The WInter Night
By: KingBritain
He'd never been outside, but he knew what lay there. Waiting at the heavy metal gates of the Lower Jewel, snarling through mangled, misshapen mouths, the Hackers congregated in the irradiated darkness, waiting for the gates to drop and the city to be open.
It was Winter. It was their time to feast.
Marcus slapped his hand against the boards on his windows and drew away satisfied that they'd hold. Turning back, he saw his wife sitting, blinking away tears, absently loading a shotgun with hands that had been baking only yesterday, and would bake again tomorrow, after the Hackers had had their fill – and if they survived.
'Twenty-eight times,' Marcus said to her. 'We've held them off twenty-eight times. Don't be scared.'
Nadine placed the shotgun on her lap. 'I'm not scared. I'm just sad for everybody else.'
The lamps outside – which he could see by the thin slants of light coming in around the edges of the boards – dimmed to a low glow and then went off completely. Darkness reigned supreme; the absence of light – theirkind of light. The Hackers were nearly blind, and hunted best in the dark.
'It's starting,' Marcus breathed. He slapped the boards again, barely feeling them move. He'd nailed them against the window hard, had spent the last week preparing every little detail about their defence. It wasn't about hiding behind the strongest wall, or having the biggest gun – staying alive was about making yourself more trouble than you were worth. After twenty-eight Winter Nights, Marcus knew what to do. Keep quiet, keep still, keep breathing; there wasn't really more you could do. Hope was their greatest weapon.
'I love you,' Nadine said.
'I love you, too.'
A heavy clunk thudded through the city. A metallic clicking sound, like a rusted chain on a bicycle, followed instantly after. The gates were opening. The Lower Jewel, and all of its citizens, were being sacrificed. Marcus knew that up in the Upper Jewel, rich snobs with fat stinking children and televisions bigger than his bed were watching, knowing that they'd be safe for another year because those in the Lower Jewel had paid for their safety in blood.
'Twenty-eight years,' Marcus said. 'Twenty-eight–'
Something thudded on the window. Marcus dropped down. Nadine grabbed the shotgun, nearly dropping it. They exchanged a look, fear and love and horrid anticipation all mixing together in one, terrible concoction. The Hackers were in the city. They were sniffing out food. The hunt had begun.
Twenty-eight years, he thought. He replayed images of a new rising sun in his head, a sun that banished all the bad in the world away. He'd seen that beautiful light twenty-eight times, had survived to see it twenty-eight times.
And I'll see it again.
The Hackers were animals in the guise of humans – twisted, snarling humans with red eyes that glowered in the dark that seemed to flood around them. Their hunger was insatiable, and no manner of defences could ever stop them once that burning hunger reached its apex. The only choice was sacrifice – to fill their blood lust enough that, for another year at least, the Hackers would slope off and leave the Upper and Lower Jewel alone.
But the Upper controlled the gates and lights of the entire city – a city of two classes in brutal honesty – and with each passing year, the Winter Nights fell on the weakest of shoulders, the Lower Jewel.
Bastards. Marcus scratched his head hard. Bastards. Living off our blood. Our deaths.
The thing outside bulled into the window, wooden boards creaking. Dust coughed out from the gaps. Fevered sounds of sniffing and a wet tongue rolling around in a warped, blackened mouth radiated through the window like a heavy, acrid smell. Marcus could feel the presence of the Hacker, could almost see it. A decrepit version of a man, burnt and mangled by the thick streams of radiation running through his mutant blood. He saw a huge, slobbering mouth, dark red eyes surrounded by grey skin full of weeping sores, a crude claw that had once been a hand knocking against the boarded up window.
And then there was nothing. No sound. No presence. Not even a stench.
'Do you think it's–'
A heavy black figure burst through the window, the essence of night flooding in after it. A wretched screaming, so loud and dreadful that it made his ears weep with blood, came out of the creature's huge grinning mouth. Then it turned its head this way and that, scrambling through the shadows for something, for its prey, for its food.
'Oh, Jesus, no–'
And then it was on her. Marcus saw the heaving black shadow mount his wife, saw it rip and tear and bite and yank and feast. He heard blood pumping out of her throat, the mangled cries for help coming out of the hole in her neck and not her mouth. He saw her hands search for his own, like a drowning figure that only seeks to be pulled out of the crashing waters.
'Marcus? Marcus–'
He sat up and opened his eyes. Sweat poured down his back, pooling around his sheets, sticking them to his skin like the blood of his dead wife had ten wretched years ago. Even after all that time, the pain never abated. When he woke from that dream – a dream that felt so real he fancied he was probably stepping back in time – Marcus found himself weeping, and he knew he wouldn't stop till that new rising sun showcased itself to the world.
He wiped his eyes and glanced at the clock. It was four in the morning. Work in two hours. Pushing a mop around the building, cleaning up after the rich bastards that had put him through the horrible night and killed his wife. It was a job fit for a rat, but he'd needed it to get to where he was – his realwork. The Winter Night was coming around again, and this time Marcus was going to unleash the Hackers on the Upper Jewel. He was going to make those bastards pay.
It had been hard getting into the Upper Jewel. People from the slums spent years working up to the most trivial of jobs in the Upper Jewel, as it had been for Marcus, ever since he swore revenge on the twisted regime that butchered thousands of people each year. It had taken him ten years of working seven day weeks, eleven hours a day, for whatever wage was thrown his way. He'd licked the arse of every higher upper he'd ever come across – all to get into the Upper Jewel, so he'd be able to bring justice to those in charge.
And now he had the means in which to do it. He worked in the Central Building – the heart of the Upper Jewel. A gleaming tower of glass and steel, so bright in the morning that most people had to wear shades to look at it. Marcus had never seen anything like it. Back in the Lower Jewel, the grandest building had been an abandoned school, some few hundred years old, that had escaped the bombs.
Seeing such a grand building had only fuelled Marcus' rage further. It wasn't fair that people in the Lower were starving whilst those in the Upper were building needlessly tall building, or wasting water in swimming pools, or fruits in bowls that would inevitably would never be eaten. It wasn't fair that every year his people had to fight and die and bury their loved ones so that those in the Upper would be safe. It was time that they understood the true meaning of life – terrible things happen to everyone. It was only fair that it happened to them.
Working in the Central Building meant he was close to the city's control system. Of course, he wasn't allowed any where near it, and would be executed on the spot for ever even looking at it. But Marcus had been there hundreds of times before – slipping in and out every other night, dreaming about pulling the lever that dragged the Upper Jewel's gates wide open. He pictured himself flicking the gleaming switches that controlled the city's power – a switch they used to light the city so bright during the Winter Night that no Hacker could ever go near it. In his mind's eye he saw the explosive lights flicker off, heard the screams of the Jewel's inhabitants scour the night, saw the rambling army of Hackers swarm through the streets, tearing and eating and screeching. Those were the good dreams, in which he liked the Hackers.
Slipping into the control room on the Winter Night would be harder than usual, though. The gates and lights of the Lower Jewel were also controlled from that room, and so people would be there, controlling the switches that would lead to hundreds, maybe even thousands, of deaths.
But Marcus was prepared for that. He had a plan to get rid of them, and although he knew it would break his heart, he was prepared to go through with it. After all, what were a few more deaths on a night like the Winter Night?
He got ready for work, and for the next ten hours he pushed a wet mop around the building, cleaning up after rich slob after rich slob. By the time the sun began to fall, the muscles in his shoulders and back were screaming, and the fuel that fired his flames of hatred for those of the Upper Jewel flared.
Marcus looked down at his watch. Six o'clock. Down in the Lower Jewel, people would be readying themselves for a night of horror. Up in the Upper, they would be partying.
I'll kill them all. Every single one of them.
He threw his mop on the floor and started off in the direction of the control room, his heart thudding happily in his throat. A man in a blue silk shirt with black gelled hair came up to him, shouting that he couldn't just leave the mop lying there, that he'd send Marcus back down to the slums if he didn't lick the dirt off his black leather boots clean.
Marcus wrapped his calloused hands around the man's throat and squeezed till his eyes bulged and his tongue stopped flapping.
He didn't even bother hiding the body. By the time somebody found him, Marcus would hopefully be dead, and the Hackers, with their deformed bodies and screeching laughter, would already be sweeping through the city.
The control room wasn't far. He'd made sure to hang around on this particular floor, knowing where he'd need to be by this time of day. As he drew closer to the room, more and more people began to emerge around him, so much so that they choked the hallways, leaving him no possible way through. Marcus growled, feeling the heavy weight of the gun he'd robbed beneath his overalls call out to him. He could rip it out, kill them all, be satisfied that at least some Upper blood had been spilled.
He almost did it, his fingers twitching at the zip in which the handgun was concealed. But hatred is a powerful motivator, and Marcus knew he'd never be satisfied, not until the people of the Upper understood true desolation. He lowered his head and barged through the swathes of people, rats who'd come along to watch the switch controllers enter the concealed room that would keep them safe for yet another year. To the Uppers these people were heroes. Once again he felt rage burning inside him, boiling in his blood.
Marcus shouldered through and came out at the other side. In front of him, a line of people were standing before a large steel door, the door to the control room. The masses of people behind him protested as Marcus stepped forward, calling out that a sewer rat like him couldn't witness something as great as this, that a mangy dog from the slums ought to be cleaning up some sick somewhere, that he should be thankful he isn't dying with his brothers and sisters down in the Lower.
But his brothers and sisters were already dead, and so was Nadine. Marcus stood in front of the gawking mass of people – the door and the switch controllers behind him – and pulled the gun out from his overalls.
The screaming was music to his ears. Marcus danced and span and howled laughter as they fled, trampling over each other, yanking past their loved ones, showing their true colours as forces much worse than even the Hackers.
There was little security. The people of the Upper Jewel had grown fat and stale from their safety. Marcus identified the people in the crowd with weapons and dispatched them easily. Blood exploded over the white walls, brain matter and bits of skull colouring the crimson.
The switch controllers were cowering behind him. Marcus span on his heels and barked at them to open the door. Adrenaline was pouring through his body. Never had he felt so alive, so happy. For ten years he had waited for this moment, to avenge his beautiful wife.
The steel door opened. Marcus stepped through, ushering the switch controllers in. They squealed and begged for their lives, and Marcus was not surprised when they did as he bid, pulling the gates of the Upper open and the gates of the Lower closed. They didn't even think about what they were doing, how they were slaughtering their own families to save their own pathetic lives. Whatever sympathy Marcus had of them vanished.
'Keep the gates down there closed.' Marcus waved his gun at the man who seemed to be in charge. 'I don't want one Hacker in the Lower. You hear? If just one gets in there, I'm going to kill you all? Do you understand?'
The man in charge was drenched in sweat. Tears ran down his skullish face. 'Oh, God, yes, I understand!'
Marcus orchestrated the destruction of the Upper Jewel, and it was beautiful. He ordered for the blinding lights to be switched off, for the lights in the Lower to be turned up completely. The Hackers would be waiting outside the Lower gates, but they were magnetised to darkness, and eventually they would gravitate towards the Upper Jewel, where no light would ever be seen again, if Marcus had his way.
'You can't do this,' one man screamed. He was monitoring the pressure off the Upper gate's hydraulics , making sure they kept to the proper level as the heaving steel slabs pulled apart. Despite his desperate protests that this was wrong, that Marcus would killing innocent children, the man kept on doing what he was doing.
The low metallic rumbling that had sounded every year – signalling the opening of the gates and the coming of the Hackers – had seemed the most hellish sound that Marcus thought he'd ever hear. But hearing it then, as the room began to shake and the people of the Upper Jewel, realising their fate, began to scream, Marcus thought that he'd never hear a sound so sweet again.
'Cameras.' Marcus span over to a weedy man at a group of monitors. 'Do you have cameras? On the streets?'
'Oh, God. Yes. We do.' The weedy man gulped hard and tried to use his shaking hands. Sweat turned his pink shirt blood red. 'We do. Why?'
Marcus pushed the gun into his back. 'It doesn't matter why. Just bring them up on the screens. I want to watch.'
'You're mad.' The weedy man wept and worked. 'Jesus, God, you're mad.'
Green images – night vision – blinked on over the monitors. Empty streets. People huddled in houses. A screaming woman as she ran the length of a main square that should have housed thousands of bystanders.
And then they came. Like a plague of locusts, the Hackers flooded across the streets. In their dark, maligned eyes he saw hunger and greed, something that would have terrified him years ago but now filled his heart with joy. Like the army of the Devil himself, the Hackers swept through the city in their vast, seemingly innumerable quantity, screeching and crying for flesh and blood and death.
Marcus understood that the images on the screens were from random cameras, but he liked to think that a higher power – God, maybe – placed the image of the family huddled together in the dark there especially for him. It was how he had dreamed it. Stinking fat children that had never known the dark, clasping desperately to the parents that had turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Lower Jewel. Their eyes trembling, their hitched breathes shuddering with every Hacker howl that screeched outside.
And then the best bit of all – the door they had never had to border up, or hide behind, smashing open, darkness and hell spilling in, choking the life out of the room as twisted creatures that had once been men laid waste to whatever they found. Marcus laughed and wept and would have watched it all if a splatter of blood hadn't covered the camera.
The weedy man was vomiting. Marcus looked down at him, devoid of sympathy, thinking that still this man was lucky, that despite everything, he hadn't experienced one tenth the terror that Marcus had.
Marcus placed the barrel of his hand gun against the back of the man's bobbing head and squeezed the trigger. Pulped brains flopped out of his shattered skull onto the floor like a dead jellyfish.
Then he placed it against his own temple, and knowing that his work was finally done, that the people of the Upper had finally experienced desperation as he, his wife, and every poor soul in the Lower Jewel had, Marcus pulled the trigger and finally ended his life.