Where Light Dies

27. Savages

"That the last of 'em?"

North...... Arbor Square...... East........ Find........ river...

"Blake? You there?"

"Yeah. Zoned out for a bit."

-- North Carlisle, Surface -- 2016 --

Mark stepped over the bodies, his footsteps splashing blood all over the concrete. He touched the wound on his shoulder, a deep cut from a bullet that had grazed him in the fight that had just come to a climax. Their pack was in pieces, three members dead and the other six injured, all of them Daytons.

It wasn't the injuries that worried them. Those could easily be treated once they reached Carlisle.

It was the blood that had pooled around them, the fresh scent of iron that kept spreading all around.

A horde was on its way, and they knew it.

Mark faced his pack, pointing his finger at the settlement they'd just taken over. "Get the supplies in, and make it fast!"

The campers who remained scrounged the warehouse for anything useful, turning the whole place upside down. Bandits were always on the move, occupying one building a week, then the next. They stole from all sorts of places, from lone survivors to small base camps. Which was exactly why they were the best targets. "They play with us and we fuck them right in the ass!" Blake's mind recalled Mark's words when they drew first blood an hour ago. The idiot could make anything awkward.

The bandits had all sorts of stuff just like they expected. Dehydrated food, guns, blades, ammunition, the works. There was just one thing missing.

"Search the floor, the walls everything," Blake boomed, setting the campers back into action. "We're not leaving them behind, you hear me!"

"Loud and clear!"

The bandits were usually a group of well-trained men with a lot of weapons. However, what made them bandits in the true sense of the word was the fact they were assholes, your typical scum of the earth stereotypes. Now what would a pack of redneck assholes do if they came across an innocent lot of people?

They would torture them, make them suffer until they didn't know what hurt and what didn't.

The reason?

Nothing.

They just like to have fun.

A smaller pack of three had come across this lot last week. They made the smarter choice, scouting out all their activities and reporting them as is to the base. If they had planned on playing hero, there would've been three more slaves in their collection.

Or heads.

And they knew it just as much as everyone else did. The apocalypse had an impressive advantage. It made people smart, or it made sure only smart ones were left.

Natural selection at its finest.

However, this pack's reports were quite different from the kind of bandits they'd encountered before. In most cases, the larger bases didn't interfere with these hooligans as they posed no threat. This one however, was a bit, extreme. While most bandits were known to indulge in storming small bases or survivor groups for supplies, this one was known to hold people captive. Rape and torture were words too subtle to describe the things that they did to them.

This wasn't a threat to the bases.

It was a threat to the sense of humanity itself, the only thing they had left in this wretched, godforsaken world.