A crude little post apocalyptic story, courtesy of the Glaswegian train system's terrible timekeeping. Don't fret if background material isn't given much, I wasn't trying to build too much on that in case of conflicts with the guy who I was thinking of jotting this down for. Title's a reference to the fire worshipping cults that have spread throughout the ruins of the world's old cities (the fires being from the nuclear bombs and the flame storms that ravaged afterwords). A "redemption unfinished" as they put it.^^
Eight shots left. One for the outrunner that had came at with Aaron’s head in hand. Another spent on the torch bearer that gutted his squad’s APC as it was crippled by their rockets. Last for Paola they dragged her away to the cages.
The basement was getting hotter, he knew it. Not the cloying heat that rained from the bloated sun above outside, nor the smothers of the gutted boiler that the vagrants had enshrined at the room’s centre. No, they were trying to burn him out. He pictured them now outside, pummelling the crude barrier that he’d thrown together with what little the scavenger’s had left. A Molotov crackled, a flamer broom boomed. The chorus of fingernails on blistered wood continued.
His pistol was aimed squarely at the door. He relaxed and cradled against his palm as he reached for his last cigarette. The room was littered with the possessions of a generation of scavengers. Foul mats were sprawled across the floor, taken from the old Grenada hotel above, a bit of old world taste left to waste away in the new’s calamity. The boiler sat as a pitiful shrine to a new religion, one of bombs and flame no doubt. Symbols of its faith lay sprawled around it. Ashes piled high, the remains of books laying where they’d been burned. A child’s toy sat upright at the base, its blonde hair somehow remaining intact and shining brightly. Bad memories.
The door cracked as something heavy and animal pummelled it. He spat out a glob of ashen flem as they cheered and guffawed. They’d been sent out here into the dead city on a regular cleansing patrol. The things that bred here had been growing more restless in recently, sending out their ravening bands further from the city limits, burning the skyscrapers in great pyres for their apocalyptic gods. During the second night, their APCs parked up against the ruins of what the maps had said to be the old stock exchange, a temple to old world decadence, they’d came. Out of the dusk, bound upon the burning wrecks cannibalised automotives, hatred upon their breaths. And despite their guns they were slaughtered to a man, except for those that they took to the pens, except for him.
He flinched as splinters spat from the door frame. His gun was already out as the first of them screwed its head through the rent. It let out a ghastly scream from its blinded head before it fell back and out of sight. Another quickly replaced it, more horrifying than the last, one of the “new people” born from the flames of humanity’s redemption unfinished at they put it. Another shot, falling like the first, still yet more came to clamber into his shelter. Soon he was almost out of bullets. They had retreated for now, though already he heard the agitators rasping out their hatred, spurring them to burn out the “apostate”.
He snatched up his cigarette. He’d hardly noticed dropping it and it had fallen into a pool of filth on the floor. The doll had gone up in the flames like the rest of the fire shrine. Smoke had began to fill the room and he could tell that the rotted supports wouldn’t hold through the fire for long. He’d resigned that he was long out of radio range of the nearest patrol so he left his receiver idle on his belt, instead reaching for his lighter. It flicked empty. The crude oil that filled out had run dry, the last light he’d got from it had been running on vapours and hadn’t lasted long. He looked at the blistered face of the doll, its one remaining eye still staring out innocently and unknowing, and sighed.
The things outside were coming again and he knew that this time they’d take him. Burnt upon the pyres like the rest. The flamer broom stuck its head through into his sanctum. He lit his cigarette on the ignitor.
Fire motifs much?
