Intro
Since my story is pretty AU, I'm going to explain the differences between my story and the game before you all can think of flaming me with: HUNTERS ARE INFECTED AND CAN'T THINK THE WAY YOU DESCRIBE THEM TO! or the much debated: HUNTERS DON'T HAVE EYES!
First of all, I'm going to explain the hunters. Unlike the game, the hunters in my story are pretty smart, just as smart as a noninfected but they think in different ways than normal humans. Also, there are two different classifications of hunters, social individuals and solitary individuals.
The social hunters go after their prey like a pack of wolves or dogs and have a loose hierarchy based on fighting ability. These hunters are generally more docile than solitary individuals and can maintain a much larger territory. The packs also use numbers to their advantage and can usually kill as many survivors as there are hunters.
The solitary hunters are as you guessed, the lone wolves. They are usually larger and more agressive than the pack hunters. And although a solitary hunter can nearly always defeat a social individual, they cannot go after large groups of survivors by themselves and usually single out the weaker survivors that have strayed from the group.
I've also made hunters generally smarter than their in-game counterparts. They have the ability to think logically and visualize the actions of other individuals based on variables within the environment. They can also communicate with eachother through basic hand gestures and growls. Instead of being a killing machine, the hunters are able to think somewhat rationally even in a scared/frenzied state.
And for my final point on these AU hunters, I'm going to explain the eyes- yes they have eyes. I've studied screenshots of pictures of hunters under their hood and decided that for all intents of purposes of my story, hunter eyes are red and surrounded by bloody flesh which the hunter clawed at during the pain of turning into an infected as opposed to actually gouging the eyes out. The reason for this is because when you see a hunter in the game, they are some most aware infected to their apocolyptic environment and jump from building to building accurately. I don't think an infected with even some means of echolocation could jump from halfway up a skyscraper directly onto a survivor without vision, and I also find the very idea of hunter echolocation pretty sketchy. A virus doesn't think, it wouldn't mutate an animal so that it would grow parts that are completely unrelated to the other thousands of years of evolution and it wouldn't say to itself, "Gee, I'm taking out the eyes of this dude, I better supply it with some other means to interact accurately within its environment."
Hunters aside for the time being, I've also tweaked the other infected to corrospond with these changes. In the game, the infected are shown to be just a mob of brainless, rabid creatures within which the irregular special infected are thrown in. In this AU I've decided to make them actually form a rough order to their activities. It's simaliar to how the herbivores and carnivores act on the savannah, the wildebeast, zebras, thompsons gazelles and various other prey animals all eat grass, but they eat it in such a way that each species fills a certain niche and does not compete with another species. For example, smokers pull away a single survivor from a small group after a tank has scattered the main party and a hunter pounces the remaining survivor. The common infected are kind of like vultures, going after the leftovers and harassing the survivors before the special infected attack.
Also, the smaller, weaker special infected like smokers, jockeys and hunters are generally smarter than the larger ones like tanks, chargers, etc. This is mostly attributed to the fact that the characteristics the smaller ones use like leaping and um... trapping? snaring? are usually used strategically in-game.
Ok, the massive rant is finally over, time to spell check it. Yay me.
The story officialy begins with the next chapter.