The Broken Dark
Compendium 2020 – Story 40
By Andrew Hawnt
Sam Kincaid's the name. Shooting the dead in the head is the game. You may have seen me in the newsfeeds or cluttering up streams from channels that should know better. Yeah, the job at the Osbourne tower, that was me. Yeah, it was true. A full-on gateway to Death on the eightieth floor. What else could I do but blow up everything over the seventy-ninth? Yeah, it was expensive, but what isn't these days?
I gotta get this recorded as I'm getting low on ammo and even lower on time. This is probably gonna be the end of me, but I've had a good life. I'm fifty-three now and I've lived better than a lot of the poor bastards around me have since the first gate opened and the world was overrun by corpses who wanted to eat us. Keep in mind that when they came, there were over eleven billion people crammed onto this planet, so the dead had no shortage of meat.
You probably know the rest of what happened. The Great Cull. The Food Wars. The Ammo Revolution. The Purification. That last one was never gonna work, was it? The virus those assholes at Genetex made to wipe them out just got passed onto the humans they were eating and it mutated and spread. Boom. Half a billion people dead, then alive again and trying to eat everyone else. It just kept getting worse.
So of course, idiots like me were given heavy-duty guns, a licence to kill anything that was walking around without a heartbeat and a shitty salary considering what we put up with.
None of which really matters any more. Not to me. I got the looks, the slicked-back hair, the cool gun and an attitude that fires twice as hard, but what I don't have is a chance of survival. Not now.
'Coz I'm way too far up shit creek now. I've seen the truth of it all, baby. I've seen the other side of this whole mess and now I'm just ridin' the wave all the way to god-damn Valhalla.
Wait – lemme just blast these cadavers. One. Two. Three. Four. There we go. Power's in the amber lines on my gun, but I got two-thirds of a charge on my comm, so stick with me a while, yeah? I'm at Serenity Plaza, the museum put up to remember those who died in the first wave of attacks. I was trailing a stream of Deadheads and found the gate they were comin' through. I got in, dusted a bunch of them and managed to detonate the gateway before it could become a permanent thing.
But the explosion went wrong. Sure, the gateway blew up, but it left something else behind. A new doorway. A glimpse of somewhere else. Death's a mess, man. It's all a mess now. The dead are in control and they win. They beat us, do you hear?
The gate that opened up was black, not green like the others, and I saw something else. The other gates just had millions of dead assholes in them,. This looked for all the world like a mistake, like the gear had malfunctioned when I set the charge off. I got to see something else. Little old Dead Hunter me.
I saw where the bodies are coming from. I wish I had a vid link still working so I could show you.
The dead that are coming through? They're us. At some point, the shitheads in charge of us work out how to mess with time. I guess so they could go back and kill this shit before it ever happens, but somehow the Dead got hold of it. remember the temporal bomb scare a while back? Back in 2175 or so? That's when the outbreak got worse. The first trip must have gone wrong and the dead went back to the future instead. The bastards have been sending millions of corpses back in time to kill themselves in the present. They haven't just killed us, they've broken time. We're done for, man. Done for.
But before I give in and let these rotting sonsabitches eat me, I've got a score to settle. The future me, my face hanging off my god-damn skull, is right in front of me and shuffling over. I'm gonna blow its frigging head off.
After that, wish me luck. There's a hell of a lot of dead comin', and this gun will be empty soon.
When they come for you, make sure you take one down with you. Or two. Or twenty.
Just go down fightin'. Promise me.
Sam out.
© Andrew Hawnt
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About Compendium 2020:
Compendium 2020 is a project from author Andrew Hawnt that consists of 52 original short stories, flash fiction stories and vignettes given away for FREE in 2020. Featuring science fiction, fantasy, horror and more, this began as a personal quest and due to the weirdness of 2020 has become an ambition to provide free distractions for anyone who needs them.
About Andrew Hawnt:
Andrew is based in Nottingham, England. Known for his music journalism career, comics writing and film critique work, Andrew is a prolific writer and is the author of a growing stack of books, including the cult hit VHS Ate My Brain. He made the movies The Demon And I and The Demon And I: Birthrite completely in lockdown with cast members filming their scenes remotely, and new films are coming.
Andrew is also the creator and presenter of the YouTube shows Planet Hex, Turn One Shock and the VHS Ate My Brain series as well as the video versions of the Compendium stories.
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© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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