Mikhail is panicking.
He’s rocking back and forth, trembling like a leaf. Okwembu stares at him. How did she ever think he would be useful?
If he wants to stay here, fine. She may not like Prakesh Kumar and Aaron Carver, but she’s a lot safer with them than she is with him. But which direction did they go? They’ve long since vanished into the trees. Okwembu tries to remember. Her thoughts come slowly, the cold sapping her energy.
I have to get out of the wind.
She strides back to the table. “Move,” she says to Mikhail. When he doesn’t respond, she climbs on top of it, barking her knees against the wood, then puts a hand on his back and shoves. He falls forward, crying out in surprise, the sound whipped away by the wind.
Okwembu doesn’t wait for him to get up. She clambers off the table, dropping back to the ground. She’s not used to this amount of physical activity, and her arms are already aching. The wood is soft and rotten beneath her palms, but she pushes hard, using every ounce of strength she still has. If she can lift the table upright, she can make a windbreak. It’s far from ideal, but it’s the best she can do.
The table lifts an inch, then thumps back down. Okwembu tries again, leaning into it.
No good. She’s going to need Mikhail’s help. But when she turns to find him, he’s walking away, hugging himself, head down.
“What are you doing?” she yells after him. No reaction. She abandons the table, shielding her eyes against the biting wind.
By some miracle, she manages to get in front of him. He doesn’t look at her. His eyes are fixed on a point in the distance. He keeps walking, as if determined to get as far away as possible.
“Mikhail, no,” she says, putting a hand on his chest.
He shrugs her off. “We have to go back,” he says.
“What?” She can barely hear him over the wind.
When he doesn’t answer, she plants herself in front of him. He finally looks at her, and that’s when she sees what’s really happening. The panic she heard in his voice, back at the lake, has taken over completely. It’s the panic of someone who finally realises that all their plans are utterly useless.
“Listen to me,” she says. “We—”
Mikhail puts a hand on her neck, and shoves her to one side. She goes down hard, twisting her ankle, bruising splayed fingers on the hard dirt.
“It was a mistake,” Mikhail says, raising his voice so that it cuts above the wind. Tears are streaming down his face. “All of this. We should never have come.”
He starts walking again, and that’s when Janice Okwembu decides she’s had enough.
No matter what she tries to do, no matter how well-meaning her intentions, she is met with stupidity and cowardice. She is confronted by people who hate her, who want her dead, who would take everything she’s worked for and smash it to pieces. None of them realise how much she’s sacrificed, how much she’s put on the line for humanity. They’re weak. All of them.
And she is tired of weakness.
She doesn’t know how she finds the rock, but suddenly it’s in her fingers, almost too big for her hand. She gets to one knee, then to her feet. Mikhail is almost at the trees.
Okwembu sprints after him. He doesn’t look round as she approaches, and he doesn’t see her raise the rock.
She swings it into the side of his head. He goes down, his legs crumpling, sprawling on his stomach in the dirt. Okwembu doesn’t wait for him to roll over. She plants a knee in his back, and brings the rock down on the base of his skull. Then she does it again. And again.
Blood spatters her upper arms, dots her face. She barely feels the wind now.
After a while, Mikhail stops moving.
Okwembu takes a long look at what’s left of his head. I should feel something, she thinks. Guilt, triumph, sorrow. He saved her life, pulled her out of the freezing lake. He should mean something to her.
But for all that she’s done, for all the lengths she’s had to go to ensure her survival, Okwembu has never killed anyone. Not directly. Not before now. And as she stares down at Mikhail’s body, she feels nothing but quiet satisfaction.
She met weakness with strength. Cowardice with courage.
She tries to rise, but the wind is so strong now that it almost knocks her over. She saves herself by grabbing hold of a tree trunk. Her back is to the wind, and it cuts through her thin, damp clothing, turning her skin to ice. Strength and courage got her this far, but if she doesn’t get shelter soon, she’s not going to live long enough to reap the benefits.
She drops to her knees alongside Mikhail, wedging her hands under his torso. Gritting her teeth, she rolls him onto his side. Then she lies prone, curling her knees to her chest, pushing herself into the gap. The thought of being this close to his body is revolting, but Okwembu finds herself regarding the feeling at a distance, like it’s someone else’s problem.
She’s not completely out of the wind, and she’s still bitterly cold, but it’s a vast improvement. They’re low down on the ground, and she doesn’t think a falling tree or snapped branch will hit them. She can feel the last residual heat from Mikhail’s body leaching into her. Nothing to do now but wait for it to stop.
Janice Okwembu closes her eyes.
She’s still lying there when bright lights illuminate the clearing.