The World We Deserve

“Clean-blood!” the aberration bellowed in a gurgling roar, spittle splaying along a tangled nest of its silver and scarlet beard. The hulking figure abruptly froze as the fog of its fetid breath floated to oblivion. Drawing a deep and labored breath into mucus ensconced lungs, silently it stood slumped, the hairless crown of its head cocked to one side, ears grasping for the sound prey with the intensity of a deer appraising the cackling of distant fire. Its right hand balled tensely at its waist clutching a crudely fashioned mace in white-knuckled hunger. The weapon itself was a wretched beam of pine, a sloppily hacked handle on one end, the opposing end adorned in a crown of dozens of oxidized and corroded nails. Dried ichor encrusted the entirety, as it did the bearer’s arm, giving all a ruddy hue.

Fastidiously tucked within the profound gloom of a hastily chosen alcove, Ellie watches acutely. Her pine needle colored eyes focused well upon her burly aggressor. The aberration arrhythmically swaying nauseatingly about thirty feet distant. Its feet stood sheathed within ragged ochre boots, the putrid leather of them melding with the calloused flesh; laced over decaying woolen stockings that climbed under the ruin of a skirt. In the anemic light Ellie struggled to discern the original color of the soiled and shambolic ensemble. Pink? Red? Above the waist the creature was nude excepting filth and an excessive amount hair, as coarsened and black as the soulless hulk growing it. Her eyes briefly and involuntarily lingered on its bristled, distended gut; fueling the assumption that it had once conspired with gravity and fate to obliterate whatever once concealed it.

Her stomach clenched with dread-tinged revulsion as the beast’s puissant musk assailed her. All the fluidic wastes a body could spew or secrete mingled amongst rot and flesh in a virulent miasma. Ellie covered her nose and quietly, futilely, focused on the smell of her own palm. She distracted herself with thoughts that parents would be livid if ever they learned just how flat-footed she’d let herself be trapped. A single egress, single stairwell, no weapons within her reach other than a puny knife. She may as well have been picking flowers in a minefield. Her only small comfort was a labyrinth of ruin between her and the aberration. She had needed to shed her pack and bow to squeeze through the tendrils of collapsed structure, twisted steel, cables, rebar, and the corpses of industrial tools.

The aberration jolted with a discordant violence. They both heard it unison, the furious scream of a bull beyond the failing walls. With agility defying its bulk, the aberration wrenched its body unnaturally, painfully, and bolted back towards the exterior. Ellie quietly gasped a sigh of vented tension and wasted not one glorious second slipping out of the alcove and deftly dropping to the floor.

“Blessed is the One. Hallowed is the voice. Sacred is the fire.” She prayed in a soundless whisper, plucking the stainless-steel pliers that had originally caught her eye off a crippled workbench and pocketing them.

As an eel swimming through a reef, she quietly negotiated her way through the rubble strewn wreckage to her things. She shouldered her pack and nocked an arrow ready to draw. A solitary bead of sweat rolled from her brow, plopping upon her dust layered forearm. A star-like splotch formed tailing down where the droplet had lost its struggle with gravity. “A comet or a meteor?” she wondered “You’re always says we’re like meteors, Dad.” She smirked while cautiously creeping, ascending the stairs towards the mouth of the building, forever agape. Forcing her back taught to the corroding iron threshold of the entryway she slowly cast a cautious glance outward.

The aberration was hunched over, its back to her. It was moaning dolefully and coughed wetly as it bashed away at the dead bull with its crude mace. Its other hand tore flesh and fur off the carcass at with brutish strength. Grime caked fingers, with slivers of broken nails torn to the quick, lifted tainted flesh to its quivering mouth. As with the bulk of beings who scoured a meager survival in this cursed land, the bull was brutally debased by spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease in this case. When the aberration had answered its agonized call, the bull could barely stand, let alone evade the nailed club that granted and end to its misery. Such nobility degraded to the worst kind of pitiful. Ellie was struck by the grim thought that this might count as a type of cannibalism, the prions that decimated the living husk devouring those of the newly dead.

Ellie drew her bow carefully taking aim. She hated to lose the broadhead she had nocked, but felt she needed its heavy punch. These creatures seemed to shed their virulence and it was the duty of all the uninfested to put them down. A small sacrifice towards rekindling barely glowing embers of mankind’s fire before they burned to ash and took flight upon the wind.

“You aren’t the only predator here.” She thought, releasing the arrow.

She watched it punch through the corrupted flesh and bone of the torso, sluicing gore upon the broken deer. With a convulsant stutter the aberration quickly stilled, forever breathless. A miniscule step towards reclaiming her world. Ellie shouldered her bow and then gathered her bearings. Upon commencing her trek home, she resolved to omit the part about getting trapped when she recounted this particular tale to her parents, it would only worry them. Thinking about them made her smile and she decided then that she was a comet; they all were. Uncorrupted and unbroken, willing to die free rather than living under the yoke of oppression. The wreckage of what once had been a man that she left in her wake, that was a meteor. The fallen may have the world they deserve, but she did not. She was still building that.