Author's Note: This is my first trial into the Alien/ Predator universe. I had this rule once, to only work on one story at at time, but that's out the window today. I have an idea of where this story is going and where it will end, but I don't expect it to get regular updates (at least not until I force myself to finish some other things). Eventually there will be something resembling cover art and an actual summary, and an explanation of the title. I'm sure there are typos and I don't care right now.
This is a teaser and only a teaser. The real chapter one will just have to be chapter two. :P
Enjoy.
The Huntress
She was old.
At least, old-looking, by twenty-fourth century standards. With modern medicine and the advancement of longevity, with the practicality, rather, with the commonality of cosmetic procedures even the elderly in this day and age looked youthful long beyond their years.
But, not her. Not this woman.
She was an untamed thing. Like something out of a history-vid, the sight of her invoking primal imagry in the back of the mind of witch doctors, voodoo spells, human sacrafice, and all manner of taboos unspoken but dredged forth like dark childhood fears long forgotten. She was the mother of monsters which lurked in the shadows and slithered unseen to nest in adolescence then burst forth from deep in the hearts of grown men just when they needed the strength of resolve the most.
She wore her age with pride. Even sitting there in the interview room, like a queen on a throne instead of a murder on the floor.
This wasn't really happening, was it?
From the other side of the one-way glass, Briley swallowed hard. His spit was sour with fear and the aftertaste of bile and bitter coffee.
"Jesus," he murmured, perhaps as a plea, the vain expletive uttered to fill the viewing room with a noise other than his hammering heart and the blood rushing in his ears. He sighed. It was a tight intake of breath followed by a shuttering, brittle exhail. A sound bordering on the hysteria.
On the shallow counter before him were effects and weapons, the likes of which he had never seen in person nor tried too hard to imagine. He had heard the tales. Stories of alien hunters which spanned the last several hundred years of human history. Camp fire stories denied by the government, the drunken ramblings of an old ex-con decades ago, stories told and retold, gaining and losing snatches of detail in the telling. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing to see here. But, they were so much more and so much less than anything Briley had heard and there was indeed something to see here.
But, those hunters were not supposed to be human...
Briley let his fingertips trace the upper edge of a weapon, some manner of gun. The metal was rough to the touch as if pitted with age, secured in some unknowable manner to another bulky device. The charging mechanism, perhaps? That wasn't important, and it was far beyond his comprehension anyhow. What stopped Briley's fingertips in there caressing pursuit, what caused his breath to hitch in his throat and an unbidden whimper to escape his lips was the material which had been used to secure the monstrous weapon in slabs and straps to the old woman's shoulder. Leather...but but he knew it was not leather. The thick hide was tanned to a medium and sallow brown, glued in layers by an adhesive he assumed was as strong and unknowable as anything else he was seeing. A dancing girl adorned it, one arm disappearing beneath the machinery, but a dancing girl clear enough in blue-green, faded ink.
The not-leather was human flesh.
Deep in the back of his mind Briley knew, knew he had been there the day the tattoo had been placed, drawn on in indelible ink in the front room of a shady parlor on Eudora Prime. The vestage of a woman whose name he could no longer recall, etched on the skin like a brand; fast, tiny needles, blood and excess ink smeared across the beefy forearm of a hardened man fresh from the pen.
Kavin.
The name of his older brother left unspoken for decades resurfaced with the memory and Briley tried to force it back into that part of his mind which hoped to forever forget the sins of his youth. He shivered, his eyes closing involuntarily with the force of it, opening to light on assorted bits of armor. Shin guards. An off-center center chest plate. Forearm braces, one with a small computer of sorts and the other boasting protracted twin-blades. The lengths were curved, edges serrated top and bottom in opposing directions, the metal coated in a veneer of dried blood. There was a wad of netted material and not-leather booted shoes, a bladed disk tucked into a leather sheath, and various small knives of sharpened fangs and tusks, a bloody spear with the shafts retracted in, deadly points gleaming like a promise of death in dark hollows on each end. And, a necklace of small things strung together on a long, thin string: tiny skulls and odd teeth, dried strips of flesh and sinues, a piece of an indecernable creature's small paw, alien looking fingers and those which were all too familiar.
Briley bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper.
The center piece of this macabre jewelry was half a jawbone, distinguishable as human by the glitter of a gold cap on one remaining incisor.
Enin.
This time it was the memory of his younger brother's lady-killing smile which streaked through Briley's memory. Lady-killing, Christ, what a poor choice of words, Briley chided himself, anything to destract from the thought of another name, another testament to his culpability and with it all the things he wished not to be forced to remember.
Enin's smile had been punctuated with uneven dimples and Briley had always been jealous of the boyish charm women saw in them. But, in his later years Enin's smile bore a flash of gold above the bottom lip and there was more swooning at this roguish display. Oh, if those foolish women had only known the tooth had been repaired after Enin had been caught with an underage girl and met her uncle's fist. Would women have swooned then, knowing the bad-boy whose attention they craved had realy been after their young daughters?
The old woman stirred and Briley looked up, jerked from long dead memories as she carefully lifted herself from the floor.
She moved with fluid grace, her skin the rich mahogany of African descent, hatched and mottled. An old burn fell across her left shoulder, the skin gnarled in a contorted scar. Her hair was waist length and twisted into frazzled locks, a shorter one ripped partly from her temple and hanging from a scrap of scalp. She didn't seem to mind. Her raven dreads were matted with blood and streaked through with coarse gray strands. Tiny curls escsped at the root-line. Odd clasps and rings of copper and gold colored metal encircled each lock at intervals and jangled sweetly as she turned her head, surveying a room empty but for herself. Hands calloused with use hung at her sides. Her bony-knuckled fingers had wide nails, thick and yellowed and filed into points. A thumb gently stroked the orbit of a broken skull which adorned the belt at one side of her wide hips.
Why hadn't that been confiscated? And what was she thinking as she took in her surroundings? Plotting, perhaps, as her thumb caressed the shard of skull?
A small strip of fabric in a shade of dry earth covered her crotch and aside from it she was nude. Her breasts hung in pendulous masses, dark areolea and nipples pointing to the floor. Yet, her muscles were toned, tensing and flexing beneath ancient and wrinkled, ashen and scarred flesh. Though her abdominals were rippled, her lower belly sagged slightly like a deflated baloon beneath the hollow of her navel above her belt. Her legs were strong, feet bare and calloused, toes as rough and boney as her fingers, with toenails thick and yellow and filed to match.
Briley knew without knowing the reek coming off of her was pure rotten death. Musty putrefaction. The oily smell of a long unwashed body mixed with the iron pungency of blood and the salty tang of dry sweat.
Vacant eyes stared as if unseeing, blinking with almost casual indifference. Wrinkles were etched at the corners of her eyes and mouth like trenches. Blood was crusted to her face, falling in shades of deep red across her neck and shoulder where it had leaked from the wound to her head. One side of her face was slowly deforming with an ugly bruise. A full bottom lip was split and the tip of a red-pink tongue explored the injury between teeth stained orange with blood.
Her face had a jowly softness which was utterly alarming otherwise. She could have been anyone's grandmother with that round, serene look were it not for the rest of her, her wounds and what she did and didn't wear. And there was that scar which adorned her forehead. Like a comma with its tail drawn too long and hooked around too far, it sat centered above her unruly brows, prominent even as time had creased her face.
And, those eyes.
If Briley hoped there was something in this woman which remained human, even a tiny piece to which he could make a plea for mercy it died right there in her eyes, in the depths of those black pools of contempt which held a viciousness and a hardened conviction. Her eyes said there was nothing, save her aged body which remained human.
Briley stood in captivated horror as she slowly sauntered to the one-way glass like a predator stalking its prey. Even knowing the image which greeted her on the other side was of herself, Briley felt as if she were looking into him, seeing all of his sins, hearing words he had never spoken, knowing everything he wanted desperately to forget.
As unlikely a thing it would seem to anyone else, Briley knew she had come for him. He could tell himself a thousand times it was not, could not be her. She would be at least sixty years old by now. It could be a coincidence, her choice of trophies, but he knew in his guts it was not. This old woman, this huntress forged in battles on worlds no other human had ever seen; a human somehow taken in and hardened and honed by a people whose existance the Company denied but whose technology they longed to exploit, she was that girl. Or had been. Now, she was a monstress Briley had, by his complicence helped his brothers to create all of those decades ago. She had killed them, both of them he had no doubt, making trophies of their destinctive body parts. She had wanted him to see, wanted him to know the victim had become the predator and the predators had become her prey and soon it would be Tem Briley's turn to die. The Devil had come to collect her final due.
