I came too late.

The farm was ransacked and destroyed. Its owner's grinning head sat on a chair in the small shack. The body was cut to pieces. Every animal on the property was killed as well. The barn was a pile of ashes.

I met the old man. He was friendly and offered me food when I first stepped into this world. He lived by selling his chickens to the neighboring city, although without killing them because he didn't like to harm the poor things. And now he was dead.

And it was all my fault.

I let my guard down. Just for a moment. It was something I felt I deserved after doing nothing but killing demons all day long. Someone paid the price for my stupidity.

That memory came to me after I shot down a Pinky, hidden behind some rocks. After blowing half of its head off, I sat down and leaned my armor-covered back on a wall. I don't know why I remembered that man so suddenly. It probably had to do with one of Hell's specialties.

See, Hell's this one big can of things meant to make you suffer. The moment you set your foot in it, your mind loses its shit and you get this sudden rush of negative emotions. In many cases it develops into a psychosis or a full-blown suicidal depression. The longer you stay in it, the worse the symptoms you have to suffer through.

It might have been the reason why I felt moody all the time. The packets with the Berserk stimulant didn't help either. Now that I think about it, those things were a big deal back then. So you had this black bag with a red cross and inside you would find a syringe pistol filled with red stuff. You were supposed to take that in two, three shots, in small doses basically. But being the dumbass I was, and, you know, in the middle of an ongoing demonic invasion, I used to inject it all in one go.

For a few seconds I saw red. Whatever living thing was around me got torn to pieces. Few hours later my muscles would be sore as all Hell if I didn't find another pack. I think it developed into an addiction. After a fifteenth shot I didn't feel it the way I used to. It became entirely irrelevant some time later, but then I found an even better substitute...

My mind was wandering again. It became difficult to concentrate on things. Time stopped making sense long ago. It was all about the present and how painful it was. Yet I felt this uneasiness of being really old, even if I retained the same looks I had on my first encounter with the demons.

I yawned inside my helmet. It was a reminder that I was still a human being, not just a demon-killing beast. Stretching my sore legs, I stood up and decided to look for a spot where I could hide and take a short nap. I was in some kind of a mountain chain shrouded in complete darkness. The sky's shining red light did not reach the land. Abnormalities like this never ceased to be unnerving to me.

I found what I was looking for after passing two mountains where there wasn't a single sign of life. It was in the middle of a massive boneyard, shared by creatures whose appearance could only be imagined. Hidden in a little alcove behind three pillars of human skulls was an entrance to a cave. The place was desolate like everything else.

The darkness posed no problem for me, though it did bring back bitter memories. There was this one time when I had to run through a forest in the middle of the night. Being surrounded by house-sized trees and a pure-black curtain does wonders for the imagination and becomes an absolute nightmare for the psyche. Especially when you are hunted by demons.

One demonically corrupted blue-skinned stag went down with two blasts of my shotgun. Then I kept running without looking back. I learned just recently that demons, at least some of them, are able to corrupt the wildlife of the reality they invade, simply by being in their presence. Don't know how or why, though my bet would go to the emotional weight they carry around themselves. You never get to experience true hatred until you come face to face with a demon. Some of them get so high on their desire for murder that they can shrug off rockets to the face. It gets bloody real soon.

Anyway, I remember running and jumping without a clear goal in my mind. Ammo was getting low and there was no way for me to kill them all with just my chainsaw. No sooner than the thoughts of how screwed I was appeared in my head that I found a settlement, whose architecture made me think it was built by non-humans.

I rushed into the first house available. The guttural growls of the Prowlers that chased me became somewhat distant, as if the place repelled them or something. Honestly I had no idea what the fuck was I thinking. I just needed a hidey hole, if only for a brief moment.

I went upstairs, locked the door behind me and crouched near a window. Couldn't see shit out there, not even a silhouette. My throat was dry and my stomach rumbled. I think it was a few days since I last ate something edible, but I don't know anymore.

It occured to me how the chirping of bugs and birds was there, outside, without me noticing before I hid myself. I was sure I didn't hear those while I was running and nothing could convince me otherwise. But then the cries got louder and more animals joined in. Howling, neighing, chirping...

They surrounded the village entirely. My heart was pumping like a motherfucker when I realized that my hunch of it me falling into a trap was true all along. A tiny white spark could be seen from the window, floating in that darkness. It turned into a brilliant flash within seconds, spreading like a wall on both left and right. As it did so, it lit up the forest grounds as if it were in the middle of the day.

What awaited me, between rows of trees, was a massive horde of zombified and demonically corrputed animals, all staring up at me as if waiting for a signal to rush into the village. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that it was the whole population of the forest that they sent against me. I tried to crane my neck from the window just to see how big the wave of animal bodies was. They were everywhere. They had me surrounded on all sides. The only way out was through them. It was one of the rare moments when my life almost reached its end.

Thinking back on it, I have no idea how I lived through that night. Certainly didn't know the answer in that cave I walked through, ready to jump at the slightest noise. But no, I was alone there. Disturbingly so.

It made me uncomfortable and I'm not afraid to admit it. Dunno what's scarier; fighting demons untill the body feels pain all over while, in the back of the mind, having a little voice that keeps repeating that the newest encounter might as well be my last, or the coldness I felt back then. Was... is it worse to keep up with the struggle, knowing that their numbers will never drop to the point of it being relevant? Or is the feeling of being stranded in an environment so inimical to me and my own nature?

You have no idea of the emotional payoff that comes with killing a demon. it's almost like a drug. You're there, gun in hand, looking at the motherfucker that bleeds and suffers in front of you, just like many of its victims ago, only the roles are reversed. You have the chance to end its suffering and send it to whatever fate awaits it after death... or you can just let it bleed until its falls, enjoying or gawking at the hateful gaze it gives you even in its final moments. And sometimes it gets a little bit repetitive and you kinda go on autopilot. But then you have to remind yourself that you are making a change, no matter how small, and it deserves your full attention...

Sorry. I got deep there for a second... Back to the cave. When I finally thought I wouldn't see the end of that place, there it was. A dead end littered with corpses. Six of them impaled on wooden spikes. Four hanging from the ceiling. One chained to a rock, their limbs missing. Some of them still twitched. The limbless one kept screaming and screaming through his helmet. His bones were sticking out and were scraping the floor and the rock, yet he couldn't bleed to death. Swallowing a lump that formed in my throat, I shot everyone that seemed alive to me. Couldn't see their faces, but I kept pretending that they smiled because someone came to save them from the torture.

That whole scene... I dunno, it felt liek a punch to the gut. It awakened some kind of a deep despair I didn't know I carried. Somehow, I came to a conclusion, proven to be right, that it wouldn't be the last time I would have to do something like that. It was hard to breathe. I bawled my eyes out and I couldn't stop it.

What made things worse was that hallucination once again. In the midst of all that gore, in the pool of blood that formed under the victims, I saw it again. The impaled head of my pet rabbit. It whispered something as I removed my helmet.

"This is what you chose, Flynn."

...

I'm sorry, can we do this another time? Not feeling great right now.