Harvested

In the dead of night, the only sound was the slight creaking of a wooden door whose hinges had not been used in almost a decade. In the dilapidated room stepped Hunter Pantone, a young cheetah with striking yellow fur and golden eyes. As the door closed with a single click, he gazed out at the dim interior. He was standing in an abandoned bar, with the overbearing smell of wood rot. In the dark he saw the remains of a dozen tables scattered around, deteriorated chairs and stools resting inverted on their surfaces. Across the back wall was a long series of shelves decorated with a variety of glass bottles once clear but now completely marred with dirt and grit. This was all that was left of Hunter’s childhood home.

He’d been a poor troublesome boy, but his adopted father, a black lab named Charcoal Pantone, had loved him more than anything. The bar had been one of the few spots of happiness in the Powder District, named for the flecks of soot that would blow in from the more industrial sectors of Grand Concentra City. Ironically, most of the workers responsible for the amount of soot lived in the Powder District themselves. Charcoal’s bar had always been a place to relax after work for all the workers sharing the slums to air their grievances about their bosses. Charcoal had made the mistake of working to clean up his street, to make life just a bit more bearable for his brothers. But the Authorities had got him on a technicality of which Hunter could not remember. Something about it being ‘dirty’, as if any amount of sweeping and mopping could clear out the thin dark coating that dusted the entire district. But Hunter knew that wasn’t the real reason his father was arrested. Health code violations were met with fines, but no one had heard from Charcoal since he was taken away when Hunter was only fourteen years old. His father had always been one to speak his mind, and too much discussion of the Imperial War between the Northern Empire and Sur Kingdoms might get people thinking. And the Empire certainly didn’t want that.

Clutching his leather jacket, the only thing Hunter had left from his father, he shook away the bad memories. He hadn’t come back to the district for nostalgia’s sake, there was something much more sinister in the works. For the past several nights, residents had reported a methodic rumbling followed by a series of metallic clanks, which would abruptly cease. A dead body would then be discovered not long after sunrise. There had been four such cases thus far, but Authority patrols in the district were scarce, and reported incidents were usually never followed up on. And so it would land to Hunter to figure out what was killing people. As a mercenary specializing in tracking down lost items he was the one for the job. But with the killings so close to his home it wasn’t just another job, it was personal.

Closing the door to the bar, Hunter stepped outside once more. The streets were narrow, not wide enough for any vehicles, and each building was joined together in rows, haphazardly constructed with wood paneling and cement. The sparse streetlamps reflected a pale orange haze into low-hanging clouds, and as it was just after 3:30 in the morning there weren’t many out on the roads. He leaned gently against the door to the bar, keeping his paw on the hilt of his sword sheathed on his left hip. There was always the risk of being mugged in this part of the city and he didn’t want to be caught off guard.

Suddenly, Hunter’s ears perked up as he heard a low rumbling, like the sound of treads over a gravel track. The rumbling was followed by a muffled cry and the methodical activation of a metal system transforming. Wasting no time, Hunter sprinted around a corner and down the street, the stranger’s distressed cry suddenly ceasing with a strangled hack. One last metal clang announced the return of the rumbling treads before leaving the streets silent once more.

Carefully, Hunter turned down an alley. Taking out his phone and activating his flashlight, he stopped in his tracks, placing his free paw over his mouth in shock at the scene before him. The body of a middle-aged goat with dirty off-white fur, clad in a brown and green coat, lay sprawled in the dust, his mouth hung open in distress. Stepping cautiously over, Hunter knelt down, noticing the goat had one hoof clutching his throat. The cheetah could see large indents in his neck, signs his windpipe had been crushed and the poor goat had suffocated.

Examining the scene, Hunter then noticed something else, nestled in the victim’s other hoof. A small white panel, made of either metal or reinforced plastic. Prying it out of the goat’s grip, Hunter took a closer look. On the inside of the panel was a company logo, a bold honey-orange H inside a lime green hexagon. On the upper sides of the hexagon were two adjacent identical hexagons, linking together to form an inverted triangle. Underneath the logo were the words Harvest Tech, Inc.

Standing up, Hunter slipped the panel into a pocket lining the inside of his jacket and gazed down towards the opposite end of the alleyway. Leading away from the goat was a single treaded track which he followed, but once he reached the end onto an adjoining street, the track disappeared. Whatever the machine was that was going around murdering, Hunter knew he would not find it tonight. But this time would be different, for now he had a clue.