It was one of the creatures.
Suddenly, there were:
Screams.
Threats.
Curses.
But the new arrivals just stood there, taking it all in silence.
A quick sketch of the three people we were yelling at:
Two men and a woman. All three were lean, muscular and, even standing still, had an obvious energy and vitality most of us lacked in our community. The woman, who was tall and broad with red hair held in one long plait, looked like some kind of Viking warrior. The men, if I’m honest, looked less impressive next to this fine example of femininity but they still had an air of confidence and ability about them. One of them would have been considered short except he was so well-proportioned, compact felt like a better word. He looked to be the youngest of the group, maybe mid-twenties. The man standing in the middle was about my age and had a face that was almost handsome but undercut a little by its sharp angles. Even though the closest any of them came to military dress were the cargo shorts the young guy was wearing, the way they held themselves, the way they stood with one another, sent the message they were more than civilians, more than us. On closer inspection, they were all wearing belts holding knives and guns but these seemed more like fashion accessories than weapons since nobody ever got close enough to a creature and lived to so much as fire a shot, never mind stab one of them.
But there at their feet was proof to the contrary.
One big ugly question mark.
When the screaming and threats had died down, the middle man spoke.
He was the one who hadn’t been carrying the thing and that made me figure him for management but I would find out later that the reason he hadn’t helped to carry the creature was because he was the one who killed it and could barely lift his arms after the effort of breaking through its breastplate.
“Hey, everyone. My name is Alan but you can call me Al,” and then, no shit, he whistled the first few bars of “You Can Call Me Al”.
That nobody joined in or at least slow-clapped didn’t seem to faze him. I eventually learned that this was the latest of many intros Al had made to frightened survivors and that he’d discovered people didn’t respond any better to a pretence of stern authoritarianism than to his real self and I can tell you, his real self was very much someone who enjoyed whistling classic pop hits.
“On my right is Steve and this guy here is Fernando.”
“My name is Fred everybody,” not-Fernando corrected him. The woman didn’t object to being called Steve so I guessed that was either her name or she’d given up arguing with Al.
“Hush, Fernando.” Al said and started laughing at his own private joke. It could have come across as narcissistic or given the circumstances, absolutely crazy, but it didn’t. He didn’t seem manic or delusional, he just seemed happy and that was absolutely mind-blowing.
“And here,” Al said, pointing at the creature on the ground, “we have Cecil. We’re making assumptions here but he looks like a Cecil. Cecil can’t hurt anyone because he is very much dead, fully dead,” he said and looked around at us with a question in his eyes, one which the dumb expression we gave back seemed to answer.
“Poor Cecil died of a broken heart.” He nodded at Steve and Fred who turned the creature over so that it was lying on its back. There was a large hole in its centre. From a pocket of his cargo shorts, Fred produced a dry black thing that kind of looked like a heart if you squinted just right but looked more like a carburettor mixed with a turnip. He tossed it to one of ours and it made its way through the crowd.
“Ugly as sin, aren’t they?” Al said, hunkering down next to the creature. “My high school biology teacher told me all things in nature follow a pattern, there’s always a symmetry or an underlying beauty if you look at them the right way. Not these things. No symmetry, no beauty. No offence, Cecil.”
He was right. Up close, the creature looked just as ugly as our imaginations had promised. Sharp, off-kilter angles, messily-knitted tendons and joints that bent in unnatural ways, the things that might have been knees looked to bend inwards. I couldn’t tell if the dim light and flickering shadows made Cecil look worse than he or she would have looked in broad daylight but I doubted any lighting was flattering to Cecil’s kind.
We all stared at the creature, mesmerised by both its horrible thereness and the idea that these people had somehow killed it, until eventually one of ours broke the silence.
“Who are you?” someone asked, I thought it was Dan R. (we also had a Dan W. and a Danny) and I felt a mixture of pride that someone from our little tribe had finally said something sensible and embarrassment at how scared they sounded.
“Are you…military?” somebody else asked and you could feel a palpable need come off of all of us.
“Yes, as much as that means nowadays,” Al replied.
“US Army?” someone asked and they may as well have said “Are you God?”
“We might be. Who knows? As far as we know, we’re all there is so I guess that makes us the US Armed Forces or maybe even the North American Continental Troops. Oh, I like that, write it down, Steve.” Steve made no motion to write anything down. “Hell, we’re probably NATO and the UN by now as well but to be honest, we’ve never had much use for a name, it’s not like we’ve needed to differentiate ourselves from anyone else. We’re just a group of concerned citizens who have devoted ourselves to the fight. I won’t say which fight because there’s only one left.”
“Just the three of you?” someone called out, sounding unimpressed regardless of any respect for what they’d dragged in with them. Colour us jaded.
“The three of us and, as of latest count, six hundred and twenty seven-”
“Nine,” Steve said.
“Six hundred and twenty nine other brave souls,” Al said with pride.
“Are they…outside?” A child’s voice, dripping with hope and wonder and I noted Al was a good enough guy to drop the bit for a while.
“No, son, not outside. But they’re out there, like us; planning, fighting, recruiting and training. Which is why we’re here this beautiful un-moonlit night. We’ve got some important stuff to tell you and then, once we’ve done the telling, we’ve got a proposition for you. Fair warning, Fernando doesn’t handle rejection well.”
One of the guys up front, Hector, ex-fireman, held up a gun he had been holding by his side.488Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdreUb4bV65
