The Dark Desert Night

     It is surprisingly cold tonight in the desert. Today, I crashed my chopper a few miles away from this isolated village. I was uninjured and God knows there was no shortage of weapons or fuel. I am now the only one left from my squad. The other guys had died horribly during the long day which had just passed.
     The reason I say 'horribly' is because they died at the hands of the foul creatures that we had traveled so far to kill. They were subhuman. They were zombies. They were mutated humans, perhaps. All we knew was that an experiment in a desert lab had gone terribly wrong and this new species threatened to overrun humanity and dominate the planet. Their numbers seemed endless. Some of them had learned to use weapons. Some of them had attacked us with rocket launchers, automatic rifles and even their own helicopters. They were not really thoughtless or stupid, but they were motivated by their bellies and by their urge to kill. Yes, they liked to eat their prey.
     The village we were in was fairly large at one time. Now it was a group of bombed-out buildings with streets of sand. I was the only human left alive in town, and for all I knew, the whole world. I have no way to communicate with the outside world.
     That's why I sit here at the top of an outside staircase, attached to a shell of a building. I have survived this long by taking the elevated position. When I run out of ammo I have to go down to the streets below and scavenge more. The last wave that came, a smart zombie stood on the roof across the street and shot at me. He hurt me too, spraying stone fragments in my face as his bullets lacerated the stone wall beside me. I killed him, though, locating him by his muzzle flash. Earlier in the day I shot down a helo that came over. I ran to the room below me so that he couldn't shoot me, then sprang in and out of cover until I brought him down. His savage, inhuman face stared at me from the blazing cockpit.
      I use my teeth to help me tear a strip of cloth from my shirt. I use it to bind my left arm. A bullet had passed cleanly through the muscles and it had bled a bit. I held one end of the cloth in my teeth so I could cinch down hard and staunch the flow of blood. I catch myself humming an old tune and then I recognize it and sing softly to myself.
On a dark desert highway
Cool breeze in my hair
      I chuckle at that line and think about the part of the song which says "This could be Heaven or this could be Hell."
    My God, how dark it is tonight! Only the fires from burning oil drums lights the darkness. I am more afraid than I've ever been in my life. I think about my wife and son, so far away. Would I live to see them again? I doubted it. I thought about my team again. Smitty is gone, Frank is dead, all of my mates are dead.
      In the distance I hear footfalls and moans from a slathering mouth. I hear the thing approaching. My heart pounds. Then, on the street before me, a block away, I see it. It is at least twelve feet tall and it appears that he could pluck me from my perch without stretching upward. He is nearly naked and his skin is mottled black and white. He has fangs! His great hulking shoulders suggest a power I could never match. He carries no weapons. I see him stop and lift his nose to the night air and sniff. The sounds are obvious even at this distance. He sniffs in one direction, then turns his body in my direction and sniffs deeply. Then, like a hound on a trail, he heads toward my nest.
     In the town square below me is a 50 caliber machine gun, mounted on a tripod. Instantly I start down the stairs toward it, knowing that I will need some heavy armament to kill the thing. Thoughts fly through my head. I know that the range of travel on the tripod would allow a smart foe to approach me at a certain angle. That's why I had deserted it earlier. Was this huge brute smart enough to figure this out? My legs are weak from fear and horror. I stumble and fall at the foot of the stairs, then arise to stagger onward. The creature roars as he sights me and I hear an answering cry from the west, then another from the east. They are being called to the feast!
    I reach the gun and take a few deep breaths in an effort to control my fear. Then I look past the light of the fires and watch his approach from the dark desert night. I hold my life as a cheap commodity, but it will cost these brutes dearly!
     If this sounds like your kind of evening, try the game Desert Zombie: Last Stand and select the night scenarios. From the dark, desert night, I'm CE Wills.