Chapter Text
The window shattered, two figures tripping over the short wall and onto the broken glass that now littered the street. The figure on top had hands around the other’s neck, middle fingers straining to meet. The figure held against the shattered glass had a firm grip, her boney fingers digging into his throat, bruising the skin as she squeezed.
The woman grinned up at him in the dark, palms firmly connected to his throat. His vision started to blur, lungs burning.
Fuck you, he thought, fuck you!
Rage took him. He ripped his grip away, snatched a jagged shard with his left and levered himself up with the right, driving his knees into her stomach. The woman’s grip loosened as the air was forced from her lungs, mouth wide open in shock. A second later he drove the long shard up through her open jaw. The woman’s eyes grew in size, staring incredulously at the man above her as she choked on her own blood.
He shifted into a straddle, planting his weight on her stomach as he heaved. Oxygen could not come fast enough, each breath of air followed by a cough on the way out. He found that he could not tear his eyes away from her face, relishing each gurgle of blood that signified the life leaving her. He wasn’t sure how long he sat there - long enough for her eyes to grow dull and the faint scent of ammonia to mix with the smell of iron that lingered in his nose.
Iron.
Blood…
He lifted his left hand, absently staring at the red liquid that dripped from his palm. His blood. He fixed his gaze on the shard of glass sticking out of the now deceased woman’s head, and wrapped it within his palm. He tore the makeshift blade free with a sickening squelch. Once, twice, three times more he impaled her face, pieces of brain matter clinging to the rigid edges of the blade. He stood, finally, and tossed the glass to the side, staggering only long enough to spit over her corpse and turn back to the building they had fallen out of.
The world reeled as he regained his footing, pressing his hand against the frame that had previously held the large pane of glass in place. He lifted his right foot and stepped in through the shattered window, spotting his knife on the floor over by one of the shelves. Shards of glass bit into his palm as he pulled his hand from the frame, blood trickling down his fingers and dripping onto the floor.
He reached over and seized the knife from off the floor, tucking it back into the sheath on his belt. His boots scuffed along the floor as he staggered to the front counter of the small grocery store. The man he had shot earlier was lying still, body crumpled in a widening puddle of blood and urine. He yanked the shotgun from the corpse and turned it in his hands, scanning for movement. Nothing caught his attention.
He shuffled over towards the front of the store, where he had been standing when he shot the man behind the counter. Where he had been standing when the woman hit him over the head with a baseball bat. He grabbed his shotgun from where it had been laying, and took a moment to quickly compare the two.
Both shotguns used standard 12 gauge. His weapon could only chamber two shells at a time, while the other could chamber seven. He thumbed over the stock on his own weapon and slung the new-to-him pump-action over his shoulder. Keeping the weapon ready, he trudged over to the counter, stepped over the dead man’s body, and crouched to view what was hidden beneath the counter’s shelves.
The store had been overrun for some time, if the wooden pole with a rotting human head out front was anything to go by. Most of the shelves in the small store had been cleared by other scavengers, or tossed to the side in a hurry to find something worthwhile. To his surprise, tucked behind old plastic signs and extra rolls of receipt paper, was a box of buckshot. He expected there might be some shells somewhere, but the real surprise was the rifled slugs within the paper box. There were three. He thought back to his brief analysis of the shotgun that was now over his shoulder. The weapon could only chamber seven shells at a time. Buckshot was the standard for close-range stopping power; what you would want if you were expecting to shoot anyone who entered your store without permission. Rifled slugs, however, were designed for longer range accuracy. If he had to make an educated guess, he would say the rifled slugs were from a hunting trip or something outside the store. Whatever their prior purpose, they were his now.
He snatched the box, emptied it into his hands, and slid the shells into his pockets. Later, he’d worry about whether stuffing them there had been smart. He leaned against the wall and watched as blood seeped from the dead man’s neck. With the heel of his boot, he slammed his foot down into the man’s head. His heel cracked the nose. He hammered the face until it was a ruined thing and his kicks blurred into a single, ugly rhythm.
Spitting onto the man’s corpse for good measure, he readied his weapon and shuffled into the small back room. There he found more shelves for storage, all of them empty. Any food items or useful supplies he found were a welcome bonus, but had not been the main purpose of this trip. He stumbled to the back right, the rear exit of the building, the reason he had killed the both of them in the first place. Upon opening the squeaking door, the stench of death and something smokey greeted him.
Before him was a pile of corpses. On the bottom of the pile were the oldest, bodies charred by the intensity of the sun, so scorched they would wither into ash if touched. On the top of the pile were the freshest, those not yet fully tempered to dust in the heat of the solar flares. A particularly fresh body was on the very top, what appeared to have once been an emaciated teenage boy with a buzz cut. The boy had blood around his shoulder, a gunshot wound.
I wonder how much time passed between the murder they committed and mine, the man thought, staring bitterly up at the pile. He stood for a moment longer before turning his eyes to the east. The very first hint of sunlight was peeking over the horizon. He had maybe an hour and a half before the deadly sun was upon him.
Leaving the now vacant grocery store, he weaved in and out of alleys, weapon always ready, until he reached the metal trash can where he had stored his pack. He watched the streets around him, ears fluttering as he listened. Just the sound of crickets and the night breeze. The shotgun on his back was uncomfortable, the metal pushed into a painful caress against his skin as he slung the bag over his shoulders.
A stray piece of paper blew past as he approached the road, drawing his gaze. He could discern the outline of a two story building set back off the main road. The roof was intact, and no light poked through from behind the windows, though he hadn’t seen any lights on anywhere in days.
His knuckle rapped on the wooden door of the house, eyes wide and ears open. No answer. A bird cooed somewhere around him, a gentle reminder of the ticking clock. He knocked again.
Reply now or I’m coming in regardless, he thought. When he was still met with silence, he reached for the knob and twisted. The door creaked open. Moving the stock of the shotgun into his shoulder, he aimed the barrel at chest level and scanned the first room. It was dark, and the dust invaded his lungs as he stepped through the doorway. The couch of the room had been moved, as if someone or something had accidentally shoved it crooked. On the right, a set of stairs led to the second floor. A small kitchen was below the stairs, and the door to the fridge was ajar. A table next to the couch had been knocked over. But the door had been nicely shut.
FEMA, he thought. Fucking bureaucrats.
The rest of the house was empty, just as he suspected. There was blood in one of the bedrooms upstairs, the now familiar brackish black liquid a tribute and a warning. He opted to stay on the first floor, as both second story rooms had large windows that couldn’t be easily covered. Sitting on the couch, he brought his left hand up to his face, eyeing the deep gash in his skin. There had been a first aid kit left in the bathroom upstairs, and a well equipped one at that. He flipped the lid open, reaching around for the bottle of peroxide. Using it to clean his wound was suboptimal - it could end up causing more damage, worsen the bleeding, or even fucking up his tendons and nerves - but he didn’t see any other option. The gauze was set on the couch next to him, the peroxide rolling towards the back cushion, and his right hand reached down to grab at the knife on his belt.
His lips tightened as he used the point of the knife to dig a small shard of glass out of his hand.
Murderous fucks, he thought. He flicked that piece of glass to the floor, and studied his hand again. Another piece of glass was flicked to the floor, and another, and another. There was a small pile forming at his feet by the time he was down to the last piece of glass, a particularly brutal shard. He took a deep breath to steady himself, and set the tip of the blade into his skin. The shard of glass was lodged into his palm, the skin around it stretching to reveal the jagged shape beneath.
His mind slid back in time as he put pressure on his blade. The singing stench of death that could be heard from blocks away. The mangled body parts strung up like piñatas. The blood spattering from the dead man’s shoulder. The window shattering as he fell over the woman. The feeling of the glass digging into his hand as he gripped the shard with all his strength and plunged it into her throat, removing it only to butcher the woman’s face.
Clink.
He stared at his palm - not the woman’s head now, only his blood - and watched it run down his arm, heavier than before. The final piece of glass was on the floor a pace away. The knife clanged as it was dropped, the cap of the peroxide coming off with a crisp pop. He took a deep breath and doused the open wound.
It felt as though the sun had crawled inside and fixated itself on his hand. No matter how hard he clenched his jaw, spittle flying out as he breathed, the antiseptic burned like the sun itself. He couldn’t help but to tense his hand, peroxide spilling onto the couch and onto his pants as he continued to flush the wound. Finally, when he thought he was going to black out, he stopped. His mouth opened to draw in hefty breaths, eyelids batting to blink away the darkness at the edge of his vision.
The squelch of the dead man’s head beneath my boot, he reminded himself, and the pain in his arm lessened. People here can live in peace, now, he reminded himself. With focused eyes, he looked down at his palm. While stitches would be ideal, there was no needle or thread in the first aid kit. Even if there was, he doubted he would have been able to suture the wound himself. The plastic around the gauze peeled easily between his teeth, his right hand grabbing the roll and wrapping it around the palm of his left. Then, he lifted the medical tape with his fingernail, wrapping it around the gauze to hold it in place and tearing that too with his teeth. When he was done, his hand was decently bandaged.
Leaning to his right to grab the shotgun he had picked up that day, he sighed absently as he inspected the weapon. Both shotguns had the same manufacturer, an arms plant out of Tula. Both were smooth bore barrels. While the pump action was new-to-him, it certainly wasn’t brand new. Based on what was stamped into the metal, the weapon was a TOZ-194; a cylinder, which meant it would fire the rifled slugs just fine. His own weapon was a few decades older, he thought. It was a TOZ-34, and had tighter chokes, which meant it would squeeze and deform slugs. He was better off sticking to buckshot.
A shell fell to the floor as he racked the pump to eject what was in the chamber, then another, and another, and another. He fished shells from his pocket, set the buckshot aside and fed the three rifled slugs into the pump. A firm rack chambered one slug; he set the gun down and picked up his old double barrel. Flipping the top lever, he broke the action open, kept the existing buckshot in place and loaded another into the other barrel before snapping the action closed.
The pump rested at his side, and the double barrel rested in his lap as he stared down the door. Eventually, the sun would retreat and he would be free to leave, free to crawl the streets, free to find the next sick fuck that prevented peace and stick the barrel of either of his weapons down their throat. All he had to do now was wait.
The door creaked open as the last bits of sunlight lingered on the horizon; he was too eager to wait any longer. Beads of sweat formed on his brow, licking down his forehead and running along his eyebrow. He flitted down the streets, from alley to alley, watching, listening. His eyes started to sting and he wasn’t sure how many hours of the evening had been spent in search of life when finally he heard it. A scream.
The voice that screamed was low, masculine, and panicked. He was too far to make out what had been said, if anything had been said at all, but he immediately changed course and headed in its direction. As he closed in, he could make out more voices—one, then another, and another—each different from the original cry. He eventually got close enough to make out words, but he was too focused to process them. The original voice that had cried out had become muffled, though the cries and yells had gotten louder.
Walking through an alley towards a clearing up ahead, it was then that he saw them. Three figures, two masculine and one feminine. The two masculine figures were kneeled over something on the ground, and the feminine figure was standing at their side, laughing about something. It wasn’t until the original voice screamed out again that he saw the flailing legs and realized they weren’t just kneeling, but rather kneeling over someone. Someone that was obviously in pain, by the hands of the three above them.
His eyes darkened. He gripped his double barrel in his right hand, and lowered it to his side. His bag fell from his left shoulder. He didn’t bother to stash the bag somewhere safe, or to hide his double barrel anywhere other than off to the side. But thought had nothing to do with it now as he slid the pump action from his back. He was simply acting.