There was light.
It reminded him of the fire, and he cringed. He backed further underneath the rock as the machine in the sky smacked down the air with its spinning blades. It moved through the night sky like some sort of spot light equipt insect with a probe of white fire, its beam casting shadows off the bodies and parts thereof scattered about the Humvee. Finally, it flew away.
With the light gone it was safe to come outside again.
The light hurt.
He wanted to hurt the light back.
He knew he was badly injured. But it was not a coherent thought, it was a feeling. He sensed now like an amoeba , a protists that moves by crawling, and crawl he did. He saw, but it was easier to see the bushes moving in the hot wind than it was to see his companion, who was lying underneath the humvee. He smelled, but the smell was fire and blood, it smelled good.
Over the three weeks of sitting at this checkpoint the liquid inside the canisters marked DVICE had baked at a average daylight temp well over the century mark. Things in the water compartment began to grow. The free-living amoeba Naegleria fowleri found in diverse freshwater environments, produces a rapidly fatal primary amoebic meningoencephalitis after exposure to contaminated water. It had never been mixed with a prototypical military grade exteriorized substance, which was what the slime cannon on the hummers ammo was made of.
Weeks of cell division, a commercial anti-riot product, near madness and being nearly burned alive made a strange soupy elixir.
But he could almost remember his name. Almost...
The moon now was the only light. He felt like he looked around him with a new vision. The plants stood out sharply against the soil and rocks. Bats flitted by and he deeply remembers shooting stars as a boy, because the animals all now glowed with a infrared illumination, from his point of view, and the movement of them as they chased insects was like that; of shooting stars. He smiled, and the seared skin around his face seaped fluid which dripped in long ropey streamers from his open mouth and jaw. Something that may have been a laugh but sounded more like the snot gagged cough of a lung cancer victim came out from his mouth and the other one underneath the vehicle came out.
Dimly, from some part of his mind that was still human he thought, You can't raise hell if you can't stand up.
They looked at each other.
It wasn't so much that they could read each others thoughts, it was more like they both felt the same thing.
It wasn't a horror at their burned and naked bodies, it was a wonder.
There was no memory of the fight they had been in shortly before. No concern over the food that had filled their bellies before the first light had came and they had slept in what shadows they could find. They gazed at each other. Stripped of skin, the bodies were lean and muscular. Their eyeballs, as big ass golf balls with the flesh burned away locked onto each other. With no thought, their hands touched, and they lingered that way.
A voice whimpered from by the truck. One of the girls was still alive.
She was shot badly, but moving.
They looked to her, and then back to each other. If they had had lips they would have curled in a smile, but all that was was a bloody gleam in the eyes and they stood there for four minutes before they turned to her.
With sounds like tearing bedsheets and wet mud splattering against a plywood wall they shambled to her She screamed as they fell upon her.
The ghost of a memory introduced itself to his mind as he ate her brains, freshly cracked and pulled from the skull.
He remembered the mass of people grouped by miles of wrecked cars on the freeway between Barstow and his location in Southern California.
He wanted to spray the slime cannon on them, and burn them too.
The humvee still ran. He remembered how to start it and as the engine started over he yelled " iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggggggggggggggggg. "
And they drove away into the remains of the darkness.
Here.