The Carcass of The Beast

It used to be perfect, they used to be the most powerful fighting force in the world, they used to be stronger, and richer than everyone else. Now they weren't stronger or richer than anything, because they just weren't. They were gone. His entire life had been ripped apart by this sick disease, he had watched as his family was split in two by the ilness, and he had watched his friends get annihalated by the virus.

He stood at the cliff's edge, staring down onto the ruins, the wreckage he had once called home. The sweltering jungle heat covered the cliffside, but all he could feel was cold. Calamity after calamity had struck this land. Travelers from distant lands had come. The society had assimilated them and with the travelers came into the land, and- if the conspiracy theories were correct- they had brought the Disease.

The Disease was bizarre, it was like nothing they had ever seen before. The infected would boil up all over their faces, and people would watch in horror as one boil would expand untill the point that it would damage the nervers in the eye.When it finally connects to the brain, the boil explodes. He, as a hospital worker, he had seen this happen many a time. It was a huge mess to clean up, and a traumatizing experience for all who witnessed it. Yet even when the Disease first struck, no one could possibly apprehend how it was transmited. That was, at least. Untill the floods. The water from the heavy rains blocked up the sewage and water systems, leaving people to drink from a few central fountains in the city. Soon later, the amount of infected nearly doubled, confirming it was transmited through saliva and water, human contact. As the time elapsed, and the king refused to acknoledge how bad the people's condition was. Riot's began.

This only made everything worse. The King acted on it, of course. But in a very unexpected way.

He stands at the edge of the cliff and shivers. He remembers being shackled onto a chair in an interrogation room, pale white walls, multiple with blood stains. He remembers the crimson curtains draped from the ugly slitted windows. He remembers the door, his only hope of escape, less than five meters from where he sat. Then he remembers the people who tried to find out what he knew about the Disease. His people had always been treated as second class citizens, but when they were blamed for bringing the Disease into this land they lost everything.

In a meticulous manner, as to not rise suspicion, The King's men spied on all of them. They found every house number, every school the children went to, their hosiptals, their ages. Everything. And then they rounded up all his people and threw them into cells. There was no arraingments for them. They were treated brutally, violently lashed for information and tortured. Not even the children were spared. After months of endurance, it all stopped in one day. No one showed up at the doors. The Jails were silent apart from the sound of prisoners dying from the Disease and the usual murmurs. He had torn at the door untill his finger nails bled, kicked at it untill his foot was covered in blisters, and then resorted to hitting it with his head. Finally, he broke a hole through it.

That was a week ago. He was the last one left now. Everyone else had died from the Disease or had joined the gangs of Immunes that now roamed the city looting, the King was dead and the land was in a state of anarchy.

He smiles and picks up a piece of broken glass. He holds it near his face. The boil is half grown, he's lost vision in his left eye. He drops it then looks over the cliff again. Death is immenent. He was born in this land, he was born in that burning wreck that used to be a city below him. He will die in that city. He smiles a weary smile, then steps forward and jumps off the cliff.

Short/Memoir: Delicious Water.

I was edging my way across the muddy hillside, trapped between razor wire and the stench of sewage. Rocks littered the face of the hill , with small patches of under-grown grass infesting the already ugly slope's side. We weren't in the best of situations right now, and it was partly our fault. On the way back to our house, dissension had occurred in our car. Evert and I had decided to get out at Embassy Gardens to prove that we could make it back home faster by foot.

On a normal occasion, we could. Except the guy who lived near the shortcuts border had decided to put up a huge, ten foot fence topped with razor wire and with iron bars under it so we couldn't rip the whole damn thing up then clamber under it. It was a bizarre sight, on our neighbourhoods side, there was a pathetic, miniature fence that I could step over. Yet on the shortcut side it looked like we were trying to cross the Mexican border. If I had paid more attention to the people around here, I would have known the guy who built this fence was lionized here in Cardenas. As a complete asshole, that is.

"Well... Shit."

We now had a choice, double back and take the long, two hour walk around taking the main roads. Or take the adventurous, stupid way. Through a swamp like jungle , snakes, sewage, drains and spiky plants. To be fair to ourselves, the stupid way was only a twenty minute trip at maximum. It seemed like the obvious choice at the time. But of course when I had razor wire a few yards to my right, and a sewage line on the other time, I didn't feel all too smart.

The water at Crap Creek(formerly Crab Creek) is a very special kind of sludge. It seems that anything that falls into it just assimilates into the drink. Now I'm meticulously moving my way across the slope, finding places to put my feet and grabbing onto the hillside. My brother is at the very start, being a pussy(or being smart?) waiting to see if it's safe. My foot hits a loose rock, and now I'm sliding down on my leg, swearing. I try to grab onto the grass, but it just rips out of the soil. "Gah! F*CK!" I tried jumping to the over side of the shallow water(this was pure sewage, not the creek anymore) but my feet can't get a grip.

Splash.
Now I'm over the ankle in sewage water, damn.

Short: The Spin of A Bullet.

SThe old man's wrinkled finger curled around the trigger of the gun, the metal was damp from the humidity and the man's sweat. For what seemed like the thousandth time, his cold, gray eyes slightly touched the lens of his scope. He had done this countless times, he had done it in Siberia in his training camp, decades ago. He had sniped in countless Russian conflicts, he had done the same in Europe, Australia, Asia. Even in South America he had taken shots at the opposers of his nation's beliefs. Yet this job, which he would carry out in the United States, was his greatest task yet.

The Motherland wanted one thing for the United States, they wanted chaos and anarchy. They wanted the president, John F. Kennedy dead. The old man knew this could be his last shot, he, Vasily Zaytsev, legendary soviet sniper and WWII veteran, was getting too old for this. He knew that at this old age the police could easily aprehend him if they found out who he was.

Yet even he could not imagine what was going to happen next. He had his gun trained on Kennedy, he was waiting for exactly the right moment, when suddently a shot echoed through the streets. Good. Now some other conspiracy could be blamed for his death and not the Russian goverment. He took a deep breath, and then he pulled the trigget