Hi-yo loyal followers. It's been some time since my last post and for that you have my deepest apologies. This is a short story that was dissected out of a longer unpublished novel. I am submitting it to a contest and wanted to share it with my followers and get any feedback you feel like sharing. Thanks and Happy Reading!
The night was a living thing. Asher moved through it with a fluid grace. His prey was elusive, but he would find it. He would find it and he would kill it. His eyes pierced the darkness, laying bare a landscape ghosted with pale moonlight. That was enough for Asher’s senses. He blazed across the forested countryside like a painters brush across a canvas, swift and sure. The humid night air stroked his skin with the feather light caresses of a lover. The black sky arced overhead, broken by the twinkling of a myriad of stars. A dense fog was beginning to roll in off of the nearby lake, but that was no obstacle, he could track by scent as easily as sight.
As he moved deeper into the forest he caught a metallic odor, instinctively slowed and came to a standstill, pausing in his urgent pursuit. He knew that scent, human blood. Far too often had he experienced it, yet it still filled him with dread. Testing the air with all of his senses, Asher located the source of the unpleasant aroma and moved toward it. A short distance to the left of his original path, he found the body. She was so young, he sighed to himself. The woman’s flesh was ravaged by terrible gashes, her left leg was missing from a point just above the knee and half of her head on that same side had been chewed to an unrecognizable mess. He crouched beside the mangled corpse. The sharp, ferrous scent of her blood assaulted him. He flared his nostrils at the offensive odor, looked sadly at the body and sighed. The women were always the worst. At least he could pretend to himself that men had some kind of a fighting chance.
Shaking his head slightly Asher reached into the right cargo pocket of his fatigues and retrieved a small plastic case. Tripping the latch he revealed a miniature blood analysis kit. With a great sense of urgency he used a syringe to collect a small amount of blood from the poor woman’s body. He wanted to continue his pursuit, but he had to know if the woman would turn. The change was different for each person infected. It could be nearly instantaneous, or it could take as long as several hours. He had to know, he couldn’t leave a potential Bakkan behind him.
Depositing the blood into a vial he added a chemical agent, sat back on his heels and swirled the suspension in his hand like a living centrifuge. Nothing happened. Asher sighed in relief. This one wouldn’t turn. She was truly dead. Lucky for her. Saying a quick prayer for her soul he stood and just stared at the body indecisively for a moment. He knew that this woman was simply dead, not infected, but every fiber of his being screamed at him to take off her head. He fought against the instincts that decades of hunting these nightmares had instilled in him and left the woman’s body without desecrating it. Sea blue eyes scanned the forest around him but found no further indications of his quarry. With a final glance and a silent prayer that no other innocents found themselves in the path of this monstrosity, he resumed the chase. No matter what, he must reach the Sleeper first.
A howl pierced the darkness. Tearing through the stillness like a shard of glass through flesh, not clean and precise, but rough and violent, leaving a gaping hole with jagged edges bleeding fear in the night. Asher’s pulse quickened as the cry called to the hunter in his blood. That’s what he was, of course. A hunter. A killer in fact. He swiftly resumed pursuit of his deadly foe. He had a charge of protection this night and he would not fail. The clay filled earth was firm beneath his booted feet as he raced onward into the gloom.
As his instincts followed the trail of his prey his mind wandered. Jeremiah had sent him to make sure that this Sleeper remained safe. His conversation with Jeremiah replayed itself in his mind.
“This man must be protected,” Jeremiah had said. “He is very important. He doesn’t know who he is, and I am not yet ready to reveal my suspicions, but it is my firm belief that Griffin Dade will play a pivotal role in our war. He is unique. Find him and keep him safe.”
“I will Jeremiah,” Asher had replied.
Jeremiah was a great man, and Asher held a great regard and respect for him. When Asher had first Awakened, it had been Jeremiah who had taken him under his wing and trained him in the ways of their order. The sensory overload he experienced had been devastatingly painful. Jeremiah had been his lifeline. The lessons had not been easy, for Jeremiah was a demanding taskmaster. Asher understood, however, that Jeremiah’s seeming hardness was so that he would learn the skills he needed to survive in his new world.
Asher chuckled to himself. And what a world it is, he thought. He had been so naïve before his Awakening. He thought then that the world was so simple to understand and that he knew his place in it. How wrong he had been. His body had undergone drastic changes and his emotional state had been fragile during the process. Several times he had lashed out in fury at Jeremiah and the others who had been trying to help him cope and adjust. If they had been normal humans, he might have killed them.
A naturally occurring Awakening was seldom an easy or pleasant experience, especially considering that the most common trigger for the change was the stress associated with some kind of life threatening event. Asher thought back to his own Awakening. He had been twenty-one years old. A night of drinking, driving too fast, add icy roads…well, two plus two equals four, as they say. The next thing Asher had known he was upside down in a ditch inside a mass of twisted, smoking metal that only vaguely resembled the Chevy pickup truck it had once been. As he had looked around dazedly, he had seen a trail of gasoline outside the car. Smoke had filled the air and he had known he was going to die.
What had happened next was unbelievable. Asher had felt his skin begin to itch and tingle. His pulse had quickened to an uncomfortable rate. His breathing had become erratic. Sweat had poured from every pore of his body. Strange things had started happening to his eyes. Odd colors were swirling and flashing before him. The sound of his own heartbeat had rung sharply in his ears. Suddenly, he had felt as if he couldn’t keep still and he began to jerk and thrash in a crazed attempt to dislodge his body from the deathtrap that contained it. Asher had thrust his leg at the crumpled door and watched in shock as it ripped off the car and crashed to the earth twenty feet away. Grasping his jammed seat belt Asher had wrenched it from its moorings and then thrown himself from the burning vehicle. He had run as fast as he could to escape the fate that tried so desperately to claim him. When he heard the explosion he had stopped and looked back. Surprisingly, he had traveled several hundred yards in just a few moments.
The flames had looked remarkable. He could see colors in them he had never noticed before, odd intermingling of blue, red and yellow. It had been beautiful in a surreal, macabre way. And the smell had been overwhelming. Asher remembered how he had felt that night so long ago. That had been in July of 1937. Jeremiah had found him shortly after as he struggled to adapt to his newfound abilities and he had been a member of the Order ever since. He thought back to that first meeting with the man who would become his mentor and his friend.
Life in the Order had always been challenging, but things had been unusually bad lately. This was his third hunt in the past two months. Asher hadn’t seen such prolific activity in the past seventy years. Many debates had raged in council as to the cause, but no one really knew. The beasts they hunted were normally very rare. In fact, in recent years Asher had begun to harbor a secret hope that perhaps they were going extinct. It appeared, however, that such was not the case.
Another cry rang out in the stillness. Asher refocused and increased his pace. He must reach the beast before it killed again. Suddenly he caught some new scents floating on the muggy night air. One was a lesser variant of the musky animal trail he tracked, clouded with harsh chemical overtones. That would be a human. There was also another scent. This one smelled more like teakwood than musk. It must be Griffin Dade, the Sleeper. Asher’s heart began to pound. He must reach the Sleeper ahead of the beast he hunted. His Order was always too few in number and any Sleepers they discovered must be protected in the hopes that they might Awaken and join the fight. Of course all humans were precious and the Order struggled endlessly to keep them safe, but Sleepers were a rare commodity.
Asher glided through the fog shrouded trees. He moved easily through the inky blackness, slicing through the cool, dark night like a scythe through a field of wheat. He could now make out the sounds of a struggle not far ahead of him and he prayed that he was not too late. Suddenly he found himself in a small glade. Locking his knees he skidded to a stop as he saw a great dark body hurtling through the air toward him. Dodging to the side he barely avoided the monstrous beast he had been tracking as it slammed into a huge oak with enough force to crack bones. Shocked, he looked to the center of the glade. A young man was standing there. He was seeping blood from several deep bites on his shoulders and arms.
There was movement from the beast. It sprang to its feet and snarled in rage. As it bunched its muscles to spring at the young man, Asher threw himself toward the giant predator…
