Primal Gambit

Chapter 19: Capturing a Dragonfly

Following the dragonfly across the charcoal sky was a task impossible enough. The four men-turned-hunters rampaged through city streets in a gutted and reassembled all-terrain jeep. Tied to the grill of the huffing grump, arms and legs flailing in the pollutant wind was an old-world teddy bear. An eye dangled from ever-thinning thread – bouncing with every pothole jerk. Taped across the left bumper of the skidding stalker was a sticker that read: "Wine Me, Dine Me, Try To Find Me." The silver undercoat, rivaled in rugged beauty only by the rust and bullet holes, raced down animated streets as the quarry faded into the clouds. Taking down something so powerful was no easy task, and there was no question to the extraordinary amount of reconnaissance performed throughout the Darwin's prior months. 

The tracking device rigged to the passenger-side dash illuminated the tracker in green luminescence as he deciphered the intentions behind the rapid direction alter in the game. A yellow dot in the center of the screen represented the jeep – a larger, fluorescent green rectangle that trailed further away from the dot was the Reaper creating distance. Based on past raids, it was understood that the Marcotte Raiders were leaving the city limits to pull from one of the lesser boroughs. Outside of the city lines meant the trackers were following a perilous trail. Malgrove was home to numerous chop shoppers who would turn a blind eye to wasting a group of four to score a 4.0 liter inline 6 of decent quality.

The bulkiest of the men had his head buried in the back of the jeep, loading weapons and troubleshooting the device integral to the success of the hunt. The second man in the back, arms littered with scars and faded tattoos, worked on securing a massive tripod to the roll-cage. In the passenger seat a man jotted down notes in a journal as he studied the screen before him. At times he would put the pencil between his yellowed teeth and grab onto the cage – heart rising and sinking with the truck he thought was about to roll. The ride surely would have been more relaxed had the quarry not been able to bound distances with such speed. A professional driver was necessary but the trackers were not expecting a maniac behind the wheel. They had come to learn that his nickname was "Shift", a moniker earned for the violent tendency he had to nearly tear the stick out of the column when changing gears.

The entire crew was hired by Darwin – a man who could justify acts of inhumanity if they were those of his own devising.

"When I was a boy in Malta, I used to capture dragonflies in my mother's garden," Shift began to shout over the whipping wind, his vague accent faltering from the noise.

"I would swing my hands through the air for hours, failing to catch them because of their nimbleness. But then I learned that to catch them, I had to wait until they landed." The passenger looked over through cracked and taped eyeglasses, pencil still in mouth.

Shift jerked the stick down into fourth.

"Then I'd launch the attack, plucking off the wings at my leisure." He looked over, a grin engulfing his bearded jaw.

The jeep pounded the earth beneath it over the course of an hour, finally leaving the city and heading towards a marked location twenty minutes east of Malgrove. The area between both the boroughs and the edge of the city line had become outstretched miles of junk – both from man's endless consumption of material as well as the excrement of past wars. One stretch of scrap was to be the setting for the strike.

Oftentimes on raids, Darwin had come to find, certain Reapers would abandon the mission for hours at a time to garner some extra hours of rest and relaxation – unbeknownst to Marcotte. Pilots would switch communication relays off, later advising Overseers that they had travelled through dark reception spots. Darwin found respite in understanding that these parties did not actively capture men, though he found vengeance to be the most important task – anyone at Marcotte was to blame. The increasingly cheerless man was willing to pay anything for redemption.

And so it came. Shrouded behind the rusted and overturned remains of a tractor trailer was the jeep – Shift smoking from the driver's seat as the tattooed man fended off sweat with a dirty bandana, standing on the backseat as he loaded the device that latched onto the tripod. Across the way, hidden on the ledge of a scrap metal mountain were the two other hunters – arming their weaponry and tracing the path of the Reaper. On past raids, Darwin's reconnaissance team had found three spots where the parties would land regularly. Each spot, surrounded by mountains of decay, was the perfect place to launch an attack. With all the equipment armed and ready, the trap was set. A low brown fog, dense with hanging ash began to set in. There they waited for their very own dragonfly.

The night progressed, the fog drifting slowly. Then, suddenly, the wait was over. The sign the men had all been waiting hours for was finally upon them – the menacing thump of the rotors began to hammer through the fog. Louder and closer the beats became, until house-sized pieces of junk began to avalanche from the massive mountains. Shift's counterpart conducted the final task of drilling spikes into the dirt to ground the jeep. Two giant spotlights began to invade the fog from above, gradually cutting through it. A dooming shadow lowered itself to the ground as the men ducked down behind the trash heaps.

Plumes of smoke billowed from the ground as the horizontal wings became vertical and the landing gear retracted. The pounding rotors nearly collapsed the lungs of the four men who fought the internal damage to carry out the siege. When the engines finally shut down and the propellers began to slow, a sliding cage door opened on the side of the plane. From the belly of the beast emerged the raiding crew. Some stretched while others sat on the ground to catch their breath and gather some space. The strike was about to hit them and they had no idea. Besides the playful banter between two of the men in the valley, the area was dead silent. A radio crackled in Shift's hands as he lifted it to his mouth:

"Let's pluck the wings."

Before another minute could pass, launching from the tripod-mounted device with a mechanical hiss was a massive harpoon. Cruising through the air at an abnormally slow pace, the goliath barb embedded itself into the wing of the landed Reaper. Rope tied to the end of the harpoon connected the airship to the grounded jeep. Raiders began to shuffle about, drawing their weapons and looking to the hills in search of targets. Exasperated shouts cut through the wind before being drowned by the ignited engines of the Reaper – rotors beginning to spin up. Shift began firing his shotgun at the men below after shouting into the radio:

"Make it breathe god damnit," He awaited the firebomb from the two men on the hill.

The airship rose from the ground at an angle, nearly lifting the jeep with it. The rope became taut – about to snap at any moment. Losing time, a tracker on the hill unjammed the weapon and lifted himself from cover to unleash destruction. The rocket burst from his shoulder with deadly precision – crossing the valley and embedding itself in the nose of the helicopter. True to its namesake, the dragonfly began to breathe fire – a massive explosion rocking the innards. Shift cringed at the stench of sulfur that infiltrated the land as the four men picked off the remaining raiders. The hunter in the jeep untethered the rope from the harpoon and watched as the Reaper spun up into the air before crashing down nearby. Everyone ducked for cover as bits of flaming debris rained from above. Deaf from the firebomb and blind from the black smoke, rounds whizzed by in every direction as the last of the raiding party fired into the obfuscation.

When the smoke cleared and the remaining men were dead, Shift began to shuffle down the garbage to loot the fallen. He was no better than the men that called Malgrove home. The others joined, overturning corpses to search filled cargo pockets. One man looked up to the sound of a distanced motor, greeted by the sight of spotlights bouncing through the fog. Pillars of flame shot from the roving vehicles as the chop shoppers burned the world around them, to ensure the dead were really dead. They had come for their quarry.

Shift stood up and began loading the final shells into his boomstick.