Chapter 13 - Fall

A scream for help and two pops. I snapped my head in the cry’s direction, just in time to see two bodies slump to the ground. I covered my mouth to stifle whatever fought to escape and closed in on myself like a turtle. The sight left me wondering which monsters would kill me first.

Four men walked past the bloody site on the roadside less than 100 feet from the dump-truck. Trash littered the area with stained boards, and red brick crumbles strewn across the roads. A man and woman laid over a concrete bench, hands tied behind their back with a white cloth.

The armed men wore military uniforms, but they didn’t look like the military. They didn’t have the demeanor or discipline of soldiers. Each step they took was as sloppy as a wobbly drunk. Only the man leading the way showed a serious face, and he didn’t seem amused with the others.

The two people lying on the ground weren’t wearing hoods to cover their faces; they didn’t have abscesses or sores; they weren’t scabs. On the base, the military had death pits. Soldiers dragged scabs to the pit’s edge, shot them, and threw their bodies into the hole.

Occasionally, officers brought scabs with hoods, compliant scabs, who everyone knew weren’t scabs. Nobody spoke up, though. As long as they kept us safe, we didn’t dare say anything. We didn’t want to become the next compliant scab. The next body in the pit to serve as an example.

Life was too valuable. The roadside victims went to parks and schools like me. They had family cookouts, birthday celebrations, and costume parties when they were kids. Nobody thought they’d die on their knees, shot execution-style, and have their bodies left to rot in the sun.

No child blew out the eight candles on their cake and saw themselves being tortured to death. Those things happened in our world, but they were rare before the breach. They shocked us on the 24-hour news stations and social media.

Now every one of us that waited nervously for their first bus ride would die horribly. Every person who played duck, duck, goose as a kid would never make it to old age. The kids playing red light green light would suffer painfully until the end. I was one of those kids. It was a terrible thought. I didn’t know why we hurt each other, especially with so few of us left.

The lead man barked orders I couldn’t hear, then jumped in the passenger side of the rust-yellow dump-truck. The same dump-truck a year before would spread salt on the roads and keep the thruway clear of snow. There’d be no going outside this winter, though.

Two more armed men led a line of people held together by ropes and chains to a black and silver horse trailer, hitched to a white pickup truck. There were at least twenty in the line, and a dozen in the trailer already. All they were missing was the white jumpsuit with black stripes.

Everyone’s face looked dead. They gave up on running and accepted what would happen. Sometimes uncertainty was too hard to handle. I struggled against it as well. One by one, they climbed in, and the gate locked behind them without a fight. With that, they accepted whatever happened to them from that point onward.

Six men and two women rested in the back of the dump-truck, and each carried a gun across their chest. Not as long as mine, but not a handgun. Some type of military gun. Still, I didn’t think they were soldiers—more like a militia of armed guards.

I couldn’t imagine where they found so many people. I wasn’t the only survivor, but 30 people wouldn’t survive in the lake town. Not unless the town hid large bunkers, which I doubted. The armed men must have captured them from different places. It didn’t look like a survivor run, either.

A whistle pierced the air, and one of the wobbly guards gestured to open the horse trailer again.

Survivors of Albany and surrounding areas escaped to a military fortress built into the cliffs. That’s all I knew. That’s the only thing I heard from base officials before the hordes destroyed it. Nobody doubted that information, and the few of us that survived bet with our lives. We had nowhere else to go.

Traveling in groups was smart and stupid. There was safety in numbers, but crowds drew attention, and they needed supplies. Too many stops and we moved slow—humans were like herd animals, herd animals that lost their survival instincts. It was silly to think we’d all make it if we worked together.

Scabs and beasts picked off the edges and split us apart. Groups of five became pairs, and eventually, I was alone, raiding a store I didn’t know was a trap. I’ve beaten scabs, but monsters and essence beasts were far beyond me, and I had never beaten a human in a fight. I still wasn’t sure I could.

Through the rifle, I couldn’t tell if the people in the trailer came from the base. I didn’t recognize anyone’s face, but they were too far to make out, and I was too distraught when we escaped to remember anyone.

Three more captures exited a side street with their hands behind their heads at gunpoint. A pudgy man and two teenagers, perhaps a father and his two children. How he stayed overweight was something I wished to learn. The boy tripped and fell, but one of the armed men ripped him from the dirt and shoved him forward.

The father stopped and shouted something, dropping his hands and running to check on the boy, but he didn’t make it. A guard kicked the father in the leg, causing him to fall to the ground hard. When he tried to stand, the other guard pushed him to the ground and cursed loud enough to get his point across to anyone in the valley.

The girl ran to him, but the three guards from earlier pulled them apart, and a few kicks to the father’s face left him lying on the pavement. His head rose, but one last stomp kept him down for good. My back locked in place at the scene, and I closed my eyes until I could breathe again. They beat a man to death in front of me like his life meant nothing. They killed him for checking on his son. And I did nothing.

A moment later, the commander returned from the dump-truck and yelled, pointing at the trailer, then bending down to touch the father’s neck. The father didn’t move, though. The three dragged the teens to the trailer and locked them with the rest of the group. Four guards entered the pickup, the rest jumped into the dump-truck, and the leader shot the father in the back of the head.

In less than an hour, they threw 20 people in a horse trailer and killed three more. Fake soldiers killed more people than I had seen in months, and I couldn’t imagine the thirty in the trailer would end up any better.

The dump-truck dropped its plow and pushed two cars off the ramp to the thruway before heading south. The pickup loaded with people trailed close behind, and the town became quiet. South was the direction I needed to go. If they collected survivors from Lake George to Albany—if Albany still existed—then travel would become more complicated than it already was.

Humans killing humans made everything harder.

I wiped my tears and rested my head on the bed of tall grass. With my eyes closed, I could almost bring myself back to open meadows with clover and yellow dandelions dotting the green sea. Warm winds and grasshoppers chirred in the distance while we rolled down the gentle hills on our sides. Humans killing humans. I was a hypocrite.

Traitors. That’s how we reconciled the murders in the base with our morals. The military base was harsh, but not that harsh. They wouldn’t kill innocents, so if they weren’t scabs, then they had to be traitors. The soldiers needed to remove the traitors from the populace. They had no choice. That’s what we told ourselves.

Five months of traitors, yet we never knew who the traitors betrayed us to.

I needed to avoid the group rounding up survivors. I didn’t know their location, though. The only route I knew of to Albany was the highway, which wasn’t possible any longer. I needed a map.

For the rest of the day, I lay on the bed of grass and didn’t move. Warm and comfortable. There was no guarantee the armed guards left, and I needed a plan to keep away from them. I curled into a ball and wrapped my arms around my knees.

The world around me faded, and the only thing remaining was my soft, golden bed. As long as I stayed hidden in the grass, I could hide from reality, and I was safe. I stayed safe that way until the temperature dropped, and the fiery sun dipped behind the hills to my west.

When the sky turned black, I lifted my head and stretched. I hadn’t eaten the fish yet, and the smell of rot clung to my clothing. Rancid fish wasn’t appetizing, but I had nothing else. After slipping my backpack on and slinging the rifle strap around my shoulder, I headed to the forest, until I heard a metallic clatter in the town.

I ducked back and searched my surroundings. Nothing glowed using the essence filter, and nothing appeared in night vision. I crawled through the grass back to my earlier bed, then pointed the rifle back towards the town, and found a problem.

Two scabs, or scab-like creatures on all fours, walked down the main street, sniffing in the air. No hair and no clothing; they had to be scabs, but not like the scabs I had seen.

The poisoning distorted their bodies, with webbed flaps of skin spreading from their backs and attaching to their arms and legs like a flying squirrel. Their gangly bodies jerked and snapped back, struggling to move towards the victims on the ground.

Two more arrived, running like a hand free from its wrist, and a fight broke out. The creatures ripped at each other with clawed hands and sharp teeth until one came out as the winner and claimed the plump man’s body. Soon after, the three others joined in on the feast.

Human faces on bat-like bodies feeding on human corpses.

Despite everything I had seen before, nothing explained them. Blood coated their faces as they bathed in it, and their bodies dimmed in the night vision lens. There was no other way to see them. Unlike any other scab, they had no essence in their bodies. Nothing pointed to them once being human.

I closed my eyes and sorted my thoughts. I had never seen the creatures before, and they came out at night. They also fed on humans. But did they feed on live humans, or did they only scavenge dead bodies? I couldn’t stay, but before I had the chance to leave, the tall grass rustled behind me.

The air sunk, and the hairs on my arms stood straight as my follicles contracted—soft steps and gentle rustling. The light breeze disappeared the moment my ears caught a jaw snapping shut above me. A steamy wave of rank air heated my lower back, a hot breath that sent shivers throughout my body. Something pushed its way into my safety bubble, and it hovered just over my shoulder.