Reflect

Reflect

    The sway of trees in the wind reminds me of what happened. It's not the only thing, but it is the strangest. It's because of a hallucination I had, half dead, while it all went down. The world was being flooded by darkness, and I was fool enough to try to fight it.
    It was in the early days, well, the early days after what remained of humanity figured out what was going on. Remnants of a few militaries - those that had only partially compromised command structures, or went rogue - worked together to try and fight back. I joined the fight, and was assigned guard duty on a base outside of Melbourne.
    I've been told that Australia was the worst. It all began here, so it's not really surprising. The 'military' was a couple of rogue units from the Australian army, and some U.S. forces that had been stationed in Australia early on to contain some 'riots'. They mostly ran operations to find and rescue civilians from towns, as well as recon for the planned nuclear targets.
    I was one of the few who escaped from Melbourne when what was going on was discovered and spread widely. Most who were still human were caught, caged up. We know now that they abandoned the cities, and hauled 'em out to the country to farm and breed; the monsters either went with them or travelled overseas.
    That's why things went fairly well, for a while. The organised groups of monsters were all setting up their bases, and ignoring the smaller towns in areas poor for agriculture. So we only ran into a few of them, small groups that were scouts or that had split off the larger groups. A couple of towns were bad news, but mostly the military rolled into a town, killed a couple of nasties, and brought everyone back to safety.
    One day, all three groups went out and didn't come back. We kept radio silence (in fact, we avoided all communication to keep ourselves beneath the notice of larger groups), so we didn't know what had happened. In fact, I still don't know what happened. They just didn't come back one day.
    That night, we were attacked. About four hundred of the brute vampires hit the camp, coming at us from all directions. We didn't stand a chance - there were maybe sixty of us armed, acting as guards while the military were out and about, and few walking wounded. The civilians - about two thousand people - put up a good fight, but we had no real chance.
    I was injured by friendly fire, which luckily also got the brute about to tear me to pieces. I crawled off into the dark, fell down a hole, and passed out. I was woken by the midday sun, which shone down into the hole. I couldn't move, I could barely see... I could barely feel anything. After a little, I found I could move a tiny, tiny bit, and slowly, so slowly, I put bandages over my wounds. I decided to try to move after that was done, but the pain (I think from cracking all the clotting) knocked me out.
    I spent two days in that hole; my canteen helped me make it through, but I was delirious from the blood loss. I had nightmares - terrible nightmares - of what had happened, and what might have happened after I fled; but I knew I couldn't scream in case they were still nearby.
    And then, there was the hallucinations. I don't remember them now; there were too many and they made no sense, but in one of them I saw a forest. The trees started to sway, at first a tiny bit, but then more, and more, and more, until they were being violently flung back and forth in the wind.
    This made me think, I wonder if this is a metaphor?, which made the hallucination change. The trees started to snap, and the snapped trees stood up, dark and rotten and terrible. They moved to the other trees, and started shaking them until they snapped. This went on until it wasn't the wind making the trees sway at all, it was the dead trees. The hallucination moved, and all of a sudden I was looking at other forests, around the first, dead trees streaming into them and repeating the horrible process.
    I woke up feeling cold, despite the warmth of the hole, and decided that I'd never wonder if a hallucination was a metaphor ever again. At least, not a metaphor for something horrible.
    After two days, I was found by one of the IPCR crews that had been investigating the site. Apparently, the entire camp was slated for integration about a week after the attack took place. That's something worth keeping in mind, by the way - we live in a dangerous world, never expect people to stay safe until you're ready to welcome them in.