The Hellhounds of War

A crazed lunatic is waging war against society. In the midst of the war, a girl's father is shot, her life turned upside down, and she is forced to live her life on the run. But how did it all begin?

The Hellhounds of War

A gunshot rang out, echoing through the cold, frigid air. She sat up, ridged, terrified. Adrenalin pounded through her bloodstream, making her senses sharper than usual, her ears picking up the click of a gun being reloaded. Then there was a shout, and she heard the faint thud of a body being pressed against a wall. Then a demand, stated in a gruff voice:

“Well? Where does she live?”

“Th-that house, r-right there, yes, please don’t h-hurt me, p-please, I have children...”

The crack of a bullet made her jump. There was a muffled noise as the body of the man was discarded.

Silence pressed firmly against her ears, and then was shattered by another bullet. Leaping from her cot, she quickly pulled on her socks, struggling to pull them onto her frozen feet. Another gunshot, followed by screams, pierced the air. Now the whole town was awake. Lights flooded the houses up and down the street and spilled into her room through the open window. Struggling with her shoes now, she squinted through the darkness of her room to locate things she needed to stuff into her pack before she left, letting her primal, survival instincts take over. She knew she had to leave; they were coming for her.

        Fervently thankful that she had tumbled into bed without changing out of her tight leggings and shirt, she grabbed her jacket and stuffed it into her pack along with a change of clothes, a water bottle, matches, paper, a roll of foil, and her pocket knife before speeding out of her room and down the hallway. Through the broken window and into the darkness of the woods behind her house she ran, black hair being whipped into a furious storm by her speed. Behind her, she heard the spray of gasoline dousing her house, her home, her shelter, and then the roar of flames that would devoured the wooden beams until only nuts, bolts, and hinges remained.

        Where had this all started? Which was the first domino in line? Whose hand was it that tipped the first tile? It had begun years and years ago, when he was born, hunched and paralyzed from the waist down. His mother had loved him for his big, watery blue eyes and had cherished his quiet words and gentle ways from the time he learned to talk, but his father had fled from the hospital in shame. Later, as he grew into adolescence, his mother, out of pure chance, had died in an airplane crash on her way home from a business trip. Devastated and alone, the poor boy, broken in body and soul, had been handed over into the care of his mother’s parents. They, like his father, were ashamed of him, keeping him indoors and out of sight. The boy grew thin and pale within the walls of the large, extravagant house of his grandparents. They paid doctor after doctor, physician after physician, nurse after nurse, sending them into his room with the plea that they could turn him back to “normal”, that they could somehow, from the broken, mangled form hidden from sight, draw out a boy, a human. The shades of his room were always kept tightly closed. No one in town knew that he existed. Worse yet, nothing the doctors suggested to his grandparents was too painful or too risky that they didn’t try it; in their minds, they didn’t have anything to lose as this mangled lump of skin was not what they would consider a child, let alone their grandson. The boy soon became the test subject for new medicines, many of the less successful ones bringing his so close to death that he could have sworn he felt his mother hugging him to sleep one night, whispering comforting words in his ear.

        The chemicals, over time, seeped into his mind, twisting it, replacing sorrow with anger and hunger for freedom with thirst for revenge. Years later, as an adult, he rose to power. He acquired an army of followers, all intent on serving justice to those who had stolen away theirs. It was no longer just his grandparents who the man saw as his enemy; it was the doctors who had treated him, the government who paid to support their “research”, the people who had stood by, doing nothing to stop his torture, his own, personal hell. The world was his enemy, the world needed to pay for the years it had stolen from his life, from his mother’s. All of the money spent on pumping him full of drugs could have been spent on safety precautions that would have saved his mother’s life. The world had to pay, and he would be the one to make it.

        Slowly, over many years, he acquired a partner who he turned to for advice and strategies, the first person since his mother who he listened to for reasons other than convenience or manipulation. He, too, had suffered at the hands of the government. His daughter had passed away when he didn’t have enough money to pay for treatment for her brain cancer. The loss of his one family member left alive left him with a haunted look in his sunken, pitch black eyes, and a hunch in his shoulders that made his thin frame seem frail, breakable. The two made a good team. Together in their hunt for justice, there was no factor they overlooked, no price paid without good reason. If one could not solve a problem alone, they as one could solve it together. If one overlooked a loophole for the enemy to slip through, the other would quickly close it. Together, they were unstoppable.

        Then, one night, while raiding a government building to get valuable information with a small army of men, the partner ran into another man who worked at the building, a security guard. This man, upon realizing why the building was being attacked, had downloaded all of the information onto a flash drive and then destroyed all other records of the information. Stumbling out of the building and into the darkness, the security guard was spotted. It was obvious that he intended to reach his home in order to hide the flash drive from the invaders.

What could the partner do? The man had practically reached the door of his house. His partner needed that flash drive. What other choices did he have? Without any second thoughts, he leveled his pistol with the man’s head and, with a twitch of his finger, killed him. The lights of the house in front of the now dead man flickered on.

        “Dad? Is that you? I heard a gun…” A girl of seventeen years with raven hair poked her head around the door. Her eyes fell upon the pistol still smoking and aimed in the direction of her dead father. Then her eyes, looking like sunken black holes, fell onto her father’s body, his face tilted to the side, blood soaking the front of his crisp uniform, gore seeping from the hole in the back of his skull. His arm lay stretched at an awkward angle towards his house, as if he was, in death, attempting to throw the flash drive that had tumbled out of his outstretched hand towards his house. She stifled a gasp. Hundreds of emotions flitted across her face, from shock to anguish, horror, and finally resting on pure, unchecked anger. Her tear-streaked face rose once again to the man. “You will PAY! You have no idea what you have done. What did he ever do to YOU?! Now I am alone, I have no family, no one… I am alone… everyone is dead but me…” She collapsed onto her knees and sobbed into her hands, soaking them. Soon though, her tears of sadness turned to tears of anger once more. Raising her eyes to bore into the partner’s own, she threatened quietly, dangerously, “You have taken a life of the surface of this earth. Now you must give one.”

        The man sneered and tossed the useless, empty pistol aside. Who was she to think that she had a chance against him, a man who had just killed her father with no trouble at all? He watched as the girl, bones weak with grief, stumbled down the steps to hold her father’s ruined face in her hands. She sobbed openly. His eyes widened, however, when he saw her glimpse the flash drive and, in an attempt to take a token of her father, in order to hold close the last thing that he had touched while he had still lived, slipped the flash drive loaded with information into her pocket.

He strode forward, and the girl seemed not to notice.

“Give me the flash drive,” He demanded, his voice cold and hard. He hovered over her, deciding that she, like her father, had to die as well. Slowly, silently, he eased a knife out of its sheath.

“I’m going to ask you one more time. I need that flash drive. Either you will give it to me in exchange for your life, or you will pay for it with your life. Now, give me that flash drive! NOW!” He snarled, anger flashing in his eyes. He was the hero here! He was saving the world from the corrupt system that had allowed his daughter to die because of money! He was going to save them all! Why couldn’t this stupid, idiot girl see that? He was the patriots of the Revolutionary war, he was George Washington, rebelling against a corrupt system. Why couldn’t she just give him the flash drive?!

Inside of her head, the raven-haired girl was thinking very quickly. Her father, her wonderful, loving father had died for the small, smooth piece of metal in her pocket. Her father, her wonderful, loving father, was dead. He was dead. Gone. As she stared into her father’s unseeing eyes, her anger resurfaced, and she didn’t have any control over her actions anymore. Her anger took the reins and let itself be known.

All of a sudden, the girl stood up and whirled around with a snarl, her hair arcing around her in a black blur, her eyes sharp as knives, her face twisted into a vengeful glare as she shoved the heel of her palm into the partner’s nose, breaking the bone and killing him. His body fell to the ground limply, a pool of blood already gathering around his head, his eyes open wide and vacant to the heavens. As the saying went, an eye for an eye, a man for a man, a life for a life. She stumbled into the house and fainted onto her bed in grief.

When the news that his partner had been killed by the girl reached him, the man bent over even more with grief and anger. How dare she?! First his mother, then his partner… His heart froze solid, his eyes saw red, and he demanded, “Find her! Make her pay for what she has stolen from us; destroy her.”

So here the girl was, only hours after she had killed for the first time in her life, just barely escaping her burning house, still mourning the loss of her father.

She ran through the woods, crying, branches tearing at her face, not caring where she ended up, she just needed to escape, to run away, to run as far as possible from the horrible house that was witness to two murders that took place seconds away from each other. Murders. She had murdered. She was a killer. She was crumbling from the inside, sinking into the void that called to her, the void in which her father had fallen, the void that meant freedom, blissful escape. Further and further into the woods she ran, tears streaking her face, cutting pale tracks through her soiled face that was covered with dirt and traces of blood. She tripped over a knotted root, falling to the ground with a cry, biting her lip on her way down. She caught herself on her elbows, her chest heaving, her eyes sprinkling the ground with tears, blood from her cut lip mingling with her salty display of sadness in the soil. Everything hurt. Her eyes hurt from crying, from lack of sleep, from the sadness that pushed at them from deep inside of her. Her arms hurt, jarred from her fall, and her right hand had a nasty bruise on it where she had struck the life out of the man who had killed her father. Her heart hurt the most, though, and every beat of it, every profound strum that sounded in her ears, painfully reminded her of the hearts that were not beating at that moment, of the heart of her father who she had left in the street, bleeding out, a shell of the wonderful, brave man that once was. Then there was the man she had killed, his blood that stained her hands, the look of shock and terror that had flitted over his face in his last few seconds before death. Self hate soon replaced all emotion, and with disgust she began scrubbing at her hands, her face, her chest, tearing at her cloths, trying to rid herself of the stench of death, of the gore and dirt that stained her very soul. For the second time that night, she collapsed, hopeless, ready for death.  

Luckily, death was not yet ready for her.

She woke up hours later in a forest of wonder. What had seemed like clawing hands that pulled at her face and hair and soul now appeared to be graceful branches surrounded by a halo of green light from the sunlight filtering through the canopy above. Slowly, she rose to her feet and began to walk deeper into the enchanted woods, numb with shock and grief that she had pushed to the back of her mind. The ferns that tickled the tips of her fingers as she walked felt like satin. The leaves above created a dappled pattern on the floor of the forest. She stared around her in awe. She turned around to see the havoc she had created the night before in her hurried escape from her burning house. Broken branches, upturned dirt, and crushed ferns created a ragged path back to her house. She could see it in the distance, but it was not a house anymore. Her whole neighborhood was nothing other than a pile of ashes. The clouds above were gray and black, thick with ash and smoke from the fire the night before. Her life, as she knew it, had ended. At the same time, however, it felt as though it had just begun. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the small flash drive, so small, yet of such great importance. The light glinted off of it’s metal surface, painting rainbows over her face.

As she looked up once more and gazed on the pile of ashes that used to be her town, she felt strings pulling at her, towards her father, towards her bed where she had drowned her sorrows and problems. Sharp, harsh, unfair reality reminded her that there was no town to go back to, no father still alive to give her advice and to wipe away her tears. Tears were falling down her face, and she only just noticed. But the tears weren’t for her village, weren’t for her house, weren’t for her father, weren’t for her dead brother, lost in the army, weren’t for her dead mother, lost to a mysterious illness. Her tears were for herself, welling up from the inside of her chest in self-pity. She was ashamed of it, but it was true. She was alone in life, she had no family left. Her tears were for her future, an orphan, always on the run from the hellhounds of war that snapped at her feet, alone. She clasped the flash drive tightly in her hand, the metal corners cutting into her skin. Yes, she was alone, but she would be strong. She had to be.