Invasive: The First Wave

Chapter 1: The Man and the Hunter

In the blue-gray haze of late August twilight a man on a horse plods down the Daniel Webster highway. His path appears aimless, meandering. He threads between the oxidized and peeling shells of automobiles. Hondas, Chevrolets, Mazdas, here and there a BMW. All are wedged together in a silent mosaic of decay. Most still sport a patch or two of sunburnt paint, but the auburn hue of rusting sheet metal is the dominant tone. The man and the horse look strangely appropriate as they wend between the sagging carcasses, describing a common thread that unites the rusty tiles of the mosaic like so many oddly shaped beads on a leather cord.

The man looks down into the cars as he passes them. Most of the windows are gaping cavities, each offering a macabre story that will come back to torment the unfortunate witness on restless nights.

Here and there the charred remains are preserved by the good fortune of unbroken windows which have fended off years of elements and scavengers. To the man, they look like the stick figures he used to scratch into his notebooks as a child. Somehow they have been transformed from graphite scribblings into real-life men, women and children. This transformation has done little to animate them, however. Like their two dimensional counterparts they sit placidly, uncannily human in their posture but endowed with the patience of a riverbed, forever content to gaze out at the world through the blurry veil of carbon-streaked glass.

The man draws up the reigns and the horse comes to a stop beside one of cars. It is a large sedan, its nose firmly planted between a pair of pickup trucks. Its hood is flung open, most likely by the collision with the two trucks, and is flexed backward at a painful angle. To the man, it looks like a hyper-extended joint. The hood covers all but the uppermost edge of the windshield. The protection it provided probably explains why the windows of the vehicle are still intact.

The man dismounts the horse and drops to the ground. His boots punch inch-deep holes in the gray mud. His horse, a patient, well-trained animal, stands unflinching as the man approaches the driver's side of the large sedan. He removes a tool from his belt and presses it firmly against the driver's window. With a pop and the tinkle of glass, the window is transformed from a hazy panel into a shower of tiny fragments that sparkle as they tumble into the desiccated lap of the vehicle's ill-fated driver. The man reaches inside, flips the door lock mechanism and pulls the release that opens the door. He swings the door wide, and bends down to examine the interior.

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Back on his horse, the man makes his way up a winding driveway to an elevated plateau, once the site of a large discount shopping warehouse. From here he has a clear view of the land surrounding the Daniel Webster highway. It is a modest road - the title of "highway" being a mostly vestigial reference to its importance in the days before the interstate system was built. The road runs parallel to a larger highway, which carried the majority of the vehicle traffic, when there was still traffic to carry. 

From this high vantage point, the man can see that the shopping district on the Daniel Webster was the epicenter of roundup campaign. Stores, a shopping mall and discount warehouses, all burnt down long ago, probably during that campaign. The snarls of traffic on the road tell him that it happened late in the resistance, when the military stopped using planned campaigns and began opportunistically herding and destroying Hunters whenever and wherever they could find them. The encircling patterns of destruction show where the boundaries of the roundup started and how those closed in, compressing the hunters into an ever shrinking ring of fire, along with the humans they had been hunting.

The man continues north, eventually leaving the Daniel Webster behind and rejoining route three. The diversion into the shopping district has paid off. In that intact sedan he found a police officer's sidearm, a shotgun and some ammunition. The ammunition is probably more dangerous to the shooter than to the target after sitting in that car for so many years. The handgun and the shotgun are next to useless against a hunter, but the mountain colonists up north will trade for it anyway. They always want firearms, even if they don't know what to do with them.