Just a little excerpt, a part of a part, an intro of sorts, to something I've been working on, on and off, for a couple years.

Rhys awoke with no more movement than a slight jerk of his head, and the opening of his eyes. He stared silently into the darkness, his senses straining to find any trace of what had jarred him from his sleep. He tilted his head slightly to the side and craned his neck in the manner people often do when searching for an unidentified sound. It had to have been a sound, it was always a sound. Right now the only sound he heard was his own shallow, rapid breaths and beating of his heart as it tried to pound its way out of his chest. He didn’t need to hear it again, he hoped he wouldn’t hear it again, but he knew what sound had woken him. It was the sound of laughter.

That was the sound they made, the ones who were sick. One of the symptoms of the disease, Kuru-Ni, was uncontrolled fits of laughter. It was a terrible laugh, like the sound of an angry hyena. In fact, that’s what people had taken to calling those with the disease, hyenas, you’d often hear them laughing before they attacked.

And they always attacked. Kuru-Ni was a neurodegenerative disease, it ate the brain, and made the infected bat-shit crazy and aggressive as hell. Rhys had seen enough zombie movies as a kid for that to be scary enough, but these were no flesh-eating undead from his childhood that wanted to eat his brains. Not that they wouldn’t eat him when he was dead, they probably would, but what they really wanted was just the dead part. You. Dead.

Rhys almost wished they were zombies, at least they were always kind of stupid and couldn’t do much besides grab and bite you. The hyenas, well they were sure as hell as vicious as anything he’d seen in a movie, and crazy on top of it, but the worst part was they still had enough intelligence to use weapons. Thankfully not guns, the shakes, another symptom of the disease, were usually too bad for that. They could definitely use knives though, and bats, rocks, crowbars, and pretty much anything else they could get their hands on. Hell, he’d even seen one chop a guy up with a chainsaw once.

‘Well,’ Rhys thought to himself, ‘at least you don’t have to hit the hyenas in the head to bring them down. They’re no harder to kill than anyone else. Except for the fact that they’re strong, really strong. Why is it crazy people are always so fucking strong?’ Before he could come up with any answers, his thoughts were interrupted by another fit of laughter, somewhere in the distance.

He thought that bit of laughter sounded different than what he’d heard earlier. ‘There must be two of them. Fuck.’ He glanced around quickly, then sighed. ‘I’ve got to get out of the open.’ He pulled the straps of his backpack tighter onto his shoulders, stood up and touched the rough bark of the tree he’d been leaning against, then turned and started jogging down the hill in front of him, the sound of laughter echoing through the darkness.

It's not obvious, or even hinted at, in this piece, but the real focus of the story is what it means to be a hero. What it does to people. No one chooses to be a hero, they become a hero as a result of the choices they make. Those choices come with consequences. If you've ever heard the story of a real-life hero, or met one, you know there is one thing that seems to be universally true: heroes suffer. The journey of the hero isn't some grand adventure, it's a story filled with pain, and loss. Exactly what form that pain and loss take varies, but it's there, it's always there. Heroes, they are heroes not because they are superhuman in ability, but because they have a strength of will beyond what the rest of us possess. Somehow, despite the pain, the loss, the sorrow, they find the will to do what needs to be done, to do the things most of us could not, would not do. They rise above their fear, and use it, they use that fear to give them courage.

What happens to the hero, when the war is won? What happens to the hero, when the celebration is over? When talking to someone once about soldiers returning from war, and the mental and emotional trauma they've suffered, I said this: you cannot ask a man to go and do savage things, and not expect to then find some savagery within him. The things you have to do, to be the hero, do they change you?

Imagine that to save the lives of those you love, you had to kill. You had to kill with no weapon but your hands. It wasn't just one person, one man you had to kill, but several. You had to kill dangerous, determined men, with your bare hands, in a vicious way. Would you, after the blood, after the killing, be the same as you are now? Or would perhaps some part of you change, become lesser, with every life you tore away?

Now imagine you're the hero in a vicious world. To save the people you love, to save the country, the world you love, you have to kill. And kill. And kill again. You have to kill everyone who tries to stop you. You must win every fight, every battle, and eventually the war. Once you've won, once you've stepped over countless corpses, and saved the day, saved the world, how then, do you live in that world? Oh yes, you saved the world, but to do so, you had to become something, something that belonged in that vicious world, not this new, peaceful one. No, in this world, there's no place for blood, for killing, for a killer. There's no room for heroes here.

I'm not suggesting anyone make a game based off the ideas above. I didn't post this as a suggestion or advice. It's just a topic that I think about from time to time.

And speaking of time, thanks to anyone who took the time to read about the strange things that occupy my mind.