Chapter 38 Shifting Winds
SHIFTING WINDS
Iwoke up feeling like a puzzle piece forced into the wrong place. My head was pounding, my trousers were soaked with blood, my joints ached, and my muscles throbbed, making even the simple task of lifting my head from Einar’s lap a chore I wasn’t quite feeling up to yet.
My throat and lungs burned with the horrid smell of smoke, blood, and charred meat. The air was notably cooler than during the day and there was the characteristically autumnal moist quality to it. I realised that I felt chilled to the bone.
It had fallen dark, and a lit petroleum lamp was in the wall’s niche. Russ stood above Einar, talking to him in a quiet voice, his stubbled face only partially illuminated by the lamp’s light.
“Time to wake up, sweetheart.” Einar pushed a strand of hair off my face. “Russ is here for the next watch. We can go home.”
“Oww,” I groaned in an attempt to achieve a more vertical position.
“I’m sorry, love.” Einar helped prop me up. “I wish I could have just carried you to bed, but to be honest, I don’t know if I have it in me.”
He didn’t look like he did, either. Face grooved with fatigue, his skin seemed sallow even in the gentle light, and there were dark, swollen circles like bruises underneath his eyes.
His voice sounded as though someone had hacked his vocal cords to pieces with a machete, and just hearing it made me wince with pain.
“As long as I don’t have to carry you, I think we’ll be fine,” I told him, straightening up, earning a chuckle from Russ and a tortured rasp from him.
“Right.” Einar stood up. “I heard a few of them still groan about an hour ago,” he told Russ, “but it’s all been quiet since. I expect no issues.”
He wrapped an arm around me and, leaning into each other for warmth and support, we walked to our townhouse with its bed of silk sheets.
Einar had been right about the sense of triumph.
It came belatedly but come it did as we gathered in the hall for a late breakfast the next morning.
We were all achy and tired, but conversation around the table was livelier than ever before, and there was a singular feeling in the air—one which signalled that fated moment when we sensed the turning of the tide at last. Humanity would not just survive, but it would reign again.
For the first time in ages, I overheard many a conversation that morning about people’s plans and dreams for after the pandemic; some wanted to start a family, others hoped to build a house or return to their profession.
And I realised what our victory gave back to us: in one simple word, a future.
We had all been robbed of our vision of the future by the Outbreak.
The pandemic kept us narrow-sighted as far as our prospects went.
We had plans for the next day or perhaps the next week, the next season at best, but nobody looked further than that because it had been impossible to do so with any degree of certainty.
Until we defeated that first swarm and saw our future expand before us anew.
It was a good thing that we were in such high spirits because the next few days were perhaps the most grim any of us have had over the course of the pandemic.
It was necessary to dispose of all the bodies that lay amassed in the streets below the citadel.
The only manageable way to do that was to pry arrows out of them, collect them in pyres, set them aflame, and then clear the ashes.
As it turned out, killing furies was significantly easier than burying them.
Not only was it physically and emotionally draining work, but we also had to be careful to avoid infection and to ensure timely detection of roamers still clinging to life despite their odds.
“Christ, I can’t do this, I swear I can’t,” I groaned, straightening up.
I had just scooped what looked conspicuously like a charred uterus and thrown it onto the nearest pile. I stepped over the coils of bowels that had slipped from my shovel with a sickening, wet splat.
“Allow me, hun.” Dave pushed them towards the pyre with his shovel. “Done.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I announced, bending in half, unsure whether it was better to breathe deeply through the scarf around my face or avoid breathing altogether.
“It’s minging, I’ll give you that.” Dave patted my back.
“And that’s coming from you! You’ve performed autopsies!” I pointed out. “Myself, I never wanted to know how alien the insides of a person look. Or the way they ... smell.”
A fresh bout of nausea crashed through me, and I groaned as my stomach churned.
Once I finally straightened up, I let Dave hug me, resting my head against his shoulder.
There wasn’t anything more comforting in the world than Dave’s bear hug, strong and very masculine in feel, almost suffocatingly warm, fiercely protective, and wholly devoid of any sexual tension.
I had two younger half-brothers, but I wasn’t particularly close with either of them, and only with Dave I found out what it felt like to actually have a brother, a man who loved me and cared for me without there being even the faintest hint of possible attraction between us.
“If you want to disappear, I won’t tell anyone,” he said, stroking my hair.
“No, I couldn’t possibly. It wouldn’t be fair on everyone else.”
Einar walked by, and I saw him shoot a narrow-eyed look in our direction.
He relaxed somewhat as soon as he realised that I was only with Dave, but his jealous frown didn’t melt away completely, and traces of displeasure still lined his eyes.
Not minding his step, he immediately slipped on a puddle of dark, congealing blood and nearly lost his balance.
I laughed at him, but stepped away from Dave.
“Bloody things are a nuisance even in their demise, eh, mate?” Dave called out to Einar.
Einar replied in his painful whisper, inaudible over the sea, the wind, and the voices around.
“You know, mate, I find you extremely tolerable today. I wonder why that is ...” Dave reached up to pat Einar’s shoulder cordially, the latter’s protests wholly mute.
Dave then walked away to collect some more scattered limbs and give us some privacy
“It serves you right,” I told Einar. “What did you think, that I was having a romantic moment with my secret lover—in here?!”
He said something I didn’t hear, looking endearingly bad-tempered. He grumbled some more and pulled the cloth down from his face, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“I’m going to assume that was an apology,” I teased him, but stepped closer.
His hand shot out to grab mine with the speed of a cowering viper, making my body crash against his.
His eyes twinkled with good humour behind the stern facade. Peeling the cloth from my own face, he leaned close, and his breath tickled my ear as he whispered to me threateningly and enticingly at once,
“I said quit bratting, my girl, or else I’ll make sure your voice is hoarse tomorrow.”
It took four increasingly odious days to burn all the corpses and to clean up the carnage, and if any of us didn’t hate the infected alive, we sure all hated them dead.
Those late September days were still hot enough to make the bodies swell and stink rapidly and to attract all sorts of insects and rodents.
Not to mention all the atrocious leakage.
The floaters may have been the worst of it, the roamers that fell into the marina but resurfaced with a mighty stench due to their post-mortem bloating.
We got through it, however, and in the end, only putrid dark stains remained on the streets. We scrubbed the worst of them off with brooms and buckets of seawater but hoped that rain would eventually take care of the rest.
A few weeks later, one (finally!) rainy afternoon found me in our bed, covered with nothing but the silk covers, with a book propped up on my knees and Einar’s arm around my bare shoulders.
Water fell in sheets behind the tall windows with a sleep-inducing drumming of the glass panes, punctuated only by the occasional thundering.
Einar had put his own book down for the moment and was staring ahead in silent contemplation.
Suddenly, there was a loud knock on our door, and Russ strode in without waiting for an invitation.
I hastily pulled the cover up to hide my chest and felt myself blush deeply.
“Och!” Russ stopped in his tracks at finding us so very nearly indisposed.
We must have looked guilty as charged, having spent most of said afternoon in the same bed, but doing things other than reading with the sensual deliberation of people wanting to prolong their pleasure as long as humanly possible. Even the air was thick with the remnant of our passion.
Not that Russ seemed to mind, grinning widely as his eyes landed on me with thinly veiled male appreciation.
“What is it, man?” Einar pulled on his boxers underneath the covers and got up, the muscle and sinew on the massive bulk of his back covered with a thin film of sweat.
“There is a messenger,” Russ announced, “from Bastia. Here to see you and Renny.”
“From Bastia?” I straightened up and struggled to keep the slick covers around me. “What, like from that so-called government the Dutch bloke told us about? New Corsica?”
Einar turned around and, upon seeing my struggle, walked over and wrapped the covers tightly and resolutely around me.
“I was actually just thinking about them. About how we would have to meet them and find out how best to deal with them. It had to come sooner or later,” he commented. “I’d just hoped for later.”
He then scooped up his trousers and shirt from the wooden floor to dress hastily.
“Come on.” He patted Russ on the shoulder in passing. “Let’s wait for Ren outside.”
“Sure.” Russ nodded but turned to me as they reached the door. “By the way, Renny, this is a very good look on you, love. A very good look indeed.”