Ravage

by MacCraw

  “You remember back up in Italy, when you were talking with whatshisface about some dream or nightmare in Sadiz?” Kylie asked.

  “What of it?”

  “What exactly happened?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Kirkley questioned, taking a 180 spin to face Kylie and her peculiar question.

  “Because I care, and I’d like to know”, Kylie smiled.

  Kirkley sighed deeply. “Alright, here’s the scoop. I had a dream that I was in a boat with my lady love Hannah, sailing across the European edge of the Caspian Sea down to Sadiz, where Hannah and I raced each other to the top of a particular building with an empty swimming pool out front. Up top was a prearranged wedding ceremony with nobody but the two of us-“

  “Building castles in the sky…” Kylie playfully sang in a soft voice, much to Kirkley’s frustration.

  “-Went and did what the mortal world didn’t want us to do, and then we got ambushed by MEC, who blasted us over the edge and shot Hannah in the face. Again, what makes my dream so relevant to the current situation?”

  “Have you had any other dreams?” Kylie inquired.

  “Why are you asking all of these damned questions?”

  “Answer this one legitly and I’ll quit asking.”

  Though reluctant to tell Kylie about the dream-nightmare hybrid involving the mutilated remains of Poet, Kirkley swallowed his pride and began to explain it in detail. “Okay, so Poet’s clearly dead; when I ran off ahead of you guys back in Germany, I had a dream that I was having breakfast and she showed up in a condition worse than… worse, telling me that Su had chosen me since I had ‘The Gift’. Now what exactly is your basis for asking that?”

  “The two are linked”, said Kylie. “Your encounter with Zombie Poet was telling you that Su wants you as its champion and hero of humankind, and your romantic cruise with Hannah gave you a location.”

  Kirkley sighed upon realizing how naïve and inattentive he had been with himself. “For once, I completely agree with you.”

  “Hey, bro”, Kylie grinned, jokingly slugging Kirkley’s shoulder; “When have I been wrong?”

  “When we pull this off I’ll tell you”, Kirkley smiled.

  “So where’s this resort?”

  “Well gee, where is the specific resort in a colossal fucking city of resorts?!” Kirkley exclaimed sarcastically.

  “Look, let’s just find the beach, and go from there”, Kylie groaned.

  The duo spent about half an hour mindlessly strolling through the ghost town until they struck out lucky and discovered the beach, as well as the shabby little dock that Kirkley and Hannah had landed on in Kirkley’s romantic dream. The boat from the dream wasn’t present, but the dock itself was as real as anything else Kirkley and Kylie had fired at for years. Kirkley retraced his imaginary steps up from the dock and back into the city, where he and his follower found themselves standing before a towering building that Kirkley immediately recognized.

  “So is this the place?”

  “…Yes. Get down”, Kirkley said in a mellow tone as he took a hand grenade out of his pack, yanked the pin out, and flung it as far as he could at the deserted resort. Kylie dove to prone, covered her ears and opened her mouth right before the deafening detonation of the grenade, which did little to no damage to the building.

  “What in Su’s spirit was the point of that?!” Kylie hollered as she rose to face Kirkley.

  “Calling in our tour guides”, Kirkley said, raising an eyebrow and nodding towards the wolf pack charging out of the building towards them.

  “Six wolves; 30 in a magazine and one in the chamber”, Kylie remarked as she causally watched the wolves encircle their exposed prey. “Your turn to duck.”

  Kirkley crouched as Kylie opened fire, hitting wolves with burning silver bullets that robbed them of immortality and their dark link to Sat, while delivering an unhealthy dosage of pain and suffering that bullets are known to provide. Kylie took down five of the six with her ARX-160 until the weapon began clicking; inconveniently as the lone remaining wolf man began closing in on her. Kylie yelped in fear as the dog soldier charged at her, hissing and panting heavily. Kirkley sprung up, knocking Kylie down, and fired a pair of shots that brought the beast to a dead stop at the feet of its would-be prey.

  “Almost got ‘im, mate”, Kirkley remarked as he swapped drum magazines.

  …

  As always, Kirkley took point through the extraordinarily pitch-black interior of the building, with no light save for the one integrated in his attached foregrip. It was particularly dangerous in this eternal apocalypse to head into buildings, even without flashlights; wolf men could seamlessly blend in the shadows and ambush their unsuspecting victims with ease. As a result, every human who had encountered a wolf soldier and actually survived without being eaten or turned had developed an instinctive fear of the darkened buildings that were now no more than dens and lairs for the ferocious beasts that blurred the line between myth and reality.

  “Want me to light a flare?” Kylie asked.

  “Watch as you do that and we find a bunch of dog men around us”, Kirkley remarked with a grin.

  “…Yeah, I guess I’ll save it for when we need it”, Kylie chuckled nervously.

  Another unexpected turn of events came when Kirkley and Kylie slipped and fell, and began tumbling downwards on what felt like a painful mix between a ramp and a staircase. After plummeting and shouting down for about 15 seconds, Kirkley and Kylie came to a stop, coughing heavily and struggling to regain their footing and get a sense of where they were. Kylie reached around to find her gun, but she ended up grabbing something else instead.

  “What the bloody ‘ell are you doing?!” Kirkley exclaimed; “You grabbed my arse!”

  “Oh, sorry!” Kylie yelped in embarrassment.

  Kirkley crawled over towards the light of his AA-12, and upon picking it up, he pointed his light at Kylie’s backpack and dug around for a magnesium flare, which he promptly lit. The flare sparked briefly before fully igniting and providing more than enough light for the two worn-down survivors. Kylie and Kirkley grabbed their bags and checked their weapons, but ultimately wound up directing their attention towards an ominous-looking tunnel ahead of them. It was very, very ancient; easily dating back countless centuries. Its architectural design was difficult to gauge; it looked like a mix of Egyptian and European design, but being in the middle of present day Iran, it was hard to understand how European influence made its way out here.

  “Do you think this leads…?”

  “…To the Shrine of Sat”, Kirkley growled as he cocked his shotgun and prepared to cross the threshold into the realm of an angry spirit.

  …

  Kirkley and Kylie spent well over an hour marching down a desolate tunnel into the underworld, with no words spoken until a frightening and unexpected thing happened.

  The ground beneath them seemed to magically disappear, and down they went, plummeting to yet another hidden underground world, which in this case was a gargantuan underground forest seemingly under the effect of the eternal eclipse, despite being beneath the surface of Sadiz. Kirkley’s heart raced as he and his longtime companion went soaring down towards the enormous forest as the wind continuously slapped him in the face. Beneath a layer of clouds, Kirkley was partially relieved to find out that he and Kylie were falling down towards a lake, though landing correctly was crucial.

  “KYLIE! CANNONBALL!”

  The two freefalling survivors balled themselves up and nervously waited to blast through the water of the lake, and after about a minute of falling, their wish came true, and they dove through the surface of the tranquil lake with a massive pair of splashes, and enough momentum to send them both over 20 feet below water; almost to the bottom of the lake, in fact.

  However, the peril was far from over. Kylie was the only one of the two to immediately recover from the blow, and immediately rushed downwards to save Kirkley from a watery grave.

  …


  Kirkley woke up coughing violently, his clothes and equipment completely drenched and soaked.

  “You okay, bro?” Kylie asked with concern for her nearly-deceased friend.

  “Fucking… what happened, mate?”

  “I’m still asking myself that”, said Kylie. “As far as I can tell, we just entered some other… dimension or something. We were in Sadiz; we fell down a hole; we fell down another hole, and now we’re here, though I haven’t the slightest clue where here is.”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter why we’re here, or where here is”, Kirkley explained as he rose to his feet with his AA-12 in his hands; “We’re here. Now how do we get out?”

  “Kirkley, for once I really think we should look for where we are. This is completely abnormal.”

  “So is the combination of man and wolf that’s rapidly whittling down the human race”, Kirkley sighed; “And they’ve been on the hunt for years and years.”

  “Wait, wait…” Kylie said, slowly crouching down and urging Kirkley to do the same. “I hear something…”

  “…Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!” screamed a badly-mutilated male who came bursting through the foliage and near Kirkley and Kylie.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Kirkley shouted as the man dropped to his knees; “What the fuck happened to you, mate?”

  A large wolf man coated in fresh blood sprung out of the same group of bushes and onto its wounded kill, who shrieked in horror as his hunter finished off its prey with a massive pair of crushing jaws around the throat. Kirkley swiftly raised his shotgun and opened fire on the wolf, firing a large burst of shots that killed the creature. It was only after a dozen loud, clanking and thundering gunshots that Kylie slapped Kirkley in the face and snapped him out of his frightened trance.

  “You wanted to know where we were”, Kirkley gasped; “And now you know. …This place is the Preserve… the personal hunting ground of the evil spirit of Sat and its wolf underlings, who claim pure souls to be used as game to track, hunt, terrorize and kill.”

  “I seriously doubted that mortals could access such a place, but I guess I doubted myself”, Kylie remarked as she reloaded her ARX-160, which she never had gotten the chance to reload.

  “This place must’ve always existed in the physical world, and I’m positive that the wolves came from here and up to the surface, but how come they didn’t devour the MEC? And how did they get to England? That’s what I want to know”, said Kirkley.

  “You think the MEC believe and worship Sat?” Kylie asked. “Seems kind of peculiar that they didn’t attack them, and that they’re so gung-ho on killing everything else.”

  “Look, we’re at a point now where we’re at war with a spirit, a spirit’s minions, and a massive empire that worships the spirit and is blessed by some unholy magic or something”, Kylie added. “There’s only one way to get this problem solved: destroy that shrine; kill Sat; bring back the sun; barbeque these furballs.”

  “But we don’t know where the damned thing is.”

  “It’s here. We were brought here, and now we’re the hunters and the hunted. But what we have that that dude who just got killed didn’t have are guns, and guns that kill these things”, Kylie grinned, pointing to Kirkley’s AA-12 and bumping her assault rifle forward with her belly, innocently blushing as she did so.

  “Alright, let’s get moving. We need to find high ground of some sort. We need to get an idea of where we are, and where the Shrine of Sat might be located.”

  …

  The tall boreal forest echoed with the roars of predatory wolf men, and the shrieks of the mutilated. Even as a long-running veteran duo of hardened survivors armed with guns capable of destroying wolf soldiers, Kylie and Kirkley still had a sense of anxiety and restlessness, for now they were in the domain of the dog soldier; a forested wilderness where death could lurk behind every tree, and shadows could step out and slaughter them.

  “Nice going, idiot”, Kylie jokingly remarked when Kirkley tripped and fell over something, but her eyes bulged upon hearing a distinct snap, and a grumble that shook her ears and the ground beneath her. Although the shadows played against Kirkley and Kylie, Kylie was able to notice something shifting and moving – a large pile of boulders that were tumbling towards her and her friend. Kylie shouted in panic, springing out of the way as Kirkley narrowly rolled aside and barely avoided having a massive boulder flatten his skull.

  “You little assholes!” a female voice screeched with frustration. Kirkley’s heart began thumping upon immediately recognizing the voice.

  The inconceivable became believable when the most captivating woman Kirkley had ever met came striding out of the darkness, and upon realizing who had accidentally sprung her trap, Hannah’s tears washed over her face like a great monsoon of joy. Hannah leapt up into the air and onto Kirkley, who caught her rear in his hands and placed his foot back to avoid getting flung backwards by the love of his life. The tears of Kirkley and Hannah embraced each other as the two lovers reunited held on for dear life, indescribably relieved to see one another alive and in person. Kylie’s heart was warmed, and she too joined in the emotional moment.

  “You came back for me…” Hannah sniffled.

  “Love never dies”, Kirkley smiled as he docked his lips with hers and pulled her in tighter.

  “Hey, uh, H”, Kylie nervously interjected; “I apologize for the interruption, but I really think we should get someplace safe.”

  …

  Sometime later, Kylie, Kirkley and Hannah were up in Hannah’s makeshift abode in a large tree with no furnishings or manmade addons. Although it wasn’t a condo in Sadiz, it did offer protection and refuge for Hannah, who Kirkley was beyond overjoyed to be reunited with.

  “So Hannah, how did you wind up here?” Kylie asked as she handed her friend an opened can of food which Hannah ravenously scarfed down.

  “Thanks for the food, by the way”, said Hannah. “You know, in the Preserve, they don’t give us any food or water, but we don’t die of starvation or thirst.”

  “Why?”

  “My guess…?” Hannah shrugged; “Sat wants us to suffer. The hunger pains and the headaches and hallucinations of being dehydrated are bad enough, but when your stomach starts grumbling, that’s another thing that’ll keep you on your toes. If you can hear it yourself, they can, too. Matter of fact, my gut was growling as loud as they do about 15 minutes before you two got here.”

  “Mmm”, Kirkley nodded as he hugged Hannah from the side and gently rubbed up against her.

  “So buddy, how did you end up here, exactly?”

  “Oh, right, right”, Hannah sighed. “When we get slashed by those fucking failed abortions, we leave our original body behind and get dropped down here. There’s a blinding light once our lives leave our bodies, and we get dropped in a new version of our body prior to getting attacked. It’s totally fucking weird how this works, and I have trouble using my words when it comes to accurately explaining how this shit works. Believe me, it isn’t an enjoyable process. Being sent to an all-male prison with a long history of rape would be preferable to this.”

  “Pretty vividly disturbing but an excellent comparison”, Kylie commented.

  “Listen, love”, Kirkley explained, “We’re on the track of the Shrine of Sat, but we got dropped here and we don’t know where we are and where we are relative to the Shrine, assuming and hoping it is here.”

  “Oh, it’s here alright”, Hannah smirked, chuckling slightly. “Passed by it when I first got dropped here. Thing is, it’s way too dangerous to go there. Based on how that’s like the spawn zone of the wolf men, there’s no way you’re getting my ass down there.”

  “Can I still get your ass?” Kirkley grinned.

  “Not now, you two”, Kylie chided. “Get kinky when we get out of the Preserve.”

  “But there’s little to no chance of that happening, now is there?” Hannah snidely remarked.

  “See these?” Kirkley said as he tapped his AA-12
.

  “New gun. Looks uh, slightly less fucking crappy than the one you had before”, Hannah snorted. “Truth is, I don’t care if you change guns as long as you don’t change women.”

  “This shotgun, my pistol, and Kylie’s assault rifle are firing bullets that kill dog soldiers.”

  “No shit?” Hannah responded as she took a sip of water.

  “And I went ahead and did you a favor”, Kirkley smiled as he snapped open his holster and handed Hannah his sidearm, which was now loaded with silver bullets.

  “If this was a wedding ring, I’d beat you over the head with it”, Hannah replied with a grin.

  “But it isn’t, so get off of your soft bum-bum and get moving with us”, Kirkley declared as he prepared to drop down from the tree he and Kylie had been “invited” up into.

  …

  “So, um, have you seen anybody else out here?” Kirkley asked.

  “You mean like our mates that got killed? No, I haven’t”, said Hannah with a deep, regretful sigh as she slashed through the bushes with Kirkley’s machete while Kirkley himself provided lighting with his foregrip’s flashlight. “Either they’ve been killed or turned, or they’re excellent at staying completely hidden.”

  “I was just wondering, y’know.”

  “I don’t blame you. This damn place leaves you with way too many unanswered questions”, Hannah answered.

  “We closing in on the Shrine?” asked Kylie.

  “Look up ahead”, Hannah replied. Through the trees was a large formation of rock that appeared to descend down into the bottom of a large, circular crevice where a white beam of light brightly lit up the bottom of the pit, though the light was too blinding to see what was at the epicenter of it.

  Kirkley, Hannah and Kylie began their descent, keeping their eyes peeled for anything covered with fur and with gigantic teeth and bladed talons. About 20 minutes later, they had reached the bottom level, where they began to psychologically prepare themselves for what they were about to witness. Hannah was quaking and shaking uncontrollably, but eventually she worked up the courage to move in with her lover and her closest friend.