Page 6 of The General's Captive
Mythology - Greek
Kill Rate - Class 2
Strengths - Large talons, powerful wings used to knock prey off their feet. A strange black smoke that seeps from between its scaled feathers which can be used to confuse and disorientate.
How to Kill – Unknown, but bullets are non-effective.
We learned this the hard way.
Notes – One of the bastards killed my uncle!
Istared down at the charcoal-smudged page that brought back painful memories from the day before. A creature surrounded by dark smoke drawn with charcoal. This used to be a journal, my second one of the year, so far, because before the world had gone to shit, I had loved to document my days, even adding sketches if there was anything interesting to draw.
I had bought a brand new one before this trip, knowing there would be so much to fill it.
Now I wished I had been wrong.
Because there was a lot to fill it alright, just not with the beautiful nature I had hoped, nor with stories of the good times spent with my uncle. And now I would never get the chance to do any of that. My sadness had followed me like a dark shroud over my head. My tears blurring the road to the point that, as soon as it was safe to do so, I pulled over and allowed myself to cry in earnest.
Sometime later, my new reality kicked in, along with the survival mode I didn’t realize I had until it was forced upon me. Which brought me to my first night…
I crossed the border into Montana and found the nearest town of West Yellowstone already abandoned. It made sense, seeing as it had been one of the closest to where the Rift had first shaken the Earth. I wondered if officials had also feared the Volcano was erupting.
This made me question how many people knew the truth, because it was more like an invasion from another world.
I had no answers, and no one to ask either because it was now a ghost town. At least, for me, it served a purpose because it gave me a random bed to sleep in for the night.
Although I had to say, it went against my nature when I was forced to smash out a glass panel in a back door to a farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Even more so when breaking and entering. I walked through the small, modest home with the flashlight my uncle had packed in my shaky hand, like I was waiting for someone to jump out and scare the shit out of me at any moment.
But then, when the evidence showed someone who had packed in a hurry, I started to relax enough to trust this wouldn’t happen. So, I raided the kitchen for anything I could eat, finding leftovers in the fridge. The plate of meatloaf, mash potatoes, and gravy were, thankfully, kept cool, thanks to the inline generator that must have kicked in when the town’s power went down. Iknew it wouldn’t last but it kept on the essentials for the time being.
I was so hungry by this point, I ate the whole plate cold. Afterward, I sat at the kitchen table and pulled out my journal.
I skipped past the five pages I had already written in and started a new page. Because if there was anything my dad had taught me, it was that information was your greatest weapon. Of course, he had been talking about business at the time, not mythical style creatures that had seemingly popped up from a great tear in the Earth.
The Rift.
That had been the first thing I had written in this new field guide of mine. I felt as if keeping a documentation of everything I saw would, one day, help someone when it came to fighting them. Because I knew that I would have no hope. I couldn’t even shoot a gun, for fuck sake, and I had been useless in trying to save my uncle.
The thought brought on a fresh round of tears and instead of crying over spilt milk, I was crying into it as I had poured myself a glass from what was left over in the fridge. But the once comforting past time now left a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.
One named guilt.
Because it wasn’t the milk at all. It was the self-loathing, knowing how I might have saved him, had I just stayed to fight. Had I grabbed that knife in the truck bed and chased after them into the forest. The rational part of my brain tried to tell me that this would have most likely just gotten me killed. But the guilty part of my brain,thatcalled me a coward.
Which meant that, in the end, I cried myself to sleep.
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It had only been about four days since the appearance of the Rift, but I was shocked at the effect left on the world already. Shocked at how much my surroundings already looked like we were two years into a zombie apocalypse.
The thought made me shiver, because I had always had a phobia of zombies. A strange phobia, to be sure, considering they weren’t real. But well, after witnessing that creature attack my uncle, I now knew that anything was possible,zombies and all.And to be honest, I would rather face a zombie any day of the week than that eagle-headed lion! At least a zombie was easier to outrun… or at least they were in the movies.
But it did make me wonder more about what that dark entity had been in the woods? It was as if it was there with the sole purpose to aid the creature. And if that was so, had it materialized into a man once I had managed to escape? The one who had been standing outside of my uncle’s cabin, like the leader of them all?
That same figure has haunted my dreams since that day. I naturally labelled him as being the bad guy and told myself this was why I couldn’t help it when my mind went back there every night. Because I needed someone to blame for it all. Someone to blame for taking my uncle from me and for fracturing the world.
Of course, I still had hope. Hope that my parents would hear the news and send the authorities to come looking for me. That’s why, for the first few days, I had stayed in the town closest to my uncle’s cabin. My prayers that the cavalry would turn up grew less and less as the time passed. Until eventually, I had no choice but to move on. Because the second I spotted them, the army of creatures marching across the land, I freaked.
