This Mortal Coil by Logan Thomas Snyder

his feet like a newborn foal. “W-What do you w-want?”
    “Your name would be a good start.”
    “P-P-Paolo.” His eyes shimmered wetly, flicking back and forth over the unsympathetic faces of his captors and comrades. “Please, d-don’t kill me. We were just following orders.”
    “Then you don’t have anything to worry about, do you, Paolo?”
    Paolo shook his head hopefully.  
    “Good. Now, take that knife on your belt and cut the rigging off that container. Then cut it into lengths of about three feet.”
    Paolo did as he was told, separating the rigging into the prescribed lengths of cord. When he finished, Willem gestured with a nod to the kneeling hunters. “Tie them up.”
    “What?”
    “You heard me,” he said. “Tie. Them. Up. Starting with him.” He pointed to Team Leader.
    Paolo crept anxiously toward his sneering commander, a length of cord held between his hands. “Sorry, sir,” he said meekly.
    Without warning, Team Leader shoveled a fist into Paolo’s groin. Leaping to his feet, he snatched the knife from the boyish hunter’s belt and deployed the blade. With one arm around Paolo’s neck and another brandishing the knife to his throat, he grinned maniacally. “Your move,” he told Willem. “I’ll kill him. I don’t give a good god-damn. But you need hostages, don’t you? Otherwise you would have killed us already. Shit, I bet those rifles aren’t even loaded—”
    Theresa and Grace stepped forward, thumping darts into the both of them. Paolo and Team Leader crumpled into a tangled, lifeless heap a split-second later.
    Willem fought back a grimace. The display was a necessary one, he knew, but it was no more palatable a sight to behold for that knowledge. “Anyone else think they’re not loaded?” When no one answered, he nodded. “Good. That said, it looks like we’re going to need another volunteer.”
    Team Leader’s second lifted a hand from the back of his head. “That’ll be me, then,” the man said with an even, almost sleepy drawl. “They’re my men now.”
    “Hand over your knife. The rest of you lie flat on your stomachs and stay put. We don’t need hostages but we’re not looking to make more bodies, either.”
    “Maybe you aren’t,” Theresa murmured. Willem shot her a glare she held for several seconds before relenting with a roll of her eyes. She turned to the others. “Someone help me search these pigs.”
    With Theresa and Grace searching the hunters, Willem turned his attention to their new boss. “What’s your name?” he asked the man.
    “The men call me Mack,” he said evenly. Even under duress, this one was cool and collected, a stark contrast to the man who now lay just feet away, his life’s essence staining the turf, like so many others before.
    “Alright, Mack. Why are you hunting us?”
    “We were hired to test some new tech.”
    “Who by?”
    “Someone with money. You know what they say. Makes the world go round.”
    “So I’ve heard.”
    “We’ve got something here,” Theresa called back to him.
    “Don’t go anywhere,” Willem quipped, leaving Lucas and a reedy young man named Joss in charge of the prisoners while he went to see what had Theresa so intrigued. “What’s up?”
    “This.” She dropped an aluminum cylinder the size of a soup can into his hands. “It looks like some kind of shell or grenade.”
    Willem turned it over in his hands, feeling the weight shift and tumble as he considered it. “Could be, I suppose. Find anything else?”
    “Pretty much just that. There’s some water and food—nothing all that appetizing—but as far as hardware, that’s it.”
    “Huh.” Willem shifted the object from hand to hand and back again. “Let’s see what our new friend has to say about it.” He handed it back to Theresa.
    “I think I can manage that.” Theresa marched over to where they were holding Mack. Taking him by the scruff of his neck, she shoved the cylindrical mystery before his face with the