Hunters (Redux)

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***

I stand up next to a mountain

George slammed his longsword into the contoured scabbard clinging to the back of his jumpsuit. The music blasted throughout the C-130. He checked the seals of the gray jumpsuit before doing a final weapons check, feeling his excitement rising. George loved what he did, a fact that earned George’s firm-mandated shrink a new yacht.

And chop it down with the edge of my hand.

“Rodriguez, that package nice and tight up there?” George said into his helmet.

Rodriguez turned and grabbed his crotch. “Package secured, New Guy. You just keep that sword sharp, Capullo.”

George laughed, shaking his head. New Guy? Some nicknames never left. He’d been a Hunter for what, fifteen years now? Seemed like only yesterday he was back in Fallujah. His great grand uncle passed into legend by storming Sword Beach with nothing but bagpipes. George passed into legend cutting down four Taliban fighters with his trademark longsword when the rest of his SAS squad’s ammo ran dry. At least as much of a legend as one can be when, strictly speaking, he and his men were never deployed, nor took part in any combat. He wondered where those envelopes were sealed at.

Two days after he shipped back, the Hunters came knocking at his London flat.

Lord knows I’m a Voodoo Child!

He tucked the silver bullet into the small flap on his jumpsuit’s breast. Today wouldn’t call for it, but he’d learned it’s better to be safe than sorry. He’d seen first hand what happened when the option wasn’t there, back when there were more of them. Were.

“Cut that shit, Geddy,” Captain Lucian said in his no-nonsense voice.

“Sorry, boss,” Geddy said in a tone that offered no contrition, “how’s about something more appropriate?”

Moments later, the booming chorus of Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries replaced Hendrix. Lucian responded with a quick flip of his middle finger back toward the cockpit. George stifled a laugh.

When there were only a handful of people qualified for this job, despite almost eight billion people on Earth, certain decorum went out the cargo hold.

“Two minutes.”

Incidentally, the Hunters would shortly follow their proverbial decorum. George flipped an inquisitive thumbs up to the last member of the team–comms drowned out by the sudden onrush of air as the ramp descended. Ifunanya flashed him a thumbs up. She was somehow more serious than Lucian, but given what her file said, George couldn’t blame her. The mess they pulled her out of made Fallujah look like a Sunday stroll.

“Ay dios mío…”

As they pulled below the cloud cover, or what George realized was more aptly a smokescreen, they saw half of Los Angeles ablaze.

“How you still believe in God working this job, I’ll never understand, Rodriguez,” George said, more to distract himself than anything. It’s one thing to read a file; it’s quite another to see the tracts of burning land extending as far as the eye could see. The C-130 banked northward, and ocean replaced devastation.

“Some things stick with you, amigo.”

“One minu–shit. Bogey inbound!”

George’s heart jumped into his throat as the C-130 rolled to avoid… something.

The something gained immediate clarity as the fireball’s heat cooked the cargo bay.

“Bail! Bail!” Lucian commanded coolly. “Rodriguez, if that box doesn’t make it ashore…”

And before the threat fully coalesced, George was falling… falling… falling…

He fumbled at the ripcord, unable to grasp it in shaking fingers. The C-130’s open cargo door was right there, even as the plane grew ever smaller.

Then there was only fire.

Getty…

“Oh no,” Lucian said, and George watched another fireball rip through the wing. The rest of the plane broke up seconds later. He didn’t stand a chance.

“We’re next. Get flying.”

George finally found the ripcord and pulled. The glidewings deployed, and within seconds, he was skimming towards the island. Fireballs erupted somewhere near its center.

“She’ll be nested there. Stay on schedule, team,” Lucian said, knowing full well that they were, in fact, now the ones fully off schedule.

“Smoke inbound,” Rodriguez said. They’d all made it out of the plane then; George could see Ifunanya gliding half a league in front of him. On queue, the barrage from the Coast Guard cutter shadowing them popped dense smoke across the island.

“LZ clear.”

George hit the sand at a roll, pausing only to unlimber his standard issue M4. They had specially designed glider suits that would make a comic book writer envious, but couldn’t figure out laser rifles. One of the job’s many disappointments.

“Oi, package delivery,” Rodriguez chimed.

“Rally,” Lucian ordered, and a pin blipped on George’s HUD. All things considered, this was going exceedingly well.

What they lacked in laser rifles, they more than made up for in anti-material rifles, automatic shotguns, multiple grenade launchers, and heavy machine guns.

“Welcome to Bodega Rodriguez!” Rodriguez said, one foot propped on the crate, an MGL racked on his shoulder. George swapped his M4 for the Barrett M82. If Americans were good at one thing, it was making quality firearms. There was plenty to unpack there, but George left such matters to poets and filmmakers. Almost on instinct, he also grabbed an extraction flare.

“Alright, we gotta move. Barrage ending in ten… nine… “

As if on Lucian’s cue, the offshore rounds ceased, and they were running toward what low foliage remained on the island's windswept landscape. Their suits blurred and contoured to the sandy and rugged terrain of Santa Rosa Island.

“Movement ahead,” Lucian said, and they hit the deck along a deep sand dune. By George’s reckoning they had to be close. A roar bellowed across the island, and George really hoped their prey could not hear his thoughts.

“George, Ifu, fire support, hundred meter spread. Rodriguez, take the right. You all know what to do.”

They nodded, then crawled toward their respective positions. Smoke still hung heavy in the air, helping with concealment, but minimizing visibility.

“Sound off.”

“Ready, boss,” Rodriguez said.

“Ready,” Ifu said, her voice trembling ever so slightly. George didn’t blame her.

“Ready,” George said. He took a deep breath and exhaled, emptying his lungs. The world around him slowed.

“Go.”

Vampires, Werewolves, Chimeras, Demons: all child’s play compared to Dragons.

And the one that filled George’s scope was the largest he had ever seen. Where most were the size of a Black Hawk helicopter, this mess of forest-green scales before him rivaled a small airliner.

Fortunately, the tactics for taking down a dragon with a four-Hunter team remained the same.

From his perch on the right, Rodriguez’s MGL pumped grenades of a Geneva Convention-violating concoction of heavier-than-air combustible vapors into the Dragon’s nest. Dragons weren’t stupid brutes, and the mixture prevented it bringing its fire to bear.

In a reasonable animalistic response, the Dragon would then either take to the air, or create a draft to flush the vapors away. George watched the great wings fold out–easily two-hundred feet of translucent membrane from taloned tip to taloned tip. Right on cue, Lucian unloaded his auto shotgun, flechettes shredding the membranes and keeping the great beast beached.

The beast's pain would have saddened George. Would have, had he not seen the destruction it wrought.

He readied his sniper rifle.

Dragon scales created a tight lattice impregnable by even the strongest of tungsten rounds. At the first sign of danger, like from a bombardment, the Dragon would curl into a tight ball where even a direct hit from a Hellfire missile wouldn’t affect it. That left three options.

Left with naught but teeth and talons, the dragon charged Lucian’s position. Ifu took aim with the LMG and fired concentrated bursts into the softer scales on the underbelly. George scanned, waiting, waiting, waiting for an opening to appear for his Barrett to exploit. Option 1: If none did, he could go for the eyes, but that was a one-in-a-million shot. Option 2, then.

Option 3 was suicide.

Despite Ifu’s constant and well-trained fire, none of the softer underbelly scales broke off.

The dragon bore down on Lucian, its taloned wings climbing up the dune. George aimed at its head and fired, trying to distract the beast, but to no effect. Rodriguez ditched his MGL and opened up with his own M4 racked with explosive rounds from a kneeling position on the dune’s lip.

And George realized there was a problem with the dragon’s size.

As if in slow motion, the Dragon’s taloned wing lashed out across the dune, catching Rodriguez through his knee; the ensuing scream tripped the sound dampener in George’s helmet.

It shouldn’t have changed anything, but for the briefest moment, Ifu and Lucian stopped firing.

And in that moment, the Dragon struck again. It lifted its beautifully terrible head over the edge of the dune toward Lucian.

“Fuck me.”

Fitting last words from their stoic captain.

“What the fuck do we do now?” Ifu said, impressively calmly if George was honest.

“Do you trust me?”

“Not at all.”

“Then you might just survive. Get down.”

She did so as George sparked the extraction flare. A quick flick of the wrist, and the world exploded in a fireball they’d see from the space station.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Ifu said, crawling back toward his position.

“Now do you really trust me?”

“Like hell.”

“Good, you’re going over the top.” George could feel Ifu’s eyes bore into his soul. “I have a plan,” he added quickly, as if that made the order any easier to stomach. The sand vibrated as the Dragon approached the lip of the dune.

“I am no damsel.”

“Consider yourself bait then if it makes you feel better.”

Option 3 it was.

He tossed his rifle to the sand; it would do him no good now. If Ifu harbored any notions of George’s sanity, he presumed said notions more dead than Lucian.

“Ready?”

The problem with the third way was it was predicated on the dragon being in a barbeque-y mood.

Ifu nodded and threw herself over the dune.

One breath…

Two breaths…

George drew his longsword and readied himself near the top of the dune, trying to find the best footing for what he was about to do.

The Dragon was, thankfully, perfectly below them. As Ifu slid down the dune, the great beast puffed its chest, smoke rising out of its nostrils.

There was a tiny point, too small for a large caliber bullet, right where the Dragon’s palate ended, that if you managed to pierce, drew a straight line into the Dragon’s hindbrain.

And the only time a Dragon exposed this point was when it prepared its fire, in this instance to engulf Ifu.

As if full of understandable incredulity, the Dragon lifted its head from Ifu toward the tiny, newly appeared spec of meat jumping through the air toward its horned head.

In the final twist of incredible fortuity, this particular great dragon decided that it wanted its meat rare and did not atomize George in a stream of fire that made napalm look like a nice Christmas dessert jelly. It opened its jaw, revealing row upon row of razor-sharp teeth.

George’s longsword bit deep sinewy flesh, and the dragon crumpled without a sound.

Autonomic brain functions were astounding.

Then for the second time in under an hour, George was falling. He slammed against the sand, glad for the minimal cushion it provided, and rolled as fast as he could before the massive falling carcass crushed him. After all this, that would be his luck. Everything went black anyway.

The next thing he felt was an unceasing banging against his helmet.

It was Ifu.

Once, George would have laughed in death’s face. Today, he simply closed his eyes.

***

Two days later, George awoke still sore in his cramped London flat to an entirely unwelcome buzzing. His first thought was who the bloody hell buzzes the doorbell, his second was who the bloody hell buzzes the doorbell at three in the morning, and his third was right, I kill monsters for a living, I should grab my gun.

He peered into the empty street. George’s stoop was empty. Annoyed, he closed the door slowly, but stopped as it brushed up against an unmarked cardboard box on his welcome mat.

He sighed.

Knowing that he could literally be holding Pandora’s Box, George locked his door, deadbolt and all.

And after a quick examination, he wished it was Pandora’s Box; he had a neutron stabilizing field laying around somewhere that would negate the worst of those effects. A short message adorned the thin box: Open - DVH

George closed his eyes. He was tired, and there was nothing that said he had to open it now. In fact, there was nothing in his contract that said he had to open it up at all. He could chuck this box, and whatever it contained, in the Thames and… he didn’t even know. Given that every coffee and tea shop was full of teenage girls reading Romantasy these days, he imagined he could make a good living on his, of course carefully disguised and edited, memoirs.

Whatever path he chose, it wouldn’t be back into the fire. That thrill was gone.

Still, DVH deserved to hear it from him. The thin knock-off iPad (though it was assuredly some proprietary technology to DVH that was eons ahead of any actual iPad) immediately illuminated.

“Dr., I presume you understand the concept of time zones?”

“Do you think vampires care?” the decrepit man said. It struck George that he had never actually seen Dr. Van Helsing before, and he wished he never did–the man was a corpse one step out of the grave.

“How’s Rodriguez healing up?”

“His boot expenses have been halved, but he’ll be alright… We had to remove the left leg, you see…”

“Oh, I understood the joke. It was bad. Very bad. Anyway, Lucian usually sent a text, instead of this,” George said, waving at the screen.

“And Lucian is dead. Congratulations, Captain George Whitehall, you’re now Hunter Number One.”

“I reject the promotion.”

Now as he said it, he realized how dumb it sounded.

“And I’ve tried to reject living, yet here I am. Such are our curses. At least mine is an actual curse. I don’t even remember if it was Odin or Aurora who gave me this blessing of immortality.”

George saw each of their faces: Anita, John, Kai, Mo, Jessica, and now Getty and Lucian…

“I’m tired. I’m tired of seeing my friends…”

“And you think I enjoy it? But that’s the job. If you walk away now because you ‘feel bad,’ the monsters win. The monsters win, George. That’s what you want, fine. I’ll remind you of it when you’re watching hydras tear apart the Underground on the BBC. I’ll give it to Ifu then since she’s got bigger balls than you do, it seems.”

George sighed, knowing the Dr. had the right of it. Lesser men gave up. Not George. Not when there were Dragons to slay.

“Where are we off to?”

He wished Dr. Van Helsing did not smile; it was a decidedly disturbing sight. “I knew you’d come around. It seems there’s a spike of activity… again… in the American State of Florida. At least some sun will do you good.”

——————————————————————————————————————-

A/N:

I wouldn’t have been able to make this happen without Jon and Stephen and their unrelenting professionalism. More about the process here:

Stay tuned for the Jon and Stephen Recorded Readings podcast’s triumphant return for Season 3: The Comedy Season. First episode airing September 5, 2025. Seriously, give them a listen. There’s no better way to support independent artists.

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