Registered: July 07, 2003
Posts: 738
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I want to know how many other people out there are writing stories like me. If you are, feel free to post parts of them here.
Dust
By Andrew M.
Part 1
Believe
Prologue
More than three hundred years have passed since the apocalypse, and humanity has finally settled down. Cities have sprung up everywhere. Though technology has regressed, the lands shine with new life in the bright daylight. But dark shadows stalk the jet-black night.
Men, women, and children are stolen away by an unknown evil. Some claim to be survivors of strange attacks, claim to have seen monsters that feed on blood, monsters that crush men with their bare hands, monsters that swoop down from the trees and out of the shadows, but are passed off as insane.
People don’t believe in monsters. People don’t want to believe in monsters. But monsters are a reality, and as long as humanity is plagued with disbelief, it will not be able to fight. But there is a hope.
Chosen humans start to come forth to combat the evil that rose from the ashes of the old world: humans born with unreal strength, imbued with knowledge of the past, and an uncanny skill - and almost a need - for tracking down and using weapons from the old world.
These few fight an unknown battle against the new threat, and they are as much of a myth among humanity as their enemies.
They call themselves the Slayers.
1
Damion drifted in a void between consciousness and sleep, vaguely aware of the distant pounding of his horse’s hooves echoing in his ears, and the numerous fresh wounds that streaked across his body. His vision was a blur of shadows in the dark night, and Damion thought he could make out trees on either side of him. Every now and then a branch would lash out at his face or his and broken, eviscerated frame, reminding him that he was still alive.
Damion was falling into the darkness that surrounded him. It was below him, above him, around him. He held onto the constant drumming of his stallion’s lope. Though he was drained and weary, though his thoughts were incoherent and his eyes were heavy, Damion held on.
With nothing but will he stayed awake for what seemed a lifetime, and Damion noticed a change in light. It was getting more and more difficult to hold on, and Damion was tempted to just let go and end it, for he was sure he was desperately lost by now.
Then, in the distance, there was a variation from the monotonous, never-ending trees. Damion tried to focus on the strange inconsistency, but it was soon consumed by a wall of black that took him immediately after.
Kathryn Graye brought her axe down on the small log positioned upright on a tree’s stump, splitting it in half. She pulled the axe out of the stump, pushed the two pieces of wood into a pile to her left, took another small log from a pile to her right, and positioned it upright on the stump that she had used for six years.
This stump was no mere stump to her. It was the one thing that had not changed in the six years she had lived here. Her lover had chopped down the colossal tree – which provided this stump – and used only that tree’s wood to build their house. They had added furniture, broken furniture, made fences, fixed any problems they found. One day her lover, Sean, was killed. And she, at twenty years of age was left to take care of her two year old son. Still things changed, trees fell, birds nested and left, everything changed except for the stump.
And now she stood, the twenty-four year old, dark-haired, slender yet strong mother of a six year old boy that couldn’t talk, poised to strike the log with her axe and make another dent in the old stump, extending its legacy that much more. Her muscles tensed and the axe came down on the log at the exact moment her son, James, emerged from the cabin door.
Kat looked at him questioningly as he ran toward her pointing franticly westward down the forest road. It was just after dawn, and she wondered what he was doing awake.
“What is it, dear?” she asked him sweetly, though she did not expect an answer.
He continued pointing westward then pretended to gallop like a horse.
“You heard a horse?” she guessed, with not a trace of skepticism in her voice or mind. She knew he had exceptional hearing, and if there were a horse out there he would hear it.
He nodded quickly and, pointing once more, climbed over the peg fence to wait in front of the house by the road. She followed him over the fence, keeping the axe just in case, and motioned him inside.
He donned an expression that said, ‘That’s not fair!’
“Go,” she said simply, and he obeyed looking over-dramatically disappointed and glum.
After a while she heard the horse coming, then a moment later it rounded a corner far down the road. The beast was huge. Kat had never seen any horse so massive. She could not make out the rider, but saw him slump in the saddle a ways down. The horse slowed its pace a little, and as it came closer she saw that the rider was drenched in blood and dotted with strange black blotches.
Oh god, oh god, she repeated to herself as she ran to the horse, dropping her axe, and pulled the man down. Kat dragged the body inside and laid it on the empty table in the middle of the main room. She checked the pulse, and it was weak, but it was there.
She glanced at James. He stared in horror at the scene of the bloody man, but realized that would do no good and, shaking it off, ran to get his mother’s medical supplies from the cupboard. It was in a nice convenient case that Kat had organized for emergencies. James brought it to her, and watched his mother kick aside chairs to make room, then go to work.
Damion saw a woman in the clearing, standing on a white boulder. She was completely naked. She was singing. Beautifully at first but then it became so horrible that Damion could not stand it.
“Why don’t you sing as beautifully as you did at the beginning of your song?” he asked, suddenly in the clearing.
She turned to face him, white hair blowing in the wind and responded, “Because I sing of humanity and the world.”
The dream faded and Damion found himself in a nightmare of blood and fire. He had no strength to fight; yet monsters threw themselves upon him.
Damion awoke yelling and thrashing about. He rolled to his side and fell off a table, quickly coming to his feet and backing into a corner.
He looked himself over; he had stitches – some had been pulled – and bandages all over his body. He calmed himself breathing and sweating heavily.
Light poured in through a window.
It’s daytime. Good. Now where the hell am I?
A door crashed open and a very attractive woman with jet-black hair came through the door holding an axe. Even from here he could see that the blade of the wood-axe was extremely sharp. The woman held it ready as she approached.
“Calm down,” she said, “you’re safe. It’s okay.”
“Where am I?” Damion demanded sharply.
“In my house.”
“This is a house? Not much of one.” Damion said.
“Show some respect, I saved your life”
“I apologize,” Damion said as he rose, “I’m just a little irritable right now.”
“I don’t blame you,” the woman said, setting down her axe, “I’m Kat. You?”
“Damion.”
“What happened to you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Damion almost told her, but decided to lie. “Bear,” he said. Then a thought struck him. “My horse. Where’s my horse?”
“Got him tethered outside,” she replied, “Probably wouldn’t need it though. It stayed out there on its own while I stitched you up.”
“He’s quite a horse.” Damion said, “You didn’t go through my saddlebags did you?”
“No, why? You got something bad in there?”
“Depends on how you look at it,” Damion stated plainly as he sat down.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kat pressed.
“Nothin’ really.”
“If I go through that saddle, what’ll I find?”
“You sound like a mother.” Damion replied, avoiding the subject.
“I am a mother.”
“Not mine.”
“No, but I’m your host” Kat said firmly.
“Didn’t ask you save me.”
“You sound like a child.”
“I do don’t I?”
“What’s in the damned saddlebags?” Kat continued to press.
“It’s my damned business.”
“It better not be illegal.”
“Nope, it’s not,” declared Damion bluntly.
There was a long, awkward silence, and then Kat remembered something.
“What was that black stuff all over your shirt?” she asked curiously.
“Don’t know,” was the simple reply.
Kat frowned. The realization dawned on her that she was talking to a grown man and not a child, that she could not and should not expect him to obey her like her son.
She began to admire Damion. He was towheaded and very muscular, and seemed to have a kind of animal strength.
Damion looked out the window and saw the light growing darker. “You said you have a child?”
“That’s right. He’s outside playing.”
“You should tell him to come in,” Damion suggested.
“Why?”
“Do it.”
Kat looked at him, slightly worried, and nodded, walking away. She opened the back door and went out into her yard to find James. She was curious as to why Damion wanted James inside, but decided that he must have some good reason.
Damion pulled an old shotgun from a small couch on his saddle. It was a semi-automatic twelve-gauge shotgun. The wood showed its age but was strong nonetheless. It was long, had a padded butt, and on the end of the fore grip read “Beretta.”
He pulled back the slide, exposing the breach, and slid a shell in. He closed the slide and thumbed shells into the bottom. He set the shotgun down and pulled a Colt 1911 from his saddlebags, pushed in a full magazine of .45 ACP bullets but did not pull back the slide. He put the put the pistol in a brown leather holster and the two magazines in his belt, and picked up his shotgun. He walked into the house and lay in wait for the evil that accompanied the nightfall.
James was frantic, and Kat, sitting at her table, could make nothing out of his panicky gestures and whimpering mixed with sobs. Something was scaring him, Kat knew, something he could hear. Damion sat in silent thought in a chair in a corner of the room, holding what looked to be an odd staff of wood and metal. Kat had never seen anything so strange. There were other peculiar things on his belt: some small club-like tool or weapon that looked to be the shape of an L, several metal bars, and red cylinders capped with brass.
James stopped crying and curled up in Kat’s lap, and soon fell asleep. The hearth’s warm, glowing blaze held the pitch-black night at bay, and it threw shadows on Damion’s face, sharpening his ominously thoughtful features.
Damion drew in a deep, exaggerated breath, and let it out in a sigh. He stared at her gravely for a moment before saying, “Find a safe hiding place and stay…”
“What?” Kat cut him off, “Why?”
“Do it,” Damion replied so sternly that she could not argue.
Kat lifted a loose floorboard and, with her now-awake child, slipped into a hiding spot that she had put James in many times to protect him from brigands while she fought them off. Damion tipped the heavy oak table over onto the loose board, and then readied his shotgun. His clothes in tatters, his body torn and bandaged, he stood prepared for the battle to come.
The thing leapt from treetop to treetop, swung from branch to branch, did everything he could to get to the light as fast as he could. Because where there was light in the middle of the night, there was fire. Fires are built by people, so were there is a fire there are people. People had the only blood that could sustain the thing’s simple life.
It landed soundlessly in a treetop overlooking a campsite where two men and a pregnant woman sat around their blaze. One man had his arm around the pregnant woman and was whispering sweetly into her ear, making her laugh. The other man was dozing.
The thing sent out a high-pitched shriek, undetectable to a human’s ears, which signaled other things just like this one that there was food. In the distance, more shrieks passed among other creatures, and thus the word was spread. They gathered in the treetops above the camp and waited for the discoverer to make the first kill.
It swooped down, grabbed the woman with its grotesque talons, and carried her off to the treetops with no sound but her screams to tell of the deed. The man sitting next to her was caught in a horde of the creatures, talons dug into him, fangs dug into his neck, and a crimson spray shrouded the scene. The third man tried to run but was swarmed the same way.
The pregnant woman stopped screaming as the last of her blood was drained from her through her captor’s fangs. The thing looked around, it needed more. It spotted another light in the distance, and started toward it.
2
The howl was too high-pitched for any normal human to hear… any normal human.
Damion had heard the vampires’ shrieks. He felt their presence, their hunger. He was one with them, and was about to destroy them. Though monster blood did not run through his veins, it was caked on his hands. Adrenaline surged through him.
He had killed thousands of the foul creatures, with their hunched backs and broad shoulders and their purple, lizard-like skin. He had killed thousands and would kill more tonight. They would come and he would kill, for he had but one purpose: to slay.
The beast landed on a forest road directly in front of a fairly large cabin. It crept forward, peering through the window. It saw a man holding an object of wood and blackened steel. Its eyes widened in terror.
Its shriek of warning was cut off as the glass of the window exploded outward and buckshot tore through its skin. Its head snapped back as he flipped backward and the shot reverberated through the forest, catching the attention of all the other beasts nearby.
Kat cowered under the floor with her son. She heard huge explosions above her. She heard angry growls, doors being ripped apart, bodies falling to the ground.
Damion dodged a downward stroke of a vampire’s talons, then pressed the barrel of his shotgun against its neck and shot off his last shell, decapitating it. He threw down the shotgun, for, even though he had more shells at his waste, he had no time to reload.
He yanked his .45 from his waste, pulled back the slide, shot a leaping vampire once in the head in mid-air, and watched it back flip, though still moving forward, into the fireplace. Several burning logs rolled out onto the floor.
A vampire tried to lunge at Damion’s chest, but was met with a bullet in its hand, which flung it sideways, and a strong foot, which sent it across the room and into another vampire. As the two fell to the ground he put three bullets into the first’s chest, all of which traveled through it and into the second, killing them both. Another vampire leapt through the window, swung on the rafters, and sailed towards Damion. Damion sent a bullet sailing towards the vampire. The vampire didn’t sail quite so well afterward, and crashed to the ground, half of its head having previously been splattered on the ceiling.
Damion put two bullets in the chest of a vampire that tried to sneak in through the other side of the house. He reloaded quickly, picked up his shotgun and reloaded that, then stood to face the next threat.
And so the night went on. Damion deftly cut down countless more of the pathetic vampires until he ran out of ammunition. Even then he fought. Damion dodged vampires’ blows, broke their bones, twisted their necks, and used their lifeless bodies as cudgels.
Then, after what seemed a lifetime, the monsters retreated. For the first time, Damion noticed the extreme heat, the smoke. He was coughing and his eyes were watering.
The fire! God damn it!
Damion found the table he had overturned and hurled it aside. He opened the floorboard that Kat hid under. The smoke hadn’t reached down there yet. Kat sprung out of the hole with James in her arms.
The three of them bolted for the door but a burning rafter fell and blocked their way. Damion, teeth clenched, grabbed the rafter with both hands, not caring about the fire that burned and blistered them, and hurled it aside with a might roar.
The house collapsed behind them as they ran through the door. Kat stood on the road, James still in her arms, staring at her burning home. Meanwhile, Damion fell to his knees and smothered the flames on his hands with dirt from the forest road.
Damion realized that his pistol and shotgun had been in the house, and were now lost. But that was unimportant now.
“Kat,” Damion yelled above the roar of the house’s blaze, “are you alright?”
Kat didn’t respond. She was only staring at her home. Her home for six years had just burned down. The home that she and Sean had spent so much time and effort building was gone. She had grown used to living in a good, strong house rather than the many wagons of her nomadic childhood. But here she was, moving again.
James was equally absorbed, but for different reasons. He had never known anything but this home. It was his entire world, and it had just disappeared.
Damion grabbed Kat’s shoulder, and she snapped out of her daze.
“Kat,” Damion persisted, “Come on. Where is the nearest city?”
“Ban. It’s just about ten miles down the road,” she replied shakily.
Damion let out a whistle and his stallion burst from the trees and onto the road, waiting for him to mount.
“Come on, get on my horse, we’ll be at the city before morning. I’ll take you there, but you’re on your own after that.”
[This message was edited by YNLissa on September 18, 2003 at 06:09 AM.]
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Topics 
and futility you do have good writing buffy the vampire/doom and whats up with the clown i hate clowns
