Human Element

by AJ Powers

  After a few minutes, Hadas gave the all-clear and they walked over to the kill. Aaran grabbed his knife and immediately got to work field dressing the buck.

  “Oh, that is so disgusting,” Hadas gagged when Aaran pulled the animal’s entrails out onto the ground, steam rising from the pile of guts.

  Aaran found the liver and held it up in his hand. He watched as blood dripped off the organ, splashing down into the frosty grass below before swinging it around to Hadas. “I’ll make you a deal. You take one bite of the liver, right now, and I’ll let you off the hook for the back massage tonight.”

  Hadas put her hand over her mouth and dry-heaved. She spun her body away from the ghastly sight and coughed a few times. It took great concentration to keep her breakfast inside her roiling stomach. “I hate you,” she said with playful disdain.

  “Seriously, Hadas, you can totally eat it raw. It won’t kill you…Well, I’m pretty sure it won’t, anyway,” he chuckled, which prompted more heaves from Hadas. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” he said with genuine remorse. He hadn’t expected her to react so poorly to the joke. With the field part of the job done, Aaran stood up and walked over to her. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said bitterly, doing what she could to find a way to turn her back to him even further.

  Aaran bent down and grabbed the animal’s legs and hoisted the body over his shoulders. He immediately felt the warmth of the blood on his neck, which was horribly pleasant on his skin. He walked up behind Hadas and said, “Lead the way.”

  She moved forward, careful not to look back.

  Chapter 29

  December had finally arrived, and the twenty-something degree temperatures confirmed that winter had come with it. It felt strange to be alone again—it had been over a month since Aaran had last ventured into a dark, creepy building without Hadas watching his back. But she was in no shape to travel.

  Though she had seemed fine for the rest of that day, the popped ankle they’d heard on Thanksgiving morning had been the delayed start to a nasty sprain. She’d woken up to painful swelling, and it had only mildly improved since. Fortunately, they had a warm, dry, and well-stocked place to call home for the winter, affording her plenty of time for recovery. Still, he missed having her by his side—sarcastic commentary and all.

  Ordinarily, Aaran would not have taken such a big risk to fly solo back into town, but the growing anticipation to get the Mustang up and running again consumed his thoughts. Even though he and Hadas had no immediate plans to vacate the premises—at least, certainly not before the end of winter—having a good escape plan was as vital as having food and water. Plus, he wanted to hear that Boss 302 engine purr.

  Looking through the reflex sight of his Scorpion, Aaran carefully checked the small auto parts store for threats. He had contemplated bringing the AR-15, but opted for the tried and true nine-millimeter carbine. Having never fired that particular AR-15, he had no way of knowing if the sights were zeroed in or if the weapon had any cycling issues. Based on the keyhole accuracy of the Savage, he trusted that everything about the rifle was good to go, but not enough to stake his life on it. However, he knew the Scorpion cycled faithfully, and the sights were dead nuts. The deciding factor, however, was the suppressor. If he ran into trouble, he needed to make as small a splash as possible to aid in his escape, especially without Hadas’s Tavor providing him backup.

  The store was clear, so Aaran started shopping. Reaching for the large book attached to the shelf, Aaran thumbed through the pages until he reached the year and model for the car. His finger dragged down the page until he found the air filter he needed, then repeated the same for the oil filter. Having successfully found both parts on the shelf, he stuffed them into his backpack, along with four quarts of synthetic 10W-30, before moving to the next item on his list. Ten minutes later, he ended his shopping spree with eight of the most expensive spark plugs the store had in stock.

  After finishing up, Aaran took a few minutes to wander around the store, soaking in the nostalgia associated with mechanic tools and car parts. He thought of his father and the thousands of hours they’d spent working on cars throughout his childhood. A smile swept across Aaran’s face when he walked into the employee lounge and saw the poster of a bright orange 1969 GTO hanging on the wall. His dad had had the exact same print taped up in the garage. That was a great year for cars, Aaran thought.

  The smile faded when the fond memories from the past turned into the ugly nightmares of the present. Time to go, he thought as he turned around and left the break room. He gave the store one last look, then headed for the exit.

  Walking back out into the tundra-like temperatures, Aaran was satisfied with his trip. He had scratched off everything on his shopping list and had even collected some things that weren’t on it—like the chrome skull to replace the shifter knob. It had been more of an impulse “purchase”, but he couldn’t pass it up. It reminded him of the Terminator skulls, which was fitting, given the world they lived in. He’d also grabbed a couple of cans of CLP, which would be helpful for both car repairs and firearms maintenance. Unable to recall the last time he’d thoroughly scrubbed his guns, he knew he shouldn’t procrastinate much longer.

  Standing just outside the store, Aaran contemplated his route home. Eaton Avenue was the most direct route, but had a daunting hill to climb and was a bigger road, increasing his chances of running into a Webber or two. The alternative path tacked on a few extra miles, but the roads were a little more off the beaten path, and the elevation change was spread out more generously. Plus, there was an old pawn shop that Aaran considered visiting. Christmas was coming up soon and he thought an elegant necklace for Hadas would be a nice token of his affection. Aaran checked his watch, it was going to be close, but he decided on the latter.

  Fifteen minutes into his journey, the earbuds started spewing out digital gibberish. He had never heard the sounds before, but based on Hadas’s description, he assumed they were nearby. Seconds later, he heard the engine. Aaran took cover behind a horse trailer rusting away by a feed store at the end of a large shopping center—the anchor store of the shopping center being a major grocery chain at the opposite end. He peeked from behind the back of the trailer, quickly locating the source of the sound.

  A Humvee.

  The military vehicle screamed down the road, then made a sharp turn into the grocery store parking lot. It shot down a row of cars toward the front of the store before the tires squelched to an abrupt stop. All four doors on the Humvee blasted open, and four armed Sentinels stepped out. The spastic sounds blaring over the earbuds were almost painful. The wireless chatter was high—if only Aaran could understand what any of it meant.

  His eyes locked on to the four armed men as they approached the store, guns raised. “What are you guys up to?” he asked himself quietly. A work van parked about thirty feet in front of him blocked his view, and he lost sight of the Sentinels behind it. With his curiosity getting the best of him, Aaran left the safety of the horse trailer and ran over to the work van. As he pressed up against the side of the van, a hideous shriek filled the air, followed by multiple gunshots.

  “No! Please no!” the woman cried out. Then more gunfire.

  Then silence.

  The screams sent a malevolent chill down Aaran’s spine that made him want to vomit. His trembling hand could barely keep a grasp on his gun, and he felt like his knees were going to give out. “What just happened…?”

  Shaking off the paralyzing fear, Aaran looked around the back corner of the van just as the Humvee’s engine fired up. The truck sped off toward the parking lot’s exit and tore down the road, leaving a trail of exhaust and burnt rubber as it disappeared behind the store.

  As soon as the garble in the earbuds faded, Aaran hustled toward the grocery store. His mind warned him of the dreadful scene up ahead, but he refused to stop. His stomach was floating near his throat as he quickly bridged the gap between him and the store. Both fear and the bitter col
d made him all but lose sensation in his legs, yet they kept churning; it felt as if he was gliding through the air.

  Clutching his carbine tight, Aaran said a silent prayer in hopes that somehow what he had just heard was not what he thought it was. But when Aaran rounded a corner of the row of cars, he realized his prayers would go unanswered today. His legs gradually slowed to a stop and his shoulders slumped down. Winded, all Aaran could muster up was, “No…”

  In the middle of the parking lot lay a woman and two young boys, each one swathed in an expanding pool of blood. Cans of food had spilled out of the shopping bags on the ground next to the woman, one still rolling across the blacktop toward the road. Aaran squeezed his eyes shut in a feeble attempt to scrub the horrifying sight from his memory. It didn’t work. The images would be yet another thing to stalk him in his sleep for the remainder of his days.

  His eyes were still closed when he heard a soft whimper come from the other side of the row. He was already running toward the sound by the time his eyes had opened.

  “Mama…” the older of the two boys cried weakly.

  Aaran dropped to his knees and quickly assessed the damage to the boy’s body. He didn’t need to be a combat medic to know the wounds were mortal, and it would likely be minutes, if not seconds, before the child perished. Knowing there was nothing to be done, Aaran put his arm beneath the boy’s body and brought him closer, embracing him as if he was his own child.

  The boy, his mind and body in shock as vital organs began to shut down, hadn’t even noticed that a stranger was cradling him. “Mama,” he cried.

  “It’s okay,” Aaran said with a shaky voice. Tears collected at the corner of his eyes as he looked down at the boy’s pale face, a terrifying sound accompanying each labored breath. The boy looked like Henry—even sounded like him—causing Aaran to tighten his embrace.

  “Mama…Please, w-w-wake up, Mama,” he pleaded in vain as he strained his eyes to look toward his dead mother.

  Aaran gently pushed the boy’s bloodied hair out of his face. “Shhhh, it’s okay,” Aaran said again. “Your mama’s just fine…” he lied, doing the only thing he could to bring some form of comfort to the boy’s mind in his final minutes.

  “I love you, Mama…” he said, his lip quivering. Then the quivering stopped, and the boy’s body relaxed.

  He was dead.

  Aaran’s furious scream transformed into a guttural growl before he devolved into a mess of tears for the departed souls. As he cradled the lifeless body in his arms, the distant laments of his own family’s gruesome murder clawed its way back into his soul, gnawing and gnashing at his psyche like a monster in the night. He rocked back and forth, begging God for this terrible nightmare to finally be over.

  “I’m sorry,” he cried as he held the limp body in his hands. “I’m so sorry…” he said, as if he had pulled the trigger himself.

  Aaran sat in silence on the cold, hard blacktop, staring blankly at the license plate on the car in front of him. His tears had frozen to his cheeks, and he felt colder than he had ever felt in his life. He stayed motionless for several minutes, trying to understand why a hungry mother and her two sons would be ruthlessly executed outside a grocery store, but there was no explanation for it. For any of it.

  He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but Aaran finally placed the boy’s body on the ground and got back to his feet. He looked at all three corpses before looking down at his blood-soaked clothing. He held his hands out in front of him and stared at the same dark, red stains on his skin…A switch in his head suddenly flipped, and a surging psychosis soon consumed Aaran’s entire being. His body trembled again, but this time, it was not from the cold, or fear, or even sorrow, and Aaran found himself with an answer to a question he hadn’t even asked.

  Kill them all.

  The next conscious memory he had was on the side of the road, running in the direction the Humvee had driven away. He couldn’t remember leaving the bodies behind—or even remember his brain giving the order to give pursuit. There had been a noticeable “dead zone” between memories of the young boy dying in his arms and where he was now. But as he ran down the road, his lungs aching painfully and his nerves fraying a million different directions, it didn’t matter to Aaran how or why he’d ended up here. All that mattered was that he followed through, that he caught up to them and made them pay.

  Aaran’s sprint quickly decelerated to a run, and shortly after that, a jog. Despite his body’s protests, he would not allow himself to move any slower than that. A deadly combination of rage and adrenaline kept him going long after his body’s natural source of energy had depleted.

  About thirty minutes later, the earbud crackled to life. It was faint, but with each heavy footstep Aaran took, it got a little stronger. He was closing in on the enemy, sparking a fresh jolt of energy to his exhausted body. Sweeping his head left to right and back again, Aaran searched every nanometer of his vision for the tan military vehicle.

  There!

  He changed his course and headed for an apartment complex across the road. The digitized static from his earbuds quickly became distracting, so he pulled the earbud out. The garbled mess of sounds were no longer telling him anything useful, anyway. The enemy was right in front of him. But instead of fleeing, Aaran had used Hadas’s advanced warning system to track them down.

  His mind reeled with panic when he reached the driveway to the apartments, but still, he didn’t hesitate. He had been so focused on finding the Sentinels that he had not yet figured out what he would do once he had. He knew the outcome he wanted, but achieving it—without dying himself—would be a challenge.

  Aaran bounced from car to car in the fading evening sunlight, eventually closing in on the vacant Humvee. He looked over at the door of the apartment building directly in front of the truck and noticed it was open. The Sentinels were inside. With no better idea coming to mind, Aaran decided to ambush them when they came back out. Staying low, he ran over to the rear side of the Humvee, putting the 5,500-pound, up-armored vehicle between him and the building.

  While he prepared himself for the coming battle, a risky idea took root in his mind. He slowly inched up and looked at the turret-mounted Browning M2A1 machinegun on the roof. He played mental hot potato with his new plan before mumbling, “To hell with it.” He planted his foot on the bumper and pulled himself up to the sloped cap of the truck. Crawling on his hands and knees, Aaran’s muscles screamed in agony as he crept his way to the turret on the roof.

  He had no experience handling such a destructive device before, but he was not completely ignorant to how it worked, either. He observed the belt of .50 caliber bullets feeding into the left side of the gun from a mounted ammo can and assumed it was ready to go. Still, he pulled back on the large charging handle on the right side of the receiver, and a loaded .50 caliber bullet dumped out of the bottom of the gun. The ejected bullet confirmed his suspicion that the gun was hot, but there was no room for error now; it was do or die. And every fiber of his being wanted the four Sentinels inside to be on the latter half of the equation.

  Aaran swiveled the gun, training the muzzle on the open door. He had no idea how accurate the machinegun would be, but suspected accuracy wouldn’t play much of a factor from this range. He was no more than twenty yards from the door; missing wouldn’t be an option for the gun.

  Resting his thumbs on the butterfly trigger, Aaran waited like a pissed-off lion stalking a spotted hyena in the grass. Ice coursed through his veins as he braced himself for the moment of retribution. Because when it arrived, it would not be pretty.

  Soon, there was a power struggle between emotion and rational thinking. This is a bad idea, he heard himself say, but his rage was still all-consuming and quickly quieted that logic. Before the voice of reason had a chance to appeal, Aaran spotted a shadowy figure lurking in the hallway just inside the opened door.

  No turning back now.

  He waited until he could see multiple sets of boots com
ing toward him. If even one of them walked away, he would consider the mission a failure, and he wasn’t about to fail. Not now.

  As the first Sentinel walked outside, his empty eyes immediately locked on to the turret of the Humvee. The others, as they processed the digital commands, quickly exited the building in formation, but it was too late.

  “Burn in hell, motherfu—” Aaran’s battle cry was cut short when he mashed down on the butterfly trigger.

  The machinegun spewed out 700 grains of hate at 500 rounds per minute. Shells poured from the bottom of the gun like a brass waterfall, the cartridge links kicking out to the side. The intense flash erupting out the end of the barrel was mesmerizing in the twilight of the evening sky. From Aaran’s side of the gun, it was an incredible sight.

  The same could not be said for those on the opposite side.

  Explosions of brick, wood, and cartilage filled the air as the .50 caliber bullets indiscriminately passed through any solid object standing in their way. With his thumbs unmovable, Aaran mowed down the group of Sentinels while swiss-cheesing the already-dilapidated apartment behind them.

  He screamed furiously as the bullets continued to pound his targets ahead.

  THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

  Aaran felt his ribcage rattle from the machinegun’s powerful blasts, but could no longer hear the shots. He quickly lost sight of his targets when they became engulfed in the dust and debris from the crumbling façade, but he still did not release the trigger. The barrel had an eerie red glow to it, and Aaran worried the gun might blow up in his face, but he pressed on. The twenty or so seconds it took to empty the ammo can went fast, yet seemed to take years. But the gun was now silent.

  Aaran was still pressing down on the trigger, his eyes glazed over as he stared at the particles of carnage swirling around in the evening’s winter breeze. The sounds of the world around him had been replaced by an obnoxious ringing that screamed relentlessly in his head. Besides the ringing, all he could hear was his own heartbeat.