"P-please!" cried the boy, obediently cowering on what was left of his knees. "You don't, you don't have to do this, you d-don't have to k-kill me! Don't kill me! Please don't! Don't hurt me, you fucking asshole! I'll do anything, anything, just don't hurt me! Fucking get away from me! STOP IT!" His big bruised eyes blindly peered out at her impenetrable mask from behind trembling fingers. He'd seen what had happened to all of his friends.
She stalked over behind him, certain that the fear of her gun would keep him from struggling. The young man was openly crying now - huge racking sobs that would scare a baby, if there were any left around to hear him. He really was making too much noise. "Please, it was their fault, it was HERS, I DIDN'T MEAN TO DO ANYTHING!" She wrapped her rigid arms around his throat in a guillotining choke, jerking his terrified face up. He opened his mouth, noiselessly forming a frail plea, and phlegm dribbled over his cracked lips.
"You'll live," she whispered. Her voice was muffled and dry from having been unused for so long, but the young man understood all too well. "For a few minutes."
Then she started strangling him.
***
She had been confused about that Relic, but only for a moment. She hastily scooped up the ashes into her jar, inwardly assaulting herself for being so lenient with that library from last night - it had probably been one of that lovely Alma's booby traps - and hiding behind a truck as paranoia suddenly settled in. Several burning truths wafted through her tumultuous thoughts, filling her muscles with unwanted laxity. Even though her flashlight had been reactivated by the Relic's capture, she left the light off and tried to focus in the darkness.
1. I haven't slept in three days. You reckless imbecile.
2. I haven't slept because I've been eating things that I'd be called mad if I tried to describe them, and taking pills because Hoyle told me to.
3. I just wasted all my ammo on a fucking dinosaur. This building won't be abandoned much longer.
So she quietly crept out of the parking lot (pausing to take a photograph of the Mauler before realizing, not with a little bitterness, that an amateur with a $200 allowance could have made a more convincing being) and moved into the corridor leading to Falconer's Meat Paradise. Perhaps not too surprisingly, there were mutilated dolls and maddening graffiti defiling the decidedly un-pristine walls of the room. Haphazardly scattered at the door lay suspiciously putrid lumps of scavenger-free flesh, along with a multitude of crudely drawn phalluses scribbled with what appeared to be pus and urine. Spontaneously, the Tracker began taking photographic record of the threats. Maybe there was a coherent message here.
YOU LEFT US TO DIE! Cowards. We DO'NT need U with us! THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID! DONT BE SHY, cum in well kill you fuck We are serious! No bitches pussies assholes zombies soilders around well make you ded O wait grils come on were lonely and Bill here was too faggy to live hes right bills a fag glad we got him fuck right punk ass bitch wasnt a man anyway we showd him ddint we
The door was locked from the other side. Fortunately, a cramped but suitably over-sized ventilation grate lay to the side, and with a little fiddling she had wrenched it open and crawled inside. She turned on her flashlight, navigating her long but slender body against the enclosed metal and struggled not to cause a racket. Leather boots and gloves chafed loudly, echoing across the hallways, and she half-expected for a half-naked cannibal to start nibbling her ass because that would just be lovely.
She heard voices as she reached a fork in the shaft. There was an overwhelmingly repulsive stench emanating from the left turn, while light shone out at the end of the right tunnel along with the grumbling and nervous laughter of several men. The inhabitants of this place.
Should I risk scoping out how many are there? Oh, why not. These idiots didn't bother to safeguard the vent shafts anyway.Taking out a mirror and painstakingly slithering silently towards the light, she took notice of the inane conversations taking place.
"I can't fucking take this!"
"Stop bitching, you kept hogging all the meat!"
"Fucking shut up or I swear I'm gonna ram a spike up your ass!"
Lying just out of sight, she tilted her mirror around to take stock of the recreation room below. A few sad emergency lights, along with several sorry excuse for candles, illuminated a musty dump of a hideout where 6 men lurked. Torn jeans and shirts and bras and discarded boxes of food adorned the floors, all of it raw flesh. One light-haired youth, gangly and starved, nervously carved notches into the incoherent mess of bodily fluids and burns that stained the walls. Most of the men were hunched over on a pool table, egging on a burly man who was busy smashing his gun into a screaming man whose face was freely running with blood. They laughed, stroking their own blood-stained bludgeons and knives and pistols with a lover's caress.
What a charming bunch. Just like everyone else here. Should I blame Alma here, or are these guys simply enjoying the anarchy? Get away from them. There's 6 of them, 1 with a Replica Penetrator. They may be civilians but a gang of raging punks are not a laughing matter.
Ten feet directly beneath the grate lay a vat of blackened, ill-looking meat, lit by an irritatingly soft blue light. She surmised that this was either the waste disposal room or the storage room - probably an interchangeable state at this rate. She glared down, trying to judge whether she was about to trap herself with those people, and heard the flesh calling to her.
Of course. It's not meat. It's humans. And those men would be killing their own food.She closed her eyes, nodded to herself, and then leaped down. She smashed through the grate with a muffled thud and softened her fall with the tub of rotten innards. An instant analysis of the room revealed it to be filled with humanoid bodies - stacked on tables, clumsily hacked to pieces and lumped together in useless freezers, or impaled through their chests with meat-hooks. Altogether, she counted at least two dozen, almost exclusively women, strung up like animals, throats slit with butcher knives and limbs being chopped out at random. Dead eyes from severed heads focused on her, nibbled fingers pointed at her, faceless torsos with "Whore" on them lay in the tubs, hearts beat and lungs wheezed and teeth chattered. Absolutely nowhere was there a spot that was not tainted with splashes of blood.
To her, they were always screaming. She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the ever-present spirits that begged her to free them, and found that she couldn't move. She trembled, twitched, felt nothing more than to curl up and hide from them and stop them from hurting her.
I've gotten over this bullshit back when dad finally scraped enough money to send me to kindergarten. Don't be afraid. Just feel for them."...no...finish it...end it..." whispered a particularly strong voice. A woman's. The Tracker glanced around, and found herself drawn to a locker in the far corner of the room. This was dangerous, but somehow she wanted to know everything they did. She even used her PDA to photograph the madness, permanently freeing spirits from the chains of existence by filming them (although she knew the footage would be unusable). She got to the locker, pulled it open, and a dead young woman fell on her.
Marisa blinked wearily, trying to shake the blood out of her head, and realized that the men were surrounding her. "Bitch," they laughed as she tried in vain to break free from their circle, kicking and threatening them. "It's your own fault. Like all the others. Y'all need to learn some manners. Some respect." "Here," Jake said, green eyes glimmering as he forced her knife out of her broken wrist. "Let me handle that, sweetie." "Hey, are you a virgin?" Brett asked in complete seriousness. She spat in his face and thrashed, crying out for help. They slapped her and pulled her throat and smashed her face and twisted her breasts, but not so much that she'd be knocked unconscious. They knocked her down and their hands were all over her and knives cut through her jacket and blouse and jeans and underwear and into her skin and then she couldn't stop them. Bill thought it wasn't cool that they were hurting her so much that she wasn't pretty anymore, so they beat him to death while she watched. It would be over soon, wouldn't it. It would be over. One took his turn to thrust inside her, feeling and giving his own satisfied compliments, and then the other smugly took over, and then the others came and it wouldn't stop. It went on. And on. For hours. For days. She was bleeding all over and couldn't breathe and they were fighting over her meat and one day she found her legs were gone and her nose was gone and her hair was ripped and she wasn't Marisa Redford anymore and she couldn't cry anymore. She couldn't move anymore. She didn't make any more noise. She became boring. So, a few days later, they found someone else and locked her in here.
The Tracker opened her eyes. She was on the floor, and she had been crying.
Enough.
She took her knife out, opened the door and someone almost stumbled into her. She rammed the blade up through his trachea and sliced down, wrenching him back into the room of the victims and throwing him to the floor. She stomped onto his skull, letting his anguished gurgles echo across the room, and could only imagine how he laughed as Marisa begged that she'd help them if they wouldn't kill her. She took the knife out of his throat, letting his blood fountain out and drench the floor, and stabbed him in the temples. His arms flailed out momentarily, he let out a weak moan of agony, and then he never moved again.
And then there were five.She walked out of the room once more, grateful to find that the fusebox was right beside the door. She immediately hacked its wires apart, a vicious spark plunging the room into darkness, and she activated her thermal vision. The men, for their part, struggled to find their flashlights and cut the room into swathes of light. But she was faster and quieter than them, and they were quite clearly terrified.
"Shit... it must be one of those ninja pussies!" whispered a bearded man, his baseball cap tight over his mullet. His flashlight swept across the ceiling, where she had grappled up onto the rafters, and then went down again.
"Or a freak. Stay together, shine your lights everywhere, find this monster!" growled the penetrator-wielding thug. The Tracker could see four clear heat signatures below her, with the 'spic' lying underneath the pool table with most of his head missing and his naked rear impaled with an iron spike. That left her a skinny teenager who was carrying a knife, a burly man wielding an advanced piece of prototype military hardware, another man shakily holding up an axe, and the short bearded man with a half-loaded revolver in his fists. There was a painful silence, in which the men spread across the room and into the kitchen, and then there was a collective shriek.
"YOU FUCKING CUNT, WHERE ARE YOU!" screamed the burly man as the Tracker quietly jumped down and dug her knife deeply into the straggling bearded man's back. She held his mouth and stabbed him repeatedly, preventing his gurgles from reaching the others' ears, and tried to drag his body further back into the darkness. His legs beat a frantic tattoo against the floor, however, and she had to contend herself with one last gut-liberating slash through his ribcage before moving away from him. She didn't need HIS gun.
Her heart was thundering, and she was aware that she was breathing audibly. She shut her mouth, but not before the burly man burst out and started firing inanely, sending iron stakes through the room in bright flashes and absolutely destroying their own furniture.
"I KNOW YOU'RE THERE, BITCH! YOU'LL PAY FOR KILLING HIM!" he roared in the completely wrong direction, and she drove her knife deep into the base of his skull - it would prove a challenge to wrench out, but that would be for later. He let out a muffled cry, and she took that opportunity to wrest the nail-spewing weapon out of his thrashing arms.
She fired carefully, the ammo counter telling her that there were only 6 nails left. One spike hit the dark-skinned man directly through the groin, eliciting a blood-chilling howl of agony as he failed to feel for the castrated organ and crumpled to the floor, sobbing in pain. She fired again, this time nailing his neck to the ground with a vicious crack and a few dying gurgles of blood. A growl alerted her to the last one, the teenager, and a nail to the thigh quickly took care of him.
She was panting and sweating, and in her head she felt a familiar fear.
I'm enjoying this, aren't I?
"P-please!" the doomed teenager shouted.
***
The boy's eyes bulged out like over-boiled eggs and he made the most awful gagging noises. His face turned a grim purplish shade, his veins popped, and something cracked. He pissed himself. And then he stopped writhing. She couldn't look at his eyes.
They deserved it. They all fucking deserved to die.
There wasn't much in the way of ammo that these psychopaths had, and she was in no mood to eat their 'food'. In fact, there was pretty much nothing she'd gained from this. Her clothes were smeared with blood, and it would take some doing to wash it off.
She left the mutilated corpses behind, certain that she'd never be haunted by them, and was startled when she opened the exit door to find a gloomy light peering out. The mushroom cloud hung over the devastated parking lot, wreathed in swathes of graying, ash-strewn sunlight. The pathetic urge to bathe in the light and kiss the ground entered her head, but she reminded herself that the safehouse wasn't too far away.
It's been a long night.