Sweat, Flesh, Blood, and Bones
Prologue - "Pull The Trigger"
Prologue, Pull The Trigger
A thud echoed in the darkness, quickly followed by a splash of mud as a man fell on its knees, hissing out its last breath, a small jet of dark red spitting out of a large gap slashed though his neck. As the last shivers ran across the dead shape’s back, a large shadow stood from behind. A knife rested in his right hand, reflecting no light as a thick lid of black clouds hid every star from the blood-soaked edge.
Thunder roared over the biped’s head and a lightning bolt slashed through far in the horizon, throwing his tanned face and brow hair into stark relief. With the last stream of light, his eyes opened, revealing two deep green murderous eyes. Tonight, the hunt was on.
A droplet hit his forehead and, as a new bolt cracked far above the man’s head, downpour crashed over his bareback. The storm quickly enshrouded the land in a thick veil of rumbling water. Freezing and numbing, the liquid rampart strained and bit, tensing the silent hunter’s muscles. Seeking for warmth, he weaved around the vegetation, dead trunks, crooked bushes, and still surviving trees. The harsh sensations gripping his body were as many physical anchors making each of his step a struggle. Trying not to care, he focused on keeping his head down, silent as he was closing in toward a lit fire a few hundred feet in front of him.
A makeshift camp made up by three ragged tents was soaking rapidly under the dreary deluge. The fire was badly protected by torn canvas, giving fumes as the wind was blowing water on its embers. The loud voice of two men talking was muffling the trickles cracking over the hot rocks circling the hearth. Beyond, a third individual was beating out a child with a large leather thong. Each time the hand was going down, the kid’s crystalline voice erupted in a squeaking yelp.
Hidden behind a dead trunk, the hunter narrowed his eyes to a knife-blade width, trying to distinguish the features of the three bandits. The rain, coupled with loud cracks of thunder, dropped a load on the scout’s shoulder. Water trickling down between his muscles, scars, and mud marring his sides, he chose to crawl closer, taking the risk to reveal his position.
Pondering the pros and cons of attacking upfront, scanning the three men for a hint of a weapon other than sticks and blades, his eyes went down on a tiny box left safe under the linen of one of the tents. Splattered with indent scrapping away the black paint, the item was rusty, covered with dust, and hermetically closed with a strange long lock. The dance of the flames coming from the camp fire threw strangely weaving shadows on the nearest side of it.
Stopping by a puddle of sludge, the hunter slipped his knife in, blanketing the red and shiny edge under a thin cover of brown murk. He walked around a tree, entered the camp through the hiding spot a tent’s shadow offered him and stood, heeding at the raucous laughter of the three men, ready to strike when the time would come in handy.
“J’vais pisser pronto, garde un oeil sur l’gamin,” the one carrying the leather strap called, stepping over the child as he wandered away from the camp.
“T’inquiètes, il est pas prêt de bouger l’con,” the second laughed, quickly followed by the third stooge.
To join his words with acts, the man kicked the curled up kid, throwing his ragged boots in his thigh. Sobs burst in response.
Crawling out of his hiding spot, the hunter glided behind the nearest of his preys who was looking down at his friend beating the child by the book. Even though rain drummed over the fabric of the tents, one could hear the third moaning his satisfaction outside the camp, freeing himself from an overweighting burden. Time was running out.
The blow, fast and silent, sliced through the throat, slicing deep through the sinews, throat, and bone. A hand over the dying weight’s mouth, the body crumbled like a castle of cards under the breeze. Its knee hurtled over a rusty pan left unattended on the ground. The metallic thud echoed under the rain.
The second bandit jerked his head on the side, looking straight at the hunter. An indented rusty knife welcomed his stupor, right through his nose cartilage. Blood spurted out. The bandit’s eyes slipped to a red-striated white as they revolved behind his eyelids. Thrusting the blade out, drawing a large jet of red gore on its way, the hunter sought for the third remaining assaulter.
His eyes locked on the tip of a gun a few feet away. The weapon blared a white hot burst.
In a reflex, the hunter slid on the side, the bullet missing by a hair’s width, then jumped over the campfire, bringing himself forward to an arm reach of his target as the second bang echoed.
Pain flared in the hunter’s right shoulder, passing through the articulation, shattering bones, splitting apart the ligaments, and drying the synovial cavity out of its fluid. Carried away by the strength of kinetic, the hunter stumbled over his assailant and both roared in pain and rage.
Both fell back on the side of a tent, ripping its fabric off. A hard floor of dirt welcomed the gunman’s back and the weight of the hunter wrestled all air out of his lungs, kicking him out for a couple of seconds. Groping around in the chiaroscuro, seeking for his knife, the hunter pushed the bandit aside. His fingertips met the cold touch of metal.
Square shaped, the box was sitting there right before him, for he had not come for the urchin but for this piece of lead. Losing his wit, the hunter crawled in the direction of the key item.
A fist struck his back, cracking a few ribs under the sucker punch’s strength. A kick followed and an arm slid around the hunter’s neck, locking his jugular in a deadly stance, tightening.
Gasping for air, the hunter now become hunted struggled, hacking his hands and feet around… trying to reach with his bare hands the face nearing toward his right ear.
“You think you can fuck with me,” the bandit jutted, his raspy voice massacring the language with an outrageous accent. “You piece of shit.”
The foreigner’s arm shifted his muscle gears and slowly, the hunter’s face turned from red to violet.
“You understand,” the bandit beckoned, grunting each time he tried to clench his arms a bit further. “I think I know what’s inside the box!”
“Mah… dick…” the hunter gurgled.
The bandit lowered the hunter’s head in a fit of rage, bashing it over the metal box itself which soon was covered with blood.
“This is mine!” he laughed madly. “Haven’t opened it yet, but you and your fuckhead friends must keep great things inside! Ain’t walking down the roads with shit in a locker! Gonna sell it to the army in Geneva. Will buy food and…”
Eyes shifting away, the hunter heard a scream above his head and the armlock vanished. His head hit the ground turned into mud as the flogging rain had entered the tent through its torn side. Lightning bolts streaked away up above this world of grim, gore, and gashes.
Looking aside, the hunter saw the kid, holding his knife, striking as seconds passed, again, again, and again, down to the bandit’s neck, eyes, head, chest, arms, flesh, and clothes. Despite his little height, twelve years old at most, he was striking down the bandit, rage blaring off his eyes, teeth clenched, flashing with the thunderbolts, crying and smiling at the same time. Hard times called for harsh measures. Yet, it was always hard to see the littlest break apart under one’s eyes, even more when it showed off how powerless one were to stop such a shameful gall.
The kid raised the knife over his head, ready to hit once again the already dead disfigured mess of wounds that could not be called a human anymore. A hand thrust out of the darkness and held this final desperate attack toward the incarnated pain that had dared lift a hand on him.
Acting rabid, the kid shrieked and turned around, biting at the arm holding his hand until blood was drawn. A feminine voice yelped and forced the child away with a slap from the back of her other hand.
“Oh, the fucker!”
“Maria,” the hunter hissed, lying on his chest, his ribs stabbing his lungs and sparking shivers down his spine.
A sliver of moonlight poured from a slit in the night cloudy sky, reflecting over the girl’s face standing a footstep away from the fallen warrior. Tanned by filth, young, yet marred with the mark of exhaustion and trauma, her face peered down at her friend with two piercing brown eyes. Giving a second punch in the child’s ribcage, making him drop his stolen knife, she kneeled over the man and started pressing over his right shoulder. Her black hair soaked as blood spurted out, bubbling over her slender fingers betraying an overwhelming state of famine.
“Don’t die on me, please,” she blurted.
“Eh, careful!” shouted a third male voice.
Maria jerked aside as the urchin struck forth with the knife, his eyes burning with tears. This time a heavy hand fell down on his face. Suckering, powerful, and dry, the uppercut sent the young boy away, making him bit the dirt in a loud thump.
Two young men walked in the light, and looked around, catching on what had just happened. The blue eyes of the one who had cast the child away glowed under the dim light, his once blond hair now brown by a flagrant lack of hygiene. His lips, torn in a rictus of disgust, revealed yellowish teeth.
The shocking sight of their downed friend forced a gasp out of the last human. Small and slender, his black hair had agglomerated in long dreadlocks, covering his ghoulish face enclosing two frightened brown irises. He was carrying the sole weapon of the group, a large shotgun, rusty and scrapped by time and lack of proper care.
The three men wore large hirsute beards, their features, while still apparently young, were scarred with wrinkles of exhaustion, hanger, and never-ending stress… Survival. But from the four of the group, the girl called Maria was the most pitiful. Parchment skin over flailing bones.
“John, help me instead of standing there like a motherfucker!” Maria cried out at her blond dumbstruck friend. “Don’t let Adam die.”
Her daggers-glaring eyes darted at the last one. The scrawny little piece of man’s hand clutched over his weapon, gritting his teeth as he awaited the girl acid statement.
“And you, Kreps, none of this would have happened if you hadn’t let them steal the box!”
The blemish rastaman looked down at his feet, his shoulders dropping a little.
“Yes, M’am,” he muttered.
Kreps’s eyes went up toward where he had seen the box as he had entered the tent, trying to shut his ears from Maria’s pleadings as John and she were actively trying to stop Adam’s open haemorrhage. His eyes twitched. The box was nowhere to be found.
Eyes widening, he tilted his head at the outside of the tent and saw the kid humping away, the box under his left arm, the knife held clumsily in the other. Blood rushed to Kreps’s head and rage burst out his chest.
“Come back here!” he screamed at the young poor boy running away for his life, thinking taking the knife and the box with him was of something useful. “Don’t make me do this.”
Kreps raised his shotgun and aimed at the whining kid, desperately trying to cast himself in the safe shadows outside in the dreadful storm. “Don’t force me!”
Struck by pure terror, the child turned his back and tried to sprint, toddling among the roots hidden by the darkness. Kreps closed his eyes and pressed the trigger. The recoil shot his shoulder back, nearly wrestling the gun out of his hands. The shot rammed the air in an ungodly roar. The gun ejected an empty brenneke gauge as a tree was already shredded to pieces a few inches above the child’s head. He screamed a grating shrill as bits of wood peppered his surroundings.
“Are you crazy?” John urged Kreps from his crouched position.
“He has the box!” Kreps bellowed, starting the chase. “And it’s mine.”
“Stay there!”
“It’s my mistake! I’m gonna repair what I’ve done!”
And he disappeared in the night, rain, and lightning bolts.
“Dumbass!” John raged, drifting his attention to Adam’s convulsing body. “Is he going to make it?”
“I don’t know,” Maria replied between two sobs, her hands covered in gore. “I have stuff in the car.”
“Help me then.”
John ripped off a large shred of the rags he wore and applied a tourniquet on his friend’s shoulder, drying suddenly his bleeding out veins. Adam growled in his half-stupor half-comatose state. He screamed when Maria and John lifted him off the ground and began carrying him out in the rain.
The camp fire had died, plunging their surrounding in the dark. A shot rang far away.
“Such a brainfuck,” John muttered as he turned his head toward Maria, the low hanging head of a passed out Adam between the two of them. “Let’s get back to the car, fast!”
The trip to the car extended up to ten long minutes, accounted by the pouring rain over the heads and bodies, and the booms breaking the drumming filling the air with a deafening silence from time to time. Three times a shotgun had roared in the far away.
Resting over a smashed open road without any marking, the car was a large dark beige four-wheel drive, muddy and scrapped. One window was cracked open and the headlights were non-existent. Large indents marked its front and sides, along with sparse bullet holes.
Grunting, Maria opened the backdoor and John dropped the limp body in the stinky yet dry large trunk, pushing away the mess accumulated in that closed space, scarce dried food, used cartridges, a large bag stamped with a red cross, and a huge metal case.
Maria grabbed the Red Cross bag and rummaged through its content, pulling out gauzes, scissors, bandages…
“We don’t have antiseptic…” she dropped.
“Doesn’t matter, help me bandage that wound!” John spat.
A gunshot cracked not far from the car and the sizzling of a bullet passing by rang in the trio’s ears.
“Stay right here, you sick fuck,” Kreps voice beckoned loudly.
Maria and John looked outside and stared at the urchin, standing in the middle of the road, afraid, clenching his arms over the box, Adam’s knife nowhere to be found in his little hands. On the opposite side, pointing with his shotgun at the child and the ground intermittently, Kreps threatened to shoot once again if he could not make the box peacefully his.
“Drop it,” Kreps shrieked with a tone easily mistaken for a pleading. “I don’t want to do this, but it’s mine, mine alone.”
Shivering from all his might, the child looked behind his right shoulder at the car. Occupied bandaging his gunned friend, John was swearing at the limp shape sprawled inside the large truck. Next to him, Maria, a foot on the inside of the trunk and a hand on the roof rack of the car, aimed at Kreps a small gun she had retrieved from the metallic box.
“No kids, we said!” she rasped her voice. “Not. Anymore!”
“It’s my burden…”
“As much as ours…” Maria supplicated.
“No, it’s mine and mine alone!”
Kreps held up the gun at the child, pumped a cartridge within, and swallowed. “Last warning, drop it, I count up to three.”
“Kreps, don’t do it,” John warned, his eyes still riveted on Adam’s motionless body.
“Three!”
A bolt of lightning cracked open the sky over the five life-stranded humans, midnight toiling on the dead watch dangling around the steering wheel of the car. The winds closed up the night sky, throwing the world into dim oblivious shadows as moon and stars disappeared. Only five pairs of eyes remained.
“Two!”
A bolt of lightning struck open a nearby tree, dichotomizing its trunk into two burning shreds. The rain flogged the faces, blanketing everything under a thick layer of biting-cold water. The child’s sob erupted in the air, his little hands bleaching under the strength he applied over the leaded box. He looked up at Maria, seeking for help. Her grip over the handle of her gun trembled as the last warning rammed the hair like a needle the arm of a drug addict.
“One!”
The boy raised the box as the shotgun bellowed with a loud bang. Yet the flash which closed everybody’s eyes was not the deed of the gunshot but the explosion of a lightning bolt melting the slug mid-air as it struck the box and through it the child behind.
A Doppler Effect stretching to infinite in everybody’s ears, ringing like a carillon of cathedral bells, eyes opened over a horrendous sight.
The box dropped on the ground, glowing blue as a hole had punched through. The kid raised his hands to his torso where a blood-splattering hole was visible despite the nightmarish rain. Shaking madly, he slowly looked at Kreps who, overwhelmed by guiltiness, lowered his weapon, glaring beyond the child in an astonishing horror. He turned toward Maria who, awestruck, had her eyes fixed onto something that first escaped the child’s comprehension. John’s livid face betrayed something was wrong. And finally, the kid settled his teary eyes on what laid behind him.
The slug, bloodied and dripping fluids was stuck mid-air, glowing the same sickening blue as the box. The drip of blood floated in its trail. There was no pain, only terror as all took in the harsh reality that rain had stopped falling, stuck into place as if time had stopped flowing.
The child screamed at the hole in his chest, the rain resumed its path, the blood dripped through the air and wounds, melting down in the mud into a sickening dark brown, and a last crack of thunder wracked the sky. The white bolt descended onto the screaming little piece of human, tearing the sky with marvellous black and violet shades soon replaced with a blinding light.
ⱴĦ – V α ϵ R, E! Ω – Ħⱴ
“You sure it worked?” Rainbow Dash asked.
“In mah opinion, she broke the weather,” Applejack retorted.
“Maybe she just stopped the rain,” Rarity chuckled, then laughed as Rainbow Dash gave her a weird look.
“At least it’s fun, look!” Pinkie laughed, tip-toeing on the guardrail of Twilight Castle’s first-floor terrace, digging out a path through the stuck-in-motion rain and calling out at Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, and Apple Bloom to join her in her mining quest.
The atmosphere was dark. Thick grey cloud hiding the sky thrust ponyville and the country into a dim ambiance of end of the world. And though the wind had stopped, many ponies had locked themselves behind the safe walls of their houses.
“Eh… maybe you shouldn’t have used your magic,” Fluttershy raised her voice over a butterfly’s squeak, hiding her eyes behind a full lock of soft pink mane.
“Stop,” Twilight said, grumbling over, glaring daggers at Rainbow Dash. “It’s you who asked me to solve the storm problem lickity split!”
“Wow, stop right here,” the cyan pegasus countered. “You teleported us all here and even used the power of the box to deal with that.”
“You asked me to stop the tempest!”
“Yes, because Snowflake and Derpy were sick since they tasted that watermelon you brought from Canterlot…”
“And because you were too lazy to do it by yourself,” Twilight cut her friend off. “And I got this watermelon from the Griffin Ambassador, it was in the cornu copiae he offered to Celestia. Not my fault if there was a spider in the melon.”
Rainbow Dash raised her hoof, wings flapping around and catching dew as she flew past the petrified rain. Pouting, she rubbed her head, searching for a good answer, breathed in, and smiled.
“I…”
A violent slash of white streaked the sky, passing over the heads to strike the tallest nearby mountain, shattering its peak. The explosion was bright blue, deafening, and burning. Blastwaves washed over Ponyville, breaking left unattended windows, flipping over tables, abandoned carts, and barrels. The sky bubbled with blue, violet, green, and yellow lights as rainbows whirled from the mountain, chasing the menacing clouds away, and with it the rain and winds. Then, Ponyville, although partially damaged, stood proud in the bathing sunlight.
“Ah, ah!” Twilight erupted in joy, jumping on her hooves as she had been thrust on the ground by the strength of the blow. “Told you!” Who’s the best princess? Who’s she?”
Laughing, dancing victoriously around a knocked out Rainbow Dash whose eyes were dancing with stars, Twilight stuck out her tongue, her childish instinct taking over… until a high hanging flag with her cutie mark and its pole snapped and fell down her head. Headache conquering the young alicorn, her mutters sparked laughter among her friends.
“I came, I saw, and I don’t believe my eyes…” she grunted.
And her friends laughed even more, unaware that a few kilometers from here, among the rubbles falling from the shattered mountains were more than just rocks.
