by Anna Collins
“Do you think I’m ready now?” I asked.
“Yes,” He said with a chuckle. “Yes, I do.”
“Then let’s get to work.”
The painted desert of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico is, for a lack of a better term, a complete wasteland. It is nothing but red, the wind blasted clay and scrub brush. It’s beautiful in its own stark way, but I wouldn’t want to be caught out here for longer than 24 hours without food or water. If you’ve never seen it before, think about all those photos of Mars that have been sent back by the space rover the US has wandering around on it right now. Well, that’s what the painted desert looks like, except more desolate.
D-Arin had detected the hunter because a small group of Navajo ranchers had gone missing (The painted desert is a massive chunk of the Navajo reservation.), but then their remains had been discovered just a few days ago by reservation police. The men and their horses were nothing grizzled and bloody bone. The Navajo police thought that the ranchers may have been attacked by a pack of rabid wolves or rabid dogs. But the locals whispered about skinwalkers and the men trespassing onto sacred land. The locals weren’t too far off the mark.
We teleported to the surface in full gray man gear. If we came across anyone out here in the middle of the night, we’d be inevitably blamed for the massacre of the ranchers. Which was fine, because D-Arin’s people were also big into injecting disinformation into the weird culture of UFO conspiracists. Also, the less the general population knew about the hunters, the better.
We communicated via our heads up display and attuned our visuals to the hunter’s heat spectrum. Hunters are like reptiles, they’re cold blooded (And they look a lot like giant worms, but with hundreds of rows of razor sharp teeth.) and largely travel underground, burrowing deep below the surface and only coming up to hunt when they’re hungry, or in a blood frenzy. With the 9 dead ranchers, D-Arin and I made the assumption that the hunter was now entirely out of control and looking to kill anything that crossed its path. If the hunter was above ground, we were in trouble, because despite their massive size, they could be very stealthy and quiet killers. If it was below ground, our armor would let us know that it was coming via seismic readings.
We scanned and searched the area both below and above ground for hours with no luck. We knew it was there, but it looked like we were going to have to flush out of hiding. Hunters are essentially blind, they can see a few feet in front of them, but they largely rely on scent and hearing. Their sense of hearing was particularly keen, so D-Arin activated a simple sensory pulse device and tossed it out into a large field of scrub brush. The sound the device omitted was entirely undetectable by humans, but I guarantee you that every dog, coyote, and wold within 100 miles of our location was going absolutely bonkers and howling in discomfort. We also hoped it was doing the same thing to the hunter and would bring it to our location.
We waited 10 minutes … 20 minutes … 30 minutes, and nothing happened. D-Arin turned to me, a video of his face appearing on my heads-up display. His brow was knitted with confusion.
“Do you think it’s moved on?” He asked.
“Or maybe it’s de—!”
The desert floor below us exploded, tossing me into the air and I was thrown two dozen yards from where I had been standing. D-Arin was no longer transmitting, and for a brief moment, I panicked. The only reason why he would no longer be transmitting is if he was out of range, or he was dead. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to think about either possibility, because the hunter was now right in front of me. From what I could see, it was at its full, mature size and was easily 20 feet long and was nearly 10 feet in height. Even though I was easily 20 feet away from, I could feel its hot, stinking breath—the smell of rot permeated my every pore. Its front row of teeth were the size of tombstones but filed down to razor sharp points.
I rose to my feet slowly, readying my weapons, priming my in-suit lasers and activating my synth knives which lit up the black night air with an iridescent blue light. This monster had most likely just devoured the love of my life, and I was going to make it pay.
I charged the hunter just as it started to move towards me, firing my lasers. It was surprisingly fast for a creature so large, and it danced around the beams with only one or two of my shots hitting their target, but the hunter barely seemed to notice. It size was too large, so I would have to engage it directly with my synth blades. I leaped into the air when I was within 7 feet of its mouth, hoping to drive my blades into the tough skin of its head. By I moved too slow and the hunter anticipated me and knocked me hard to the ground. I was now right in front of its open maw, it teeth glittering dull in the wan moonlight. I would soon be joining D-Arin in death and the planet was most likely doomed.
But as the hunter moved in to devour me, it came to a halt, and I could smell the distinct stench of burning emanating from its mouth. Suddenly, the hunter’s midsection exploded in a rain of rotten flesh, and with it came D-Arin, covered in head-to-toe in carrion, his armor scarred, but he was alive!
He pulled me to my feet and then removed his helmet.
“I’m sorry that took me so long.” He said.
I stripped off my helmet, and even though he was covered in slime and stank of what smelled like burnt dog hair, I kissed him so harder that you would have thought I was trying to eat him.
***
D-Arin has decided to stay on earth. Well, not on earth, in his ship orbiting the planet in stealth mode. And I’ll be staying with him most of the time. I’ll occasionally travel to earth to visit my parents and my sister—and before you ask: No, my memories will not be intact when I am on earth that would be too dangerous, especially if the hunter laid any eggs. But D-Arin has vowed to reactivate my memories once I am back on board—but for the most part, I will stay in the ship with D-Arin, waiting patiently for the next time the planet will need us to defend it. My only hope is, it won’t be for a very, very long time.
THE END
