Night of The Dead- Chapter 13: The Persistence for Survival

The rain was already subsiding, water still trickling down from above. Far to the east of here, a gutter from a roof was still gushing the night's load down into another bigger drain. Save that, silence was all around. We were gearing up for a stream attack of creeps. I still had no idea what we were up against, but Pyut made sure we would not hold back on anything that moves. Kheez was already far on the western junction, heating up his Arclite. The rest of us were grouped within the cross junction. Warm light from the four lamp posts cast a sombre ambience around us.
"Remember what I said about the fatty monsters. Follow me up when I move, okay."
Nods ran across the place.
" Night. I need you to injure the fatty enough before it reaches us." No reply came. "Night Cat."
" Give him some time, Pyut," I finally decided I had to defend my team member a little.
" He'll come around soon enough."

So many years have passed, and the only thing that stood between life and death was his mission. Chris has had the darkest of lives, he thought. There was not one person living today that could retell a story worse than his own. The happiness he felt was the memories he had to keep sealed dearly in his head, and he occasionally used them to keep him going on. Everyone else in the world took for granted their families. Everyone else in the world took for granted what had been given to them. He barely had anything in his life. Most of the times, he would blame god for being unfair to him and his family. He would tell people that what they see only in television, of kids living under bridges and in parks, feeding off scrap food left to rot behind restaurants, was his life.

The wave of monsters begun reaching the Cross junction they were stationed at. Those monsters ranged from mutated dogs to zombified people. The zombified people were not much of a threat to the team as compared to the faster and more agile dogs, but they needed a considerably high amount of bullets to take down. That itself was already starting to worry the team. Night Cat strode lazily towards the entrance of a building nearby. He needed to be in a silent and lonely place to think, I thought. None of us said anything. Pyut was about to cry out orders, but refrained once he got my objection.

‘Tomorrow would be a clear day for us,’ was what his brother would often tell him. It made him happy for a while. It gave him the confidence to face the perils laid before him and his brother, for a while. Life is pointless, he thought. People would wake up everyday, struggle at work all day, so that they could earn enough money not to die from starvation, disease and cold. They do all these things so that they could wake up the next morning to go to work. It is a cycle. People work to live to work to live to work. And what happens in the end? They would either die from unnatural causes, or of old age. It’s pointless to fight for survival when the end of the road would inevitably be death.

"This is not working for us. We're not getting a good distance from the monsters," Pyut conplained.
"What do you mean by that?" Kheez turned to him, puzzled. As far as we all could see, the monsters couldn't even get anywhere close to the half-mile radius around us. I was confused as well, and turned to him for answers.
"It may seem fine now. But when we're up against the fatty, we'll need to constantly shift our firepower to and from the fatty and the others. Without a Marksman, it'll be impossible to take the fatty down without causing a mess. Messes would be something we wanna avoid, as they lead to deaths."
Suddenly, it seemed all clear to me what Pyut was explaining. We need to allow more time for ourselves to concentrate our firepower on the fatty. And with the current clearance progress, we're not getting anywhere. We needed Night Cat now. I radioed him, but no reply came.

‘The importance of life is to live it happy.’ Happy? What is happiness? It is merely a self generated feeling from within a person’s mind, be it from himself or his surroundings.
‘People would not know the true meaning of happiness until he has gone through hardship.’ ‘I still don’t know the true meaning of happiness,’ Chris thought. What is happiness if you don’t know what it feels like? How does one derive happiness from a dead father, a prostituting sister, a financially crippled mother, and an aunt and a grandmother who couldn’t care less? How does one derive happiness from the surroundings filled with kids far better off than him and his brother, simply because they chose to be in another woman’s womb?
His sister got herself married to a rich person from the UK. They were all very happy for her. ‘We’re old enough to make a change in our lives now. This, my brother, is the time we know the true meaning of happiness,’ his brother looked over the heads of people seated in front of them in the church. His sister was beautiful in the white gown. To Chris’ left, his mother sobbing from joy. 'We can work for our future,’ his mother said, eyes still filled with happiness. Chris smiled. He could already see light at the end of the tunnel he was stuck in his whole life. It was going to be a new beginning for his family, he thought.

"What on Earth is wrong with that fella? Sure, his brother's dead. That doesn't constitute to him acting so emotional!" Clearly, Pyut did not know Night Cat and his brother very well. It wasn't surprising for Pyut to complain. Anyone would've said what Pyut said just now. We were not mere civilians, to be despairing so long about something that has already happened. We were already very good at keeping our job and our private problems apart from each other. Night Cat's current condition seemed pretty bad, and this would also spell bad news for us all.

The happiness was short-lived. They died in a plane crash. God must have hated his family, he thought. All these years, his mother and sister struggled to survive so many probabilities of death, and god had to send them on a one way trip to nowhere. So much for ‘working for our own future’. If we had to die, we had to die. There’s no stopping what destiny god laid down for us. What is the point in living? All these feelings of happiness, fulfillment, love. They’re meaningless when we’re dead. The beauty of the world would be nothing if you had no one to enjoy them with. Chris never saw anything beautiful in the world. Just a dark and colorless world, ruled by a tyrant, pointing down from the skies, deciding who would live and who would die, who would be rich and who would not.

"Night Cat!" I radioed. "Snap out of this, man. We need you now. We can't take the fatty down without you!" Static was the reply. Night Cat was already sitting at the edge of the tiled floor, with his upper half against the wall. There was total darkness, save the light emanating from the outside world through a series of windows across from him. The yellow light would then flash all the time, the sources came from gunfire downstairs. He moved his eyes away from the window, and went into a stooping position.
"There's nothing in the world for me now. All is lost, and I am very tired of fighting a losing battle," he thought to himself. He tried to allow a scream of frustration, but in the end couldn't manage it.

‘Don’t give up on me, Chris. Don’t give up on the world.’
‘Brother. I have nothing left. I’ve lost everything I have ever loved and tried to protect. I don’t belong in this world anymore.’
‘You have your friends. You have to protect them.’
‘They’d be fine without me. What more can I help with, anyway?’
They would not be alright. They would all die from the monsters that killed his brother. That’s good. No one needs to live in this stupid world, anyway. There’s absolutely no purpose in living at all. Why fight?
Because Crucist needs to avenge his family. Because Kheez have a woman to return to. Because Ixate believes in the future of peace for the world. And because Pyut promised Sam a proper funeral. All these cannot be done without him protecting them from these monsters.

The sound of thumping footsteps became more prominent now, sending rattles through the asphalt ground. Water puddles vibrated to the ever growing danger that was already closing in on the team. One by one, the team ran out of ammunition. The reload time for Pyut and Crucist was immediate, and Kheez reported that his fuel could last for another couple of hours. My gun's reload time would take almost one and a half minute, fastest.
"I'm reloading now!" I needed to report before making the clip change, to avoid mismanagement of the shooting consistancy. We needed to find a way to gain more radial distance from the oncoming creeps.
"Could you launch the cluster grenades onto one area to losen their attacks out?" Kheez asked Pyut.
"It'll be a waste. The creeps are not really concentrated now. I could throw 10 grenades, but only 3 or 4 would die. Hardly worth my time."
He had a point. The distance one creep had from another was too far apart, and deploying the cluster would not even cause a slight improvement. We were all still figuring out various ways to help gain more distance between us and the monsters, when Pyut, standing further south from us, radioed. "I see it."
There it was. The layers of fog begun to unfold like a million translucent curtains drawing up on the surprise attack. It was big. At least 2 storeys high. As the figure of the fatty grew ever clearer, I seemed to notice something rather weird about it. It was as if the fatty was..
"Is he stitched together or something?" Kheez asked. Exactly what I thought. Both his arms were non proportionate to each other, and his torso seemed uneven. As the fatty moved closer to us, I realised that there were in fact stitches running all over his body.
"What on Earth is this crap?!" Kheez was alarmed to see what I saw. I totally agreed, althought there was not much time for us to complain over the fatty's hideous outlook.
"Remember what I said. Run up north when I do. We might need to modify our movements a little, because the explosives I planted just now would not cut it for this fella." Replies of affirmation ran across the area.
Just to test out the fatty's resistance towards our bullets, I threw a few shells towards it. It felt as if the fatty was being attacked by mosquitoes! We clearly needed Night Cat's help now.
As the fatty inched closer towards us, I can't help but noticed the head area of the fatty occasionally spitting out chunks of blood. Then, I could hear a series of loud bangs following silence. It came from a building behind me. Pyut sensed the same, and looked around to find the source of the incident. It was the Black Arrow.