Jake wasn’t sure how long he sat there shaking alone in the cave. The shrieks outside the cave had long retreated by now, but he still sat shaking, unable to move from where he sat. He hadn’t even removed the corpse of The Swarm who lay dead in his lap. After her death she had slid down, her jaw slipping free of his throat as she fell face up, staring glassy-eyed at Jake. Her blood spilled freely from the wounds in her head and chest, continually coating Jake in viscous black fluid. But still Jake sat unmoving, finding he didn’t have it in himself to shove the monster away.
Eventually, someone in the cave stirred, as Lana lifted her head in a daze from the rock she was resting on. A dazed smile crossed her face, and a tired-sounding whisper escaped her throat,
“Yay… we’re still alive.”
Jake looked over slowly, still shaking. Something about her tired cry jogged something in his mind and drew him back to his senses. He slowly pushed the corpse sprawled across him to the side till it no longer lay upon him and turned to Lana.
“Are… Are you ok?”
His voice was coarse and rough, barely rising above a whisper despite his efforts to talk normally. His hands were still shaking and despite his best efforts to steady himself, he felt numb.
“Me? I’m fine Just tired that’s all!”
She sounded drunk and completely out of it to Jake. The closer he looked at her the worse off she seemed. Her head was swaying more and more violently the longer she kept it up, and her eyes looked glazed over. Jake tried to reach out and catch her swaying head, worried she would slam her head into the ground. In response Lana violently jerked her head away and swatted Jake’s hand away, loudly crying out,
“I’m fiiiiine, stop it.”
Lana’s sudden loud call reverberated about the confines of the cave, startling Jake back and causing Leopold and Rick to stir, awakening them from their exhausted slumber. They were slow to sit up, letting out groans and grumbles of complaints as they pulled their tired bodies upright. Leopold blinked a bit, trying to get the sleep out of his eyes, before catching sight of the struggling Jake and the dazed Lana and letting out a loud laugh, his smile returning to his face as he pulled himself upright.
“Don’t worry about her kid, she’s fine. Still just a little dazed from overexerting her magic. She’s still asleep right now. Put her to bed and she’ll wake up fine, though a little embarrassed probably.” Leopold said, finishing with a snicker. He was sitting up now, busying himself with the leather straps holding his armor to his body.
“How long were we out?”
“I don’t know, pretty long I think. Those things are gone now, or at least they’re not shrieking anymore. They may be hiding outside the cave, I’m not sure.”
“Nah,” Leopold said, finishing fumbling with the leather straps clasping his armor together, letting it fall off him to the ground.
“Ah, that's a relief. They aren’t smart enough to hide, they just shriek and hunt what’s in front of them. They’ll have passed us by now, we should be safe for the time being. Help me up?”
He asked Jake, before noticing Jake’s bloodied leg and quickly saying,
“Never mind, forgot for a second. Just stay there. I got it”
Leopold said, flashing a toothy smile to Jake and launching himself to his feet. Rick was already standing at this point, wandering around the cave. The cave had been somewhat spacious before, comfortable enough for all of them, and their supplies, to comfortably move around and rest in. Now the cave was crowded, overflowing with corpses of withered Swarm. The walls and floor were stained black, and the corpses piled on top of each other in stacks of dismembered flesh. Jake struggled counting all the bodies piled around the cave at a glance. He counted roughly thirty, maybe forty, but it was hard to count with all the corpses overlapping each other. It could be any number more or less than that and he wouldn’t be surprised.
Rick was currently walking around to each corpse, digging through the piles of bodies to reach the ones buried below, and examining their faces carefully. After a few seconds of thorough examination, he would throw the corpse aside with a look of disgust and move on to the next one. Leopold seemed uninterested in Rick’s actions, paying him a quick glance before looking back at Jake and asking,
“You ok kid?”
Jake looked down and saw he was still shaking. His hands were coated in viscous blood, originally sticky now completely dried as it flaked from his hands in tiny shards falling to the ground. Jake gripped his hands into fists, trying to control his hands to stop shaking as he took slow, measured breaths. Putting his shaking hands at his side, he nodded his head, hoping Leopold wouldn’t ask anything else right now.
Leopold looked at him for a few moments, before he turned to Rick and asked,
“Are you done searching yet? We should burn the bodies soon before they start to stink.”
Rick stood up from the farthest pile of bodies, closest to the entrance of the cave, and nodded, turning towards Leopold and saying,
“I’m done, they aren’t here. We can burn them.”
With that Leopold and Rick began dragging the bodies outside the entrance of the cave to the mountain trail outside. The cave was offset from the main trail that carved through the mountain. It lay in a small clearing set into the mountain, hidden from view surrounded by rocky crags and ingrown trees. The cave was not far from the main trail up the mountain, but it was well-hidden. Leopold and Rick busied themselves now with pilling the bodies of the dead Swarm outside the cave in the clearing.
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As they moved the bodies, occasionally they would pause to remove one of Rick’s knives from the corpses’ rotted flesh. The rotted bodies of The Swarm were light and easy to carry or drag through the cave. Often the disturbance of the bodies would result in large quantities of black oozing out onto the ground, but as the cave was already coated in black blood neither made much effort to avoid it leaking out.
Jake didn’t move, watching as the two did their grim work. Eventually, the final body remaining in the cave was the one lying dead on the ground next to him. She too was dragged away and added to the sizable pile outside, waiting to be burned. Soon the smell of burned flesh and smoke rose to the air, the barest hints of which reached back into the cave tickling Jake’s nose and causing him to recoil. It wasn’t long after the smell of burning flesh filled the air that both Rick and Leopold returned to the cave. Rick busied himself with work, taking to cleaning and inspecting his recovered knives.
Leopold on the other hand walked over and stood between Jake and Lana. By now Lana had drifted back to sleep, her head lolling back and resting against the rocks in an uncomfortable angle. Leopold smiled down at her and adjusted her head till she reached a more natural sleeping position, eliciting an unhappy gurgle from the slumbering girl. Then he turned his attention to the still-trembling Jake.
“You must have a lot of questions, huh?”
Jake gave a slow, measured nod unsure of where to start. His head felt foggy, it was difficult now to come up with any questions to ask even though he remembered a time not too long ago in this cave he’d been filled with what felt like a million questions. Seeing him sit there, silently struggling to come up with the words he wanted to ask, Leopold shrugged and walked over to one of the bags resting against the wall. The bags themselves were also coated in a layer of viscous blood, but opening the bag revealed the contents inside were still in mint condition.
Leopold dug around for a bit before pulling out two pieces of dried meat. He popped one in his mouth, letting it dangle from his teeth as he repacked the bag, before turning to Jake and tossing the other piece of meat his way.
“Don’t know about you but I’m hungry, thirsty too but we’ll start with this while we talk.”
Jake accepted the meat and stared at it in his hands. Something about the dried texture of the meat reminded him of the monster crashing against him, its rotting flesh, its pleading eyes. He felt he would be sick. He simply held the dried meat for some time, staring into it lost in thought before he turned to Leopold and asked,
“What were those things?”
“The swarm,” Leopold began with a nod, expecting the question, “There the watchdogs around these parts. Remember what I said, anyone lost to The Corruption is lost forever, and when the sky was stolen The Corruption ran wild. In all the panic and confusion, The Corruption ran rampant, claiming a still countless number of people. What’s left of those people is The Swarm.”
Leopold gestured vaguely towards the entrance of the cave where the burning pile of bodies sat to try and help make his point, before continuing,
“They’re mindless animals now driven only by their hunger. They move on to an instinctual need to kill and devour anything in sight. They move in mass packs, swarming the mountains in packs of tens of thousands at a minimum.”
“So… So are we safe?”
“For now, yeah. The Swarm’s packs usually move separated by a few days at a minimum to avoid hunting each other. We’re safe for now.”
Leopold let out a little chuckle, before gesturing to Jake’s still-shaking hands and asking,
“Is that all you wanted to ask?”
Jake looked down at his trembling hands, remembered the look in the monster's eyes before it lunged at his throat, and struggled to voice his thoughts into words tacitly. Before long they all burst out at once, uncontrolled.
“How can you just kill them like that?” Jake asked rapid fire, surprised by his own question.
Leopold looked surprised too, but before he could say anything Rick interjected into the conversation, loudly crying,
“Because it’s right!”
Both Jake and Leopold jumped at Rick’s sudden intervention into the conversation, as Lana let out a sleepy babble in response to the loud noise. Shooting a glare toward both Leopold and Jake, Rick pocketed the knives he’d been polishing and said,
“Killing them is right. I’m going hunting.”
He stuttered a bit over his words as if struggling a bit to contain his rage. Without another word, he rushed out of the cave, leaving Leopold shaking his head and chuckling. Leopold turned back toward Jake and said,
“Sorry about that, as you can see Rick hates The Swarm. I wouldn’t bring them up around him right now, since he also hates you. Bad combination.”
Leopold laughed to himself, before focusing back in on Jake.
“Can you explain what you mean?”
“What I mean is… You said these things… this Swarm were people, right? How can you just murder them without trying to help them? I mean the one that attacked me, there was this moment where it looked at me and It looked like it was begging for help, crying out to me.”
Jake’s voice was a frantic cry now. Leopold nodded along with his desperate cries silently, before kneeling in front of Jake and saying,
“Tell you the truth, Jake, there are some people still trying to cure The Swarm. Lana is one of them. But it’s been years now, and they’ve never once shown signs of intellectual thought beyond an instinctual need to hunt and kill. You claimed you saw something in its eyes, right? Something begging you not to kill it? Lots of people have said the same thing. Those same people were all, without fail, torn apart soon after by the same Swarm they swore had intelligence.”
A chill ran down Jake’s spine as he recalled how close he’d come to death, the feeling of The Swarm's teeth grazing against his neck. He looked into Leopold’s eyes, and though his smile remained his eyes had a certain edge to them now.
“You asked how I could just kill them? It’s simple, I have a family waiting for me back home. I don’t want to die pitying some stranger. I don’t blame you for pitying them Jake, they are pitiable people. Doomed to wander endlessly in the dark. But don’t pity them so much that you end up dying or get someone else killed.”
His eye flickered as he said that, glancing at the sleeping form of Lana who lay a little ways away from Jake. A small fleck of black blood lay on her cheek, leftover from the lunging of the Swarm who attacked Jake. After she had finished killing Jake, it was doubtless who her next target would be. Jake gulped and nodded.
Leopold flashed him a toothy smile as the edge disappeared from his eyes. With a laugh, he clapped Jake on the back and said,
“Good, just keep it in mind. Not a bad first effort kid.”
Before going back to the bag and pulling out a water flask and some more bits of meat for the two to share. The rest of the meal was silent, born out of a mutual understanding that for now, both parties had said all they needed to say. Following the meal, Leopold let out a loud yawn before laying back on the ground and quickly falling asleep. Jake tried to follow suit, but try as he might the face of The Swarm begging for mercy circled through his head torturing him long into a restless sleep.