A Good Meal [Jarvis]

What remained of New York was a fetid, festering hellhole. The man in black had heard all his life the legends of how the pre-war cityscape would light up the sky at night. How its denizens never slept, how the activity never died and the city shone like a beacon, a testament to their entire country's productivity. Perhaps, he mused, pulling down his mask, that was why they all dropped bombs in the first place. It didn't matter now. What did was that this city was overtaken, swollen with a disease. A cancer. And it was his job to excise it, one cut at a time.

Today was, for the Punisher, a day like any other. He carried his scoped .308 by its sling and moved under the dying light of the evening sun through the interconnected bowels of first-floor buildings, flanking another Bronx street that might as well have been identical to all the others. Casings and carcasses littering the street, rodents -- some with two legs -- making a scurrying slalom around the burnt-out shells of cars Frank knew the Bronx was quiet. But, just like the old city, quiet didn't mean dead.

Night was when the darker side of the borough came out to play. And even though its denizens weren't, perhaps, as concentrated as Brooklyn or Manhattan, they were there. He'd been around this area long enough to know that much. And there was only an hour or so of evening light left before the howling and screeching began to echo ritualistically some cry of readiness on the horizon, and his prey loosed themselves upon the city. Eager, hungry, snarling, and not at all expecting him to turn their head into a canoe with a single shot.

A few shops down the line from base camp was when he saw it. Figure on the horizon, tucking eagerly into... something. "Sometimes, it's just too easy..." Frank thought to himself, shouldering the rifle and looking down the crosshairs at what he presumed to be some sort of vile, bestial raider or ganger he'd be happy to execute. If it was a feral, at least he'd get a chance to put the zombie out of its misery.

"Well, shit," Frank mumbled to himself when he zeroed his sights through the convenience store window. Wasn't like anything he'd seen before. Sure enough this city churned out freaks and monsters left and right like ejected casings from a rifle, but this was new. Diseased, discoloured skin, but none of the dimples or the rotten holes that were the telltale signs of the ghoul, but this thing definitely wasn't human. This meant one thing; there was a third option.

His finger tightened round the trigger and he murmured inconsequentially to himself. "Let's see what you have to say for yourself..." The rifle barrel jerked a fraction of an inch to the right. The suppressor made a soft thwump as the bullet carved into the ground a foot to the right of the thing, spitting up a torrent of grit and powdered tarmac. Loud enough impact that it would've heard.

Frank moved the sight back to the creature. Simple test. If it ran towards him, it was feral. If it ran away, it wasn't.

The creature shuffled for cover in Frank's crosshairs, and then with admirable strength, launched itself up onto the top of the building it had been crouching by with considerable speed. The marksman's brow furrowed and he scanned the few feet he could see of the ruined skyscraper's roof to no avail. The diseased, off-green blur flitted in and out of his vision. As a further warning, Frank squeezed the trigger and put another bullet into the crumbling rebar edge.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Getting closer. Frank's senses weren't by any stretch of the imagination supernatural, but his ear was trained. Khans learnt to listen before they learnt to shoot. You had to hunt before you could kill. The loudest thud was the last, and the closest, just a few floors up. Whatever this thing could do with its legs, it had keenly enough stayed out of sight and bounded towards him. Too smart to be a feral. Too stupid to run away.

It was trying to flank him, whatever it was. The muffled footsteps of the staircase above might have been harder to hear if he was still aiming out of the window -- but Frank knew subterfuge, even if it wasn't exactly his calling card. Two ways in -- stairs from street-level, or stairs from above. No way he was coming in from below without a neat .308-shaped hole in his skull. Near-silently, the Punisher propped his rifle up against the window, backed along to a point where his back was covered, in case this thing had friends, and produced one of his insignia-bearing pistols.

As a flash of green appeared at the top of the stairs, Frank aimed, again, a few inches to the left, and shot once into the wall. "That's three times I've missed you on purpose. I don't miss by accident and there won't be a fourth. Stay where you are." Gunsmoke trailed upwards. The orange light of the dying evening sun glanced across the white skull painted onto his mask. "I thought you were a feral. Wanted to scare you off." Frank paused. "What are you?"