‘The hardest thing for aspiring writers is to put black ink on white paper.’ Indeed. Time to slog.
Writing practice: Story from a news article
The men creeped. No, they stalked, the sharp edges of their moonlit shadows cutting through the underbrush of the mountain forest. This was their land, or rather they and the land belonged to each other. The mountains could be cruel, and so could they.
They looked down upon a valley – their valley – asleep, hours before twilight would paint a bluish tinge on the bloodied corpses of their soon victims. The intruders, those who came to rule, who thought they could buy allegiance from men they did not know, whose allegiance they could not understand, and who became as unwelcome in this land as the intruders themselves.
Each man of the night-raid party moved with his own deliberate rhythm, but each breathed with the mountain. The mountain’s sweat deadened the crunch of the leaves, as though to say, “My nervous anticipation is to lend my own titanic, though dead, hand.
When the stalkers came upon the encampment, they didn’t consider personal safety or escape; they came for revenge, for retribution, and that’s what they were going to get before their death, whether that come soon, or decades hence. As they approached their sleeping prey, they exchanged no glances; they didn’t need to. Each man sensed the others, and they selected their marks based on proximity.
One man thought of his son, killed by a militiaman in retaliation for refusing extortion payments. Another, his wife and daughter caught in the crossfire of two sets of militia thugs fighting for turf. A third man thought only of his homeland, a peaceful valley which for decades was secure from invasion – it was too remote, its land to barren for outsiders to populate.
The first blade to strike gave no warning – whetted on moonlight, then wetted with blood. After the first scream, a frenzy of cries. The first blade broke the silent, the rest sliced to create it again.
When they finished, the only thing louder than the men’s breathing was the squishing of their boots in the mud. They took the weapons from the dead, unused in the terror of their former wielders. And then they rested.
One man, in the blue of twilight, composed a message for the invaders’ brothers, as he’d done on the many previous night raids:
“Your men came to take our land. Remove their bodies; you’ll leave their blood.”
One of the men was sitting on a rock, slumped, staring unfixedly at the ground. He’d lost the ability to feel – rage, vengeance, or pity – ever since he found his family, their corpses pantomimed eating breakfast by a man, some man, using torture and terror as a means to subjugate. He didn’t join these raids to bring his family back – he knew that could never be – nor even to prevent further terror. He killed simply because he was the best at it – feeling no fear, no remorse, not even the ruthless precision of a man who kills for money, he killed simply because he knew no other way to live until he, too, died. His name was Haji. He was thirty-two years old. Perhaps the closest thing to a real zombie. The living dead. The undead.
He was brought out of his numb reverie by the crackling of a fire, lit by his comrade to burn the clothes and food of the dead; their retrievers would obtain nothing of value from the site.
[just keep slogging. don’t think, just write. you need the practice]
From the first, they never ate their food, wore their clothes, or even used their weapons. These all were rendered dead by the dead. They wouldn’t benefit from the spoils of their invaders – let their comrades claim the bodies, let the mountain claim their ashes.
Haji’s men couldn’t enjoy the satisfaction of reducing the enemy numbers. They knew that as quickly as they killed, more would come to replace the slain. Though not to the extent Haji was numbed, his men were weary. Kill they must to save their land, their people, but it was no life. Living without life.
[we’re often unskillful before we’re quite good…]
In the attack, Omar thought he’d been cut. He’d felt a liquid warmth soak through his pants around the shin. Pulling up his drenched pant leg, he saw to injury. “I must have cut the neck in the wrong place,” he thought. Wrong not because it was ineffective, but because it pointed the geyser at himself. The hazards of not killing first – the first victim’s resting heartrate is low, as is his blood pressure. Once the others wake to their impending death, the blood pumps with vigor unleashed with a torrent of adrenaline, and the geysers erupt stronger, farther, and with greater volume. “I’ll try to pre-empt Haji next time,” he thought. “He never minds the blood. He never minds anything.” He saw Haji nearby, stripped naked, washing his clothes in the stream. “It’s all the same to him,” thought Omar. “Blood, dirt, or sweat – he’ll take any as a matter of course, and wash them all with the same absent thoroughness.”
Akhtar was the youngest of the group. Two years prior, at seventeen, he told his father he wanted to join him in these raids. “No. I don’t need another dead son.” was all his father would say. Akhtar lost his eldest brother to a land mine, planted by a militiaman for no other reason than to entertain himself with the imaginings of who might drive, or walk, across his secret and be dead before the sound registered in the victim’s ears. Akhtar’s brother was on foot, and only his head, neck, and the top third of his torso were recognizable, and they were found thirty feet away from the crater. When Akhtar’s father was killed in an ambush, Akhtar had no authority left to object – he joined the day he learned of his father’s death.
In the early days, Akhtar would shadow Haji. Haji always kept the newest members of the night raid squad next to him, for the initial kills, when resistance was the lowest. The most vengeful, and more experienced, of the group would kill last, drowning out their victims’ screams in their grunts as they buried their knives deep into the chests of the shrieking invaders.
Omar washed his pants in the river, and when he returned with Haji the men stood to leave. It was nearly sunrise, and it was time to disappear back into the mountains until the next raid. Akhtar doused the flames and collected the weapons to be destroyed later that day, and then the men left.
[that was 2 hours]