Decided to see if I could quickly write out a story on the train home, so here you go...
Taking the apocalypse corporate.
It started with the werewolves.
No one knows quite why, but it seems like one day they'd just had enough of living in the shadows. Those countries that had wide open wild spaces fell quickly. Canada, Australia (who the hell would have ever thought Australia had werewolfs?), Wales, Siberia...
All pretty much no go areas for humanity these days.
Of course we weren't going to take that lying down. We prepared our militaries and made ready to go in and kick some hairy arse! That was then we found out we had vampires amongst us. And it wasn't like the movies. Those things don't have so many weaknesses that it is amazing they could get out of bed in the morning without falling down dead. Again.
Any city with over a million people in it as it turned out also had a substantial population of vampires ready to feed on them. If the were's were going to come out of the shadows, why should the lords of the night be any different. When they called Dracula the Prince of Darkness they weren't kidding. All manner of undead were at their command. Want to visit somewhere like London or New York today, you better be able to deal with not just the vampires, but the hordes of zombies at their command, not to mention the humans in thrall to their predators.
Central America... Jeez, no one can even guess what the hell is going on down there, but no one who goes in there comes out alive. Or at all. Our satellites can't even see that area, although we are pretty sure it is still there.
I think it was the fae who appeared next. Kicked the werewolves out of Britain, claiming the islands as their own once more. That was also our first inkling that these creatures don't get along with each other any more than they get on with humans. Turns out part of the reason they hadn't wiped us out before is that they all hate each other more than us. Might be the only reason we've been able to cling onto existence at all.
Other than many of them need us to feed on of course, or to breed.
Oh, my name is Jess. I am a hunter. What do I hunt? Well, all the things that hunt us basically. Of course I don't do it alone. No human could hope to go one on one with the Universals. Why do we call them Universals? Well back before all this started out some guys used to make movies with all these creatures in them, only they aren't like the ones you've seen that tell you how to kill them, they were make believe. Anyway, one of these groups called their films 'Universal' and they did them about werewolfs, vampires and all sorts of other creatures of the night so as a sort of joke that is what we call them.
Wonder if it was those bastards that caused all this? Maybe they didn't like how they were being portrayed in these movies and rebelled against them. Humanity wiped out by a bunch of film critics.
There are about a dozen members of our team. We have a pretty high turnover rate and its not really worth remembering the new guys names until they've been around a month or two. it just works better that way. Sometimes you don't want to know the name of the guy you are scrubbing out of your denims.
We live and work out of our customised Battle Bus. Officially its called a Grumman Landship 3000, but we all call it the Battle Bus. Three inch thick armour all over, enough to keep a rampaging pack of were's out. Well for a while at least. UV spotlights for dealing with vamps, top mounted high ex rockets for... well pretty much everything. Front assault guns, every 100th round is silver coated for weres, armour plating is cold iron which takes care of a hell of lot of demons and faeries... all sorts of weapons. The flame throwers are my favourite though. Not a lot (except the demons), is immune to them. Of course, not everything is quite as safe and easy to deal with as the ones we can take out with our ranged weapons, and even then it only weakens a lot of creatures. Most of the time you have to finish them off, up close and personal. Cutting their heads off is pretty much the only way to be sure. Then we stuff the mouth full of a mixture of stuff. Salt, earth, few herbs and spices. I don't know the story behind it but we call it the Colonels Special Sauce. Then we burn the head. With all this on board, you don't get a great turn of speed out of them, 50 miles an hour tops, but they sure do make you feel safe when you are inside.
So, anyway we were resting up in some roadside motel. Those things are beacons of civilisation in the wilderness. Heavily protected against Universal's, a group of hunters out on a deep patrol know they can rest easy in one of them. We weren't the only group staying there either. Five other Battle Buses were parked up inside. Got to be figuring you aren't going to get much safer than that right?
Well that is exactly what we were figuring too.
We'd been on a run deep into Canada. Travelling for about 3 months, starting to run low on supplies and were thinking about heading south again. We'd collected plenty of pelts for a good bounty, not to mention a whole nest of vamp's we'd wiped out. The money from this trip would give us a pretty damn good time off. Well we could even retire if we wanted to from this kind of trip, but once you are in the life of a hunter, well what the hell else would you do if you quit? Not that most of us get the chance to retire. If you last a month you can consider yourself a veteran. Me? Well as it happens I celebrated my first year in the job last week.
We'd all gathered in Mike's room, cracked open a few beers and were swapping war stories when there was a knock at the door. Larry the tech guy (no idea if that was his name or not, but the tech guy when I had joined was called Larry. A succubus had drained the life from him. We found him, a dry husk when we'd gotten back from taking out a Rakshasa in the south east. No idea what happened to the succubus. Maybe she starved to death? Larry was a total nerd and couldn't have given her much of a meal. Still I've seen plenty of guys go out in much worse ways. Beats getting trampled to death by a leprechaun on a pogo stick.
So anyway, Larry opens the door and speaks to whoever is on the other side. None of us can see who is there, 'cos even with the food shortage Larry has still managed to become a pretty big guy. It was a bit of a surprise to us when Larry fell to the sides.
Yeah, I know I said to the sides. Its what I meant to say. The guy at the door was some kind of souped up ancient vampire and had just used the edge of his hand to cut Larry in half from his nuts up to his head. One half fell left, one half fell right so to the sides like I said. We all moved pretty fast after that. You don't last long in this game if you can't, but most of us only had small arms on us and you need serious artillery to take down one of the ancients. This guy however, he was moving a lot faster. Parts of hunters were flying through the air as he tore through us like we were nothing man! Me and Milly, we could see we weren't even going to slow this guy down with what we had. Mike gave it a good try with a silver coated flick knife. If he'd stuck it in the heart it might have done some good, but he just caught it high in the shoulder, so we threw a chair through a window and followed it out sharpish. Everyone else was dead or dying, so I tossed a grenade through the window. We could hear Mike screaming as the bastard took his time with him, suddenly cut short with the foomph of the grenade going off. What we didn't know was that there was a whle bunch of other vamps round the front, and the explosion distracted them Gave us enough time to get to our Battle Bus and get inside. Turned out the whole damn place was a trap. They'd set up their own motel and been attracting hunter patrols then killing them, which explained the five other buses right?
Milly gunned the engines and we drove straight through the perimeter wall. A Battle Bus does not move fast, but when it is going it is unstoppable. Anyway, once we got out of there we could see the vamps chasing us on the rear view. I got into the rocket turret, and made sure that bastard who did for Mike was out there with the rest of them before launching a full spread right at them. No amount of hi ex will stop a vampire completely, but when you've blown his arms and legs off... well he tends to move a mite slower afters. So we stopped the bus, strapped on a chainsaw each and went out to finish the job. When we got to the old guy, his face all ripped open, body in pieces, well I took my time with him, just like he had wanted to with Mike. I didn't kill him though. Took his head off whatever the hi ex had left on his body, and pulled his fangs out. Then I decided f**k it and removed his entire lower jaw. Took his eyeballs too, but left him his ears then took the head for a walk into the woods and left it stuck high up in some tree. I know if he gets enough blood he can regrow his body, but best of luck with that one buddy.
By the time we got them all must have had anther 50 vampire heads to add to the collection. At first we were thinking wow, this bounty on top of what we already had, split between the pair of us instead of 12. Had no idea what to do with that much money. But as we realised on the drive back south, we were thinking too small there. Here is the thing, no one else owns that motel or the Battle Buses. We got salvage rights on all of it. So what we are going to do is go back up there with a few full crews and turn that motel into a proper base. Then we'll franchise out those buses to different local areas and clear each zone at a time. We'll advertise for settler in each safe zone once we've kicked the Universals out, buy more buses and keep spreading, setting up more strongpoints and using them to secure each area. People will pay to live in a safe zone and pay well. Then when Canada is sorted we'll look at going intercontinental and clean up the rest of the world. No more of this random wandering and picking them off where we come across them. I am talking about organised and professional, wholesale, corporate slaughter.
Eventually we'll run those creatures back to where we only know them from the movies. So how about it? You man enough to join up and get in on the ground floor of the next big thing? If you've got $10,000 as a security bond you can be the captain of your very own bus. The only question is, do you have the cahojes to take back the night?
I was even thinking about going to fetch that old vampires head. Maybe he could be a corporate mascot. I could let him know every week how many of his kind we've exterminated. If nothing else, it would be one hell of a conversation piece during dinner parties. I knew there was a good reason I left him his ears.