In the Name of the Sinner

The screams started again. He closed his eyes and shook his head sharply to quieten them, but he knew he could never really get rid of them. They were as much a part of him as his rifle now. Even if he made it out the woods alive he would never put it down, not really anyway. He glanced up at the sky, still faintly visible between the razor sharp forest of pines, but he knew that the smoke would hide it again soon. He adjusted his glasses with two fingers, not that it particularly helped as the lenses were smeared with sweat, soot and blood. There was a helmet by his feet, balanced awkwardly on a root. It had a dent in the crown and a hairline crack just above the visor. It was regulation issue; stamped, numbered, and completely useless. It has been said that protection is primarily about feeling safe rather than keeping you alive. Well, he felt neither safe nor even alive. He picked it up anyway, and ran his fingers over the words taped on to it: Time to Die. He couldn’t remember if he had been the one who had taped the words, and which Time it referred to — as The Sinner was pretty sure he was already dead.

The Sinner wasn’t his real name of course, and he couldn’t remember why it had stuck. Was he a sinner? He supposed they all were now but he was the one with the name. Before he was The Sinner, when he had a different name, he had a feeling that he might have been happy, back home maybe, but he couldn’t really remember his name, let alone his home. The image of it would swim into his mind in half woken dreams but the fires soon extinguished it. That wasn’t his life anymore. This place, this forest, this… what had The Saint called it? This carnival of terror was his life now and The Sinner was his name. He was a travelling performer, balancing on this tightrope of insanity, but there was no safety net below, nothing but fire waited to catch him if he fell. Some enjoyed the fall, even enjoyed the flames, but he wasn’t one of them. He had stood near the inferno, he had felt the heat and even from a distance he had been burnt.

There was one man who relished it more than any other. He would light the fire, walk into the flames and exit with a smile on his face, his skin seemingly unblemished from the scorching heat. But The Sinner knew better. The man was burnt. He was blackened inside. The flames had devoured whatever soul he had once had, leaving nothing but a pile of ash in its stead. The man was his commanding officer. His name too was lost in the forest, but the men thought of him simply as The Damned.

The Sinner had watched him do what he did that night, until the final scream was silenced, and then from his jacket, The Damned had removed a stack of paperwork. Were they letters from home? Documents from command? Our IDs? We will never know, as he set them all ablaze. The Damned stared into the fire and watched as the charcoaled hands seemed to grasp at the papers before they were all consumed. In that moment you would have thought he was reborn, no longer a man, but something far greater and far more terrible.

The Sinner, the flames reflecting in his glasses, lifted his rifle, took a breath, and fired.

And so the hunt began.

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