Savagery

Sorry for the delay, there has ben a bit of family health issues going on, the last few weeks. I appreciate your patience and willingness to put up with some crazy posting rates to keep reading.

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To anyone who was listening, it was clear what Grant was doing. He was stalling for time. Jim had just said what he wanted. Everything that Grant had. What Grant wanted as a little more time, as much as he could get, in which more of his people, whether his directly owned ladies or the rest of his small number of households, could get into position. There wasn’t any way he was going to avoid this fight, and there was no way for this fight to end until either Grant was dead or Jim was dead. Likely more than just Jim dead, since he doubted that the other men would run just because their obsessed leader was dead. After all, there were a lot of women that could potentially be recaptured.

“I want your head on a platter! I want to see your dull skull mounted on the wall as a trophy!” Jim yelled, his voice clearly straining to produce the volume he wanted. He was too far away for it to do more than sound like he was trying to be loud without releasing his bowels. A thought that nearly sent Grant into a fit of laughter that he was only partially able to stop.

“Well that’s a bit gruesome. What about just a toe? Or maybe you could go all the way back to primitive and just put some of my teeth on a necklace. You know, like a mighty hunter of old?” Grant retorted, unable to stop the mockery from entering his voice. Even Jim’s group members were looking at him like he was insane. Who mounted skulls like some weird Mad Max parody? This wasn’t Dracula or something, this was suburban America. Cannibal tribes and road warriors and Night of the Living Dead was a bit much.

“I’m gonna fucking kill you!” Jim shouted, and started running forward.

As Grant watched, it seemed like the world was in some sort of weird time dilation. Jim seemed to be moving through some sort of clear jelly. Something that couldn’t be seen, but was keeping him from moving at a pace that was anything other than glacial anyway. The world around that focused lens seemed to warp. Not go grey or black like they always said in the books, but like it was just too unimportant at the moment to bother the cameraman’s work to bring it into focus.

Even as Grant had those thoughts, he could feel his hands bringing his rifle to his shoulder. He could hear his own voice in his mind talking to him. Part of him was telling him to get the guy with the shotgun first, like the plan had been. Part of him was just whispering the instructions that Sarah and Brittany had been telling him about how to shoot in a real fight. ‘Slow is steady. Steady is fast,’ echoed in his mind as he felt the butt of the rifle settle into place. It was almost a surprise when the recoil of the shooting pushed into his shoulder. Once…twice…three times. Quick and clean, each trigger pull followed by a round firing, and the recoil against his shoulder.

Grant watched in real time as the rounds struck the charging madman, watched the first slow him to a stop, the second strike and stagger him backwards, but the third bullet struck in the neck. The gore that shot out blinding one of the men that Jim was passing. Even as he watched in sick and horrified fascination, he heard the dulled thumps of Brittany’s pistol firing, the man with the shotgun getting one loud blast off before he too was pitching sideways, a red leaking hole just under his left armpit.

As the world was brought back into focus, not just visually, but audibly as well, Grant had to swallow bile as he swung his rifle from the dead or dying body of Jim over to one of the gang that was charging around the short end of the wall. Grant began firing again, with the first two shots missing, but the third striking the man in the gut. Intellectually, Grant knew that that was going to be a long, painful wound that couldn’t be fixed, in the moment all he cared about was that the man dropped his machete as he clung to his stomach and fell over.

And then, instead of the hammer blows of sound and fury that had reigned unchallenged king just a few moments ago, an equally stunning silence fell. The last three unharmed members of the enemy gang, only one of which happened to be a woman, were laying down their weapons carefully. The moans of at least two hurt people on the street seemingly unusually loud in the otherwise still and silent street.

The ringing in his ears made hearing difficult, so when Sarah touched his shoulder, Grant startled. He had no idea where she had come from, but in the moment, all he could do was keep himself from hyperventilating.

Putting hs rifle down slowly, Grant looked at the older woman who leaned forward and kissed him. Whether it was her way of expressing thanks that they were both still alive, a reaffirmation that she was his, or something else, Grant didn’t know. He didn’t care either, because right that moment, the thing that he needed was a touch of humanity. A touch that said that, yes, the things he’d done were scary and hard, but were also right. That letting people be kidnapped, abused, tortured, and so on weren’t things that were acceptable, and that the only way to have stopped them was to do exactly what he’d done. Fight to stop it.

“Okay, we need to call some ambulances, Sarah.” Grant said, his voice having a slightly hollowed out and ringing quality to his own ears. Probably some level of earing loss, he knew, but that didn’t stop him from what he was saying. “I know it’s a long shot, but we can’t let people just suffer. If the ambulances won’t come…well, we can deal with that when it comes to it. For now though, we’ll at least try. We can’t do much about the dead ones, but we can at least try for those that are still living.”

Nodding, Sarah cupped his cheek almost like she was comforting someone who looked to her for leadership rather than the reverse, and then kissed him again. Once she broke the kiss, she turned away, and called out to two people to help her, instructing them to gather the weapons from those down below, and calling out to another person to call 9-1-1, and that no it didn’t matter that it unlikely to get a response.

Grant, for his part, leaned over the wall of the gatehouse, and just looked at what the world was already coming too. Raiding parties for women, supplies, and places to set up base. In that order, no less. It was something that he knew was going to happen, and had dreaded. Because now…now everything got harder. Everything got worse. Now, it meant that the old ways had truly started dying, but it hadn’t gotten into the new ways that living would have to find and adapt too.