I’ve grown to hate the sound of machinery in the Hollow.
It does not bode well.
With the memory of the tank still fresh, I listened to the rumbling of a diesel engine with some concern. When I discovered the sound was remaining in one place, I ventured forth, my BAR ready.
As the engine rattled and clanked, while noxious fumes settled over the forest, I discovered I was walking through snow, though there had been nothing of the sort when I broke camp.
Men called out to one another in a language with which I was unfamiliar. Their tones were amiable, and the words were punctuated by a burst of genial laughter on occasion.
For a short time, I held onto the thin hope that perhaps I might not need to kill whoever I met in this Godforsaken place.
It was vanity to entertain such thoughts.
I reached a clearing and saw a piece of forestry equipment set atop a pair of rough-cut runners. Cables ran and hummed, and finally, as I watched, they went taut. I followed the lines with my eyes and saw they were connected to large hooks, buried into the flesh of a giant.
They had killed him, though I know not how.
He was stripped down, though, and a platoon of butchers was walking around him, marking off sections with blue chalk as the winches pulled the dead giant out of the hole he had tried to dig for himself. The wind shifted, and I heard blades being sharpened. With the wind came the smell of fire, and I knew what would occur.
They would butcher him. They would render his fat and break his bones to scrape out the marrow. This creature would go to feed some soldiers, who, in turn, would go on to fight, and thus demand that the butchers find another giant to slay.
Whether this giant was good or evil, whether he did or did not do something to warrant such an end to his existence, I neither knew nor did I care.
There are only so many abominations in the Hollow that I can accept.
This was unacceptable.
I brought the BAR up to my shoulder and began to fire.
None of the butchers made it out alive, and I made it a point to spoil the meat.
#horror #monsters #supernatural #death
