor in the privacy of my own mind.
“I am sure you are good, sweetheart. But no can do. No matter how pretty the word please sounds coming out of your mouth,” he said, his tone carrying a deflating note of finality.
“Shame, really ... I would have enjoyed hearing you say it in a different context. One where it would have been my pleasure to reward you for being so polite. Come find me if you change your mind, aye?”
I gasped audibly at his words, an unintended smile forming on my face. With a scandalous twinkle in his eyes, he touched my face briefly as if in farewell. Then he turned around and walked away, followed closely by his men. My skin tingled from his touch.
I recognised in a detached sort of way I should have considered his offer vulgar and offensive.
But his words did nothing but make me burn like nobody else’s ever had.
Such was his magnetic pull on me that for a brief moment I was none too proud of, I did, in fact, consider leaving my companions to their own fate in favour of accepting, of letting him take me to my new home and his bed.
But that lasted for only a few seconds before I decided resolutely that I would never do that.
“Terrible.” Monika shook her head, looking utterly scandalised. “Some people behave like animals.”
Wanting very much to behave like an animal myself, I chose not to comment.
“What now?” Dave asked. “Poor Kev here can’t walk far like this.”
“I say we don’t take no for an answer,” I declared, sincerely hoping that no one would guess my ulterior motives. “Convincing him to let us stay is our only option.”
“That’s all well, but how do you propose to do that?” Amit asked dubiously.
The copse teeming with idling infected was nearby and well visible from where we stood, its edge lining the nearest end of the meadowy clearing in front of us. Choked growls were occasionally carried on the wind towards us, making the back of my neck prickle in an instinctive reaction to danger.
Looking back, I could never tell how I got the idea because it felt rather as if it got me, the unhinged scheme suddenly appearing at the forefront of my mind as if it had been there all along.
We had to move fast, while Einar and his group were still in sight.
I quickly explained what I intended to do to the others.
Unsurprisingly, there were a few objections:
“What if you run out of arrows?”
“How is this self-defence?”
“What if there are more of them than you can handle?”
“How do you know this will convince him to let us in?”
“Are you insane?”
But there was little time to argue, and the very fact that I got my friends to agree spoke to our state of exhausted desperation even more than it did to their trust in my capabilities.
We placed the four spare quivers of arrows that we carried between us at the edge of the plain, further from the forest and nearer to the settlement, evenly spaced out.
I stood in the centre of the meadow with the fifth one on my back. Others were well behind, in relative safety.
“Right, DJ,” I called to Amit. “Turn it up. Let’s draw them out here.”
Pop music blasted from the portable speaker that Amit had picked up from the cabin the night before. I had argued with him about the usefulness of carrying such a thing with us and was now grateful that I had lost that particular argument.
“Come, my furious friends, come!” I yelled, spreading my arms out in a welcoming gesture. “Come and rage with me!”
I bobbed to the rhythm, then turned around to look.
Einar and his group stood unmoving near their settlements’ gate, close enough to disappear behind it if they needed to.
I couldn’t see their faces clearly, but I took pleasure in picturing their baffled expressions.
I smiled and waved in their direction, imagining Einar’s eyes on me, and to show him just how blasé I was about all this, I started dancing.
I swayed and turned to the melody, feeling awkward.
And likely looking it, too, since I never was much of a dancer.
Not that it mattered. I didn’t need to look good. I needed to look unafraid.
Roamers began emerging from the forest, at first trickling in slowly like a dried-up stream, but gradually increasing in number. I dispatched the first few quickly. While waiting for more, I kept on dancing for my audience.
I shot the next few incoming cannibals neatly through the eye socket.
And then I just got into what I called the ‘zone’, and the shooting became wholly effortless, my concentration so absolute that a meteorite could have crashed nearby and I would not have noticed it.
More and more infected were coming, and I picked them off with accelerating speed.
I ran out of arrows and signalled to Amit. Holding the speaker in his hands, he ran in the direction of my next quiver whilst keeping a safe distance from it, helping me redirect the horde to where I needed it. And then again and again and once more after that until I was on my last quiver.
That was no issue since only the last few stragglers rushed towards us across the plain that was darkly littered with corpses of their peers.
Adrenalin coursed through my veins like a drug, tasting irresistibly of power. The bow had become an extension of my own body, the arrows a lethal manifestation of my will. Nothing else existed.
My breathing gradually slowed down after my final kill, and I looked around in kind of a horrified awe. There were so many more than I had anticipated, and now they all lay at my feet, lifeless in an oddly neat carnage.