In the distance, the machine gun stopped its barrage. He saw a few yellow flickers of smaller guns going off and in a few seconds the distant echoes of sound reached his ears. Were those the last of the soldiers, trying to sell their lives at a high price, or were they just finishing off the last enemies to preserve the ammo of larger caliber?
After a few minutes, the lonely wisp of light above the generator trembled as it started moving. It could only mean one thing: the General had successfully fought off the enemy.
Corpse Eater looked around and considered his chances. As he had been guarding the rear of their formation, when the things started to look bad, he had instinctively started running back toward the exit along their trail, and thus two options were open to him.
He could continue to march toward the exit, taking the only route that had been checked. But with his wounded leg it would take him a day—if he wouldn’t pass out first. Corpse Eater had no illusions about what would happen to him in that case—the creatures of the Underworld would not miss out on such an easy meal.
Or, he could return to the brigade. It was doubtful that they had any medical equipment on them, but at the very least he would be surrounded by armed men. The General may have opened fire without any concern as to whether it would hit him or not, but that wasn’t anything new to the boy. Homewrecker would never accept it, but he? He knew his place in the food chain, and he didn’t see any point resisting it.
They could cauterize his wound. They could lead him out of the Keep. In this situation, the men who had no regard whatsoever for his life were his best hope. As long as he could shoot, they would take him in with open arms. Just as they had six years before.
He got up and started walking toward the fleeing light. In his pocket he found the lighter that he had used so many times to light up a blunt and escape reality, and decided to keep it close—just in case he needed any more light. He tried to use it to burn his wound, but the flame kept on pointing upward, hopelessly seeking its big blazing brother in the sky, and didn’t achieve the desired result, only hurting him. Realizing that he was just pointlessly torturing himself, the boy abandoned that idea and continued walking.
His slow pace was annoying him, and the light seemed to be only getting more and more distant. He felt light-headed, and the gun in his hands felt heavier by the second. Only fear was urging him to go on.
He was afraid that he wouldn’t make it to the remains of the brigade before his blood drained from him. He feared that whatever survivors of the battle lurked in the dark could find him and kill him.
His head spinning, occupied with such thoughts and focused solely on the light ahead of him, he would’ve missed that he had walked into the spot where the battlefield had taken place had he not tripped over someone’s body.
It was one of the adult soldiers, and the gaping wound on his chest left no doubt as to who killed him. The body next to him was riddled with bullets, and a bit further away was a vague silhouette that the boy recognized as one of the villagers.
The boy had no doubt that was their last burial ground; no one would care enough to carry them back to the surface or give them a proper burial. Their bones would be scattered across the Keep—their new massive tomb.
In the shadows, something was already chewing on the corpses, trying to suck blood and bone marrow while they were still warm. The boy pulled out the lighter and lit it up, but the light made it only harder to see in the distance—the glimmers of the Underworld vanished like stars over a city. The unknown desecrator was not distracted from his meal, so the boy decided not to bother him and tempt his fate.
Driven by some morbid curiosity, the boy decided not to turn off the lighter and keep it on. He told himself that he wanted to see where he was going, but he knew that it hadn’t been a problem before. In reality, he wanted to take a closer look at the scope of fatalities.
He recognized some of the faces on the ground. Unseeing eyes, open in eternal terror that seemed to haunt them even beyond the grave, were staring at the ceiling in defiance of the old man’s words. He walked past the small body of Death Herald, who even in death was still squeezing his favorite machete—the boy’s only toy. Corpse Eater pursed his lips in regret.
The grotesque forms of the villagers that had already barely resembled humans lost all semblance of who they used to be in the shadows. It was quite easy to tell them apart even from a distance; their bodies were much larger than those of normal humans. The boy counted quite a lot of them lying around—he was sure that pretty much everyone was there. In his hazy state, he vaguely hoped that they wouldn’t come back to life once more.
His blood froze when he heard a shuffling sound to the left of him. It seemed that somebody was still alive, after all, and it sounded like they were pulling themselves in his direction.
Alarmed and caught off guard, the boy involuntarily took a few steps back and to the right where he tripped over some soldier’s body. His lighter fell out of his weakened grasp and the light instantly went out. His eyes, having already adjusted to the flame’s brightness, went blind, and the boy panicked. Trying to anticipate where could the lighter might have landed, he got on his knees and started searching the ground, trying to find it as soon as possible to restore his sight.
Luckily, it hadn’t flown too far away from him, and a few seconds later he felt it under his fingers. Still concerned with the sounds he had heard, he quickly flicked it on to see what was ahead of him.
It was Homewrecker’s body.
The boy was dead, there was no doubt about it. A massive piece of his cranium was missing, having been blown out of its place by a large bullet. Corpse Eater could see the round shape of the hold on the exposed bone where the projectile went into his skull, and everything on the other side was blown out. One of the boy’s eyes was closed, and the other one was aimlessly looking to the side. His lower jaw hung down and to the side, giving him almost a goofy look.
“No,” Corpse Eater whispered. “You can’t…”
His lighter fell out of his grip once more. He stretched his hands toward his friend’s head but then instantly snapped them away, as if they were burned by mere presence of that gruesome wound.
He couldn’t grasp the fact that his only friend was dead. He had seen far too many deaths in his life—far more deaths than a boy his age should. But had never been moved by those deaths. They had become a part of his life and he had almost taken them for granted. Death was something that happened to other people, and he was always telling himself that when his time came he wouldn’t be able to regret it since he would be dead. He never imagined that death could hurt on such a personal level.
In horror, the boy threw away his gun. It wasn’t a symbol of safety for him anymore; its touch burned him. In that short moment he acknowledged that it was the evil that had been responsible for everything wrong in his life. It was the reason why Homewrecker was lying in the dirt with his head split open. Homewrecker, who had been defiant of the world around him, who to the very end had refused to let the brigade break him and make him fit in.
“All of this will be over one day, and we’ll survive today to see it.” He remembered Homewrecker’s last words. “I’m sure of it and I’ll claw at the Earth to fulfill that. Because only I decide what I am and what my future will be.”
Could he have anticipated what he would become just a few more minutes later?
It should’ve been me, Corpse Eater thought as tears started streaming down his face. He was the one who deserved such an end. He who had admitted defeat long ago and had let despair into his heart.