Ravage

by MacCraw

  “Grab your guns and get behind me!” Kylie shouted. The others complied, picking up their weapons and stepping over the immobilized Bridget. “Kirkley, stand by the door, and get ready to open it on my mark.”

  Kylie nodded to Hannah, and both girls grabbed one of Bridget’s arms. “What are you twats doing?” Bridget asked in an angry and concerned way.

  “What you tried to do to my friend, motherfucker”, Kylie smirked. “Kirkley! The door!”

  Kirkley swung the door open, and Hannah and Kylie flung Bridget into the cellar. As soon as the savage woman was in the dark confines of the wine cellar, the man shut the door and locked it as Bridget furiously banged against it. “Open this door, or you’ll be sorry!” she growled.

  “Yeah, sorry we didn’t do this sooner”, said Hannah.

  Everybody suddenly quieted down, and their ears detected the low grumbling of Bridget’s canine husband. Bridget was still going berserk, and due to the commotion on her end she wasn’t paying attention to her surroundings. This proved to be the harbinger of her downfall, for she was taken completely by surprise by her hungry husband. Bridget shrieked in pain as his enormous jaws clamped down on her thin neck and slowly compressed, painfully tearing through skin and crunching through bone with a wet, juicy crunch that sickened the survivors, and even caused poor Hannah to vomit in disgust. As the husband wolf decapitated Bridget with his mighty jaws, he aggressively hacked and slashed her back, effortlessly shredding her apart with swipe after swipe. Once his kill had been confirmed, he howled in triumph. But the group wasn’t around to hear it, because after they had confirmed that he was locked in the cellar for the rest of his life, they had made their escape from Bridget’s cottage.

  The blizzard had died down; now reduced to light snowfall and the snow on the ground, so marching through the Scottish wilderness was slightly less agonizing; though in comparison to the ordeal they had just gone through it was almost a privilege.

  “Good to know that that was a complete waste of time and energy, and a waste that nearly killed us all”, Hannah scoffed.

  “Yeah, but we got free food, and you got some much needed rest”, Kirkley smiled. “Take the good with the bad. It’s better than not taking anything at all.”

  “Speaking of bad, what became of those creepers at the window earlier?”

  “Well, they aren’t here, so that’s what matters”, said Pack; his inspiring point was swiftly foiled with a howl that sounded close.

  “We have company coming over”, Kylie remarked, unknowingly quoting Bridget.

  …

  The sound of gunshots ripped through the snowy woods, and the gunshots themselves ripped through the branches and wolves and clipped the trees.

  Each weapon used by each of the five survivors was reminiscent of their users. Kylie’s L85 assault rifle was a tried and true weapon that was as to-the-point and reckless as its operator. The H&K MP5A2 used by Pack was a low-caliber weapon that made up for this with a high rate of fire and controllable kick. Poet’s GOL sniper rifle was a precise, deadly, soft-spoken weapon that struck in a fraction of a second. Kirkley’s Franchi SPAS-15 was a strong, dangerous robust weapon with unquestionable force; whether with accurate pump-action shots or automatic firing ideal for plowing into a wolf soldier, Kirkley’s gun was a combination of Pack’s short-tempered impulsiveness and Poet’s long-ranged, patient precision.

  And it was this versatile mixture of raw firepower that always turned the tide in any engagement. Kirkley had also been exercising the “slam-firing” technique, which, for shotguns that fired in pump-action mode, meant that as long as you held your finger on the trigger, and you kept pumping back and then forward, the gun would automatically fire off, and you could repeat as needed. One of the only issues of slam-firing was that it was somewhat more difficult to control, but given that most engagements take place at close to medium range, Kirkley deemed this an acceptable tradeoff. And on top of that, it was a shotgun, which was designed almost exclusively for close quarters combat. Still, in the hands of a professional, any weapon could be used with unquestioned efficiency.

  As the war for survival beneath the eclipse drew on, Pack occasionally missed his G3 battle rifle that he had ditched in the gun store in Glasgow, due to its accuracy and ridiculous stopping power. But after discovering the MP5, his viewpoint changed. The MP5’s 9mm banana magazines were more portable, meaning he could carry well over 10 on his person; the magazines also had a high ammo capacity and were attached to each other in pairs, meaning that when one magazine ran out of bullets, he didn’t have to go digging around to pull out another one – he could rapidly swap mags. The MP5 was another useful asset in repelling enemies, since it had the highest firing rate out of everybody’s weapons. The 9mm bullets dealt the least amount of tissue damage, but they were enough to stun the wolves as the others concentrated their more powerful weapons onto the dogs.

  Compared to the rest of her friends, Hannah felt absolutely weak, and was ashamed by how little she could offer the group in the heat of battle armed with nothing more than a 9mm handgun. Hannah eventually resolved to save her bullets for point-blank encounters, or for when the time to kill herself rather than turning into a dog soldier. The others understood this, and filled in for their friend during combat situations.

  “One of these days!” Kylie shouted as she smashed the butt of her rifle into the fragile nose of a dog, “Somebody’s gonna wonder where the hell all these damn bullet casings came from!”

  “Well who’s gonna come out here?! This place is a fuckin’ no-man’s land!” Pack bellowed.

  “Poet, 2 o’clock!” Kirkley shouted. Poet nodded in affirmation and quickly scoped in on the target. Without an ounce of hesitation, she fired a shot that echoed through the snowy forest before it nailed the dog man in the face. The creature whimpered in pain and frantically fled as its pack mates continued to press forward towards their prey with a pure dedication to the kill.

  From the perspective of the wolves, the stubborn resistance of these notable humans was actually more engaging, and what was leaving a trail for the wolf soldiers to follow. Like most humans, the dog soldiers were all about immediate gratification, and being deprived of badly-craved food only enraged them even further. They were formerly human creatures now powered by nothing but anger, and negative energy pulsed through their bodies. This anger manifested itself into urge and impulse, mixed in with primal instincts, and that was ultimately what kept propelling them forward despite once being the same creatures that they hunted.

  After another drawn-out skirmish, the bullets were too much to take, and the wolves made a hasty escape. Moving and shooting while facing your attacker gave Kirkley a few moments here and there to study his opponents, and he deduced that he and his team had encountered at least two of these particular dogs before due to the visible gunshot wounds. Most of the wounds were simple skin disruptions, but a few of them had bullets in their buff chests. Still, there was no reason to keep thinking about them after they had retreated, so it was a train of thought with no destination.

  “We’re clear!” Pack shouted as he hit the magazine release and slammed a crisp new magazine into his gun.

  “Kirkley, are we still on course?” asked Hannah.

  “Yep, still heading south.”

  “I miss the car”, Kylie sighed.

  “Don’t we all”, said Pack.

  “No, I mean because I practically built the whole fuckin’ thing!” she laughed. “Though seriously, it was a sick-ass car.”

  “Walking makes me feel like a tramp”, Hannah groaned as she flung her legs in front of her.

  “You are not a tramp. You’re a perfectly lovely lady”, Kirkley firmly stated.

  “I think she means like a traveling nomad, scrub”, Kylie commented.

  “Well sorry, arsehole”, snapped Kirkley. “I just hadn’t heard the term in that context.”

  “Oh… my- no…” Pack weakly croaked as he slowly elevated his arm towards the horri
fic massacre spread out in a wide arc in front of him. Everybody else shuddered in disgust, and poor Hannah even threw up once again.

  Sprawled across the clearing in the forest were the mutilated remnants of a small group of survivors who didn’t exactly survive. Like Kirkley’s group, they were a small fireteam of five; lightly armed with submachine guns, a pump-action 12-gauge, and a handgun. Their light armament might’ve contributed to their ultimate demise, but given that the bulk of Kirkley’s survivors were armed with similar weaponry, Kirkley deduced that these folks were either inexperienced or caught completely by surprise.

  The bodies were in an absolutely revolting state. The deceased group was consisted of three men and two women; though it was extremely difficult to tell who was who. Faces were practically torn off; the faces still attached to the heads were coated in blood, and it wasn’t a shock to see that some of the limbs had been torn from the bodies. Like regular dogs, which Kirkley had not seen in years, the wolf men liked to use bones as chew toys, but the “chew” part of it came from the skin and muscle still tightly bound to the bones that turned a human arm or leg into a rawhide toy. Quite obviously, blood was scattered and splattered all around, and it actually told a bit of a story as to what ultimately went down.

  …

  “Okay, do you even know what direction we’re going?” the heavily pregnant woman named Leah Crowley asked in doubt to the party leader and her husband, Roger.

  “Relax, honey”, said Roger, “We’re on course to London.”

  “Well I for one think that leadership should be reevaluated”, the youngest member of the party, a rebellious gothic teen girl nicknamed “Missy” declared.

  “Settle down, Missy”, Roger ordered. “We’re gonna be alright. We’ll find safety and sanctuary protection in London. Maybe we’ll find a boat that’ll take us to the mainland.”

  “Those are all the same things you said about Edinburgh”, the ginger named Stan commented.

  “Hey, can it, Stan!” Roger barked, beginning to lose his carefully balanced patience with the unruly insubordinates he called allies.

  “I’m just saying; Edinburgh was supposed to be our ticket out of this cursed country, but what did we find when we arrived?” Stan sarcastically squawked, his naturally scratchy voice further delivering the negativity of his retort, “A shoreline ghost town with no signs of human life; few useable munitions, dog soldiers running amok, and a small wooden boat that fucking broke the second we slowly climbed into it. We were stuck out there for at least a week; how exactly we were able to run for our lives without getting killed was beyond my wildest dreams.”

  “Montes, back me the fuck up here”, Roger groaned as he turned around to hear his friend Montes’ two-cents on the matter, only to be unpleasantly surprised by the awkward and unsettling silence that whirled around them.

  “Montes?” Leah hollered with concern.

  “Done suckin’ your own balls yet?” Missy remarked, only to scream in horror when she saw what the Samantha wolf was doing to him. Samantha had her ferocious fangs plunged deep into the neck of David Montes, ex-Marine; a soldier who had fought in – and escaped from – the Drone Wars, and was now meeting his demise at the jaws and claws of a fierce wolf soldier. As Montes exhaled for the last time, his lifeless hands dropped his pistol, which discharged upon hitting the rock he and his murderer were standing upon. The gun discharged, and the bullet that went blazing out of the handgun’s barrel scored a successful hit on Leah’s leg, causing the pregnant lady to fall over backwards and painfully smash her spine against a rather rigid and rough boulder. In a burst of paternal fury, Roger began spraying bullets in Samantha’s direction, but the position that she was in only made the bullets strike Montes’ lifeless corpse that was still in her talon-tipped hands. Roger was too distracted by his sudden desire to slaughter the creature that had killed his friend Montes to realize that he was shooting a dead body; right as his magazine ran dry. The Samantha wolf smirked, and flung the bullet-filled carcass towards the shooter, incapacitating him for a brief amount of time.

  With Montes dead, Leah writhing around in agony, and Roger incapacitated, that only left Stan and Missy standing, which, in the perspective of Samantha, was an uneven fight.

  For them.

  Missy and Stan fired on Samantha with their submachine gun and shotgun, respectively. Since the shotgun was causing the Samantha wolf more pain, she decided to eliminate the shooter. With a strong backhand swipe, the gun went hurdling out of Stan’s hands, smacking against a tree with a loud crack that send pieces of the receiver littering around the base of the tree. With his primary armament disabled, Stan’s only valid offensive option was to throw a series of quick, mighty punches that connected with the Samantha wolf’s wishbone. As Stan moved in for another strike, Samantha grabbed his streaking arm with her gigantic, furry hand, much to his horror. Samantha hissed menacingly as she made eye contact with the mortified Stan, and before he could make any other movement with his free arm, she angrily flung him against the same tree his shotgun had hit, and the destroyed shotgun sat in crimson snow alongside its owner, whose head had violently fractured upon colliding with the thick tree.

  Missy felt regret for not firing on Samantha while she was face-to-face with Stan, but she consciously tried to battle this by telling herself that the bullets from her SMG would’ve hit Stan’s body in the same way that Roger’s hit Montes. But now that the human shield was out of commission, she went trigger happy and began chewing into the brown wolf with an unrelenting cyclone of submachine gun fire. Samantha was rather annoyed with the stinging sensation that the bullets produced upon contact with her taut hide; for the wolves, the bullets felt like painful stings from a nest of larger-than-average-sized wasps. Not able to bear the stings of the 9mm hollow point bullets, Samantha charged Missy in a head-on charge. Like an oversized football player that forgot to shave or trim their nails, the Samantha wolf completely bulldozed through Missy and knocked her to the ground. The wolf soldier hacked and slashed relentlessly into Missy’s abdomen, sending several streams of blood splattering against the walls of the snowy gorge. Missy choked and gasped for life as she stared at her internal organs whilst Samantha began devouring them. As Missy’s life slipped away from her, Samantha’s ravenous feast was briefly interrupted by shots striking her from behind. The ravenous predator swung around to see that Roger was indeed alive, and was making his final stand with a pistol.

  Not amused by the human’s comical attempt to stay alive and to save his wife and unborn child, Samantha marched over to Roger and stomped her foot down on the hand holding the pistol. Under the pressure of a 3-or-400 pound dog soldier, Roger couldn’t continue to clutch the gun due to the immense pain that it caused. This pain was increased tenfold when Samantha sunk the overgrown claws on her foot into the defenseless man’s wrist, which made him shriek and bellow in agony the deeper it sliced into the veins pulsing through his arm. Though her wolfish facial movements couldn’t quite display it, the Samantha wolf was having an enjoyable time causing agony for this poor soul, and while she slowly sawed through Roger’s wrist with her oversized toenails, she bit down on his other hand while aggressively trying to rip it off. In little time and effort she accomplished this, and the severed hand went flying off into the forest as Roger slowly died. With literally no way to defend himself or his wife, Roger was left to slowly die as Samantha turned to put a gruesome end to Leah and the unborn Crowley child.

  As Leah watched her friends and husband die horribly, she had been trying to end her own life and that of her child’s, but inconveniently enough the gun had jammed, and she had spent these last few minutes of her life trying to get her gun ready to fire so she could kill her unborn baby, and then herself. Bullets only pissed Samantha off, and Leah had realized this immediately. Tears streamed down her cheeks as her gun disobeyed her; it clicked as it refused to fire and put a bullet into Leah’s pregnant stomach, and by the time Samantha had stomped up to the last survivor, it w
as too late. The voracious wolf soldier grabbed Leah’s gun in her jaws, and with tremendous crushing force, the Samantha wolf snapped the gun into pieces. However, the amount of force compressing the gun caused the jammed bullets to violently discharge and blast one of Samantha’s fangs out, along with tiny shards of metal and polymer. With her prey’s last line of defense demolished, Samantha went in for the kill. Horrifically enough, she didn’t go for the neck, but for the swollen abdomen containing the baby. Leah screamed and shrieked as Samantha ravenously munched through the defenseless fetus, scarfing it down in little time. Once the baby had been killed, Samantha finished off the mother, and with Leah dead, Samantha had singlehandedly annihilated an entire squad of armed survivors.

  …

  “I always knew these cunts were vicious”, Hannah growled as she studied the remains of Leah and her open stomach, “But this is just… just pure evil.”

  “They don’t have ethics or discriminate”, Kirkley sighed as he took off his beanie. “These things just kill for the fun of it.”

  “It’s just not right though”, said Hannah. “Killing a defenseless pregnant woman? Ethically unacceptable.”

  “Well let’s just make sure we don’t end up like these sorry fucks”, Pack remarked.

  “Indeed”, Kirkley replied. “Grab whatever you can carry.”

  It was Pack’s lucky day, for the submachine guns used by these people were the same as his. Both due to ethics and just not wanting to go digging around in a carcass, Pack only took the magazines that weren’t covered in blood and pus. Poet stuck out lucky, for she had gotten a pair of 1911 .45 tactical pistols – modernized pistols that dealt a lot of damage to anything that the bullets hit. They were extremely versatile handguns, and it was an opportunity that was too good to pass up. Having a set of pistols also gave her a good option for close quarters fighting.