SpecialSnowFlakeNVG-not named yet

>The streetlights stayed on.
For the first year at least.
I don't know exactly what happened. I couldn't tell anyone just what happened. The story I managed to grasp onto was that some woman in Patterson, just a couple towns over, had failed a drug test, and tried to pass it off as having been a prescribed medication. Of course if it were marijuana or the narcotics they pass out like candy, it might have been believable. Not this one though. She had the agency to have a forged prescription and everything... for medicinal meth. Since that time, some whispers about it became common place among shoppers at the market. Then the first tendrils of panic seemed to become a shadow hanging over the present and since then... Well, I couldn't ever keep track of it. Six months in my F5032 had come in, and I had thought that I'd be using it on camping trips when the panic died down and I wasn't too scared to leave my house unguarded.

Alas the day never came that I'd venture off into the wilderness to hike around at night and see the sights, climb the hills, and stow them on my helmet to watch the sunrise. Instead a few weeks later the panic reached a fever pitch, coming to a crescendo of fleet and terror as, for what reason I couldn't tell, soldiers came, and briefly left with all the other civilians. I found myself on that last day at the evac site watching the helicopter take off as I shot a flare up and it was promptly ignored. In the three years since then, I've found why people might have wanted to move out in the form of some strange wild pig, the species I have never been able to identify. I couldn't tell why the evacuation was such a fever pitch, but of course these strange new animals are quite a danger, so much so that I don't leave what is now, in a very literal sense MY neighborhood during the day.


The streetlights, after the first year, finally darkened for the last time, and much more than the intermittent entrance of a shadowed area, I used my F5032 to see.
The streetlights, for some reason, are the most prominent failing infrastructure of the town. Of course water treatment plants became stagnant with no one tending them, but that was dozens of miles away. No one could see that from my location. The mosquitoes seemed not to notice, almost as though they'd died out. During the days however.. well, to borrow a line from a famous horror movie... they mostly come in the day... mostly.

>July 30 2022
>Today is just another. Once upon a time, I was a fanatic of summer. A boy in a valley, and then, of course when I was a young child, in the summer of two thousand and three or four there was a heatwave, and the elementary school, in which I was attending first grade, would send us out to the blacktop during the day everyday... It was a hundred and ten degrees. Of course as the years went on I eventually became sensitive to the cold and... well I'll just say it fucking sucked having cold extremities all the time. Maybe I ate fewer calories and couldn't heat myself as well. Maybe something else.
Today, however, at the age of twenty six, I face something that I hadn't faced at the age of seven. And today, of course, I lack one very important luxury... Air conditioning.
>As I pick some fruit at the edge of the fence that used to divide my property from that of my neighbors, and now only serves to cordon off my "garden," really the rear yards of my neighbor's houses, fortified by soil I stol- Appropriated from the local hardware store.

I made my way inside at the time of six in the evening and turned on the computer. One of the many things that still survived, along with, surprisingly enough, the power grid, and began looking up websites. Of course, here in the valley, it was hot, as the sun glared and pounded down, luckily it wasn't drought anymore, as that would see me promptly starved, but it wasn't exactly cool. Finally I found a podcast, and clicked play while I waited for nightfall to pick up my military issue MK17, picked off the remains of a barricade along with many other fully automatic weapons, piles on piles of ammunition and several dozen of various models of night vision goggles including fusion systems, aviation systems, various electro-optics such as IR Laser modules, FLIR systems handheld and weapon mounted, even an FN MK20, the designated marksman rifle variant of their MK17. For at least two hours, to near the time of sunset I'll be occupied by some much needed noise in this world of silence, and I can simply sit back and radiate heat while I wait for sundown as I'm finally greeted by the podcast's standard starting soundbite, an audio recording of former president and fitness junkie George W. Bush stating "If you don't like. What we tell you to believe in, we'll kill ya."


>A song, podcast and two hours and twenty minutes later, I shut down the computer, grab my bump helmet, attach the L4G24 and the F5032, and walk out of the house in a plate carrier, sans rifle plates, which I had judged to be less obtrusive than my old chestrig, and headed out the door, helmet on the head, tubes rotated all the way outward and back, and MK17 safely carried with selector set to auto, and chamber empty.

In another hour and a half the sun had set from bright orange sunset to pink bloom, then a faint blue glow... and now pitch black.
While the street lights were out, I found myself in my most natural setting these last couple years, getting ready to pick off stragglers of these rather large pigs. I don't know what created the pigs, maybe genetically modified, maybe chemically changed or by some irradiated habitat issues over generations of hogs, so, to take no chances, I'd leave them to rot and get meat only from other animals whose range, in the absence of humans had expanded into town. In the mean time before I saw some deer, I'd have to be contented with the gray image of the goggles, just slightly blue, but much less than the outright turquoise color the L3 tubes who'd had their nights out, but nonetheless the image was crisp and clear, and while the color was less preferable, I'd grown attached to them, since they were the pair I'd gotten for myself when there were people here.

>Tonight, I'd chosen a rooftop to take a seat on a few thousand yards from my house overlooking the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe railroad where it passed through my town running north to south, the fields that used to be farms, and a couple of fields that, hilariously enough, were intended to be housing developments (I'd call them projects but even here, a good two hundred and fifty miles from any other human life, you'd be wrong to say the projects would ever be finished.)
A patch of ground full of some plant that I personally wouldn't eat straight from the root, but one of these pigs might, potentially grass or wheat, with Lengths of unconnected electric wire, spooled into two foot wide loops sticking out of the ground would serve as my closest killbox, and my further kill box would be to shoot over the railroad into the fields across the road, where some of these rather dangerous animals were likely to be grazing, or rather rooting.
>I lie down on the spur of the roof, MK 17 across my stomach, and chamber a round while I gaze at the stars.
Soon enough I hear the sounds of the vegetation crunching under a rather vigorous hoof. I sat up and looked down to the square patch of dirt.

    Of course there was an interesting development, one of my favorite species of mutant hogs just thirty yards away rooting up the meager plantlife that'd taken hold of the patch of dirt.
In an act of redundancy, I raised the MK17 to my face, bringing my objective down in line with the Aimpoint Micro that rested on top of the rifle, sitting comfortably on a riser mount for just such an occasion, placed the small dot on the animals shoulder, and gently milked the trigger.

>CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK.

I held the rifle rock solid, having plenty of practice doing so with it, and held the dot on the hog, sliding it from the back of the shoulder, unprotected by the bone of the shoulder, walking seven rounds from the shoulder blade to the center of its head, watching as the animal's four tusks, curved sharply outward at about sixty degrees up and down on each symmetrical set, caught into the ground, creating a snapping sound and in another second, as the animal flipped, a thud sound that sounded as though an animal of maybe the weight of a large man had fallen twenty feet onto concrete. It quickly revived and began to squirm back onto its feet while squealing bloody murder.
I once more raised the dot to the animal's head and squeezed off another four rounds of CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK into the general area of the base of its head, dropping it from its partially regained stance and rolling it onto its left side, showing me its soft underbelly. I felt pretty good for the precise application of force onto what I assumed must've been a five hundred pound hog, but I still felt a strong distaste for the squealing of the hog, which hadn't stopped despite that it was fully paralyzed.

Seeking relief from the undignified squeal of the animal, I flicked the switch on the rifle back to semi, and placed the dot just to the right of what I judged to be the animal's crotch, firing the first of the remaining nine rounds in the magazine into the belly of the hog just forward of its hind hips and walking it right a couple inches before firing another round, stopping with an empty magazine just forward of the sockets where the forelegs attached to the shoulders.
The last of the thrashing stopped, and in thirty seconds the squealing, which had immediately shrank and weakened was no more than a rattle dissolving into silence.

"Sometimes I wish I had a fifty cal with a PVS-27. What do you mean other Paul? I mean it'd be nice to have a heavy rifle, maybe a stopping rifle, with a fucking dedicated day optic and a clip on. But wouldn't that most likely blow out the tube? Maybe. I don't know."
Talking to yourself is a comfort out here. There's exactly fuck all in terms of other people to talk to anyway, one may as well talk to themself. Not like someone's gonna walk up on you and call you crazy.
"What about a nice Marauder D750? I'm sure we got one of those lying around. Maybe several. Hell, might even be a one o'seven A-one. Maybe a QDL."
>As I sat, I looked on toward the other houses nearby, and I saw one just a couple hundred yards to the north, it was perfect. It was a two story house with a roof that had a low slope angle, it seemed pretty tall and overlooked nearby cornfields, a minty fresh new park
perfect turf for a hog to be roaming in.
>One of the things that I learned very early on is that these hogs can kill people armed with guns... and they don't seem to be scared of gunshots when they're up close.
>It was a night like any other, I was trying to figure what the panic was about when I heard the last of the motorvehicles, a chinook flying away over my head and off to the horizon, I heard shooting in full auto and screams just a few hundred yards down the road.
>I moved from alleyway to allyway as the number of guns decreased, the screams became silent.
>The sun was already down, but that didn't stop these ones. Maybe they'd stumbled upon the soldiers, but I couldn't tell.

>I waited for the sounds of pigs devouring so nearby to die down. I waited about an hour and a half before I walked out to the post and found the desicrated and thoroughly dismembered remains of what appeared to be a squad from the national guard among dozens of dead pigs, judging by the inactive PVS-14's that were left in their active positions, and the PVS-7's, some of which were stowed, and had tripped their auto shutoff as was intended when their ancient and well worn mounts had been designed.
>The thing about PVS-7's though, is that they didn't have one hour shutoff timers like their counterparts a decade newer, instead, they had four hour shutoffs, so the PVS-7's donned and active at the time of the men's deaths still glowed with that P43 green hue, illuminating eyes and sockets among heavily disfigured patches of skin atop shredded and bloody bodies.
>If one really wished, they might be able to distinguish their blood trails from where they'd been dragged around by the hogs, but I didn't really wanna spare the attention span to pick those out among the sticky red goop that'd practically come to stand in the hudred yards or so of road surrounding them.
>It was one of those things I tried to simply never think about. But in the end, one thing is always evident.
The need for a way inside from a roof.
The pigs could never collapse a building... or at least they didn't, but they could certainly tree me, and had a couple of times. In one of these instances, I nearly fell weak from exposure when I was forced to spend days atop a roof, and outstayed my meager food and water supply that I'd brought with me.


Some houses had skylights, others had balconies, but one thing I've found I can rely on is detcord and blasting caps. It seems like a cure all for any situation at this point. Need a way into a house? Make a frame charge from detcord and blast a door in the roof, need a cat out of a tree? Need to loosen up a locked gate? Need something to break down dead hogs? Works okay for that too. The only thing det cord doesn't seem to do, besides exist in limitless quantity, is talk to you when your feeling lonely, or cuddle when you're cold at night.
>I looked out into the field and saw more animals yet approaching, something looked like a wolf, maybe a stray dog, couple sheep. The cows had long since died off, being that the cow is an animal more domesticated than even a dog, it wasn't surprising, then you just account for them being left in their pens. They weren't exactly going to make it in the wild anyway.
>Somewhere far out to my right I could see what looked like... a deer?
"Maybe. I've seen stranger things."
>I sighed to myself, thinking of the meat that I could be preparing all morning before collapsing into bed if only I'd brought the MK20 and the CO mini. I'd be able to hit it from here... only maybe... seven hundred and thirty yards? Buuuut then I wouldn't have full auto for the walk home and... yeah I still wish I had the MK-20.
>Time passed, and eventually I find that it's five something in the morning of july thirty-first. The horizon is brightened but not yet intruded by the sun as I flip up the nods, which turn off by themselves, fold the tubes to the sides, and begin making a sprint for home before the hogs come out in herds.


August 5 2022
>As I lie about in the day, a familiar sense of lassitude washing over me like a layer of plastic.
>At two in the afternoon I get a sense. Something to be done? Something I used to do?
>Doesn't matter, I celebrate birthdays with DAYS out hunting. It's always a good day to go out hunting. Maybe one day the wait will finally end.
>Hollow earth, Nazi antarctic bases, Soviet missile silos, the Red October... None of these things could compare alone or in combined total to the weight of boredom.
>I walked around the house wearing my helmet. goggles dancing above my head and searched for...SOMETHING. ANYTHING that called out to me.
>Nothing around really called out "TAKE ME! SHOOT HOGS WITH ME!"
>Semi auto... Full auto, antipersonnel, antimaterial, magnified optics, red dots, advanced electro-optics... nothing called to my mind... "ANTI HOG"
>Oh.... That'll do something.
>In one of the rooms I found an M-107A1 with a QDL, a fortyfive degree offset sight and a 4-10 power leupold MK4.
>And with that, I just need the thermal clip-on, some jerky, detcord, a couple blasting caps, some sunblock just in case that doesn't work, some spare batteries and some drinks to start out.
>In another hour, I'd found myself with the necessary supplies and heading down the road with some... unseasonable clouds beginning to block out the sun.
>The whistling of various songs, the words to which I honestly couldn't know, or even if I did, wouldn't know to associate with their syllables, grows louder.
>Whoever the previous owner of this heavy chunk of sheet metal and hidden solid parts was, they clearly weren't military. Couldn't be. Who but a three gunner would put a forty five degree offset sight on a FIFTY of all things?
>I couldn't help but look down the street at the sun, blackened by clouds, it merely peered through in a blackish gray haze against the surface. The world was almost to an apocalyptic sheen, dark surfaces were almost slate black, lighter surfaces were dimmed.
>Running into the built up areas of the city, perfectly preserved as they were, I couldn't help but feel that the forty five degree sight may be helpful.
>As I saw the first signs of where THEY had been, I could only think to rack the first round into the chamber, hearing the spring, less overpowering to the weight of the rounds than the magazines of smaller rifles, slowly clattering a round into the feed lips of the rifle, and the bolt slowly accelerating forward into battery, carrying a rather large cartridge into the chamber of the rifle, which was the rifle equivalent of a three and a half inch shotgun slug.
>I continued down the avenue, which ran from the east side of the town all the way to the west side of town.
>I decided to walk along the canal so that I might have the advantage of a slightly elevated position to force any hogs to haul their fat asses up the side of a berm in order to gore me.
"Maybe I'll feel better after some exercise...."