Memories

Fool," I hissed and then made my way to the man who in the meantime had managed to get on his feet, but was still able to avert his gaze from the Candir's carcass.

Yes, even if there have been many people who have already had bad encounters with proles, there are still some who have so far been spared. And the way this man looked, he was probably one of those lucky ones - well, he had been until today.

I walked over to him, leaned forward slightly, and studied his cheesy face. “Are you okay? Have you been hurt? "

His gaze flicked to me and then back to the corpse. His tongue twitched nervously over his lips. "No," he said, shaking his head. "No, I ... everything is okay."

"Are you sure? We can have an ambulance fetched so ... "

"No, everything is fine." His eyes flickered to me again, only to then rush back to the candir. This man really seemed like someone who had previously been spared such cruelty.

"OK. Maybe you'd better sit down anyway. ”Not that he just fell over.

He didn't seem to hear me at all.

Great.

With a cautious voice I got him to sit down on the step of the door niche. I stayed with him until I heard the police sirens in the distance. One car stopped right at our side of the road, the others drove on to the scene of the accident. Reese ran the business as usual, directing the police and the ambulance, reporting to the guild, and grimacing when a news van showed up.

In the meantime I got down on the body of the Candir. Just a cursory examination. A male, maybe half a year old. Not an abnormal mutation. This copy was like something out of a textbook. A cross between a golden retriever and a long-haired polar bear with ball joints and the ability to straighten up on its hind legs and strike with its paws when attacked.

Fortunately, these proles only lived in small family groups, because they were really serious opponents. Oh, what was I saying? All proles were serious opponents, no matter how small or large they were. For the first time in human history we had an enemy that we could not easily deal with, and we owed that to two parties.

For one, there is the well-known and infamous Doctor Christopher Krynick, the creator of these creatures. His intentions had been honorable, but he hadn't had the patience to give his research time to develop. He had fussed, wanted to develop a medicine that would take away the fear of deformity and mental retardation of their babies from expectant mothers.

Of course, he only carried out his experiments on animals, but something went wrong - so extremely wrong that many people today lived in fear. He had given the medicine to pregnant dogs and cats. Mice, madas and monkeys. But the babies were not what Doctor Krynick had imagined. No, they weren't malformed, they were ... mutated. Dogs with blue fur that were bigger than they should be. Cats with poison in their claws. A monkey that could give out electric shocks like a ray.

But those weren't the only differences that set them apart from their natural relatives. These mutated descendants also differed in their behavior. They were reduced to three instincts. Reproduction, nutrition and an extremely strong territorial behavior.

With these first descendants, Doctor Christopher Krynick had created the monsters that now flooded the world and that still pose a threat to every single being on this planet today, almost two decades later. Proles had no natural enemies. They were bigger, faster and stronger than me. Their natural relatives and besides, they felt the need to mate with everything, just kept still long enough. Therefore it was hardly possible to master this plague and it was still questionable which of us would survive in the end. They or we?

The other party that threw our world into chaos was the self-proclaimed animal welfare organization Live for Animals. In an act of charity they broke into Doctor Christopher Krynick's research laboratory to bring the animals to safety. Unfortunately they had no idea what was going on and a well-meaning rescue operation turned into a global catastrophe. The proles first killed their rescuers and then escaped from the research facility to bring a plague of unprecedented proportions to the world.

When a hand came to rest on my shoulder and slowly brushed the back of my neck, I tried to ignore the tingling sensation. "You can leave that nice. I'm still mad at you. "

"I would have been surprised if it were different." Reese crouched down next to me and only threw a moderately interested look at our prey. "Something special?"

"No, the cattle were just darn fast." I pulled my lips up to examine the teeth, but they looked perfectly normal for a Candir, too. "When is Judd coming?"

“He's still in the parking lot and the critters there to collect. It'll take a while before he shows up here. ”His thumb brushed the skin on my neck. He didn't even seem to notice - I did.

Sighing, I straightened up again. "Well at least ..." When my cell phone started to ring, I interrupted myself and pulled it out of my jacket. One look at the display was enough. "Jilin," I just said, holding it to my ear. "Yes?"

"Are you very busy at the moment?"

"It works." At the creaking noise on the line, I could almost see in front of me how the boss of our guild leaned back in her leather executive chair - okay, it was just an office chair, but that was also impressive. “We just finished the hunt. No injuries. The pack is eliminated. "

"I wasn't expecting anything else." Something clicked as if she were tapping a ballpoint pen on her desk. "How long do you need?"

"Not for long. The police arrived a quarter of an hour ago. "

"It's good. Please put the officer in charge and come here. I have to show you something. "

"Show something?"

“Actually, I have to show you something. So see that you move your buttocks into the car and make your way. "

Aha, very cryptic. "OK."

"See you soon." She hung up.

Frowning looked at my display and asked me what that had just been.

Reese looked up at me. Another cigarette hung between his lips. "What's happening?"

"No idea. We should come to the guild. Jilin wants to show me something. "

"And what?"

I shrugged unsuspectingly. “She didn't say that. We should hand over the supervision of the police and get on our way. "

"Fantastic." Grumbling, Reese rose and stomped sullenly over to the police force. He didn't like being called off in the middle of duty. His fight against the proles took place on the street and any interruption just annoyed him terribly.

But I wondered what Jilin wanted to show me. What was so important that she even pulled us away from a mission? It wasn't normal. Could that have something to do with your strange behavior last night?

When we came to the Guild yesterday, it seemed very busy. She was tied even shorter than was usually the case. But I must have noticed the strange look she gave me.

Strange. Really strange.

I slipped the cell phone into my jacket and pulled the sleeves of my parka over my hands. It was January and we were in the dead of winter. The days were now so short that the sun was setting again as soon as it had made it to the sky, and the temperatures were a good substitute should the freezer fail.

Every breath conjured up little clouds in front of my mouth and now that the heat of the chase had subsided, I began to freeze. Another year was behind us. It was hard to believe how quickly time could go by.

I looked up at the cloudy sky. There had been no snow this year, just disgusting cold rain. Frau Holle had not even appeared over Christmas. It had been the fourth Christmas without Wynn.

This thought made my already bad mood sink a bit.

A few weeks ago, after three years of practical training, I passed my training as a Venator with flying colors. So not only was I a trained monster hunter, I was also one of the best Venators in our guild. Just like I always wanted.

But this success also had a bitter aftertaste. In the last few years that I had spent on the streets with my partner Reese to make the world a little bit safer, I had seen many things that I would like to forget. But at least none of it was as bad as what happened back then with Taid and his creations.

So much had changed since then. And so much remained the same. Wynn, my little sister, had put me out of her life. She still blamed me for Uncle Rod's death. I couldn't blame her. Everything had gone so wrong then. Just like this one encounter with her.

It was about two months after I graduated from the academy. I drove to Wynn and her foster home. I had stood at the front door for almost twenty minutes before I dared ring the bell. My little sister wasn't very pleased with my visit. She wished the hell for me and told me I died for her. I hadn't dared come near her since then.

I sent her cards for Christmas and her birthday. So far she hadn't responded to any. I only knew what had become of her through third parties.

In the meantime she lived in a shared apartment with two other young women and studied to be a teacher. She wants to be a primary school teacher. Alongside hospitals, schools were the safest places in the world. It was just another attempt by her to hide from real life.

I, on the other hand, went out into the streets every day to protect them and other people from the monsters. I had so much to do well. Because of my failure back then, not only people died who cared about something. One of them was so badly injured trying to help that he was still in a coma today.

Nick, Reese's little brother.

Reese and I knew there was little chance he'd ever wake up, but as long as that lasted, we just couldn't bring ourselves to shut down the machines. Maybe he just needed a little more time. Maybe he would wake up again tomorrow. It was unlikely, but ... no one could say for sure. So we clung to that little bit of hope and let the machines keep working.

Nick probably didn't feel it anyway. He didn't suffer, he just slept. Quite the opposite of Reese.

Shortly after he made it clear to me that he loved me and would not give me up anymore, we moved in together. This step had come rather suddenly, but I couldn't take it anymore in Uncle Roderick's little house. Too many memories hung on those walls - both good and bad. But since I just couldn't bring myself to sell the house, I rented it to a small family and moved into the apartment with Reese and Nick's cat Cherry.

But too much had happened there too for both of us to have endured there for long. About half a year after I moved in with him, we looked for an apartment near the guild. Our little retreat. There we could lock out the past and hide away if the world threatened to collapse over us again.