Road to Redemption Part 1

Carlo sighed and stuck his last joint in between his lips and lit the end of it with his Zippo lighter. Sometimes it was hard to believe it had been three years since the world blew up in everybody’s faces and millions of people died but many of them didn’t technically stay dead. He grunted solemnly as he puffed on the joint. He had raided what was once apparently some minor drug dealer’s home and had helped himself to as many bags of weed he could grab before he heard gunshots and ran so he wouldn’t be discovered by a pack of looters. By no means was he weak or a coward but he knew that one man with a bolt action Winchester could stand up against a dozen armed people who would shoot first and forget asking questions.

He had started this horrible pandemic as a private contractor working as a security guard for Camp Protection, a downsized version of Camp Saint Teresa, in northern Georgia. Carlo had been a gang member in his teenage years, a soldier from the age of eighteen to his mid-twenties and then a variety of odd jobs but his last real job was a guard at the camp for the people who were sick but in reality was a death camp no different than Auschwitz of Hitler’s Germany. But despite all his occupations and all of the things he had done throughout his life of twenty-eight years the most horrible thing he had ever witnessed was being a guard at the damned camp. In the end when the government was nearing collapse and the infected were taking to the streets in the hundreds of thousands and the camps were overfilling the guards at most of the camps were given their final orders.

Just like the damn Republican soldiers in motherfucking Star Wars with their Order Sixty-Six we had to fucking execute those poor bastards, Carlo thought bitterly as he finished the joint and as temporary high engulfed his brain and body. The two hundred odd guards at Camp Protection had methodically moved through the camp and had opened fire with automatic weapons and then torched the infected barracks. Of course, there had been guards that had refused to follow the orders but they had been killed too and their bodies torched along with the infected. The only reason Carlo hadn’t refused was because he knew the camp commandant was a cold unfeeling bastard and wouldn’t hesitate to kill anybody who got in the way of him following his orders. However, Carlo had only shot at infected people who had tried to rush him and other wise had shot at targets that weren’t really there so his fellow guards wouldn’t turn on him. But no, Carlo wasn’t a saint, not by a long shot.

Carlo snorted, yeah a real patriotic bastard that commandant was alright. Even with the government obviously collapsing and rioting and chaos in the cities and towns the commandant had still followed the orders he had received from Washington to the letter. “But,” Carlo began,” we followed the orders he gave us so none of our hands were clean in that entire cluster fuck.” Carlo shook his head and stood up and shouldered his pack and picked up his bolt action Winchester. In the distance he heard a few gun shots in rapid succession and the almost ever present moan and shriek of the dead. Well I guess that a good a place as any to began my crusade to redemption, Carlo thought as he came out of the shack he had been sitting in and began to walk towards the sounds. As he replayed the thought in his mind and feeling the weight of his rifle in his hand as he walked he began to cackle wildly.