What Makes A Monster

Excellence Award in the 'Top Secret 2016' competition

Terrifying chanting drifted up the path to the village, competing with the clash of metal on metal. The tramp of many feet shook the ground as if the land itself trembled in fear. In their houses the citizens cowered, windows and doors obstructed to prevent the violent intruders from entering. The invaders drew level with the first houses and raised burning torches to the roofs. Their grotesque faces were made into masks of savagery by the flickering of the growing fires. The chants of “Death to the monsters” were soon accompanied by the screams of the dying.
Paint blistered on the doors of the previously quaint little houses. The sounds of barricades being removed from the inside by those desperate to escape joined the cacophony as the terrified occupants chose swift if brutal deaths over slow burning and suffocation. Those that made it out were cut down, slashed, gutted and hacked away at. The sounds of violence and agony grew to become deafening and still they chanted.
Their eyes were wide under sadistic frowns, deranged grins plastered on their blood-smeared faces. Their teeth glinted threateningly in the light from fires that consumed innocent lives. In one of the untouched houses children cowered in fear, faces buried in their father’s neck and chest while their mother left to make a futile attempt at defending them. Moments after the door closed behind her and their father had replaced the heavy furniture barricading the door she fell to her knees, a hatchet lodged in her thigh. Her guttural roar of suffering tore into the hearts of her family, and still she crawled toward the enemy, intent on protecting her offspring.
The strength of her limbs compensated for her pain-induced lack of motor control as she knocked down one of the attackers. Another brought a war hammer up to swing it at her skull, but she forcefully out the hatchet from her leg and lodged it in his stomach. She shrieked as blood gushed from the open wound and the aggressors seized the moment so slash and stab at her while she was weakened. Her flailing attacks grew weaker and less frequent as her flesh was sliced and torn by unmerciful assailants. She fell forward, her body sinking slightly into earth dampened by blood, her last words drowned out by manic laughter and the heart-wrenching screams of her people.

A week later her children sit in a cramped cage, the only survivors of the massacre. Their hair has been shaved off and their exposed skin is spattered with welts, bruises, cuts and grazes. Their eyes are empty, the life leeched out of them. They sit quietly, paying no heed to the conversation going on before them as the force that destroyed their home justifies the action.

“They would’ve killed us all, we had to do it.”
“And yet not one of them killed any of you.”
“Look at them; they’re monsters.”
“From what I’ve seen, claws and fangs aren’t what make a monster.”

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