by Dave Hazel
“Go ahead and turn the AC off, but leave the windows up till it starts to get hot again,” Mykal said.
“Talking about Elves, Dwarves, Goblins and dragons makes me feel like we’re in a friggin Dungeons And Dragons game.” Boris forced a laugh. “I gotta be having one long-assed dream.”
“Want me to hit you upside the head to make sure you’re not dreaming?” Kurt gave a big toothy grin.
“This is no dream,” Towbar replied. “I believe the gods have sent you here to help since our situation is desperate.”
“What the hell?” Kurt gasped when the village of Jamison came into their view. He stopped the car. “Damn! It looks like we’re too damned late.”
“Look at that mess,” Boris mumbled and fidgeted to take a cigarette from the pack. “I need one now.”
“What the hell happened?” Roy Jr. asked quietly.
“As you can see, the Sosos left their murderous mark once again,” Towbar said with a deliberate calmness. He didn’t take his eyes off the smoldering village.
“What should we do?” Roy Jr. turned to Mykal.
Towbar spoke before Mykal answered. “We should move on to the next village. The Sosos may not have gone there,” he said, but didn’t sound convincing. “There will be no survivors here. Sosos are viciously thorough.”
“Wait a minute,” Kurt barked. “Someone may be hurt and need our help. I say we go check for survivors.”
Towbar looked to Mykal. “I was going to argue, for Sosos do not leave survivors. I think it will do all of you good to see what Sosos do to innocent men, women and children. Yes, let us inspect the village. I can assure you, my friends, you will find no survivors. If you do find anyone alive, they will beg for you to end their misery and they would curse you if you do not.”
“Towbar, that’s some cold shit you’re saying about your own people,” Kurt huffed with disgust.
“You will be angry for stopping. However, this will turn out to be a good lesson on Soso warfare. I warn you, my friends, what you are about to see will haunt you for all your life.”
“What’s your problem Towbar?”
“Kurt, that’s enough. Take a chill pill,” Mykal said firmly showing he wouldn’t allow Kurt to be disrespectful to Towbar. “Get your gear on and let’s go check out the village,” he said while putting on his helmet.
“My friends, you do not need your protective armor here. The Sosos are no longer here. They came to destroy as a group and they will leave as a group after everyone has been killed. They have moved on to kill more innocent people. If you find any Sosos here they will be dead.”
“Thanks, but I promised Denny I wouldn’t put you guys in danger. Get it on and let’s hurry, I wanna get outta here.”
They exited the car with M-16 rifles at the ready. Roy Jr. carried his Thompson sub-machinegun. Mykal expected Sosos to appear out of the desolation and attack them despite Towbar’s reassuring words. Mykal picked up the anxiety from the darting eyes of his men. The wind howled through the ruins, carrying the smell of smoke and burnt wood.
Mykal watched his men proceed with caution on the grass beaten path into the devastated village. Towbar walked casually as if on a Sunday stroll. As a group they watched for any signs of life, friendly or unfriendly. They listened intently for sounds of anyone injured or still being tortured.
WARNING: VERY GRAPHIC
The village smoldered. Most homes were jagged skeletal remains of what they had once been. Bodies were strewn about like the toys of a child who had his fill at playtime. Animals sprawled out amid the refuse giving the impression that nothing survived the Soso onslaught.
Mykal couldn’t believe the destruction of the village. He regretted stopping, but if anyone survived he wanted to help. “Let’s split up to save time, cuz this village is bigger than I thought it would be.”
They walked off in four directions among the dead and broken village. Mykal approached one of the few homes that had not been burned or smashed to the ground.
Before reaching the walkway to the house Mykal neared the body of a boy who couldn’t have been more than eleven years old. Both hands and both feet were chopped off. The quantity of blood that surrounded the child’s body shocked him. The expression of pain fixed on his face made Mykal want to yell and cry. ‘This was someone’s child.’ Mykal’s hands began to shake. ‘Who would do this?’ Mykal eyed several large bumps and cuts on the kid’s head and face. He matched those with several large rocks around the boy’s head and body. Mykal believed the Sosos stoned the child while he bled to death.
Next to the boy missing his hands and feet lay the lifeless body of another boy about the same age. He lay on his side with his hands bound behind his back. A dirty footprint on the side of his head and face led Mykal to believe it held his head still. A deep gaping wound in his neck passed through his throat to the other side and into the ground. Some ‘heroic’ Soso pinned the harmless child to the ground with a sword. The child, left to die in a pool of his own blood, squirmed violently as displayed by the dirt that had been kicked around by his dirty legs. Mykal wanted to drop and start sobbing. “They’re just kids,” he whispered and fought the tears that crept up. He wondered if they were playing when the Sosos attacked. His stomach felt sick.
Words, thoughts, and expressions escaped him. He pulled himself together because of the task at hand. He snuck up to the door of the home. The building, larger than his two-car garage, seemed small for a house. Mykal peaked into the slight opening of the door so as not to give himself away. Still not taking any chances, he looked back to Towbar who nonchalantly waved him on.
Out of fear he hesitated. A gust of wind blew his way filled with the smell of burnt wood and charred animal hides. He wondered why this building didn’t get torched. Could Sosos be hiding inside? Might this be a trap? He glanced back at Towbar who appeared not to be concerned. The giant waved him on again.
Mykal couldn’t see much from his position at the door opening. Using the barrel of his rifle he pushed on the wooden door causing an eerie creak that seemed a million times louder in his mind. His heart thumped and raced. Despite Towbar’s words and re-assuring waves he feared a Soso would jump out at him. He leaned his head in, but still couldn’t see the entire room. He saw meager furnishings scattered about the home but everything had been broken, smashed, slashed or chopped. ‘Overkill!’
He jumped into the doorway with his M-16 ready to rip apart anything that moved. No Sosos, but what he saw sickened him and shocked him with such force that he jerked with fright. Five bodies had been laid out in the middle of the home. It appeared to be a family placed side by side.
The first, the body of an elderly man, face up and sprawled out like a five pointed star. The wounds in the man’s hands and feet made Mykal think he had been pinned to the dirt floor with swords. The Sosos had taken the stew that looked to be the next meal and poured it over his bare belly and chest. Mykal assumed it was hot when they doused him with it. Burning coals under the cooking pot had been tossed onto his restrained body. Second and third degree burns sizzled into his neck, chest and stomach.
The man’s kneecaps had been hacked off and his jaw visibly broken from the joint. The axe wound to the head looked to be the killing blow. The wide open chasm in his forehead was at least three inches deep. His eyes, swelled considerably, and his nose had been flattened and bloody.
The body of a second man, though younger, appeared to have been nailed to the floor in a similar manner. The man had been decapitated and his head missing. The second man’s chest looked deformed and caved in. Mykal detected several dirty foot prints on the blackened and bruised flesh. Sosos probably jumped up and down on his chest till it gave way under the pressure. There were far too many stab wounds in his legs and arms to count. The stab wounds to his stomach made a gory mess of blood, flesh and internal organs. Mykal’s jaws tightened as the hint of bile soured his mouth.
Next to the headless man lay a naked woman about the same age. Mykal gue
ssed her to be his wife. Both her arms were severed and missing. One arm chopped off at the shoulder and the other hewed off between the shoulder and elbow. Her midsection displayed a horrific mess of terror and suffering. After being ripped open and her intestines pulled out, the Sosos wrapped her innards around the head of her husband and shoved the remains back into the gaping hole of her stomach.
Her nipples had been sliced off. The middle of her nose looked to have been bitten off. He guessed that because of the bite marks on her cheek. He saw something fleshy and bloody in her mouth but he couldn’t tell what it was until he looked at the next body. In her mouth, the penis and testicles of a boy not yet ten years old, probably her son.
In addition to being castrated, the boy’s arms and legs were broken in several places and grotesquely twisted out of shape. Judging by the twisted position of the boy’s head, Mykal wondered if his neck had been broken. Bruises covered more than fifty percent of his flesh where he had been punched and kicked. The boy’s ears were missing and Mykal guessed some ‘mighty Soso warrior’ had the ears attached to his belt as a souvenir to show off his ‘great warrior work’.
The boy’s dirty face hit Mykal hard, causing him to openly cry. He saw where the tracks of his tears washed away some of the dirt and blood. Clumps of hair had been pulled from his head. The young boy suffered. Mykal put his hand to his mouth and his eyes burned with fresh tears.
“What the hell’s wrong with these people?” He mumbled while looking at the face that obviously cried through the torture. “He’s just a kid,” he whispered. He tried to stop the tears. He couldn’t imagine how much the parents suffered watching their children being abused, and unable to prevent it.
The fifth body couldn’t have been more than six years old. She was stripped naked and by the looks of the blood and other liquids leaking from her tiny body, she had been raped several times before they killed her. She had been stabbed with a dagger four times in her pre-pubic vaginal area. Part of a wooden table leg protruded from her bloody anus.
Three stab wounds from a sword entered one side and exited the other of her tiny frame. Her face looked as if it had been bludgeoned with a blunt object. Another table leg rested beside her head. Her thin blonde hair was caked with dried blood. Several vicious bite marks bore blood and opened flesh on her neck and shoulder. One of her eyes had been plucked out and rested on her bloody cheek. This girl wasn’t much older than his two sons.
Part of Mykal wanted to curl into a ball and disappear and part of him craved to go on a rampage against the Sosos. He just needed to go home and leave all the madness behind. He wanted to pick the girl up and hold her, but being long dead, it wouldn’t help. He couldn’t stop the tears and continued to cry quietly.
“These poor kids,” he moaned. The gore of their brutalized bodies didn’t bother him as much as the emotional impact of imagining what the family felt watching the children suffer.
Emotions of fear, anger, hatred and disgust hit him like a blast furnace. He felt physically ill. He wanted to yell and curse, cry and mourn. He wished to go back in time so he could choose not to stop and see this. He needed to go home to tell Pam and the boys how much he loved and missed them. He burned desperately with a desire to kill the bastards who did this. His brain flooded with so many contradicting thoughts.
He could never have imagined anything so gruesome. What would make someone do something like this let alone an entire army of people? ‘How could they be so calloused and soulless and heartless and cruel to the children?’ He wondered with groans.
“What the hell am I mixed up in?” He said aloud.
He wiped his eyes and left the little house. He wished the Sosos would have burned the home to the ground so he wouldn’t have seen what they did to this family. The Sosos turned his life upside down, killing a part of his innocence. June 25th 1983 would be the day he changed forever. He’d never be the same.
Numbed and heavy hearted, Mykal made his way through the village looking for ‘survivors’. “Towbar was right. I hate myself for stopping,” he mumbled. All the death and eradication stunned him. He passed body after mutilated body, both human and animal. Huts had been burned to the ground or were in pieces. Evidence of women and children being raped and butchered mercilessly lay everywhere he looked. Most men had been castrated and or beheaded, but all were murdered in many different and horrible ways. It seemed like the Sosos tried to ‘out do’ each other in a contest of ‘who could be the most vicious’.
Mykal had to stop. He came upon twenty-three bodies lined in a row. A mix of men, women and children of all ages. All lay face down, hands bound behind them. All had dirty footprints on their backs, apparently to hold them down. The back of all their heads had been crushed and smashed in. A bloody, sledgehammer like, war hammer lay on the ground near the line of bodies. Being only one hammer he guessed the poor victims were lined up and one at a time had their skulls crushed with a vicious blow. He couldn’t imagine the fear as each waited their turn to die, probably under the humorous taunts of the ‘mighty Soso warriors’.
He cursed using words he hadn’t uttered since he was a punk teenager back in New York. He openly cried, not out of weakness, but of sadness. He felt an emptying sadness he never experienced before. Everywhere he looked he saw bodies. He turned his head to avoid the dead, but then he saw parts of bodies, pools of blood and pieces of stuff that belonged inside bodies. “This can’t be friggin real,” he whispered and moaned.
He continued making his way through the death site looking for survivors, and now he hoped not to find any. He had to wipe the blurriness of tears from his eyes in order to see. Several villagers had Soso death arrows sticking from their bodies and most of those were shot in the back. Mykal could only imagine the chaos that occurred and how people ran for their lives only to be shot fleeing. Animals had skulls bashed in, bodies chopped in half and pulled apart. Some animals had been set on fire and let run free. The animals died trying to run from the flames.
In the center of the village he stopped at the front of the largest home in the village, still intact. He wasn’t going inside this home. The body of a large fat man, probably the village leader, had all his limbs chopped off. His head shoved on top of a long spear stuck into the ground. His legs and arms were laid out as in an X on both sides of the spear. Nausea started creeping up stronger at the sight of the man’s head embedded onto the spear. His dull eyes were open and his tongue poked through the fat swelled lips.
The body of a naked woman a couple of feet from his body could have been his wife. The woman had been near the full term of her pregnancy when the Sosos attacked. She had been tied up and her baby had been ripped from her body. Impaled on the end of the spear was a male baby. The umbilical cord didn’t look to have a clean cut. He could only guess what the monsters did.
The mother’s eyes had been gouged out of her head. He wondered if they did that after they split her breasts open. Her left thigh had most of the flesh and muscle cut away. Mykal saw the bone of her thigh. His head started to swim in a dazed fog of numbness. ‘How do Sosos live with themselves?’
A few feet away from the couple lay the naked body of a boy. By the size of the body Mykal guessed the child to be six or seven. He couldn’t tell that from the face, because all the flesh had been removed from the boy’s face. The Sosos cut the boy’s face and peeled his skin back like a banana. All his fingers were twisted and deformed. The ‘brave’ Soso warriors had broken and twisted each of the boy’s fingers. They ended the boy’s suffering by gutting him like a fish.
Mykal had seen enough though plenty more lay around to inspect. Towbar was right, there couldn’t be any survivors. The savage Sosos wouldn’t allow anyone to live. Mykal overflowed with so many negative emotions. He hated Sosos with everything inside him. He wanted another opportunity to cross paths with them. This time his point of view would be different.
“Boris, Kurt and Roy Jr.,” he yelled out, his nausea growing stronger. He had to put his ha
nd over his mouth and take a deep breath. The others came running to his call. Their expressions showed they felt what he felt. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”
“This is some sick shit man,” Roy Jr. said. His face pale, he looked like he was going to vomit and cry.
“I wish Ski was here,” Mykal said to Boris.
“Who?” Roy Jr. asked.
“A guy on our Crew, Stanley Winczewski,” Boris said. “We call him Ski. He’s our Crew religious fanatic. A Jesus freak.”
“Cuz I wanna ask him, if God is real, how could God allow people like the Sosos to live?” Mykal said and paused for a moment as Kurt came into view. “These friggin Soso scumbags need to be completely wiped off the planet,” Mykal hissed with a revulsion and hatred he had never tasted before.
“But you know there are some bleeding heart liberals that wouldn’t agree with that, Myk,” Boris said and he looked like he started to weaken. “They’d say it’s cuz of their upbringing. I’m gonna be sick,” Boris said and held his hand to his mouth.
Mykal ignored him, turned and went for the car. He tried not to take in any more of the carnage, but the dead, brutalized and butchered lay everywhere. Like a nightmare he couldn’t escape, he felt trapped in a tub of corpses and couldn’t get out from underneath them fast enough. He closed his eyes to prevent seeing some of them a second time, but he couldn’t erase them from his mind. The images were burned into his brain.
‘Why?’ That one word kept repeating in his head. When they first arrived he smelt burnt wood, but now he smelled blood and burnt flesh. He breathed in death and suffering. He needed to get away before he lost his mind. Reaching the car he had to lean over the hood to keep from falling. The queasy feeling in his stomach increased and the terrible taste in the back of his throat made him want to heave. He feared he would vomit.
