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The Union

"I don’t want to have to kill nobody. You know? I got three kids, an ex-wife and a new wife. We all have bills to pay. We all have our dues and duties. We got a nice neighborhood here for the most part. Sure, you see some graffi ti. Okay, you got those guys selling bootleg DVDs and whatever down out front of the zoo. But we’re good people. Trying to get by. Mikey, Johnette and I, we didn’t kill that kid. I don’t know how he got dead. Oh, we hurt him, sure. Dragged him into the park, pulled him underneath the jungle gym thing, and we put the lead pipe to his legs. Broke one of ’em. Not the knee, but the shinbone. And we didn’t break it, not really. Just…chipped it. Kid was crying, boo hoo, woe is me, blah-dee-blah. Sorry, asshole. Kid had to recognize, he’s 17 years old. Right? You do bad shit at that age, they can convict you like you’s an adult. Throw you in the slammer and melt down the key. I fi gure we’re doin’ him a favor. He wants to make a deal with a demon? To bring drugs into our nice neighborhood and try to sell that poison to our goddamn kids? Oh, hell no, chief. That’s some bullshit right there. I will hit you where the Good Lord split you. I know, he thought we weren’t watching. Didn’t know we had our own little neighborhood watch program going on. Well, Home First, motherfucker. Except, shit. Now the kid’s dead. Found his body in someone’s trunk. Bunch of his organs missing. Some weird symbol carved in his head, and no, I don’t know what symbol and I don’t much care, either. You’s guys want to look up the symbol, go the fuck ahead, no sweat off my back. But I’m feelin’ bad. Now, the three of us gotta fi gure out who killed the kid. I just better not fi nd out it’s some other hunter asshole, thinks he can come up in our business and start asserting himself. We took care of business. We police our own. We’re unionized up here, and nobody better forget it."

  In the States, it started with the Labor movement at the turn of the 20th century. Workers in factories and mines began to unionize, coming together to support and protect each other, the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, the common folk against the powerful forces who would exploit them. A group of mobilized, politicized workers in Chicago discovered that the disease that plagued their children was no natural phenomenon. As they saw it, things other than factory owners exploited the masses, squeezing them dry for fl esh, blood and souls just as much as grasping bosses used them for cheap labor. Alone they were weak. Together they were strong, and just as industrial action forced the fat cats to take notice, so, too, did organized resistance drive back terrible evils. The Chicago Union stayed together for a few years. When their fight was over, they disbanded. Across the Western world, the labor movement spawned more than just trade unions. It happened in England in the late 19th century, and in the 1920s. It happened in Australia in the 1930s and 1970s. Each time, as people banded together to support each other, someone or other discovered the creatures that preyed upon them, and did something about it. For a long time, they were localized, short-lived movements. This changed in 1999 when Holly Ramirez, an active member of one of these “unions,” started looking for resources online. She found a number of people across the English-speaking world who had banded together for mutual defense against the monsters. Weblogs and online forums made oblique, coded allusions to the struggles these blue-collar hunters faced. Messages posted on bulletin boards dedicated to parenting made reference to things a person could only understand if she’d been through the things Holly had been through. Holly, a student of the labor movement, began to bring people together from all over the world and all across the Internet. The first Hunters’ Union bulletin board started up in March 2000. By June, it was gone. Naïvely, the board hadn’t vetted its members. It was publicly visible. Too many people volunteered enough information for them to be pretty conclusively visible. More than a dozen people — who were too busy with day jobs and hunting monsters to be Net savvy — died because they didn’t realize who was reading. Still, Holly and her growing number of friends persisted. Since that disastrous spring, the Union forum has moved addresses four times,each time becoming more secure.. Now, possible members have to be invited. The administrators of the network, who rotate every six months, take notice of news stories, blogs and forums. If there’s someone in the region, they send them in to investigate and, if there really are fellow hunters out there, to offer them the opportunity to get a bit of support. On the message boards, members of the network contribute financially not only to the upkeep of the site but to each others’ efforts, paying for armaments, medical fees and funerals. Like a true union, the Union looks after the bereaved families of people who fell in the struggle. The online community has fostered a real community, with real friendships, real bonds of trust. Several people have met and married signifi cant others through the community. It may be unoffi cial and ad hoc, but the bonds of human trust are powerful. It’s not so political these days, but it serves the same purpose as those men and women of Chicago so long ago: ordinary people standing together as one against those who would oppress them. The Union seems fi nally to be working on a worldwide basis. Holly would have been proud. The Union certainly recognizes its debt to her: there’s a picture of her on a banner at the top of every forum page, linking to a page in her memory. She died fi ghting in 2005. Many of the Union’s members knew her and would follow her, if necessary. For now, they’re paying their dues.

Structure

Independant Cells loosely organized through hidden forums.

Culture

Working class American citizens.

Regular Joes and Janes

Founding Date
1999
Type
Information Network
Demonym
Unionized
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