Stand your ground
“I can’t abandon these kids!” you realize, hefting up your weapon as you face the opposite end of the hall. The shouting, banging sounds of the enemy wave growing ever closer mounts in the echoing sounds of the hall.
Their voices get louder and louder, reaching a shrieking volume as they rounded the final corner! A jolting shiver runs down your spine in that final moment of anticipation before suddenly, you fall backwards.
Confusion grabs at your mind before you look up to see an array of fuzzy, chubby faces of all the cub-aged children around you. In the last moments, hearing the rising noise, they’d opened the door and yanked you back in. Outside, the enemy fled past the seal door, uninterested in exploring the sleeping chambers of an evacuated ship. Instead, they head right towards the control room.
Over the course of hours, blind to what’s happening outside, you try to guess based on the screams which team each death belongs to. It all echoes in your head, each minute gaining a layer of new terror, new voices, new fallen people to hear on a loop. More footsteps clamber up and down the corridor, something slams into the door every few hours, but now one attempts to enter. The battles just rages on.
Finally, a deadly silence casts over everything. Blinking, you hush the murmurs of the children before moving to the door to open it. With a mechanical shhht it slides open, revealing the hall.
The metallic floor, with gleaming silver, is entirely bathed in a sheen of red. It’s not droplets or splatter, but an actual veil of shining blood coating the walkway. Bodies pile against the windows, one pierced through the reinforced plastic, caught with intestines tangling into the broken edges. Peering through one open window, you see the field is littered with bodies from both teams.
The entire ground is covered in the texture of fallen warriors, leaving none of the actual Earth exposed. You look back at the children, still waiting inside the little bedroom, not yet exposed to this truth.
“Is everyone dead?” you silently ask, realizing at once the implications of that. “Are we all that’s left of the species?” Your decision to change back as soon as possible, to flee form this form and planet, is brought into question. Could you leave this group of seven frightened youths in a slaughtered world?
“We need to find a base camp of some sort and figure this out...” you think, mentally running through what you saw of the ship to guess where a mess or cafeteria would be.
“Okay, kids.” You turn back, looking at their striped, tired faces. “Can everyone grab hands and close your eyes for me?” You hold onto the first kids hand, starting a train of them all dependant on only your eyes, forcing you to drink up the horror all around while they remain innocent, protected. Though, their eyelids don’t protect them from the wet squish of every foot step on the pooling pockets of seeping blood.
Squish. Squish. Squish.
Step by step they meander down till you find the mess in the belly of the ship. So deeper inside the ship, without any fancy equipment to damage, the mess is minimally desecrated. There, with the kids, you settled down around a silent meal on rations while your mind continues to run always circling back to the same question.
“How are these kids going to survive?”
***
Fed and exhausted, your charges finally fall asleep all around you. That night, with silence finally encompassing you, you plan. You count the rations, you plot how little they can live off of. You dig for maps, information on the planet. Hour by hour as the little ones sleep, you locate a clearing mapped out in the forest that is located a small pace from viable waters. Surely it’d be best to find someplace new to begin this life.
The next day begins the challenge of implementing it. Each child takes a bag with all the rations they can carry. You rummage the ship, finding a damaged land rover that eventually some motor memory kicks in to fix, sparking to life your transport. You load it with all food and utensils from the ship it can hold. Then, you tie rounds of torn wiring to it’s back bumper and jerry rig a wagon out of a sheared off hull of metal, loading on more items. You bark out orders, forcing the kids to feed into the tasks and not look down. Look at the box you carry, not that twitching mound of maggots finding the eldest dead. Look up there for anymore pieces of the ship we could build with, not at the sword slicing through that stack of three skulls.
Notice not your dead mothers. Notice not your dead fathers.
***
Over the course of a week, your infantile tribe builds a trio of lean-tos in the clearing. Tomorrow you’ll begin chopping down trees in the hopes of building the shell for a mud hut, Shalinka assures you she remembers her mother building their hut.
Asura says his father taught him to hunt.
Alinka has the reflexes of a true feline and has already fished out your dinner that now roasts over a flicking fire pit.
Their skills are mere echoes of the tribe that birthed them like yours are echoes of Anyaka who once lived in this body. Together, you think as they all hum around the fire together finally imbued with some life and hope, we will make these echoes into our own song.
Written by Picklessauce69 on 15 May 2016
The end (for now)