Page 39 - Hunter - The Vigil

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in their dead flesh or it’s some kind of medical anomaly (a pered dogs, roving the night, looking to slake a living thirst.

disease, perhaps), nobody’s really sure. But what’s damn sure Theories abound as to what they are or how they got that
is that the walking dead are out there, hungry, desperate and way. Speculations suggest a monstrous origin, born from Tia-
sometimes quite mad. mat’s belly or the Devil’s own head or from some curse laid
upon the earth by God His Ownself. Less popular ideas lean
Vampires toward the scientific: vampirism is the result of some plague,

In a dockside warehouse, the Rat King licks his fangs with a or perhaps each of the Damned is the puppet of some kind of
pale tongue and bellows to his gathered ghouls a command: Go, blood-hungry parasite.
my little mice, and hunt. Wherever they came from, vampires are bad mojo, the
In a penthouse suite, hunters tear at the metal “curtains” undead manifestations of vice and inequity. They are driven
locked down over the windows, prying them back just enough to by dark passions, stirred by the blood to give into whatever
get a single shaft of sunlight in: it burns the beautiful woman they geeks them at a given moment: a mad grab for cash, a claws-
have staked to the fl oor. out cackling sex rush, a gluttonous gorge to get a belly hot
In a boiler room, servants of the Long Night pray over a lit- with the red stuff. They are passionate creatures, in a way.
tle girl who, even now, unwittingly sups at the emotion coming And those passions are dead and twisted.
off those hunters, her belly growing full with all their hopes and To invoke those passions, a vampire can tear a fence out
dreams. of the ground, ignore a stitching of bullets to the chest, run
It’s a grim cycle with these vampires. A bloodsucking mind control on unwitting hunters, even command a whole
creature of the night kills an innocent human, feeds the dy- colony of rats to reduce a victim to bones.
ing man a drop of its own thick and vile blood, and another Most hunters want the vampires in the ground. They
bloodsucking creature rises from death and stalks the night. don’t like the idea that humanity is a food source. But they
Vampires exist. Most of them feed off blood, though ru- also recognize that some of the unliving are still very human,

mors exist of other types that eat flesh, drink spinal fl uid, or indeed (or at least look that way), and hunters sometimes
drain brains of their memories. Some are solitary, true Lords give them the benefi t of the doubt, especially if that means
of the Night, ruling over neighborhoods or whole cities, com- forging an alliance with some group of the bastards to put
manding their own unliving soldiers and relishing in the power a bigger, meaner enemy down. Vampires have power both
it gives them. Others work in packs: blood-spattered coteries mystical and temporal. Some hunters know how to use that
that work in tandem just like hunter cells or a pack of distem- to their advantage. Most, though, just get dead, or worse —

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