*Phew! Story line done! I am never going to do that again. I will close off Tenderness and New World before I dare start another, I have learned my lesson, I promise.
This, I can safely say, is my darkest story line, and apparently, you like the dark, so all I can hope is that you will appreciate the way I tie things up.
PS, I wrote the last third of the story listening to the INCEPTION soundtrack... I believe it helped. ^_^
All characters are 18+*
*
Good and Evil.
They are words.
And words have little meaning at the End of the World.
---
A smaller and more desperate camp was being held by the five men that remained of the raiding party. Two of them were wounded, one with a grazed leg and one with a shattered shoulderblade. Among them, a Wal-Mart manager, a college student, a mailman, a high school teacher, and a bus driver. Desperate men, not Evil. And desperate men can be persuaded to do terrible, incredible things.
The teacher with the broken shoulder had finally stopped bleeding, but hadn't woken up either. The mailman with the grazed leg was whimpering with the pain of it, tying a clumsy bandage made with his own sleeve.
"Why did we do that?" The wounded man moaned. "Why the fuck did we do that?" He whimpered as he tugged the bandage shut. "We never should have listened to Calvin, he was insane!"
The college student was pacing the fire. They had a single tent, but it was an unseasonably cold night, so they all circled the fire. He was twitching. He did that when he was excited or angry. "Yeah, that fuck had us attack the place in broad fucking daylight. We don't have the manpower for a fuckin siege. I'm glad that motherfucker got his brains blown out, they weren't any use to him alive!"
The bus driver was a timid older man. The manager was a heavy latino man with wet frightened eyes. The student was a twitchy burly overgrown boy with a wispy mustache and bad acne. The mailman was a tall gaunt man who twisted his wedding ring with worry. The teacher was a heavy bearded man who carried photos of his children and his wife in his wallet, and had rubbed them nearly invisible with his big fingers.
These men weren't Evil, just capable of it.
The mailman scoffed. He was normally a quiet man, but pain and despair made him bold. "You stupid kid! He was an idiot because he attacked them at all! He stood there like a fucking bandit, asking for women! Threatening to burn down the house! I bet if we had gone up like civilized men, they might have given us some food! Instead I got a bullet in my leg and he's dead, and we're still starving! We should just move on, we can find something in the next town."
The kid stopped pacing. He glared at the mailman. "Fuck you." Not loud, not angry, just contemptuous. "You can't get it through your thick skull can you, it's the end of the fucking world, and you just don't want to live. It's us, or them. We're gonna attack again, and this time we're gonna be smarter..."
The bus driver stood. He had a heavy white mustache, and thick forearms and scarred knuckles. "Please, let's just be civil here, there's no need for fighting..."
"Fuck you old man." The kid spat and the wad of crud landed right on the bus driver's scuffed black loafers.
Something had changed. The body language of the group had changed. The manager and the bus driver were suddenly in the background, hesitant, watching. The kid was standing over the mailman, fists clenched, staring down at him. They were animals, and this was a show of dominance. They might have been wearing clothes, they might have had jobs and families and lives, but at the end of the world, they were wolves on two legs.
The boy was a violent lean upstart, he frightened the others with his raw vitality. He was a leader. Perhaps not a good one, perhaps a horrible one, but he was a leader, and only one of them had the gumption to argue with him.
"We're not going back you dumb shit!" The mailman spat, looking up at the kid. His voice was snarling and loud and dominant, but his eyes were getting wider and wider. The college boy was just looking down at him, smiling like it was a joke. All of them had lost weight, but the kid still had the networks of muscle that had made him huge. Even after weeks of near-starvation, he weighed nearly two hundred pounds, nothing but muscles and bone and sinew and grit and ambition.
"So what are you gonna do? You gonna walk to the next town? We're out of gas, and the next place is forty miles away. We are going to collapse without food. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. They are standing on a stockpile of exactly what we need, and if we're smart, we can get what we need."
The mailman looked at the bus driver, the manager, looking for backing, for allies. They stared back with timid follower's stares. On his sleeping bag, the wounded teacher groaned, blood oozing from his mouth.
"For fuck's sake!" The mailman snarled. His voice rose to a shout, an appeal. "We are human beings! We can't just attack, and take. You can't... you can't..."
He looked up at the kid and rose to his feet, shaking and pale-faced from the pain. "You little fucking punk!" He bellowed. "You think this is a fucking game. You think you can just--"
It was so quick, so unexpected. A woman crashed from the treeline. An older slender woman. A woman with a regal neck and a slender body dressed elegantly in a silk blouse and dark slacks.
Her carefully upkept curls were bedraggled and bloodstained, filled with twigs and leaves. A flap of her scalp nearly hid her left ear. Her eyes were twitching and crazed, the right one filled to the brim with blood. Her mouth was a twisted stroke-victim sneer. Her mouth and swan-neck were tacky with blood. Her blouse was torn, and one flat sagging breast flopped as she ran on torn bleeding feet.
The men got up, galvanized with terror, but she ran past them and swooped to her knees, silent and almost graceful.
Then she bent down and took the eyebrow of the unconscious teacher between her teeth and tore away a chunk of flesh as big as a pack of cards.
The teacher started to writhe and scream. He begged for help from his fellows, who were frozen in place. The woman sank a claw-like hand into his face, and her first two fingers popped the agonized blue orb of the man's left eye. Popped it in a flow of viscous fluid, and blood. He screamed in a high weak voice like a woman. He beat weakly at the woman's body and head with his working arm. She bent down, spitting out the piece of flesh. She lapped up the clear fluid leaking from the socket, like a dog, before sinking her teeth into his cheek to tear away another piece.
A single gunshot rang out and the woman flopped down on the teacher, growling incoherently around the blood that gushed from her sneering mouth and broken teeth.
The bullet went through the middle of her back, exited from her ribcage and entered the stomach of the teacher.
The man wailed and thrashed weakly with agony, blood streamed from his eye.
"Shut him up!" The mailman whimpered, cowering by the side of the fire with the others. The manager was swaying, near fainting. The bus driver was gibbering what sounded like a prayer, clasping the saint's medal he wore around his neck.
The college student stood, the gun handle warm and heavy clasped in his cold hand. He stood, the gun still aimed at the limp crazy and the agonized man.
"He's infected, fucking kill him already." The mailman shrieked.
The college student fired another round, and this one missed, hitting the teacher in the thigh. His hand was shaking badly. The teacher thrashed and groaned, blood bubbled through his lips and into his beard. He begged them weakly to stop as he flopped and screamed under the woman like a dying fish. It was obscene. It was disgusting.
The college student was crying, tears streaming down his face. He shot again, and this bullet thankfully caved in the teacher's temple.
It was finally quiet, except for the crackling fire, and amorous frogs singing throaty love songs in the marsh.
The college student turned the gun on his fellows.
