Shot to the head – Phevra fought the Afterlifes with her trusty Matilda and a bottle of vodka. It was all a girl needed in life. (Rating: 15, Genre – Fantasy, Sci Fi, Action, Warnings – violence),.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Phevra said as she stepped over the decimated corpse of the bar owner. Her boots were heavy against the wood floor, echoing through the empty bar and probably to the enhanced ears of the few Afterlifes that were wandering around the town.
She pulled a shot glass from under the bar.
“So what do you have here?” Phevra said, examining the dusty bottles on the shelf. There was no doubt that this shit was illegal, after all no one had made alcohol since the Meta-event that had wiped out most of the goddamn country.
Not just country, Phevra thought, world.
The thing was, the world wasn’t really expecting alien contact in when the year turned to 2200. Yet dead on New Years Day, 12:01, the aliens from the distant galaxies had thought that little old planet Earth just wasn’t exciting enough for them.
So they dumped some kind of alien born virus that made those infected start to go on the rampage. It was as if the aliens had watched every zombie movie possible and decided that it would be awfully fun to watch the little humans die by their own hands.
Phevra ran her hands across the dusty bottles, before picking the one she wanted from the shelf. She pulled it off the shelf with ease, knocking dust particles across the sunbeams which fell through the dilapidated ceiling.
Phevra poured herself a drink, raising the glass to the empty bar and the corpses which littered the floor.
“Cheers,” she said, knocking the glass back in one.
Her mother would have been horrified that Phevra was drinking alcohol. Not that Phevra’s mother could do much, she was buried six feet under with the traditional spike through the heart that all the dead were given. It was a ritual of sorts, one of the things that banded the few remaining humans together.
Phevra poured herself another glass. She was pretty sure this was vodka. Or a bastardisation of vodka.
Phevra knocked the glass back.
Whatever it was, it helped.
A noise caught Phevra’s attention. She paused, lowering the glass to the bartop carefully and screwing the lid back on the bottle of vodka. With her free hand, she holstered her ever faithful Matilda from its holster. It was an old gun, her mother’s gun, and some said the old pump automatic was a vestige of a bygone era, when the humans had first started fighting for survival. Pherva liked it because it was devastatingly efficient, with the power of an ancient shotgun coupled with the accuracy of a rifle.
She holstered the gun with one hand, as she put the bottle of vodka in the specially made pocket on the outside of her jacket.
One didn’t waste anything in this world, especially not the alcohol.
Phevra brought her supporting hand up to the barrel of the gun, pressing the butt into her shoulder. It was so easy now, almost as simple as breathing. Every child was taught how to fight, both with and without weapons. If you wanted to survive, you had to know how to kill.
The sound happened again, this time towards the door of the bar. It was a quiet noise, a shuffle, but a trademark of the Afterlifes. Phevra smiled as she trained her gun on the spot where the creature’s head would be and pulled the trigger.
The kick in her shoulder was comforting, like the warm embrace of a long lost friend. The bullet tore from the end of the gun, ripping through the battered wooden wall of the bar and taking the Afterlife straight though the skull.
It dropped to the floor, finally dead. Phevra’s bullets were laced with an electronic shock that would kill the Afterlife’s brain when it hit, frying their synapse so that they could not rise again.
Phevra holstered her gun and pulled the bottle of whiskey from her pocket and took a swig.
“Cheers for this” she said to the corpse of the bar man, before vaulting over the bar and walking through the gap her shot had made in the wooden wall.
It was only 10am, and she had more shit to go kill.
Alex.J.Cobalt 