Painted Maroon

Chapter 2 - Nightmares to Flashbacks to Nightmares

2

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a-" "GAHHH" Chris dropped to the ground with a bullet through his chest. Fred stepped over the body with his M9 still raised and squeezed the trigger again, with his iron sights on Chris to let another bullet enter his skull and confirm the end of that man's life. Fred was never one to take chances. He knew that a man with an axe could easily take on a man with a pistol and win. He reached down and grabbed the axe to slide it from where it was attached on the dead man's backpack, and then strapped it onto his own pack. There was no guilt in his eyes. No regret marked on his face. He looked for a second at the dead man and no emotion hit him as he did.

Fred left the small kitchen of the old house he had entered to find supplies and went into the office. A gunshot rang in the background and the sound seemed to stay for a while, it was close, but not close enough to worry about. The office seemed to be old and was slightly rusted, with dust covering it like flies on a rubbish tip. He put his hand over the desk and felt a slight indent where a computer must've sat for years before being taken away, most likely looted by other survivors. It reminded him of the desk he sat at while looking over report papers with the same handgun that he had now. With the same lack of emotion he had now too. A few years ago, Fred would be going through houses with a pistol at his side but with entirely different intentions. He was chief of police not because he stayed in the force for a long time but instead because he seemed to be the only one in the department that knew what they were doing. A situation like this was foreign to him. For the first time since his days in the police, he didnt know what he was doing.

He passed the desk and stood facing a bookshelf. It was just as dusty, and no books remained but rather loose papers and cuts in the wood. Fred moved on from the office and into the living room when his ears adjusted and he heard the moans and snorts of an infected. It was leaned up against an arm chair and it's head had two large slices in it that probably cut deep into the brain. Fred unclipped the axe and moved forward. The infected was a male before it turned into this. It had jeans on and a checkered long sleeve shirt. There wasn't much to do to save someone in this condition. As far as Fred knew, there was no cure available, so he raised his axe with two arms and let it fall into the infected man's face, cutting through his nose and between his eyes, deep into the front of his brain. A slight groan was let out, and then it was back to silence.

Silence that Fred had been used to for the past seven days. It wasn't always silent, there were occasional gun shots, usually two or three at a time. But his ears could barely adjust to hear those shots anymore. He clipped the axe back onto the pack and looked into the dead infected's eyes. They were white, and the only spots that weren't white were instead red. There seemed to be some sort of red liquid in every infected's body, but it was too thick to be blood. Fred wasn't the type to be scared, but at this moment staring down into a man with no pupils frightened him more than anything in the world could. He turned his body first and then his eyes and face followed, as he walked past, pistol still raised, and into the master bedroom.

'Eeerrrkkkk'...the door was creaky and Fred cringed a bit, before making his way into the room and flicking on a light switch that he could barely see. Only the room lit up with light, but it felt like the whole house had, his eyes hadn't seen any light in hours and it was shockingly bright.

On the bed he saw a woman, 'definately dead' he thought, judging from the position she was lying down in. She was completely stripped naked of her clothes, which could apparently be used to help a bandit on his quest. Probably not how they were used though, it was more likely that whoever took her clothes did it with the intention of seeing her naked. Fred looked in shame for longer than he knew was necessary. He stepped forward to get a better look at what looked like cuts on her chest. Whoever had taken her clothes had done a lot more than just kill her, Fred tried not to think about it. He knew that he would never forgive a man that would do...that... to his wife.

He had seen enough, and it was more than enough to disturb him so he simply turned around and left the room. It was the right thing to do. He moved slower now, because the sight of a rape victim naked and dead on a bed with blood smothering her face was more than enough to give a tough man nightmares. He left the master bedroom and into the hallway, leaving the light from the bedroom on to provide some light to the hallway too.

Fred stepped back into the kitchen to make sure he had gotten all the food he had seen (which wasn't much anyway) before leaving when he heard a moan in a room or two away. He stood still as ice and waited, slowly reaching a hand down to grab the gun that had it's handle slipped into his pants and it's barrel poking out. It was better to have it like that then to have the barrel pointing down to his crotch. He raised the pistol and moved forward, another groan hit the air and it was slightly louder this time. Fred turned his face back to the kitchen he had just left and his gun followed.

"Grrr...RAGHHH" he turned back to look into the living room as the naked woman from the bedroom grabbed onto him and started smacking at his face and chest. Fred struggled to pull the gun up and put in his best effort to step back. He tripped on the dividing wood piece between the two rooms and was now lying on his back with an infected, blood covered naked woman preparing to jump on him and end his poor life. Fred raised his pistol and squeezed the trigger as quick as he could. Once, twice, and three times before realising there was some sort of failure with the gun's firing system. He crawled back with his legs and dropped the gun so he could use his arms to get up. He kicked away at the woman who was trying her best to stretch her arms out and rip his eyes out of their sockets. She threw a punch and he dodged, before throwing his own arm at her, with a leg following, and another arm. A clenched fist struck her face and she stumbled back before getting right up again and screeching loudly, almost like a hiss. That gave Fred just enough time to punch again, and this one hit her eye and knocked her backwards, her face completely twisting around and her body following.

Without further hesitation, he stepped over her arm which was stretched out widely and stomped her face with his boot three times. The red goo oozed out her brain and Fred was shaken, staring at her back which had tattoos mostly hidden by the dried blood that painted her. A tear or two left his eye, thinking of his wife again who was beaten in a cellar by prisoners of war that were desperate for pleasure. She was killed there, and god knows what else happened to her. He had been told of how she died by a US marines officer who could barely talk about it without his voice shaking in sadness.

On the day of her funeral, he promised her dead body that he would commit suicide to see her in heaven. But he couldn't do it. He couldn't toughen up and put a gun to his face, even after knowing what his wife went through during the war. He cursed at the Chinese reflecting on it all, while staring at this woman's dead body as more tears left his eyes. Fred walked past and looked through one of the windows in the living room. There was a fire flickering out there, and it wasn't far away.