You never think how hard it is to control a fire
without a dedicated fire department. It looked like something out of an old
movie; it only took 4 hours of the bucket brigade to put the fires out. A good
portion of the palisade was burned down, or ripped up. Now only smoke from the
still hot ashes rise from what is left of a dozen people’s huts.
It had been a few hours but still many people sat
shocked. The power that man has over his fellows is quite intense. Of all the species
in the world only man kills itself in such great numbers. The power that comes
from it is the horror, shock, and disbelief. Disemboweling a fellow human being
with a bayonet or blowing large holes in them with bullets and bombs damages
our being. If you ask any Combat veteran about what they did to those they
fought, if they haven’t tried to bury it they almost universally feel terrible
remorse over the actions they took. War and combat have that effect on people.
This apocalypse has changed all that. The minority
of moral degenerates has become a sizable force of the remaining survivors. The
fires were started by this savage and depraved minority, these Stalkers.
After the fall, packaged and unpackaged food was
scavenged up quickly as people hoarded what they could. Without farms, or
factories, or workers food doesn’t get produced. Man is at his most basic, a
predator. And there is only so much prey a person can survive on: either
killing animals or foraging for food. The infected also moved us out of the top
of the food chain. Now we must be the hunters just as we are the prey.
As hunters we go for the easy prey, the most amount
of gain from the least amount of effort. Unlike how the name suggests Hidden
Timber was not has hidden as much as it was in the timber. The attack on the
palisade came from the one thing worse than the infected, it came from
Stalkers. Put simply they are healthy humans who hunt the uninfected – to eat.
In a world of ravenous sub-humans that look like our
former friends and colleagues we are now assailed by our fellow people. Like a
horror movie gone wrong I now fight two enemies: one that is relentless, and
the others that are intelligent problem solvers. With stalkers you trade the
shambling instinct and drive to eat for the ability to move quietly, open a
locked door, and know the perfect time to strike. When they strike it is always
with fierce brutality they take down their prey.
They coursed over the palisade. The first few poured
what looked gasoline at the base, lit a match and started the blaze. I leapt
from my seat as Bill ran to his daughter. Looking around I didn’t see any of
the palisade guards on the wall, but small dark lumps lay over the top or at
the base of the wall. There were no defenders. I began to run as fast as I
could toward the cabin and what I hoped were my weapons – my salvation. But I
took one step and the familiar spider spun his web of pain across my leg. I
resigned myself to the fastest limping shuffle I could. I felt my head snap
forward like a bobble head on a bumpy road.
I woke up several minutes later by Bill who was
shaking my shoulder, yelling and gesturing for me to take the assault rifle he
was carrying. Touching the back of my aching head transformed my hand into a
crimson glove of my own blood. I grabbed the rifle. The combination of my head
wound and my blood slick hand made me fumble. Recovering in seconds I sat in a
firing position as a crazed man with a machete charged me.
Thack! Thump!
Thack! Thump!
Thack! Thump!
I shot rapidly three times. The powerful sound of a
hastily accelerated lead pellet streaked at my target followed shortly by the
grotesquely satisfying sound that I hit the target.
When a bullet hits human flesh it tumbles end over
end like a gymnast doing backflips. Lead is so soft it also deforms creating a
mushroom shape that batters through bone and tissue. If a victim is unlucky
enough the bullet passes through the body and exits the other side leaving a
hole the size of a fist. If the bullet is moving fast enough it creates a
vacuum sucking blood, brain, intestines, bone – whatever it passed through –
gets ejected explosively from the body.
My target suffered three of these shots. He collapse
feet from me, dead, with three fist sized wounds staring at me like eyes. Bill
came to my side checking my head as I stared at the bloody eye sockets on the
ground in front of me. Snapping out of my shock I noticed the remaining raiders
leaving through the charred remainders of the palisade.
Then it struck me, our world has been ripped apart
by the destruction of all things human. The most basic instincts of man, to
hunt and eat, are the driving force of the infected. That man resorts to cannibalism
when being cannibalized is a horrific statement about humanity. There is no desperate need of supplies or lack of
forgeable food. That for no particular reason other than its easier than
farming makes man eat another man, proves the depth of depravity in the worst
of us.
I walked with Bill to the medical tent which was
little more than a lean-to tarp tent; supplied with some distilled alcohol rag
bandages. I had Bill pour some of the alcohol on my gash in my head. Not taking
the risks of any more infections. I helped Bill and June put their little shack
back together. A fire weakened log fell from the palisade and created a domino
effect with several of the homes. Many of the families wandered around
aimlessly. When we finished we helped two other families put their huts back
together. The work took most of the day.
As evening approached there was a smell in the air. A
smell I remembered form childhood. Autumn was steadily approaching and it was
evident in the evenings. The air was crisper carrying the scent of nature
preparing for a cold winter.
The sun stopped peeking through the trees. As soon
as the forest around us began to become murky in the gloom of late evening
fires sparked up around the different camps, some families sharing the warmth
while others stayed more solitary. June got the fire started surprisingly
quickly. For being such a young girl she seemed very adept at the elements of
survival. The man with the bread trolley came around calling out names for the
bread and dried venison ration. It was sad to see the man call out names of
people he delivered to every day, but now did not respond. Name after name that
called that did not respond put an invisible weight on the man’s shoulders. He
never cried or demanded answers from witnesses. He just continued on calling
out names hoping that not all had gone. He had hope, but it was leaving him
quickly.
I looked around again at the few people lit by their
fires. I pride myself on being able to notice details, but I am ashamed to say
I missed big ones. Many faces I saw looked thin, drawn out, like the jaw and
cheek bones were too big for the skin. Parents were giving their children most of
their ration saving a mouthful for themselves if even that. This was a dying
collection of people.
I handed my bread to June. She said nothing but
looked grateful. Bill did not say anything either but gave me a look of
profound appreciation. I kept the venison for myself; I do have a wounded body
after all.
As the night wore on the guards at the opening at
the palisade changed and fires around the camp became less flame and more
smoke. Bill and June went inside to sleep while I tended the fire and dozed in
a cracked lawn chair. I was in the twilight sleep; the point between awake and
sleep where the strangest of dreams can happen. A woman came screaming out of
the hazy dream state startled by the loud cry I jerked awake and instinctively
put a round in the chamber of my 9mm. The screaming isn’t coming from a woman
but from one of the guards at the hole in the wall. He is fighting off some
dark form. The other guard beside him shouts and two loud rifle shots sound. Soon
more shots are coming from the hole in the wall and the flashes of the guns
create a staccato of light that shows infected pouring through the gate. They
stutter step through the light like some terribly made horror film from the
early years of film. The sounds of the rifles were impressive but the mass of
bodies barely paused at the hail of lead. Camps woke as they fathers and
mothers prepared to defend their families.
A dark mass charged at me. As they approached the
flames of the fire at my feet I could see three of the creatures. One, rather
large was ahead of the other two by a few steps. He had about 50 pounds on me
and I braced myself into a ready stance. I may not be able to stop him but his
weight is his weakness, and I am ready for it. Before he gets close to me
thunder erupts from the doorway to. The big one suddenly becomes top heavy and
tumbles off to the side. His lifeless body trips the right-hand most infected.
Bill, barreling through the door, pounces on the tripped up infected driving
what looked like a railroad spike through the skull. I train the 9mm on the
last one steadying myself for a headshot when again thunder from the doorway
throws me off. The third infected, suddenly headless, collapsed into the fire
like a baseball player stretching for that extra base. June comes walking
through the doorway like an action heroine; the only thing missing was the
explosion behind her. The shotgun dwarfed he small body but she held it like a
champion hunter. Bill shouted a warning to another man at the next campfire. He
and June took off to help rescue a family from being devoured.
Still startled by the rapid and violent action of
this father/daughter duo I quickly gathered my wits and my pack. If I have to
leave I will. These people have been nice but they are not worth dying for. I
began to move towards the action by the gap in the fence. It was disgusting.
Guards swarmed in firing madly. In the darkness many shots missed and the
diseased charged the new victims making quick work of the untrained. Poor souls
screamed as several infected chewed on the still living flesh of wounded men.
I stepped in quickly rescuing a poor kid from being
swarmed. I shot twice dropping one of the diseased while my second bullet
burrowed through the jaw of the second, leaving a bloody mandible dangling. I
pulled the young boy up by his shirt collar threw him behind me as a third
creature charged. I stepped into this one reaching past its throat and over its
shoulder. Its chin was tucked up on the back of my armpit. Jerking my fist up
in between its shoulder blades resulted in a satisfying crunching of multiple
vertebrate. When I turned around the boy picked up his gun and ran off toward
the other end of the camp. Ungrateful snot.
The guards on the walls wised up and threw Molotov
cocktails onto the remaining clusters of infected burning them to a crisp while
the remaining guards went around systematically putting down those infected
that were still putting up a struggle.
The smell of burnt meat and hair filled the air. The
few lightly wounded guards were taken to the medical tent for bandages. A crowd was gathering near Bill’s tent. I
pushed through the crowed. Bill was on his knees with June in his lap. She was
covered in blood and had two large chunks of bloody flesh on her thigh and
shoulder. Several other bite marks were on her arms and legs. Scratches covered
her back. She wasn’t breathing and Bill was crying like a man who had just lost
everything. There is some truth in the words that a parent should never outlive
their children, but in this modern apocalypse, it is an emotional luxury. If I
held my child, my blood and body, in my arms and felt the life escape I would
not have been any stronger than Bill. The true tragedy was that she lived for
so long without a scratch or bite. It gave Bill hope that maybe her lack of
immunity was not as much a hindrance as he thought. But this stripped him of it
all. You could see with every sob his body whither, as the hope left.
Bill looked at the shotgun at his side. It’s breech
lay open and the magazine empty. I walked over to Bill and handed him my gun.
He took it limply, like he didn’t have the willpower to continue. I looked up
and saw Mr. Robertson looking from the porch, his face illuminated by a near
fire. It was set, hard, grim and dispassionate to the suffering around him.
Bill placed June’s body on the ground. If it weren’t for the bloody bite marks
she would have looked like a giant’s doll, discarded after a hard days play.
Bill looked down at his daughter. He stared for a long moment then quickly
brought the gun up and shot June’s body twice in the head. He slowly lowered
the gun, put the safety on, and handed it to me. When I reached for it he
turned to me and looked directly into my soul and said “If there is someone out
there you love – if they are like my daughter – make sure you shoot them twice.”
I waited until dawn to leave. I looked for Bill but
I never found him. And Mr. Robertson only watched from his porch as I took my
bike and my gear and walked out the gate. No one said goodbye, no one asked me
to stay.
It was a place of the dead. They just didn’t know it
yet.
