Short Stories

Nσƚ Aʅʅ Mσɳʂƚҽɾʂ Aɾҽ Bαԃ

Where do I start? I am what you would call a hunter of sorts. For people who know about cryptids and believe they are real. Well, they are, and stop looking for them and end up dead. It makes my job three times harder when people go looking for trouble. As you can guess, I hunt the things no one should see. Yet here I am daily hunting them and killing or relocating them. We don't always kill the creature that killed you or your entire family. Instead, given some situations, we can move the animal to a more untraveled place in the world. Most of the time, the thing we hunt is too intelligent or powerful to live and must be killed. At least, this is what we are told; in recent days, I have found that we are looking at everything incorrectly. Instead, we are the monsters killing entire intelligent species because we see them as scary, or worst we capture them and try to ingratiate their abilities into our bodies. Well, I can gladly say my views have changed, and I see they are just like us here, trying to survive.

Now I'm getting ahead of myself; let's start my story on the day I did my last job. Like any call, two bodies appeared in a bad neighborhood and seemed to have "odd" markings. Upon arrival at the crime scene, I flashed my hunting license and was let through the yellow tap. I looked around to see the bodies of a female and a male roughly the same age. The male was face down in the dirt with his legs aiming toward a maintenance hole that was missing his lid. I glanced toward the woman and asked, "any ID on the bodies?" To any cops that were listening to me. A cop, in a few seconds, then said, "the female didn't have any ID on her, but the male had his wallet and car keys a few feet away from him. His name is John Paul, age 23." I pulled a small flashlight out of my pants pocket and walked to the maintenance hole, and began to shine into it to see if any claw marks or visible signs were pointing to the unnatural variety. Unfortunately, not a single sign of anything. I looked at the man, rolled him over with my foot, and saw his head dented in light. Something tried to bash his head in.

I crouched down near the head and whispered to the guy, "what happened to you?" The corpse reanimated and yelled, "GO AWAY!" I fell back, a bit scared, as it was unexpected for a dead body to yell at you. I looked around and saw the other cops giving confused looks meaning I was the only one to see and hear the body. This provided evidence witchcraft could be involved. Before I could think of any more conclusions, the female gasped for air as she screamed and kicked at the cops yelling, "monster!" I quickly ran to give her aid, but I was cut off by an old coworker stepping in my way, almost getting run over by me. She held a hand in the air towards my face and said, "Easy boy, now we don't need to bombard the poor girl with questions. In the meantime, I found the victim's car." With a snarky comment, I replied, "there must be a mistake; I didn't request a bitch to follow me around."

I should probably give some insight into who this coworker is precise—an EX-girlfriend. I doubt I need to say more; Rebecca decided to cheat on me after a heavily heated argument. So I did the most reasonable thing: I burned her house after taking all my stuff out of it. Of course, the crime was not reported, and we hunters got an excellent talk k place relationships and how they are banned from happening. Most eyes were, of course, but that's the point she was at my job telling me what to do. Before I could tell her to properly fuck off, she looked at the crime scene. I then said, "why are you here anyway." Rebecca nodded but was not listening and said, "anyways, I need to show you this thing; you missed." I rolled my eyes and gave a hand gesture to lead the way. She brought me a bit away from the crime scene to a fast food place. I looked at her in confusion as I said, "are you hungry or something and can afford food?" She hissed at my comment before saying, "no, the victim's car was here." With raised eyebrows, and here? Did it disappear or something." She shrugged and said, "let's see if the restaurant has footage of the events."