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Story Copyright 2004 by Jacob Thomson. All rights reserved. A limited license is hereby granted to post this story on Usenet, on appropriate fiction websites, or to include this story in PERSONAL emails, provided that this notice remains intact, and that a link is provided to http://jacobthomson.com. With the exception of brief quotes in reviews, no other use of this material is permitted without permission in writing from the author.

He thought of himself as a predator. In nature, predation was an important part of the ecological system. Predators removed the animals who could no longer keep up with the herd. They culled the weak, the sick, the unfit specimens that needed to be removed from the gene pool for the benefit of the others.

Nature wasn't a cartoon, he thought. The cute little animals didn't spend their days frolicing in a bright, sunny meadow. Mostly, he thought, a lot of them spent the day eating grass, or twigs, or other vegetation, while the rest spent the day killing and eating the herbivores. It was all a part of the natural balance, and if you left it alone it usually worked out for the best.

At least, for the best in an overall sense. It was obviously hard on the individual deer or rabbit that found itself as a predator's supper. But it was good for the majority of those who didn't.

That was one of the problems with people, he thought. They had done too much in the way of tampering with the natural balance. If a child was born it had something like a 96% chance of surviving to adulthood, and nearly as good a chance of reproducing.

And this was true both of the superior individuals, whose progeny could be expected to contribute the most to the collective good of humanity, and of the sickly and weak, who could probably contribute best by not reproducing at all.

Curiously, he had never taken this idea to the usual conclusion. He wasn't a racist. It had never once occurred to him that a particular race was superior. Strong, healthy individuals of any race were included in his definition of superior. The same was true when he classified the inferior.

The problem, to his way of thinking, was that too many of the wrong people were growing up and having inferior children. In earlier times, when the human race was steadily progressing, slightly more than half of all children could be expected to die before they were two. It was nature's way of culling the weak and inferior before they were old enough to mate and pass on their bad genes.

But this no longer happened, which left it up to him. He knew, as surely as he was alive, that this was the reason he had been created and placed on the earth.

Now, he didn't hurt children. It wasn't their fault, really, that modern medicine was extending their lives past the point where nature should have removed them from the gene pool. Instead, he culled the inferior adults. Mostly, he hoped, before they could reproduce.

He had an inborn gift for finding these people. He could tell just by looking at someone whether they deserved to live or die. He wasn't sure how he knew—he just did. How did the wolf know which caribou needed to be culled from the herd? It was an instinct; something that simply was.

He never thought it odd that all of the inferior specimens he culled were women. Again, this was simply something that just was. He had nothing against women in general. He merely had a talent for recognizing the ones who needed to be removed from the gene pool. He thought there were probably men who also needed culling, but he hadn't found any of them yet.

He had managed to discover 28 women so far. They were all dead now, of course. After all, what was the value of these insights into the natural order if he didn't follow up on them? Once he recognized that a woman needed to be removed, it became his duty to nature to remove her.

He wasn't sure just how he knew. It wasn't anything obvious. Most of them had looked normal enough—even healthy and attractive. But he knew that an outward appearance of good health could conceal the truth; that her genes were bad, and that she would produce more weak, useless children to further drag down the quality of the human race.

This knowledge came to him from some instinctive source. He could look at any woman and know if she was supposed to live or die. On this single topic, his judgment was never wrong. Every woman he believed should die did die. So he had to be right. Otherwise, they would easily have defended themselves, and would still be alive.

It was a basic law of nature that the fit would always survive. If they didn't, they obviously didn't deserve to.

Just now he was searching. It was never ending, this mission he had set for himself. He had to go out each night, looking at every person he encountered, waiting for that intuitive recognition of the inferior that would set him on the trail of yet another genetic misprint in need of erasure.

Most of the people he encountered this night were just fine. There was nothing about them crying out to his instincts, alerting them that something needed to be done. It was like that most nights. He would prowl the city and no one would draw his interest.

But some nights it was different. On those nights he would notice a particular woman, and something deep in his highly-developed brain would instantly identify her as one of the bad ones. He might not do anything that night, but he would remember her.

Once he knew where she lived, the rest was easy enough. At some point he would get into her home, or catch her in a place where there was no danger of being disturbed. If she was unmarried, and not involved with anyone, it might take longer. If she had a husband, though, he felt compelled to work more quickly. She might get pregnant and, as his purpose was to prevent any more genetically inferior children from being born, it was important to remove her from the gene pool as expeditiously as possible.

The girl walking ahead of him caught his eye. She was tall and slender, dressed in a sheath skirt and a white, fitted blouse. Physically, she was a wonderful specimen, with a perfect figure, good legs, and long, shiny hair in a striking coppery red color.

But she was also one of them. His instincts were screaming at him, warning him that, beautiful as this girl might be, she was one of the genetic defectives, and should not be allowed to live long enough to pass on her imperfect genes to the next generation.

Of course, the knowledge that he would have to kill her didn't preclude having a little fun at the same time. That was one of the privileges of his special position in nature's genetic enforcement corps. Should he so choose, he was allowed to have sex with the women before killing them.

His own genes were, obviously, superior, and so should be combined only with the genes of an equally superior woman when it was time to reproduce. Still, as the defective women would die once he'd had them, it didn't matter. They would serve the useful function of giving him pleasure before they died.

Like this one, he thought. She was turning into an alley now, probably taking a short cut over to the next avenue. All the better for him. He wondered if that was what he had recognized in her, that she was one who would take foolish chances. She was making it easy on him. He could simply follow her down the alley, take her in the darkness, and then kill her right there.

He knew the city in every detail. There was a narrow side alley about halfway along the wider alley, between an old theatre on one side and the back of a row of three-story retail buildings on the other. You couldn't see into that side alley from either main street. It was a perfect venue for what he had in mind.

He quickly glanced around, pleased to discover that he was virtually alone on the street. With another quick look back he slipped into the alley. The girl was about 50 feet in front of him, strolling toward the next street as if she hadn't a care in the world.

He always tried to move quietly, but this time it was as if she simply wasn't listening. He caught up with her just as she was passing the side alley and swiftly dragged her into it, his hand clasped tightly over her mouth to prevent her crying out. She hardly seemed to resist, and in a moment he had her pushed up against the back of the old theatre's loading dock. Soon, he thought, there would be one more misfit removed from the gene pool.

But she was fighting back now. He was a big man, three inches over six feet tall, weighing 225 pounds and hardly an ounce of fat on his well-muscled body. Yet the girl was pushing him away, catching hold of his wrists and wrenching them from her lithe body, the effort hardly showing on her lovely face.

"You're not very smart, are you?" she said. Her tone was flat, dismissive. "Why so rough? I hate it when men act like brutes."

He couldn't believe it. Despite his size, the girl was pushing him back, forcing him up against the opposite wall, his arms pinned at his sides as she leaned toward him, her lips inches from his.

"Foolish," she said. "It didn't have to be like this."

She leaned forward, her lips lightly brushing his cheek. His mind was reeling. Was she coming on to him? He felt her kissing him, her soft lips against his throat, the tip of her tongue flicking out against the sensitive skin.

There was hardly any pain at all. He felt a slight pressure on his throat, a sharp twinge as the girl's canine teeth pierced the skin and plunged into the artery beneath. But it didn't really hurt, even as the world began to fade, and the only sound was the frantic pumping of his heart.

Five minutes later the girl walked out of the alley and turned east on the broad sidewalk. It had been easier than she'd expected, and curiously satisfying. She didn't think she was a bad person, after all. It was just her nature. And this time, in this man, she had sensed true evil. A predator, he thought of himself. She had sensed that, taken in his thoughts with his blood.

But he was, after all, only an amateur. One who killed from some psychotic delusion, not out of necessity. A mere child. And he had forgotten the most basic rule of predation. That predators come in all sizes. Foxes ate rabbits, but coyotes ate foxes, and cougars ate coyotes. And there was always a bigger fish. How was he to know that his intended victim had been hunting for more than seven centuries?

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