The Dig

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The boat had reached the opposite shoreline, with them noticing a relatively gentle area to stop the boat for them to get off. Arthur was guiding the outboard motor with one hand, while stuffing the gummi like fruit snacks into his mouth with the other. He had already gone through three bags yet these cheap soft candies were just tasting absolutely delicious, his mouth watering as his tongue tasted the cheap artificial flavoring. He even closed his eyes a few times to fully bask in the flavor.

“Here,” Anna muttered with one simple word yet for some reason Arthur was able to decipher the statement and cut the power to the motor, letting them drift towards the shore until the shallow water would stop their boat and they could disembark.

The Marshal had her Glock ready.

It was a good chance that as soon as they got on the shore they could be ambushed. If that was the case, she was intent on at least getting the chance of killing a few of them before she went down. It would be unavoidable anyhow, the longer they spent on the lake, the more time their mysterious adversaries would have to regroup and essentially, hem them in.

The bottom of the boat pressed against the soft mud and dirt bottom, slowly coming to a stop in knee deep waters only a dozen feet from the ominous wooded shoreline. In her other hand was the digital map with the supposed location of sanctuary. She jumped over the side of the boat, her bag strapped across her chest and hanging off her back, and had that scoped Remington slung off her shoulder. With the map in one hand and pistol in the other and a cowboy hat still fixed on her pretty blonde head, Arthur thought she looked like some sort of modern day gunfighter or pioneer.

Very cool.

He hopped out of the boat after her, before glancing back and making sure they left nothing behind. Shotgun in hand, a gymbag with an empty AR-15 barrel poking out, and the DNR officers’ pistol tightly squeezed into the holster of his liberated state trooper gun belt.

“Looks to me,” she started to speak softly as they walked up the rapidly receding waterline onto the dry land. “…that this location is north of us about six or so miles. Looks to be located off the main road, somewhere right in the hills from this map.”

“Helioburg is a mining town I think,” Arthur replied when he recalled something from the radio. “Didn’t that Fire Chief lady say that the mines were overrun?”

“Not much of a choice really,” the Marshal replied with a shrug. “Unless you got another idea Arthur, I think we should head to where this map says.”

“Just, it could be an old message,” Arthur reasoned. “It might have been down there too long to be of use.”

She shrugged her shoulders, not looking back as they emerged from the brush and found themselves crossing a bike path that circled around the lake. “What do you want me to say Arthur?” the Marshal finally replied as she briskly jogged across the open ground to the opposite side where more dark woodlands provided nigh impenetrable concealment from any possible pursuers.

It was four miles of going mostly uphill that Arthur finally breached the silence.

“Do you hear that?”

“Yes,” she simply replied.

It was a loud noise, almost like a constant airy rumble as their eyes turned up to the night sky. A streak of fire crossed the night sky as the flames and starlight suddenly illuminated an awe inspiring sight coming down from the sky to their back. A massive airplane, emblazoned in yellow paint with black lettering struck against a foreground covered with smoke and streaking fire as they realized two of its engines, one on each o the crafts two massive wings, were alight with fire.

As it got closer, the noise grew infinitely louder. From their tiny vantage point, it looked as if it was coming straight for them. The bulbous nose of the plane was already pointed low, directly at the slope that they were on as the Marshal, reacting quickly rather then wanting to think it out, immediately started running off to the side. But Arthur simply stoodfast and stared, ignoring his companions panic.

Doesn’t it always look like its coming towards you only to have it turn out to be an optical illusion.

Instead of running away in a random direction in a full sprint, he just took a few sidesteps behind a nearby thick tree, his eyes never taken off of the massive four engine aircraft. The sight of it was so macabre and yet so riveting. It was almost as if the plane, despite careening towards the ground at probably hundreds of miles per hour, came closer and closer.

He was soon able to make out details of the craft, noticing the red specks on the white nose, looking almost like a bugshield. He saw little figures falling out of the side of the plane as the aircraft itself seemed to buck upwards, as if trying to avoid the inevitable crash into the hillside. As the plane came closer and closer, he could feel the power of the engines and saw those little figures falling from the sky, white parachutes billowing out then for some reason collapsing inward.

He saw dozens of black specks apparently zipping over the parachutes and the wings of the plane as it came closer and closer and then heard over the boom of the engines the endless caws and cries of birds, literally hundreds of them, swarming. Several of the birds, large and black, with sharp beaks, suddenly shot outward like a whip from the aircraft and seemingly shot towards him now.

A snapping beak and a flash of dark plumage greeted him as in an instant he shot his arms up to his face as a blackbird collided with his arms, a sharp sting nipping at his forearms as he immediately scrambled back a foot.

Overhead the infernal cargo plane let out a last rumble before a torrential explosion erupted and in an instant sound and air was ripped from Arthur’s body as he felt a huge fireball erupt higher on the hill. Pressure ripped soil from the ground and leaves from the trees as his winged tormentors recoiled away, as if carried afar by some invisible force.

In the periphery of his vision he could see a rising orange cloud, lined with pure darkness, billow outward into an ever expanding firestorm. It was massive, and all encompassing, it almost devoured him even.

But in fact it stopped a hundred feet short of his position downhill.

The heat alone almost toasted his backside.

He turned about, his arm still raised as he noticed the explosion had receded, pulling back to reveal a charred landscape where the plane hand landed. In the middle of blackened grounds and bare trees covered with charred bark where seconds ago, an actual forest had actual lay. Flames sparked across patches of dry ground, as streaks of fuel jetted across the land, still alight and treetops sparkled with growing embers.

In the midst of the devastation lay its origin. The frame of the aircraft was alight with flames, bits and pieces of the fuselage peppering the landscape and caught in the tree tops. The nose was crushed up and inwards, with the tail section having been torn from the rear of the craft and pinwheeling into the hillside some fifty yards away, mangled into some sort of heap of twisted metal.

The front fuselage was alight with flames and one of the engines, still burning, had a turboprop engine still spinning. Then there was the blackbirds. They were no longer swarming the airplane. Diced feathers were fluttering through the air as Arthur suddenly felt his eye sting and rubbed it, realizing these bird feathers and other detritus was filling the sky. He flinched a moment later, noticing a bit of red on his shoulder and flicked it away, realizing it was some bloody animal intestine.

His vision shifted back up to the plane.

The birds brought down that plane.

At this moment he wanted to go to the bathroom, but he had so little to eat, or drink this day.

It just felt like the appropriate time.

“Wake the fuck up!” he heard a familiar voice scream when, turning his head to the side, he saw a literal cloud of feathers, beaks and talons practically surging outward from the darkness of the night sky, their noticeable mass again almost looking like a tendril, reach out towards their comparatively tiny prey.

A little cowgirl wearing a leather hat.

He raised his shotgun.

She leaped into the hollow of a wide tree.

He took aim.

She held her thick utility police bag up against the entrance to the tree.

He fired.

The blast of his weapon seemingly dissipated into the surging throng of avian beasts, briefly disrupting the cohesion of the mass as it practically reflected off of the tree Anna had taken cover in. He almost laughed at how helpless they were until he noticed that same mixed flock of death was now aiming straight for him.

Against that, even if his shotgun had birdshot it wouldn’t be enough.

He started running, straight for the flaming crash site.

The flock pursued, many of them with reddened beaks, hungry for warm flesh and barely satiated by that of the evacuated crew.

It was almost a football field in distance, was there anyway he could beat the speed of flight. Couldn’t these birds go at two hundred miles per hour.

Or was that just a dive.

They didn’t seem that high up.

The Marshal made it to cover.

He glanced over his shoulder, cursing himself a moment later as he saw drawing ever closer to him was the massive flock. The crackling of flames and fire was overwhelmed by the horrifying bloodthirsty caws and croaks of the hundreds of countless birds and critters that made up this pack. Goosebumps rose along his skin as he felt the chill of the night crash against the heat of the burning wreckage. He imagined a death of a thousand little stabs, multitudes of sharp beaks and tiny blade like talons and claws ripping through his clothes, into his flesh. Eyelids ripped off, his eyeballs popped like balloons, the little hellish creatures nipping chunks of skin and muscle from his weakening body, ripping open every exposed bit of skin.

He would die slow and in pain, as nothing more then a heaping blood mess, which would slowly erode into the ground.

They came closer, but he was still sprinting ahead.

They were faster, but not quite fast enough he hoped.

His lungs started to burn, wanting him to give up.

He reminded his body of the bloody death that remained if he failed and tossed aside his shotgun. With another shrug his gymbag hit the ground. In front of him a man sized pillar of flame rose from the ground where a last pile of debris was burning out to the bitter end. If he changed direction or slowed down, the surging flock of death behind him would catch up.

Risking being burned alive, he ran through the flames.

Pain seared across his face, he felt his shoes sizzle.

The flock surged through the flames, extinguishing it with mass and the wind generated by a thousand flaps of wings.

A coolness brushed across Arthur’s burning face. It almost felt relaxing as he dived forward and felt the air itself try to pull him off his feet. He wasn’t a big man, but large enough to keep his body rooted to the ground. The turboprop engine was still spinning, sucking in air as well as it did during the venerable run of the crashed aircraft. But not only air was sucked into the massive machine.

Occasionally the unfortunate bird would get sucked in as well.

Flocks of them were dangerous.

Together they were deadly.

But individually each was light, their numbers useless as in their bloody minded thirst, the origins of their lust still unknown, surged with a single mind towards the young man lying prone before the running engine. They wanted to rip into his flesh, pluck out his tasty eyes, slurp up his lifegiving fluids dry to the bone and then gouge out the marrow in his bones.

Instead, one by one they were overwhelmed by the suctioning effect of the engine and as a flock, they were all sucked into the spinning propeller blades. Arthur never though that a propeller could make a sound similar to what would’ve been an industrial sized blender, but it did.

When the engine exploded seconds later, Arthur had already rolled back down the slope only to be peppered by the still steaming debris that resulted from the explosion. He felt heavy though as he rose to his feet a moment later. Five thousand horsepower beats a thousand bird power any day of the week apparently. Lackadaisically, he clambered down the slope, picking up his gymbag and the shotgun, feeling even more exhausted and tired now, unable to believe that such a thing was possible a few minutes ago.

Upon hearing the explosion, Marshal Anna Dugan literally came out of her hole in the tree, peeking her head out and then up the slope. Her brief smile of obvious relief immediately faded a moment later when she noticed Arthur standing in the foreground.

Realizing he was standing with a shotgun before a blazing inferno behind him, the young man stuck his chin up and smiled. “Hail to the king baby!” he said with a confident nod before pumping the action of his shotgun.

She flicked her eyebrows up and grinned at him warmly. “You look like a giant chicken,” the Marshal replied with a tip of her hat as she walked up to him.

He glanced down and grunted. She was right. His jacket, his pants, his hands and arms and legs, even his head was covered in black and gray and white feathers, all of it stuck to his body by what appeared to be very finely chopped bird meat. “It’s going to be a warm night,” the Marshal said reassuringly as she walked up to him, about to pat him on the shoulder before realizing she didn’t want to get her hands dirty.

Arthur coyly shrugged off his jacket and brushed the bloody gore and feathers from his hair as the Marshal, a serious looking covering her face again, checked out the wreckage. “Looks like a DHL plane,” she said finally when her voice picked up a bit of a hopeful accent. “Maybe they saw the fire. Did you see anyone jump out?”

“Yeah,” he said dimly looking back down the hillside. “I think they’ve been pecked to death on the way down. About three parachutes came out, but they all collapsed to the ground.”

She shook her head and then looked at him hard. “Think we should go back and see if there are any survivors because there are none here I bet. The nose of the plane is caved in and everything is on fire here.”

“They’ll be coming,” Arthur said resolutely. He turned back to her. “We should head to the sanctuary.” She nodded. If the circumstances were any different, she’d want to check but chances were this plane crash was a beacon of attention. The sooner they departed the better.

Once again the Marshal took the lead as she started running forward at a brisk pace up the slope, with him scampering behind her. They were close after all, less then two miles she said as they approached the cusp of the rocky hill. Her head popped over the high edge of the hill as she glanced over to what was on the other side of the hill, wondering even what this sanctuary even looked like.

Instead she saw more hills covered in trees. No lights. No roads. Not even a shack. When she heard Arthur huffing and puffing as he caught up with her, she withdrew the digital handheld map. She opened her mouth as she saw the glare of a helicopter rising up the hill behind them, the reflection barely noticeable on the screen of the device.

“Run!” she called out as just like that they both suddenly heard the rushing sweep of the helicopter behind them; a bright white searchlight illuminated their bodies completely, the choppers noises having been masked by the flames the entire time. The Marshal jerked on Arthur’s arm and they both started to tumble on the hillside as the helicopter started spitting out fire.

No more semiautomatic rifle shots, the steady din of a door mounted machine gun erupted through the night air, streaks of tracer rounds tearing into the foliage and forest as the two survivors bounced and rolled down the hillside, narrowly avoiding death with every second. Intercepting trees seemed to come out of nowhere as bullets kicked up dirt and smoke around their falling bodies. The searchlight kept with them as the helicopter slowly flew sideways, following their haphazard trip down the heavily wooded slope.

The Marshal shot out her legs under her, her hardy boots digging into the soft dirt, trying to slow herself down as innumerable saplings and branches whipped and snapped under her. She slowed as a line of machine gun fire cut a smoking path of death beside her. She rolled out of the way in desperation, heading for the nearest tree.

The searchlight kept going on.

Arthur was still falling.

Fortunately a tree broke his fall, as his legs whipped across its thin trunk, causing him to flip over several more times, rolling across his back and head before finally coming to a stop a few dozen feet farther down. Before he could catch his breath, a torrent of gunfire was already tearing the nearby trees to shreds as the searchlight shot farther down the slope only to realize it had lost its quarry.

Braving the torrent of blind gunfire, Arthur raced horizontally along the slope, desperate to find real cover before he was spotted again. Meanwhile some sixty feet upslope and a few more feet off to the side, Anna unslung her rifle and steadied her leading hand as she tried to draw a bead on the shifting helicopter. It was going to be a hard shot as she focused through her scope, trying to get the gunner in view.

But the aircraft kept shifting and bobbing in the air, the crew probably still looking for Arthur. She hoped he could get to cover as she took aim.

Then, in midair, the helicopter suddenly made a turn, the door gunner and searchlight setting upon her position. They remembered where she stopped. The bright white searchlight blasted her face, blinding her as the machine gun erupted anew. A spray of gunfire tore into the thick tree that she was crouched behind, tearing open chunks of bark and natural wood. As thick as it was, it wouldn’t provide protection from concentrated gunfire.

She clutched her rifle tightly.

No shot from here without getting her head blown off. Any other cover would be just as useless as where she was now. Could she hide? No, she needed a distraction.

But what?

Maybe Arthur would come up with something.

The bullets were tearing through the edges of the tree trunk now, the deadly rounds punching through her cover, coming ever closer to her cowering body. The vest wouldn’t protect against concentrated gunfire. Arthur saw the predicament from his new hiding spot, crouched under a small dropoff beside some thick gnarled tree roots. Shotgun couldn’t work here.

Maybe if he fired his pistol he could distract them. He was in a better concealed place. Just maybe they could think of something then. The man popped out from behind the waist high dropoff of dirt and roots, leaning to the side from behind the tree and started squeezing off rounds from his pistol. Each shot was distinct. He took time aiming. But it was almost impossible. The plane was at least a hundred feet up and another hundred away and moving.

He closed an eye.

Used both hands.

Single shots. Compensating for recoil everytime.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Nothing.

He wondered if they even noticed him firing. She screamed audibly. The great old tree she was cowering behind started to sway as its trunk was torn to shreds. For some reason the helicopter started slowly shifting to the side, the gunfire shifting around the edge of the tree trunk as the Marshal, realizing they were circling about for a new angle, immediately scrambled around to the other side, hoping to keep the trunk between her and the gunfire.

It was enraging. Fuming.

Ferocious with rage, Arthur bet they were laughing at her. Tormenting her. Toying with her. He snarled at them as he charged up the slope, firing his pistol at the helicopter, pistol rounds deflecting off of the thick airframe of the helicopter, the gunner intent on scything the tree away to get at his target.

He emptied the second clip.

In desperation he hurled the pistol at the chopper, watching his useless, empty weapon spin up into the night air. Useless and helpless. Now they would both die. The pistol arched higher and higher, spinning end over end, glimmering in the starlight when it came close to the helicopter, almost as if it would hit it. But that was just an illusion, the chopper was dozens of feet away, the little gun only rose in between his view of the murderous machine.

Then a torrent of blue and white surged out from the sky itself, falling around the chopper, engulfing it in a brilliant mist of pure power and force. Arthur stumbled back in shock as he saw torrents of water fall around the helicopter, the rotors thrashing in desperation as the liquid sloshed over the trembling aircraft. The searchlight flickered, not from shorting out but from the water itself.

The bird jerked upwards, still rattled as the water falling around it shook its airframe, washing out the interior. The tail bobbed low to the ground, the rear rotors cutting into the trees. The helicopter jerked hard to the side, the tail whipping around, colliding with another tree top, the small rear fins tearing into hard bark and branches before sparking, metal clashing against metal.

Water shot outward from the spraying rotors as the aircraft itself suddenly tottered off to the side, careening ever closer to the ground. The searchlight shot blindly across the night sky, the shaft of light arching straight upwards as the helicopter panned away, its tail rotor exploding into fire as the vehicle itself crashed sidelong into the hills rocky promontory.

The main rotors were still thrashing, each blade slicing deep into the ground before snapping and braking, launcuing the resulting shards outward. But the two survivors looked up and saw the landing skids instead as slowly a man in a black balaclava came out, bits of bones ripping through his forest green fatigues, covered in blood. A single gunshot rang out, and the mans neck exploded out of his back in a geyser of gore as the Marshal offered a bit of revenge. The machine gunner, suddenly grasping this new injury with a shattered arm, tumbled over and out of the bottom of the fallen helicopter.

Arthur raced up to ‘check’ on any more survivors when a new searchlight suddenly illuminated them both. Anna and Arthur glanced upwards towards the sky. Their savior was divinely inspired. It was another helicopter. And it had the same markings as the crashed out. Even the lettering was the same. Ulric Country Fire Department.

Then they saw something else.

A side door opened up and a man in a blue uniform peeked out. His features were unseen from this distance, but as the two survivors fixed on him, he shouted something. The Marshal was already determined to believe they were friendly, and started waving her badge up in the air, screaming back at them and waving the digital handheld map in the other one.

The man in the chopper had a badge on his chest too. He showed them his outward palm then retreated back into the cabin of the chopper. Arthur glanced down at the crashed helicopter, not wanting any surprises. The man Anna had shot was laying in heap before the crash site.

He looked up again. The remaining chopper, a massive one from the looks of it, with a giant water tank installed where the normal hold for cargo should be, was slowly lowering to the ground.

But the helicopter wasn’t setting down. Instead the man in the chopper, realizing neither of them could hear the other, now had a large black knapsack in his hands as slowly the helicopter moved directly over them and he unceremoniously pitched the fully laden pack over the side.

Arthur’s face slackened.

They weren’t going to rescue them.

They were just going to drop them some crap and leave.

Was that this so-called sanctuary? Maybe it was some sort of sick fucking game. Make a checkpoint alive and get some goodies to stay alive. Or were they infected or something? That helicopter just dumped a few tons of water on its supposed sister craft, like hell they couldn’t take them wherever they were going.

But the man in the cabin gave them a wave and seemed to shout good luck before retreating back into the helicopter and closing the door.

“Come back!” the Marshal screamed, still waving her arms futilely. But the massive firefighting chopper was already pulling away.

It wasn’t until it was clearly out of sight that her arms finally, limply, fell to her sides. Her head lowered to the large knapsack they had pitched over the side. It was packed tight with something.

Arthur walked past it though and approached the crashed helicopter, shotgun in hand. The machine gunner who Anna had shot was still moving, or at least breathing it seemed. Arthur kicked him onto his back and aimed the shotgun at his head, his eyes scanning for weapons. He saw none but backed up as soon as he confirmed it.

A pair of cold gray eyes stared back at him from beneath the balaclava mask.

He was still alive.

“Who are you?” he screamed at the man. The machine gunner raised his hands, palms facing outwards.

“Fatum…”

“What?” Arthur asked, not quite sure on what he just heard. From the tone though, he could tell it was condescending. “What the fuck did you say?”Anna approached the crash site, but not towards Arthur and his victim, but instead circled around to the ground of the helicopter and fired a pair of rounds into the cockpit to finish off the pilot.

“Ego mos utor…” the man barely managed to whisper from a weak, raspy voice as blood oozed out of his neck, spilling down his mask, pooling on the ground. “…titulus vestri caput capitis in quris.”

“What is that?” Arthur growled at him. “Is that Latin?” He screamed and suddenly shot forward and drove a kick into the side of his attackers neck, causing a brief eruption of blood to occur. “Speak English damn it!”

“Ut center of orbis terrarium…” the dying machine gunner started to whisper, his eyes locking with Arthurs, so firm was his grip it the survivor silent. These next words, though meaningless in construction to him, still felt powerful. “…Acheron… ut superficies. Ut domus of Hades vos ero sentio.”

“Hades!” Arthur quipped. “I know who that is. What about Hades?” He leaned in closer when suddenly two hands shot outward, gripping his throat in a vise like grip. The man dropped his shotgun as he felt his attackers iron like clasp slowly press his fingertips inward, slowly crushing his throat as he pulled him in closer.

“Vos mos animadverto Hades…”

A hardwood rifle butt split open the assailants’ forehead as Anna shot forward with the butt of the Remington rifle, hearing the reassuring crack of bone as she struck in with all of her strength. The deadly stranglehold dissipated with a surprising immediacy as life just seemed to flow from his attacker. His body slowly relaxed and then laid down calmly.

“Look but don’t touch…” the Marshal snickered, her jovial attitude somehow returning as she treated another near death experience with a somewhat disturbing and offsetting comedic attitude. “Ain’t that right Kwai Chang Caine,” she added with a friendly nudge of her brain covered rifle butt.

Apparently the profoundness of what just happened was lost on some.

Well, from what my limited Latin skills could provide, that's definitely rather... omnious. If that is just a prelude to what is supposed to be happening... I guess you weren't joking when you called it a Book of Revelations fanfic.

One has to wonder about who those soldiers are, too. They seem to be both more intelligent [or at least collected and cool-headed] than the... infected, for the lack of better term, [though I suppose that "possessed" by this point would be more appriopate] and seem to require somewhat less killing to be put down. Not to mention the Latin angle.

It's true, though, you do end every update with cliffhanger.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“We should get going…” Arthur said softly, his eyes looking up to the sky. But Anna had already occupied herself with unzipping the latest corpses forest green jacket, revealing a thick body armor vest underneath.

“We could of shot this guy all day for all of the good it would’ve done us,” she muttered, tapping her fist against the thick kevlars implanted trauma plate. She then felt the corpse’s arms and legs. “Full body too.” She briefly wondered if this was military but as she peeled off the mans jacket, immediately came to a different conclusion. “He made this suit homemade.”

“You can do that?” Arthur asked as he walked over to the black knapsack their apparent savior helicopter had pitched over.

“The shooters in North Hollywood did,” the Marshal replied. “Held off a hundred armed police officers for over an hour.” Her hands slowly moved to the mans mask as she leaned her head back, bracing herself just in case of any surprises but peeled off the balaclava with a quick motion. Doing thing slowly wouldn’t help. It felt moist with blood. The forehead and hair of this man was drenched in it.

Even Arthur turned his head from the backpack, somewhat curious to see the face underneath the mask.

But it was just a man.

One with his forehead fractured open and spilling out bits of chunky blood, but a man no less. His gray eyes were still open, looking up to the sky, fixed on nothing as she jostled his face from side to side. Arthur, compelled to stare, walked above her. “What are you doing?”


“Checking for any markings or possible identification,” Anna replied, noticing no piercings. His skin was white, with a tinge of peach or flesh tones, probably from the blood loss. Thin lips. A cleft chin. His face appeared to be slightly florid, with light pink cheeks. Cleft chin. His face looked florid, almost fat. A line of stitches were above his left brow. “Did he have an accent?”

“He was speaking Latin I think,” Arthur replied, leaning over the two of them, his hands pressed against his knees as the Marshal started to undo the straps along the side of the mans Kevlar vest.

“He’s been shot twice in the back and once in the front it seems. Probably a pistol round,” she muttered, fingering the impressions and torn fabric as she removed the dead mans upper body armor, sleeves included and tossed it aside. Underneath it all, he was still wearing a long sleeved shirt underneath with a plaid pattern. “Search his jacket,” she asked Arthur as she patted his shirt down, feeling something in a breast pocket.

Pulling it out, she noticed it was a small notepad. Before she could open it however, she heard her companion calling out to her nearby. “Found something,” Arthur said at the same moment, producing a small book from the corpses rear pants pocket, along with a cheap looking plastic billfold.

She glanced over her shoulder at the flimsy looking book filled with yellow, dog eared pages. There was no title, but as soon as he opened the first page, he was bombarded by yet another foreign language.

Дмитрий Сергеевич Мережковский

The fuck?

That is what Arthur noticed Marshal Dugan mouth silently. “Is that Russian?” she asked immediately afterwards.

“Cyrillic yes,” Arthur replied, somewhat sure of himself. “I think that’s the author of this book.”

“What’s his name?” the Marshal asked as Arthur turned the page only to find more indecipherable Cyrillic written on every other page before turning back to the first inside page where the apparent name was.

It took him a moment, but he threw out the first name that popped in his head that might match with the Cyrillic. “Merezhkovsky.” His head started bobbing up and down in recognition. “Dmitry Merezhkovsky. He was this revolutionary Russian author. Wrote a bunch of anti-czarist stuff.”

“A uh… Bolshevik?” Anna replied, falling back on her apparent thin knowledge of Russian history. However the very fact she knew the word Bolshevik put her heads and shoulders above most people Arthur figured.

“I don’t think so,” Arthur hazarded, himself not being an expert on the subject. “I can’t even read Cyrillic. I just… I don’t know,” he said shaking his head. “Must’ve taken a course in college or something. The name just seems familiar.” He felt his head filling with thoughts and dates and places and bits of information about Russia filling up his head. More general knowledge but nothing that could clue him into his past.

“Wish we had internet access out here…” Dugan replied wispfully when Arthur noticed the notepad in her hand and gestured towards it. Suddenly remembering, she smiled and handed it over to him as he flipped it open.

He smiled. “This is in English,” he replied, as his eyes scanned over the cursive handwritten passages scribbled down in what was probably a cheap ballpoint pen.

THIS JOURNAL IS MADE FOR ENGLISH TO REMEMBER OUR STRUGGLE IN LIBERATION OF THEOLOGICAL ANARCHY. COLLECTIONS OF THOUGHTS AND REVIEWS WILL BE MADE HERE FROM DATES 20/01/0001 TO 30/01/0001.

20/01/0001

I READ A MAGAZINE WHILE ON THE AIRPLANE. IT WAS THE NATION. IT HAD A LOT TO SAY ABOUT FACTS AND NEWS BUT THERE WAS NO PASSION IN IT. IT WAS SIMPLY A LECTURE ON EVENTS WITH ANALYSIS THAT SEEMED STEREOTYPED. ANY THOUGHTS OR CRITICAL THINKING WOULD BE EASILY IMITATED BY ITS COUNTERPARTS. THERE WERE NO COLLAGES OF IDEAS OR EVOLUTIONARY THINKING BEYOND SOCIAL OR PHYSICAL SCIENCES.

HOW CAN PROGRESSION BE MADE IF NEVER TRASCENDENT BEYOND SOCIAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES. WORKING IN THE SYSTEM NATURAL ########## ################ #### ########## ########## ################################# ########################### ########## ########## #################### ########## ########## ########## ######## REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS AFTER THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR.

21/01/0001

I ########## #################### ########## ########## ########## ####### ###################### ########## ########## ########## ########## ################# ### ############## ##### ##### ################ ####### ### ####### ################## ###### ########## FUNCTION DEMOCKRACY WORKS FROM THE STREETS ########## ######### ########## ########## ########## ########## HOBBES DISCUSSION OF FEAR OF VIOLENT DEATH WHEN IN FACT DEATH ##### ######## ####### ########## ISLAMIC SUICIDE BOMBERS ########## ########## ############## ###### ########## ###### ############# ########## ##### #####

21/02/0001

########## #################### COMPARISONS OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH WHICH ARE RIDICULOUS ########## ########## ############## ########## ########## ########## ####### ##### ########### #### ########## ########## ################# CURRENTLY KNOWN AS THE PAGAN ALLIANCE OR WICCANISM ################ ########################### ########## ########## OUTGROWTH OF DECADENTISM WHICH COMBINED WITH LIBERAL THEOLOGY WILL NATURALLY GRAVITATE TOWARDS MYSTICISM #################### ########## ########## ###################### ########## ############## ###### ########## ###### ############# ########## ##### ##### ########## ############## ###### ########## ###### ############# ########## ##### ##### ########## ########## SO THAT THE ULTIMATE THESIS ########## ########## ####### ################ ANARCHY NOT EXPRESSED BY NOAM CHOMSKY#### ########## ########## ANARCHY.

##########

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON HAS WRITTEN EXTENSIVELY ON THE RISE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION THROUGH MAIN FACTORS OF ##### ############ ################ CIVIC MILITARISM IS UNDOUBTEDLY A FOE ################### ######## ########## ########## #################### ########## ANARCHY ACTUALLY TRANSCENDS THE SCIENCE PRESENTED BY ARGUMENTS OF NATURAL DETERMINISM ########## ######## ############## EVIDENT IN THE EXISTENCE OF APOCALYPSE OR ANTICHRIST LITERATURE SUCH AS THE WORK BY CHURLOV########## ########## ############## ########## #### ###### ########## ########## ########### ###### ### ################ ########## ####### #### ####################### ########## ########## ###### ############## ########## ########## ############# ######### ########## ############## #####

21/04/0001

########### REFERRED TO FROM NOW ON AS LOSERTARIANS BY SOME AMERICAN CONSERVATIVES ###### ### ################ ########## ####### #### ####################### ########## ########## ###### ############## IS NOT THE IDEAL OF RUGGED AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM ########## ########## ############# ######### ################### ######## ########## THE WORD SLAVE IS DERIVED FROM SLAV AND WHO ENSLAVED THE SLAVS. IT WAS UNQUESTIONABLY THE NORSE ########## #################### ########## ########## ################## #### A ROBUST THEOLOGY IN WHICH THERE IS SOMETHING HEROICALLY GOOD BUT NOT EQUATED WITH GOOD OF THE MORAL COMPASS ########## ############## ###### ########## ###### ############# ########## ##### ##### ########## ########## ############## ###### ########## ###### ############# ########## ##### ##### ########## HELMOD WROTE THAT THE SLAVS ############## ###### ########## ###### ############# ########## ##### ##### GOD IS KNOWN AS ########## OR ########## MEANING BLACK GOD.


“Why are you grumbling?” Anna asked as the man continued reading the large cursive writing from the notepad.

“He bleed over most of the words,” Arthur replied as he saw her climb out of the helicopter, a first aid case and some pen flares in her hand. He went over the next few pages, only to find them covered in blood before tossing it aside. “No machine gun?”

“The RPK in there weights like twenty pounds. If you want to heft that,” Anna replied when she noticed he had tossed the blood soaked notepad aside, with apparent frustration. “What’d you read?”

He blinked, as if trying to clear his mind. “Umm,” he said with a pause as he picked up the notepad and handed it back to her in case she wanted to review it. “It sounded like he’s Russian or something Slavic. Most of the stuff in their relates to some sort of anarchist revolution I think.” His hands were making odd gestures as he tried to explain it. “There was this supernatural connotation to it all though. I don’t really understand.”

She grunted as she pocketed the notepad. “I’ll take a look at it when I get a chance,” the Marshal said before reaching back into the helicopter and pulling out the RPK machine gun, which to him looked like a Kalashnikov on steroids. “Drop that AR-15. Heft this bad boy instead if you want,” the Marshal said, forking it over to him.

He grunted and held the machine gun in his hands. “Doesn’t feel too bad. I tried out that backpack they dropped us,” Arthur added. “Spreads the weight out well.”

“We should check it out,” Anna replied moving towards the knapsack.

“Not right now, we should get moving. The others could be coming, that airplane crash will just attract them,” Arthur responded as he rose up and walking towards the top of the hillside, he unceremoniously pitched his rather underused AR-15 rifle into the crash sites flames. No need giving these guys anymore of an arsenal.

He glanced back down the other end of the hill and saw Anna was hefting the large black backpack over her back and saw her briefly buck forward from the weight, but then stand up straight again. In one hand she held the hunting rifle, in the other her police bag. Arthur suppressed a snicker as he jogged back down the hill.

“Need some help with that?” he offered earnestly.

“Only weighs about fifty pounds,” she grunted. “Humped more then this hiking in Chaco Canyon. I’ll be fine.” He smiled, taking the police bag from her grasp and slipping his shotgun in it before slinging the bag over his shoulder, beside the gym bag he was already carrying. She looked up at him, apparently a little bit of relief on her face.

“You’re the sharpshooter here. You’ll need both hands free to use that rifle won’t you?” Arthur replied rationally. She nodded, a bashful look on her face, before they continued moving.

“So where we heading?” Anna finally asked.

“Sanctuary,” he replied. “You said it was just another mile north right, in the next hillside?”

“Wasn’t that helicopter it?”

“As far as we know it could’ve seen the plane go down, think we were survivors of the crash and decide to help us out,” the man responded. “Anyways, we need to rest and inventory our supplies or something right?” he offered. “Maybe there’s some shelter nearby we can catch some sleep in. A cave or something.”

She glanced behind them at the now fading fire that was glowing farther and farther behind them. “I can build a shelter for us. They won’t find it,” she replied with a mixed sound in her voice.

“Unless?”

“Well I don’t know Ensign Kim,” Anna replied with a tired sigh. “The birds themselves are working against us. I know how to build a shelter that can hide us from humans, but animals?”

Noticing the progressively depressing tone in her voice, as well as her slackening face, Arthur tried to change the subject to something more positive. “Were you in the Army or something?”

“No…” she replied with another resigned look on her face. “I wish I could. I have two brothers in Iraq right now, and my dad was in the SADF back in Africa.”

“You’re from South Africa?”

“No my dad was,” she replied with a grin. He smiled too. Her constant desire to socialize about the seemingly unimportant could be annoying, but it was far more preferential then seeing her get depressed. If that happened, where would he be, he wondered. “We used to go back to South Africa on these safari type of things with my brothers. It was wild. You so could live off the land out there. You learned things like setting up camp overnight in canyons and deep valleys was a bad idea because moisture and cold air would collect down there, freeze you up while you tried to take a nap. Or how to tell edible fresh kills from ones that had gone rotten on the plains.”

“Wow,” Arthur remarked, somewhat impressed. “Any observations on the present situation?”

She shrugged, not sure what he meant by such a broad question but deciding to answer anyways. “Well the thing about this place is that there is food all around us. The problem is we’re in like… hostile territory. I’m almost positive that these psychos got some survival skills themselves. Probably bloodhounds. When we find refuge, we’re going to have to wash ourselves somehow, and rub ourselves with smoke or pine needles or something to obfuscate our scent.”

“That really work?” Arthur asked.

She shrugged. “Well any aromatic plants would work to be honest. Anything to make us not smell human.” Anna paused, then glanced back at him before smiling at him. He raised a suspicious eyebrow in response as she resumed facing forward. “Truth is, I’d be a lot more effective by myself out here.”

“Ouch.”

“Oh no offense Arthur,” Anna replied with a stifled laugh. “It’s just that I’ve lived out by myself, camping and the like. You can survive out here with nothing but a knife for at least a couple days and if you get past that, maybe indefinitely. In hostile terrain like this, well, it’s easier to move about without any hanger ons.” Before he could say anything in his defense, she explained her position more. “I mean you’ve been a great help, don’t get me wrong. I might not be alive right now if it wasn’t for you.”

“Okay,” Arthur said nodding his head. “Outside of sympathy for your fellow man, is there any other reason why I’m still with you?”

She paused a step, then kept going, cocking her head to the side for a moment as if in deep thought or a moment of reflection. “To be honest, after about… two days maybe out in the wilderness by yourself, you get this feeling in you. It’s a hard one of just being lonely. It hit me when I was camping in the Rockies. By the end of the second day I was just staring out into the sunset, it was like… so clichéd but I just felt this emptiness fill me. Just the thought of it almost brought me to tears. You look back on your life and just see all of these… authentic connections you had with other people and see how much of life is based around just being with other people. But when I was out there, it just gnawed at me. We’re social animals you know.”

He nodded, thinking he understood as they approached the deepest recess of this narrow valley, a small mountain stream drizzling down the cut between the hills. Anna immediately doused her boots into the water and started walking upstream, the waters surging past her feet. “Keep them off the trail,” she said gesturing to a point about a hundred yards up the stream. “Get off there and keep going.”

They started plodding through the water, both of them occasionally glancing upwards. The stream itself meant there was a gap in the tree cover above their heads, which left them exposed to whatever could be lurking above in the sky. When they had cleared the stream a few minutes later, a wave of relief seemed to waft over them as Arthur felt comfortable enough to continue the conversation.

“So how did you cope?” Arthur asked. The Marshal glanced back at him and then nodded, apparently forgetting their previous line of conversation for a moment.

“With the loneliness?” she asked to clarify. “Well you have to look in yourself you know. You’d be surprised how creative and imaginative you can be when you have to keep your mind busy. You sing or talk to yourself or I don’t know, daydream.” She coughed momentarily, cupping her mouth with a fist. “Excuse me. Getting depressed out here is just as bad as breaking your leg. It saps you of your will and energy. Not even hunger can do that over a short time.”

“Guess we have plenty to think about huh?” Arthur remarked.

“I suppose,” Anna said with a shrug. “But I’m not a thinker. That’s all you man.”
The continued trekking up the next slope, finding it was a fair bit steeper then the last hill. Off in the distance, a few hundred meters behind them, the previous hilltop still burned. Beyond that, miles behind them, the lake still shimmered in the starlight. “I’m tired of talking. So what do you think is happening?”

“A cult maybe,” Arthur replied with a shrug. “Some sort of religious extremist group.”

“That spread across South Carolina?” the Marshal replied, referencing his brief radio contact with the air force base.

“Well I remember reading about parasites and stuff that make people like, go crazy. Maybe it’s a new bioweapon or something,” he tried to explain, though he wasn’t quite sure where his thoughts would lead him. “Or a broadcast weapon.”

“A what?”

“Remember on the radio. The Fire Marshal or Chief or whatever said that you shouldn’t use your phone or television...,” Arthur started to point out.

“Yes… so the ‘terrorists’ couldn’t track you.”

“Well what if it was some sort of subliminal message or something,” Arthur continued to expand. “I remember reading this novel...”

“Novel?”

“No serious. It was like this Tom Clancy type of thing. It was serious, trust me. But they discussed the creation of a broadcast device which could change your brain pattern or something.” He paused, finding it hard to explain the concept until an example popped in his head. “You know how you listen to music and your head or feet start nodding to the beat and stuff.” She nodded. “Well a broadcast weapon works on the same uhhh method. It’s a transmission which would like, permanently transform the way you think and act.”

Anna shivered a bit at the thought of it. “Sounds scary, but how does that explain them getting shot twenty times in the head and not dying?” Her objection was punctuated by a simple shrug of slight disbelief. It sounded good, but just not matching this current situation.

He frowned. There was no good explanation for that. “Maybe. Maybe it’s a bioweapon.” He remembered the warning not to drink the water way back in the prison. Damn he was thirsty.

It was then he stopped in his tracks and wondered for a moment if he had drunk any of the water in the lake or if that water was even contaminated.

He licked his dry lips.

Then he moved on when Anna glanced over her shoulder. “Hurry up slacker,” she chided him playfully. “I think I see something up ahead.” Her voice grew lower, like a hoarse whisper. He lowered his head a bit and cradled the RPK in his hands. It was feeling heavier now. She was crouching low as well, then stopped just below what looked like a cut into the hillside just some thirty or forty yards uphill. Gesturing for Arthur, he softly scampered up to her side. “Control your fire. Just lightly tap the trigger if you want to get off only a round or two. Aim for the stomach.”

He nodded, understanding her brief machine gun operation 101 lecture and then saw her sling the rifle over her shoulder and produce her sidearm instead. “Might be close quarters.”

“What do you see?” Arthur asked, only seeing a crest ahead of them that was simply lacking trees for a bit.

“A tight spot,” she replied before spurring up the slope, Glock in both hands as she continued up. He followed her as best he could despite feeling two bags hanging off his back. As soon as they stopped again, he resigned to put everything in the Anna’s police bag and ditch the gym one. Two was just one too many. She cleared the crest of the rise and immediately panned her gun across something which was out of Arthur’s site until he climbed up beside her.

She lowered her pistol.

He just took a deep breath.

A small clearing was apparently cut into the side of this hill. The trees were so tall and the flat area itself so small, you couldn’t even see the place from a neighboring hill, only more trees. But there was something here.

A small one lane dirt road spiraled and twisted around the hill, heading upwards right to this spot. A partially rusted eight foot tall metal wire fence surrounding what looked like the entrance to a mine shaft. The gate along the road was wide open.

But a sign said on the fence said DANGER NO TRESSPASSERS. Between a US Marshal and an apparent inmate, the warning fell upon uncaring eyes as the two of them walked through the open fence gate, the soles of their shoes grinding gravel lot underfoot.

There were car tire tracks in the gravel but nothing else of note on the ground. The whole clearing itself wasn’t more then sixty feet wide in either direction and was in a roughly square shape. The mine entrance itself had an arch like doorway, surrounded by several inches of concrete and appeared to be sealed up tight by a thick metal doorway which also had a similar trespassing sign on it.

But there was some red lettering painted on the massive doorway itself. It was largely faded, and chipped away, perhaps illustrating just how long ago this place was abandoned and fallen into disrepair.

ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS
STORAGE DEPOT/ BOMB SHELTER

“Is this the mine they talked about on the radio?” Anna asked as she leaned against the metal door itself, noticing the buildup of dirt and grime on its surface.

“No,” Arthur replied. “There should be people here if there was an active mineshaft here. They said it was west of Helioburg, not north.” He paused, staring at the door. “Think this is the sanctuary.”

“Maybe the park ranger hid out here, damned if I know how he got in though,” the Marshal replied with a shrug, apparently assuming the park ranger had made it here before they did.

“Fucking waste,” Arthur suddenly spat.

She turned to him. “What do you mean?”

“The door looks heavy as hell, no way we can open it,” Arthur said as he looked around, until he noticed a ten button keypad beside the door. It was an old model, covered in dust and spider webs, the panel itself apparently built into the side of the

Anna just shrugged again. “We could always try knocking.” She read the red lettering again. “Or…” A sudden buzzing started emanating from her backpack. Immediately alarmed, she shrugged the pack off of her back and laid it on the ground before taking a few cautious steps back.

Arthur, also hearing the sudden buzzing, approached the backpack slowly. “Is that your pack buzzing?”

“Yes.”

He crouched down beside the backpack and lowered his head towards it, as if trying to single out where the sound was coming from before finally unzipping a side pocket and reaching in only to pull out the digital map that they had found in the Visitors Center. It was what was buzzing.

“I must’ve put it in there,” the Marshal stated blankly as he glanced at the screen, and then satisfied, turned it towards her.

The map was gone. Instead in red digital letters flashed the word SANCTUARY.

Marshal Anna Dugan had backed up quite a bit so that when she turned to the door, she was conveniently right next to the doors keypad. It was just like a phones number pad. Three letters were nestled underneath almost every number.

726288279

A brief sound of straining metal and the creaking of a winch or chain slowly lifting the heavy door upwards erupted in front of them as they both immediately took several steps back, weapons drawn and steeling themselves for whatever might be on the other side.

Slowly the bottom edge of the metal door rose upwards, a dim yellow glow emanating from within as, almost compelled to look, both Arthur and Anna ducked their heads down, their darkness adjusted eyes wincing momentarily as their faces were lit up. But both of them suddenly froze when they saw who was on the other side.

Several dozen feet down the concrete lined tunnel was a line of sandbags and the army green front end of a humvee. On both sides of the vehicle, piles of molted sandbags piled up to chest height blocked off the rest of the tunnel as standing behind them were two men clad in uniforms covered in pixilated black, brown and green colors. Both were training rifles on the entrance, their faces covered in black, their helmets fixed around their heads and mottled green body armor vests wrapped around their torsos.

Arthur immediately flinched as he saw the dark faces stare him down with a lethal intensity, but Anna slackened her aim, a bit of a smile flickering on her face as a few seconds passed with neither of them opening fire. Finally she asked the question burning in her mind. “Are you guys Army?” she asked, noticing the faded lettering on the entryway.

“Ma’am, we’re the United States Marine Corp,” they replied in unison.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Arthur was about to mouth a word of protest when he saw the marine snatch the entrée from his hands, only to see him pour the beef and mushroom gravy mix down a long plastic looking bag and then pour a dabble of water into it. The marine, his face still covered in the black camo paint, looked up at Arthur and smiled at him with two neat rows of white teeth as he folded the top open end of the bag and then handed it back to him.

“It should be done in about twelve minutes sir,” the lanky and tall leatherneck said before turning back to the entrance and falling to a knee behind the sandbag barrier that sealed the tunnel off. He resumed his watch on the door, a long rifle in hand.

Arthur simply nodded, somewhat miffed by these guys as he then cast his glance down towards the tunnel and saw the other Marine was beside Anna, chatting her up while breaking open the backpack. Even farther down the tunnel, past what looked like army green strongboxes and ammunition crates covered in dust and in some cases, bits of rust. The walls and ceilings also had cobwebs and grime layered onto it, aging this bunker or whatever it was quite well.

What was most interesting was that another hundred yards down the tunnel, he saw several apparently laying on some bedrolls, olive drab blankets covering their bodies. But there were no kits or rifles beside these people, instead he saw what looked like a handbag, some toiletries and other spare clothing though most of it looked olive green or tan in color, with deeply recessed wrinkles. Civilians maybe. All of them asleep.

This was an Army Storage Depot. Why were their marines in here? It was just too many questions for his idle mind to process passively as his food cooked, especially when answers were so close by. But Marshal Dugan was still conversing with the second marine who was already withdrawing various items from the helicopter pack.

Arthur’s eyes started wandering about. Behind the dust covered ammunition boxes and other crates, he saw giant factory machinery lining both sides of the tunnel, well into the darkness. Some were covered in tarps, others merely gathering dust, but all of them looked even older then the boxes that were forming practical walls around them. Multi-needle sewing machines, milling cutters, drill presses, lathes, vertical shapers and much, much more.

The man glanced at his warming entrée bag and frowned, already somewhat bored. Setting it down, he approached the Marshal and his new friend, earning a rather sharp glance from the rifleman that was currently watching the door. Arthur ignored the glare as he interjected himself in the others conversation.

Anna was sharing a laugh with the marine when he spoke.

“Hey Arthur,” the Marshal then said noticing his approach. “I was just clarifying how we weren’t from the crashed plane. Apparently they know the guys in the helicopter that dropped these supplies; it was sort of intended for them.”

“Who are you guys?” he asked flatly.

This marine was a bit shorter, with broader shoulders and a rounder jaw. He too was covered in the black face paint, which made the white of his eyes and teeth all the more pronounced, at least in this light. His smile faded. “Corporal Vann,” the marine said, laying a fingerless gloved hand on his own chest before gesturing towards his counterpart. “And that is Private Steve Nakaj. Our four man fire team was doing exercises in the mountains when yesterday, things got weird.”

“So there are four of you?” Arthur asked before he could continue his story.

“There still are, but our Gunny and the other guy went for help back at base,” the Corporal stated.

“Why?” Arthur queried, earning a sudden glare from Anna.

The Corporal smiled. “One of our exercises was reporting civilian traffic along the mountain roads without being detected.” The NCO smiled in a bout of selfishness as he noticed Arthurs’ raised eyebrow. “It was nothing evil, trust me. The Gunny just thought it’d be a good idea.”


“But your snipers…”

“We’re scout snipers,” the Corporal corrected him with a bit more of a stern voice. “One of our duties is to observe, not engage the enemy. Unfortunately that became impossible when we witnessed the attacks on the road to the Helos mining facility from town by those…”

“Psychos?” Anna offered.

The Corporal snickered a bit in acknowledgement and nodded. “They just raced out of the woods, rolled some fiery vehicles in the middle of the road, stopped the exodus cold and swarmed over them, smashing in windows, tearing people out of vehicles, pulling themselves in, beating the shit out of women and kids and dragging them off. We just happened upon the entire scene as it was finishing up when we heard the Fire Chiefs radio message on the civilian band. It’s a good thing most of them weren’t armed but, it was a close affair. Tried to do our best.”

Arthur blinked, as if taken aback. “Couldn’t you just shoot them?”

The Corporal chortled. “Do you have any idea what the repercussions would be if armed marines shot unarmed civilians, even in the practice of a felony. Our restraint in that thing almost got us killed.” He tapped a fist against his armored chest. “Thank God for Dragon Skin. It was a close bit, one of them ripped the radio right off my back and tried smashing my head in with it. But I wear protection,” he added with a slightly macho air to his voice. “We drove them off and saved the folks you see back there. A reverends wife and some parishioners in a van, a long haul trucker and some other folks, including a firefighter whose in the reserves, got us in contact with the Fire Chief. The two of us and the civvies fell back to here soon after being appraised of the situation while the Gunny decided to take our better half and bug out to open country and get some help.”

“Aren’t you people in radio contact on exercise missions?” Arthur continued. “Or have an emergency extraction or something?”

“Our radio is shot. The reservist says that signals can’t escape an area around this place. But we can still communicate to the fire station and back, or would if this piece of shit PRC-25 would work again,” the Corporal explained. “Same goes for cellular phones too for some damn reason.” He turned to the Marshal. “Isn’t that right?” he asked, his voice taken a kinder tone.

Anna smiled and nodded, holding up her phone.

“Not a good idea anyways,” the Corporal said as he kneeled beside the black knapsack again and started filtering through the various items. “We think they can track the signals. That’s how they managed to overrun the mines.”

“What happened at the mines?” Anna asked.

“Came up from below apparently,” Corporal Vann replied, a tinge of melancholy in his voice, as if he was there witnessing the event. He shook his head slowly. “Heard them firing like crazy on the radio. They might’ve been civilians but I bet they fought like hell, just like Concord and Lexington. But what followed, the screams shook you. But what were worse were… the laughing and the giggling and crying that followed.”

The marine started to bite his lower lip. “Yeah. We lost contact with the fire station about an hour ago. They’re being hit pretty hard. Only safe place left in town. When we were in contact with them before the PRC conked out, they were planning on commandeering one of the choppers to get help. We saw them out there on the security feed along with the plane crash.”

He turned to the two of them. “You have no idea how relieved we were when we saw that plane go down on that hill and not fly one more hill over. We thought that plane was aiming for us,” Vann continued to explain, apparently not quite coming to grips with the fact of how macabre his relief was considering there were people on that plane.

The NCO pulled out what appeared to be a vehicle power adapter cable. With that in hand he walked towards the end of the tunnel and with a gentle kick to the ribs, awoke one of the sleeping civilians awake.

The sleepy man grunted groggily, and sat up on his bedroll, his thick short brown hair all tangled up as he fixed his eyes on the two apparent strangers embodied by Arthur and Anna. “This is Marshal Anna Dugan and … Arthur?” Corporal Vann whispered softly to them.

Still a bit groggy, the sleepy man threw the green blanket off of himself and slowly rose on unsteady feet. He was wearing a dark navy blue tee shirt and long pants of the same color. His shoes were still on, both looked like polished black leather, with a little dirt and scuffing. A roughly circular white emblem on the shirt was surrounded by a circle of words reading ULRIC COUNTY FIRE DEPARTMENT.

Licking his lips as he approached the two, he outstretched a muscular arm to greet the two properly. “Name’s Cooper,” he said in a slightly drawn out voice, like he was suppressing a yawn. But his handshake was firm with them both as he glanced down at his shirt. “As you can see I’m with the…” he said, nodding in rapid motion. “… fire department.”

“We got the cable with the package,” Corporal Vann interjected. “Can you give it some juice now?”

“Sure can,” Cooper replied, his response sounding like one whole word as he turned his feet and then turned his body about the next second, overly dramatizing his movement. Anna and Arthur exchanged worried glances with the Corporal who just rolled his eyes upwards as the quirky firefighter walked past them to a metal workbench where the Vietnam era radio was waiting. Also beside it was a hand operated generator of some sort, which looked even older then the Vietnam conflict.

“So what is this place exactly?” Arthur finally asked.

Vann however was fixated on the firefighter repairing the radio as Anna suddenly offered an explanation. “It’s a storage depot,” she said almost matter of factly. Before Arthur could roll his eyes at her lame attempt at humor, she expanded her answer. “Back after World War Two,” the Marshal started to explain. “The US government put a bunch of obsolete factory equipment in these unused shelters and caves in various mountain ranges throughout the country.” Her head tilted to the side. “Apparently the wisdom was in case of a nuclear war, all of the factories and machine tools in cities would be wiped out, but we’d still have replacement machine tools in a billion of these semi-secret locations across the country.”

“And military equipment?” Arthur queried.

“Well,” Anna replied, raising a hand towards a pair of small black and white televisions mounted on the ceiling showing both views inside the tunnel and outside. “This place is probably monitored by the US Army or the state government.”

“State government apparently,” Corporal Vann replied. “It was that Park Ranger fella who got us in here in the first place.” Both he and Cooper briefly displayed crestfallen looks.

“What happened to him?” Arthur suddenly asked, his eyes growing wider as he just knew it wasn’t something good.

“Yesterday happened,” Cooper practically grunted with a jaded response as he continued to tinker with the radio.

“But at least he brought you two here to safety,” the Corporal said reassuringly. Such sentiments did little to alleviate the emptiness of the situation. But Arthur’s nose picked up something flavorful in the air.

His entrée was done.

The man was wearing a bright orange vest over his denim coveralls. Reflector strips crisscrossed the vest and he even had a light built into his helmet. It wasn’t so much the stop sign he was holding that scared him as it was his stare. He was a big guy, with long brown hair a square moustache, almost like a handlebar.

Holy shit, looked like Ben Davidson.

He was one scary Defensive End.

The man tried to stop walking forward, but his feet kept him going.

The stop sign was pressed into his chest. “Where do you think your going buddy?” Ben Davidson asked him in one of those gruff, and intimidating voices, his massive body practically leaning over him now, casting along shadow.

“To work.”

“Not this way your not,” the construction worker responded when he suddenly pushed him back with the stop sign, in an obvious display of strength.

The man took several steps forced steps backward then looked up at his challenger. Impotent rage filled him. “I just need to get to work.”

“Then get on your little leather work shoes and walk around,” Ben Davidson replied, before nodding his head to the side. Beyond Mr. Davidson he could see the subway tunnel. Why couldn’t he just step aside, things would be so much easier. Then he could take the subway to work.

“I said go around!” the burly man repeated gruffly.

The man turned his head to the side and saw the alleyway. It was dark, cut between two gothic brick buildings that just seemed out of place in this modern city. From the depths of the alleyway he noticed a blood red glow emanating from the other end. “Is it safe?” the man asked, his voice trembling.

Ben Davidson chuckled. “Like you fucking give a shit.” He lowered the stop sign and raised his opposite arm. It was only then he noticed that the vest and overalls had no sleeves. The NFL construction worker flexed his arm, his bicep pumping upward as he stared at the man and simply uttered a growl.

That was that then. The man immediately headed into the alleyway, casting one terrified glance back at his flexing challenger before picking up the pace. Whatever was in the alleyway must be preferable then facing that scary man. He was in the Conan movie for goodness sake.

Rexor. High Priest of Set.

“Mr. #######!”

“Mr. #######!”

The man turned, hearing his name being called out.

He turned his head. “Captain?” the man responded, noticing he was no longer wearing his blue battle armor, but a suit and a tie and an ID badge.

The man leaned in, wanting to see the name under the picture…

“Sir!” the Captain said, seizing him by his shoulders.

“What is it?” the man asked, still heading towards the glowing alleyway.

“The North Koreans have invaded!”

He blinked and then balked. “Throw money at them,” he replied matter of factly.

“Proletariat revolution sir!” the Captain replied, apparently unaware of how ridiculous he was sounding, his chubby face suddenly filling with nervous sweat. “They’ll simply take the money.” The Captain then paused, realizing that his boss was heading into the alley for some reason. “Sir, why not take the trains?” he asked, a look of fear filling his eyes. He gestured towards the underground train entrance.

The man glanced over and realized that Ben Davidson was not there anymore. But it was too late, he had already walked inside the alleyway. He felt himself turning forward, his legs propelling him forward… perhaps against his will.

In the alleyglow he saw the triad.

They were waiting for him.

The Roman Legionnaire was clutching his red body shield and a gladius, clad in his cuirboulli and banded armor. In the center of the triad was the Samurai with his lamellar armor constructed from pieces of lacquered leather and metal. He was gripping the deadly honor sword, the wakizashi, in both hands. But the third person, off to the side, he couldn’t quite identify. He was clad in red leggings and an overcoat, replete with brass buttons and a large fur hat. Thrust in a leather belt was a blackpowder pistol, and in his hands he wielded a cruel looking polearm.

“If it isn’t the man who would be Aetius,” the Legionnaire called out to him as he entered. The other two snickered at his greetings and advanced upon the man. He paused, realizing the inherent danger. “You’re no great leader of men,” the Legionnaire continued.

The man launched out a fist, catching the red clad Russian across the chin, only to get the blunt end of the pole arm to strike into his soft belly, causing him to crumple up on his feet. The samurai, with a cunning grace, shifted to the side and around the back, launching out a deft low kick and brought him to his knees. Another kick to his backside sent him leaning forward.

“Finally you know your betters,” the Legionnaire boasted when he turned to the masked samurai and nodded.

The Samurai flipped the weapon in his hand and offered it to him before taking several steps back, placing his own hands on his katana. Behind him and to the opposite side, the Russian raised his polearm, with the broad axe blade on the end ready to strike. The man gripped his wakizashi with both hands, and then looked up at the triads speaker.

“In certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords,” the Legionnaire stated. The man cocked his head to the side, he heard that before…

Off to the side, the Samurai nodded approvingly.

He snorted. Of course he would.

The man gripped the honor blade more tightly and then glanced up at each of the triad. He lunged at the one with the big mouth. The wakizashi short outward, the flashing steel little more then a blur as it cut effortlessly through the air, aiming towards the Legionnaires chest when instead a dead thunk occurred as it struck against a stout wooden shield.

In the next instant, he was face to face with the Legionnaire as he felt the gladius drive into his abdomen until buried to the hilt. “And that’s what separates the soldiers from the warriors,” the Legionnaire stated calmly as a fine katana blade cut threw his back, and a heavy polearm chopped deep into his neck.

Arthur let out a cry of alarm as he suddenly awoke to screaming.

He screamed again in response. It was the second time he did that since he woke up a second ago. His head shot towards the radio on the table as Anna shot her head towards him, a flash of anger in her eyes. “Damn it Arthur!” she roughly scolded him before turning her attention back to the radio.

The screaming had subsided on the radio, but what followed was more disturbing.

Large, deep thumps.

The sound of feeding.

And that sultry voice came on the radio.

“If any helots are listening right now, we have the sounds of flesh being consumed or sodomy of the innocents, which do you want?” the same voice said over the radio before it cut to static.

Cooper, Corporal Vann and Marshal Dugan exchanged glances but it was Anna that spoke first, and the most resolutely. “We have to go down there and rescue those people.”

Apparently conflicted, or perhaps feeling shame, Cooper just averted his eyes from the Marshal and turned back to the radio. Corporal Vann’s face tightened up. “I’d want to but, it’s a suicide mission.”

“There are innocent people that need rescuing there,” the Marshal replied firmly.

“There are innocent people here!” the Corporal reasoned with an equally firm voice as he gestured an arm to the civilians who by now, were starting to wake in the back of the storage area.

“You said the radio room was on the first level, they could still be holding out on the upper floors of the fire station!” the Marshal sharply retorted. “None of them have the training you two have. We can help them. Get them out of there!”

“It’s in the middle of town!” suddenly snapped the other Marine, Private Nakaj, his eyes still shifting from the security feeds to the doorway as he remained perched behind the sandbags. Arthur turned back towards the confrontation when he noticed someone had placed a old fashioned looking machine gun on the top of the black humvee. Where the hell did that machine gun come from?

“We can take the humvee!” Anna continued, gesturing towards it.

“That’s a fucking H2,” Corporal Vann explained. “It’s for pussies.”

“I have a container truck,” suddenly said a deep baritone voice from the back. Everyone, except Private Nakaj who simply perked an ear to the relevant discussion, glanced backwards. Standing over his sleeping bag was a potbellied Black man, with a small bald spot, a paunchy face and gray hairs encroaching on a head mostly full of short black hair. “Got the keys. Radio in it,” he continued to explain. “It’s on the road leading to the mine though, we’d have to find it but there’s enough space in the back to fit a lot of people in.”

The Marshal turned back to the Corporal. “These psychos, they don’t know who is with them or against them unless we let it slip,” the Marshal said though Arthur knew she was far from sure. It just appeared that from the encounters they had, that they had let it slip that they were different.

“We can’t be certain of that,” the Corporal replied. “Anyways help is already on its way most likely.”

“How do you know this hasn’t spread?” the Marshal continued when he gestured towards Arthur. “At the visitors center we heard a report from an Air Force base outside Colombia that the same thing was happening there.”

“Well,” Arthur suddenly replied. “It could have been a fake signal.”

The Marshal’s jaw dropped slightly as she simply glared at him. “Hey I’m saying, if what Corporal Vann said is true earlier,” he continued to explain, already feeling the heat from her stare. “I mean, if it’s true that radio signals can’t be broadcasted out of here, it could have been faked. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Well fine,” Anna replied. “I’ll go myself.”

“You can’t even drive a container truck,” the Corporal said dismissively.

“I’ll go with her,” the truck driver said resignedly. The Corporal looked like he had been punched in the gut and Arthur’s eyes just grew wide. This was bad and unexpected. Feeling they were looking for an explanation, the trucker continued. “I don’t have a family, or anything really. I’m fifty seven years old. If I can do some good before I die, I’ll do it.”

The Marshal nodded firmly as the trucker walked up to her.

The Corporal glanced at his fellow marine who feeling his eyes on him, turned and shrugged. Vann cursed underbreath. Arthur knew what he was thinking. Two civilians were going to do what two marines didn’t dare try. But it wasn’t just pride, Corporal Vann wouldn’t go on a mission of certain death for futile reasons. He actually thought there was a chance they could pull it off.

A slim one.

“Fuck it. Anna. Umm trucker guy. We’ll go with you,” the Corporal decided. “Cooper and Arthur here can hold the fort.”

“I’m going too,” Arthur said.

“Umm no,” Vann stated. “I already got two civilians on this field trip, I don’t need anymore minutemen ruining my day.”

“I’m not a civilian,” Arthur suddenly stated as he stood straight up and stared right into Corporal Vann’s eyes. “I was in the 203rd Special Assault brigade that served on the DMZ. Air assault. I’m airborne qualified. Familiar with small arms. I was an instructor in Tukong moosul, you know, special forces martial arts.”

He took a step forward, close enough to just be short of getting in the Marine Corporals face. Arthur stole a glance at Marshal Dugan and immediately realized she wasn’t buying a single bit of his bullshit. But Corporal Vann looked conflicted. “Bullshit,” he said, with a slight uncertainty in his voice.

“You can ask Anna how I took apart that psycho with a claw hammer,” Arthur replied confidently, before nodding towards her. When both marines turned to her, she nodded honestly. He did in fact do just that, though it was after it got shot in the head, for whatever good that actually did.

“I saw Oldboy man,” Private Nakaj suddenly piped in. “Those Koreans kick ass when it comes to hammers. Hardcore shit.”

“Fine,” Corporal Vann stated, amazed at how quickly this discussion had turned into some sort of bad movie with everyone volunteering. “Cooper, your in charge here, I promise we’ll get your buddies back.”

The sullen looking firefighter just nodded.

“Well,” the Corporal said with a nod as he glared at Arthur. “Let’s get kitted out. We got a rescue mission to perform.” With that said, he slapped Arthur as hard as he could on the shoulder.

Arthur suppressed the urge to rub away the pain. That really hurt.

END OF ACT I

Yeah it's kind of, repetitive writing about the same characters over and over again. I think I'll fiddle about with some other stuff, and layout the next part of the story. Maybe write some other short fiction as well. Who knows.

Either way it seems like a fair enough stopping point.

Not nearly enough...

But yeah, I'll prolly take a break from this story for a bit, maybe try my hand at something else like maybe writing an actual fantasy based short story. Plus this thread is kinda unusually long for the Original Fiction board.

I maybe continuing this story as time permits. The first few chapters have already been written and the story outlined. I've sent out parts of the first chapter to a few readers, seeing what they think of it, and hoping I didn't forget anything continuity wise and making sure that the new material is... palpable.

Wow four minute response time... I'm flattered.

PART II

CHAPTER ONE

Southern Africa, Sometime Before

“They got pipes sir,” a plump Asian looking man said, sweating not so much from the desert heat as from the dusty navy blue riot gear he was clad in from head to toe. In his hand he held a loudspeaker instead of a gun. The same couldn’t be said for the guards in the wooden towers. They looked like soldiers and for all intents and purposes, were paramilitaries. Kalashnikovs in their hands, each one of them was itching to pop their cherries with their black eyed virgins.

Before them, were literally thousands of angry miners. The fence wouldn’t stop them. Nor would the men with shields and batons. But the guns. If they used the guns. That would stop them. At least the threat of it.

Standing behind the line of local security, dressed in military green, and holding up hard wood batons and transparent riot shields, the mine manager turned to his adjutant in the riot gear and frowned. “Tell them if they don’t drop their weapons and go to work, we will disperse them.”

The adjutant frowned. The crowd of angry workers pressed against the fence. It was creaking. Like a dam, it was going to bust soon unless they relieved it of pressure. The plump man on the loudspeaker turned to the crowd and started to speak in their native tongue, one that was as foreign to the manager as most of the things his workers did, or said, or believed. Just gibberish.

Whatever the translator said, it did not relieve pressure. The fence broke, rusted chain links exploding into powder, the fence itself flattening as a horde of angry miners, resembling barbarians storming the borders of the Roman Empire two millennia before… or angry natives storming across the plains only two centuries before. The tribe had been angered, their fury had to be released. Between them and the destruction of the mine, this regions only source of enrichment, money, stability… dare he say civilization, was a thin green line of men with batons.

And behind them, men with guns.

The mine manager checked his shotgun and stood his ground. Beside him, his adjutant started to fall back as the miners didn’t so much as push through the line of baton and shield armed police as swarm over them like water over a dike. It was a force.

One of the miners came for the manager. “Stop!” the manager ordered, gripping his weapon firmly. The miner, not even armed except with rage, kept running towards him. “I said stop!” He didn’t. The manager knew the miner knew what he was saying, even if it was in a different language. He’d have to show him then, it was all these people understood. Force.

At the last moment he lowered his helmet encased head, and drove his shoulder into the onrushing protestor, his steel helmet clipping the native on his chin, his shoulder smashing into the oncoming chest, knocking the wind and momentum out of the aggressor. With clean efficiency, the manager dispatched of his attacker with the short swing of his shotgun handle, knocking it along the side of the mans face. He toppled into a heap before the manager, defeated.

They always underestimated us Asians, the manager realized. Thinking that politeness and being soft spoken was somehow a weakness, when it fact it revealed a reserved strength. Only fools show their passions and emotions on their faces so openly and carelessly, now they would pay the price for such pride. Another worker turned adversary approached him. The manager dispatched of his charge with a quick low kick to the mans knee, and another swing of his shotguns handle, battering him to the ground.

The manager started sweating. Not just his underarms or his face, his hands. Even his tongue was swelling. This was exciting. The soul of battle that he had read about in books, fantasized about in the dojo. He was loving this. He saw a gun barrel rise from the melee before him, one of the black faced Africans rising slowly above a fallen guard. He saw the guards baton slipping from his grasp, blood oozing from his brow.

They weren’t armed with pipes, they were armed with guns, and he saw the business end of a weapon aiming for him now. He was so caught up in melee, he didn’t hear the gunshots. The manager obliged, and reacted identically to the armed miner with one exception, the manager was quicker to react and when he leveled his shotgun with the would be assassins face, he squeezed the trigger. It really was as simple as that.

Boom. Smoke. The face disappeared into gore.

Several of the workers behind the gunman fell down as well, the spread of pellets striking them as well, causing them to scream and howl in pain as they fell upon one another backwards. In the towers, Kalashnikov actions cut through the air as the most recognized sound in a warzone suddenly entered this scene. More fell. The miners fled. The guns did their job.

The mine would remain open. They would just need more workers.
---

Now

Arthur slurred his first words, his first breaths, as he found himself face down in the asphalt, with blurs of color and movement hither and thither. He slowly rotated his neck about, feeling little rocks and pebbles sticking against his cheek. Sounds were on the periphery of his consciousness, slowly rising, growing sharper and sharper. It wasn’t until he heard the gunshots that he realized where he was. What was going on.

He wasn’t dreaming, he was in Hell on Earth.

Thankfully, he was with the Marines now to even up the odds.

The sharp sound of rifle fire, M-4 assault rifles as it was, helped jar him awake as his vision suddenly grew clear and he realized he was laying facedown in a dirty, grimy street and twenty feet away, he saw a blood soaked, tatter clothed man topple to the ground as a dozen rifle rounds ripped open his chest, churning up his insides, and caused him to collapse in the middle of the road with a final hissing groan.

“Arthur get the fuck up!” screamed a familiar voice as he felt a strong hand suddenly grab the back of his shirts collar, yanking him to his hands and knees. “Get up!” the man repeated. It was the Corporal. Corporal Vann.

Arthur grunted, slowly rising off his hands, onto his knees. He saw the darkness around them. Fires and headlights provided illumination. The warmth of one fire was behind him. He didn’t have to look to realize that the container truck they were driving into the town with had flipped onto its side. They spilled out. Off to the side he saw Private Nakaj popping away with his M-4 assault rifle, sighting invisible targets through nightvision goggles. Could only see shapes, but you could hear them.

“The firehouse is only a few blocks more, come on!” Corporal Vann screamed as he finally yanked the still dazed man to his feet when they both heard the sound of a loud, rapid buzzing. The whirr of powered equipment. It was close. It was above them.

Corporal Vann let go of Arthur’s collar and lifted his eyes, and his own rifle, up to the warehouse next to them. It had a dark glass window on its second floor that was practically right above them. Instinctively both backed away, as everything else around them seemed to seemingly dissipate. Then the window shattered and they both practically tripped over each other as they scrambled away from the spectral horror that leaped from the window, shattering the glass front into a thousand pieces.

Shreds of a black shroud or cloak wafted behind the human creature that leaped down from the second story window. In the hands of the short statured ambusher was a sharp fire axe, its fine edge pointed downward as the barefoot assailant landed on his feet just inches away from the two. It hissed as it raised the axe above its head, rearing back its face only to reveal a blackened crust of gore where the face should be, exposed orblike eyes resting in exposed sockets, and a lipless visage of cruelly jagged teeth.

The Corporal raised his own rifle, still pedaling backwards as the fire axe was raised. A three round burst erupted from his rifle, as the bullets ripped up through the pale neck and grosteque face of the creature attacking them. Half of its neck was torn open, the final bullet shattering half of its jaw but it kept on coming and still they could hear the undetected buzzing as well. The reddish steel blade of the weapon surged forward towards the marine who simply fired again. This time, all three rounds tore through the blackish red flesh of the faceless monster, the same bullets ripping through what remained of its brains and erupted like a geyser out the back and top of its head.

Ringing hollow as it struck the ground, the fire axe fell at the soldiers feet. “We got to go-!” Corporal Vann started to say when the buzzing sound suddenly grew far larger as a second attacker leaped right out of the same window, this one with a circular saw in hand, its serrated round blade spinning about, occasionally spitting out a bit of reddish blood. This one leaped farther into the air. The Corporal reacted instinctively, raising his rifle above his head as this second hellish ambusher fell upon him.

Sparks flew, and the Corporal crashed to the ground as the creature landed atop of him, driving down with the circular buzzsaw, howling with a mix of glee and madness as he tried to carve his blade through the weapon, into the marines face. He screamed. The madman pressed his attack as he crouched low, hissing and cursing gibberish as the sparks continued to fly, the bits of molten metal peppering the marines face with pain.

Awakened from his stupor, Arthur tucked his shoulder down and smashed into the side of this new foe, knocking him off of his partner but only just. In a flash, the human creature turned to Arthur and immediately lashed out with the buzzsaw again, a gurgling cackle escaping its masked face as he tried to rip his new victim apart. But he leaped away, just as much from the deadly saw as he did upon realizing the man was wearing a jack o’ lantern mask over his face with no visible eyeslit. In the darkness, with the violence, such a simple orange and black plastic bag worn over the face simply sent Arthur into a terrified retreat.

He leaped back as the edge of the buzzsaw almost sliced across his chest. The madman swung forward again, this time narrowly cutting open the young mans arm as he desperately tried to weave and dodge the potentially lethal strikes when out of the corner of his peripheral vision, he noticed possible salvation.

The mad creature shot forward with the buzzsaw, thrusting it outward as at the last moment, Arthur dodged to the side as the blade exploded into another spray of orange and reddish sparks as it struck into a light post. Falling to the ground in desperation to avoid that attack, Arthur then reached out with his hand, grabbed hold of the fire axe and before his attempted murderer could extricate his own weapon from the street lamp, Arthur swung the axe at his arm.

It didn’t sound quite as he imagined, with a crunching of bone as the axe blade drove into the upper arm of the assailant, instead of a clean slicing sound like he had expected. The man in the Jack O Lantern masked let out a muffled cry that rose above the din of the gunfire and distant, inhuman growls and cries which seemed to fill this town. Somehow Arthur found himself returning to his feet, and he swung again.

This time the axe cleaved into the side of the mans head, caving it in, ripping apart the flimsy plastic Hallowenn bag that was his mask. The howl stopped. The Jack O Lantern man staggered, but was still standing, his ruined arm still somehow pulling on the buzzsaw. Impossible for anyone who was human. Arthur could see the gory bits of brain on the axes blade. It should be dead. He raised the axe again, and brought it down. Then again. And again.

He struck blood streaked asphalt the next time. It was finished.

The Corporal grabbed him again. He informed him of the obvious. They had to run.

Up ahead Arthur could see Private Nakaj was leading the way, his sniper rifle strapped to his back, the M-4 in his hands. Behind him, thank God, was the Marshal. She had survived. She was still with him. Still giving him a purpose to keep on going.

His legs started pumping. He was dog tired, his quadriceps and calves were burning. So much running, so little rest. His breathing was ragged, the Corporal slowly pulling ahead of him as they crossed an intersection. Just then, he hefted his rifle up high again, towards the night sky, or rather a silhouette that appeared against it. It was a man with a flaming bottle in his hand. He held the firebomb, ready to incinerate the unknowing Marine private that was running point for their group.

The Corporal proved his own scout sniper training as a three round burst shattered the bottle, ripped apart the hand that held it, and set the man ablaze. Then, almost nonchalantly, he glanced over his shoulder at Arthur. “Two more blocks!” he said when his eyes grew large. He looked past Arthur, just as bullets cracked the air around them and Arthur heard the rumbling of a pickup truck.

But when Arthur, still running full on, glanced over his shoulder, he saw the red pickup and in the back a trio of more adversaries, one of them waving something above his head like a helicopter rotor. A moment later the man let go of whatever he was spinning above his head. Judging from the Corporal’s reaction, it turned out to be an explosive of some sort. They somehow ran even faster as the sling propelled explosive rattled onto the pavement behind them. Maybe yards behind them, maybe inches. It didn’t matter knowing now, they had to run.

They sprinted past the flaming corpse at the opposite corner of the intersection. It was the man the Corporal shot seconds earlier, he was flailing about disoriented. “Truck! Take it out!” the Corporal screamed as a geyser shaped explosion erupted behind them, shooting up a plume of smoke and dust when a few seconds later the pickup truck drove through the pillar of its own making while at the same time the Private spun about, fell to one knee and opened fire on the man with the sling standing in the back. Arthur, in a weird digression, wondered if the explosive was contact, because a grenade needed a timer did it not.

He shook his head, realizing that he somehow managed to daydream in the middle of running for his life. The Private fired a single pinpointed round. The man with the explosive laden sling suddenly glanced up, just in time to see his arm go limp and the explosive drop into the bed of the pickup. Instantly the back of the pursuing vehicle exploded, ripping the truck in two, as the front half, cab and engine, was suddenly blasted forward, spinning in midair.

The Corporal dived to the side as they both realized it was catapulting through the air right towards them. Arthur immediately hit the ground, clamping his eyes shut as he could almost feel several hundred pounds of metal fly literally inches over his body and crash into a smoking heap several feet in front of him.

Arthur scrambled back to his feet when remarkably, the drivers side door of the ruined cab opened up and a blood soaked person shambled out, a dozen lacerations still oozing blood and both arms twisted into twisted into oblique angles. The drivers head was hanging off to the side, sinews and muscle fibers sticking out of a neck freshly torn open. The partly decapitated head gave him a wink as it surged forward, its ragged broken arms reaching for him.

In response, Arthur swung the fireaxe down and finished the beheading before hockey checking the body aside and running past the ruined half of a pickup. When he caught sight of his friends again, he realized that they were pulling ahead. The multistoried firehouse was in sight now, just two blocks away, just two more intersections. He chased after them without pause, even when the windows on both sides of the party started to break open, and from the ceilings of the buildings lining the road, bodies started to fly off.

Well not bodies, they were still people, in some sense of the term.

The steady staccato of rifle fire was punctuated by the boom of the Marshals shotgun as they were literally assaulted from above, a cacophony of horribly visage and mutilated monsters falling upon them, eager to drag them down, and who knew what would follow. One of the bodies had its torso explode into a red mist as the Marshals shotgun intercepted the potential adversary in mid fall. Rifle fire ensured that others collapsed instead of landing on their feet.

But by the time Arthur ran past them, these same foes were recovering. A few mere bullets wouldn’t stop them. Arms and hands, some ending in jagged, clawlike fingers, lashed out for Arthur’s ankles and feet as he desperately ran amongst them. One of the fallen lurched directly into his path, dragging his shredded legs behind him and opening his mouth, uttering a guttural growl as he reached up at the passing man. Arthur gave him a hard soccer kick to the face as he passed by.

His three comrades were crossing the final intersection towards the firehouse, towards safety, when a bright light enveloped the dark intersection as soon as they started to cross. All three of them turned to the source of the light and opened fire as a sedan, high beam headlights on, suddenly careened down the road, wildly out of control. Private Nakaj leaped into the air at the last moment, as the car crashed into his side, causing the sharpshooter to be lifted onto its hood, and roll clear over the entire vehicle as it crashed into a building behind them.

The Marshal dropped to the wounded Marines side, as Arthur started to sprint towards them, still a half block behind when he noticed a shadow crossing his body, even in this dark night. He glanced up, gripping the fireaxe as he noticed another of the human creatures run clear off of the roof, his arms wrapped in oily rags that were alight with flame, a grease covered face glaring down at him in his descent. Arthur raised his axe to swing, just as the two of them colliding into a spill across the road.

Arthur shot out his arms, both hands gripping his fireaxe, as he pushed away his latest foe and pushed himself onto his legs. But the other man seized hold of the axe, grappling for control of the weapon as they both stood up. He locked eyes with his attacker, only to have his adversaries forehead shoot forward, smashing into his face with a headbutt. “Take it then!” Arthur growled back as he responded to the mans pulls on the weapon by pushing it forward, driving the shaft of the weapon into his opponents face horizontally. Smashed teeth and gurgling blood silenced his foe as Arthur gave the shaft of the weapon a final tug, wrenching it free from his foes shattered face and kicking him away.

He turned to the intersection only to see the fate of his friends sealed right before his eyes as Anna was helping the wounded Marine to his feet when a moment later, a mass of blood crazed…. Humans…. charged down the street. All three of them opened fire, as the first couple of them toppled or staggered, only to have the rest of the mob keep charging forward. Arthur started to move towards them.

Something seized his ankle before he made his first step. It pulled on his ankle, causing him to topple to the ground. He landed hard, as he glanced behind him and saw more of the armed mongrels coming up behind him and the man with the shredded legs had crawled up to him again. With a downward swing of his axe, Arthur brought the blade down upon its head, splitting it open and then kicking it away as he tried to scramble to his feet.

He heard a crack in the air, and then a searing burning sensation across his back. He staggered, as a second later, another of their attackers tackled him from behind. Screaming, Arthur shot his elbow back, catching something with the blow only to have others fall upon him, pushing him down. In the distance he could hear gunfire, and screams, an explosion, and then silence.

His vision was obscured as he was surrounded by a sea of these blood crazed maniacs as they pulled and tugged and clawed at him, until he realized some were tearing off his pants. “No. No. NO!” he started to scream, kicking away at his possible captors in desperation, his eyes staring up at the various ghastly faces staring down at him. Some looked normal, others were horribly mutilated or scarred beyond conception. All were inhuman. His pants were ripped away, as were his boxers.

He didn’t know what to think, except that he was terrified, and he wasn’t going to give up. Kill him. Knock him out. Not this. Anything but this. He didn’t want to experience it. He started to scream. A knife flashing from the mob suddenly made him fear something else. They weren’t going to rape him, not yet… anyways.

“Hold him down, I’m taking a pair of souvenirs!” one of them gushed excitedly, a slender man in a plaid shirt and trucker cap. In his dirty hand he held a small knife only a few inches long, barely more then a pocketknife. The others responded to the request with a series of giggles and chortling laughs as Arthur felt his limbs practically suspended.

Was this how it started. Was this how all of these… things that were once people turned into such savages. Not him. The blade hovered low over his legs, slowly coming towards his groin. “NO!” Arthur screamed, as with a burst of frantic, panicked strength, he wrenched a leg free of the mobs grasp and shot his foot out, slamming it into the hand holding the knife, driving the blade, coincidentally perhaps, into its owners throat.

The knife wielding man looked surprised as he staggered back, clutching at the knife buried hilt deep into the top of his neck. “Fuck this!” one of the others said as they grabbed hold of his errant leg again, and almost collectively, they started to pull at him from every direction when, cutting through the mob, appeared an unharmed looking man.

He stood out not only because he still looked human, but also because he wore something that just seemed out of place. A clean dark blue vest, with a Wal-Mart nametag on it. It said Ask! I can help! Corey on it. He had a rifle in hand. Almost immediately the others stopped trying to rip Arthur apart as the man raised the rifle butt into the air above his captives head. “Good night sweet cheeks,” suddenly said another voice, one he remembered from only hours ago.

Arthur glanced down and saw a familiar, almost pretty face, looking down at him. It was the woman from the farmhouse, the EMT with the pretty green eyes. He almost lost himself in them. She waved at him, with what was a bloody stump where her hand once was. That’s right, Arthur realized. They shot her hand off when they made their escape.

The man whose name may or may not have been Corey lowered the rifle butt upon Arthurs head. He blacked out.

CHAPTER TWO

Arthur awoke again, slowly growing used to such feelings. He felt heavy, like his head was weighed down with lead, a great pressure filling his skull. It wasn’t until he felt the tightness around his ankles that he realized he was actually hanging upside down. The blood was already rushed to his head. His eyes slowly opened up, and immediately he let out a cry of alarm as he jerked his head back from the Jack O’ Lantern mask staring at him. He tried to move his arms, but soon felt they were bound behind his back, tied to a rope that wrapped around his waist as well.

He realized it was just a Halloween mask, hefted up to his level by simply being mounted on a small lamp stand. His chest heaved, the cold sweat already beading on his body, as he felt an unseasonably cold draft waft over his body. His naked body.

Arthur glanced up, struggling through sheer exhaustion to even lift his head up and forward, noticing he was in fact stripped naked and suddenly felt vulnerable, his eyes already frantically searching for any possible cuts or wounds that might’ve already been inflicted on him while he was unconscious. But outside of quite a few bruises, many of which he already had before he had even been captured, he saw nothing nefarious, at least on the front side of his body.

He even managed to wiggle his toes as he noticed that he was being suspended from the ceiling by more synthetic rope, hanging from a meathook hanging on a strong heavy chain from the ceiling. It was cold in here. He looked around, noticing no other windows, as he studied the drab room he was in and immediately felt a swelling in his stomach.

There were a few metal folding chairs, a line of partially rusted lockers lined up against one of the dull gray painted walls, and beside the lockers was a pile of bloody clothes, shoes, personal items, soaked bandages… and bits of flesh. Hanging above the pile of soiled detritus was a dull yellow fire jacket with helmet and mask. His panned his vision farther along the wall, noticing a wooden door with a long shattered glass window was slightly ajar, leading into a dark hallway beyond. The room with the high ceiling he was in was brightly lit in contrast however, as he noticed bloody handprints crisscrossing the walls and the smell of something acrid yet perhaps… disturbingly, savory, in the air.

But what made his stomach churn was what was laying out on a roughly cut out square of green tarp. A completely charred and burned corpse, the flesh burned and baked until it was crisp all over, undoubtedly the origin of the sickeningly unpleasant smell and yet despite the horrible burns, Arthur could still recognize the corpse as once being a female.

He started to think of a way to escape, hoping his initial cry of alarm didn’t attract anyone. Realizing his hands were bound by rope and not handcuffed, he started to flex and relax his wrists and forearms. Flex. Relax. Flex. Relax. Over time the knots would loosen, soon he’d be able to wiggle his hands free. Then he’d reach up, unhook himself, fall to the ground, make his escape. Simple. And entirely possible. Or so he hoped. It would just require a lot of patience, and a great deal of luck to go with it.

Flex.

Relax.

Flex.

Relax.

Fifteen minutes passed, and he could feel the binds on his wrists loosening. He was going to do it. He was actually going to do it. Arthur let out a soft smile as he started to pull on one of his hands, struggling to get the base of his thumb through the bonds. He started to wince in pain. It was still tight, maybe a few more minutes. He hoped he had them.

“Almost there,” he heard a voice say. Arthur paused for a second, needing it to realize he wasn’t saying it himself. Suddenly alarmed again, he twisted his head around, desperately trying to see the origin of the voice and noticed in the periphery of his vision a fleeting glimpse of the Wal-Mart guy and the EMT with the pretty eyes and their twisted smiles.

“What do you think your doing?” the EMT asked with a girlish giggle as she laid one cold hand… and one uneasily sharp tip of a forearm bone on each side of his face, gently caressing it. “Shhhhh…” she cooed softly into his ear. “Don’t panic my little helot,” the green eyed EMT said, her lusty Southern accent taking a disturbingly seductive tone as he felt her tickle his jawline with her fractured forearm. He started to shiver, out of fear.

She laughed. He shot his head backward but the back of his skull only struck air and the response was only a bout of laughter from the two. “Corey…” the EMT said backstepping away and in front of the suspended man. Arthur turned his gaze upon the pouty lips and green eyes of the EMT, he remembered the first time he encountered her, at the farmhouse. He had asked her Why then. At this moment, he still felt no closer to the answer.

He felt a noose suddenly wrap around his neck, another length of rope. It started to constrict him. They were choking him. He started to gag, his reddish hued face started to turn purple, his skin feeling like it was going to pop from the pressure. “Your asking why aren’t you?” the EMT asked. “This is who I am, deep inside me. Deep inside you,” the female medic said, laying a hand on her chest, then pointed her finger at his. “But to be honest, I don’t have the words. I’ll show you.”

His body started to grow numb, his neck and throat and lungs alight with raw pain as the medic slowly sauntered her curvy hips towards her captive plaything and laid her hand on his cheek again. It still felt ice cold. “We’re going to rape you Arthur.” She twirled her finger around in front of his face. “Evvvverywhere!” she added with a light giggle before slapping him softly. “You are going to suffer humiliation, degradation, torture, all of the worst parts of the Bible before the night is up. And in the morning, when you awaken from this nightmare, you’re going to be groveling at my feet my little helot, and you’ll love every minute of it my handsome helot.”

The noose tightened. He blacked out again.
---

Fifty thousand volts shocked him awake as Arthur started to writhe and scream, still in the same position as before. But as he shot his head forward, it struck a metal device as he suddenly realized, as soon as his eyes shot open, that his head was only a couple feet off the ground. In front of him, he noticed a hamster water bottle was in front of him and above that, there was the Wal-Mart guy with the nametag standing over him. Arthur hesitated, looking up at the handsome young man staring down at him.

“Hi, my name is… Corey,” the man in the Wal-Mart vest said, tapping his nametag which just seemed surreal right now. “Are you thirsty?” he asked in a soft voice, his almost doe like brown eyes staring down at him. He smiled, warmly.

Arthur didn’t return the affection but then eyed the water bottle. It was clean, and it was full of water. He tried to sniff it, which only caused Corey to chuckle. “Hey, it’s not poison okay,” Corey said as he reached a finger down in front of Arthur’s face and rubbed a fingertip against the bottles nozzle, letting a drop fall on his finger and then put it in his own mouth. “See. Water.”

But the captive remained aloof. Corey frowned. “I’m trying to help you Arthur,” he said, using his name. That got his attention as Arthur immediately glanced up at him. Corey smiled. “You have nightmares, you talk about yourself, do you know that?” Wal-Mart man smiled again. “I don’t have nightmares anymore. I have… fantasies…” He shot his hands out to each side of his face, wiggling his fingers. “Then I wake up and live them out.” For a moment, he stopped talking and then glanced at the water bottle. “You sure you aren’t thirsty?”

“I’m not drinking that water,” Arthur said, not falling for the trap.

“Okay,” Corey shrugged as he started to unzip his khaki pants. “If you won’t drink water, then you don’t deserve water you little bitch!” the young man then said, his calm, almost endearing veneer fading in an instance as his personality made a complete one eighty degree turn. “Don’t worry, I heard on the Discovery channel it’s quite sterile.”
---

This time he woke up spitting, gagging, shaking his head, as he realized what had just happened. It seemed like only seconds ago, but it could’ve been hours ago. He just felt absolutely wiped. In front of him, he noticed the hamster water bottle and this time didn’t hesitate. He wrapped his lips around the metal nozzle and started suckling the water from the bottle, each drop that he sucked out of the tube moistening his dry mouth, each drop seemingly invigorating his weakened body.

He stopped when he heard a groan and immediately pulled his lips off of the nozzle, as he noticed off to the side, Corey was sitting on one of the folding chairs, his back to him, but sitting on his lap, facing him and thus Arthur, was the one handed EMT. Immediately he deduced what they were doing. It wasn’t making love.

Having sex was merely a polite description.

They were humping like bunnies, and in the middle of one of their embraces when the medic slowly lifted her head from her mates… or perhaps helots, face, and looked up at Arthur who immediately closed his eyes as his nose took a whiff of something. But it wasn’t the smell of flesh, or sex, some sort of chemical. Almost caustic.

His two torturers continued their session until he could hear their joint cries as they climaxed and then, breathing a bit heavier, he could hear the two slowly approach him now. The medic smiled. “Are you faking my handsome helot,” she asked, taking a few deep breaths after every few words. He kept his eyes closed and remained unmoving. He suppressed shivering when he heard, and indeed, felt, her lips next to his ear. “Know how I know?” she asked seductively before her lips left his ear.

He felt a clenching pain around his groin. “Your hard you sick little pervert!” she hissed a moment later, giving his shaft a painful jerk before driving her knee into his stomach. “Punish him Corey…” she added, patting his naked backside. “Hard!”
---

The slightly burning chemical spell was the first thing he could sense, as he started to sniffle his nose. But he noticed something else, his body was relaxing, No… it was laying down. He was laying down. It felt great. Such a physical relief. It had been so arduous… so long…. He almost forgot caution now as he opened his eyes and glanced to his side, only to see the charred to a crisp face staring right back at him, eyes wide open. He then heard a scream emanating from it and immediately let out one of his own only to have the medic pop up from behind the table and the charred corpse and letting out a hearty laugh.

A second later he suddenly felt a jerk on his feet as he was pulled clear off of the table and started to spin around, as if the chain suspending him had been wrapped up over and over and over again. At the same moment, the lights suddenly went out as an unseen projector suddenly illuminated one of the walls, as the buildings PA system staring blaring with a cacophony of disturbing sounds as he heard a near random mix of music, animal cries of pain, human screams, sobbing, and even worse, the black and white imagery being shown on one of the gray walls.

It was military or medical testing on animals from what he could see as he seemed to spin about endlessly. A few revolutions later, he heard a hose suddenly start up, dousing him with ice cold water as a voiceover came over the PA, interrupting the maddening cacophony of sound which at the moment, was of children laughing and giggling.

“There are many unidentified compounds, poisons and chemicals that we do not know of. Others that are so rarely used in certain manners that we do not think of it. For example, when a certain dry chemical is applied to human skin, is it possible that the application of only water can induce painful burning sensations upon the combination of the two ingredients. It be possible to feel like you are being burned alive and yet… still physically unharmed.” The water mixed with the chemicals on his skin. It started to burn. He started to burn as the hellish soundtrack started to play again as he saw still squealing, still living adult pigs getting charred by handheld blowtorches and flamethrowers.
---

Fifty thousand volts from a stun gun shocked him awake again. This time there was no foreplay. He’d lost count on how many times he’d been… been… violated by the medics sadistic partner. He seemed to relish in it. Arthur realized he shouldn’t be surprised. He wished he was dead.

Before his eyes could even open though, he felt a great weight suddenly wrap around his torso and looked up and noticed the backside of a beautiful onion shaped posterior pressing down on his chin, a pair of bare legs wrapped around his chest, the legs hooked on his underarms, the pain of supported the weight of a whole other body sending a burning pain through his bound wrists and shoulders, almost to the point of dislocating it seemed. Through the pain… it took him a moment to realize it was the medic, as naked as him now, had leaped onto his body.

She pulled back her arm, the one with the missing hand and waved her appendage above his face, causing him to stare at it in mute terror, even through the pain. She had replaced her hand… with a long fine blade. “I’m going to cut you my handsome helot,” she said teasingly before her arm disappeared out of sight.

Her legs gave his chest an even tighter squeeze, her butt pushing down on his chin, straining his throat until it was beet red, making it almost impossible for him to breath even if he could expand his lungs. Then he felt the sharp blade against his stretched stomach, the fine edge felt cold, a chilled pain slicing across his stomach, each slice precise and several inches in length. He started to close his eyes, unable to scream in outright terror as he felt her precise, surgical lacerations open up his torso before working on his trembling flanks. He wanted to cry out, he wanted to beg her to stop, but was barely able to remain conscious.

All that he could feel though was the cutting of his flesh, the inexorably slow incisions criss crossing his lower body. He could feel the warmth replacing the cold metal blade, feel his body grow weaker. He’d be left hanging here like a piece of meat, bleeding out slowly, painfully.

One final cut, right across his stomach. He could almost feel himself die.

Then, almost gingerly, the green eyed EMT hopped off of her victim, her lean, shapely nude form slowly, almost gracefully, kneeling low before Arthur. Her bladed arm was behind her back, and she leaned in close, staring into the eyes of the man who looked like he was on deaths door. She was looking for something, Arthur knew that. Something dark, perverse, tucked away for the length of a mans life until he was faced with his own inevitable mortality. To her, staring into the eyes of a person about to die, looking through those windows to a persons soul…

She opened up her soft lips as Arthur, feeling unable to turn away, stared deep into her emerald orbs. He could breath now, the pressure off his chest relieved. He opened up his mouth, took a deep breath, and felt her lips press against his. It tasted good. He closed his eyes.

He’d give in.

They parted lips, Arthur opened his eyes, staring at her with a glossy gaze. “I… I…” Arthur started to murmur weakly, his dry tongue slowly, futilely trying to moisten his lips.

“Shhhh…” the medic replied. “I need you to answer me a question my little helot,” she said softly, her voice still crisp, and at this moment, completely enrapturing his attention.

“Anything…”

“Where is the woman that freed you from the prison?” the green eyed beauty asked innocuously.

Now there was an image of perfect beauty. He recalled her now, she saved his life. If not for her, he would’ve never escaped the prison. He would have been trapped there, alone… perhaps captured by these… creatures… earlier. Perhaps it was an infatuation, but he did want to see her again. Suddenly, he looked at everything anew.

The gloss disappeared. The haze over his mind dissipated. He felt his stomach, his entire body still heaving and deflating and glanced at his torso. There was nary a mark on it. He started to blink, clearing his mind of the cobwebs. His captor recoiled. He shot forward his head, the top of his head glancing off of her brow as she stumbled back in surprise.

Arthur screamed, finally losing control. “Finish it you coward!” Green eyes snarled back and suddenly shot forward with her blade arm, intent on driving the point of the weapon clean through his chest. “Come on!”

The blade lunged forward, when suddenly a whirlwind of action filled the room.

Inexplicably, she froze up in mid thrust, the point of her weapon only inches from his bare chest. She gritted her teeth, sweat suddenly beading on her brow. She was trying to propel herself forward, but instead… she was faltering, even collapsing when at the same moment as she crumpled to the ground, a trio of masked men in mottled camouflage burst into the room. The leading one was speaking in strange tongues, bellowing indecipherable gibberish as he pointed at green eyes, reducing her to a shivering, naked ball curled up on the floor.

But Arthur had no time to consider what was going on as the other two moved straight for him. One moved to a switch on the wall and flipped it. An instant later, Arthur dropped to the floor, practically landing on his head as he crashed to the ground, his arms painfully constrained behind his back still. He tried to recover, but the third masked man was already upon him.

Just as large and burly as the others, he laid his gloved hands on Arthur and with an angry growl, picked Arthur up to his feet and threw him into a far concrete wall. “Tell us where she is!” he growled before pulling his hand back and delivering a swift backhand to the prisoners face, knocking him back to the ground, a trail of blood drizzling from his nose when before he could move again, he felt a hard knee suddenly slam down on the back of his neck, crushing and asphyxiating him.

He gritted his teeth, his face turning red again. “Tell us where she is!” the masked man growled at him, pressing down on his neck with all of his considerable bodyweight. Arthur’s blood red face tightened up, his thin dry lips slowly curving at the edges and he started smiling, barely able to breath, his dry, weak chuckling somehow managed to escape his lips.

There’s nothing they could do to him, he realized, not after this.

CHAPTER THREE

“Can’t believe this little Asian fuck has been giving us so many problems,” a detached voice said, sounding gruff, as Arthur, vision blurred, slowly opened his eyes anew and closed them again, finding he was still in the same place he had been before. Strapped to the table now, he felt a burning in his upper arm, right above the elbow, an IV or something hooked into it. He felt thirsty, and hungry and his entire body was just feeling numb right now, a sense of cold clamminess wafting over him.

“We should just bring Jill back in here, she had him to the breaking point,” the other man stated, his voice also ringing deep, almost baritone. From the sounds of their speech, Arthur could connect the dots, realizing these were probably the same two large framed men who had beaten him into unconsciousness a moment earlier.

“No. No. They tortured him. Choked him. Beat him.” He paused with a chuckle. “Raped and sodomized him. We’ll stick with the psychotropics, get him to trip up,” the first voice said.

“He might be too far gone,” the second man said as Arthur felt a sharp stabbing pain in his arm, followed by a deep burning that ran up through his arm, following a bit of pressure of a new drug being injected into his system. His forehead started to flare up, like it was boiling, fingers and toes starting to twitch.
---

The smell of sulphur, and burning, suddenly overwhelmed his senses as his eyes shot awake and suddenly he felt the cold sweat covering his entire body, sending chills through him, his hair wet and sticking to his head, absolute fear overwhelming him as his pupils shrunk up, focusing on a bright orange flame in front of him. It started to get closer, and closer, until he realized it wasn’t just a flame, it was the tip of a glowing red hot metal skewer of some sort. He started to pant and panic, trying to move his head aside but finding his muscles and tendons having turned to jelly it seemed.

So he closed his eyes, shutting out the fire, when suddenly he heard something else building up, a low buzzing sound rising in the room, the only thing he could hear. Seconds passed, it grew louder. More seconds, the more intense it became. His head lulled off to one side, as he felt his ears start to tingle, and his stomach churn. The discomfort slowly rose through his body, his breathing become erratic, as he tried to ignore, or shut out the plain buzz noise. “Fffhhh…. Fhhhhh….fhhhhh,” he started to gasp weakly, as if trying to interrupt the constancy of the auditory irritation. He winced, feeling the burning in his temples, his eyes closing even tighter until finally they shot open again.

He yelped, immediately feeling the heat of the glowing metal skewer on his naked eyeball and closed his eyes again, still desperately trying to find a way to just… shut down his hearing. He tried to drown it out again, focus his thoughts so he could at least start to growl, or hum, or whistle, but as he started to haggardly blow air through his chapped lips, he felt a light tap of a cane across his exposed genatalia and immediately tightened up.

It tapped again.

He bristled, eyes tightening shut again.

Then again.

His body remained tense, anticipating the next blow. It wasn’t painful, but it was… unpleasant, a mild numbness rising from his groin already.

The next strike didn’t occur. He relaxed.

He felt the cane tap across the exact area and uttered a whimper. Another one. He mewed softly, almost like a kitten. The buzz sound persisted. He started to grit his teeth, biting his lip… struggling to find an outlet for the pain, the irritation, the simple heat growing on his face, causing him to tear up. He tasted the salty blood trickling down his tongue as his teeth broke the dry skin. It was unbearable. The seconds passed with agony.

Finally he tried to form a word, but a weak groan was all that escaped his lips. Gibberish. The noise, the caning of his private parts, the heat. Whatever they pumped into his body. He felt like liquid, as if immersed in a vat of meat tenderizer, unable to even control anything beyond his face, yet his nerves absorbing everything. A minute later, maybe an eternity longer, he felt his genatalia grow numb. Now there was pain. Indescribable pain as his sensitive nerve clusters started to flare up with even the slightest stimulation. The night had to be over soon, they had to kill him soon. This couldn’t go on forever.
---

His eyes shot across the room wildly, as he looked about with wild abandon, his own mind running wild, almost feral and feverish from the ordeal. He saw a bright light, not fire, but still terrifying, try to focus on his eyes. Hands were holding his head in place, forcing him to face the small flashlight, but his eyes continued darting about.

A familiar lusty voice anchored a splinter of his sane mind back to the world. “He’s in deep psychosis,” the green eyed medic said, now wearing a pair of seafoam green scrubs, but looking no less beautiful.

“So it’s working,” one of the big men said, still wearing his mask.

“No you idiots!” the medic snapped back harshly. “He’s losing all of his connections with reality. If you want information from him, all you’ll get is nonsense!”

Her repudiation earned her a swift backhand from one of the men, knocking her to the ground. But almost immediately, she shot back to her feet only to suddenly freeze in place. “Don’t talk back slave,” the same man ordered, having raised his hand to her before, with another gesture, dropping his arm to his side and like magic, she was allowed to move again. Looking down towards the floor, she started to speak in a far more deferential tone.

“I need to check his ears,” she said softly. The big man stepped aside, she stepped forward, leaning in close with the flashlight as she focused it into his ears. Then, barely moving her full lips, she started whispering into his ears. “The more you lose control, the more they take it. Bring them in close,” she practically cooed into his ears while leaning beside his table.

Without another word, she rose up and shrugged. “Besides the psychosis, he’s still not in danger physically,” she said, as all of them stared down at their now half delirious prisoner. Jill, the green eyed EMT gave him a final glance before leaving the room.
---

The blow almost crushed his head, as suddenly Arthur let out a cry of pain, his mouth wide open, screaming, only to have it cut short by a sudden inhalation of thick dust. He gagged, he coughed, wheezing as he felt the entire room and yes, even the ground, suddenly tremble. Earthquake? He heard loud sparks of sound, muffled by this buildings thick walls, continuous, peppering. Dulled by the drugs and torture, it took him a while to recognize what it was.

Gunfire.

The room shuddered again, thick mason and brick walls cracking, mortar and cement loosening, thick billows of white dust brewing up from a thousand newly made cracks and creases in the building itself. Almost concurrently, he heard a slicing of air cut through the air above him. They were being bombed. Another distant boom, and a second later the building shivered and shuddered, several of the rusted lockers along the wall toppling over as Arthur, feeling some control over his body, groggily glanced over the edge of the table, noticing nearby the charred corpse laying neatly atop the pile of blood soaked refuse and tatters. It looked different now, one of his perverse captors had decided to dress the corpse up in the heavy yellow firefighter jacket and helmet.

But other then the recently departed, no one else was in the room.

He wanted to feel relieved but being strapped, and naked, to a table while the building was falling around him was far from ideal. Still, he tried to lift his head, get better bearing, only to immediately feel a swirl of pain and numbness surge through his body, compelling him to stay down. It struck him like a jackhammer.

Physical exhaustion. Emotionally drained. The torture. The rape. The drugs. Whatever it was, it had taken his toll. He just wanted to curl up and die, even now. Another distant explosion interrupted the almost perennial sounds of battle that seemed to fill the surroundings beyond the confines of this room. At that same moment, two of the heavily built masked men, his tormentors, raced into the room.

Arthur relaxed, giving up. He moaned.

One of them took it as a good sign. “He’s alive!” the first one said, racing over to the side of Arthur’s table.

“Kill him, no time now,” the other said as he ran to the opposite end of the room, and snatching up the three knapsacks lined against the wall. Dutifully, the first man unbuttoned the strap on his pistol holster that was hanging off of the right side of his belt.

“Maria…” Arthur moaned softly. “Maria…” The first man, picking up on what he said, leaned in closer, wondering if he was saying something useful, or just engaging in more delirious gibberish. “M…mmmaria,’ he murmured softly.

Noting the Latino name, the masked man pulled off his skimask, lowering his ear to his mouth. “Where is Maria?” the big man asked when he felt something grip his waist. He moved his hand down, just as Arthur suddenly shot his head upward, opening wide and bringing his teeth clashing down on his torturers soft fleshy ear bottom.

He let out a wail, as he felt his victims sharp teeth slice through his skin, ripping through the bottom of his ear before cruelly tearing back and away. The torturer snapped his head back, finishing the work as the bottom of the ear was torn away. Staggering back and clutching the side of his head, the big man reached for his pistol only to find nothing in the holster. Arthur spit out the bit of bloody flesh he caught in his teeth and aimed his recently liberated pistol at the big man.

He started puling the trigger. Three shots spit out of the sidearm, the first tearing through the wailing mans shoulder, tearing through his arteries, a geyser of blood shooting from the grazing shot as he stumbled back, doubly reeling in pain. Two more rounds tore into his neck, tearing out chunks of his throat, causing his body to simply drop. His chest spasmed upward, as his arms futilely clawed at his ruined neck. He was still gagging when Arthur heard the sound of backpacks dropping to the opposite side of his table.

The second gunman immediately spun about upon hearing the cry of pain, dropping his pack and unslinging his rifle. Unable to fire over his own prone body and strapped to the table by his wrists, ankles and waist, Arthur took a deep breath. Putting his faith in some mysterious intangible, he flicked his wrist upward, tossing the pistol over his own body, and caught it it in his opposite hand. Even through his ski mask, Arthur could see the mans eyes grow wide at the stunning maneuver. He winked back at the dumbfounded gunman, and opened fire.

The first round caught the remaining man in the gut, knocking the fight out of him, and causing him to drop his rifle, as the successive rounds started cutting into his chest and arms, each successive impact sending the mans bullet riddled body staggering farther back until finally the pistol ran empty and its target struck agaisnt the far wall, slowly sinking to the ground, leaving a red smear of blood on the wall in his wake.

Another blast tremored through the weakening structure, chunks of brick masonry tumbling about. Arthur tried to struggle a bit, but it only made him feel worse. Just the simple exertion of gunning down these two men had drained him. He sighed, staring up at the crumbling ceiling. At least he cut two more of them down. That had to mean something.

A third member of this… cult or whatever it was, staggered into the room, his woodland fatigues marred with dust, a grimy looking AK-47 in his hands. He took two steps into the room before suddenly freezing, noticing the bullet riddled corpses in the room, and Arthur, still naked, laying strapped down to the table. Blood was still caking his chin as he turned to the newcomer and calmly dropped his revolver. “Don’t worry, I’m finished!” he groaned softly, finding at least a little comfort in the fact that this coward would probably just shoot him rather then torture him to death.

The gunman raised his Kalashnikov when a deafening blast suddenly ripped him off his feet, a surge of dust and dirt enveloping him from behind. The edge of the shockwave smashed into the side of Arthur’s table, rattling it, but not knocking it over as he felt a thousand particles pepper his naked body, each one delivering a tiny sting of pain that when combined over a fraction of a second, set off an inferno of sharp pain that further overwhelmed him.

Soon though the dust cleared, the murky mists of gray gradually falling to the ground, revealing the dust caked gunman. He was battered, and rattled, but far from dead. Shaking off the grogginess in his jarred mind, he raised his rifle as Arthur stiffened up, his eyes focusing not on his executioner, but looking past him.

A red bladed axe held high, the same one he had used before he was captured, was seemingly vaulted high above the cloud of dust in the room, hanging high above and behind the gunmans masked head. At the last moment, the cultist realized something was amiss and yet, not trusting himself to take his eyes off of the supposedly helpless Arthur, shifted his vision to his side slightly and out of the periphery of his eye, he saw a blackened and charred corpse, wearing a rugged, blood stained firefighter jacket and cracked helmet, holding that same fireaxe high above her head.

He took his finger off the trigger guard.

The axe blade swung down, the metal edge cleaving through cloth, scalp and skull, cutting deep into his brain, scrambling its inner workings. The fingers went limp, the rifle dropped from his hand. The seemingly resurrected firefighter, still looking like a crispy black corpse, and for all purposes was, planted a heavy boot covered foot on the backside of the fallen gunman and wrenched her axe free. Scrambled brains oozed out of a cleaved open skull. Arthur stole a glance.

Distasteful to say the least.

He glanced up at his unexpected savior. She lowered her axe, milky white eyes that were still full of life rose from the butchered adversary, and took in sight of the helpless prisoner. The building itself seemed to sway. “Help me…” Arthur asked softly, barely able to find the strength to speak.

She approached him, each of her steps seemingly uncertain, as if she was learning to walk all over again. When she got closer, Arthurs eyes managed to focus on some faded black lettering on the chest of the dirty yellow coat she was wearing. It said CARANO. The Fire Chief they were going to rescue. If she was still… alive, maybe, just maybe, she knew if his friends were okay. Especially the Marshal.

Her nailless fingers, also burnt to little crisps, somehow still worked as if they were undamaged, as she undid the leather straps that held him down quickly, efficiently. He could hear that with every moment, her… skin… seemed to crackle, but he noticed no sores open up as should of happened. It should be impossible, but he had already seen men… and women… keep functioning far beyond the point of death. He even had a skeleton pursue him. When it came the horrors so far, he reasoned, this was almost expected.

Except for the entire rescuing him instead of beating and raping him to death part, that was still a surprise. “Re…” he started to say, struggling to breath, much less speak. “Regina… my friends… are they… are they somewhere?” he barely managed to mutter, his voice so weak it was almost inaudible.

She didn’t answer, if she could. Perhaps not hearing, or just ignoring him, she slipped her charred arms underneath his body and in a display of peculiar physical strength, lifted his near limp body clean off the table and over her shoulders, into a firemans carry, appropriately enough. She didn’t evne grunt. She just started to walk towards the door, before pausing for a second as she crouched down besides one of the bodies and picking up the Kalashnikov.

He started to groan in pain as he felt his own body starting to move, each step making him barely bounce on her shoulders, but still causing a wave of pain and discomfort to practically flow through him. He closed his eyes tightly, warm tears slipping between his shut eyelids as he tried to cope with the painful journey. This was tortorous, but he didn’t want to give her any reason to leave him behind.

They slowly moved into the adjoining hallway, pitch black now, and the path behind them covered in rubble. Holes in the wall and through the shattered glass brick windows above them had beams of moonlight shining through and combined with the dust, giving the entire hallway an almost ethereal silvery purple glow. He suppressed another urge to scream, and then to pass out as she carried him deeper into the hall, towards what looked like a pair of metal double doors at the end of the corridor.

Her boots crunched with every step, he could even hear her breathing, a slight wheeze, even over the din of distant explosions and gunfire. Occassionally, he heard louder blasts and distant purrs of motorized machines. He couldn’t quite come to grips with what was going on. They came upon the double doors. He felt a pain swelling from within him, as if the pressure placed on his chest from being carried across her shoulders was about to boil over him, overtake his senses, make him pass out from the sheer fatigue.

But he resisted and managed to see her reach out with one of her blackened hands, still gripping the AK, and push the door open. As soon as it opened even slightly, a rush of cold mountain air swept into the hallway, wafting over them, the night bringing its own chill. Also coming with the breeze, was the magnified sounds of battle. He heard her grunt as she pushed the door open with one hand, forcing it against a pile of rubble covering the pavement. It only took a few seconds, but she managed to widen the opening enough for them to step out.

She took a first step, as, wearily, Arthur looked up and suddenly they were both bathed in the bright white headlights of a nearby vehicle. The bright points of light alone caused them to stop them cold as both Arthur and his unexpected rescuer turned and saw a large squat vehicle, with rough angles and a broad chassis, seemingly aimed right at them. For some reason the lights seemed to double in their sheer intensity and then a vaguely humanoid shape mounted on the top, akin to a knight on its horse, operated the action on his weapon and opened fire.

It sounded like a hydraulic action, as a forty millimeter explosive projectile burst from the tip of the humvee mounted automatic grenade launcher. The Fire Chief started to sprint, carrying him still firmly with one arm wrapped around his legs, the other slinging her rifle over her shoulder. He didn’t see where the grenade landed, but could hear the nearby explosion, and feel chips and splinters of brick and rock pepper his body.

The next few rounds followed in rapid succession as the humvees engine roared to life, closing in on their prey. He could hear a loud snap, whoever was firing simply wasn’t a good shot, treating the grenade launcher like a machine gun, letting the rounds sail past or over their heads with a crackle of air and explode a couple blocks past them. Maybe they would make it.

Two more cracks in the wind then a third explosion disintegrated the corner of the brownstone they were heading towards, causing the alleyway that she was heading for to suddenly explode outward as huge chunks of brick and red hot shrapnel, hurtling through the air on the cusp of its own shockwave, slammed into the two of them and sent them both spilling to the ground. She let out a weak moan as he tumbled into a roll, his body knocking against the opposite curb. The noise of the humvee grew louder until he could just barely lift his head and saw the suddenly massive looking vehicle about to overcome them.

Then the wall of the very building they came out of suddenly collapsed, but not from any external explosion, but rather within. The meathooks were the first clue. It was a meat packing warehouse of some sort.

But Arthur wasn’t expecting the image he then saw as the walls collapsed and bursting forth from the ensuing cloud of debris was something clearly supernatural. Easily a dozen feet tall, and even more wide, balanced on two tiny, fat covered, human sized leg, and two massive flabby arms that looked more like clubs. It was bulbous, with sickly pale, blood stained flesh. With every bounding, almost bouncing gait of the ponderous… creature, layers upon layers of skin rippled and recoiled as the thick, corpulant mass of flesh surged forward. It let out a bellow as it charged across the street towards the suddenly dwarfed humvee, a small head with a wide, razor toothed maw of teeth, mounted on the top of the spherical body being the source of the inhuman battlecry.

The gunner turned his weapon as the humvee inexplicably skidded to a stop just sort of Arthur and his collapsed rescue. It proved to be a fatal miscalculation as within a span of seconds, the corpulent abomination unleashed one of its club shaped arms and with an almost casual gesture, lifted the humvee clean into the air, flipping it onto its side and throwing the hapless gunner out onto the street.

Arthur watched, in his condition, practically helpless, as he saw the gunner who was clearly wearing the battle dress uniform of the United States military, try to scramble away only to have the same meaty hand suddenly seize hold of one of his squirming legs and hoist him into the air. A pistol came out, the soldier started firing. Arthur blinked.

He saw the man raised over the rotund monsters gaping maw, firing round after round point blank into the creatures face to no effect. It squeezed its hand, crushing the mans leg and then lowered his arm, pistol and all into its mouth and closed its lips. It jerked the human upward again, ripping the arm off, along with most of the shoulder as thick trails of blood seeped from the mortal wound of the still twitching man.

Arthur tried to scream, but only managed a dry rasp of his voice as he rolled his head to the side and noticed the drum fed Kalashnikov was only feet away. If he could only summon the strength to grab it. He heard another sickening crunch though, and looking back, saw the upper body of the soldier was now completely gone, all that was left was a pair of wriggling legs and a copious amount of intestine that was being shaken out and down into the beasts open maw like it was candy.

He let out a soft shriek of terror and tried to move his arm with force alone towards the weapon, but to no avail. His arm moved only an inch, and then out of the corner of his eye he noticed the bulky monstrosity turn its tiny, neckless and hairless head towards them. It tossed the two bloody limbs aside upon noticing the fresh morsel, naked and helpless, as if prepared for it to feast upon.

It made one ponderous gait towards the two of them, when before it could take another step another thundering boom could be heard, but this one was far more crisp. The massive creature suddenly staggered, a massive shockwave visibly rippling through its entire girthy mass for a split second before it suddenly was torn apart, exploding like a pus and fat filled balloon. Thick drops of sickly yellow liquid fat and greasy crimson fell upon Arthur as he vainly tried to recoil from the awful cacophony of grisly bits of liquid and flesh that were falling around and upon him.

Farther down the road, another unmistakable sight could be seen as what looked like a main battle tank rumbled down the road, its main gun trailing off with smoke visible in the moonlight. Behind it a squad of soldiers with glowing night vision pieces and burdened down with weapons and kit jogged after the the large vehicle.

The main gun was turning towards them as the Fire Chief suddenly burst back to life just as the the small machine gun mounted alongside the mammoth main one started spitting out a lethal line of lead at a rate of almost ten rounds a seconds.

I haven't seen Lost so your reference is lost on me. (edit: no pun actually intended)

Thank you for your time.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bullets zipped past their heads, slicing through the air, tearing up the red bricks on either side of the alleyways as puffs of particles jetted outward from each impact, peppering the two of them as they charged through what was becoming a dust cloud. Arthur wanted to scream, just being carried was almost unbearable, as he literally felt his insides slosh around painfully with every bounce. Through it all, he could even feel his bearer stagger not once, but twice, leading him to fear each time that she was struck by an unlucky round.

But she kept on moving as they cleared the alleyway and the steady tempo of the tanks machine gun flew farther behind them. Heading into another perpendicular alley. It was empty of corpses, but detritus and garbage littered the once peaceful avenue. Numerous fires from far off gave an eerie glow to the entire scene as the Fire Chief immediately turned around a corner, staying close to the back wall of the businesses and heading downt the slightly wider road. Up ahead an overturned dumpster, its contents spilled out across the road, provided an impromptu roadblock.

Arthur however was slowly raising his eyes up to the rooftops, knowing that is where they struck from last time. But all he saw was an eerie orange glow, barely creeping over the top edges of the alley they were now in. Like they were surrounded by fire. Maybe they were. Around them, they could still hear the near constant din of a full blown firefight erupting and above them, the night sky was filled with invisible thunderclaps which he now could only assume were jets.

He didn’t put two and two together though until he noticed the Fire Chief finally stop and inexplicably slide him off her shoulder and onto the ground. Arthurs head involuntarily rolled to the side as he notice they had stopped beside a massive crater. It had literally seemed to of blown straight out of the ground, at least ten feet deep and thirty feet wide. Chunks of asphalt, concrete, brick and masonry were brewed up, with smaller chunks having been hurled into an even larger spread. Just a couple feet away was the half buried front end of what looked like the burnt out frame of a minivan.

Looking beyond the crater, he saw half of a large brick building, surrounded by the twisted remains of a black iron railed fence, replete with spikes on its top. He heard the scraping of metal off to the side and turned, noticing the Fire Chief pick up a charred wooden sign and then wave it at him. With the glow of the night, he could read the words clearly.

City Hall.

The bomb had landed right in Helioburg’s City Hall backyard and blew apart the entire building, except for the front facing. A shallow haze still pervaded the place as he noticed dozens of tiny fires were burning whatever patches of grass and vegetation remained in the city halls lawn, or from the flammables torn apart from within the ruined building. The Fire Chief turned to him then, dropping the sign and held up a single finger to him before thumbing to the main avenue and nodding to it. Perhaps half understanding, all Arthur could do was whimper as she approached him.

“No.. please don’t carry me anymore,” he finally said as she laid a hand on his arm, intent on lifting him again. She paused, shaking her disturbingly charred face and still all too human eyes. Her grip was cold, but the skin… hardened, feeling almost like a carapace. Her fingers wrapped around his forearm, tugging on him, pulling his upper body into a sitting position, when he quite involuntarily let out a painful cry. “Oh… no… please don’t move me,” he moaned again, feeling sharp stabs of pain originating from his stomach and sending painful barbs of pain through his limbs, seemingly setting his groin and heart on fire with pure pain.

Frowning, she held up her finger again and just like that, scampered off, moving quickly around the ruins of the City Hall building and to the front of the building, its main street, and out of sight. It took a span of seconds for Arthur to suddenly feel lonely… and terrified.

He just couldn’t stand moving again. He didn’t know why… his body just felt so weak and vulnerable. Even breathing was awful enough, bringing him constant pain. But now that he was alone, and especially since he was helpless, he felt and immediate chill of the night air. The gunshots felt like they were coming closer. He started to shiver as a cool breeze wafted over his naked body. He darted his head to the side, only to notice the wind was only causing some random papers to rustle in the wind. It sounded disturbingly a lot like footsteps.

Then he heard an odd whinnying sound, like squeaky wheels of a bicycle coming from the front of the City Hall. He turned and smiled as he saw his saviour had returned and she was pushing something in front of her. It took him a second to realize it was a stretcher. Where the hell did she find one of those…

She lifted him up this time, despite his cries and protests. He let out a groan a moment later, as soon as his back touched the stretcher itself. He felt a surge of phlegm or bile surging up from his stomach and immediately his body started to coil up. Vomit was brewing up his throat, his eyes started to expand, his cheeks suck in. The Fire Chief immediately grabbed him and pushed his upper body onto the side, pushing his head over the edge of the stretcher.

The vomitous bile boiled up and over his lips, spraying more then flowing, out of his mouth and falling onto the ground. She started pushing the stretcher as he weakly groaned, and then spasmed again, as a followup geyser of yellowish bile burst from his gaping mouth, his lips and face looking haggard now before he limply rolled back onto his back, coughing a couple times, feeling a few cold tears escape the corner of his eyes.

The stretcher bucked as it surmounded another piece of rubble.

Oddly, he felt better now. Well, it wasn’t that odd.

He glanced over to his side again, as soon as another round of coughing and dry heaving was finished and noticed the stretcher was being turned as they were now on another main street. No more back alleys. As soon as the alleyways gave way though, Arthur couldn’t help but gasp as his eyes were illuminated by a thousand individual sparks of light and a cacophony of sounds no longer muted by obstacles.

Helioburg’s City Hall, this entire part of town, was located on a gentle sloping hill on the outskirts of town. It gave it a somewhat better view of the city, one that Arthur was enjoying right now as he overlooked neighboring rooftops and piles of rubble and witnessed the closest thing he had ever seen to Armageddon.

Dozens of buisnesses and homes, cluttered streets, thick lush forests blanketing the surrounding hills. A few narrow country roads slicing through the countryside. Filling it all was a full blown war. At least a dozen helicopters that he could see were zig zagging across the smoke filled air above town. Sleek looking attack helicopters, larger Blackhawks and he could swear he even saw a massive twin rotored Chinook beelining across the town itself, sprays of light erupting from either side as miniguns peppered the residences below.

Higher yet, a pair of jets recognizable only by their streaking black silhouettes and the flare of engines, soared several hundred feet above the helicopters below them. He could almost see the bombs being dropped on one of the near hillsides on the opposite end of the community. A thick column of orange fire suddenly engulfed a stretch of trees, swallowing up one of the clogged roadways leading out of the town.

He focused his eyes back on the helicopters, noticing one break what looked like a formation as it lowered its nose and unleash a terrifying salvo of rockets from its side mounted pods. Fiery streaks shot from the air to the ground, blasting apart indistinct targets below as the helicopter itself darted low above the rooftops, dancing between darts of light brewing up from the ground itself. Arthur tried to see what was happening on the ground itself, noticing dozens of muzzle flashes flaring at anyone time. But only occassionally could he see the tiny, almost antlike, participants, often silhouetted against one of the dozens of fires still blazing throughout the town.

Then just like that, his view of the apocalyptic scene was stolen from him as he soon found himself amongst something equally compelling as his eyes rested upon the side of a police cruiser, one clearly marked ‘South Carolina Highway Patrol.’ Its silver paint job with blue trim was dulled by the night, the ash and what looked like numerous gunshots, dents, smears of blood and its front tires apparently torn apart by something.

The stretcher proceeded more slowly now as he noticed Fire Chief Carano carefully picking her steps and pushing him forward with only one hand, the other still on the drum fed Kalashnikov. Warily, he glanced down, and saw he was amidst the battle. The road in front of the remnants of City Hall wasn’t just choked with vehicles, but bodies. He panned his vision around and soon realized this was where it happened. One of the first major engagements of this awful situation. Spread throughout the wide street, the front lawn of city hall, and beside or even within the buildings and homes opposite of the City Hall were about twenty different vehicles. Most of them looked similar to the State Patrol car, with the same words on the side and paint jobs, but he could also see a few motorcycles, one large extended size bronco and a few different colored law enforcement vehicles from other Sheriff Departments or from out of town ambulances.

Abounding them were their former operators as well as attackers. Arthur felt a pang of remorse coming over him as he realized, what seemed like an eternity ago but couldn’t have been more then the previous morning, when he stumbled upon that police cruiser… and radioed for help. They must have come, from the looks of it, in considerable numbers as they undoubtedly got word of the rising tide of suspicious activity emanating from their neighboring town. They came in, perhaps expecting to deal with the aftermath of a terrorist threat, or maybe a hostage situation, or some sort of disaster.

Either way, they came in this far, or were lured in, and then they were engulfed by the blood crazed residents they had originally arrived to rescue. From the looks of it, they didn’t go quite as easily as sheep though. Bullet casings littered the ground amongst the bodies, as every vehicle looked absolutely riddled, some of them obviously set alight. Tempered windows were cracked and shattered, tires torn open, doors and locks smashed or ripped apart.

Each of the law enforcement officers bodies looked literally beatne and butchered to death in what must’ve been a bloody hand to hand affair as he saw all manners of improvised and gruesome weaponry embedded in their bodies or littering the ground. Just as numerous through were the often bullet riddled and sometimes smashed bodies of what looked like the local townsfolk, many of them almost literally seeping with gunshot wounds that shredded their bodies, others crushed underneath or between vehicles.

All of the guns though, they were gone.

The townsfolk must have taken them, must have known that something bigger was coming. Overhead, another nearly invisible but clearly heard jet soared over their heads. Even with these weapons though, they couldn’t stand up to the might of the United States military. Was the goal just to unleash a bloodcurdling frenzy for propaganda purposes or…

The stretcher bumped. Regina lifted the stretcher up gently into the back of one of the ambulances at the end of the battlefield when inexplicably several points of light started to softly glow in the corpse littered ground behind them. Immediately she readied her weapon, standing between the numerous corpses, perhaps fearing they would come to life, and Arthur. It took a moment for the two to realize it was actually cell phones that were suddenly liting up from incoming calls. At the same moment, the state police car radios and personal handsets on the dead cops themselves also crackled to life. Even the ambulance dispatch radio was blaring to life.

Arthur gulped. He tried to steel himself for whatever was about to happen as he even heard the sounds of battle beyond slacken, but not quite dissipate.

A dry, rasping voice came over each receiver in crystal clarity and made its proclaimation.

“FIRST YOU WILL ADMIT THERES IS NO GOD, OR GODS.”

“THEN YOU WILL ADMIT THERE IS NO FREE WILL, NO MORALITY, THAT YOUR EXISTENCE HAS NO MEANING WITHIN OR BEYOND YOURSELF.”

“THEN YOU WILL ADMIT THAT YOUR SCIENCE AND REASON AND LOGIC ARE USELESS.”

“AND THEN, WE WILL HAVE COME.”

A dead monotone static followed as each of the radios was now somehow left on.

The din of battle resumed its previous intensity. The Fire Chief moved to the back of the ambulance and opened up the doors, sweeping it with her gun barrel, before gently pushing Arthur into the back of the vehicle. She closed one door, and then moved to close the other when the static ended.

“WE SEE YOU NOW!”

The ground itself seemed to tremble, as if the Earth itself had pulsed. Arthur noticed the Fire Chiefs burnt face suddenly look up into the sky, her beautiful white eyes gazing up at the sky, looking past the front of the ambulance, at something he couldn’t see. Behind her, beyond her, she noticed the mysterious rout of what looked like a swarm of military helicopters.

She took a single step back. “What is it?” Arthur barely managed to groan. He peered into her eyes, trying to see something reflect off of them, but all she saw was light. An explosion crackled through the air, she visibly shuddered and instinctively ducked as suddenly a bright burning fireball suddenly cut across the night sky as Arthur realized it was one of the jets plummeting to the ground alight. But that wasn’t what she was looking at, it was something else. “What do you see Regina?” Arthur finally screamed when, as if taken out of a stupor, she glanced down at him and suddenly found herself rooted again. Without hesitating, she closed the remaining ambulance door and ran around to the front of the vehicle, hopping into the drivers seat.

He struggled to angle his head to look up through the windshield. “What is it Regina? What do you see?” he asked, unable to see what she had seen, what the helicopters had seen, what the jet had encountered. A moment later, he heard a sound of a thunderous, constant, booming from the opposite direction, something vaguely more recognizable as he peered through the small back window and saw dozens of large flashes in the distance, coinciding with what looked like dozens of missiles and rockets streaking brightly through the air.

The radio started to flicker.

He heard it and soon realized it was Gina switching oddly secure channels as the ambulance spun about. No more static. No more cryptic messages. But he could hear chaos coming from a dozen different voices which seemed accustomed to sounding calm and cool.

“…pull back all units to beyond the town limits…”

“…friendly is down. More fire support…”

“…if engaging final protective fire…”

“…ground is trembling, not from air…”

“…vectoring in B-52 strikes…”

“…two friendly marine personnel and other civilian are located near city hospital still requesting…”

Arthurs eyes suddenly lit up. The Marines. The Marshal. Anna… they were still alive. They had to be. Who else could it be referring to? “We have to go to the city hospital…” he suddenly shouted as the ambulance jerked and bounced about as it drove down the road, towards a destination unknown.

“…fuel air ordnance with Presidential authorization…”

The ambulance kept driving and Arthur started to ball his fists, feeling a new energy overcoming him. “Damn it Regina… we have to go to the hospital! They came back to rescue you! We can’t leave them!”

“…see that? Do you fucking see that?”

“…noise discipline. Clear the channels…”

“… has been authorized. A C-130 is incoming with optional ordinance…”

He looked up from the stretcher, feeling able to finally look forward, and then noticed Regina finally turn over her shoulder, looking at him over her shoulder and offered a quick, reassuring nod. It was the only acknowledgment he needed. They were already heading towards the hospital. She turned back to the road just as both she and Arthur suddenly recoiled as a vague crimson red apparation roared through the sky, streaking straight for the front end of the ambulance.

The view of the windshield erupted into a molten red glow as suddenly he left the ambulance itself seemingly lose its grip on the road itself before he felt the stretcher itself smash into the side of the vehicle. He reached out, grabbing hold of one of the bars built into the side of the ambulance as the stretcher fell out from underneath him and his legs hit the floor. The entire vehicle buckled, the windshield shattered and he turned to the front of the vehicle just as he heard the unmistakable sound of the Kalashnikov opening up on full automatic.

But he couldn’t believe his eyes as he saw the Fire Chief suddenly get ripped from her seat, which itself seemed to tear away, as a crimson mist billowed into the out of control vehicle, blotting vision, causing the air itself to seem to haze, and boil, He could see the Kalashnikov flare, her body twisting, struggling against some invisible form and then noticed in the maddening assault of colors and lights a pair of red hot glowing coal like eyes and the deep red visage of a lion as it uttered a terrible roar. He recoiled, his head pressed against the suddenly hot inner walls of the ambulance as he glanced to his side, noticing through his hazy vision the large oxygen tank in the vehicle. First he thought of finding a way to make it explode, before realizing that such an explosion would be suicide. But if there was an oxygen tank on board…

The ambulance left the ground once again but Arthur couldn’t feel it as he saw the mist open up, revealing an unseen fiery hot core. It boiled a bright white hot, constantly churning and writhing. The red mist filled the entire ambulance, as the intanglible force suddenly hemmed him in agaisnt the wall and he lost all sight of the battle between Regina and the same apparition even though it must’ve only been inches away.

He closed his eyes, feeling as if they were burn out of his sockets if he opened them, catching one last glimpse of salvation.

His hand struck out, seizing grip of the fire extinguisher mounted along the inside wall of the ambulance. He screamed, he howled, and ripped it off its holding, hurling it blindingly into his adversary. The ambulance suddenly decelerated, as they suffered a sudden lack of flight and Arthur felt himself thrown forward. His head struck something hard.

His vison faded to black first.

The radio cackled, a commercial station coming to life now. “…and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss. When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss. And out of the smoke…”

His mind faded to black.