Chapter 24
A PYRRHIC VICTORY
Three days later in the morning, thick fog covered the road in front of us, showing and concealing dark shapes of trees and buildings.
Swirling inertly, it enveloped the world like a blanket, muting all sound, making me conscious of every little crunch of pebbles under my feet, of every inconspicuous cough or whisper behind me.
Einar, Finlay, and I were at the front of our platoon, if it could be so called, leading it towards Vizzavona.
“I don’t like this,” I whispered for the hundredth time that morning. “We cannot take on a town in this visibility.”
“A village, lass,” Finlay corrected me, also for the hundredth time, though not unkindly. “Population of a hundred and fifty, Jean-Luc said. We’ll dae just fine, dinna fash yersel.”
“Yes, but Jean-Luc also said it can be twice as many during the hiking season. So fash I shall—as I should. Einar?”
Our leader’s face was forlorn, as he strode next to me mostly in silence and with a deep frown. His face was covered in a three-day stubble, concealing the tightness of his jaw, but his tension was obvious nonetheless.
“The fog will lift. It’s still early,” he said in disgruntled tones.
“And if it doesn’t?”
He shot a darkly annoyed look in my direction.
“We’ll go back. But it will lift. It has to.”
“Right,” I replied, none too reassured and thinking something less than polite about the pig-headedness of men.
Descending into the valley, with the imposing Mount Oro then hidden in the mist from our sight, we walked on a comfortably wide path in the thick forest that surrounded Vizzavona.
After about an hour, we came across a signpost indicating that we had found ourselves precisely at the midpoint of the GR20 route, separating its more challenging northern part from the more manageable southern section.
We turned north, walking the asphalt road that intersected the path perpendicularly.
We were getting close, and still the fog wouldn’t lift. If anything, it seemed to get thicker the lower we got, dulling all senses. The air felt wet and solid in my nostrils, and the scent of it was fresh but bland. It was like breathing through damp cotton.
“Let’s take a break,” Einar decided reluctantly, passing the order down the line.
As soon as we stopped, I detected someone’s presence close to me and turned my head.
Albert, his face only inches higher above my own, the high forehead covered with perspiration.
He took a sip from his water bottle and then offered it to me with something akin to a smile in his ferret eyes.
A peace offering. I accepted with a smile of my own, or as close as I could get to it, and shared with him some of my meat jerky in return.
We all loitered about nervously, some standing, others sitting down on the cold asphalt. Einar paced around, hand running through his hair.
“How much longer?” Lucas came to enquire of him after about an hour; he was the tenth person asking.
To his credit, Einar didn’t lose patience. He explained calmly and quietly that we had to wait for better visibility, commiserating with each inquirer and agreeing that it was unpleasant to linger around like this before a big clearing.
“It’s not going to happen, is it?” he asked rhetorically when Lucas left, sighing heavily. “Right, well, let’s turn back, I guess ...”
He straightened up, readying himself to give out the instructions.
And just as he squared his shoulders in the manner of a man preparing mentally for an unpleasant task, the clouds above our heads drifted apart and the sun shone down on us, its rays reaching the ground even through the trees lining the road.
Imperceptibly at first, and then all of a sudden, the fog lifted and dissipated.
The sounds of the forest around us returned, the chirps of birds and the creaking of branches.
All the while, Einar stood there, frozen in spot, his face overtaken by a huge, incredulous grin.
“All right,” he said eventually, just loud enough to be heard above the excited murmurs of our troops. “Off to battle!”
Vizzavona was a sleepy little commune dominated by its train station, the only one in the mountain region.
It was pale pink, two-storied, and vaguely resembling a last-century getaway rather than a utility building.
By the time we entered the town, we already had about ten kills under our belts: the cannibals that rushed at us from the houses we had passed on the last stretch of the road, snaking through the forest in sharp turns.
We emerged from the woods not far from the station.
Not unexpectedly, dozens of infected milled around on the crossroads in front of it, grubby, with matted hair, dressed in rags.
Despite the sun, it was chilly, and the wind was strong.
It carried the distorted chorus of growling towards us, but by the same token, it also made the furies oblivious to our approach.
“Josh, come here.”
The request was whispered from person to person, and soon, a faint rustle and footsteps signalled Joshua’s approach.
“Will you lead some of them here?” I asked quietly, and he leaned towards me to hear, bending slightly to compensate for the difference in our height. “I don’t want to use the speaker yet. Better to draw them here very gradually.”
He gulped audibly, his dark eyes huge in his sharp, bony face. He buried his fingers in the cinnamon expanse of his afro. There was a twitch near his mouth and an expression on his face so conflicted that it seemed physically painful. He didn’t assent, but nor did he decline.
“Man, we need you to do this.” Einar laid his hand on Joshua’s shoulder and spoke to him, his whispered voice coarse and raspy. “If anything goes wrong, I will come for you again like last time, you hear me? I won’t let them have you, you have my word.”
Josh looked as if he were about to be sick, but he nodded wordlessly and stalked slowly towards the crossroads.
On my signal, our group spread across the width of the road in a formation of two rows, with the people in the second row standing in line with empty spaces between people in the first row.
There were still too many of us, so the archers who were both tall and more talented than most, such as Einar and Finlay, formed a third row to aim over the formation.
Josh crept slowly and silently towards the roamers until a couple of them noticed him. At which point, he turned around and ran back towards us along the very edge of the road to avoid being in our line of fire. Reaching us, he picked up his own bow and joined the third row in our formation.
Only those couple of infected took off after him at first. But more roamers noticed them moving and followed, and yet more after them.
However, their initial approach was very gradual, much more so than had we made ourselves known to all of them at once.
The groups approached us one after another, their sizes increasing exponentially from twos and threes to fours and sixes, to ten or more, until all were running towards us.
“Stand your ground,” I yelled commands occasionally from my front row, sweat running down between my breasts in a single rivulet.
I could hear panicked breathing and a fair share of cussing all around me.
Still, my archers didn’t budge and kept firing at the incoming menace of enraged grimaces belonging to bodies like cadavers, injured, skeletal, and filthy.
Half a year after the Outbreak, it was getting harder to distinguish the males from the females.
The infected now no longer looked like living people.
They were ravaged by elements, infections, and injuries, their movements often hindered by those.
This made them slower than they used to be, their destroyed bodies no longer able to sustain and support their furious madness fully.
Most only limped and jerked forward instead of sprinting the way their peers used to at the onset of the pandemic.
Yet the tide was still far from turning.
Corpses were piling up a good two hundred metres in front of us, none getting closer than that.
And the approaching groups got smaller and further apart, trickling in.
Once they stopped coming altogether, we advanced forward, keeping in our formation as much as possible while stepping over and between corpses.
We circled around the train station, killing a few last stragglers, most of whom were too desolate to even try to approach us. We then continued along the road until reaching a GR20 campsite, the village’s second CanLys epicentre.
We repeated the same method, except this time, I placed guards around our formation facing other directions in case stray furies ambushed us from behind.
I thought of this way of clearing as ‘draining’; we were draining the campsite, the infected like a stream of filth and disease flowing towards us.
Once it was done, I split our group, which counted forty or so in total, into groups of about five. They were to comb through buildings—erstwhile homes, hotels, and amenities—to clear out the small pockets of remaining infected.
I pointed each in their own direction, also sending one group to houses at the southern edge of Vizzavona and another towards Pierre Castel, which was a tiny stone chapel set above the town to the south.
I myself walked alone, intending to run between groups to check how they fared and help when necessary.
I proceeded fast, fuelled not only by adrenaline but also by a kind of horrific pride swelling like a balloon in my chest. They were all my trainees after all, and I could see then that I had trained them well.