He Runs (Part One) by Seth Owen

Author:Seth, Owen [Seth, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic | Dystopian
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2016-06-26T04:00:00+00:00

***********************

Man contemplates the darkness of what he saw the day before, the treatment of human beings as nothing more than livestock. In a way, they were nothing more than livestock, even before the lights went out. They were just never eaten. A lucid vision appears in his mind, a memory of what he once saw when the televisions worked and man-harnessed lightning surged through insulated metal. He remembers watching a TV documentary about battery; seeing them, malformed and stuffed into cages, or crammed into an aluminium warehouse, falling over each other, pecking at manufactured seeds until they were deemed old enough and plump enough to massacre. He remembers those chickens, the expressionless look in their eyes, the constant echoes of clucking idiots who were born into a life that was not worth living. Man remembers those birds and laughs. Compared to what he saw the chickens had it easy. They were not starved and hacked to pieces, one limb at a time by their own fucking species.

There are many sights that Man cannot un-see, many scenes of horror etched into his mind, some of which he was responsible for, but what he saw, what he can still see, stands alone at the top of a depraved mountain.

Man looks through his rucksack, sorts the items that remain and lines them up on the grass. He has all the tools, all the equipment he needs to survive. But he has no food. The goat rotted quickly and the tinned goods perished long before that.

He stands up on wobbly legs, the first time he has stood up in days, and looks over the village. He scratches his beard with long nails, feels the drying skin loosen and scatter like snowflakes. Everything in his being tells him to leave the village alone, to run far away and never come back. But there will be other villages like this one. And he is still being hunted by Smith and his remaining comrades. He looks at the village, the bridge and the barbed wire gate and the guards standing either side of it. He can't say for sure but they look clumsy and weak, novices to the art of commensurate combat. He knows he could kill them. Destroy their bodies in just a few moves but then what. He'd have a whole village descend upon him and before he knew it he'd be limbless, rolling around in his shit and blood, moaning and wheezing like the battery people he sees in the cage.

A thought bursts into to his mind from of the darkness.

'Why are they taking one limb at a time?' he says out loud. 'Surely they'd take a whole body. Or multiple bodies with a whole village to feed.' He sits down, removes the karambit from his waistband and runs his finger along the edge. 'Maybe there are other cells in the village. Maybe the prisoners I saw are being punished. Or maybe the village isn't full of life. It could be just a handful of cannibals, preying on the weak.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.