Jake's Story ch 17

Okay, this is the last chapter of Jake's Story I plan to write before I get done with Delvers LLC 5.

I /might/ do one or two more chapters, but I need to make up for a lot of lost time now that the sun has finally come out.

Whew.  It's gonna be a wild month for me.

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A strange feeling of dread began growing in Jake’s chest as he neared Macon.  His instincts seemed to be at odds with what he was actually seeing, though.

The world actually felt a lot less ravaged than at this point in his first life.  There were still a few pockets of destruction and chaos.  He ran past one in the night--a travel stop by the side of the highway that had been the site of a battle right up until some of the pumps had caught fire.  Jake could easily figure out what had happened just by scanning the burning, hellish scene as he passed.  There must have still been resources available, because groups of armed people were still at the scene, shooting anything that got near, monster or human.

Desperate people do desperate things.

Jake loped along at an easy pace, probably faster than he could have managed at a dead sprint when he’d been human.  Avoiding other monsters was easy in the dark and human survivors had learned to stick to lighted areas at night, or better yet to not come out at all.

During his run to Macon, Jake only paused to kill and drain another ghoul.  He also took the opportunity to remove the custom sword from his storage ring and attach its sheath to his belt.  After some thought, he’d decided not to take any of his firearms out of the ring.  They were easier to remove than a sword if he needed them, and he felt less confident about making sure they didn’t get lost as he ran.

When he got really close to Macon, only a few minutes away, he caught sight of something that made him frown in concern.  He might not have spotted it before getting his incredible night vision, but there was definitely a head poking up over the trees.  A giant, a class D monster.

Class D monsters were extremely dangerous and generally too much to handle even for a large group of people armed with conventional weapons.

Giants hadn’t shown up for at least a month after Purple Rain in his first life.  Things were definitely different this time around.  Jake filed it away to think about later.  He was almost to the outskirts of Macon.

Light in the distance made him slow down again.  What the hell? He thought.  Jake had been running near the highway.  He ducked into the trees before moving forward any further.

Jake crouched down, keeping himself unnaturally still, and watched a procession of vehicles drive down the road ahead at about 30 miles per hour.  The group of four trucks actually included two military vehicles, and there were a couple men in the back of a pickup.  One of the men raised a hand, and a globe of light hovered into the sky about thirty feet above him, lighting up the surroundings.

A mage, thought Jake.  He suddenly realized what he’d been missing while busy thinking about giants and violence.  All the vehicles had been cleared off the highway in this area.  This sort of cleanup was definitely not supposed to happen in most places for a long time after Purple Rain.

The procession of vehicles vanished up the highway, moving away from Jake, taking I-75 Northwest.  If Jake wasn’t wrong, he’d just witnessed a patrol...a night patrol.  The disquiet he’d felt earlier came back, but he didn’t understand why.  If the survivors were patrolling, keeping the city safe, that would be a good thing.  More organized survivors and fewer monsters meant there’d be less senseless death.

With a mental shrug, Jake waited until all the lights were gone before running towards I-475, heading Northeast.  He had a decent amount of distance left to go, but he knew how he could cut through the trees past Highway 80 towards his parents’ house.

Once he got there, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do, but he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.  Right now, he wanted--needed--to know that his family was safe.

***

Jake crouched down behind the house across the street and watched his family’s home, looking for the slightest flicker of motion or light.  Nothing.  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been watching, but he should have seen something by now.  Or maybe his family was just lying low.  Not knowing was maddening, but he couldn’t just walk up to the door and knock.

The entire area seemed to be deserted, but unlike the residential neighborhood he’d set on fire back in Tifton, this one wasn’t crawling with monsters.  In fact, he’d only seen a couple zombies the entire time he’d been in Macon so far.  Effort was definitely being made to clear the city and keep it safe.

So why wasn’t his family home?  Or were they hiding?

Jake finally moved forward across the street.  He hadn’t wanted to break and enter, not least of which because he would give his family a heart attack if they were home, or worse, catch a bullet.  He suddenly paused, foot in the air.  Stupid Jake, he thought, and wondered what was wrong with his mind.  Something must really be bothering him.

There was no need to actually break the door down.  Besides, he’d changed his mind about knocking.  He should announce himself before escalating.  Jake just made a fist and heavily knocked on the door before flash-stepping back across the street to hide.

Nothing happened, nothing at all.  Well, so much for that, he thought.

The street was motionless, unusually quiet for the apocalypse.  There was some distant gunfire and other noises like shouting in the distance, but not much.  The night was extremely dark, too.  Other than a dim glow in the distance from something burning, there weren’t any light sources that Jake could see.  This area seemed to have lost power and nobody was running a generator or solar.

His parents didn’t exactly live in the ritziest part of town, so the lack of solar power didn’t surprise him that much, nor did the fact that all the little lawn solar lights were missing from yards.  That sort of thing had happened during his first lifetime, too.  Survivors had scavenged all the solar lights they could find to help make certain areas more secure at night, at least until people had figured out easier and more powerful ways to light the darkness.

Jake remembered the mage in the back of the patrol earlier.  Maybe people here already have figured some things out, he amended.

He moved to the side of the house that had the kitchen window, activated his phasing ability, and just walked through the wall.  Inside, the house was dark.  Nobody was hiding.  The building was trulyy empty--Jake would be able to sense if there were anyone nearby he was pretty sure, especially his family.

The building wasn’t very big, so Jake was able to search the place relatively quickly.  It didn’t take long to realize that all the extra food and weapons were gone.  The front door was locked.  He finally found the note that had been left on the kitchen counter after thoroughly checking for clues one last time.

“Figures it would have been right under my nose when I first came in,” he tried to say.  His annoyed growl drifted across the kitchen.

The note was from his mother.

“Jake,

We went to the Andersons house.  The city has been split up into three groups or gangs and our neighborhood is being patrolled by people that call themselves the Macon Protectors.  They give us a bad vibe so we left the house for the time being.

Your sister says not to worry about you but I can’t help it sometimes.  She also said we should take your warnings seriously and we have.  I hope you are okay.  Come find us at the Andersons if you see this.

Love,

Mom”

“God dammit,” Jake tried to say.  He pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table to sit and think.

He knew where the Andersons’ house was.  But in his first life, where they lived in Macon had been extremely dangerous from the get-go.  It’d just gotten more dangerous over time, too.

Among the messages he’d sent online when he’d been a zombie, he’d also created one for his family.  He’d sent it to his sister, actually, since his parents weren’t the most tech-savvy people on the planet.

Aldina had definitely seen the message, she must have.  There was no other way for his mother to assume he might stop by.  In his first life, he’d been on the other side of the country.  The problem was, now they weren’t here for him to protect.

When he’d sent his message, he actually hadn’t known what exactly to say.  Other than some simple direction and a note that he was on the way, he’d included a link to all of the advice he’d posted elsewhere about surviving in the changed world.  Maybe it was a stretch, but he assumed that his family had read it--he could just glance around and see that they’d taken most of the useful items from the house when they’d left.  Taking most of it would have been common sense, but he could see the salt shaker sitting conspicuously empty on the kitchen island.

Jake tapped his long, sharp pinky nail on the table as he thought.

His family not being here was a potentially very bad turn of events.  Jake wanted to feel positive and optimistic about it, but the feeling in the pit of his stomach just wouldn’t go away.  Part of him wanted to take off, run into the night straight to the Anderson’s house.  He’d learned from his old life that planning ahead often saved time, though.  What if he ran into trouble or had to turn back altogether?

The city looked different than he’d expected.  In his first life, there hadn’t been a “Macon Protectors” group or any gang with that name.  There’d been a few large gangs, including Screaming Demons and Night Rangers.  Maybe they still existed and were growing in power--he couldn’t be sure.  The present and the future had changed.  As he thought about it, he had to admit that he might be part of the reason.

Now he would need to stop assuming he knew how things worked or where the danger was anymore.  He wasn’t arrogant enough to think that his warning he’d given right after Purple Rain had changed the US, much less the entire world, but it might have started something, created a snowball effect.  The results he had been seeing were undeniable.

It seemed like people in a lot of places had banded together, figured out how to survive, and even had discovered magic or their gifted powers a lot faster than in Jake’s first life.  But an unintended result seemed to be that more powerful monsters are beginning to appear a lot earlier than last time.  This turn of events would have confused Jake before he’d met The Morrigan.  Now he knew there was an aspect of show, or maybe… a game….to the destruction of the world.  The Earth had been sacrificed as part of an ongoing proxy war of the gods.

Jake began to feel something new, a burning frustration bordering on hate.

He calmed himself and checked the house before leaving.  There wasn’t much of value that he bothered to store in his ring, but he did put a few personal effects away just in case.

Jake left the house with a heavy, foreboding heart.

***

The sounds of distant gunshots and other violence in the night made Jake pick up the pace.  None of the noise seemed to be centralized in any one direction.  That was somewhat expected.  In his first life, the night was a dangerous time and people struggled for their lives, at least for a year after Purple Rain.  He had to be careful, but now that he had his new form, he could slink through the darkness faster than a human could jog.

A hellish red glow hung above the central part of the city, near the hotels.  Something big was on fire.  Jake was actually heading the opposite direction.  Unlike his family, the Andersons lived in a more wealthy part of town.  Lyonel Anderson was a retired doctor, and his wife Eileen was a nurse.  The two of them had been married for over thirty years, had even worked together sometimes, and were still in love.  Jake’s parents and the Andersons knew each other from church and had been friends for a long time.

The Andersons had died in Jake’s past life about a week after his parents had, nearest he could discover.

Jake moved stealthily towards Lake Tobesofkee, heading northwest.  He’d dipped south first to travel through the woods.  It felt calming to be back in a familiar area.  During his teen years, he’d ranged a bit, so he knew the general lay of the land.  Moving through the forest now helped him avoid detection, and minimize any trouble he might encounter.  He didn’t want to have any unnecessary fights, especially against people.  The handful of monsters he saw through the trees were sparse. This lack of monsters confirmed his belief that the gangs and whoever else had been pitching in around the area had thinned them out.

The first time he came across any people was on a back road.  He quickly ducked into some bushes and watched with narrowed eyes as a truck with a few ragged-looking men passed by.  A few things about the scene seemed suspicious.  People traveling at night through a forest, something about the group itself, and Jake caught a whiff of blood coming from the bed of the truck.

This group was obviously different from the one he’d seen patrolling the highway earlier.  People didn’t go out at night to the woods to hunt monsters--that would be insane.  No, skulking around in the dark was the sort of thing people only did if they were desperate, evil, the area was free of monsters, or some combination of the three.  And the blood Jake had smelled and the look of the group had triggered Jake’s instincts.  These were bad men.

It seemed that even in an area like Macon that was safer than other cities had people up to no good.   Jake thought back to the home invaders he’d killed just a few hours ago.  The dread in his gut spiked.

He reminded himself that this timeline was different.  Anything at all could happen.  His ability to predict events had pretty much vanished, though.

Jake made a note of the suspicious truck, where it was going, and ran.

He made great time the rest of the way through the wood.  At one point, he thought he might have seen another big monster like the giant he’d spotted earlier, but couldn’t make it out clearly and didn’t hang around to make sure.  There wasn’t time to waste, especially not gawking at other monsters in the dark.

When he popped out of the forest, he found himself in a familiar place--right at the dam, where the lake fed the creek for drainage.  The night was still clear and bright, at least to Jake’s eyes.  He was having a tough time figuring out how it’d look to regular people.  Judging by the tiny sliver of moon, there probably wouldn’t be the greatest visibility for regular humans.

Jake began running east, heading up around the lake.  There were little sources of light everywhere--a few battery-powered flashlights, but mostly torches and little bonfires.  This area definitely looked better than it had around this time in his first life.  Many of the houses still had boarded-up windows, though.  Nobody other than the patrol trucks were outside, at least not that he could see.  The people in the patrol trucks must have been maintaining some of the fires, too.

Something was strange.

Maybe the lake itself was still a danger in this timeline, but the patrols had it under control.  Beyond the threat of the lake, something else was bothering him that he couldn’t quite pinpoint.

He eyed his surroundings with a critical eye and began to get another sinking feeling, especially after passing a burnt out shell of a house, and seeing another that was still hot and smoking, coals glowing in the night.

What the hell? He thought.

Jake dodged another patrol before hitting Moseley Dixon Road and headed downhill towards the other side of the lake.  He was getting close.

Nothing seemed to move in the Andersons’ neighborhood.  Jake could hear distant screaming and crying--too far away to be of immediate concern for him.  Still, a feeling of violence hung in the air.  As he watched from behind a tree, a couple of dark vans pulled out from behind a house farther down the street and took off like bats out of hell.

The Andersons’ house was closer to where he was hiding.  A trickle of smoke was rising from it.   Jake hadn’t seen it at first even with his enhanced night sight because of the surrounding dark.  His nose picked up the smell of a small fire now, though.  The mailbox had been mowed flat and the lawn was torn up by tire treads.  Blood was on the ground.  Jake’s sensitive nose told him that all of the commotion had likely taken place minutes ago, definitely no longer than half an hour.

Oh no, thought Jake.  He threw all caution to the window and rushed to the Andersons’ house.  The door had been kicked down.

No no no no no, he thought.  Jake drew his custom saber and pulled his dark, cracked lips back as he went from room to room.  He found the bodies of Mr and Mrs. Anderson first.

Lyonel Anderson had a shovel.  He still gripped it in his large, dark-skinned hands in death.  His grey and white speckled hair had been burned.  He had obviously gone down fighting.

His wife was definitely dead as well.  Her complexion--usually glowing, like warm chocolate--had grown pallid in death.  Lisa Anderson had no weapons in her hands, but the air smelled like cordite, like there’d been shooting.  There were bullet casings on the floor.  Jake remembered that she’d known how to shoot and had kept a .380 pistol in the house.

Both of them looked like they’d been killed with something sharp.  Their bodies had been cut to ribbons.  There was some evidence of blunt force impact, too, and Mr. Anderson had a big burn on his arm in addition to the first one Jake had seen on his head.  One wall of the room was charred, but nothing had caught on fire long-term.

The Andersons had been some of the kindest, most honest people Jake had ever met.  They would have never hurt anyone.  In fact, skilled doctors would eventually be hard to find, worth their weight in gold.  The world was definitely a dimmer place without the Andersons.

Jake dreaded what more he’d find, but he had to know.

His father’s body was in the family room.  Jake fell to his knees.  There were more bullet casings on the floor here.  His father had fallen out of his wheelchair when he’d died.  Horror began to rise, horror and guilt.  Jake stomped on it.  He’d already seen the bodies of his family and friends once before.  Seeing them again was both easier, and harder.  The fact he wasn’t human anymore might have actually been helping.  Instead of breaking down or choking up, it felt like ice had begun flowing through his veins.

Leonard Mazzariello had a number of wounds.  At least one had been caused by magic.  If not for the grievous wounds on his body, he might have looked like he was sleeping.  His facial expression was peaceful, somewhat at odds with the difficulty he’d been having with depression over the last year.  Bent frames on the floor were all that remained of his glasses.

Jake got up slowly.  I was too late, he thought.  He’d somehow arrived days before when his parents had died in his first life.  This was not how it was supposed to be.

He found his mother’s body in front of the hallway leading to the bedrooms.  She’d been stabbed in the back, or maybe shot.  Her graying hair had been tied back in a bun and she’d been wearing sweats, what she wore around the house for comfort.

Despite his muted emotions, Jake didn’t want to look further.  All the blood was starting to give him disturbing cravings, too.  He’d rather kill himself than desecrate the bodies of his family or friends.  The new sense of disgust he felt for himself actually helped keep him thinking.

At the end of the hall, the carpet was thick with blood.  It was so thick in some places it squished like jello. Jake’s inhuman senses could immediately tell the blood was the freshest in the house.  Maybe he could catch the fuckers that did this.  He steeled himself and entered the room.

A bolt of ice almost took his head off.

Jake sprang to the side and held his sword up in a guard position just in time to catch a glimpse of another ice spike heading for his face.  He flash stepped a short distance to the other side of the room.  Only a second had passed, but he’d finally been able to figure out what was going on.

His sister was sitting on the floor, most of her body behind the heavy door of a safe that had been opened.  She had one side of her face exposed, resting her head on the door.  A pistol and a few empy magazines lay on the floor beside her.  She might have run out of ammo, but she wasn’t defenseless.  Her hand was raised and magic gathered at her fingertips.  Jake’s nose told him she was injured, but he didn’t know how bad yet.

“Aldina!  Aldina, stop!”  Too late, Jake remembered what he was, that he wasn’t human anymore as the words left his mouth in a garble of hisses and growls.  He’d probably just made things worse.

But instead of screaming or attacking anymore, Aldina spit a glob of crimson phlegm and croaked something that might have been a laugh.  One eye opened a bit more fully and she managed,  “Jake, that you?”  Her voice was pained, strained, but still carried the spirit that had gotten her through law school on an academic scholarship.

Jake mutely nodded, blinked, and looked down at himself.  Yup, still a monster, he thought.

“Are you wondering how I knew?”  Aldina slouched behind her makeshift cover and crawled painfully to one side.  “And I’m assuming they’re really all gone now, huh?”  Aldina was putting on a stong front but she had to be in agony.  It was a miracle she could even talk.

Jake nodded.  He tried to keep a poker face.  Shock rattled his heart as he saw the full extent of his sister's injuries.  It looked like she’d been cut, burned, and shot.  Her breathing was pained, and she was visibly exhausted.  At this point, Jake was too devastated by everything else to even do more than distantly note his sister had been using magic.

Actually, the fact his sister seemed to be channeling magic was likely why she was still conscious.  That mystery was solved.  She should probably actually already be dead.

He doubted that all of his friends in high school who’d had a crush on his sister would even recognize her now.  Of course, any time one of them had mentioned his “hot” sister, or even worse, tried to bring up anything about her body, it’d been gross.

Aldina’s dark hair was matted and congealed in clumps.  Her comfortable clothes had been ripped and torn.  It looked like one of her arms was broken, too.  There was a cut bisecting her full lips that thankfully wasn’t bleeding like some of her other wounds.

Jake slowly lowered himself into a sitting position across the room from Aldina and leaned against the wall. He suddenly felt so very tired.  Everything he'd been through over the last few days flashed through his mind.

His sister slowly said, "Wow, you are one demonic looking fucker now Jakey-poo.  Even while knowing it’s you I kind of want to scream.  Can you make your eyes glow blue whenever you want?  I saw your little video a few hours ago.  Internet went down for good not long after that.  It's weird you are a monster but it’s also weird the world is hell and I'm dying and you are supposed to be on the other side of the country right now so...fuck it." She wheezed a laugh.  "My little brother, the ‘Heavenly Grim.’ Hell of a thing."

Jake made a serious effort to speak out loud. He had to concentrate to get the sounds right. It still took about four times too long and sounded like a lion clearing its throat. He managed, "Heaven grim. Old Grim. Me. How?"

"How do I know you are the grim, my fanged brother?"  Jake nodded.  Aldina said, "You sent a link to those posts you made about the Purple Rain. Didn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out who 'Jake M,' was.  Then there was all the other stuff you did.  Stories came out about the mysterious, helpful monster in Florida or georgia.  You weren’t supposed on this side of the country but you sent that message to us saying you would try to get here in less than a week. It kind of made sense, since nothing makes sense anymore."

Jake growled, "Iterrrnent. News?"

"News has been off and on. The internet usually hasn’t worked since Purple Rain.  Everything was in chaos.  News stations and sites have mostly been down--government took over for a while but they were useless until they also started referencing your posts.   'Course, everything is down today, probably not going to come back.  But you saved a lot of people, bro."  She shook her head.  “I tried to tell mom and dad that you were a monster now but they wouldn't believe me." Aldina wheezed a laugh that trailed off into a hiss of pain.  Her face tight, she asked, "They are all dead now huh?"

Jake looked down and nodded.

His sister sighed and uselessly tried covering one of her wounds with her hands.  “Mom and dad told me to come back here.  Ordered me to.  They wouldn’t argue with me.  It was all stupid.  The Andersons, Mom, Dad, they had guns, but the Warhounds had at least one mage and some guy in super thick armor.  Pretty sure I killed one, maybe two.  They pulled one of the bodies back.  Didn’t leave them on the ground.

“I hit a few more with ice spikes whenever they poked their heads around the corner, and I was holding up in here...but it was only a matter of time before they got me.  At least I was too wounded to rape if they did.  Maybe that’s why Mom and Dad made me come back here myself.”

“Fire?”

“Yeah, no real arson, just some fire magic.  If they’d been keen to burn the house down instead of steal our shit, I wouldn’t have lasted this long.  ‘Course, the only reason they left was the Post Apoc Kings showed up.  Or maybe the Screaming Demons.  Probably pissed someone was taking shit in their territory.  Big fight outside.  I stayed in here.  Not much choice.”  She gestured at her broken body.

Things made perfect sense for Jake now.  The Post Apoc Kings, the Screaming Demons, Night Rangers, and the Warhounds had existed in his first life.  In fact, the Screaming Demons had killed his family the first time around, too.  He didn’t allow himself to fall into the enormous ocean of despair he felt opening beneath him.  Some of the arcane senses he’d developed in his first life must have been tied to his soul, because he could feel that his sister was running out of mana.  She didn’t have much more time.

“You. Magic?” he grunted.

“Yeah, I’m a mage--thanks to you.  I took your instructions seriously, followed them to see if I had any power I could awaken.  Turned out I did.  Studying magic for a few days was a hell of a lot easier than cramming in school.  So yeah, I can use magic thanks to you.  A lot of people can probably say the same.  You’re kind of famous among some people who are still alive.  I’ve heard that some nuts out there are even worshipping you.  Wild, huh?”  She coughed a laugh that faded as she held one of her injuries that began to weep fresh blood.  ”I really don’t have much time left, Jake.  Little demon bro.  I wish I could hear that story, how you got to be...this.”  She gestured with one bloody hand.

Jake couldn’t do anything other than helplessly watch her.

Aldina smiled with crimson-covered teeth and said, “I’d ask for a hug, but you suck at hugging, and you look like the devil.  Do me a favor instead, would you?”

Jake cocked his head, and she continued, “Kill every last one of those bastards that did this.”  Her voice turned ragged, savage.  “Get them all.  Don’t show any mercy.  Destroy everything they care about.  Even kill their fucking dogs.”

Yup, that’s my sister, thought Jake.

“Mom and dad… you would have been proud, Jake.  They were so brave.  Especially dad, there at the end.  I was only in here for like a minute by myself probably, but...God.  They shot through the walls.  Unfair.”  Her eyes teared up.  “I don’t wanna die, Jake.  My mana’s almost gone.  I’m starting to feel cold.  Sleepy.  That’s bad.”

Jake mutely nodded.

“I think I am gonna let the mana go and take a nap now. This sucks.  You can suck my blood or eat me or whatever it is you do these days as long as you go kill the tampons that did this to us.  They were here for resources.  They tried talking, but I guess it was taking too long because they just attacked out of nowhere.  If Mr. Anderson didn’t have such a good door, that would have been it right there.”  Jake watched his sister Dina lay down on the blood-soaked floor.  She closed her eyes and said, “Jake, I…”  Her voice trailed off.

Jake’s stomach turned to stone.  He saw something rising from his sister’s body, like a mist, and on impulse he rotated his chi.  With the energy running through his body, he was able to see what it was better, like an outline.  It could only be one thing.
Why am I seeing Dina’s soul? Jake thought.  It was hard to think through his grief, but he answered his own question.  His sister was a mage, maybe a novice, but she obviously had talent and she also had access to mana.  She would have had to touch her own soul to attain this much power, and she would know how to give it away.  His sister had meant what she’d said.  She’d offered her power to Jake if he needed it to get revenge for their family.

Aldina always had been the strongest Mazzariello.  She was the one who’d helped their dad start to get over some of his deepest lows after being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease.

Jake’s eyes narrowed.  He refused to let his sister die.  There wasn’t much he could do about her body, but maybe he could still do something for her in the future.  He stretched out his fledgling senses and gathered up Aldina’s soul.  This was something he shouldn’t have been able to accomplish at his level of cultivation, but he did it anyway.

Once he’d gently secured Aldina’s spirit, he guided into his ring of holding for safekeeping.

Up until this point, Jake had been as passive as possible and had avoided killing people.  All of that had just changed.  Now it was game on.  Everything had just become very, very personal between him and some looting shit stains out there.  They had his family’s blood on their hands.

Jake growled low in his chest as he left the ruined, shot-up house.  He didn’t look down at his parents’ corpses again.  Monster or not, he couldn’t keep literally staring at his failure and still keep his sanity.

Anger at everything, at Ahriman, Purple Rain, raiders, it all caught in his throat.  His family had been killed over food.  Again.  Or maybe batteries.  Murder for batteries.  It was senseless.  There were still plenty of unoccupied houses in Macon the aggressive salvage gangs could have raided instead.  This little skirmish had likely been to piss off the gang that owned this territory, who the Anderson’s had likely been “protected” by as much as anything.

Sounds like it had backfired on them after the protecting gang arrived.  For all Jake knew, the two groups were still fighting it out after taking off.  The vans he’d seen pull out must have either been homeowners or other looters who’d laid low and left after the coast was clear.

As he disappeared into the night to track down his family’s killers, Jake moaned softly, aching for his family for the second time.  His eyes burned but no moisture came out.  Seemed ghouls couldn’t really cry.

Then his sadness began to feed his rage.

Jake's heart turned to ice.  This wasn’t going to be a fight--it was going to be a slaughter.