The Sound of Violence

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.