The three of us walked through the double doors, letting them swing back and forth like an old west saloon. The light of the moon out over the water shone in through the windows on our right. I could see another exit on the far end of the room opposite the survivors’ barricade. If we could distract the thing long enough, maybe they could escape. I could hear the theme from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in my head as the were-pair turned towards the noise of our entrance. My childhood gunslinger dreams quickly shattered on the ground.

“Hunter!” Tony’s familiar voice cried out from the barricade. “Get my niece the hell out of here before something happens!”

“And here I was trying to make an entrance. Eh, what the hell?” I opened fire with both of the pistols in my hands, alternating one head to the other in my targeting. Even the silver slugs seemed to be barely an inconvenience to the genetic mistake towering over the room. As it reared its’ head back and roared I could imagine small little people running around a mini Tokyo at its feet.

Mara, in full were form, leaped on the thing’s back while it was distracted. She grabbed and clawed at its throat, it was like watching a Chihuahua take on a Great Dane. The beast grabbed onto Mara’s arm and tore it away from its neck. It twisted her arm around, and a series of popping sounds echoed as it used the limb to slam her into the ground. It reached down and grabbed her by the neck, lifting her with one hand and clasping her windpipe in a vice grip.

She just dangled there for a moment, like the fight had just drained out of her. I had to give the thing a different target before it decided its toy wasn’t fun anymore. I fired the last of the bullets in the pistols; one got lucky and tagged the beast’s eye. The one head screamed as silver dripped out the eye socket, the other head looking to see what was wrong. If Mara hadn’t been hanging bonelessly from its hand it would almost seem comical. It tossed Mara’s limp form aside, her body hitting the wall with enough force to crack the plaster.

The were-ettin started after her prone form but Lisa sent a gout of flame out to change its mind. Before I could even register, the thing charged at me ready to take out all its anger. I ducked out of the way of its claws, dropping the pistols to the ground and pulling out a pair of silver knives. I punched out into its gut with the blades perforating its stomach a few times. In my mind I was doing well, taking the monster on toe to toe. As a massive claw covered nearly my entire head and lifted me off the ground I realized just how far out of my weight class I was fighting. The thing slammed my head against the ground so hard that my vision went dark. On the plus side, I didn’t feel the next two times it repeated the action.

I could taste blood in my mouth and I was pretty sure I swallowed one of my teeth. I blinked away the blackness to see the were-pair looming over me, its eyes looking wildly at me like a pork chop. It raised both its claws high above its head, ready to finish me off. I tried to scramble backwards but my limbs just jerked spasmodically. Down came those arms, like a sledgehammer ready to end me. That final blow never came, however. Lisa, that little bundle of energy and muscles, was there to take the blow for me.

She crouched over me, aquamarine in hand casting a light bluish field over the two of us. The look of confusion on the monster’s face would have made me laugh if I could move any part of my body. The thing’s confusion quickly turned to anger and it unleashed its full fury on us. With each hit I could see Lisa’s face contort with concentration, her arm trying to absorb the force of the strikes. With her other hand, she pulled out an amber-colored stone from one of her pouches. She pressed the rock against my chest and I was filled with a warm energy. I still felt like crap but at least I could pretend I didn’t for a while.

It was then that the situation, having been just great so far, took a rapid nosedive. Tony must have thought the creature was distracted enough to make a run for the side door. He stepped over one of the chairs they had used and ran like I’d never seen him run before. He made it halfway before the chair fell over. Both heads swerved in unison towards Tony, he didn’t even look up, intently staring ahead at his goal. With one step the thing caught up to Tony and raked its claws straight up his back.

The flesh parted beneath those claws like butter under a laser beam. Blood exploded from the wound as Tony was launched through the door into the hall where he lay unmoving. Above me, I could see all the blood drain from Lisa’s face.

“No no no no no no no…” Lisa stood up, her legs shaking. The creature turned towards her, claws still dripping with Tony’s blood, and emitted a high-pitched scream that ripped through my brain. Lisa’s wail rose to match the thing’s sound and pulled out a white quartz and extended a trembling hand out to the creature. The temperature in the room dropped several degrees and flakes of ice formed in the air. White frost formed on the monster’s fur as the cold became unbearable. Ice formed over one of the thing’s heads stretching down across its chest to its arm. “He was my family! I can’t again… can’t…WON’T!”

She produced two pieces of graphite, clapping them together with a sound like thunder. Electricity arced between her two hands spreading them apart letting the charge build up. With a grunt of effort, she pushed both hands at the monster releasing all the stored energy in one giant blast. All the hairs I had on my body stood up as the lightning threw the thing across the room into the wall. Lisa screamed in agony as she kept pumping lightning into the thing’s unmoving form, scorching the wall behind it. Chunks of wall and even ceiling collapsed on the body as it fell to the ground lifeless.

“I can’t be alone again…” Lisa slumped to the ground, sobbing into her hand. “Can’t lose… my family… don’t want to… alone again.”

I went over to where she was weeping, sometimes I forget how she’s barely older than my daughter. She had balled herself up so small she reminded me of my daughter years ago when a boy first broke her heart. I put my hands on her shoulders, gently, like I was afraid to break her.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“It’s okay, kid, you won’t be. I’ll make sure of it.” Mara groaned and moved a little where she had been thrown. The people behind the barricade began peeking out, checking if it was safe. I took off my coat and put it over Mara so no one would see her as she shifted back. I went back to Lisa who was still trying to compose herself. I heard a noise behind me and at first, I thought it was just the survivors coming out from hiding. The first scream told me it wasn’t so simple.

I turned to see the were-beast standing up from the rubble. If possible, it looked even more disturbing. One of its heads and its arms were gone, except for a bloody scorched stump. The whole room smelled of burnt dog hair and char ass the thing limped forward like a hound from hell. Lisa didn’t even look up, she had put so much into that last attack that she didn’t even have enough to stand. I drew my knives again, stepping between her and the nightmare.

The thing built up to a run as it charged at us. I stepped forward, ready to keep this angry steamroller from reaching Lisa. Two steps away from us it launched sideways towards the windows. Down the hallway, Tony lay on his stomach in a trail of blood with a belt-fed HK21. He must have dragged himself to his office and back with the gun despite his injuries.

“Who the hell do you think I am!!!” He shouted, holding down the trigger and letting loose a hailstorm of bullets. Every bullet impact drove the creature closer to the window and finally sent it crashing through the window out into the dark night. I ran to the window and looked out to see movement near where the thing had landed. At first, I wondered just what it would take to kill this thing but then I realized that the movement wasn’t coming from the creature. There were figures gathering around the fallen monster.

Three people, dressed in black so completely as to not even allow eye holes surrounded the were. Drawing some sort of katana-looking blades they quickly set about slicing the body into pieces. They glanced upwards as one, seeing me standing in the window before they leaped backward disappearing into the shadows from which they had come.

“Hunter, there’s a full emergency rollout heading your way. ETA less than five minutes.” I looked around the room, from Mara just getting up off the floor to Tony having passed out on top of his gun to Lisa still sitting motionless… there was no way we were getting out of here before the authorities arrived. The best we could do is help the survivors and hope for the best. I motioned for the people limping out from behind the barrier to follow me and started leading them out of the building.

~ * ~

Fifteen minutes later the entire area around ARC was filled with lights and people. Emergency workers swept the building for additional survivors while the people we had led out were being worked on by EMTs. Tony had been loaded into an ambulance that had sped off to the nearest hospital to get him into surgery. The workers looking after him said we would hear something later today but their grim faces told me they didn’t think he had a chance. They obviously didn’t know Tony the way I did. If death came for him he would somehow out-stubborn the reaper and send him packing.

Seven people… seven out of the over fifty on the overnight shift at ARC had survived the attack. Most only thanks to Tony’s intervention. Mara and Lisa were up and around more, the activity seemed to do wonders in their recovery. Mara chatted with some of the officers on scene wrapped in a firefighter’s jacket. Other trucks were slowly gathering in the area, local news vans crowded the area outside the police lines. The officers shifted the barriers to let a government-looking car through into the authorized area. When it came to a stop in front of the building out stepped Frederick Colton.

He didn’t look a thing like when I had seen him on the television. He was dressed in old, wrinkled clothes that looked like he had slept in them. He was older than me but his eyes looked ancient, tired… like a person who had seen too much and been changed by it forever. He was accompanied by two men in suits wherever he walked, they stood at his shoulders. Some of the captains on the scene told him what had happened through the night. His eyes widened more than once but at the end, the two in suits began shouting and gesturing at me.

Colton started walking towards me with his escort in tow. He exchanged some heated words with them before approaching alone. Up close his mousy gray hair and blue eyes looked out of place in a government job, most in positions like his had more of an air of calculated indifference. Colton seemed more like the crazy uncle no one talked about in the family. He stood a bit away from me and just looked me over for a few seconds.

“So which Hunter are you?” He finally broke the silence between us.

“Not sure what you mean.”

“I’ve been presented tonight with two very different pictures of you. One is Derek Hunter, a terrorist, who instigated this attack on ARC as some sort of revenge plot… the other is a man who ran in out of the night trying to save the lives of an organization that had distanced itself from him. I have a hard time believing you could be both so the question is… which Hunter are you?”

“I was just trying to do what the company trained me to. Kill the monsters.” The phrase I lived my life by for so long felt different… Mara… George… no, exceptions to the rule nothing more.

“I suppose that is one way to look at things.” Colton glanced over his shoulder at his two shadows. “These two want me to put you in chains and toss you down the nearest hole. I think they picked me for this job because a washed-up old colonel would be used to following orders and easy to control. That way if you make a giant cock-up of the situation they can lay it at my feet. They probably should have looked harder into the redacted part of my file before they decided that.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Myself?” He chuckled to himself. “I’m going to go over there and give a statement they force-feed me to the press. I figure you can wait at least till I’m done over there, right? It would be terribly inconvenient if you didn’t wait. I would have to organize an entire manhunt just to bring you in. The manpower for that sort of thing would take time to organize… say like forty-eight hours?”

I nodded, shocked. The higher-ups really did not know what they had gotten themselves into when they hired this man. I couldn’t imagine the headaches he would give them if he was allowed to continue in the position.

“If you aren’t responsible for this whole mess going around you may just be the only one close enough to actually do something about it. I fancy myself a decent judge of character after so many years… don’t you dare go proving me wrong. Let’s just see how pissed off they get if we can stop what they seem to be betting on from happening.”

Colton turned and went back to the two men in their suits. Immediately the buzz around him increased tenfold as they made him television-ready. The rumbled clothes were quickly replaced with a smartly tailored suit as stylists tried to tame the wildness in his hair. I could easily see by his demeanor that men would fight for him. Who knows, if I could clear my name maybe I would too. I gathered up Mara and Lisa and the three of us quietly slipped away.