These stories first appeared in Hunt's Book of Weapons, an in-game collection of found documents curated by an unknown researcher. They are replicated here in their original format. This means that many of the stories are not presented chronologically, or in one grouping, and it is left to the reader to put together the puzzle pieces and determine to what extent they contain fact, fiction, or fable.

Prior to the launch of Hunt: Showdown 1896, this weapon was named the Caldwell Pax. Our Variant terminology has since been simplified. We have updated the names where relevant, but you may still see the more period accurate names within the lore texts.

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Pax

CALDWELL PAX (See also, REVOLVERS) The Caldwell Pax, sometimes known as the Single Action Army, swiftly became one of the most iconic and popular firearms of all time. A single-action revolver with a six chamber cylinder, designed for durability and reliability, it proved a success at the U.S. Government Service Revolver Trials of 1872. Its reputation was truly earned, as the years that followed put it through its paces across the American west. Named for the Latin word for "peace," the firearm played its part in dominating the American continent and cemented Henry Samuel Caldwell's legacy.

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The Papers of Hayden Collins
Filed under: Lynch
Story draft?
Undated

She had pinned him to the ground with giant, rusty railroad stakes. The factory must've laid the tracks to move raw materials around the large grounds. With a scalpel she had cut the flesh from his leg into long strips before peeling it off in long, blood-damp ribbons. These she dipped in a foul-smelling bucket and hung from a clothesline, no more forced to carry the starched undergarments of the family whose corpses still sat around the kitchen table inside the house.

The man before her was no one—not special, not chosen—though perhaps, once, there were people who valued human sacrifice. Who saw it as an honor. But in order to believe that you had to believe in something.

His breath was shallow, and that he was still alive at all was due to the glowing, pulsing liquid she had injected into his arm while she was still playing the role of nurse, when he still thought he was a patient, about to be treated, to be healed. She laughed at the thought, and slowly pulled another length of warm flesh from his leg. The nerve endings ripped and the muscles below, now exposed, convulsed. He felt nothing, which was a shame, because the pain and the terror tended to make the results more potent. Non est pax. But screaming might draw in others, and she could not afford to be found before she completed her task.

She wrote her name on a piece of cloth and sewed it in the place where his tongue had been. Lynch.

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The Papers of Hayden Collins
Filed under, Lynch
Story draft?
Undated

She left only his face intact. The pieces of flesh there were too small to be of any use to her, the thick black hair would only get in the way, and at least if someone remained behind to mourn, they might be able to identify the corpse, though the man was not yet dead.

While the strips of flesh she had hung from the clothesline slowly dried in the sun, and the man slowly died, she slept. It would take a while, a day at the very least, both the man's death and the preparation of his skin. Death filled the house, and so she lay outside, curled around herself in a pile of leaves, like a dog.

When she awoke, the afternoon and the night had past, and the man had begun to moan, though he did not appear to have regained consciousness. She stepped over his body to check the drying meat. Almost ready. Once the flesh was cured, she would braid it into thick ropes. The spirit, the demon—though they did not refer to themselves that way, their word for themselves was more accurately translated as gods—must be called, bound, and carried. Subdued, it could be distilled. The process took seven days, and resulted in a liquid that she used to carefully fill syringes of metal and glass, and sold to that idiot Huffington. The eyes and lips of the corpse would be used in the summoning ceremony, and the process of binding was part speed, part spell, part patience, part wit. They thought themselves infallible, and it was their greatest weakness.

Pax Incendiary Ammo

RN: Gruesome, too gruesome for any publisher. To what extent were these descriptions drawn from personal experience? It seems that nothing remains of his own journal—if Collins even kept one. No doubt such a journal would be a valuable find.

Pax Claw

CALDWELL PAX CLAW (See also, CALDWELL PAX, FIELD MODIFICATIONS) The Caldwell Pax Claw was never an officially mandated design, and rather the term given to a particularly malicious field modification. The handle is extended with a large knife blade, particularly suited to a stabbing thrust motion. The namesake is purely visual, resembling an animal's claw. This practice emerged and became popular in lawless backwaters, where conflicts are solved brutally at close quarters, somewhat at odds with the name Pax.

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The Papers of Hayden Collins
Filed under: Lynch
Story draft?
Undated

The circle was drawn in salt, the symbols that danced around and inside and through it painted in ash. The corpse had been laid across the border of the circle, bait and bridge. She crouched in the shadows, the long rope of flesh in her hands. She lamented the fact that intestines could not be used to bind a demon—it would be so much easier—before she forced her attention back to the circle.

And then it was there, a glimmer like heat in the air, an absence of light, a wisp of smoke, and the faint smell of wet clay. It crawled across the body, its image solidifying with each movement, running a long purple tongue across the exposed muscle. The expression on what she thought of as its face was unreadable, too other for human interpretation, though it was ecstasy and greed she projected upon it.

As the being crossed the line of the salt where it was broken by the body, Lynch jumped into action, pushing the corpse into the circle even as she entered it herself, closing the broken full moon of salt again with a quick motion of her hand. The being, the demon, the creature, the god remained atop the man. She was not worthy of its attention during a meal. The last mistake you will make, she thought, before she sprung and bound it in the ropes made from the same flesh it was currently devouring. So it was sustained. And so it was undone.

She would distill its corpse into the serum used by the Association, an inoculation of a sort, though nearly as deadly as the ailment it prevented.

Pax Dumdum Ammo

RN: Collins had a penchant for embellishment, in fact made a career of it, and it's strange to read his version of our somber practices, which I always thought in a way clinical. Yet the gravitas of his language also fails to convey the forces that really flowed, or the vitality of the moment.

Pax Poison Ammo

RN: Was every inoculation prepared in such a way? Would the Hunters really do that? The answer seems obvious, yes, yes they would. Yet. The truth is a hard bitter pill to swallow. The taint of such a ritual runs deep.

Pax Trueshot

CALDWELL PAX TRUESHOT. (See also, CALDWELL PAX) After becoming a staple among US lawmen, the Caldwell Pax's popularity saw it fall into more nefarious hands. To keep pace with outlaws, sheriffs and marshals began to strike unofficial deals for the expensive "Trueshot" variant of their service weapons, reducing stability in exchange for a more powerful shot. Though named to distinguish it as the one true vessel of peace, the mighty revolver was servant to a great many ends.

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The Papers of Hayden Collins
Filed under: Lynch
Story draft?

November 1909

Beneath a shadowed cypress tree, a cloaked figure waited. Unmoving, she gazed upon three women at a distance, who all waded through filthy waist-high waters to reach her. Each of the wading women wore the coats of law marshals with matching firearms, and each looked prepared to kill. As they arrived, Lynch—for it was Lynch under the cypress—smiled shrewdly at how malleable the human mind remained. She gave a nod.

A moment and five gunshots later, one marshal remained, standing above the two corpses of her companions. She was battle-scarred and graceful. Lynch rose and cast off her cloak, now singed by two bullets.

"Fac quod faciendum est," said the survivor, breathless. Lynch caressed her snarling face, and the survivor's expression softened.

"Close your eyes, my paragon, and I will mold you anew against your creator's wishes, remade in your own image."

The survivor hesitated, but ultimately obeyed. The sway Lynch held was potent, and it arrested the survivor with enough faith for Lynch to pull her cloak from the earth. Thereby she revealed to no watching eyes: a metal bucket, rusty stakes, two scalpels, a filled syringe, salt, and a silver dagger. She reminisced at the thrill of forcing the stakes through men's hands, yet her hair nearly glowed with eager anticipation for the improved concoction—one which flowed from a willing sacrifice, and one which held her very own blood.

Serenity was upon the survivor's face as salt was spread around her feet. It remained as Lynch injected her forearm. It even remained as the scalpel was traced slowly across the flesh of her chest. As Lynch drove the stakes through her feet into the sodden dirt, however, her eyes snapped open, and her hand twitched to her holster. But it was too late, for Lynch was already aiming the survivor's own pistol into her left eye. Screams echoed across the bayou as Lynch worked. Gasps rustled through the leaves as an ethereal deity devoured the euphoric survivor.

A sigh struck hell as Lynch brewed her finest inoculation yet—a toxin for herself that you will be powerless against. Tremble, twisted Beira. Lynch is hunting still.

Pax FMJ Ammo

RN: These papers seem rougher, more gruesome than any others. Less filtered? The question remains, how much of Collins writing is fanciful imagination, how much was verbatim? The more I read into this, the less I think I'm able to differentiate.

Pax High Velocity Ammo

RN: I find myself called back to this passage time and again. Collins' mind must have been addled to concoct a story such as this. Yet every visible incentive would have pushed him to sanitize his work, so to write as brutally as this makes me wonder.

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