There wasn’t much left at the outpost except for some blood splattered boards and splinters of bone. The thirty residents never stood a chance against the hoard. Those devils had an unsavory appetite for human flesh.
He jumped off of his black horse and landed on the bloodstained sand of the high sierra desert. His cold grey eyes scanned the terrain. The outpost was littered with bodies. He slowly walked down the main road; the silent screams of the people rang through his ears as his mind reenacted their deaths. He walked up to a large pile of timbers that once made up his brother’s cottage. He recognized a body on the ground as his brother’s fiancé Mary Beth.
The only distinguishable things left on her were a few strands of brown hair and the ring that Jasper had given her. It was their mother’s old wedding ring. She gave it to him before she died from illness the previous winter. She said he was the Rush’s only hope to carry on the family name since Jon was, as she described, “Only a shadow of a human.” It didn’t bother him that she thought that way. After all he’d seen and been through he was convinced of only two things. That earth must be the hell he learned about as a boy, and that there was nothing in this world he was afraid of.
It was clear after scanning through the debris several times that Jasper was not among those slaughtered here. He followed the tracks left by the creatures until they left the outpost. Amidst the tracks he saw a piece of red fabric. It was Jasper’s bandana. He tied it around his left bicep and gazed at the tracks as they veered north into the mountains. It was a land that had long since been abandoned. A land marred by some type of evil. He whistled for his horse and for a brief moment he felt sympathy for the devil…
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