Chapter 4

Hunter

March 7, 2005, Miami

"Have I ever told you about the time I regained my faith?"

I was certain, almost convinced of the fact that neither God nor the devil existed.

The Greek used to tell the ancient history of his people and how they believed in all their gods. He taught me about the Romans and their gods. Later, I read about the Egyptians, the Indians, the Asians, the Germans, and all their gods. What I have learned is that there is no God. There is only mankind's hope for one.

Now Christianity and Islam rule in most of the known world just like the true religion of the Egyptians and their most ancient god, Horus, once did. Just like the cults to Jupiter, Zeus, Odin, Buddha, Ra, and all the rest dominated social and collective minds so long ago. There's no doubt in my mind that the carpenter, his "Divine" father, the apostles and Muhammad will be the subject of a history book, not a religious one, at some point.

Good and evil are relative, or so I thought, until those nights of March 2005 in Vampire City, Miami. I was looking for a kill with no reason to believe when a reason found me. It found me in the middle of a hunt. It found me in the middle of my thoughts.

I didn't know it at the time, but after centuries, I had become the prey, even though at this point it certainly felt the other way around.

However, I don't want to get way ahead of myself.

In those first nights of March 2005, I watched how my vigilante got ready for his next kill. I found him in a cheap motel near the beach. It turns out that the subject of my attention was a captain in the U.S. Marines. I paid him a visit while he was asleep, and I got inside his mind.

Of all my abilities, mind reading has proven to be the most useful. I have to admit that without it, I probably would have gotten killed or destroyed a long time ago.

Reading people's thoughts is like reading a secret letter or breaking into somebody's e-mail account. You have all the information, but you need to know whom the information is coming from and for whom it is intended; otherwise, you will end with up with useless random knowledge.

The vigilante was a tormented soul filled with hate and regret. There was something about him—better said, in him. At first, I didn't know what to make of it. I picked the scent that very first night back in Orlando. There was something odd about it, something not quite human.

His name was Maximillian Hunter. Born and raised in Virginia, he was an all-American in every sense of the word. He was not tall, and neither was he too big. But he was smart, strong, and willing; and that by itself is enough in my book. He didn't have relatives or friends. He was, just like me, alone in this life.

I saw fragments of a lonely childhood. Apparently, Hunter's parents were not together when he was growing up. He had fond memories of friends and athletic activities, especially football and hunting. He didn't do well in school—not because he was slow but because he was stubborn and that would serve him well later in his military years. He got used to loneliness, but he never meant to become a loner.

I was taken aback by his memories. I have always been fascinated by my ability to learn about other people's lives. In this case, I was aware of the soldier, but seeing the lonely child and then the insecure young boy he became gave me a clear image of the man who was sleeping a few steps from me.

Hunter decided to enlist right after college. He had always wanted to be a navy SEAL, but he chose the Marine Corps instead at the last moment. It seemed that his hunger for action turned out to be detrimental in the end. He might have had a chance to be a fine executive; after all, he had a BA in foreign policies. Instead, as a marine, he was groomed to be an auto-soldier. But there was a problem: His brain was not wired like that. The military got very enthusiastic with him. He had every qualification they were after. He was young, idealistic, and, more importantly, he was alone. His father had died by the time he turned sixteen, and his mother, shortly before he graduated from college. He had no siblings or close friends. By all accounts, if the military was looking for suitable subjects to be part of their special ops, Hunter was one of those who should have been taken into consideration.

He had served in Iraq back in 1991, proving his courage by taking charge of his unit after their captain was gunned down by a sniper. Then came Somalia. There he got a taste for genocide carried out by a cleansing party sent to wipe out an entire village. He acted as he always had, motivated by the desire to protect the weak; instead, he found himself gunning down children dressed as soldiers sent to do the killing.

That was when he started to get detached from human emotions, when the real nightmare started.

Right after 9/11, Hunter, now a Captain, was recruited as part of an obscure elite force called CYKOS. These men were going to be the subject of an experiment involving a new, enhanced cocktail of steroids and chemicals aimed to improve their mental skills and physique. Over 500 men were selected, all of them with the same profile: proven soldiers, young and alone in this world. By the end of the program, only 117 remained. By the year 2003, only 25 were left; and out of all of them, Hunter was the one who didn't exhibit any of the side effects of the chemical cocktail. Apparently, the super soldiers had a tendency to turn into psychopaths. By the time the program was shut down, the last 12 healthy CYKOS spent much of their time decommissioning the others who had gone mad. The use of the enhancing cocktail was then suspended for messing up the physical and mental balance of the subjects, accelerating dementia in most cases, and causing chronic depression and suicidal tendencies in the lucky few.

The Pentagon ordered the complete destruction of all records, including those of the program's participants.

Hunter was kept on a tight leash and under the influence of the cocktail. He was then ordered to hunt down the remaining members of his unit, but he couldn't do it. He had joined the CYKO program under the impression that the participants were going to be the models for the soldier of the future. The program was designed to be the perfect marriage of technology and military supremacy.