History of the Hunters

“They have been called Hunters. They have been called Predators. Their actual name is unpronounceable by the human tongue. Their native language is unintelligible to human ears, yet they can speak in our native tongue after limited exposure. Their kind has been around since ancient times. An advanced species, yet simple in nature. Their entire culture revolves around . . . the hunt. 

I have been on this planet for thirty-seven cycles now. Some would call that a miracle since this is the Hunter’s Playground. That’s how my parents described it to me. From what I understand it is an alien planet, not the home world of the human race, though it can easily sustain human life. Sustaining it long enough for the Hunters to track and kill us. While not the only species they bring here for sport, humans seem to be the preponderance of prey. Maybe because of the intellect, the ability to adapt, or maybe because of the basic human nature of fight or flight. Most of the humans I’ve seen imported here have been fighters. Everything from soldiers to gangsters to plain old thugs. Again, that’s what my parents told me as I was growing up. We would watch the parachutes fall to the jungle with the unsuspecting prey swinging underneath the canopy. Some never made it to the surface. Eliminated before they even touched the ground. Some never survived first contact while others never lasting for very long. Every now and then, though, one, or a small group manages to put up a fight, giving the Predators a good hunt. They enjoy that, revel in it even. If somehow one of the Hunters is taken out by the prey, that prey is given a degree of respect by the aliens.

But forgive me, I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Adam. My mother was the daughter of two former imports, Royce and Isabelle. He was a mercenary while she was a Mossad agent. Mossad is an Israeli intelligence agency back on Earth if I remember right. My mother and grandparents did the best they could to educate me on the history of their home planet. My father was an import who was saved by my mother and grandparents but was killed shortly after I went through what my mother called puberty. He got careless foraging for food one day, ending up on a Predator’s spear tip, his skull and spine torn from his lifeless body as a trophy for the Hunter. 

We spent most of our waking moments though either avoiding or killing the Hunters. Neither feat being easy as they’re all equipped with a personal cloaking device, can see in multiple spectrums of light, and use beasts to flush their prey if it’s hiding. This is what makes humans some of their favorite sport. We are an adaptive, intelligent species as a whole. We’re one of the few beings that can actually give them a run for their money. Their other favorite seems to be a large, black insect looking alien. If the Predators are the ultimate hunters, then these aliens are the ultimate prey. Purebred killers with little thought but to eliminate all other beings. From what I’ve observed, they lack any emotion, display a hive mindset, and are vicious, brutal, cunning although not extremely intelligent. They live only to kill and further their species, overwhelming any and every world they can for their queens. It’s time to go deep into hiding when that species is imported. They’re even more dangerous than the humanoid Predators and it is extremely dangerous trying to deal with both aliens at the same time. One at a time is bad enough.

Stated earlier, the Predators are a humanoid species. They walk on two feet, have two arms and a head on their shoulders. But that’s where the resemblance ends. They have a large flat skulled head with a row of dreadlocks or tentacles in a ring around the edge of the skull. They have eyes similar to a human’s, but their mouth is hidden within a set of moving mandible jaws. The air they breathe isn’t life sustaining for humans and the creatures all wear a helmet with either a filtration system or some sort of self-contained breathing apparatus. They can survive short stints in an Earth type atmosphere without the helmet, but long-term exposure to the air humans breathe will kill them. Their blood is a fluorescent green which, if you can wound one, is extremely helpful to track it down. The problem is wounding one in the first place. They are tough to injure, even tougher to kill. 

While they may look and act like savage beasts, they are highly intelligent, capable of highly sophisticated beam weaponry and faster than light space travel. They have harnessed nuclear power, miniaturizing it down to an armband sized self-destruct mechanism each Hunter wears as a failsafe in the event of falling victim to its prey. It’s my understanding this was demonstrated in the Earth year 1987 in the Central American jungle when the leader of a small Special Forces unit bested one of the Hunters. The only reason my grandmother knew about it was because of her ties to the Mossad. Her department kept apprised of such happenings like that, monitoring the globe for any nuclear activity. The radiation from that blast, while registering as a nuclear explosion, had a radiation signature that was both contained within a small footprint and was unexplainable to human science at that time. I have no idea if it’s been since classified by human science. I can only vouch for the results of what I’ve seen here in the Playground during my lifetime. Occasionally there is a blast from a Hunter as one of the ‘bugs’ as I call them, or a human import manage to defeat a Hunter.

While each Hunter possesses armor and advanced weaponry, they prefer to make their kill with an edged weapon, up close and personal. Spears, knives, retractable long claw wrist gauntlets are the preferred methods of dispatching their prey, yet they are not averse to blasting them to kingdom come with a shoulder mounted pulse cannon. The beam of energy fired being what Grandfather termed an area weapon, not a point weapon such as the sniper rifle, he himself procured, using it to eliminate a fair share of the beasts.

As I mentioned before both the creatures themselves and their modes of transportation are capable of being cloaked by a device incorporated into the technology of their wristbands. The device somehow bends the light around the creature, rendering it invisible with nothing but a cursory shimmer of light to indicate the presence of the stalking alien. If you managed to see it, catch that fleeting glimpse of the warped light beams, it was usually too late, the last thing prey saw before meeting their demise at the hands of the large creature.

The creatures themselves were divided into two genus of their species. I call them the Talls and the Shorts. The Shorts is actually misleading since that genus usually run, at full maturation, about a full head and a half taller than me and I was told by my mother that I'm close to six Earth feet tall. The Talls however, at full maturation stand close to what I was told to be ten full feet high. There is a great cultural divide between these two, each thinking they’re more superior than the other.

My mother and I were able to track and capture a Short after it was wounded on a hunt. We were wearing the cloaking armor we’d stolen off a dead Hunter, following the blood trail, capturing it as it tried to recover and heal its wounds. It was a young Short on his first hunt. One of the ‘bugs’ had wounded him rather gravely. The Hunter had managed to get close enough to make the kill stroke with his bladed weapon, but he hadn’t managed to dodge the spew of the ‘bug’s’ acidic blood as it was decapitated by the Predator. The caustic bodily fluid had shorted out his armor and other weaponry while also leaving deep burning wounds all over the Hunter’s body. The loss of blood and pain it must have been feeling allowed us to sneak up behind it, snaring it with manacles we had stolen from other Hunters throughout the years. We forced it to walk to our seasonal hiding hole, caring for it long enough to get some of the history of the species.

It was able to tell us that human English was one of many languages they had encountered throughout the thousands of years they had been visiting Earth, entering words and phrases from across the centuries into a data repository the species as a whole has access to. Their species had frequented the planet for thousands of years because of the grand sport humans provide. Sometimes they would hunt on Earth itself, other times they would bring their imports from the third planet of that solar system’s sun back here to hunt on the planet of my birth, the Playground. They enjoyed the deadly competition we as humans gave them, our advances in technology and ways of killing each other intriguing them immensely. Over the years both the Talls and the Shorts had increased their own hunting acumen by both observing and stalking the human race.

Their home planet was a combination of high-tech building constructs and lush, thick, treacherous jungle. The Shorts predominantly inhabited the cities and were the watchful guardians and scholars of the species, while the Talls were more of the backwoods, less civilized brutes of the jungle. 

Status in their society is gained by a combination of factors regarding each trophy collecting mission. There was the factor of the sheer number of hunts a warrior had been on, the complexity of the chase, the world on which the hunt took place, and the danger presented by the prey. Each hunt was recorded with the High Council of the species determining the level of honor for each individual foray. Warriors could fathomably continue to hunt for what my mother and I determined to be close to two hundred fifty Earth years. In their culture, both Talls and Shorts, there is no concept of growing old peacefully and dying at home. From what I was told it seemed very similar in belief to the Aesir gods of the Vikings. Dying in battle and going to their own version of Valhalla was the only way to die with honor and to retain a blood line’s status. Anything less and that blood line was scorned for centuries or until it was remedied by an epic hunt or trophy collected. For recreation there were often hunts between sects and factions of each genus, Talls versus Shorts, to the death, for honor and glory, giving credence to the term, the deadliest game.

We learned that the ‘bugs’ and the Hunters have a contentious and antagonistic relationship that has spanned eons. The ‘bugs’ have been used multiple times throughout the centuries for sporting game, evolving and fanning the flames of hatred against the Hunters by the insectoids. While the ‘bugs’ longed to kill all beings in their path, there seems to be a particularly sharp bias against both the Talls and Shorts, for good reason. The Hunters are equal opportunity stalkers though. They will go against any species, small or large, if it provides an honest, dangerous hunt.

The youngling in our custody succumbed to his wounds after the first cycle of the season, what my mother said was about an Earth month. We were unable to move him once he laid down, he was entirely too heavy. We also didn’t want him to leave. We couldn’t afford to have him reveal one of our best hideaways. It was deep within a hillside, keeping us safe for many seasons. Our assurance to him was that someday we would find a way to regale the tale of his fight against the ‘bug’ that took his life to his own kind, so that his blood line would not be disgraced, his own personal tale of honor being told.

I am now using his holocube to record his legacy along with my own story. I have looked to the sky in the hopes that a female from Earth might be dropped again, that I may be able to continue my line. As of yet, I have had had no success. I have always been too late in getting to the drop zones. There have been remains of human females, indicating they have been dropped, lady warriors deemed worthy of the hunt, but none have survived long enough for me to attempt a rescue or an assault to consolidate our forces. I fear that my blood line will end here on this planet, in this Hunter’s Playground, courtesy of these Predators.”

The large alien closed his hand over the small cube in his hand essentially turning off the hologram he had been watching.

“Adam” he said in digitized English while looking down at the disemboweled human in front of him. 

His sensors had captured the trail of something that had been raiding his campsite for food. He had stalked it on the third evening after discovering the loss of provisions. He was here for his own hunt. His imported prey, a trio of ‘bugs’ as the human had called them, were out there either in the jungle or the nearby ruins of the ancient city, waiting for him. He couldn’t afford to lose rations, not when it would take a good amount of time to hunt the bugs.

The creature opened a small compartment in his chest armor. Placing the cube inside for safe keeping, he hoped he would survive his hunt so he could bring back the story of the youngling that had gone missing many seasons ago on his first hunt. It was now his duty to return honor and dignity back to the youngling’s blood line, which had indeed been scorned since he had disappeared such a long time ago. 

Wrenching the spine and skull from the deceased earthling, he returned to his campsite to polish and pack away the first of what he hoped to be many trophies on this trip.