Day 64

The English translation map said this was Bashnya. Didn't know if it was considered a town or that was the name of the forest that surrounded the house. The maps in Chernarus were bullshit. No legend or anything.
I'd been hiking now for 17 hours and the hunting blind and little hut were a welcome site. Not to mention the well that the little house had.
This was the nearest settlement to what had been our camp.
Our camp.
Guess there was no more "our".
Canteen's running empty at this point. We had planned it like that, drink till you're satisfied then when it's all gone not too long till Bashnya. The well was one of those hand pump jobs you see in films depicting the old west. Go to fill the canteen and see my hand for the first time since the massacre.
Blood. It had become such a familiar site in the last... 2 months? Christ it seemed almost forever ago. Literally a lifetime ago. Somehow this was different. It was the blood of the living, of someone I had known just 17 hours before.
Fuck, I had never killed anyone before, or had I forgotten?
When you finally break down, you really break down.
In this world the weak have been dead for months, and weakness has a way of killing you.
I went to wash my hands in the cold flow but the world started to go grey. The hand moving under the flow seemed to blur as it moved, it left traces of itself as it moved across my vision. The sound of the water splashing on the ground started to echo and then grow faint. The world was spinning and grey.
I fell to my knees and put my head under the flow of water hoping that would help. The cold shock brought the color back but when I went to stand the sudden loss of blood to the brain was all it took to make me fall.
Laying there looking up at the stars I though to myself, "My God, there's so many. How have I never seen this before?"

"Yhmmph... dalmphhh. Phmmph blumphh du lumphh?"
"Dalfummm mnf der blamphh dumm."
"Is hmf dead?"
"No, he's still breathing, keep your gun on him."
Like breaking the surface of water I awoke, gasped suddenly inwards.
"Whoa there cowboy, take it easy. Don't wanna have to put you down."
A firm hand put itself on my shoulder and pushed me back into the dirt.
I looked around from faceless silhouette to faceless silhouette. Two of them standing over me. Panic. Breathing like I had just sprinted a mile.
"What's your name son?"
"Sum just, uhhh..."
"He's just one of those crazy locals pa..."
"Shut up Pascal."
As my vision adjusted to the broad daylight of high noon I saw their faces. An older one and a younger one, the younger had an old Moisin trained right between my eyes.
"Pascal?"
"So he does understand English!" Exclaimed the older.
"I, uh, I am English! No, I'm American! I mean I speak English. I just. Pascal?"
"Yeah, that's my name."
"I named him that hoping he'd be smart. The best laid plans right?" The elder chuckled.
Long tense silence.
"Don't just stand there Pascal help the poor sap up."
Pascal shoulders his rifle and offers me his hand. I accept. That familiar weight on my side is missing
"If you're looking for your gun," Says the Elder, "It's right here." He gestures to his hip.
"Can I-?"
"Come on. You know the answer to that."
Another long tense silence.
"So I'm your prisoner then?"
They both laugh
"Prisoner. We don't got time for that shit! You're our guest." Says the Elder
"Well thank you for your hospitality. Give me my gun and I'll be on my way."
The elder takes my 1911 from his hip, takes out the magazine, empties the rounds, puts back in the mag, and hands it over.
"Thank you." I say and move next to Pascal who is facing his father, "You forgot the one in the chamber." I put one in Pascal's head while grabbing the strap of his Moisin. While he falls the strap slips off his shoulder and I turn to the Elder before he has time to react. The butt of the Moisin comes around with extreme velocity and violence and fractures his skull. While he lies there I give him two more hits with the butt of the rifle till I see his brains. That oughta do I think.
As I search their bodies I realize something. My heart doesn't race, my palms don't sweat, but I puke anyways.
Weakness has a way of killing you.

Day 0

Puking on the beach.
That's how I came to. No moment of wakefulness, just pure unadulterated heaving to wake me up. My head hurt, no hangover ever felt like this. I put my hand to the back of my head and pull it away. Blood, a lot of blood.  I put my hand back.  Jesus Christ, was that my skull?
I woke up again what I assume to be several hours later. The sun was going down when before it had been pretty high in the sky. Where's my watch? Wait, where the hell am I? Last thing I remember I was hiking in the hills around base. 
Oh, shit, nope, that's not the last thing I remember, I wish to hell it was.
Look around frantically, get on my feet and look around more. Pretty terrified now. About 50 meters away there's a white Toyota Hilux with a gun mounted in the back, just like the insurgents use. But this one was smoking and wasn't entirely white anymore, there was much black soot covering it, and three what appeared to be badly burned department store mannequins strewn about it. Do mannequins smell like burning pork chops?
Dodged a bullet there. Maybe literally. 
The last thing I really remember is hiking in the hills around base and having a bag pulled down around my head and something being yelled at me in Russian or whatever God awful language they spoke in this shit hole country. Then I remember just bits and pieces. 
Getting dragged and beaten, cruel laughter, a woman screaming as she was getting raped, a man crying for his mother. Getting pissed on. Getting the bag ripped off my head and there being a bright ass light and a camera and more Russainesse being shouted. 
I knew I was fucked. 
The insurgents were in the habit of nabbing any foreigner they could lay their hands on and asking for ransom and then killing the poor bastards anyway in a very public, painful, and gruesome way. I saw a video of a guy literally getting every bone in his body broken till he died. One by one, using a hammer and chisel in places. It was a 45 minute video. They made all us contractors watch it.  Just like the birthing video in High School health class, you know, to scare you into submission. We were not to, under any circumstances, go outside of base alone or not in convoy. 
Shit gets boring fast when you're on a dinky little Forward Operating Base (FOB) seeing the same 77 people everyday with internet that's total bullshit.  You get a little cabin fever. Anyway, rationalizing. 
I got "bagged", as the Jarheads called it. At this point the US high command wasn't even trying to find the baggers or bagees. Bigger fish to fry putting down the insurgency in the main hubs. 
Chernarus, or "some motherfucking nothing backwater Soviet shit storm sandwich", as the Marines put it had oil, or some shit. I don't know, I'm a diesel mechanic not some Political Science major. We were here because they had something we wanted, the current government was friendly to us, and there were people who wanted to change that. 
So here I was, in some stupid country I'd never heard of, getting paid a lot of money to sit on my ass and occasionally fix a shot up Hummer, and masturbate when the internet was working.
Now? Well now I'd gotten my golden fucking ticket and some Marine pilot had laid the hate on some insurgent assholes and saved my life. Where was my welcome wagon? Did Chernarus even have beaches? I was not in Kansas anymore, that was for damn sure.
I stood up again and looked around. There was a ribbon of highway running along the shore for as long as I could see. It looked to be a main thoroughfare, but no traffic. Oddly enough there was a burnt out bus about a half mile to the left. We must have kicked some ass right here to stop all the traffic on this busy of a highway. God damn my head hurt.
No houses or buildings anywhere to be seen. Guess I'll check out the bus. Walking's difficult, I'm hungry and thirsty like you wouldn't believe. Thinking sucks, is that a sign of dehydration?  Or maybe the skull cracking I got? God it's like I'm drunk. How long was I beaten and drugged? Take about a dozen more steps and puke again. This is going to be a long half mile. 
The sun had set by the time I got to the bus. It too smelt like burnt pork chops. What the hell was going on? This looked like a bus full of civilians. The bus looked like it had been heading west. 
Well, that was as good a direction as any. I had no idea where I was, I needed to find water and food, there should be some kind of city or town along the water. Outside the bus there was a small day pack that was somehow untouched by flame. These people weren't going to be missing it. Empty, of course. I'll take it anyway.
You never know when you're going to need to carry something....

Day 63

Endless woods in every direction, nothing but silhouettes against a sheet of black. Like decrepit old men reaching into the sky as the dark clouds preceding the four horsemen come to swallow those unlucky enough to still be alive. I expect it any minute now...
 Death, it's never far away. He will come knocking, and I will receive him with open arms. Hell cannot be worse than this.
 I started running through these woods... Four hours ago? Five hours ago? So much running the last 63 days that time ceases to matter. Silence save the fall of my feet, the sound of my breathing and the sound of the rain. Alone now, only my sidearm for company now. Stop to take stock for the countless time now. I don't know what I expect to change, maybe a can of food will fall out of my backpack, stranger things have happened.
Three magazines for my 1911, matches, compass, map, one empty water bottle, one full water bottle, 3 cans of food, bino's, two road flares, and, God know's why, an empty whiskey bottle.
Then there was the engraved knife.
It had belonged to Loki, and no not the Norse god. He wasn't using it anymore so I grabbed it before I ran. Loki had been murdered by someone he trusted, by someone we had all trusted.
There were 8 of us by the end, surviving in the endless wastes, hanging on because what else can you do? Four days ago Johnson had accused Bonni of holding out on her food loot. She always raided alone, preferring stealth over rolling into town in force guns blazing. She always produced for the group and no one ever questioned her integrity. Hell, we would have never had the motorcycle had it not been for her. Johnson thought that Bonni looked too, "healthy", as he put it, the implication that she'd been gorging on her loot before bringing it to the group. It deteriorated quickly from there.
Johnson wanted to look in Bonni's tent, Loki stepped in and said no way. Johnson accused them of sleeping together and the guns came out...
I would like to say that I was a Saint in all of this. I would like to say that I managed to stay out of it and got lucky.
I was the first to shoot.
Johnson was always a divisive force in the group, never co-operating, always pushing people around. Your classic meathead dick. He ignored every consensus that didn't adhere to his idea of how the group should run, and that being with him as the monarch and us as his subjects.
He never saw it coming. Double tap to the left back of the head, just like I'd done a dozen times before in countless towns on countless raids. But this time was different, this time it was a living, breathing, free thinking individual, not some mindless mouth with legs.
It was just Bonni, Loki and I in camp at the time. The rest were looking for vehicle salvage at the old factory. Bonni and Loki never questioned my decision, and we hid the body in the forest. The story we told was that Johnson had gone running after a boar, half hour later we heard what sounded like Enfield shots and assumed he'd be back with the boar but that he never came back. The charade lasted 4 days.
 On the night of the fourth day, while I was on watch, I heard the sound of someone startled, and a muffled thud. I roused Chester from his tent, as he got up we heard another muffled and wet thurwhack come from the direction of Bonni's tent.
 Chester and I rushed to the sound to see Roger coming out of Bonni's tent, bloody hatchet in hand. Chester freaked. Roger said he'd found Johnson's body, 2 holes from a .45 in his head, not Enfield rounds. Said one of us had murdered Johnson and we couldn't be trusted. Roger and Johnson had been close, and apparently so had Chester and Bonni.
 Chester went at Roger, knife in hand. By this time the last 2 of the group had been roused and were coming towards the commotion. The three of us managed to separate Roger and Chester but Roger was already bleeding out. Bonni had been the camp medic, being an ER nurse for 10 years in her prior life. I searched Loki's tent while the other 2 searched Bonni's for med supplies, that' when I grabbed Loki's knife.
Roger explained to the others what he'd found and what he'd done and that if they were smart they'd do the same to me. I stuck to the Enfield story. Then Chester spoke up, said Bonni had told them when they were together that I had killed Johnson. He had kept my secret for her sake. But now she was dead and it was all my fault.
MY FAULT? Who swung the ax? I asked. If I'd come clean she'd still be alive. His anger was rousted again but the other two managed to keep him restrained. They were both wearing their Makarovs, Chester pulled one out of the holster, but Laurence, the one who's gun it had been, struggled with Chester, while Barnes pulled his gun and trained it on Chester. During the struggle there was a shot and Laurence went down, Barnes pulled the trigger and Chester went down. Barnes had taken off the top of Chester's skull but somehow Chester was still alive, he shot Barnes three times in the chest and Barnes was still.
 After the bloodbath I grabbed my bag and my gun and ran, leaving Roger and Chester to their fates.
 At the end of the world and who had I become. A wraith, a shell of a man. A harbinger of a world that was the worst it had ever been and was not likely to ever get better. Not in my, if God is merciful, short life.