Durjoy

Good men still exist, your fake eyelashes just won't let you see them.

NEW STATE

ALL HUNTERS EVE

BY STEPHEN BLACKMOORE

FULL STORY

Midnight hunters in gleaming gold masks. Phantoms stepping out from the fog and just as quickly melting back into it. You know the stories. The Hunters are like the Headless Horseman or The Phantom Hitchhiker. Nobody believes them.

Even though they’re true.

Now, I wasn’t there when it all happened. But I met a man who was and I believe him. See, I got a part in this story, too. Not a big one, but enough of one that I’ve never slept right since.

First off, I should tell you who I am or at least who I was. First Sergeant Tom Granger of the Great Lakes Coalition. When I was in the Army I was a 68 Whiskey, Combat Medic Specialist. We didn’t hold to the MOS system in the Coalition, but it was useful to know where people came from.

My training is as a line medic, guy who goes out with infantry. I made sure when soldiers get shot all to hell that they stayed alive long enough to get back before going into a body bag.

This was back in ’44, right after the US defaulted on its debts and went bankrupt. Pulled the rest of the world down with it. Yeah, you know all this. But you probably don’t know just how bad it was right after. Everything went straight to Hell. Everybody panicked. Grocery stores got raided. Banks shut down. Then the nurses went on strike. Hospitals run on nurses. Don’t ever let anybody tell you different. Without them they couldn’t handle the load.

What really screwed the pooch was when police, firefighters, paramedics and other front liners did the same thing. Emergency calls went unanswered. It was an ugly time. Folks thought it was the end of the world and in a way it was. It was the end of a world they understood, or at least the one thought they did. Their way of life was over.

Nobody was surprised when every military asset was ordered back to U.S. soil. Not that all of us could get there. Some countries decided that U.S. equipment would be better off in their hands. With no outside support they were easy pickings.

Allies, enemies, didn’t matter. They hit airbases, FOBs, locked down Green Zones. Hardly anybody made it out of South Asia, especially Varannai.

But then nobody really made it out of Varannai.

I was stationed in Japan when the order came. Nobody shot anybody, nobody stole anything. But we did have to leave gear behind. Some of it because it was too big and took too long to ship. Some of it because it was just the right thing to do.

When I get back everything’s chaos. Secretary of Defense was caught in the Varannai blast and the new one was an even bigger idiot. Guy couldn’t wipe his own ass without somebody telling him how to do it. I keep getting different orders. Gonna ship out to Maryland. Gonna ship out to Florida, not that there was much there that wasn’t under water.

When I heard East Texas that got my heart racing. I grew up in Gainesville and I hadn’t seen my family in maybe ten years. Figured with everything going on this might be a good time to reconnect.

By then so much of East Texas had been flattened by tornados and the storms in the Gulf had gotten so bad that pretty much the entire coast had to be abandoned. Galveston, New Orleans, Tampa, Fort Myers. All gone. Storm after storm, flood after flood. Got so bad they didn’t know what to fix first. And when they did fix something it was gone in the next flood.

I wasn’t there for that, but I had family out there. Not all of them made it. Some of them died in the floods, some died trying to keep the floods from getting worse. Whole state was spread thin. National Guard was in California and Oregon dealing with the big burn.

Ironic, really. One side of the country being destroyed by water while the other side was being destroyed by fire. I’d like to say I was surprised, but was anybody, really? I suppose if you lived under a rock the last thirty years.

But expecting it doesn’t make you prepared for it. Even hardcore preppers out in the ass end of nowhere found it wasn’t as easy as they thought it would be. Every day brought a new shock, a new tragedy. After a while you just get numb.

Finally, I was shipped out to Michigan. The thing about being a soldier is you go where they send you. I wasn’t happy about it, but then I’m not sure anywhere would have been much better. The fighting in Oregon and Idaho was getting really bad, California was already starting to split up, and the water wars between Texas and Oklahoma were just kicking off.

We got border duty. Mostly it was making sure that what little trade there was coming through Lake Michigan kept flowing. I use the term ‘trade’ loosely. Not all of it was legitimate, but most of it was necessary.

Our CO was this huge law and order type. Couldn’t wrap his head around the difference between what’s legal and what’s good. My pop had a saying, “You can do things right or you can do the right thing. But you can’t always do both.”

Well, this guy only knew how to do things right. He didn’t last long. His second shot him in the head and took over. After that things eased up. Our list of contraband was cut down to about ten percent. No hardcore drugs, no weapons, no people.

That last one was rough. Refugees coming in from Canada wasn’t the problem. It was all the people leaving the U.S.. We got ordered to help the Canadians secure the border. Between the two of us nobody was supposed to get through. Turning those people away was maybe the hardest thing I ever had to do. Pointing them toward a landing we didn’t patrol, though, that was probably the easiest.

That’s the thing about the early days. People kept thinking everything was going back to normal in a couple days, week at the most. That if they could hoard enough toilet paper and coffee, eventually they’d come out of their cellars and it’d all be like a bad dream. Folks couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that, like it or not, it wasn’t gonna just get better. It was gonna get a lot worse. And if we wanted to survive it, we had to understand that we were all in it together.

Tough to do when you’re expecting the government to swoop in and fix everything. Hell, the government had caused all the problems in the first place. Neighbor was turning on neighbor, crime was rampant. Kind of chaos like that, somebody needs to come in to clean it up.

That’s pretty much how the Great Lakes Coalition came to be. I know ‘militia” is a dirty word to some people. But everything had fallen apart. Police and paramedics were too overwhelmed to respond to calls. Hospitals were closed. Infrastructure broke down so badly people were freezing to death for lack of fuel, starving to death because they were trapped under ten feet of snow.

There was a break in the order of things and somebody needed to fix it. Make sure the roads were clear, food and medicine got to where it was needed, that trash got picked up. You can’t have order if you can’t enforce it. And that’s what we did.

The world runs on supply lines. You break a link in that chain, a factory shuts down, a ship blocks a canal, the whole thing falls apart.

Michigan mostly runs on coal and natural gas, but it doesn’t have any mines and most of its gas is piped in from other states. What happens when those pipelines break down? Or some engineer doesn’t show up for work? What are those coal miners doing when the mines close down because the economy’s so screwed they can’t make any money at it?

Take those problems and crank them up to eleven because it was happening everywhere. We knew we couldn’t fix the U.S., but we thought that maybe we could keep some people alive through the winter.

Not everybody was happy someone was stepping in where the government failed and put some order on the chaos. Some were just upset we weren’t the U.S. military. Heard a lot of talk about insurrection and civil war, how we had no right to do what we were doing. How it was illegal.

F**k illegal. Sh*t’s going to hell, what are we supposed to do? I’ll take alive and free over legal any day of the week. Most of the GLC was active or ex-military. We put that s**t down hard. There were fights, a lot of them turned deadly.

After a while I found myself out of the fighting. Ironically, took a bullet to the knee while I was trying to stabilize another soldier. I’m proud to say I saved three lives before I passed out. I didn’t lose the leg, but there was no way I was going out again. Limping around a battlefield triaging shot up troops isn’t exactly ideal.

I ended up as the base doctor for an outpost just outside of Lansing. A doctor. Me. Yeah, that’s how I felt about it. I can do a tube thoracostomy or a venous cutdown when people are shooting at me, but the f**k do I know about diabetes management? Thank god we got McLaren back up and running. Somebody needed surgery I couldn’t do I’d send them there. Real doctors in a real hospital.

Now the day this happened me and my second, Corporal Bobbi Hayworth, we’re going through our medication supplies and I can tell you I was not happy. Dangerously low on basic antibiotics. We needed Azithromycin, Vancomycin, Minocycline. I was almost at the point where I was willing to scrape a rotting orange and take my chances. Not that I’d seen an orange in at least three years, but still.

The only places in Michigan still manufacturing medications were all in Ann Arbor over a hundred kilometers away. Not a big deal before things collapsed. Two hours tops from Lansing and it wouldn’t have been the only option.

But after? The roads were too dangerous and even a military convoy would have to deal with bandits, not to mention those New State as****es. Looters and squatters every last one of them. What was once a short trip could take almost two days.

“We have another MRSA outbreak we’re screwed,” Hayworth says.

“Hell, we get hit with another outbreak of the clap we’re screwed. We’re low on lorazepam, fentanyl, colchicine… Seriously? How are we low on colchicine?”

“I think somebody’s stealing it,” Hayworth says.

“Nobody steals gout medication, Bobbi. Fentanyl, yes. Colchicine? No. How are we on surgical supplies?”

“Better. So long as people don’t mind biting on a stick by way of anesthetic. ”

That’s when we heard the Humvee screech to a stop outside.

Two soldiers haul a third one through the door. Get him on a gurney, get him in a room. Young, Asian. Tags say his name’s Corporal Ray Yang, blood type A+, no religious preference. He’s in bad shape. Covered in blood, burns, with an arrow through his left thigh. It’s too short and heavy and the nock is flat. That nock is what clues me in that it’s a crossbow bolt. Who the hell shoots at soldiers with a crossbow?

The kid’s in shock. Bobbi’s already prepping an IV line. Looking at him I figure he’s got maybe a 50/50 chance of making it through.

“What the hell happened?”

Takes a second for the soldiers to find their voices. They’re new. Probably haven’t seen their first fight, yet, much less a downed comrade.

“We found him on the highway. Few miles outside town. He was crawling on the side of the road.”

“Crawling? Was there a wreck?” Bobbi says. That’s wishful thinking. Car accidents don’t happen much on these roads. Not anymore. It’s almost always one of the ABCs; Ambushes, Bandits, and Combat. Smashed up cars? Enh, not so much.

“Didn’t see a vehicle. Said he crawled away from Troi.”

Crawled? Uh huh, sure. Troi’s forty miles away.

“He wasn’t making a whole lotta sense. Going on about how everybody’s dead. Even Captain Portillo.”

“Portillo dead?” I say. “Horses**t. That woman’s bullet-proof.”

“New State?” Hayworth says.

“Who else could it be?” Goddamn. Captain Portillo was a legend. Used to say about her that she ‘ate lightning and crapped thunder’. I served under Portillo. Anybody tries to take her down better bring an army.

“What about that motorcycle gang?” one of the soldiers says.

“Mayhem? Calling them a motorcycle gang’s like calling the Mongol Horde a polo club. Could be them. Christ, I hope they’re not working with New State again.”

New State and Mayhem were probably our two biggest headaches. There was a lot of frustration back then. Anger. People sick of the way things were. They decided they’d build, I wouldn’t call it Utopia, these weren’t stupid people. They wanted a world where things were fair. Where things were equal. Only problem was they figured the way to do it was by chucking molotovs into rich people’s houses, places they saw as part of the problem. Walmarts, golf courses, that sort of thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand it. Some point or another we all want to eat the rich if only to make an open slot we can move into. But there’s a difference between wanting it and doing it. With the GLC we had stability, more or less. We propped things up, we didn’t tear them down. All New State did was light s**t on fire.

There was this Sheriff in Troi, Sheriff Berry. Troi’s a s**tty little tourist town southwest of Lansing near the lake. Way I hear it guy went out to put down a riot and decided he wanted to join the festivities, instead. Turned him into some kind of folk hero. Real pain in the ass. Everybody goddamn loves him. But an anarchist is an anarchist and that s**t don’t stand. So GLC rolls in to take Troi. Put these squatters in their place.

Shoulda been in and out in maybe a day tops. ‘Cept everything goes to s**t. Turns out all those janitors and bus drivers? They’re armed to the teeth. Know where they got the guns?

Mayhem. Biggest biker gang in the Midwest. Arms dealing, drug smuggling. Hated the New State. Feeling was mutual. But more than that, they hated the GLC. We were rolling in and actually establishing order. Unlike New State we could back it up.

Neither of them wanted us or anybody else in there. Separately, they were nothing. Never expected them to team up against us.

We get our asses handed to us. But the joke’s on them. See, Mayhem’s not big on playing well with others. Doesn’t take long before New State and Mayhem are at each other’s throats.

Now Captain Portillo, she knows an opportunity when she sees one. She sends some of her people in but instead of a big push, she starts doing guerilla attacks on convoys, going after infrastructure. Nothing big. Just annoying. Bug bites. An itch you can’t scratch.

That ratchets up the tension between New State and Mayhem. But that’s not enough. Need to drive a bigger wedge between them. So, Captain Portillo, she makes a deal with some boys in Mayhem to buy a bunch of their guns.

And then makes sure New State finds out about it.

Next thing you know they’re at each other’s throats like pi**ed off wolverines. Portillo rolls in her troops and gets to work. By the time the dust settles Troi’s split into three different zones; Mayhem, New State and GLC.

Saying we’d reached détente with New State and Mayhem would be a stretch. At some point Portillo was gonna do a major push and wipe both those f**kers out, but until then we held our line.

Anyway, Yang’s a mess. Left eye has a blown pupil. No response at all. Head trauma. Not for the first time I wish we had a CT scanner. His lungs aren’t sounding great, either. Got a wheezing crackle that I’ve heard way too many times. A good while later and I got a pretty good picture of what happened to him.

Second and third degree burns on his back and neck. Massive contusions and avulsions. Hairline fractures in his spine from C7 all the way down to T8. Lungs are f**ked. Pulmonary barotrauma, over-pressurization from a blast wave you get setting off high-order explosives like Semtex or C-4. Organs filled with gas or liquid, lungs, GI tract, eyeballs, s**t’ll pop like balloons. Kid’s lucky he only blew out one lung. Pop in a chest tube with a flutter valve and at least he’ll keep breathing until we can get a thoracic surgeon over from McLaren to do an assessment.

Overall, the kid got off light. Whatever s**t he was in he managed to survive and from what I can tell, he shouldn’t have.

Then there’s the crossbow bolt. Entered the back of his left thigh, barely missed his femoral artery, came out the other side. Bolt’s got an expandable head, four blades that pop out on impact. Higher velocity, more damage than a broadhead.

I can’t just yank it out. It’ll rip right through the artery. Pair of pliers to unscrew the head does f**k all. That thing’s on there tight.

The shaft looks to be aluminum, so I get a ring cutter. Ring cutter should go through aluminum like it’s butter.

Except it doesn’t.

Fifteen minutes of turning that goddamn saw blade and I’ve barely made a scratch. Only thing for it is bolt-cutters. I go through two sets because the blades are too soft and the third one I need one of the soldiers to shove on the other arm to get enough force. I don’t know what the hell that thing is made of, but it sure as s**t ain’t aluminum. After a lot of struggling I end up with two halves of a crossbow bolt and no idea what to do with them.

Don’t get a chance to really look it over until we have Yang stabilized, and now turning them over in my hands, trying to puzzle them out, they just seem even stranger to me.

The fact it’s not aluminum is weird enough. Titanium? Maybe, but who even makes titanium crossbow bolts? But there’s something particular about it that’s bothering me, I just can’t put my finger on it.

It must have been stupidly expensive to make, but a whole lot of stupid, expensive crap was floating around before the s**t hit the fan. It’s been less than ten years so I figure, hey, maybe not all that surprising. And that’s when it comes to me.

It’s too clean.

Crossbow bolts are designed for multiple shots. This thing? There’s no wear. Considering the shaft material I wouldn’t expect to see much in the way of scratches or nicks on it, but the head’s got an orange coating on it and that should show at least a little wear. Same with the fletching. Even the nock should have some sign it’s been used before.

Everything’s a hand-me-down these days. Take the desk. It was already there when the GLC opened the clinic. Got bare patches worn into its surface from hundreds of hours of hands moving mice, typing on keyboards. How many people? How many years? No idea. But the point is that there’s wear.

If you’re going to make a titanium crossbow bolt, hell, any crossbow bolt, you need certain things. You need material for the shaft, the head and the fletching. I mean, sure you could carve one yourself out of a piece of birch and slap on some feathers. But this thing? Getting and working the titanium is hard enough, but that expandable head has half a dozen moving parts.

Where’d they source all the materials? The parts? Who made it? How? Hell, why? Remember that bit I said about supply lines? This wouldn’t be possible without a whole bunch of them working like they’re on rails. And after things started falling apart, nothing worked like that. No way a bunch of New State zealots built these things, and they’re sure as hell not the sort of thing Mayhem dealt in.

I used to smoke. Easy to quit when you can’t get ci******es, anymore. I kept an old, crumpled pack of Marlboros with one, single cigarette inside shoved in the back of a desk drawer.

I’d been carrying it around for, hell, six, seven years. Scavenged a waterlogged carton from the back of a gas station. Only a handful of the packs hadn’t turned into to***co sludge.

The Last Cigarette. Used to tell myself that I kept it as a testament to my willpower. And that I knew it would taste like ass after all this time.

Truth is I was afraid to smoke it on the chance that The Last Cigarette would literally be the last cigarette. Was it stupid? Sure. But like knocking on wood or stepping on cracks I did it, anyway.

The crossbow bolt and The Last Cigarette have a lot in common. They’re both at the mercy of supply lines that don’t exist anymore. Only a cigarette was more likely to end up on my desk than a titanium crossbow bolt.

More I thought about it the creepier it felt. One farmer with a stash of old paper could make new smokes, but what sorts of resources does it take to make this bolt? Money, materials, people.

The two soldiers who brought in Yang reported up to command about him and some guys came down to talk to Yang. But he was out cold and nothing we could do was gonna wake him up.

We told them what we knew, which was a whole lotta nothing. Yang hadn’t regained consciousness and the only thing we knew was what those two soldiers told us. They did let us in on something, though, so we could keep an ear out for when Yang woke up in case he said anything.

Early recon reports coming in were… troubling. Place was a ghost town. No activity. No people walking around, vehicles moving, nothing. It was obvious there’d been one hell of a fight. Only one problem.

No bodies. If there was a fight, there’d be dead on the streets. Between the GLC, New State and Mayhem there were hundreds of people in that town. So, where the hell are all the bodies?

I see Hayworth walking by the office and call her over. She looks exhausted. She was seeing a guy who’d been stationed in Troi and the worry was eating her up.

“How you holding up?”

“Been better,” she says. “Been worse.”

I’m about to ask how our patient’s doing when I get an answer by way of a full-throated scream. We bolt into Yang’s room and find him thrashing on the bed like he’s possessed. He’s managed to pop his IV out of the needle port and I can’t tell if he’s having a seizure or he’s just so disoriented and panicked this is just him trying to get out of bed.

“Who are you?” he says.

“First Sergeant Tom Granger and this is Corporal Bobbi Hayworth. We’re the ones taking care of you. Two soldiers found you injured outside town. It took some work but we managed to patch you up.”

“I’m in Lansing?”

“You are.”

“Thank Christ,” he says. “Troi’s-”

“Fallen,” Hayworth says. There’s resignation in her voice. She’s already convinced herself that her man’s not coming out of there alive. “We know.”

“How much do you know?”

“Not nearly enough. Command wants to talk to you.”

“Good thing I want to talk to them, then. I-” His next words disappear in a spasm of coughing, blood dribbling down his chin. A moment later his eyes start to bug out. The f**king chest tube. He must have dislodged it with his thrashing around and popped the stitches, letting air into the pleural cavity. His lungs are collapsing.

“Get on the horn to McLaren. Tell them we need that f**king surgeon now,” I say. Hayworth bolts to the other room. Fixing it is simple enough, but Yang’s not going to enjoy it. I don’t have time to get a painkiller in him. I get the tube reseated and the stitches in to keep the wound closed.

But that’s not the part that worries me. Yang’s spitting up blood. Not a lot, but enough. He’s got an internal bleed somewhere. If that doesn’t get fixed right proper and right now he’s not gonna make it to the morning.

“I need- I need-” His words are coming out in halting gasps. He just doesn’t have enough air to talk right.”

“Quiet. Let things relax. Slow down your breathing. Last thing we need is you hyperventilating on top of your lungs trying to get air back in them.”

He closes his eyes. His breathing slows. “I’m not gonna last the night,” he says. “Am I?” His voice is a whisper, a croak like an anemic frog.

“‘Course you are,” I say. “You’ll be outta here and swapping stories at the bar soon enough.”

“No. I’m spitting up blood. I know what that means. I gotta tell you somethin’. Tell you what happened.”

“You should save that for command. We’ll have them down here, shortly.” I wipe bloody spit off his chin with a towel.

“Everybody in Troi’s dead,” he says.

“How’s that possible?”

“I don’t even remember how I got out of there.” The kid, and it’s only now that I really see that’s what he is, a kid, is terrified. And I don’t think it’s a New State or Mayhem what’s got him that way. I think it has a lot more to do with whoever put that crossbow bolt in his leg.

“I was part of Captain Portillo’s administrative team,” he says. “Maps, intel, requisitions. If it was paperwork, we handled it. I was in there when that woman showed up.”

“Okay, slow down. What woman?”

“She was too clean. Too healthy. Heels, skirt. Like when the rest of the world went to s**t it didn’t so much as chip a nail on her. Except one side of her face. It was like somebody’d torn up a photo of her and tried to glue it back together. Everything about her was perfect and then you look into her eyes and it’s terrifying.

“She glides in, and I mean glides. Moved like a dancer. Like a predator. You ever seen a jaguar? She moved like that. Like she was the most dangerous thing in the jungle and she knew it.” Yang’s eyes drift and his voice slows.

“Stay with me, corporal. Who was she?”

“Said her name was… Marion? Yeah. Marion. She shows up. Says she’s part of an organization that can come in, help us out. Wipe New State and Mayhem off the map.”

“Why would anybody do that?” I say. “Hell, who could do that?”

“Didn’t say who they were. Just that they’d help us take the town. And in return we’d get Troi, but only after they were done with it. Gonna run some sort of test. But then she calls it a game. Like they’re the same thing. It didn’t make any sense.”

There is so much wrong with that I don’t know where to start. An organization that could do what the GLC hadn’t been able to? For the price of having the town for a game?

“Portillo laughed her out of the room, didn’t she?”

“No, she gets all quiet,” Yang says. “One of those silences that’s a complete conversation. Got a look on her face like she knew what this woman was talking about. Tells her to get the hell out.”

When I served under her, Portillo was a hardass. Not surprised she turned this woman down. Little surprised she didn’t shoot her, though. Like I said, Portillo was a hardass.

“So this lady, she just nods her head, says, ‘You’ve got until sunset tomorrow for your answer.’ We were getting ready to hit New State this week. The whole deal sounded stupid. Should have taken it.”

“This woman, she showed up, offered to clear out the town in exchange for it for some kind of… game? And when Portillo said no, she left?”

“Just up and walked away.”

“What does any of this have to do with you being attacked?”

“It was her,” he says.” I mean, it had to be, right? They all had masks-”

“Corporal, focus.”

“Uh, yeah. Couple hours after sundown next day I’m up in the top floor of the bank and this flare goes off. Whole town’s lit up like it’s on fire. And then the shooting starts.”

Yang talks the way every soldier talks about combat. Nothing’s linear, everything’s in flashes, crystal clear and hazy simultaneously. Time stands still, goes on fast forward. Running, shooting. Seeing men and women felled by bullets, shot through with crossbow bolts. It’s stream of consciousness by way of gunfire and staccato bursts of violence.

“I didn’t see the masks at first. It was all muzzle flashes and flashbangs. And then there they are walking out of the smoke. Walking. Like they’re on a stroll in the f**king park.”

“The masks?”

“Hunters, like you see in old English paintings. Except they’re wearing gold masks all flat blank. Like it wasn’t just hiding their faces, it was erasing them. Not even letting them be human, anymore. One of them shot a crossbow at an APC and it went up like fourth of July.”

“Hayworth,” I yell. “How’s that surgeon coming?”

“Be here in about ten minutes.”

Ten minutes might as well be a lifetime. Probably will be with the way Yang is looking. He’s not dribbling out blood, but he’s looking blue pale. He’s bleeding inside and there’s f**k all I can do about it.

“Stay with me, corporal. Just another couple minutes. How’d you get away?”

“Ran,” he says, voice a raspy wheeze. Each word is a strain. “Hid- hid in a dumpster. Almost got caught. One of them finally took Portillo down. Then he does…”

“Corporal, come on. You can’t quit on me now.” Yang might be the only witness to what happened in Troi. I don’t know how much longer he’s going to last, but I need to know.

“He did something weird.” Yang struggles to keep his eyes open, the words coming. “He put two coins on her eyes. Gotta pay the ferryman, I guess. When I got out of the dumpster I grabbed one.”

“We didn’t find any coin in your uniform.”

“That’s because I hid it in my boot. It’s got a pocket under the tongue.”

When he came in, Yang was covered in blood. His boots were the only clothes salvageable. I grab one, find the pocket, pull out the coin.

It’s about the size of a challenge coin, inch-and-a-half or so in diameter. Challenge coins are an old military tradition where you’re given a coin signifying something important, like passing Ranger school, that sort of thing. You never let it go.

Somebody challenges you to show your coin and you don’t have it, you owe them a drink. If that doesn’t sound like much, trust me, the shame at not having your challenge coin on you is consequence enough.

But this is not a challenge coin. First off, it’s gold, heavy. Both sides hold an elaborate image of a chess piece, a knight, raised in relief in the center and the words MAGNA VENARI stamped along the edges. A thin line of dark red blood mars the surface of one side. Portillo’s blood?

Nothing else, Yang’s head and back trauma, the impossible crossbow bolt, a ridiculous story about hunters in gold masks, has made this all seem possible, let alone real.

But for some reason this coin does. I don’t know if it’s actual gold, but if it isn’t then somebody did a hell of a paintjob on a chunk of lead.

“Was I followed, you think?” Yang says.

“What, from Troi? Son, you were crawling on the road all night. Somebody wanted to take you out they’d have done it long before you got here.”

“What if they didn’t know?”

“You weren’t followed. Nobody here wants to hurt you.” That seems to help and it doesn’t take long before Yang’s out cold. To say I’m troubled is putting it lightly. How do I know he wasn’t followed? How do I know somebody isn’t waiting in the shadows to kill him?

Then his blood pressure monitor starts going crazy. His eyes snap open and he starts shaking, his body suddenly starved of oxygen. He’s trying to yell, trying to say, f**k I don’t know.

And then he’s gone.

I get going with chest compressions, Hayworth grabbing the defibrillator. We try to shock him back to life, but we both know he’s not coming back. Still, we don’t stop until the surgeon and a lieutenant from command get in a few minutes later.

The surgeon calls it. Hayworth and I, s**t, neither of us wants to lose somebody. But it hit hard and it hit fast. Later find out it was an aortic aneurysm. When the big ass artery coming out of the heart has a structural weakness and pops from the pressure.

Nothing we could have done. The problem was there before he showed up. When the pipe burst it dumped all of his blood into his chest. He was dead before I got to the bed.

The lieutenant debriefed us about what Yang had said. We told him what we could while fielding questions from the surgeon. Give him the crossbow bolt, show the lack of wear on it. Got a little confusing, but we gave them both what they were looking for.

We bag Yang up, get him into a refrigerator truck we have set up for a temporary morgue. Surgeon’ll be by the next morning to cut him open find out for sure what happened.

I’m exhausted and I can tell Hayworth is screaming inside. Official word’s come down about Troi and they’re posting the casualty list.

“Go on,” I say. “I got this.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. I hope-” She looks lost. We both know what she’ll find on that list. But hope’s a powerful thing and sometimes the only thing that keeps us moving.

“I hope so, too.”

Back in the office I’m straightening up a couple things when I notice the weight in my pocket. With everything that was happening I forgot all about the coin. I’ll have to get it over to the lieutenant. But not tonight.

I pull the coin out and spend some time studying it, run my fingers over the chess piece relief, along the ridged edge. That phrase, though. I grab a book off the shelf and start flipping through it.

See, everything in medicine’s Latin. I have a dictionary to look terms up in.

MAGNA VENARI. GREAT HUNT.

Two small words on a coin laid on a dead woman’s eyes by a man in a blank, gold mask. Is it supposed to show some kind of respect for the dead? For the prey?

What the hell did they want with Troi? Why even make the offer when they could have just taken the town? None of this is making a bit of sense. Thinking about it is like worrying at a broken tooth. The more I poke at it the worse it gets but I can’t stop doing it.

She told Portillo that if she took the deal the town was going to be hers before it was ours again. Some game? Some experiment? The way Yang described it Portillo knew what she was talking about. Had to.

There’s a piece of this I’m missing. Something that’ll bring the whole thing into focus. But what is it? The coin? The coin’s part of it. Out of all of this craziness, the coin’s the only thing that makes any sense.

I don’t know for sure what the coin’s for. But I can guess.

They’re a warning. A threat. Watch yourself or you’ll be on the receiving end of that hunt. You’ll find yourself being run down by those midnight hunters in their gleaming gold masks you keep hearing stories about. You’ll be that prey they drive before them that never gets out alive.

And you’ll find out what a great hunt really is.