Moving was even harder for Alexander now. Though he had survived his second encounter with a mutant today the two had definitely taken their toll. He was tired and pained both mentally and physically. His wounds continued to pain him with every movement he made and the inner strength he had relied on earlier was slowly being ebbed away as well.
Little droplets of blood trailed him as he moved, soaking into the ground at his feet with every stumbling step he took. Alexander knew that trail would guide more mutants towards him. He knew that when the sun truly sank beneath the horizon his borrowed time would run out. The boy didn’t have a shelter he could hide out in, nor would the car trick he had just used work for very long. Sooner or later he would make a mistake, or simply run out of ammunition. He would be torn to shreds and feasted upon before he could run even a few steps in the dark.
The only way humans survived in the wasteland was to hide when night arrived. Walls were the only true protection as they simply prevented the mutants from getting close to you. No matter how lucky you were, without walls you were a sitting duck. Alexander knew that his two encounters had already weakened him past the point to arriving to any settlement he knew of. His home, and the village that surrounded it, was more than an hour away and the light dimming around him told him he didn’t have that sort of time.
The tunnels beneath his feet had led him on a winding trail deeper into the city that now loomed around him. Not all of the buildings were destroyed but all showed signs of the weapons that had torn the world apart. Glass lined the streets in shimmering piles, shattered windows lay open like gaping mouths. He knew that deep within the standing structures their inhabitants would already be awake. Alexander knew that soon glimmering eyes would peer at him from their depths and he would be truly doomed.
He recognized a few bent and tattered street signs and could pinpoint himself on the mental map he had been forced to memorize. Alexander knew the streets that would take him straight home, which were clogged with rubble and which had been cleared in the years before. He knew the exact route he needed to take home but because of that he also knew how hopeless it was. He could visualize every step he needed to take, every turn that would lead him to salvation but knew his body would never be able to make it. Even if he had been perfectly healthy it would have been touch and go. He would have had to sprint almost the entire distance over uneven ground and even then he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make it.
With one almost ruined leg and the amount of blood loss he was currently dealing with he would struggle to even make a quarter of the way. Still he hopped in that direction wracking his brains with all of his energy every time he stopped. Alexander dredged up every distant memory, every small lesson his father taught him, trying to find a way out of this situation. He was searching for a safe spot or anything that would prolong his life even fractionally. He filtered the various camps he and his fathered had discovered, remnants from the earliest days of the apocalypse. Places where a small group of humans had survived for some time.
Most of these places had been long abandoned but every so often they showed signs of recent habitation. Most of those signs were bad ones, blood stains or claw marks that hinted at what had happened to these lone people, but some seemed to be strangely left alone. Oasis in the scarred landscape. How they survived Alexander and his father never understood, but that question didn’t bother the boy now. If they lived he could as well. It didn’t matter to him that he had never met one of these lonely souls and had only seen the rare hints of their existence, it simply gave him a glimmer of hope.
Still no matter how much his worried mind worked he could not remember the location of a single one. The haze surrounding his vision didn’t help. It had already begun to seep into his thought process leading the boy on tangents that didn’t achieve anything meaningful. Questions he needed to ignore drew his thoughts away, tempting him to dally and daydream. He felt cold and weary, and the state of his mind tempted him to just relax. To sit himself down somewhere comfortable and just wait.
More than just a small portion of his mind was tempted by that idea. To just give up, to drop where he stood and not to exert any more energy on the fruitless pursuit of survival. Alexander knew that even if he dropped here his parents would have still been proud of him. He had survived situations that should have killed him multiple times, and somehow he was still stumbling onwards. If he truly wanted to spare himself he would have turned the rifle towards his head at that point. Though no one knew how an individual mutant would kill their victims, pretty much everyone agreed that it did not look painless. His last moments were likely to be painful and though ending his own life now would forever snuff out any hope it would spare him the much more likely end.
Shaking his head violently the boy pushed those thoughts away. “No,” he growled to himself lifting his eyes for a moment as he took another shaking hop. The flame that had carried him this far refused to die. It wasn’t a thirst for life, nor was it a fear of what came afterwards. It wasn’t that the hope of survival refused to let the boy take his own life. No it was a burning flame deep is his psyche that flared whenever he thought of the beasts. Something that drained the pity from his mind, allowing him to take shots at what he knew had once been human. Hatred. Hatred and spite now drove the boy onwards, every step proof of the emotion burning in Alexander’s soul.
Alexander simply refused to give a mutant an easy meal. Even if it spared him some torturous ending. He refused to die almost on principle alone. He wanted to make every mutant’s life as difficult and hellish as possible, just as they had done to him. The current state of the boy burned away all the trimmings to his personality. The bright if not quiet boy was stripped down to his very core. What he found formed the central part of his existence was something he didn’t expect. When loyalty to his family faltered, the hate was still there. When his own worries for his survival could no longer lift his stumbling feet, hate was there to guide him. When he stumbled and fell to the earth, it wasn’t love, or joy, or hope, or anything that he had clung onto previously. It was a deep, black, and unending ocean of hate. He hated the world he had been born into, he hated the creatures that crawled upon it and made him struggle just to eat. He hated the air that made his father cough, he hated the other humans that nipped and harried his family’s heels. He hated that every meal could be his last, he hated that he needed to learn how to shoot before he learned how to read. He hated that every moment he spent scrambling in the rubble was another moment he had to feel pain and discomfort.
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His tired eyes suddenly hardened, the glaze that had been working itself into them suddenly burnt away with a furious energy. Picking up in speed the boy crested one hill only to descend at double the speed. He burnt every last ounce of energy he had left in a mad dash forwards. Pain lashed through his system, every step making him growl and splutter in pain. But he still moved onwards. His soul had been stripped down to its bare components to fuel the fire that now consumed him. He would live. Not to enjoy it, no, he would live just to fuck with the mutants following his blood trail.
He wouldn’t die here. He couldn’t die here. The hate that twisted him made sure that the thought never crossed his mind.
His eyes focused on every step he forced his feet to make, ignoring the sun disappearing before him. The shadows grew larger and larger until there was nothing else. The wind ripped through his hair as howling calls began to fill up the night around him. All around the boy he could see the beginnings of the mutants awakening, their starved eyes finally peering into the world at large. As the howls picked up in volume, the boy added his to the cacophony.
Without even registering it he shuddered to a stop, calling out his wordless challenge to the world. Alexander’s battle cry echoed off the brick walls surrounding him. A pile of rubble carried him upwards, above the bare street level as he gazed at the many creatures gathering in the gloom.
His eyes were now half blind, unable to peer into the dark but he could hear them. Humans with too many limbs, clattering and scratching at the earth as they climbed into the view of the stars. He saw movement all around him. Beasts clambered up and down towers of rubble, hoofs, claws, and wings allowing them to traverse the terrain in a way that the boy could not manage. The symphony of noise reached new heights as the mutants sensed the boy in their midst. There were no walls protecting him, no other humans and no lights. He was alone in the dark with them, and that was their home. He was a foreigner, a young child lost at their shores and the hunger in their eyes grew to new heights.
A single shot rang out as he levelled his weapon, mouth agape in a challenge as he launched his attack at one creature. The bullet struck it in the shoulder causing it to tumble down the rubble tower it had been clambering over. As if the shot was a signal the rest of the creatures launched themselves into action. Alexander met each set of their eyes as they began to scramble upwards. Mouth splitting into a horrific grin he quickly lost count of all the bodies looming in the dark. There were simply too many to count, and though he began to fire into the mass he knew he simply didn’t have enough bullets.
Alexander was going to die. His mind had already accepted this. His body just hadn’t caught up to that yet. Every shot jerked his wounded arm back, shooting pain up his spine. Every shot landed. It was simply impossible to miss. The bodies that clambered over each other to reach him were too closely packed together. Ending the life of their compatriots seemed to only drive the beats ever onwards, the claws scrabbling at speeds human hands could never match. Bodies would tremble and fall only to be trampled. They would feast tonight on both the boy and their own dead.
Alexander felt the rifle in his hands buck one last time, the magazine running dry with a bullet that whizzed into a creature’s skull. A moment later they were upon him with scarlet gore covering their bodies. Waving the weapon in his hands he felt it shudder as it cracked into the shoulder of one beast, only for it to be ripped from his hand a second later. He felt one of his fingers crack at the force but any pain melted away a moment later as he felt fury once again grip him.
Screaming his challenge he launched himself forwards, using the last weapons he had available to him. Wounds forgotten he slammed his hands into the creatures face, fingers clawing madly at every soft spot he could reach. He felt a clawed hand slash at his back digging into his flesh with a sickening sensation. His hoodie soon was torn to shreds as dozens of frantic fingers fought to sample him, to drag through his flesh and end the life held within. Alexander was past the point of caring. The pain that every wound inflicted seemed to only drive the madness now clasping at him deeper. Red blood splashed into the fog that surrounded them, filling the air with the scent of his life.
Alexander lifted one leg to stomp downwards, only to feel one massive fist grab onto what was left of his shirt. For a moment he was free of the mass below, lifted high above the slathering mouths that had been clawing and biting into him. Still kicking Alexander slammed one hard boot against a skull that he could feel crack, adding another body to the count he had long lost track of. It didn’t even matter if the beast got up again, merely causing pain to them was enough now.
The hand at his back tightened, clawed fingers slicing through fabric and into his flesh. Letting out a tortured scream he began to flail, trying to twist his neck to see the beast that had a hold of him. Blood dripped from him as he was lifted higher and higher, his limbs dangling limply from him as his consciousness began to ebb.
His vision rapidly began to fade, the last of his life blood pooling into gaping mouths below him. Little pools of lights danced in his vision pulling at the edges as his breathing began to slow. The heart that beat in his chest struggled to find its fuel and the cough that wracked his body a moment later didn’t help. He could feel a mix of blood and spittle begin to froth at his mouth, his eyes wide as he gazed upwards at the stars. Higher and higher he was raised, his body lifted ever towards their embrace. Limply he twitched as another cough spluttered in his throat dying before it cleared his air way.
Blue eyes met the moving lights once again, reflecting them for a moment in the dark before everything about the boy went limp.
Alexander was already unconscious when the vehicle slammed into the mutant holding him. The huge beast clawing the rider from its seat a moment later and dropping the boy to the ground.