Hunter Wars Omnibus Edition (Books 1 - 3)

by SD Tanner

  The ground floor of the house was destroyed and the pervasive odor of vomit hung heavily in the air. The bodies of at least 50 dead hunters made it difficult to move through the house and they gingerly picked their way through them to what was left of the front door. Looking around the Ranch, there was little left of the stables and the barns. The Ranch had been completely lost in the attack. All they could do now was wait for Hatch to pick them up and take them all back to the Base.

  He turned to Ip, and was about to check the bullet wound on her shoulder, when she suddenly became alert and snarled. Her odd blue eyes were flashing angrily and then she grabbed his shirt and pulled him to run with her towards a craggy hill about 500 yards away. Dave, Jay, Pop and Max followed them and when he reached the hill, he saw a hunter crouched in the shadows wearing what looked like an armored tactical vest.

  ***

  Super hunter: We are your future you do not know. For little one you are slow to grow. When you are grown you will see. We are you and you are we. Then your humans will not let you be. For you are their enemy. They will kill you to be free.

  Ip speaks: But who are you to tell me so. Whatever could you fools know? You are still human, but just moved on. How can you speak for the will of the earth? It is just what you say and what is that worth?

  Super hunter: I stayed for you tonight is true. I want to prove we care for you.

  Ip speaks: You treat me as some kind of fool. You tried to kill my humans to be cruel. You lie and hide and call me yours. I think you have mistook my cause. Now my humans have you caught. Your night’s antics have been for naught.

  ***

  Ip didn’t approach the hunter, but stood glaring at it. The hunter looked from her to him and back again, and he wondered if the hunter and Ip were communicating.

  Clearly wondering the same thing, Pop asked, ‘Can she talk to ‘em?’

  Without taking his eyes or his gun off the hunter, he replied grimly, ‘We think so.’

  Pop asked, ‘Whatdaya wanna do?’

  He was about to answer when the hunter answered for him. It suddenly launched itself at Ip and, without thinking, he shot the hunter through the throat, shredding its brain stem. Ip hadn’t even flinched, but she snarled angrily at the corpse of the hunter.

  Turning to the others, he said, ‘We should take the body back to Lydia for a post mortem.’

  ‘Why do we wanna do that?’ Max asked.

  Looking grim, he replied, ‘The hunters were organized last night.’ Pointing to the hunter he’d just killed, he added. ‘And hunters don’t wear body armor. Lydia said the hunters are still evolvin’ and maybe this one’s a new type.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A dog is only as good as its master (TL)

  ‘The Ranch is gone,’ Gears said bluntly.

  Gears was on his way back from the Ranch and he’d radioed the Base. Sitting in the mission room, he asked, ‘What happened?’

  Sounding tired, Gears replied, ‘Massive hunter attack.’

  Worried, he asked, ‘How massive?’

  Gears replied, ‘Well over a hundred.’

  He’d never even heard of an attack of that size, but he’d never seen a hunters’ nest before that week either and he asked worriedly, ‘Is everyone okay?’

  Gears steady voice came through his ear bud and he said, ‘Everyone’s fine. Ip took a through and through on the right shoulder, but she’s okay.’

  They trained the trusted combat shooters to be careful when working with Ip and, feeling annoyed, he asked, ‘Who the hell shot her?’

  Gears replied calmly, ‘Dunno. Nobody thinks they did.’

  Still puzzled by the size of the attack, he asked, ‘Why would hunters attack with that kinda force? They’re vicious dogs, but they’re no army.’

  Gears replied bluntly, ‘Looks like they are now.’

  It was difficult to have any decent length of conversation on the radio and he said, ‘I’ll meet you at the CDC.’

  ‘Roger that’, Gears replied.

  Thinking about the nest he and Benny found, he thought it suggested they no longer acted independently, but were living in groups and maybe they hunted as a pack. Looking for Lydia, he was told she was already at the CDC and, grabbing a truck, he headed over. By the time he arrived, Hatch had dropped off Gears, Ip and the hunter corpse and headed back to the Base with everyone else. Walking past the room they’d restored upstairs, he saw Ian and Louise were setting up an autopsy. He went downstairs to the underground lab and saw Lydia was bandaging Ip’s wound. Gears was sitting on a chair looking tired. Walking over to Ip, he touched her hand gently to get her attention and she gave him a tired smile.

  Sighing unhappily, he asked, ‘How’s she doing?’

  Finishing the bandage, Lydia replied, ‘She’s good. Already healing. Ian says fast healing was another quirk of hers. Apparently she has high serotonin levels which gives her a high pain threshold, and her fast metabolism means she heals fast.’

  He turned to Gears and asked, ‘Did you fill Lydia in on what happened at the Ranch?’

  Lydia answered for Gears and said, ‘Yes he did. This is definitely a new development. I’m about to autopsy the corpse. Care to join me?’

  ‘Not really,’ he replied dourly. ‘It sounds disgusting’

  They headed upstairs to the room where the corpse was laid out ready to be autopsied. Gears stretched out on the other bed, while Ip cuddled into him. It had obviously been a long night at the Ranch and they were clearly exhausted.

  Yawning, Gears said, ‘Wake me up for the good bits.’

  Turning to Lydia, he asked, ‘Why is it wearing body armor?’

  ‘Good question,’ Lydia replied. ‘Hunters can’t be killed by even devastating injuries to their bodies, but they can be crippled. If you cut off a limb, it doesn’t grow back. Maybe it was trying to protect itself from non-lethal, but potentially crippling injuries.’

  Pondering the implications, he said, ‘Getting injured has never seemed to bother them before.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Lydia replied. ‘And trying to protect their bodies is a step change in intelligence. It means they have a more sophisticated appreciation for cause and effect than they’ve demonstrated to date.’

  Lydia was inspecting the body externally and telling Louise her observations, but so far, apart from wearing body armor, it looked like a normal hunter. Once she completed her external assessment, she took a scalpel and sliced open the chest of the corpse.

  Looking closely inside the wound, Lydia exclaimed, ‘Well, now that is interesting!’

  Peering into the open gut of the corpse, he wrinkled his nose and said, ‘That stinks.’

  Lydia was wearing a facemask, but he could tell she was smiling and she said, ‘That’s not the most interesting thing about this body.’ Picking up the chest spreaders, she forcefully pushed it into the chest of the corpse and said, ‘Look closer, TL. Hunters don’t have organs.’

  Trying to understand what organs he was looking at, all he could see were coils of intestines, but they shouldn’t have been there. Having broken the chest open, Lydia continued, ‘In the hunters, the human organs have disintegrated into a thick black viscous fluid that transports nutrients throughout their body. Hunters do need food, which is why they can starve to death, but their bodies are very efficient and they need very few nutrients, which is why it takes so long for them to starve to death.’

  Lydia lifted a large heart out of the chest cavity of the corpse and placed it on a scale to weigh it. Studying the weight, she said, ‘Now this is very interesting. This heart is almost 50% larger and heavier than a normal human heart in a man of this size.’

  He’d killed enough hunters to know what they were looking at was not a hunter and he asked, ‘What does this mean?’

  Lydia was removing each of the organs and placing them in a variety of silver metal trays that Louise was holding out for her. Dropping another slimy body part into a tray, she said, ‘It means this is not a normal hunter. I’ll run some
tests, but these organs look healthy to me.’

  This was a new development and it raised a lot of questions and he asked, ‘Does that mean it eats food like a human?’

  ‘No reason why not,’ Lydia replied. Prodding around the gut of the corpse, she added, ‘It still has reproductive organs. This one was definitely male.’

  Glancing down at the crotch of the corpse and, not quite knowing the right way to explain it to Lydia, he said, ‘Umm, it doesn’t seem have the, umm, external…kit.’

  Like all hunters, due to the loss of fluid and fat, its sexual organs were shriveled and not very visible. Lydia looked at him and said, ‘You men should know better than us women that just because it’s small doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. That being the case, this mutation can procreate. To our knowledge, the shamblers and hunters can’t. This is a very significant evolution.’

  Still lying on the bed with Ip, Gears asked, ‘Does it have blood?’

  Lydia replied, ‘I have to test it, but it looks like blood of some sort.’

  Lydia picked up a small electric saw and conversation wasn’t possible while she sawed through the top of the corpse’s skull. Once she finished, she pulled the brain out of the skull and it plopped with bang into a metal bowl.

  Poking at the brain with her gloved fingers, Lydia said, ‘Okay, this brain is not the same as a regular hunter. The expansion on the right lobe is significantly larger. That’s the part of the brain we believe the hunters use for communication.’

  ‘Does that mean they can communicate more effectively than the hunters?’ He asked. ‘Effectively enough to control them?’

  ‘Possibly, but we can’t prove anything,’ Lydia replied. ‘More of this brain tissue is healthy compared to a regular hunter. That implies a lot more of its brain is working, so it’s more intelligent.’

  It’s more than that, he thought and said, ‘So, this thing has evolved from the hunter and it’s a whole new species.’

  Both Lydia and Louise nodded and Lydia said firmly, ‘It most certainly is. If I had to guess, and I do, the shamblers were a unique mutation and some shamblers were not shamblers at all, but were hunters still developing. The hunters are another unique mutation, though some hunters are not hunters, but a sort of super hunter that’s still developing.’

  Summarizing his interpretation, he said, ‘So, this super hunter is smart enough to protect its body, has better communication ability and it’s more intelligent than the original hunter. Do you think with its better communication ability and greater smarts, it could control the hunters?’

  Lydia looked up from her ongoing inspection of the brain and said, ‘It’s all hypothesis, but it is possible.’

  He looked at Ip who was sleeping with her head resting on Gears chest and he thought, she and the super hunter didn’t seem so far apart to him. They both had human organs, blood, ate normal food and were telepathic.

  Turning back to Lydia, he asked, ‘How is this super hunter different to Ip?’

  ‘I don’t know’, Lydia replied candidly. ‘Ip carries a virus that kills hunters, but I’m not sure this super hunter does. In addition, Ip was created by being infected with the designer virus and this super hunter has mutated from the original shambler virus. Ip and this super hunter have similar, but very different origins and let’s not forget, Ip acts as if she’s human. This super hunter was trying to kill humans. That’s a very different behavior.’

  Gears said, ‘When the hunters came through the perimeter lights, they didn’t seem to be blinded. They headed straight for the house and worked like a team. Could this super hunter make ‘em do that?’

  ‘It’s plausible,’ Lydia replied. ‘The original hunters don’t have a lot of their brain left, which is why it’s hard to kill them with a head shot. It means they don’t use a lot of their brain to function, and their bodies don’t work the same as ours do, so they don’t bleed out with an injury like we would.’

  ‘But hunters are blind in the light,’ he observed.

  Gears added, ‘We found this one out in daylight. How’d it do that?’

  In response to Gears question, Lydia returned to the hollowed head of the super hunter and pulled back its eyelid. It had blue eyes similar to Ip’s.

  ‘I think that’s your answer,’ Lydia said. ‘Hunters have brown irises whereas Ip and this hunter have blue irises and we think they see like cats, which means they have good vision during the day and can see in the dark.’

  Gears asked, ‘That explains how the super hunter can see, but not how the hunters were able to see in the perimeter lights.’

  ‘Maybe they couldn’t,’ Lydia replied. ‘It’s possible if the super hunter was communicating with them, it was also able to direct them or maybe they aren’t as blinded by the perimeter lights as they seem to think they are.’

  Nodding, he said, ‘That would mean the super hunter has to be able to see where it wants the hunters to go.’

  ‘True,’ Gears agreed. ‘That’s at least a weakness. They can’t send the troops in without bein’ there themselves. Kill the super hunter controllin’ them, and you’ve killed the general, then the hunter army become dumb, blind dogs again.’

  Sitting down on the end of the bed where Gears and Ip lay, he asked, ‘If that’s true, then why didn’t Ip just kill the super hunter last night?’

  Gears tightened his arm around the now sleeping Ip, making her stir slightly, and said, ‘Maybe the counter virus Ip has doesn’t kill the super hunters.’

  Looking across to Lydia, he asked, ‘Could that be true?’

  Lydia shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know, but again it’s plausible. The counter virus was designed to kill the hunter virus. It didn’t seem to have much effect on the shambler virus, and it’s more than possible it won’t have much effect on this new mutation. That said, it doesn’t mean the counter virus would have no effect on the super hunter.’

  Louise asked, ‘If the super hunter controls the hunters and turns them into the army you saw last night, why didn’t Ip kill the super hunter in a more traditional way? You know, like stab it.’

  Gears chuckled and replied, ‘The super hunter was a lot bigger than her, and she wouldn’t win a hand-to-hand combat against a Muppet. She’s no mind for anythin’ mechanical, so she can’t use a gun. Ip doesn’t kill hunters by bein’ a ninja. She just happens to have a virus that’s lethal to ‘em.’

  ‘That’s true Louise,’ Lydia agreed. ‘Ip’s a very peaceful person. She’s not a killer in that way.’

  When they’d rested in the house planning their mission, they’d only ever taken Ip hunting once and she cried every time they shot a rabbit. Although he knew she would try to kill anything that threatened the people she cared for, he didn’t think she was a natural born killer.

  Looking at Lydia, he asked, ‘Do you think the super hunters can now make the hunters dangerous in daylight?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Lydia replied. ‘Perimeter lights and daylight are very different spectrums of light. The hunters may actually be able to see more than they realize in the perimeter lights. However, true daylight has UV rays. Blind is blind. The hunters can’t see in daylight, so I don’t know how a super hunter can fully compensate for a physical constraint to that extent. That said, I don’t really know.’

  ‘So where does all this leave us?’ He asked.

  Yawning, Gears said, ‘We got ourselves a new enemy and it’s smart. Our new enemy has made our old enemy more capable ‘cos it can control ‘em. It seems to be formin’ ‘em into large packs like an army. Perimeter lights are no longer sufficient defense against an attack. The super hunter seems to want us very dead, but it probably doesn’t wanna make a meal outta us.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that, Gears,’ he added. ‘Now the hunters are forming packs, they also seem to be willing to eat animals. That means they can wipe out all animal life on earth.’

  Gears grunted in agreement and frowning, he asked, ‘If the super hunters need food like humans, don’
t they got the same problem we got with the hunters?’

  That was a good question and he suggested, ‘Maybe there are too few of them for them to worry about that.’

  Looking puzzled, Gears asked, ‘Why would ya assume that?’

  Shrugging, he replied, ‘We’ve killed quite a few hunters in the past few months, and I don’t remember any having human organs, so how many can there be. None of the survivors have ever mentioned a hunter having human organs.’

  Gears grunted again and said, ‘I think that jus’ proves we’re losin’ the fight. Collectively we ain’t killed enough to know.’

  ‘There’s one other question you need to consider,’ Lydia interrupted. ‘Why did the super hunter attack the Ranch specifically? Why not the Base? What did it want?’

  Tilted his head back and clearly thinking about her question, Gears said, ‘If I were to hazard a guess, I would suspect the super hunter was after Ip.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’ He asked.

  ‘So far, Ip has been unique,’ Gears replied. ‘We haven’t found anyone else like her, and back at the Ranch, when she took us to the super hunter, even Pop thought she was talkin’ to it. We know she has the same development in the right lobe of her brain, so it’s possible she coulda been. If the super hunter was talkin’ to her that would explain how she knew the hunters were comin’ jus’ before they turned up at the house.’

  That made sense to him too and he asked, ‘Do you think they were they trying to kill her last night?’

  ‘No,’ Gears replied firmly. ‘The super hunter had used the hunters to trap us in the storm shelter. Ip was alone and it was a lot bigger than her. It could have easily killed her then.’

  Frowning, he said, ‘But you said it went for her which is why you shot it.’

  ‘True,’ Gears replied steadily. ‘But I don’t know what it was gonna to do to her. Maybe it wasn’t gonna kill her, or maybe it was death by cop. It was cornered and it didn’t wanna be captured. It’s hard to say, but if it’s as smart as Lydia says then it hadda know I would kill it if it went for Ip.’