Fast Fiction - Several Sins

They came in the night, hulking from their boats and carts, all heavy boots and bestial screams.

We fled to the woods, took refuge there, enfolded in the grey arms of the undergrowth, and watched whilst they lit torches, whooped, hollared, and cut by the knives of rain, took the flame to our homes.

All our struggle died then.

They danced as demons would, around the villages flaming bones, the burning scratched up the sky. They danced an inhuman convulsive dance, all flails and copulatory jerks.

Vomit, whisky and tobacco, the flash of gold teeth, fucking and violence, until exhausted they, pulled down by their devil's revilry, fell in the mud unconscious, unmoving and pissed on by rain.

The wind carried the scent of burnt wood to our nostrils.

All but one of us were shackled by terror.

J, his eyes emptied and turned cold . He stripped himself naked, and smearing himself with mud he moved forward, dragging his thin wiry body invisibly through the mire, silent in the roar of the rain.

One of the raiders, when he was claimed by the whisky, had let his switchblade fall by his side. To J, it must have seemed like a lighthouse as he slithered towards it, a slow moving, undulating wave of mud.

The first one's cries we didn't even hear. We just heard the suction of his body bucking in the mud like a slaughtered bull, as J's hand pressed down upon his mouth and nose. But we saw that savage glint all right.

Some of us turned away.

J didn't, he just moved on to the next, and the next, and the next.
Nineteen in all.

The last one woke, and rose, a huge hairless brute. All crazy eyes, and distended belly. He glanced around at the corpses of his kin, a wounded beasts roar loosed from the depths of his being, an animal waving a gun around.

J lay under him, his body sheathed in mud, eyes closed, ears doing his seeing.

The rain still hammered down. The endless automatic weapon fire of nature. Mud, darkness and God's gunfire, not enough to drown the monsters scream as the knife entered his perinium.

J, Rage, blood and mud on his distorted visage, bellowed like all the Judges who ever went to Hell, repeating "THIS IS NOT YOUR HOMELAND", again and again, until finally his voice cracked and broke. He fell to his knees, spent, eyes unblinking and jaw slack.

The darkness and rain betrayed the trees, they bent and swayed in agreement with him.

We Picked our way through the smoking debris and corpses like the living dead, and wondered when they would bring their Freedom to us again.

© Fathercrow 2004

Peace and Hope

Fathercrow