Hunter

He knew the best place to find them was in the dark music clubs. The coffee houses that stayed open all night. In every city there were at least two. It was their weakness, the loneliness. They need to congregate & gather. In every case he had found a dozen, cutting them out of their crowd of followers and copycats.

Following them in the breaking dawn to their secret lairs, pretenders lived in houses and apartments, with their parents. The real ones were alone, in the night darkened stinking alleys and near abandoned buildings.

He slipped the hollow metal needles into the specially padded pouches in his jacket. These babies were 18 inches long with tapering tempered surgical steel. Once the vitals were pierced, anyone would go down real or pretender. He was careful to only take down the real ones.

It was snowing. That was how he knew he would make a kill tonight. Only the real ones came out in this weather. Those who could survive any car wreck and to whom cold meant nothing. He left the stuffy steamy warmth of the cheap hotel room to face the biting New England wind laden with miniature versions of the needles he carried.

There were few cars brushing past in the slushy street and fewer pedestrians. As he neared the side street a clump of black clad forms disentangled itself and dispersed in many directions. Some down the street to the dunking donuts, some across to the convenience store. He followed slowly, shielding himself from the full blast of the chilling winds. Ahead in the short distance lay the faint flashing of the club's neon hidden in the blizzard.

The hulking twin bouncers checked his ID and let him in. $10 was a small fee to pay for warmth and the possibility of a larger payday. The anteroom was empty. The measured tremble of amplified bass led him thru the archway that fronted the dance floor.

Which one?

The slim fairy like waif, the white devil locked boy, the Chinese youth with studded leather samurai armor, or the buxom wench with the full flaring skirts? He could hear his heart beating in his ears over the keening roar of industrial music.

They would never take center stage. Only when the crowd came full would they set foot on the flashing bright floor where their archetypal differences blended into the crowd of facsimiles. Another couple twirled under the lights. Familiar but not the ones he was looking for. He bought a mineral water and leaned in the shadows, watching, waiting... Patient.

A man lurched onto him."Sorry." Tall big and hairy.

"Don't worry about it."

"What do you think about the one with the blue streaks?" he said, the smell of whiskey strong.

He thought she was underweight, pale, starving, and probably strung out."Ok, I guess."

"She's a goddess!" The man turned back to the floor. "A goddess." he repeated staggering away.

He reached over for his bottle. In places like this, he would be inconspicuous if he was empty handed. Water was his only drink as it was one that came in a sealed bottle to stem the chances of contamination.

He sipped again. Time passed.

There were 3 he was sure of on the floor. There were two males and one female. One was a tall and auburn, while the second tiny & jet black. She gave the aura of a graceful feline. There was no way he could deal with them all here now at the club. It would have to be later. His tactic was to take the stronger down first and the rest would fall quickly.

A girl stepped onto the floor with sun-kissed silky blonde hair. She moved with the skill of 10 years of ballet practice. Her face... he paused. Sara... no! Sara was gone in the mental hospital years ago, long before today. Her mother had looked almost like that when he married her. A chill moved down his spine returning to his throat with the hidden photo montage of memory.

(The boy was hunched between her legs, in the alley over her. Her neck shining red in the white luminance of his halogen flashlight he was using. He had lunged forward.

"You don't understand!" The voice cracked in his ears before the heavy casing of the Mag-lite descended on his young skull, blood and bone cracking under his arm.

Memory would replay sound from the following days.

"What father, seeing his daughter lying brutalized would not attack her assailant?" The defense lawyer, giving his summation

"Not guilty. Temporary insanity."

Another voice, calm and authoritative, "You have a way with your hands, Mr. Murphy. Would you like to work for us?")

He was dancing with her now, a waltz fitting neatly and bizarrely to the rhythm of the music.. Not the stiff slow mannequin moves of the monochrome tatters around them. He held her gently, the sheer black vole of her skirts flowing like water about them, like the white lace of Lucy's wedding gown. He found his bottle of water still held in his hand and took a sip. From somewhere behind his eyes, a sledgehammer pounded away. He reopened them to see the flashing lasers in the grey spaces above his head.

Around him the floor had come alive, fifty or sixty dancers fill the space. One face seemed familiar, and another. Like the faces in the mad dream he had been living for 15 years.

(The voice of a hard well dressed man behind a barren leather trimmed desk, "You have a talent, for finding these demons that hide in human form. We simply give you a card, the weapons, and the training to dispatch them. You will not be prosecuted or imprisoned. You will be doing the world an important duty by saving the souls of these fallen children; as well as doing their immortal souls and their parents a favor."

"Your reward? I foresee a wealthy and quiet retirement for you. All this because you have a gift that is gravely needed in this trying time before judgment day. For on that day, we must be ready to fight! We have to take the side of righteousness and if we can decimate our enemy before it can rise...well that gives us the better chance, shall we say?")

She was before him smelling of Charlie the perfume. Her hair was the same color, her scent different, an earthy one. No, this was not his daughter Sara. Her eyes met his. Memories blinding him with hindsight...

("Daddy, he is not evil. He's just a boy and I love him!"

His own voice bitter and harsh in his mind's ears, "As long as you live under this roof you obey me. Get rid of that trash."

She had run out of the house crying.

He had started looking for her hours later when Lucy refused to go to bed, calling him a brute and domineering ass. He went looking because he could not admit that she was right. He had lost control over his daughter. As he aged, he was becoming surly and unreasonable.

He found her with that asshole boyfriend in the alley behind that weird Zombie club. Her shirt open and her breast so like her mothers, high and fully exposed for all to see. His baby girl was lying half-naked like a common slut in an alley.

Musky... that's what they called it. She smelled musky she wrapped her long silk arms around him and his mouth went dry. He took another sip and his eyes burned.

18 year old Danny Wheeler was dead of blunt force trauma. His beautiful daughter Sara was in a mental hospital. The boy had sliced her throat open and the sick bastard had a belly full of her blood at his autopsy. Satanic vampire freaks. Sickos, he reeled.)

She drew him off the floor as he was beginning to stagger a little. Her face was full of concern as she let him to a darkened table. He looked at the clock 11:30, no it had to be later than that. Time felt drawn out. He could hear her ask if he was alright over the heartbeat music.

Some one brought a cup with steaming liquid. He smelled it. It was black, strong, bitter coffee that he sipped at slowly. She smiled gently at his expression and brushed over some sugar and cream thoughtfully so like her mother.

First one packet, then two. He stirred it idly watching the dance floor slowly thin out at a slow dance. He lifted the hot cup to his lips and drank the entire contents of the cup in three swallows.

Bitter coffee. That happened in the city when the pipes were old. Copper pipes.

Sugar & cream on a table in a dance club.

A slow movement caught his eye as he stared trying to fathom his fear in the empty cup on the table in front of him.

She rewound the scarf from her throat as she sat, looking calmly at him and waiting. From her shoulder to the clavicle was a familiar looking scar.

("Plastic surgery can correct that. But I'm afraid that in her mind, you will always be someone she hates. Only time can heal that wound. And her willingness to admit what happened.")

Before him stood the boy with the white streak. He placed his fish white hand on the girls shoulder and threw his head back to flip his hair from his eyes. Over his eye was a dent leading up into the hairline. Some might call it a Frankenstein crease. Button black eyes stared at him.

(Grandpa telling him when he was a boy, "After a person has had a head injury, when they heal, their hair usually grows in white in that spot.")

A knife ripped from his stomach to his throat, he tried to vomit up the coffee. No use. He could not breathe and his muscles began to spasm. He felt his back arch and saw the scintillating strands of glitter hung high above. All too suddenly, there were hands on his shoulders, waist, and feet lifting him. Blue eyes regarding him from the china doll familiar face.

"You're dying." calm voices "Just let go." The needles in his coat. They must not find them.

Too late, his belly went cold. He was lifted out of the chair. Stiff as a board. Light as a feather. Hands carried him ceremoniously across the dance floor and levered him up a flight of stairs. Cold.

The snow had stopped. They lay him on the roof of the club. He was frozen stiff in living rigor mortis with eyes to the heavens as they passed their swift hands over his body. His lungs and bowels were the last muscle to freeze into immobility, expelling his final actions of humanity. Another spasm and he collapsed limp on the damp tar-paper, unseeing and unfeeling.

Around him they felt no cold as he knew. They passed bottles of a softly glowing green liquid, waiting, for what.

Dark grey ceiling became pale. Somewhere in the shuffle upstairs he had lost his jacket. Now he realized that the passing hands had stripped him naked. Sara stood before him.

"I tried to explain to you once before, Daddy." she whispered in his brain. "I could not be one if it were not inherited. It's not like in the movies." He could see them gather about him. "We want you to understand completely." He remembered all of their faces, each representing a rising set of figures on his checks and a deposit in his bank account.

Fire plunged into his hand thanks to one needle. Then, the other hand, and both feet, one by one. Only when the girl he had left spread in a restroom in Paris pierced his penis had he regained enough control of his body to scream. But others put an end to that by placing their long silver spines thru his lungs.

"Leave his eyes." Sara said. His first victim stood before him holding the last needle. Young, sad eyes. With a darters precision, the boy sent it downward thru his attacker's belly into the tar-paper and tin beneath his naked incapacitated body. As he stepped away, Sara wrapped him in her cloak to vanish into the growing shadow.

Bright blue dawn was creeping thru the clearing sky. There was a strafing burning from the metal and an itching over his bare skin. He was warm. So he would not freeze to death that was sure. But he was bleeding... that is what these fools were into. They had left him to bleed to death.

The dark shimmered from his view. Brightness... Day. The cold was gone he was warm, no hot. No the metal needles were melting into his wounds. He began to thrash but could not. He was still pinned down and surprisingly, still alive. Not quite! His flesh caught with a dry apologetic cough of a long time smoker. In the white light of the sun he saw the white wall of the hospital. Her white face as she spat on him.

"No not me!"

"You have a talent Mr. Murphy."

He screamed to the cold ice of dawn.

"I wouldn't be like this if you weren't." her words, his last memory before his rage incinerated it.

In answer to the ancient fire of day, a new flame sparked a light on a roof top-to quickly burn out in the chill winter morning.