Not long after controlling the trauma, Alexander lost consciousness and didn’t wake until nearly noon. He was ravenously thirsty, which wasn’t a good sign with blood loss, or so he’d read. He was also just the normal kind of ravenous, which was completely normal in a seventeen-year-old boy. Too bad there wasn’t any food. Or was there?
“I could eat those goddamned wolves, is what I could do.” He said to the control room.
Would serve them right, being served like fresh dog sashimi. Maybe a little light roasting over a fire. Assuming he could somehow get a fire going. What did he know about quote unquote survival? Just what you might pick up from watching “Survival Bros: Here’s How to Bush Hippie”. It was a favorite bit of televised nonsense, not meant to be taken seriously. But they always made a fire, and, the first season, they’d done it a different way every episode.
Alexander was going to cheat. There was a Bic lighter on the desk of the control room. He had notebooks that were dry in his car. Yep, wolf was back on the menu boys.
Could he get out there to them on his leg? Careful testing said, Yes, You Just Won’t Like It.
He didn’t like much of anything right then, did Alexander Gerifalte. Thusly armed with a growing hate for every minute of life since his plane fell from the sky, he descended, slowly, painfully, the stairs of the tower to find the wolf corpses right where he’d left them.
They were big motherfuckers. The ones that had gotten hold of him had shaken him like a rabbit. Maine wasn’t wolf country. Hadn’t been for a long time. Maine had never been wolf country for the likes of the massive canids sprawled cold on the concrete parking lot.
He got to work on the first wolf carcass, giving it the same treatment as tag in the rut. All good boys in Mainerland carried a pocket knife, it was standard operating procedure, just like having snow tires on your car in the winter, a backup generator at home, and a snowmobile for going uptacamp. Unless you were one of the sissies who lived Downeast, or, gods forbid, a flatlander. Alexander was in an awkward position, half seated, keeping the injured leg out straight to avoid putting any pressure on it. Speaking of pressure, he was losing feeling in his foot and would have to go easier on the wrap when he changed out bandages.
Later. He focused on slitting the belly of the monster sized wolf. It parted with more difficulty than he expected, but a sharp blade dealt with the task. Guts? Check. He pulled them out. Carved the diaphragm away from the body cavity and opened up the thoracic, reaching in to join guts with heart and lungs in a pile.
From there, it was just patient knife work, parting the hide from the limbs and torso. He got the whole thing off relatively without damage, shocked by the weight of just the dense furred skin. Alexander set aside the first of the pelts, probably the best one he would get: It was from the wolf he’d shot cleanly through the temple.
The rest would be worse, for having more holes in them. Not that he was going to be selling them or anything, he was mostly skinning the creatures out of habit.
With the first corpse cleaned it was another few minutes of careful cutting to quarter the canine. Alexander wasn’t really a pets kind of person. He didn’t like having to take care of things, it was aggravating. He was more of a houseplants sort, they stayed where you put them and, mostly, didn’t do things like shit in the house when you had to stay at school a little later than usual. Even so, he didn’t enjoy killing things, not just for the act.
A clean hunt was a different matter, especially when you did it on a slightly more even playing field, stalking on the ground, rather than sitting in a blind or stand. His mother wouldn’t be seen in public with a man who hunted from a blind and she made sure everybody in the house knew it.
Mostly these idle thoughts were born of a dedicated mental effort to avoid asking dangerous questions that might send him into a panic. Questions like: What was happening to his parents, if neither of them had been able to get out here? What had caused his blackout? How did bones knit in three days without causing the arm to be a crippled mess? Where did these fucking huge ass wolves come from?
Fire was a welcome change, crackling happily on the provided notebook along with some scrap plywood he knew about in one of the hangers. You could just always use plywood around, and that was a fact. Wolf meat, it turns out, cooked up about like you’d expect: Stringy, lean, and tasting like absolute shit. It was sustenance though and Alexander ate until he was full, with many a chug from the refilled water bottles he’d toted down with him. The airport had its own water tower, a much smaller affair than that of the one on down toward town. It wouldn’t last forever but, for now, it was saving his ass. Without that water, he’d be freaking out for real.
The gun he’d taken with him had served its purpose, but that was over now. There were no more bullets. He’d used every last one dispatching these animals. Gods that was a close call.
Shivering set up in him at the image of the slavering maw chewing him, the memory of his form being pulled and dragged to and fro in the jaws of the carnivores.
Full now, and with no plans on going anywhere until his leg was healed, Alexander went upstairs to change the bandage. That started with removing the old one, not fun, inspecting the wound, dirty and ragged, crying like a little bitch when he had to clean it with alcohol swabs, and then re-bandaging it. Not so tightly this time, or he’d cause himself more problems when his foot fell off from necrosis due to having the blood cut off too long.
Back to the carcasses. It took another three hours of cutting to dress and dehide the wolves. He had, for his effort, five pelts that would have gotten a gold star at wherever you went to buy hides these days. He knew some psychos still trapped fur up in these mountains but he didn’t know where they sent them. For now, they were used to trap smoke from some of the nearby cut birch trees that he was intent on using to smoke enough wolf meat to survive for as long as it took for his leg to heal and to hike in to town. Slow going, hopping around on one leg. It went faster after he was able to cut a branch down to use as a shitty crutch, but still slow. Not that it mattered, the sun was on its way down now and he didn’t have anything better to do at the moment.
It was a little hard to believe. A few days ago, he’d have sworn he should die of internal injuries or something. Then, he was almost totally healthy again. Now, he was working on one leg, the other one a bit of a gnawed mess. All with so little time between. He stayed out with the smoking meat until well after dark, managing the initial heat was critical to getting it cured out, forming the barrier of hardened meat that would keep the interior from going rancid. When the moon rose, a waning silver thing, oft covered by October clouds, he levered himself up on his crutch and returned to the refuge.
And on the third day…Alexander Gerifalte realized that his mauled leg was completely healed. He also realized that there was something not quite right about the world. When you have nothing better to do than watch, you do that watching with particular enthusiasm. Alexander had watched three sunrises now and, each one brought with it a pulse that he had never experienced, a wave of renewal that rang his being like a bell.
He was surprised that he hadn’t noticed it on previous days. Then again, he’d not been awake to feel the flush of being made new that passed through him swiftly as a cloud shadow fleeing the sun’s chasing light.
When the bandage pulled free from the unscarred skin below, he was certain that fuckery abounded. Wounds didn’t heal like that. There was scarring, there was weakness, not…wholeness. Not so soon or without intense rehabilitation. The same applied to his right arm’s now completely hale bones. Something happened when the sun rose that refreshed the body and mind. It could be felt, if you happened to be looking at the horizon when the first rays of Sol broke from behind the Earth.
“Captain, we are at Spook factor five. Advise caution, we don’t know how much more the ship can take.” Alexander narrated to the three statues that had once been people he’d known at least in passing.
The wolves were completely preserved, and, since he didn’t have much in the way of options, passing edible. Vitamin deficiencies were probably still a thing, but who knew? Whatever the case, the would be pilot was thoroughly done with this three-story brick tower. He needed with every nerve in his body to get the hell out of here and get back to town. He had to get back to his folks, to let them know that he hadn’t died when his plane fell out of the sky. If he could just get back home, they could figure things out. Whatever had happened, his old man would know and his mom would take care of things. It was on him to get back though.
Time to be off, again. But this time was different! No gun, though he now had a somewhat bitching spear. Duct tape a Bowie knife that, in other circumstances, he would have asked its owner if they were compensating for a little something-something to a length of quarter inch steel pipe and you had yourself insurance against anything that liked having all of itself on the inside. He didn’t think it would have stopped him being kibble for the wolves, but, since he was now without a firearm, it was a solid deterrence.
His clothes were reinforced by wrappings of wolf hide.
Alexander decided that, after having his trousers ripped apart, a little extra durability in his clothes might come in handy. Some time with a suture needle and silk thread had the thighs, calves and knees of his pants double layered with wolf skin, presenting the fur outward. It made his legs look ridiculously puffy, but it was warm and might scare off anything that thought the wolves were as bad news as he did. It worked so well he’d done the same to the sleeves of his pullover jacket, as well as the hood and back. So, what if he looked like a scroungy Halloween costume of a werewolf?
The backpack now carried a first aid kit, full bottles of water, some copper wire rolls, because you never knew, duct tape, a lighter, an empty gun, and some notebooks, those that hadn’t been soaked in wolf blood. Or his blood, for that matter. In addition to those, wolf claws and fangs were in a trash bag in the bottom of the pack. Maybe someone who knew about wolves could use those to tell where these had come from.
Lastly, he also had rolled up wolf hides strapped under his pack, having only used the worst of the shot-up animal skins to touch up his clothes. They were heavy, but it felt wrong to leave them behind. Besides, they could be used at night to keep him off the ground. He’d have to tan them soon though, cool or not, unpreserved hides would start to rot.
“Good bye Victor, guys. I don’t know what happened to do that to you, but I hope you didn’t suffer.” Alexander intoned, before turning his back on the control room.
It was time to get out of here.
Not quite frost overnight but distinct chill marked the sunrise. Alexander was marching away from the airport with determined strides. If he kept a good pace, he’d reach town today.
Gravel crunched under his boots to a metronome, a steady beat of footfalls, each bringing the cautious young man closer to home. He ate on the move, from a trash bag belt pouch, rather than lose time by stopping. As the miles vanished behind him, he noticed that his breath came easily, in spite of the weight of hides strapped to his pack. Of course, this was a mostly downhill stretch, so that always helped. Not as much as an uninitiated hill-climber thought though. Downhill was damned near as bad as up when you did enough of it. The muscles it worked were different from the uphill portion and, mostly, weaker than the glutes.
Still and all, Alexander had recently been hurt badly enough to require hospitalization, twice, and here he was trudging along without a problem. That was not the rules as he’d grown up with them.
By rights, he ought to be half crippled.
The previously mangled leg didn’t feel crippled. Didn’t feel anything less than perfect. Three days. Was there now a rule that people above a certain age turned to stone, and those below were restored to perfect health every three days? Alexander turned aside from that notion, it was too fanciful, and touched something a that he wasn’t ready to think about, a poisonous thing his heart wouldn’t contemplate.
“Keep your head out of the clouds, Little Falcon, or you’re going to get eaten by wolves.” Alexander warned himself, using the term he hated when his mother used.
He resumed the attempts to be wary, even while he turned over the hated nickname in his head.
It was a play on his father’s last name. Gerifalte meant gyrfalcon. He thought it sounded incredibly lame to be given a pet name. It was one of the few things his mother did that was silly for the sake of silly though, so he never complained about it.
With an eye on the forest, the gnarled brown tree trunks of tall pines dominated the view around him, scattered maples as red as their names suggested lent autumn brilliant color, white paper birch leaves mostly yellow and brown their mottled trunks interspersed, and some standing naked this time of year already, and, lastly, the deep green red cedar, though not as much of that as up higher on the mountain. Mixed together, the Maine forestland was normally a joy. Right now, not so much, those woods were dark and deep. He kept his attention on the gravel road and surroundings while he marched.
Casual meanness to family was one of those things you didn’t do, his mind cycled back, as it did. Casual meanness to anybody, really. His folks looked down on introducing more cruelty into the world than it already had. They said that once, when they sat him down and explained why he’d gotten a pat on the bottom and a time out, which had seemed like overkill to young him, for telling them a lady was bald out loud.
She had been bald, and he hadn’t intended any harm, but he hadn’t considered how the woman might feel about hearing some little twerp point out something that pained her in public and it didn’t take his parents any time to set him aside and make sure that he understood How Things Worked.
He did understand, now, and tried to avoid that kind of thing.
Not that they were hippies against violence or anything, both of them had served in the navy, and they made sure that he made use of very specific applications of cruelty, as his father had called it, when they boxed or shot guns. Very specific, and intentionally applied cruelty was fine. Just not for no reason or beyond need to be safe and healthy.
Walking for miles and miles gave you time to think. So did trying not to think about certain thoughts, who remained unvoiced, even to himself.
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It wasn’t hard to keep looking around while he marched, the forest was a thing to behold this time of year, red and yellow abounding around the mix of evergreen. The mountains were even more amazing, rearing up as they did behind him. He was headed down the mountain, into the foothills where his tiny little hometown lived. It sat nestled between a couple of low ridges though, you almost wouldn’t know it was there if the road didn’t take you through on the way to elsewhere. That was how a lot of Maine was, and he, for one, was all about it.
Such were his thoughts until he came around a bend, maybe eight hours into his hike, and, just next to one of a thousand tiny streams and watersheds that made their way off the mountain, was an Elk. A big one. With a spread of dagger like tines, the rack of horns was wider than he was tall. That elk was a problem, mostly because, like wolves, Elk hadn’t been seen around here in over a century, since the late eighteen hundreds or so. They were being reintroduced elsewhere, and there were a couple of tourist trap preserves scattered about, but those were fenced in, carefully reared for squeezing the flatlanders of their hard-earned rupees. This one here was big, wild, and not where he belonged.
The Elk bugled at him, an intensely loud sound.
Alexander had never tried hunting an Elk. He’d never tried hunting a moose either, mostly for the same reason as he wouldn’t have considered the Elk: they were fucking huge. Why kill an animal so large you couldn’t pack it out without a side by side and at least two people helping to quarter it?
This one here that was turning toward him was a brute. Ten feet head to haunches, seven feet to the shoulder, it was more like a horse than any Elk he’d ever seen. Brown pelt slightly mottled by gray, and the head of the animal lowered aggressively presenting a wall of spikes toward him.
“Uh oh.” Alexander grunted, lamely, carefully retreating backward.
Slowly, very non threateningly, he back away from the creature. Every step backward was accompanied by a step forward from the Elk, waving its antlers side to side.
“Peace is an option, you horny bastard you.” Alexander said, shakily, trying to muster as much calm as he could.
“I’ll just go around. I’ll go waaaaay around. You can just go back to doing Elk shit, I promise. I won’t even tell any of the local hicks you’re out here. See? I can be reasonable, there’s no need for -AAGH!”
The Elk brushed a foreleg across the litter just off the road and charged him. Fast.
Adrenaline soaked, the young man threw his pack off and followed after it with his body, leaping aside from the charging animal, the only saving grace being that it couldn’t see with its head down. He got to his feet about the time the beast stopped its rush and turned, waving those horns at him.
Hands suddenly sweaty gripped the spear. A foot of knife duct taped to a piece of steel pipe. He was a dead man if he fought it.
Plan revised on the fly, Alexander grabbed his pack and ran, looking over a shoulder to see if the bull followed him. It pawed the earth again, throwing gravel this time, and almost fell when it launched itself forward. That was one hell of an almost.
The young man made it about ten meters before the sound of the charging bull made him leap aside again. He jabbed the spear into the side of the bull as it passed, and nearly had the spear torn from his grasp by the sheer mass of the animal. As it was, he dropped it and the flailing, kicking leg of the animal launched the spear into the wood line, and he followed as fast as his pumping legs could go, breathing loudly. He picked up the spear and heard another piercingly loud whistle as the bull bugled again at him. The animal lowered its head and started forward, this time slowly, like it was going to walk him down.
There was only one thing to do, take to the trees!
Hand over hand, he scrambled desperately up the limbs of the closest pine that had limbs to climb, thankful that they were on the side of the road, where enough light got in for big old pines to still have limbs. Climbing, reaching and pulling, and throwing himself upward, he heard a crash of wood and horn. He looked down, saw the bull thrashing the limbs of the tree he had taken to for safety, as if it wanted to cut the trunk down to get to him.
“What the fuck is wrong with you? !” Alexander screamed at the Elk.
Were they supposed to be this aggressive? He’d never heard of it. But he didn’t know. Why would he know? The threshing horns carried on, tearing large chunks of bark away.
Could he throw the spear and kill it? No, no way, never. It wouldn’t even notice. If he stayed still, maybe it would go away.
Sunset observed the waiting game. Sunrise, after an eternity of darkness, announced that the game was still on, the Elk pacing around the bole of the tree. Alexander was exhausted. It turned out, you could sleep in a tree. For, perhaps, fifteen seconds at a time. He’d gone in and out for hours. Now he found, in the predawn twilight, that it was for nothing. The Elk was still there, circling like a shark.
Alexander Gerifalte had had just about enough of this shit. Carefully, leaving the pack hooked on a sturdy branch above, he lowered himself down branch by branch. This Elk was going to pay.
Hours of being laid up in the control tower, looking at corpses with extra steps, pain most days for a week now, exhaustion, fear, nameless worry, and flickering hope that salvation lie at the end of this road took over. Alexander was pissed.
He got down to about twice as high as where the bull’s horns could reach, the animal still making its circuit around the tree and readied the spear. This was all or nothing, no second chances, no redo’s. Two hands gripped the spear tightly and he begged all the gods above, below, and in between for luck, as he watched, calculating, before dropping fifteen feet down, riding a spear like a Pogo stick. He hit without a great deal of force, the animal was tall, but its head was down and the Bowie knife spear point drove through the top of its skull, punching through brains.
Alexander landed in a heap on top of the bull Elk, damned near goring himself on those widespread tines as he fell. The smooth steel of the spear pulled free of his hands, his grip insufficient to hang on and the metal too smooth to hold. His legs folded under him and he rolled awkwardly away, not at all smoothly like the movies showed. More a collapse than a roll, really. But his gambit paid.
Panting, in spite of the lack of exertion, just sheer excitement and terror, he saw his work. A folded corpse, over a thousand pounds of muscle and aggression. Antlers propping up a harpooned head gracelessly. The Elk was dead. Alexander was alive. That was all that mattered.
Giggling senselessly, he hurled insults at the bull. All the way up the tree to retrieve his pack, and all the way down he mercilessly delivered scathing commentary on the foul stench of the animal, its clumsiness, the likely retardation of its offspring, anything, and everything. There was a decent chance he was starting to crack under pressure.
“You dead fuck! I’m not even going to skin you, that’s what I think of you!” the sleep deprived and unstable adolescent yelled at the corpse, “I’m gonna peel those horns off though, gonna put’em on some wall somewhere, just like the rednecks. You’ll be my coat rack for ten generations of Gerifalte, you hear me you smelly bastard? !”
And, pulling his spear free and using a big rock, he did just that, smashing the antlers off the bull elk to tie to his pack.
It wasn’t a reasonable thing to do, but he was exiting reasonable territory at escape velocity. Everybody had their limits, and he was at his.
Nearly ten hours later, stumbling along in a sleep deprived haze, Alexander Gerifalte made sight of the town. It was…in shambles. Fires had started and burned themselves out, taking a few houses, but, fortunately, stopped from spreading by the heavy rain. Cars were strewn about in the middle of the streets, as if their drivers had simply stopped controlling them. Many were crashed into the sides of buildings or folded around trees off the sides of the road. There was no sound, no lights on.
Just like the tower, he saw nobody moving.
“Oh fuck, this can’t be happening.” Alexander whispered.
Was he the only one left? No, no, no, that couldn’t be true. Whatever happened there, it happened here too. He had to get home.
Home was a lovely two-story cottage built sometime in the early fifties. Arched windows, high peaked roof, doors with curtains and a tiny fenced in back yard, it was a cozy place. It was hope. And, now that he stood in front of it, Alexander felt despair. He’d yelled as soon as he’d come to the mailbox. He’d seen no one the entire way through the town. No one but the statues. Here, like they’d been up in the control tower, there was no sign of humanity other than those statues, frozen while they’d gone about their lives.
Dread filled his stomach. He didn’t want to go in. He had to go in. Dark was falling, he was out of water, his feet were killing him from the miles of walking, and he was reaching the end of his tether, even the strength of youth failing before the exertion and lack of sleep. He dropped the pack, the bound antlers, and the hides to the ground. His mom would throw a fit if he brought that smelly stuff inside.
Carefully, Alexander opened the door to the only home he’d ever known. He walked into the big open kitchen, its gas stove still lit, blue flame dancing. His mother stood, like she had so often, with an apron on, her smiling face turned toward the upstairs master where she was about to tell her husband to come down for lunch. Pale stone, frozen in time. The spear hit the floor and bounced loudly, dropped from numb fingers. Tears fell now, and he didn’t try to stop them. He had to know. He walked by, choking out a sobbed, “I’m sorry.” And dragged himself up the stairs.
Down the hall, past his room, he opened the cracked door and found the statue that had been his father sitting at his desk, tools still gripped in alabaster fingers delicately, the remains of a gutted laptop in front of him. He was looking down towards the kitchen, gently grinning as he did when he knew he was teasing his wife.
Alexander fell to his knees now, weeping silently. The dread thought he’d fought, avoiding it to prevent ever giving it life had found its way into reality, nevertheless. The curse, whatever it was, had hit his home, leaving none alive. His parents were gone. His friends were gone. Classmates, teachers, neighbors, there was nothing left except the shell of his old life. He stayed there for a span of time.
The next part wasn’t really conscious. For reasons he didn’t really understand, the last living Gerifalte dragged his mother’s statue upstairs, where it could be with his father’s. They had loved each other, dearly, passionately. It was the least their son could do for them to let them be together. After that, he turned off the lit gas stove and broke into the neighbor’s house, unwilling to stay inside the place that held memories that felt like hot knives in him now.
Fortunately, none of them had been home when the curse landed. He was thinking of it as a curse because his mind had no framework with which to describe every living human he’d ever known being turned to stone. Whatever the case, there were no Davids to deal with inside the place, no memories to haunt him when he locked a bedroom door and collapsed in exhaustion. He fell asleep, numb inside, with a promise of grief to welcome him back to waking.
It was a promise kept.
Alexander sobbed quietly for an hour on waking, and, when the tears ran out, he was left raw and filled with hatred for everything on this planet. Something had taken everything he had ever loved from him. Hate causes transcendental change to a person’s mind, much as love does. You do things out of hatred that seem insane, just like you do for love. Only, instead of sacrificing everything to preserve someone, you do it to destroy something. In his case, Alexander didn’t know what it was he was supposed to destroy, only that, when he found it, he would bend his life towards ending it.
Toward that end, the recently bereaved young man began searching the town for clues, hints, anything that might tell him what had caused the nightmare.
That was how he came upon the goblins. Short, gangly, child sized creatures with warty gray skin and bulbous yellow eyes, slitted like a cat’s. The miniature hominids that looked like they were starvation victims had two rows of shark-like teeth and made sounds like howler monkeys combined with a hyena’s laugh. They turned to look at him, scuttling alien things desecrating his homeland, picking through a set of overturned statues that had shattered, clambering over them to find shiny bits to stuff into their crude loin cloth pouches.
Alexander raged.
The goblins weren’t real, just like he wasn’t real. Whatever was real was stone now. Killing things that weren’t real didn’t count, so kill them he did. Lashing blows of steel crushed skulls, knife blade spear stabbed, and stabbed, and stabbed. Bone knives tried to cut into the leather sewn into his pants and failed, rejected by the hide. Jabbing spears driven by monsters about the size of eight-year-old children caught on rugged clothes and turned or tangled, unable to withstand his mindless aggression. He received small wounds that were inconsequential and, in exchange, slaughtered ten of the little monsters in a wrathful fury that culminated in slamming the broken off knife, having snapped when run through a goblinoid chest into the concrete below, repeatedly against a shark toothed maw until it was a pulped ruin.
His shriek of anguish rolled out across the place that had been home so recently.
Slowly, it was all coming together now, the small hints. Huge wolves where there were no wolves. An insane Elk that circled a tree for an entire night with murderous intent. Little monsters prowling about. The rising sun, that, every third day granted a healing light. None of it was real.
Alexander was in some kind of hell shaped like his old reality. He must have slipped through to it when that mind tearing pain tore him apart. His world was gone, and all that was left was insanity. The only rational response to insanity like this was to embrace it. Breathe it in, nice and deep. And return the favor. Alexander Gerifalte was going to make this hellscape pay for bringing him here, and that was all there was for it. Starting with any more of those little grey monsters he could find.
He went back inside the place that had been home and opened the gun case. The simple, functional, no-frills handgun fit nicely in his palm, and the four magazines slipped easily into his pants pockets. The long-barreled bolt gun, made longer with the suppressor screwed onto it, because his father had forgotten to take it off, and Alexander had been too lazy to clean it that afternoon, was a comfortable weight on its sling.
Only two five round magazines for that, but it was a hunting rifle and Alexander was going hunting. For nightmares.
A fact that had once amused him was that gyrfalcons were hunting birds. Prized by falconers for their grace and power in the air, they pursued their targets from behind, instead of swooping like most falcons. A little falcon he might be. But a falcon nevertheless. He patted the box of rifle shells in his coat pocket comfortingly as he closed the door softly behind him.
It was just past noon, when he strode off down familiar streets, made unfamiliar by the absence of familiar people.
There were no goblins left in the town when the sun rose the next morning. He’d shot close to forty of the things, including a great big one, tall as him, if beefier, with a huge bone spiked club and a smaller one, a head shorter than him, with a feathered staff that had to be female with its almost comically bulging breasts and pregnant swollen stomach. A grotesque caricature of humanity.
They were stupid creatures. Almost all of them had charged him in a straight line, a direct path that was easy to intercept with bullets. The time of year was his ally, the cool night caused the monsters to huddle in clusters, shivering in the late October air. A high moon with no cloud cover bathed everything in silver light, including the bunches of monsters. Easy targets. They didn’t seem to know about fire, whatever they were, the stupid little unreal things.
Stupid, but unexpectedly tough for creatures their size. The large one had taken three of the big rifle rounds to put down, two center mass, one in the head while it tried to crawl toward him. He’d dropped the feather bearing staff carrying female with six nine-millimeter slugs through its chest, ignoring the spitting yowls it made when he killed the big one.
He didn’t know what exactly motivated him, other than spite, to impale the creatures on sharpened stakes and mount them at the “Welcome” sign by the road but it seemed appropriate.
If any other nightmares decided they wanted to come to this simulacrum of his home, they would know what waited for them.
That morning, in silence, he ate canned food, grateful that people around here had a kind of lingering mistrust regarding electrical appliances.
Nearly everybody used gas to cook and heat. It was a reasonable suspicion when it happened that it could snow two feet over night, wet, heavy stuff that dropped power lines with some frequency. The rugged winterized culture of his hometown meant Alexander could probably survive the coming cold easily. Plenty of places had wood stoves, he could stay in those places overnight. He could cook sparingly using the gas, saving the precious resource for when it was necessary.
As far as food? Canned food would last for years and the grocery was full of it. There were freezers all over the place. Even if they weren’t powered, the good ones would seal and stay cold for a long, long time. There were things he could do to extend their duration too, such as filling a few of them with ice alongside their meat. If he got them good and full of meat with ice on top, they should stay fairly well frozen until the winter temperatures made freezers a non-issue. After that? He would have to worry about after thats at a later time.
There might not even be a later time. Who knew what was possible when the world wasn’t even real anymore?