(1) HUNTERS DESERTED- A Hunt: Showdown Story

Part 1.1: Hunters

I walked into the makeshift weapons shack and took a look around. It was about 8 feet tall and 10 feet wide. It went back about 15 feet and in the back behind a counter there stood a man that looked more like a pig than a person, with cover-alls on and nothing underneath. He eyed me carefully. I know the reason why too. See, before the Civil War ended, people like me wouldn't have been walking around all free and such. We'd be on plantations. It had been 30 years since then, and still there was something that happened when I walked a room that made it seem like all the air had been sucked out of it.

I didn't pay it much mind, they weren't bothering me and I wasn't bothering them, so I was just fine.

I walked further into the weapon shack and glanced around at all the equipment. There were weapons of all sorts. Springfields, Lebels, and Romeroes lined walls and on homemade wooden tables there lay sticks of dynamite and syringes full of unknown medicines. I had never used them, but I heard they worked wonders. I picked up a rifle, the Vetterli 71 Karabiner, and felt it in my hands. It wasn't too heavy and wasn't too light. Just right.

I set it down on the counter that the big man stood at, along with a chain pistol, and looked for more equipment. He watched me as I scanned the tables for what I would take with me on my Hunt.

I came back with a pair of brass knuckles, decoys, a first aid kit which carried 3 rolls of bandages, and a knife that was almost the size of my head. I also decided to get two syringes, a hellfire bomb and a stick of waxed dynamite.

The pig-man added up the total and told it to me slowly. I pulled out the amount and slid it across the table to him. He took it as if it was touched by an Infected, and put it off to the side- probably to wash it off after I left, and waved me off.

I walked out of the shack with all my equipment in my satchel (besides the weapons, which I carried) and ran to the gate that surrounded the little building. My partners were standing impatiently waiting for me to get out. Ready to begin the mission. Ready to fight anyone that stood between us and the bounty. How naive we all were. Even the veteran Hunter who served in the Union Army during the Civil War wasn't prepared for the hell that was to come...