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Been meaning to post this for a while forgot until the thread just recently got more active. So now I will post it and lessen everyone's chances of getting comments/critiques
It's longish and I know something is terribly, terribly wrong with the big speech thing in the middle, but am unsure of how to fix it.
Carl wasn’t 100% sure about how he had gotten into the situation he was in and he was even less sure of how he was going to get out of it. When the slavers had come to their small community, chaos had violently entered their lives leaving little more than confusion and death in its wake.
He had been going about his usual business when they had come like a sudden storm. In his Before life (like many others, he had given the word proper noun status in his mind), Carl had been a moderately successful novelist; in his After life (again, such terminology had become commonplace), he had become a surprisingly skilled carpenter. As he had been putting the finishing touches on a dwelling which wasn’t quite grand enough to be called a house, he heard a cry from the northern part of their small settlement. Curious, he and a few others had gone to check out the source of the disturbance; a decision they would all soon come to regret.
Winding through the ramshackle collection of shelters they called home, the group collectively tried to reassure itself; it couldn’t be anything serious, someone probably just fell out of one of the sparse, lifeless trees that still rooted themselves with undying conviction around the ruined landscape. When they came to where they thought the cry had come from, they looked upon a scene that almost all feared in the days since the bombs; men and women with guns approaching them with many of their friends and neighbors in tow. One or two of Carl’s group attempted to flee, but they were picked off before they were able to get very far; the rest of the group only stood, stunned. Most everyone feared this scene, but few truly believed that it would ever happen to them. The world had not been in such bad shape long enough for people to have such cynicism ingrained into them.
The slavers wasted no time; Carl and his fellows were quickly bound with fraying rope and roughly guided to join the growing throng of the captured. Though astonished into blank-eyed obedience, Carl still noted the bodies of several strangers a fair distance away; the guards had attempted to do their duty and drive off the marauders. They just hadn’t been enough.
The rest of the community fell in a similar fashion. A few attempted to retain their freedom by running in the other direction as quickly as possible, but none were successful. Most were either stunned into submission or simply resigned to their fate after seeing the large group of the captured and the deaths of those who tried in vain to flee. They were searched before setting out, of course, but not with any real care. These people had probably been too successful lately to be overly cautious, especially when they had already put down most of the people who would most likely cause trouble for them. With that done, the captured were loosely organized into a group, and the slavers surrounded them, weapons plainly visible to deter anyone who got an idea to try and be a hero.
Carl made most of the short trip across the wasteland in a daze, not paying attention to the now-familiar destruction around him. The harsh treatment of the slavers to himself and his fellows had a little more impact on him, but it just wasn’t enough to break him out of his trance. All of the violence and cursing that surrounded him as they traveled was little more than background noise to his shocked brain.
They seemed to be approaching an old office building. Carl wasn’t sure if this was their captor’s base of operations or simply a place to stay the night, but he assumed the latter; if they had chosen such a nearby building as their base, Carl and the others would have been taken a long time ago. It was only when they finally entered the building that the shock of having what little life he had yanked from under him started to recede.
~
So there he was, a part of the small “hostage” group that were being kept in the main lobby to prevent the others from getting any ideas. He didn’t know where the main body of prisoners was taken other than it was someplace upstairs. The former group only had around ten, all men. For the first time in five years, Carl was almost glad his wife had died in the violence during the end of the world; if she hadn’t, she surely would have been among the women who were keeping their captors “entertained” for the night. Carl didn’t think he could bear knowing she was in there, and would have probably gotten himself killed. Before the majority of the group had been taken into a different part of the building, they had separated several partners. The ones who objected were taken outside but the doors were left open so the captives could still hear the bang of the slavers counterargument. Perhaps that had sent Carl back into another shocked daze, for rather than thinking about his situation, he found himself examining the room they were in.
The lobby was fairly spacious, although they couldn’t really enjoy it since they were being kept within the rounded receptionist’s desk with a guard on watch at both ends. There wasn’t really very much to look at besides his fellow dirty and disheveled captives and their slightly less dirty captors. The room was a uniform gray with all of the decorative elements long ago having been either taken or destroyed; the same went for the various papers and electronics that once populated a presumably once-thriving business. Such things would one day be much harder to come by, a fact that many had figured out and attempted to prepare for. On the other hand, the room wasn’t as badly in need of repair as many of those around it; actually, it almost looked like someone lived here. The doors, although extremely loud, still swung on their hinges as they were supposed to, it wasn’t quite as dirty as most of the neglected things in those days, and it just generally looked, while not ideal by any means, at least serviceable. Either this really was the slaver’s main base, as unlikely as logic made it seem, or someone else lived here. Carl sincerely hoped whoever that may have been had had enough sense to either get out while they still could or, if that was not possible, at least hid him or herself well enough to avoid detection.
After getting “settled” into this predicament, even after he had mostly come to his senses, he wasn’t really entertaining any serious notions of escape. The slavers had threatened to kill the larger group if the hostages tried to escape and, although Carl doubted they would waste their “earnings” like that, the others seemed pretty well convinced. Either that, or they were just afraid to be killed themselves, not exactly something Carl could begrudge them. Trying to escape individually was pointless; they had sent guards up to the roof to keep a lookout for escapees, so any kind of freedom attained that way would almost certainly be short lived. No, it would have to be a concentrated effort if any were to survive without being sold to the highest bidder.
Apart from the changing of the guard during the evening, the rest of the day passed without much of interest.
~
Carl stayed up for some time thinking. Understandably, it usually came back to his current predicament and what exactly his options were. Few of them were desirable, and the ones that weren’t didn’t have much of a chance to succeed. The only real question seemed to be whether he’d rather be dead or a slave.
A noise interrupted Carl’s train of thought, or he thought one did at least; it was so quiet, he couldn’t be entirely sure it had ever existed at all. He sat there, listening, trying to discern where the noise, if there had been one, came from. Actually, the more he thought about it, the more Carl became certain that it was probably just some small animal that-
There it was again! He thought it had come from one of the stairwells that ended nearby. As well-made as the steps most likely were, at least a few of them had succumbed to time and betrayed whoever was descending them. It wasn’t loud enough to wake anyone in the room, thankfully, but Carl looked around quickly to check that the guards were still asleep, just to be sure. Satisfied, he turned his attention back to the door that covered the entrance to the stairs.
Slowly, it opened to reveal a small crack. It was too dark to be completely certain, but Carl thought he saw an eye in the shadows beyond the sliver that had opened.
Almost as soon as he saw it, the eye disappeared. Presumably, its owner had taken a step back to consider the information the eye had given him or her. Carl doubted it was one of the slavers; why would one of them feel the need to sneak around when they basically controlled the building? More likely this individual was some poor soul who had the bad fortune to choose this place as their home before they knew it was going to be used as a slaver hideout. After a few seconds, a head, presumably the one with the eye in it, poked out from behind the door, giving Carl a little more understanding of what was happening.
It was James, a man who occasionally traded with their settlement. Nice enough guy, even if he was a little reserved. He had wondered idly once or twice where James might live since he didn’t seem to be part of any community Carl was aware of, and it seemed that that particular question was answered, although he could have done without the circumstances that came along with the discovery.
James surveyed the scene, especially lingering on the two sleeping guards. Apparently deciding that they weren’t faking slumber, he crept out from behind the stairwell door and into the lobby. He seemed to consider the group of future slaves with unsure eyes.
Through all of this, Carl pretended to be asleep. James looked spooked enough as it was, and Carl couldn’t be sure the man would be able to suppress a noise if he made himself known.
Carl raised a silent cheer in his mind when James began to stalk towards one of the guards and reached behind him for something, but it was cut short when he suddenly stopped. James’ mind seemed to be growing more and more indecisive the more he looked at the guards. Carl’s heart sank when he saw James begin to back up, and finally to turn and walk as quickly as possible out of the building while still keeping silent.
Although Carl certainly wasn’t pleased by James’ decision, he couldn’t say he blamed the man. These were tough times, and not everyone had what it took to risk his life for a cause when the goal was uncertain at best. Unfortunately, no matter how much Carl empathized with James, he was still back at square one. Now what was he supposed to do? It wasn’t like he could-
Once again, his train of thought was interrupted by a noise, but this one immediately recognizable; gunfire. One of the rooftop guards had apparently spotted James, and began firing.
Immediately, people around him began to wake up. Carl cringed as the still-groggy guards pointed their weapons around suspiciously, trying to find the source of the disturbance. When they figured out that the sounds were coming from outside the building, they rushed out, leaving their charges alone for the moment.
Their solitude was short-lived, however. A few moments later a man burst through a door in the direction the rest of the group had been taken. Carl guessed he had ordered the rest to stay behind in order to prevent things from getting too hectic and to avoid the possibility that one or more of their new assets might be shot in the confusion. These people would kill a slave as a punishment or preventative measure, but accidental death was just a waste.
In a spur-of-the-moment decision, Carl calmly rose, walked up behind the man who was at this point peering out of the front doors, snatched his knife out of its sheath on his back, pulled his head back, and slit his throat. The man made a series of gurgling noises in what Carl interpreted as pain and surprise, and clutched at his neck. Carl had never killed a person before, and was surprised to find that he did not feel much remorse. A sort of coldness had descended upon his mind, and survival for himself and his comrades had taken a position of priority over feelings that would only serve to slow him down.
Carl knew he didn’t have much time to act. He quickly searched the body which was still breathing laboriously and found a pistol. Knowing little more about firearms than he did about killing a man in cold blood, it took Carl a few precious seconds to figure out how to check the ammo, and when he did he found a nearly-full clip inside. He would have about ten shots before it ran dry.
Striding past his awestruck fellows, Carl approached the front doors where the guards were still outside peering in the direction the snipers on top of the building were shooting in. He shot one quickly in the back of the head at point-blank range. The mess was considerable, and the recoil surprised him. Still, he quickly aimed the gun at the other guard, but did not get as clean a kill. The unfamiliarity of the weapon coupled with the darkness caused Carl to shoot the man in the leg instead of the intended target of the chest, and he let out a scream of pain. Not wanting to use any more of his dwindling ammo supply than was necessary, Carl brought the knife he still held to bear on a second man’s neck. He then quickly searched the two bodies he had just produced and came up with their guns, another pistol and a rifle, along with the little bit of ammunition each was carrying for his respective weapon. Firearms in tow, Carl reentered the lobby.
As he crossed the threshold into the room in which not five minutes before he had been held captive, Carl felt a strange wave of vertigo; this was all happening so fast. If someone had told him the day before that he was capable of not only killing one man, but three, he probably wouldn’t have laughed in that person’s face as the cliché goes, but he certainly would have been incredulous.
Carl’s entrance triggered a burst of frantic voices clambering over each other to get his attention. He was temporarily bowled over by the intensity of their attention, but managed to regain his composure soon after. He needed to keep things moving quickly or else the gravity of the situation would catch up with him and immobilize him.
Ignoring their demands for answers, Carl selected the two who he thought looked most calm and in control, men he knew named Sean and Paul. He shoved the weapons from the guards into their hands.
“We need to strike while they’re still-,” he began, hoping his voice would convey calmness but the group clearly didn’t believe they were finished speaking.
“Shut UP!” he exclaimed in frustration. The clamoring voices quickly went silent. “Now, if we want to get the rest of us out of here alive, we need to strike while they’re still unaware of what’s going on. Here’s what’s going to happen. Sean, Paul, and I are going to go in the direction the main group went, and we’re going to shoot anyone we don’t recognize. The rest of you are going to follow a few seconds behind us and pick up any weapons you find on the bodies; don’t fight over them, this is first come first serve. Anyone who finds a gun, try to catch up with us before we get to the main group. They’ll probably be in one of the lower floors in one of the larger rooms, like a conference room or something.
When we find them, we’re going to go in guns blazing, try to create as much confusion as possible. Anyone without a weapon is going to go in and evacuate as many people as possible; hopefully there’ll be a second door you can enter from so they can’t focus on a single entrance. If you see a gun lying on the ground, pick it up, but don’t go looking around for them. When you hear me shout to leave, you move. We’re going to retreat to the next floor up and hold it until these bastards decide we’re not worth it anymore. Don’t argue; we can’t run as we are now, they’d just catch us and kill us. We can’t waste anymore time. Let’s go.”
Without giving anyone, including himself, time to protest, Carl made his way to the entrance to the stairwell where James had come out of and went inside. He wasn’t sure where all that information and planning had come from, but he hoped to God that he was right. Footsteps behind him told Carl that he was being followed, but, unlike many heroes from movies and novels, he couldn’t tell if their gait was brave or hesitant. He was just glad that he wasn’t doing this alone. As the adrenaline rush began to fade, Carl was forced to consider just how mortal he really was.
~
They came upon the first guard looking anxious about two floors up on the stairwell. A round from Sean’s newfound rifle soon put an end to the man’s anxiety. Once again not waiting to see if the following group was heeding his instructions, Carl and his equally terrified companions pressed onward, trying not to dwell on what was coming. Like some sort of stubbornly demented boomerang, however, the thought of the violence that was to ensue just kept returning unbidden to their minds.
Three more guards met their ends in the rush up the stairs, and Carl suspected they were drawing near. By then the main group of slavers would know something was amiss, and would be preparing themselves. Total surprise would be an impossibility, so temporary would have to do.
Carl spotted two more men, clearly on edge, guarding the fifth floor door and knew they had arrived at their destination. By this point, Carl had three more people with guns in their hands, bringing the total of his grand army to six. That left four to gather their comrades and lead them away from the slavers under a hail of gunfire.
Two shots rang out, both enough to incapacitate the guards, though not to kill immediately. Running completely on instinct at this point, Carl grabbed one of the wounded men, opened the door to the fifth floor, and tossed him into the hallway. The life of the unfortunate man was ended almost immediately by a volley of bullets coming from the right.
Picking up the weakly protesting second guard as an impromptu shield, Carl walked out of the stairwell, that same coldness taking over his mind once again. The man was heavier than he expected, but five years of working to rebuild something akin to civilization had also built up his muscles and he was able to move without too much trouble.
About as quickly as the first man’s life had been extinguished, Carl began to feel the impacts of bullets on the now-dead body of the guard in his arms. Risking a look from behind the body, he saw that four more slavers stood at the end of the hallway, each with a gun. Had he not been mostly focused on not getting shot, he would have recognized the unfocused expression on their faces; they were badly hung-over, and had most likely already had some of the dog that bit them. Stemming from this, less of the lead they sent flying in Carl’s direction hit his shield than would have normally.
Carl’s inventory of the enemy forces was cut short by a sharp pain in the arm holding most of the weight of the dead guard, the left one. Despite how well the rest of his body was covered by the man and the apparently poor aim of his assailants, he had been hit. He hadn’t been previously aware that bullets could break bone, hadn’t really had much reason to think about it, but he now thought that he might have learned that particular lesson firsthand.
Unable to support the literal dead weight of the man any longer, Carl dropped him unceremoniously to the floor and dashed into a nearby utility closet. Streams of blood rand down from the wound in his arm, but Carl didn’t have time to check and see how bad it was. Chancing a peek around the door, he saw the men advancing on his position looking a little more confident than they had a few seconds before. He ducked back into the closet before they had a chance to bring their weapons to bear again.
A scream from the hallway told Carl that the slavers had been too focused on him to pay enough attention to the doorway he had entered from, and one of his companions had used the distraction to land a shot. The rest of the increasingly distressed sentries, now unsure of what to do, began backing towards a door Carl presumed was their temporary base of operations. It would destroy what small chance the plan had of succeeding in the first place, so Carl decided that it time to take yet another gamble.
Stepping out from inside the closet, he tried to ignore the pain in his arm and brought his pistol to bear. He squeezed off three shots. Two missed but the third hit a target square in the chest, more by luck than any actual skill. Taking his lead, Carl’s armed companions came out of their hiding spot as well and finished off the remaining two. Unfortunately they did not wish to go down without a fight and, despite their aforementioned inebriation, managed to hit Paul in the thigh.
With two injured members of the rescue party, the plan’s chances of success were looking dimmer and dimmer, but no one voiced an opinion that they should stop. This was going to be their one shot.
Carl sent the non-armed group to look for a second door for them to go through while he and the attack group positioned themselves as best they could around the small entrance. One of the others came back to report there was, in fact, a second door that could be used to get in, which Carl suspected was the first good news he had heard all day.
They waited for a minute or two for the messenger to get back into position with his group and after hesitating a few seconds, kicked in the door.
Bullets tore out of the room with deadly intensity and buried themselves in the wall across the hall. Wisely, Carl and his companions had stepped to the side immediately after opening the door. After the first barrage ended, Carl dashed into the room and hid behind the first piece of cover he saw; in this case, and overturned table. More bullets soon embedded themselves in the thick wood of his temporary hiding place; it wouldn’t hold for more than a minute or two.
The brief glimpse of the space had confirmed what he had suspected. It was a conference room with long tables set up to create a sort of makeshift corral for the captives with slavers standing more or less evenly among them. The only odd thing was that there were less slavers than he had expected, numbering in the twenties rather than fifties. It was possible that he had overestimated their numbers from the shock and awe he had felt when his settlement had been captured.
Carl heard more shooting coming from behind him and knew that his allies had joined the fray. Every few seconds when the roaring of the guns would lull slightly, Carl would pop his head out from behind the table to fire a round or two and to check on the progress of the “rescue team”. It was going about as well as could be expected.
At least one of them had gotten hold of a weapon and was attempting to protect their charges from the occasional slaver who noticed what was going on behind them. Apart from that, it was difficult to tell anything for sure from his brief glimpses. Most of the herding was blocked by the makeshift barricades.
The fighting seemed to go on for hours, although Carl knew in his rational mind that no more than a few minutes had passed. Although lasting longer than he had at first expected, the overturned table that served as his hiding spot was soon blasted out of any kind of usability, and he was forced to retreat back to the doorway under a hail of gunfire. Or that’s what would have happened if on his way back another bullet hadn’t added itself to his list of miseries by implanting itself into his lower back, driving him against a wall. Carl then sank down to the floor, seeing as how gravity had suddenly tripled itself onto his back. Then being below the line of fire from the slaver’s barrier, he managed to crawl to the safety of the hall and collapsed in a heap of exhaustion and pain. On the bright side, the stabbing pain in his back nicely distracted him from the throbbing of his forearm. That’s how to keep the spirits up, Carl thought; got to find that fucking silver lining.
After a short time that was lengthened considerably in his mind by his multiple misfortunes, Carl managed to get Paul’s attention by pulling on his pants leg. This was, of course, after he remembered how to work his arm and fingers.
“Need… get out,” he whispered once Paul’s head was close enough to hear. Carl was surprised and a little frightened at the weakness of his voice. Was that normal, or did it signify an oncoming doom?
Although Carl’s voice has grown much softer and the message was a little fragmented, Paul seemed to get the idea. Standing up and getting as near to the door as possible without getting anything important shot off, Paul shouted for the retreat.
Carl, at this point, was too far gone in a haze of pain to notice much, so the names and faces of the two men that half-carried half-dragged him towards and then up the stairs escaped him. Even for such a short distance, this was not the most comfortable means of transportation; a point Carl was very vocal about, even if he wasn’t precisely intelligible. It seemed like an eternity before they finally got off the accursed stairs and onto more level ground where they dumped him before going back into the fray. Carl thought he could still hear shooting from in the stairwell, probably covering their retreat, but he was too preoccupied to be sure that was to case, or even that he was hearing it at all.
When some unobservant person accidentally kicked his head in his rush to get to some important errand, Carl took it as a sign and gave up on trying to stay conscious.
~
An unknown length of time later, Carl regained his wits and instantly regretted it. It just wasn’t fair; there he had been minding his own business when a bunch of slavers had rolled in, fucked up his life, and now he was laying God-knew-where trying to ignore the screaming from his back and arm. Sure, he hadn’t exactly been some kind of pillar of morality, but he had been a decent guy in his own opinion. He certainly hadn’t done anything that would warrant such violent repercussions. Carl knew he was being bitter about it all, but didn’t really care. He felt he had earned the right to be.
Opening his eyes, Carl tried to make sense of his surroundings with an understandably jumbled-up mind.
He appeared to still be in the office building, which was good. That probably meant either they had won, or had at the very least not lost yet. Carl had a hunch that the slavers wouldn’t really be in the mood to try to transport and sell them after all that had transpired.
The place on the floor he had previously occupied had been swapped with an immensely more comfortable “bed” fashioned out of chairs lined up next to each other and lined with what soft materials could be scavenged from their surroundings. It wasn’t exactly the first thing that might be come up with if someone was asked to imagine a bed, but Carl certainly wasn’t complaining; well, not about the bed at any rate. He was still painfully aware of his injuries, and he was reasonably certain there were other things to complain about as well.
As he couldn’t immediately think of any of those other things, and being fairly sure that he was safe for the moment, Carl attempted to settle into a more comfortable position only to find that part of his body did not heed his commands. His legs weren’t working.
Panic began to set in soon after this discovery. Ripping back the blanket that had been placed on him, Carl had the small comfort to see that his legs were, in fact, still there; they were just ignoring him. The bullet in his back must have hit his spine or somewhere very close to it.
In an attempt to calm himself, Carl tried to take a better inventory of his surroundings. He was in a windowless room containing several tables and chairs along with the improvised cot and him. The tables were at a bad angle for him to see what was on them and, not knowing the extent of his injuries, moving around might not be a very good idea, but he guessed they probably held what medical supplies could be found around the building.
As Carl was glumly surveying his surroundings, a woman entered the room. She looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her name. He thought she might have been a recent addition to the settlement.
“Finally awake, are we?” she asked as she settled in next to him. “You’ve been out for quite a while. I’m Anne, by the way.”
“How long?” Carl inquired, his voice still weak; not as bad as it had been in the middle of the fighting, but still not up to its original volume.
“About three days. We were lucky; there were some sedatives in the medical area, so you didn’t have to be conscious for the… bad parts,” she replied.
“And the slavers?”
“Gone. They took off yesterday afternoon when they figured out we weren’t just going to hand ourselves over so they’d ‘Go easy on us’. Gotta say though, it’s been a hectic few days.”
With that, Anne refused to answer any more questions and insisted that he get some more rest. Carl found out later that, out of the fifty or so that had been originally captured, twenty-two managed to stay alive excluding himself. Of those twenty-two, seven were injured, and five had left altogether. Seeing as how Carl hadn’t thought there was much of a chance for the plan working in the first place though, he’d take what he could get. They had been living off what little food there was left in the building plus the supplies James had left scattered around his apparent abode up on the tenth floor. They would be sending out scouts soon to the settlement to see if it had been looted dry yet. It would be hard going for a while with Carl’s disability and the rest of the injured in conjunction with their dwindling stash of supplies.
Still, they’d manage to get by.
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