In a Time of Silence

Chapter 5

Cain counted at least thirty of them. A whole hunting party from the looks of it.

God, he fuckin' hated Scavs. Disgusting, animalistic, rapist, cannibal scum as far as he could tell. He remembered something Hawk had said once about them, off the cuff:
"Incel gamer nerds gone feral, ruled by women. There's irony in there somewhere."

Cain had seen Hawk kill a lot of scavs over the years. The woman didn't seem to think many lives were sacred -or much of anything else for that matter- but Scavs in particular seemed to be without worth to her. Cain wasn't even sure if Hawk was particularly revolted by them. The dispassion with which she dispatched them being so absolute that it almost seemed like she squashing really big, mildly annoying ants.

Cain personally wasn't really sure how the Scavs still were around. Right after everything fell apart, there had been a lot of groups like them. Assholes who were happy to let their impulses run free in the absence of anyone to enforce rules. It was because of people like them that he had met Hawk in fact.

He'd been stranded at an airport when society died. He barely escaped the riots when the planes dropped out of the sky and the networks crashed. He wasn't ashamed to admit that he crawled and slithered through the guts and brains of the fallen just to make it out. Big guy like him was a target in the unadulterated violence of a mob like that. He chose to survive. It's what he did.

But getting out of the violence there was just the beginning. He was in the heart of the city, millions of desperate people killing each other over nothing at all. There had been bullets flying through the air at random, cutting down anyone foolish enough to think it was safe to stand. He'd watched grown men and women die in front of their children, never knowing what hit them.

Cain had been trying to lead a few of the innocents out, hiding them and moving only at night, struggling to keep them quiet as a mouse as they slowly worked their way through the storm drains and back alleys, each day more of them, hungry and scared, struggling to stay hidden.

After a few months of creeping through hell, they'd almost made it to the edge of the city when they were caught by a pack of what had probably been chanbros or incels a few months before, now free to rape and steal and take anything they wanted from others. Cain was sure they'd be fucked, killed and eaten, though less sure of the order.

They started executing the men in the group, one by one. Cain had roared in protest, knowing it would likely just bring more death, but desperately hoping it wouldn't. The pack of man-children had laughed, pulled him aside, and told him they were going to make him watch before killing him too.

Then there had been a roar of gunfire, almost like one long gunshot, and all of them laid dead on the tarmac.

A woman with a face like granite stood in the entrance to the alley, a smoking gun in each hand, clothes hanging limp in the rain over her rail-thin frame with a short, heavily muscled woman with sharp eyes that glowed with madness hanging closely to her, a short bat in her hand.

Hawk and Raven.

Cain had been filled with relief, but before he could thank the strangers, they turned and started walking quickly away. Cain hurriedly rushed his people to follow the pair, and was met with a gravelly voice barking at him not to follow.

"Fuck off. I don't need a bunch of helpless mouths to feed." Said the gunslinging woman harshly. Cain snarled back:

"You can't just save these people then leave them to die"

"The fuck I can't" clipped Hawk "I saved them from a fate worse than death. My good deed for the entire first year of the end of the world is paid in full."