Page 20 of Treasured By the Hunter

We stepped back inside the building and descended the half-flight of stairs to the bowling alley.

It was dark inside, but the lantern Harb’k had brought from his shuttle had no trouble lighting up the place.

“Usually, it would collect and set up the pins for us, but we’re going to have to do it ourselves,” I explained as I went to the back of the lanes to find the pins.

We might as well have fun while we waited the flyers out. I set up several lanes for us as Harb’k collected all the balls he could find. It wasn’t long before we were ready to bowl.

“How does this work?” he asked.

“First, just so we’re on the same page, I’ve only done this twice, so rules and terminology are a bit foggy, and we’ll have to make some up as we go. But the goal is to knock down as many of those pins as possible. You get two turns each time.”

Harb’k hefted one of the balls, looking like he was about to whip it at the pins.

“Not like that!” I reached out to stop him. “You don’t throw the ball. You roll it. Like this.”

I picked up one of the balls, showed him how to hold it, then went for it. I only knocked down a single pin. My second try wasn’t much better, knocking down two more.

“Okay, your turn. Use a new lane.”

His fingers didn’t fit into the holes, so like I did with his blaster, he improvised, holding it in whatever way was best for him. He put way too much force into it, and the ball rolled into the gutter.

He immediately grabbed another ball and tried again, this time knocking down several pins.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Well, normally, the machinery resets the pins. We don’t have that luxury. We can go set it up again. Or we can be lazy and move on to the next two lanes.”

We chose the lazy option. Then, because we still didn’t want to go back and set up the pins again, we made our own rules and continued until we knocked down everything.

In the second round, we found more pins and decided to set them up creatively, spreading them across all of the lanes, and making up the formations as we went. I furrowed my brows at the strange formation Harb’k was setting up on the last lane. It was using a hell of a lot of pins and a good chunk of the lane.

I blinked as I realized what it was. Harb’k was drawing a cock and balls!

I don’t know why I found it so funny. Maybe it was because I’d expected it from a human dude but not a scary Xarc’n warrior, or perhaps it was the severe concentration on his face as he did it, but I burst out into giggles.

He grinned at me, for a moment looking much younger. He was having fun! And you know what? So was I!

We took turns, knocking the pins down in each lane. By the time we got to the one at the end with the dirty formation, I wasgrinning so hard my cheeks hurt. And for the first time in a very long time, I forgot all about the space bugs.

Chapter 9: Harb’k

We lay in a bowling lane each, staring at the geometrically painted ceiling. Zoey was enjoying some packaged food, and I was eating a food bar.

We’d thoroughly butchered the game of bowl-ling, and I’d enjoyed every moment of it. She hadn’t even called me immature or berated me for setting the pins up in the last lane in the shape of a human cock. I’d picked up the practice from foraging and hunting with the younger males at camp and knew that some of the females thought it silly and immature.

It wasn’t the right shape for a Xarc’n cock, but it was much easier to draw and more recognizable. She’d laughed at it until she was holding onto her stomach, which was the intended purpose.

That was one thing about coming to Earth that had changed my life forever. I’d learned it was okay to have fun.

When the Xarc’n military had created us hunters to eliminate their previous genetically modified accidents, the scourge, personality traits such as humor and playfulness hadn’t been what they’d been going for. They wanted stoic warriors with a singular purpose. We weren’t created to think but to follow orders. We were created to fight, not to have fun.

But they didn’t intentionally remove the undesirable traits either. They simply ignored them as they didn’t affect our ability to fight. That left hunters like me, who always felt out of place. There were also hunters who were more technologically inclined than others, and sometimes, they understood my humor a little more.

But those hunters had a valued and esteemed spot in our society now that Xarc, and the Xarc’n military, was gone. They helped create new weapons and improvements to our shuttles.

Me, however? The way my brain was different wasn’t very useful for fighting the scourge.

Ever since coming to Earth, we’d made many changes in the way we fought. For one, we stayed in hunter groups permanently now instead of hunting alone for most of the year and only teaming up for the summer swarms.

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