Chapter 30 Gathering Clouds
GATHERING CLOUDS
“Is it just me, or have we been expecting this to be much harder?” Dave asked incredulously, his low, tanned brow creased as he squinted in the bright sunlight.
He was looking at the sizeable central street in front of us, lined by light granite houses with red clay roofs.
It was littered with corpses in various states of decay but otherwise deserted.
Devoid of any live people, infected or not.
“Definitely not just you,” Einar answered, his voice full of the same notes of unhappy disbelief. “I don’t like this at all. Where the hell are they?”
We scoured the whole town of Solenzara—the first actual town since Corte—all the way to its heart-shaped marina at the coast, checking most houses along the way.
It was a scathingly hot June day and sweat poured down my back and between my breasts.
It was cooler inside the stone houses, though not by much, and those perched on top of the slope offered a splendid view of the dark blue Tyrrhenian sea.
The romance of the town was ruined by the omnipresent, sepulchral stench of death and rot, a sickly sweet, pungent odour that reached my nostrils even through the rag tied tightly around my mouth and nose.
I could smell it even when I tried to breathe only through my mouth, and I felt polluted by it, unable to stop imagining the little particles of the dead entering my body with every breath.
Our band scavenged whatever was possible from the town before squeezing back into our vehicles.
Our own collective smell of sweat and hot bodies filled the interior almost instantly, impossible to dispel with air-conditioning.
We had no room left for any additional supplies but still drove south to the smaller towns of Cala d’Oru, Cannella, and Favone to satisfy our curiosity.
We had hoped to find people alive there, infected or uninfected, to reassure ourselves that Solenzara was nothing but a fluke.
But that wasn’t the case. These smaller towns were just as deserted.
Overall, we encountered eight furies that day, but all were either crippled or weak, on the verge of death.
“What the hell is going on?” Einar muttered as we drove on, gripping the wheel so tightly that his fingertips turned white.
“I don’t like this one bit,” he repeated. “It can’t mean anything good, that’s for sure.”
“Perhaps they all died already,” Anna suggested hopefully from her seat beside me.
“Unlikely.” Einar shook his head. “Not all of them. Solenzara’s supposed to have a population of at least one and a half thousand. We counted eight hundred bodies altogether, give or take. Dead or alive, where are the rest of them?”
The sun hung low above the mountains to the west, and it had gotten cooler outside, but Einar decided to drive through Conca before turning our convoy around to return to Vizzavona.
Conca was a town set between trees on a slope at the southernmost end of the GR20 trail.
We drove along the serpentine road lined by more granite houses, occasionally obliged to drive over corpses that splashed and crunched under our wheels unpleasantly.
“Einar, mate, we made it to the fookin’ end of GR20!” Russ hollered from the front seat. “It only took us what, a year and two months?”
“Can’t believe it’s been more than a year since the Outbreak.” I shook my head.
We reached the flatter part of the town, a road lined with restaurants and shops, the cooling tarmac littered with yet more bodies.
The last rays of sunshine barely reached us over the ragged peaks of the mountains above.
Our convoy drove on until we arrived at a serene, spacious campsite, surrounded by tall trees with wide, leafy branches, casting shadows on the lush grass on the ground.
We stopped, the road leading nowhere further.
About to turn around, I spotted a caravan door opening across the lawn from us.
“Wait, stop,” I almost shouted, excited.
A man and a woman in their fifties stepped outside. He was tall and pale, with barely any hair left, while she was short, plump, and with rich dark curls.
“Hello there.”
Einar got out of the car, and the rest of us followed his lead. The evening air was fresh and crisp, smelling of moisture and greenery. Not a trace of the stench of rotting bodies from before. I breathed in deeply, closing my eyes, feeling purified.
“What do you want?” the man approached us cautiously, his voice full of apprehension.
I could not quite place his accent. German perhaps?
“Nothing but information.” Einar raised both his hands in a gesture of surrender, his tone mild and words deliberately slow.
“We’ve been driving around the whole day.
All along the coast. And all we’ve seen were dead bodies and a handful of roamers on the brink of death.
Would you know why that is? Where are the rest of them?
We expected it to be swarmed with infected around here . ..”
“Oh, it’s swarmed alright,” the man snorted sarcastically, then looked directly at us. “Are you all with Bastia then?”
“No ... What do you mean, with Bastia?”
“New Corsica?”
Seeing our uncomprehending expressions, the man then elaborated,
“New self-appointed government, declared by prior separatists. They drove through here a few times. Apparently, they’re hunkered down in Bastia for now, waiting for the worst of this to pass.
Nasty pieces of work, some of them. Bragged about hanging some French officials during the post-Outbreak chaos. ”
I saw Einar exchange potent looks with Russ and Albert. I raised my eyebrows at him, and he shook his head imperceptibly.
We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, he seemed to say.
“We’re not with Bastia,” he assured the man. “Tell us, what did you mean by it’s swarmed alright around here?”
A nasty grin spread on the man’s face, revealing teeth that were both startingly white considering his age and strangely diminutive like a child’s.
“Spend the night.” He invited us, spreading his arms around to indicate the vacant tents and caravans. “There’s room enough for all of you. In the morning, I’ll show you what I meant.”
As a redhead, Russell was naturally pale, but he turned even more so at the sight, his pasty and currently greenish visage in stark contrast with his bright red, wiry beard.
Wedged between him and Einar, I could feel their tension as well as my own.
Our breathing seemed to get faster and shallower in unison as panic gripped us and turned our blood to acid.
“Fookin’ ’ell ...”
“Yes, that about sums it up.” I nodded, my tone sardonic, feeling inappropriately giddy as if ready to burst out laughing. “This is very, very bad ...”
We were perched upon a gently sloping, bush-clad hill overlooking the old harbour town of Porto-Vecchio.
The maze of narrow streets of the granite old town, the modernised marina, and the newer, spacious part were teeming with infected.
Overflowing with them. They made the town look dark like an anthill and their collective moans carried on the wind all the way to where we stood, frozen to the spot.
“There are fucking hundreds of them ...” Albert’s voice was an octave higher than usual. “Thousands ...”
There were, covering every empty space between the houses, moving imperceptibly but just enough to give the impression that the town’s streets were flooded with dark, putrid liquid.
“How did this happen?” Einar asked grimly.
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Our guide shrugged.
“The infected just started gathering together, forming larger and larger groups. What I do know for sure is that when drawn either by sound, smell, or god knows what else, these swarms migrate between towns and cities, recruiting more infected and killing or turning any remaining uninfected people in the process.”
“Oh jolly, furies are pack animals now.” Dave rubbed his hands together in mock joy.
“Makes sense,” Josh interjected. “As the uninfected population diminishes and the healthy population hunkers down, the virus’s chance of spreading decreases. Forming swarms like these helps because it makes cannibals virtually unstoppable.”
“Yes, truly marvellous. What are they doing now? Why are they like this?”
“They always rest for a few days after swarming a town,” the man replied.
“They’re sated, or some of them are, and so they sleep or just stand around until they’re ready to take off again.
They’ve been moving steadily south so far, through the towns along the coast. I wonder if they’ll change direction at some point . ..”
“So do I,” I agreed with him. “I’m especially curious as to whether they’ll ever head towards the mountains ...”
“Oh, they almost certainly will.” Josh reacted readily, seemingly without realising the implications of his words. “Once they’ve exhausted their food sources along the coast.”
“Fuck,” Albert said plainly, and for once, I agreed with him wholeheartedly.
“Oh, it could be much worse.” The German tried to console him. “Imagine, on the mainland, these swarms are likely much bigger, accumulating gradually while passing through the whole continent.”
“Great. And now that we’re scarred with that nightmare image ...” Dave’s sarcastic tone did not succeed in fully concealing the distinct trace of terror in his voice. “Does anybody have any idea what to do about this?”
We returned to Vizzavona the same day in a subdued silence and a markedly dampened mood.
We drove for miles through fields and meadows as well as through abandoned towns and villages before finally joining a road that snaked up the forested hills towards our home.
And all the way, at the back of my mind, I kept seeing a dark, unstoppable anthill of human-shaped bodies, enveloping everything that came into its path until it swallowed the whole world.