The cryogenic weather hugs my body as I scan the horizon.
There are too many of them.
I see trees bowing in
silence to the dying breath of some winter god that caresses the
Earth and runs its fingers through my hair.
I grab the back of my handgun and the hard metal chunk of
loading the chamber echoes as the last sound before the
chaos.
Never trust a corporation to do God's work, specifically
armageddon. They'll find a way to make gnashing of teeth sound like a
tequila sunrise, and besides, no one wants to be
eaten.
Sinertec burned down the
rainforest through the strategic placement of artificial oxygen in the homes of the rich. Their
bloody legacy is all downhill from there, and here we stand
with two kings and no chips against a couple twenty-ones. No one thought anyone could really take a monopoly on
ruining everything. No one except my sister. She saw this coming, but then again she saw everything coming because she was a
fucking psychic. The catch is, she didn't let anyone know. None of the psychics did. The other catch is,
wartime law says traitors must hang, and if they really saw the future, they'd be gone before anyone got there to apprehend them anyway.
But they didn't leave. They offered their necks to the gallows knowing full well the consequences.
At first this was shocking, but as the
great teeth of fate's machinery continued the show, many came to believe that
maybe death wasn't such a bad option and if this was just the beginning, then the psychics were making a wise decision. After all, they knew what horrors lay beyond these.
A missile flies
enraged into the sky, leaving a great black cloudy tear in the lining of heaven. The screams will start soon. The shakes have begun already.
Public opinion of the psychics does not excuse them, not in my mind. They are not forgiven for their silence. My sister is not forgiven for not telling me how to carry the world on my shoulders, and she is absolutely not forgiven for not telling me how to save her.
Goddamnit Abby, I miss you so terribly. Why did you have to choose this for us? I swear I could handle this if I could just see you. I don't want to have to do this alone.
My sister's gravestone reads: I died because they asked 'Can we?' when they needed to ask 'Should we?'
And she is
absolutely fucking right, like almost always.
I jerk my
radio to my
face and dig my thumb into the side button. It's an old piece of shit, but everything is nowadays.
"Kingsmere Forests at least forty, max at a hundred.
Where the hell is my truck? Over."
A distorted, static, AM Radio-from-space voice shoots back. "Jesus Christ! We were
not expecting this kind of shit at K-mere. Your truck is 6 miles out, hang on til' then. I'd get offa that damn
hill an' into some
trees if I were you, I hear Sermis is in on this one."
Sermis. Him and I go way back. Before the world was wrecked, I broke his jaw to teach him that
even though you're psychic it's possible to see a fist coming that you can't quite dodge. Of course, we weren't out to mercilessly slaughter one another in those days. You see, after a while the government just
got sick of killing off the psychics, so the few that were left got
tortured for info. If anything of use was gained from it, I'll never know because the facilities were
destroyed and
everyone who was involved was subjected to their own medicine. The only person who
I could even dream of meeting with who might tell me something
would be Sermis, but he's one
evil son of a bitch now, and he's Inflicted.
But the thing is, in psychics, being Inflicted doesn't quite
take over the mind the way it does with everyone else, so they remain in
partial control. How much control is
completely unknown, and probably
subjective, but it would seem that the rest of the Infected are hive minded to some degree and are now under the control of "people" like Sermis. Sermis is still alive because killing him would do me no good, as his share of worker ants would just go under different management. But then again, even killing all of the Inflicted psychics wouldn't do much good because the Inflicted were just as bad
before they had any structure. They used to just kill everything all the time. Since they've been organized they kill a lot better, but they take breaks to have
meetings and
regroup and guys like me get to catch some
shut eye.
"Well you're not me and I stand where I choose. So hill it is."
I clip my radio back to my belt, and start looking for my damn
truck, which really should have been here by now.
Over the
deafening concert noise of war, I can hear a
diesel engine somewhere.
Ah, there it is. Good boy.
More rockets flash their way into the sky and the ground trembles from some distant
horror as I make a basic attempt to decide where we need to set up
camp.
The truck comes
slowly rolling onto the hill, growling loudly and letting everyone know it's on its
last limb. Its brakes squeal a quick high pitched note as it jolts to a stop by my side. There are tears in the tarp that coats its
wagonlike back, and through them
weapons reflect the sun. The driver's side door is shouldered open by a six foot tall muscle-filled, stubble-covered, near bald, cigar smoking, dirty man wearing a
rifle that I have never seen before. He steps down out of the huge truck and approaches me.
"Where's Craig?" I shout at him over the noise.
"Craig switched, he's gonna be a medic now."
He pulls the rifle off his back and throws a clip in it. "My name's Daniel, and I'm here to fight the virus."