“Anna, run!”
Ethan dove for the weapon in the instant the cannibal leapt up from the ground. He wrapped his hands around it and attempted to wrest the weapon from his attacker’s hands, but the killer’s greater size defeated that plan instantly. Instead, he forced the gun skyward just as the cannibal pulled the trigger, sending three bullets slicing up into the air.
His opponent’s knee flew upward and into his gut, knocking his breath out of him. He kept his grip on the gun but the knee crashed into him again, and he couldn’t breathe. A third blow sent him sprawling to the ground, coming to a rest next to the campfire. The man aimed his gun.
“What good did you think that would do?” he taunted. “I was trained to kill people before all this shit started.”
“Judging from that accent,” Ethan grinned, taking on an exaggerated southern accent, “That had to be after you were trained to fuck your cousins, right Georgia boy?”
One of the man’s booted feet landed squarely on Ethan’s neck. “Kid,” he seethed, “Those jokes about where I’m from are only going to put you six feet under that much faster.” He pressed the gun against Ethan’s head as the boy grabbed for anything within reach. He knew he had something when he felt his hand catch fire.
He swung his hand up and out of the campfire, fingers wrapped around a blazing log. His opponent saw it from the corner of his eye just before the searing, fiery object slammed into his face.
He screamed as the flames caught his head, dropping the gun as he tried to smother the fire with his hands. The flesh had been nearly peeled off Ethan’s hand by the flames. Tucking his burned hand against his chest, he frantically searched the ground through blurry red vision for the gun using his good hand. He could barely see as the pain stabbed at him, rocking his vision with imaginary earthquakes with each tremor his maimed hand shot through the rest of his body.
“You little shit!” Ethan’s world spiraled into blackness as the pain overcame him, casting him down into unconsciousness as he heard the gun fire again.
Anna felt a satisfying crack when her foot slammed into their captor’s knee. “You little shit!” he bellowed, firing the gun as he sat up from where he had fallen. The side of his head was scorched and burned from where Ethan had smacked him with the log from the fireplace. She dove, narrowly avoiding the bullet. She scooped up a handful of dirt as she rose and slung it toward his face. He screeched as it hit him in the eyes, dropping the gun again as he tried to wipe the soil out of his eyes and the burns on his face.
The cold, metallic weight of the gun in her hands was relief incarnate. She aimed at his chest and found her mark. He stood uneasily, sliding a sleek combat knife from his boot and lunging. She pulled the trigger.
Click.
He bowled into her, throwing the gun free from her hands as his heavier build sent her crashing to the ground. The hilt of the knife slammed against the side of her head, sending painful stars flying through her vision as he pushed the blade against her neck. Blood trickled from where the blade gentle kissed the flesh of her throat, wetting the blade with a thin coat of scarlet.
“Fuck are you a wily one.” He spit into her face. There was blood in it. “Jesus. Learn that from your old man?”
“Fuck you.”
“I said I’d make it quick,” he reminded her. “And I like to believe I’m a man of my word. It won’t hurt.”
“Just do it. Come on.”
“Get off of her!” The cry came from nearby. But it wasn’t Ethan. He was still passed out.
The cannibal looked up, springing from his position on top of Anna as the man she had freed from his bindings wrapped his hands around the cannibal’s neck. Their ally headbutted the maniac, who tried to rip his hands away from his neck to no avail. The cannibal scratched at their friend’s face, opening up recently scarred over cuts and wounds, but he refused to let go. The cannibal’s face grew red, dripping blood and sweat as his lungs seized up, his airways closed off.
Then the cannibal thrust the knife directly into her savior’s chest.
“Shhhhhhh, don’t struggle.”
A week. They’d been there for a week. Maybe longer.
“Mmmph, mmm!”
“Just let it happen,” Hanson said, choking on something. “Stop struggling.
Please.” A week of fear. Of anger. Of hunger. He continued to hold his hand over Neil’s mouth as the jovial tank crewman went limp, little by little. He was the last.
“I’m sorry! I am!” His gore soaked uniform was a disgusting shadow of what it had once represented. The carcasses of Neil’s fellow crew, cut apart and gnawed on, lay against the wall on the opposite side of the tank’s compartment, what was left of them rotting away in the cramped space of the tomb.
Neil’s clenched fist did little more than brush against the side of Hanson’s face. The color draining from his cold, accusing eyes, Hanson had to look away. It was too much. But it was necessary to survive.
“I don’t want to die,” Hanson sobbed as Neil’s hand went limp on the steel floor of the tank. The betrayal was frozen on his face as he stopped struggling, giving in to the sharp chill of death. “I don’t want to die…”
He slid the knife from Neil’s chest slowly, a respectful motion full of grace that was out of place among the horror inside the tank. A shallow pool of blood had gathered on the floor, less than an inch thick, but each time Hanson took a step he would hear the splash of his combat boots throwing droplets of it into the air.
And now Neil was part of the disgusting landscape within the vehicle. Another corpse decorating the innards of this charnel house.
He was
starving.“You saved me again,” Hanson whispered, closing the man’s eyes with unsteady hands. “I get to live because of you.” He’d bought himself another day or so. He’d get to live.
He replaced the knife back to the sheath in his boot and began to eat, crying to himself all the while.
Anna found the gun as the cannibal pushed her savior off of the knife, letting him collapse to the ground in front of him.
“You know,” he said, gritting his teeth, “I served this country with everything I had. I nearly died in some desert shithole before all of this happened. And what thanks do I get?” He wiped the knife clean on the leg of his jeans.
“You’re evil,” Anna hissed, turning the safety of the weapon off. He took a step toward her.
“My best fucking friend, the guy whose life I saved over there, left me to die.
That is the thanks I got for putting my ass on the line.” Anna stepped back, barely keeping her footing as she nearly stepped on her brother. He stirred, returning to the world of the waking. He kept advancing, knife in hand. “I was just like you two, you know. A normal guy, before all this happened.”
“Not anymore,” Anna threatened. “You’re about to be dead.”
He stopped in mid stride and loosed a deep, hacking cackling. “Dead?” he laughed, bending over and putting a hand to his chest as he lost control. “I already am. I’ve been dead ever since all of this started, when the man I loved like a
brother left me to die so he could save his own sorry ass.” His manic laughter slowly died. “Yeah, I know I’m a monster. I kill people, I eat them, I spend more time with the undead than I do around people. I’m one of them. I’ve been one of them for so long I don’t even know what living is like. So go ahead, pull the trigger. Put this corpse out of its misery. Do me a favor. Do the world a favor.”
The first bullet hit him in the stomach. He grunted as the second one hit him in the chest, followed by a third and a fourth. He went to his knees as his wounds exploded in a firestorm of pain and the energy was sucked from his body, leaving him paralyzed as the fifth bullet struck him and sent him falling backward, dead before he could feel the hard embrace of the ground he was laying on.
It was over.
She turned as a hand weakly gripped her ankle. It was Ethan. “Are we dead?”
She helped him stand, letting him rest against her shoulder as he tucked his burned hand against his chest. “Not quite. Can you walk?”
“Yeah, yeah… it’s my hand that hurts.” He pushed away from her, wobbling slightly without the support as the pain rushed over his body in wave.
“Then you need to help me with this guy,” she told him, pointing to her savior. Writhing in pain in the dirt, he held his hands clasped over the stab wound in his gut, wheezing with the effort of keeping himself together. “He saved me. Us.”
“Alright,” Ethan agreed. “You get on his left, I’ll get his right, and we’ll try and carry him out of here.”
Anna stopped halfway to the wounded man and looked at their dead assailant. She stepped over to him.
“Sis, what are you doing?”
“Making sure he doesn’t do this ever again.” She pulled the trigger, sending the bullet through his head. It was over.
“Let’s get this guy out of here,” Ethan told her. “It’s the least we could do.” The siblings hoisted the bleeding man off of the ground and carried him between them as they limped out of the camp, refusing to look back as the fire crackled continuously in the vacuum of silence.
Talk about your unintended consequences, right? Who could have known all this would happen with Hanson when Farley made Kelley leave him behind back in FUBAR?
I did. I knew. That's how far I plan ahead. One part left, coming tomorrow or the day after.