one. dead and buried away

one˚༺⋆♱⋆༻˚↳ dead and buried away ↲

ONE WORD, ONE SIMPLE WORD.

"Liar."

Something that could be said so easily, yet do significant damage. Words were odd like that. This one was so minuscule, but brought forth absolute devastation.

The softly uttered line was followed by a sword swinging into a mans neck. An old man who — if I had seen correctly — smiled ever so slightly before having his head severed by Brian's blade.

Smiled because he thought we had reached peace between our two groups.

However, this was anything but peace. Instead of the desired tranquility, his body was rendered cold in mere seconds as he hit the grass below him. As if my eyes were shutters from a vintage film, I watched with choppy vision as thick crimson liquid sputtered and squirted against the grass.

Then came forth the downfall of the community behind the fences. It was sudden, something that neither side was prepared for. At least, something that I was not prepared for, as my gun was now lowered in distress. Cries of anguish pierced the silent moment, erupting the heavy tension between us. Firearms were drawn in an instant, and bullets began planting into anything in their way.

In this moment, my essence felt a tug from the body I bore. I dissociated completely from everything I thought I knew, not even understanding right from left. The only thing I was positively sure of, was that I stood outside of the fences. I was behind the chain links, and I was caught the wrong side of this.

That tug of consciousness clicked like a magnet back into place, and my thoughts were my own once again. Now able to move my limbs, I shifted my weight onto the tattered boots I wore, spinning behind the truck I had previously been aiming my weapon against.

Everything had just been changed in a single moment. Only seconds ago, we had the objective of driving these tainted out people from the prison. Brian explained that they were scum-of-the-earth, and didn't deserve this place like our group did. He said there was no violence needed; unless something were to happen. He promised nobody would be hurt.

Squeezing my eyes shut tight, an unsteady breath fought from my lungs. When exhaling this air, I came to the revelation that he was the liar.

"Rick" — Brian had named the man — was being extremely compromising. Unsoundly as his mind was described by our leader, he seemed nothing of the sort to me. Even as we had come to his gates with force, he was willing to negotiate terms.

To find a way for all of us to win in this situation.

Now, everything to do with Rick's offer was destroyed. I was nothing other than oblivious, truly believing in Brian's plan. I saw it now — saw the scheme behind his tactics and utter manipulation. It took one hell of a talker to convince an entire force of fighters to do something terribly wrong. But he had made it seem so right in the way he spoke it.

One of our cannons fired, crashing into the stone fortress beyond me. The concrete crackled in its presence, before splitting down the wall. This impact caused a shift that had the wall toppling over.

I twisted my head to glance at the tank we'd used to fire it, but my attention caught on the dead flooding through the gates we had intentionally collapsed. Brian said it was for 'intimidation', but as I now watched these creatures sink their teeth into anything with a pulse, I figured it was meant to be so much more than a tactic.

It was war. Before we arrived at the gates, this place was nothing short of a promise land. It was everything someone like me could dream of being part of, but it was to be brought down now. Things were always going to end this way - dead and buried away. It was too late to do anything about it. There was nothing I could do to change the outcome, or whose weapons were in my hands.

Because of this, I allowed myself to catch up with the rest of my group. With the dead pushing in, there was nowhere else to go but forward. In order to live and see another day—one in which I might change who I fight for—I forced myself to swallow the guilt. If I let it crawl up my throat, I too would be another body in this graveyard.

"Cyn, move to the frontlines. We need a good shot like you to take them out." A voice from behind ordered me.

We were still trying to kill them? Wasn't destroying their safe haven and pushing them out the doors enough? There was nothing left for us here, not even the prison itself, or its fences.

The man, one of my many previous allies, ran ahead. His gun was carelessly slung across his shoulder, shirt stained with unidentified blood. It was almost as if he had not a care in the world, even as its end inevitably neared. But on he went, taking grip of his gun like it was the only thing he knew how to do.

Maybe it was all I knew, too. However, after witnessing the brutal slaughter of the older man, the calling of peace whispered my name. I did not want to pull the trigger anymore, I did not want to kill.

I stopped where I stood, barely past the outside courtyard. The pavement hit the tips of my boots, and the others trailing behind hardly gave a glance at me as they split around and followed the man.

I turned my head once again, wisps of unkempt hair brushing against my cheeks. I contemplated if it was easier to lay on the gravel and give my life, or to push through the dead and have a chance at being something other than a villain in another's narrative.

My neck craned as I searched for an answer, my eyes catching on two people at another's throats in the courtyard. Brian and Rick. They served violent blows at one another, blood and sweat swirling together on their skin to look like red rain had fallen onto one another.

I back-stepped toward them, only to find my legs in protest. They would either take me away from this scene, or go nowhere at all. I was too young to come between the two men. If Rick won, there would be no question in putting me down by guilt of association. If Brian came out on top, this would never end. I would never be anything but his child soldier; the girl he put on the lines purely for her aim.

I began to carry myself past the yard, running left at the blacktop to conceal myself behind a tank. There was no sign of ceasefire, no place to roam where bullets did not fly. This was a suicide mission. Brian never planned on any of us returning to live and tell other camp members of the massacre.

Dropping to my knees, the cement scuffed at my jeans as my palms pressed into the ground beneath. There was no sense of stability — my head was spinning and I couldn't quite get hold of it.

A group of seven strangers began to pass, and I dropped my head to look beneath my cover. I watched their legs carry them forward, then took note of the guns in their hands when they were far enough. Despite their weapons, they weren't looking to kill. They were making way to a small getaway bus. Through the vehicles windows, I saw mainly children inside. Few held cloths to wounds, while others rushed to find a seat in fear of being left,

New fronts of decayed flesh and yellow teeth were coming from every direction. Hearing the starved groans coming up to the machine, I placed my rifle against my shoulder, aimed at the ones closing in, and let my finger squeeze the trigger.

I wish it wasn't true, but I felt nothing but recoil. No thoughts about who the corpses were. Not since the beginning. Shortly after 'the end' had approached, I subliminally grew armor around my heart.

It was easier to be reformed, to be toughened.

A sound then drew me out of my thought process. To put it simply, it could be explained how, 'clank', would be articulated.

It then emitted such an echo, my body being pushed backwards by an extreme scalding hot force. After the singular moment of silence, light speckled in my flawed vision, a newfound ringing finding home in my ears. My body felt like a pressed-iron badge, applied and stuck to the ground with heat.

Any form of movement sent numbing tingles up my limbs, crawling through my nerves. My eyes went into a blinking frenzy as I attempted to push the blindness away, further replacing the stolen vision with an unsure picture. It was just hardly enough to pinpoint the figure with brown hair coming at me.

"Holy shit!" Its soft female voice exclaimed, and I realized it was very much not a dead one, but a girl.

She pulled my arm without giving me time to object, my body soon following as she placed me against the fence to gain my senses. Within a few sharp inhales and whimpers of agony, I was able to put a name to her face.

I knew this woman. Tara. She and I had trained with one another back at base camp. When I'd been brought into the small community as an afraid child with no other inclination but violence and handling weapons, she'd been the first to make me smile. The anger swirling between my ribs eased when she was around.

"Oh my god, are you good?" She asked, her hand coming against her side to presumably ease the building tension in her body. "The whole tank just— it fucking exploded! Someone exploded the goddamn tank!"

I looked to the bodies ahead of me. Now hardly anything but charred skin and flakey bones, the flames rising from whatever allowed it to burn. Pieces of scrap metal were scattered throughout the scene, the entire front portion of the tank amiss. If I'd been anywhere but behind it, I would have been fuel for the fire.

"We need to get out of here." She stated as if it was her third time saying it to me. It probably was.

A round of shots peeled past us before I could come to my senses and answer her, causing Tara to look sideways. Her expression was built into pure terror as bullets clanked into the metal beside us. A woman, presumably a mother who had been previously guarding the bus, was now struggling to reload to shoot at us.

Yet. . . I couldn't find it in myself to run. I was held in place, condemned to guilt and punishment by my own conviction.

"Tara," I started. "Do we deserve to leave, after what we've done?"

She looked back to me, swallowing the fear. "What?"

"We did this. These people are dead because of us." I said.

She loosened the grip on her gun before raising it again, to the vast area beside us. "I don't know if we deserve it or not, but we sure as hell don't want to be eaten alive, right?"

Another round landed on the pavement near our feet, sending the two of us to spread from one another's side senselessly. The woman was a terrible shot — she had most likely never fired a gun. But will all her willpower, she ran at, the barrel of her gun pointing somewhere between us.

"We don't have time. Get out of here." She instructed me, too many steps away to correct herself and turn back to get hold of me.

I was good at taking orders. Not at sorting through the thousands of thoughts rattling in my skull, but at taking a simple command. All of my training had made taking her words as a command simple. So I found my chin tilting at this, sending her a nod before rushing away.

Every corner of the war-ridden place was filled with dead crowding inward. There was no place left to run. My only option was to look towards crumbling the building itself.

The woman wouldn't give up. She was still aiming, her sites set on me. I had taken too much time being unsure, and now, she was making my decision for me. Though, because of Tara's orders, I found myself not wanting to yield.

As I scrambled to get to a cell block entrance, I found myself pointing my weapon back at her after being cornered against a locked door. Before I could stop to think of a better way to avoid the eminent death, my rifle had one less bullet, and she was dead on the ground.

Once being able to run toward another entrance, I found the gate open, and shut it in place. It only took seconds for the dead to be pressing themselves against it, their hands reaching at me through the bars.

I twisted to face them as I caught my breath. I noted the way their jaws snapped at me, each pair of eyes burning with the unmistakable desire to rip me apart, layer by layer. They would crack me open and let me mercilessly bleed from my chest cavity if they could. They would devour me like a past-ripe cherry, and not stop until only my seed remained.

It was with that thought that I brought myself into the darkened halls. There were quiet exhales from me in the darkness before I rounded the corner and approached an emptied cell block.

No one was there. Nothing left behind but scattered supplies. Unimportant objects of entertainment, things which I thought didn't exist anymore. Rick's people got to live like this. Small, unworthy things got to be a part of their daily lives.

My camp had been living on scraps. I was allowed two meals a day, lucky if the amounts were generous enough to keep me feeling full. There weren't piles of clean laundry to be picked through. If the day was nice enough, we had been allowed to go to the lake and scrub our clothing. We bathed ourselves while our things 'dried' in the prickly grass, putting on damp clothes by the time we were done.

I looked to the outfit I had been wearing for months. A gray long sleeve shirt, which certainly hadn't been grey when I first found it. Long rolled demin jeans with seams twisting from the stitching, and dulled red cowboy boots scuffed to the bone. The very beginning of the sole had started peeling backward a couple weeks back.

The fortunate people in this prison had made this place a home, while I believed "home" to only be a memory now. Nothing more. I couldn't truly remember what the word even meant. It could no longer mean the past comfort of my mother and sister. It would simply be a place to let myself rest, without fearing death.

I shuffled past the cells with heavy steps. Each one was intricately personalized, decorated in posters, and small trinkets. My body ached with every movement, finally threatening to give on me as I approached another door.

Placing my ear against it, the other side was sound with nothing but the ripple of soft wind against it. Odd how nature could be so gentle, when mankind itself no longer knew the term. This attack had been proof.

I couldn't be sure where the passage led, but there was no other way. I reluctantly pushed it open with a shaky arm, dragging myself through the threshold. Sunlight instantly gleamed onto my skin, taking root in the burns I had already earlier acquired.

I was through before the fear even registered. Against the ringing still resonating in the tunnels of my ears, I could make out desperate, devastated sobbing. Involuntarily, it made me hault to a stop. A frantic father and son were before me, many steps ahead. They kneeled over a baby carrier, the older man holding his son tight in his arms.

My teeth bit into a piece of thirsted lip. All of this bloodshed, for the hope of having walls. For the hope of having a home, destroying one in the process.

I struggled on my footing, picking up my slowed pace to leave the tragic events behind, for good. I wanted to forget it all, which would only take action once this place was left as nothing but a painful memory.

Then, came a small, but noticeable click. I could instantly recognize this as the cocking, of a rifle.

"You. Turn around, now."

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welcome to the very first chapter of 'cold hands'! i'm so happy you decided to be here, and read my story. i hope you stay along for the wild ride. <3

(buckle up mf's and don't say I didn't warn you)

sincerely yours,𝓜 ᥫ᭡.