Chapter 1

His legs were cramping as he crouched behind a small hillock waiting for his prey. The sun was not quite standing at noon in the cloudless summer sky. He had heard her car approach several minutes earlier followed by the squeal of brakes, which she really should get fixed, he thought. Monsters don't usually think about such details even if hunters do.

Faintly he heard the crunching of their shoes on the drying grasses as they crossed the meadow. The field was blossoming with wild flowers. The trees surrounding the Eastern European forest looked sinister to him, but he was a bit biased. He knew for a fact that there was a monster in this wood and this was where she preferred to eat her victims.

She, his prey, was seeking the source of the human life, the electrical systems that animate human flesh. Fundamentalists believed the source of human beings was an incorporeal soul, but they were wrong. If there were such a thing, which the hunter doubted at times, then the soul was powered by the neurons, nerves and spinal cord and all the other electrical bits and pieces. Monsters fed on the neurological system, although they had to eat a certain amount of flesh to get to it. Their feeding reminded him of predators on the African savannah; in fact, they were no different from his perspective.

He scoffed at the foolish believers of the devil and all things infernal. These monsters were definitely a part of this creation and this planet. Whatever their evolutionary path, they preferred human beings as their food source. Evidence of their existence could be found in mythologies around the world.

The hunter brought his thoughts back to the moment. The leaves had a darker tinge of green than Western Europe or even North America. Despite the brightness of the day, darkness hovered over the landscape. If he let his discipline down, if he allowed his imagination to run rampant, he would quickly begin trembling. "Hmph," he softly grumped. He had more control than that, of course.

His prey was giggling. She had the sexy undertones of human erotica down pat. Her victim, with his sweaty bald head, was grinning from ear to ear in expectation of a randy romp in a hidden field with a lovely madam. He wasn't ignorant; she was simply that good at luring her prey. If she was consistent her target would be a comfortable middle-class man, either divorced or on a business trip, who found himself in a friendly conversation with a well dressed woman with good manners and an alluring smile. She would have ended the previous evening with a kiss and promise to picnic the next day probably.

Monsters want to kill in complete privacy if they can manage it. They are well aware of the digital world with its cameras around them and take care to avoid detection. The desire to survive teaches all sorts of lessons.

"Set the blanket down here," she said.

She chose the same kill spot she had used the last time. She didn't see the hunter as he watched from his hidden blind. She had added blonde highlights to her reddish hair since he had last seen her.

Her sundress was pure white with pale flowers of pink, baby blue, and yellow. It had a number of buttons down the front. The top three were unbuttoned, showing her cleavage. She invited her victim to sit. Leaning forward over her victim, she took a long glance at the distant road for unexpected travelers as he gazed at the slopes of her breasts.

With giddy laughter and a feral smile, she placed both hands on his shoulders and she pushed him on his back, placing him in the kill position.

Just as she latched onto his mouth, the hunter leapt from his hiding spot and sprinted toward them from behind. Her hands moved into position at his temples. The bald man's eyes bulge as the first instant of terror registered in his brain.

With all of his might the hunter aimed a kick with his steel-toed boot just below her ear and behind the jaw. The kick was accurate, breaking the kill hold. She was knocked up and off of her prey. A black thread, as heavy as crude oil, dripped from her victim's mouth.

The blow didn't incapacitate her as it would a human being. She sat on her haunches and glared at him in fury. Momentarily her eyes rolled back into her head and her shoulders twitched. He had never seen that behavior before, but he took advantage of her inattention and charged her.

Her eyes came back to him and she launched herself into the air. Her long nails ripped through his leathers and gouged skin. He felt burning in his arm. Fortunately his knife was in the other hand. As her arm swept past him, her neck was exposed. With a yell, he plunged the knife into the side of her neck, as deeply into her spine as he could get. She collapsed.

She wasn't dead. She wasn't human after all. But she was incapacitated and would stay that way for a few minutes. That was how long it would take her to rebuild the host body. He scanned her with his hands, seeking the electrical source of her being. She had hidden it under her ribcage. That was his gift, being able to sense the crackle of electricity that was her source.

Using the machete, which he carried on his back for just this purpose, he sliced open her belly from side to side. Ignoring the gore and the malodorous smell, he shoved his hand up and into her chest until he latched onto the source.

Perhaps it is chi at a monster's core, the source of who they are regardless of which host they inhabit. The source is like a bundle of long twisting, electrified wires, which looked like pictures of microscopic dendrites, entwined around each other. As he had been taught, he grabbed the core and yanked it out of the body with all of his strength. It is neither an organ nor a mechanical device. It crackled and glowed like electricity in frenetic motion but held together as an integral whole.

His teachers had taught him to crush it, even under his boot if necessary. However he had learned, quite by accident, that by holding it in his hand for a moment, his body would absorb and digest the energy. The feeling of strength and well-being he experienced as the energy fed into his own nervous system was ... was...

Buddha had called it enlightenment. Hindus seek it within from the source they call aum. Westerners describe it as "being in the moment." His central nervous system lit up like the ball at Times Square on New Years and every muscle, ligament and organ danced frenetically with joy. His head was thrown back and his back arched as the currents rushed through his arms and up his spine. It was ecstasy squared for a brief moment.

The bald man made a sobbing sound, which made the hunter turn his way. The man had vomited on himself as he tried to take in the events of the last few moments. The hunter stood with dripping black gore nearly up to his shoulder and light blazing from his eyes. At his feet was a hacked corpse and a machete with viscera still hanging off it.

"Thank you! Thank you!" he cried softly.

The hunter wiped the blade on what was left of the sundress. Monster or not, she had had good taste in fashion. If I had a girlfriend, the hunter mused, I would like to see her in that dress.