Six shots inside me
I had six shots in me. Two were bourbon. Three were Pfizer. One was a. 38 slug that the doc never bothered to fish out of my shoulder. And on a night like this I was feeling all of em.
I knew the full moon wasn’t going to help but, god, I didn’t expect all the cursed plaguing the city just after the sun abandoned the streets. And yet, they were. Many of them were just bathing in the silver light of the August moon, just absorbing the eerie radiation that kind of appeased them and kept in their human form, but the other few … They were roaming the streets, lurking for human flesh, that they could smell from a hundred meters away, doing that smirk gesture that always sent shivers through my spine. Luckily for the neighbours, the defenses against a cursed assault are cheap: just some salt lines in the windows, or some holy water sprinkled to keep them away.
For us, hunters, is different. We need more than salt, water or faith. We need thicker, stronger trappings if we want to clean the world from the cursed, recover what is ours and restore the hope … or just not fall under their claws and teeth. For starters, we need to be clean of whatever the cursed have in their bites, and that’s why we need the vaccines. I’m no science man and god forbid me if I understand some of the talks the Ultra department delights us with about the hypothesis they have about the origin of the Curse, the rabid like transmission model, or the half life of the mystic pathogen - as they call it. The only thing that I understand from them is that the third vaccine shot is what brings a slight possibility to fight back if any of those motherfuckers bite us to avoid turning ourselves into those gnawing monsters.
The bourbon shots are not mandatory for a hunter, but should be. Who in their right mind would do a job like this without the extra … spirit? It’s a daily tradition now for the whole team. You just pour the bourbon while you restock the guns, drink in silence, and you try to remember the simple pleasures of a life that is not here anymore, and find a reason to fight back the apocalypse.
And the .38 … let me tell you that I’m lucky the doc didn’t had the time to get it out of me. Silver coated, it was Jan’s experiment and his humble attempt to even the odds against the cursed. “Don’t they look like vampires from an old movie?” said while pouring the silver into the mold. Let’s say that he is not the brightest or best shooter in the team, and my shoulder is the witness of the latter. I was lucky, as he was aiming for my head. “I thought you were one of those, I swear to God!” Sometimes the slug is a nuisance, mainly when the weather is about to change, but fuck me if it does not tremble a little bit when one of those motherfuckers is near me. Ultra says that is not possible, but I can feel them: a slight itching inside my shoulder …
And now, it’s starting to feel like a goddam party inside my flesh. Those cursed are near and someone needs to teach them this land is still ours.