Little Soldier

The boy and his father were walking along a ridge through the woods. Today, they had enough food. All they were doing was looking for a new shelter. They were always on the move. For the two of them, there was only finding food and a new place to hide.

They didn’t talk when they walked. They didn’t want to be heard. Silent anxiety had a way of making your own blunders—snapped branches, dried leaves, slips on bark—so much more magnified. Silence had a way of teaching you far faster than words did.

Snap.

They stopped.

Snap.

Lowered their bodies down.

It came from below them, near the base of the ridge.

The father pointed at the boy’s head. The boy nodded. He pulled out a helmet from his backpack and put it on. It completely covered his eyes, mouth and ears. He pressed the button on the side. The inner screen lit up.

They slowly crept forward, nearly on their hands and knees, until they were crouching behind some bushes. The father readied his rifle.

Snap again, followed by more solid sounds of footsteps.

The boy and his father waited and watched.

Then, down below, through the hazy inner screen of the helmet, the boy saw them. Three of them. The monsters.

Horns. Gnarled hair covering their bodies. Cloven hooves. Long, gnashing teeth. Terribly sharp talons carrying their spears and tridents. Burning eyes.

The monsters were walking toward the father and boy, perpendicular to the ridge. They were offset to the right by several meters, but nevertheless in a trajectory that would bring them dangerously near to the two. However, as they neared the base of the ridge, they slowed to a stop, looked around, then turned to the right and continued walking along the ridge—opposite the direction the boy and father were walking.

The two waited. Waited. Waited…. Waited…

Until they could no longer hear any footsteps…

And then the father slowly… slowly… slowly stood up… inches at a time…

Then fully stood up. Watched.

Finally turned to the boy and motioned for him to get up.

The boy nodded, powering down the helmet and taking it off. The two kept walking.

-

The two sat around a pile of coals where they roasted a rabbit they’d killed two days ago. It was autumn, which meant it was always wet and cold and gray in this region, but it also meant food didn’t spoil as quickly.

While they were waiting for the meat to cook, the boy whispered a question to his father. “Why don’t we see as many humans anymore?”

The father thought for a moment, then whispered back.

” Maybe there aren’t many humans left.”

“Are we the last ones?”

“I hope not.”

The boy looked away, thinking for a moment. Finally, he whispered, “Why don’t we kill more of the monsters? Wouldn’t that save more humans too?”

“We don’t kill unless we have to. Sometimes we have to.”

“But, if we—”

“We don’t kill unless we have to.”

-

The next day, they’d found a small town. It was abandoned, like nearly every place nowadays, but there’d always been some scraps of something to eat during this whole ordeal.

Here, however, they found very little.

The first gas station had nothing. In a fast-food restaurant, they managed to find a handful of mustard packets. In the town’s only grocery store, they found a few cans of spinach, an expired bottle of ketchup and a bag of licorice that had been torn open and its contents half-eaten.

From there, they made they way to a nearby pharmacy and general store. Here, there were quite a few more things left behind, but that was it. Just things. No food. And no medicine of any kind.

While the boy was going through the last few aisles in the far end of the store, his father suddenly rushed back to him from the front of the store, directed him behind the counter of the pharmacy, and, after ducking down out of sight, shushed him and signaled to put on the helmet.

The boy did so, pulling it over his face and ears, then pressed the button to turn it on. Almost immediately after he did, the boy heard the front door open. His father crawled next to the pharmacy door, crouched down and readied his rifle.

The boy looked through a hole beneath the counter and down the aisles. It took a few moments, but then he saw them. Four of them. Two large, hunched over, almost giant, rat-like monsters, and two smaller, almost dog-like monsters, though all of them still stood upright on their hindlegs.

All four were down one aisle for a few moments, and then they dispersed. The boy couldn’t see where any of them went, but he could hear them bumping around through the aisles and rummaging through bags and piles.

Then, one of the big rat creatures came to the pharmacy door. It opened the door, stepped in, and the boy’s father immediately raised the rifle up to the monster’s chest.

“Walk away,” the father whispered without a moment’s hesitation. “Walk away.”

The monster stopped in its tracks the moment the gun was raised.

“Walk away,” the boy’s father said again. “Don’t say a word. Get out.”

It looked from the father to his son for a moment, then stepped back.

Walked away.

Within minutes, it and the other monsters left the pharmacy. The boy and his father were left alone. They waited nearly half an hour before they crept back out into the aisles of the store, then out to the glass doors at the front, where they peered out into the world until it seemed the monsters were gone for good.

After this, they took what little they’d found and left the town, searching for someplace to hide before night fell.

-

The boy sat alone at their camp, waiting for his father to come back. Times like these were the worst. Sitting alone lying under a pile of moss. Waiting for the monsters to come while his father was away. His father didn’t do this very often, usually only when they were desperate. Today’s desperation was that they hadn’t found food in five days, and they ran out of what little they had two days ago. Sometimes, on days like these, the boy’s father would be gone all day.

Only once did the boy see a monster while his father was away. It rummaged through their belongings, though most of the important things were hidden several meters away, and then it left as quickly as it came. Still, the encounter was enough to terrify the child.

Today, the boy’s father was not gone so long. Only an hour or so. However, upon return, the boy’s father came back with one of the strangest requests he’d ever asked the boy.

“About a mile away from here, there’s a… there’s an encampment. It used to be an encampment for humans. However, monsters killed the humans there and now they’re using all their supplies. We need those supplies, so… I’m going to go in there. I’m going to kill the monsters. I’m going to take those supplies back for us. Okay?”

The boy stared at his father for a moment. Then nodded.

“I want you to go with me, but you’re going to wait outside the encampment.

The father reached into his coat. Pulled his pistol out. Handed it to the child.

The boy was bewildered. He accepted the gun, then looked up.

“There’s only one way in and one way out. There are five monsters. If any of them try to escape, you stop them. Understand?”

The boy nodded, shocked his father would ask something like this of him.

The father nodded back. “Good. I trust you, okay?”

The boy nodded again. “Okay.”

-

As they were going through the belongings of the humans who used to live here, the boy noticed something in one of the monster’s hands. A chain necklace with a heart-shaped locket. The boy knelt down and picked it up, avoiding touching the monster’s skin.

He opened the locket up, and inside were the pictures of two humans.

The boy turned back to his father, holding up the locket.

“Look what I found,” he called out.

His father turned and looked, then walked over and examined the locket.

“Why did the monster have it?”

“Monsters like stealing shiny things,” his father replied, then told him, “You should put that on one of those beds over there. Where the humans used to sleep.”

So, the boy set the necklace down there and did not disturb it, though he was still confused.

-

The boy and father found a rather large building to stay in a few days later, and they stayed here longer than they did most places. A week in, and they still hadn’t moved out.

“It’s secluded, it’s a few miles from a town, and it’s got enough rooms we can hide in if someone comes here.”

“Or something,” the boy corrected.

“Right, ‘or something,’” the father said, smiling at him.

-

The two were sleeping in the basement of the building, which the father had decided was the safest place for them to hide, when the two snapped awake.

There were sounds of footsteps from up above. Heavy, thumping, scraping—and several of them at once. One pair of footsteps started approaching the staircase near where they slept.

Boy and father stood up, beginning to gather up their essentials and escape. The father made his son put on the protective helmet. Right after putting it on, the door to the basement opened.

“Go. Now.”

The boy whipped around, running across the basement to the back exit staircase, but, halfway across the basement, he heard a gunshot. He flinched, looking over his shoulder, just in time to hear another gunshot, watch the bodies of two monsters fall from the staircase into the basement. However, as he was looking over his shoulder, the boy tripped and fell.

His head, encased in the helmet, hit the ground first. Everything went black. The boy flailed around for a moment, hearing another gunshot, then sat upright, tried to turn the helmet back on, but it refused to light up again. Kept refusing.

Finally, the boy ripped the helmet off, just in time to see his father fall back off the stairs, blood exploding in the air.

The boy was silent for a moment, then he screamed and ran across the room to his father. The man was choking on his own blood, trying to breathe, trying to speak, but to no avail. Within a minute, the man was gone.

“Is he still down there?” someone asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What was that scream? It didn’t sound like a man’s scream.”

“Go look and see.”

Boy looked up the staircase, panicking. He’d never heard the monsters speak before. He didn’t know they spoke the same language. Still, he had to kill them.

He began wrestling the rifle off of his father’s body. Once he’d had it off, he turned back around to the stairs. As he did, though, he saw the two bodies that had fallen off the stairs.

They were humans. They were human bodies.

But… He had seen monsters fall off the stairs.

Footsteps. He looked up. There was another human standing at the top of the staircase.

“Oh my god,” the said, “is that… is that a child?”

The boy stared back up at them.

“Are you alright? Are you okay?”

Shock. Then a slow recognition.

The boy shouldered the rifle.