The Variant doesn't leave much of the entryway intact. Broken hinges hold splintered remains of the wooden door, window frames hang from holes in the walls, and infected ropes of skin decorate the black pipes and loosened boards. Dazed by the throbbing in my head, I stare at the wreckage and forget what I'm supposed to be doing. But Thief reminds me.

Rough gloved hands shake my shoulders until the world spins back into focus. Worry lines crease the corners of her eyes as she shouts my name over and over again.

"Hey, King." She snaps her fingers in front of my face. "King! Wake up!"

I focus on her one silver eye until the blur in my vision clears.

"There you are," she says, then leans in and spits on my nose when she yells. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I'm hunting." I slur my words.

"You were serious about that plan?" her voice rasps. A vein pops from the side of her neck.

"Yeah." I point a weak finger to the doorway, where the monster howls outside. "That's my ticket to Mars. Well, it was supposed to be."

"King, that's stupid as hell!"

"That's your opinion."

"Mother--" She closes her eyes. When she snaps them open they seethe, even the empty one. "You're fucking irresponsible, you know that?"

"No I'm no--"

"This isn't going to work!"

"Who says?"

"I say!" She twists her hands through the front of my shirt and lifts me up against the bar table. "I'm giving you three minutes. Get yourself together and clean up your mess."

I grab her wrists. "Three minutes or what?"

"Or I'm killing your monster and going to Mars by myself."

"The Minister won't negotiate. This is the only way."

"No, this is you..." she stops and reconsiders whatever she was going to call me. "Not thinking straight, as always."

"I have a fucking chair in my head!"

Cracks interrupt our argument. They snake through the wooden boards, each one a continuation of deep lesions in the Earth outside the entryway. The Variant rages through the forest and splits the ground with its rotten feet.

Thief shoves me against the table again and lets me go. "Three minutes!" She stands and puts her new crossbow around her shoulders, unsheathing her machete. With a final wicked glare, she steps over the infected puddles, then disappears into the light of the doorway.

"Three fucking minutes, what is this bullshit." I wrap my hands around the bar inside my head and pull. "Since when did she get so damn cocky." The chair leg comes clean from my skull and oh, how I wish I were still drunk. Bile rockets to my throat again. My vision explodes into colors and black patches. I curl onto my knees and hold the wound closed as if I could mend it with my fingers.

The bones reconnect at my touch. New skin grows to close the gap until only a bloody patch of hair remains. I throw the slick rebar across the floor where it clatters inches away from the dead girl's fishnet legs.

I stumble to the door wielding my knife as if I really am drunk, my untied laces catching on the splinters and debris, the pounding in my head so intense that breathing becomes a chore. The broken door frame catches me; I lean against it as the sunlight scorches my eyes and increases the pain in my skull tenfold.

Down below, Thief slaughters the other hunters as if they were dumb animals. Her machete slices heads from shoulders and rips spines through stomachs. Ruthless and bitter, she pursues the monster and litters the ground with anyone who gets in her way. She doesn't speak to any of them, she doesn't give them a chance to beg for mercy. It doesn't matter if they're innocent, it doesn't matter who they are, the hunt belongs to nobody but her. And so, I decide to let her take it.

The Variant struggles beneath steel nets and thick cables, thrown by hunters and townsfolk who were bored enough to join. They gather around the creature and pull it to the ground. The grass dies as his skin drips to meet the dirt, and he slices deep gashes through the rocks with his claws. Faceless still, he screams until the mountains shake, and birds take to the sky from the pine trees. I clap my hands over my ears to tune it out, but pressing my fingers to my temples just makes the ache worse.

Thief distinguishes herself from the others with her energy and prowess. Unafraid to sink her arms into the infected body of the Beast, she outplays the other hunters cowering at the ends of their lines, each one too afraid to touch the creature themselves. She climbs onto the Variant's squirming back of loosened wax and growing bones, using her machete as leverage, and rockets to the top of a spine hardly connected to a swollen ribcage.

Her boots slip into the melting skin, yellow sores climbing her bare arms to meet her neck. I resist the urge to scratch my face with the memory of how infection burns, the hide of a Variant more toxic than the injection itself, rivaled only by the poison of an Ink Creeper. Thief has seconds to land a final blow before she succumbs to Corruption herself, and she doesn't waste a moment. I blink once and she's at his head, I blink twice and she's driven her machete deep into the creature's eye, one arm anchored somewhere inside its skull, elbow lost inside the wax.

The Variant rears, undoing its restraints. Poor unprepared hunters drag behind their steel ropes to be crushed underneath the creature's limbs or swallowed up by the wax. The creature tosses up its head and rips apart the dirt with the staves in its steel nets, clawing at the discharge from its eye. Thief retrieves her machete and moves as if she stands on solid ground, crawling to the center of the Variant's head. There she raises her blade, tip aimed for the center of its skull, a finishing blow she has little time to complete--the boils on her arms turn to black patches of oil, and her spine threatens to shift beneath her clothes.

A flash of light illuminates the hillside. I catch my breath--there at the creature's leg stands a hunter shrouded in a black coat, a smoking Legion light gun in his hands. Thief dodges the bullet by a mere breadth, it skims the fabric of her left shoulder and leaves an angry swollen mark. She cries, the monster howls, freeing itself from the last metal cable. The Variant sweeps her up in its claws and throws her across the forest floor. I recoil at the sound of her spine smacking against a large oak three. Her body arcs farther than it should be allowed to go, head tossed to the back of her neck. She slams into the ground unmoving, blood pooling from her mouth to decorate the dirt.

"Ah shit." I pull away from my rest on the doorframe and take out my knife. "Hang in there, Thief."

I don't need to avenge her. The hooded hunter finds himself within the monster's grasp before he takes his next shot. The creature lifts his head and opens jaws hidden by the wax, where long rows of teeth accompany a pale spiked tongue. Five steps into my race down the hill the hunter is lost inside the gullet of the beast, torn pieces caught on its teeth like spears. I use it as a welcome distraction.

With the creature busy dissecting its meal, I cut a sharp corner and make my way over to Thief. She curls up into a ball and wraps her arms around her stomach, leaning her head against the ground so I wouldn't see her tears. She took a nasty amount of damage, there's no way her spine isn't free of fractures, and I know she has broken ribs.

"How do you feel?" I ask. The beast shrieks behind me, the sound high-pitched and Mephistophelian. I stare over my shoulder a moment, watching hunters and townspeople throw their spears and weapons into its sides, dotting its ribcage with blades that pierce nothing but loosened wax. This Variant is evolved, disgusting and difficult to kill, too dangerous to confront outright.

Thief snatches up her hair as if that would help battle the pain. I crouch beside her and take her shoulder, the other arm cradled close to her chest, broken and dislocated from its socket.

"How do I--?," she says through gritted teeth. "How the fuck do you think I'm doing, King?"

"Hm." Her mutation doesn't heal her as fast as it should, but the small patches of yellow sores along her neck concern me. "I think your three minutes have run out," I say.

"Shut up." She glares at me with her empty eye. "This is your fault."

"Yep, maybe." I drag her to rest against the tree. She doesn't protest, she hangs limp in my grasp, a small whine uttered behind closed bloody lips. Her damp hair smells of sweat and infected wax and she's heavy, solid muscle through and through. As soon as her back touches the bark she attempts to get back up, but I grab her shoulders and stop her.

"No, you've done enough," I say.

"I'm fine." And as if to emphasize, she wraps her dislocated arm in her hand, and shoves it back into place. A gross snap echoes and I wince; she stays still and doesn't blink.

"Doesn't matter," I say. "This isn't your kind of fight, Thief, you're weaker than I am and you know that. Stay here and stay out of my way."

"You son of a--"

I leave her there to curse and cradle her gross broken arm, resting against the tree as her body shifts and pulls itself back together. With only my knife to accompany me, I face the creature head on, who thrashes underneath weakened cables thrown by the last courageous hunters. They dance around its sharpened claws, staring up at its blackened lips oozing with white strings of glue and red human blood, black eyes wide and hungry.

Any normal hunter would take out the others; the one who gets the kill gets to keep the prize, and all other Ancients become enemies. But I'll do that part later.

"Hold him down," I tell the others as if we were working together from the start. They only listen because it's me. Long lances find their way into the creature's sides once again, each one attached to cables that bite into the earth. Like a harpooned whale he shakes and spits, growing more rabid by the second.

My untied boots catch on the end of a lost javelin, bent and made of metal; I take it up and dash to the creature, heart pounding in my ears with the adrenaline of a fight I know I can't lose.

This spear's shit, I think, weighing it in my hands, fulcrum off-kilter and imbalanced. When the Variant snatches up its toothy, drippy head to smell the sky, I throw it as if unhindered and meet my mark. The javelin catches the hot sun for a moment, whistling through the humid air, tip sharpened and pointed at the Variant's hidden neck. My arm vibrates with the momentum of the throw. The javelin soars, the Beast screams with its mouth wide open. My spear punches through its neck and slices to its spine, silencing the creature with its metal shaft pressed up against the drizzle of an exposed jawbone.

Faint cheers resound from the rooftops of the town below where children jump on rusty metal sheets, rooting for either the hunters or the monster himself. As long as the show is bloody then it's good enough for them, no matter who wins.

I grab a metal net and run to the head of the Beast who writhes and scrapes its claws through the Earth, choking on the spear stuck in its throat. Two other hunters grab the ends of the net; together we toss it over its head and anchor it to the ground. The others back away and watch it squirm, but I don't hesitate.

Suffocating beneath the net the creature twists it's body to stretch its ribs up to the sky, gasping for breath that can only be arrested by its wounds. Insanity succumbs to desperation in its empty eyes; for a moment he isn't a demon, only a terrified animal clinging to life.

Only seconds remain until my window closes and the Beast frees itself, undying and unthinking from its binds. Only seconds remain until its infection spreads into the ground to contaminate the water bed and my precious Jawbone Hill. When I climb onto its stomach and sink into its flesh, only seconds remain before I succumb to Corruption myself.

The wax burns my arms and sends yellow boils racing to my neck. Insects start their crawling under the layers of my skin. The Beast thrashes underneath my untied boots, laces lost inside undone intestines and falling insides. I jab my knife into its slippery hide to keep my balance. A foul odor turns my vision gray and sets my stomach upside down, but I ignore every primal temptation to run, and slice further into its chest.

Guttural and revolting, the Beast attempts to shriek but only throws a bloodied discharge from its lips. Infection eats away at my skin as its blood spews and burns like acid. I bite my lip and strain to see through the tears in my eyes, scraping open a cavity in its stomach until I find what I'm looking for--a wadded up combat suit and a chewy ear.

Delta, still alive, with Corruption doing its best to eat him away. When the body dissolves the transformation is complete, and a Variant of this kind is too disgusting and contagious to sell in its final stages. I hook my elbows under his armpits and pull him from the cavity, muscles straining with his weight as the insides of the Beast refuse to let him go.

Soaked in wax, skin stinging with yellow boils turned black, I drag the two of us from the Beast. The Variant collapses into the ground, skin leaking away from monolithic bones that stretch to the hazy blue sky. A foul smell washes over the mountain side, the stench of death and pestilence like no other, as I slay the Beast by disconnecting the host.

"You—" I rearrange my fireman's grip to drag his feet across the ground. "Were not—" My face stings with acrid residue that drips to meet my shoulders. "Worth all that trouble."

We collapse, Delta an unconscious mess of mutated limbs, me, breathless and exhausted, dripping sweat and strings of glue onto the brown grass. I pull the pieces off of me one at a time until I'm free from the toxic flesh, and one by one my yellow sores fade when they meet the fresh air. The Variant melts along its massive bones beside us, stinking fumes reaching to touch the thin mountain clouds. The smell protects us; none of the others attack. At least, not yet.

"I made the final blow," I tell them around my huffs for air. "Hunter's Code, the Variant is mine."

"Right," says a familiar voice. Male, young, naïeve, and much too close. Still blinded by the Variant's poison and my own adrenaline, I find him far too late.

"But there ain't a bullet in his head yet."

Something cracks against my skull—again. But this time, I fail to stay awake.

WC: 2597