pjmedia.com By Jamie K. Wilson
Twilight lay thin across the snow, a bruised line between storm and night. Wind howled off Norton Sound, scouring the world to bone. Sheriff Harold Mack pulled his shotgun, loaded with handmade shells filled with rock salt and silver, from the truck and shut the door softly, as if the frozen silence were listening.
The trail was easy. Blood showed bright against the drifts, already crusting. He’d winged the beast an hour ago out by the refinery road. It had torn through half the town this month, leaving bodies and tracks that never stayed the same shape twice. Tonight, he meant to finish it.
The tracks led into spruce woods. Snow sifted through the beam of his flashlight. Ahead, something whimpered; not animal, not quite. Mack slowed and raised the gun.
In a hollow lay his deputy, Kyle Brennan, uniform shredded, shoulder matted with blood. The wound matched the one he’d given the beast.
He lowered the weapon. “Kyle?”
The boy’s lips were blue. “You don’t understand, Sheriff… it hurts so bad.”
Mack stepped closer. He’d suspected for weeks, but suspicion wasn’t proof, and shooting a man on suspicion was the devil’s work. He reached out to help him rise.
The eyes changed first. Gold burned through blue, pupils narrowing to slits. Mack tried to bring the shotgun up, but mercy was too deep. The last thing he saw was the muzzle flash reflected in the creature’s teeth.
He had known what the thing was. He had known and could not bring himself to strike.
That is how every civilization dies, not through ignorance of evil, but through heartbreak in the moment of recognition.
The Moral Timeline
After the Second World War, evil had a face. The swastika left no doubt. The men who stormed Normandy were good; the men who filled the camps of the Axis were not. Kamikaze pilots slaughtered thousands of brave young men on ships in the Pacific. Stories reflected that certainty of a clear good and evil: High Noon, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke. Courage meant something because sin was real.
Then came the postmodernists.
Deconstructionism swept universities and publishing houses. Theorists denied that stories carried truth at all. The hero became a construct of power; every righteous act was secretly oppressive. Virtue could exist only with irony. Writers who once sought truth began dismantling it…
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