Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  Charn talked over them. “I speak from terrifying personal experience: You do not want to risk being caught here. I spent most of 1985 in this world, was hunted by fauns, betrayed by whurls, and forced to strike a vile bargain with a golem in the service of General Gorm the Obese. It was always twilight, nine months of shadows fighting shadows. If we are separated and you do not find your way back here, you will be left.”

  God, he loved to talk, Peter thought. It seemed to Peter that Charn’s true calling was not hunting but lecturing.

  They followed Charn down the meandering flight of rough stone steps. The branches of dead trees creaked and rustled, and ancient leaves blew around their ankles.

  Once they all stopped at the sound of a great distant lowing.

  “Ogre?” Peter’s father asked.

  Charn nodded. The groan came again, a sound of aching despair. “Mating season,” Charn said, and chuckled indulgently.

  Peter’s rifle thudded and banged against his back, and once the barrel caught on a branch. Mr. Fallows offered to carry it for him. His voice did not quite disguise an edge. For himself Peter was relieved to get it off his back. He felt he was already carrying too much. He hated hunting for the most part. There was too much waiting around, and his father wouldn’t let him bring his phone. Shooting things was fun, but often hours went by and nothiiiiiiing happened. He sent a mental prayer up to whatever barbaric gods ruled this world for a good quick piece of slaughter before he himself dropped dead, of boredom.

  Christian Longs for Night

  They went down and down. Christian heard the rushing of water in the distance and shivered with delight, as if he were already up to his waist in the frigid stream.

  Charn led them off the steps and into the woods. A yard from the path, he touched a black silk ribbon hanging from a low branch. He nodded meaningfully and walked on into the poisoned forest. They followed a trail of the discreet ribbons for not quite half a mile and at last arrived upon the blind, set twenty feet off the ground. It was a shed resting on cross-planks in the boughs of a tree that resembled but was not an oak. A mossy rope ladder had been draped up out of reach on a high branch. Charn dropped it with the help of a long forked stick.

  There were a couple camp chairs in the blind, and a wooden shelf holding some dusty glasses, and a dirty-looking paperback called $20 Lust if someone wanted something to read. A wide slot, about a foot high and three feet across, faced downhill. Through the trees it was just possible to see the flash of black water below.

  Charn was the last up the ladder, and he only stuck his head and shoulders through the trap.

  “I built this blind in 2005 and haven’t shot from here since 2010. As every year of ours is three of theirs, I think it safe to assume none of them will be on their guard should they pass near. From here you can sight on the stairs and also pick off anyone moving along the footpath beside the river. I must be out to check the condition of my other blinds and to place a few snares for whurls. With luck I will have some new prizes to replace Mehitabel and Hutch before we exit this world. If I hear a shot, I will return at a brisk pace, and you need have no fear of shooting me in the half-light. I know what you can see from this blind and have no intention of crossing into your field of fire. Watch for faun! They are plentiful, and you are sure to see some before long. Remember, there are no laws here against taking down a doe or a young’un, and the meat is just as tender—but we only mount the bucks as trophies!”

  He lifted two fingers in a wry salute and descended, gently dropping the trap shut behind him.

  Christian had settled in one of the camp chairs with his drawing pad but leaped up to study a cobweb in a high shadowed corner. The spider had spun a few words into the web:

  FREE BED FOR FLYS

  Christian whispered in a breathless voice for Peter to come look. Peter studied it for a moment, then said, “I don’t think that’s how you spell flies.”

  Stockton dropped into a camp chair, unbuttoned one of the snap pockets on the front of his camos, and produced a small canteen. He had a sip of coffee and sighed and offered it to Fallows. The other man shook his head.

  “Hard to believe it’s real,” Christian said, turning his drawing pad to a new page and idly beginning to sketch. “That I’m not dreaming this.”

  “What time do you think it is? Almost night or almost day?” Stockton asked.

  Christian said, “Maybe it hasn’t made up its mind. Maybe it could still go either way.”

  “What do you want it to be?” Fallows asked.

  “Night for sure! I bet the best things come out at night. The real monsters. Be great to bring back a werewolf head for the wall.”

  Peter guffawed. He took his rifle back from Fallows and flung himself onto the floor.

  “Let’s hope we don’t see a werewolf,” Stockton said over the rim of his thermos. “After what we spent to get here, we didn’t have much left over for silver bullets.”

  Fallows Prepares

  One hour went by, then another. Christian and Peter ate sandwiches. Stockton sagged in his camp chair, drinking Irish coffee, looking sleepy and content. Fallows waited by the open window, staring into the night. His pulse beat rapidly and lightly, a feeling of anxiety and excitement in him that made him think of waiting in line for a roller coaster. Fallows always felt this way before a kill.

  “I’d like to see her,” Christian said. “The sleeper. Hey, Mr. Stockton. You never said. Is she a little girl or like, a grown-up girl?”

  “Well, I’ve only seen her from a distance, but I’d say—”

  Fallows reached back with one hand in a gesture that called for silence. Peter stiffened, staring through the slot that faced the slope below. Without looking back, Fallows beckoned Christian to join them at the window.

  Three figures mounted the steps. One of them, the tallest, held a torch that blazed with blue fire. Ram’s horns rose from either side of his skull, and he walked with his hand on the shoulder of his kid, a child in a loose, flapping vest, with fuzzed budding horns of his own. The doe was close behind them, carrying a basket.

  “It’s all yours, Peter,” Fallows whispered. “I loaded your gun myself.”

  “Nail the big one,” Stockton said.

  Peter stared out at the targets with inquisitive, thoughtful eyes. “If I shoot the kid, they’ll stop to look after him, and we can nail all three.”

  “Oh, that’s thinking,” Stockton said. “You got a good head on your shoulders. And in a minute you’re going to have an even better one for Charn’s wall.”

  “Do it,” Christian said.

  Peter pulled the trigger.

  The Hunter Racks Up His First Kills

  The gun made an unsatisfying clack.

  Frustrated and confused, Peter threw back the bolt. The rifle was empty.

  “Fucking thing,” Peter said. Behind him a chair fell over. “Mr. Fallows, this isn’t loaded.”

  He looked back over his shoulder. His face darkened, then went pale, and Christian tore his gaze away from the fauns to look for himself.

  Peter’s father had toppled over in his chair, the black rubber handle of a combat knife in his chest. His red, heavy, souse’s face was perplexed, a man reading a bank statement that suggests somehow, impossibly, his savings have been wiped out. Christian had a distant, distracted thought, that it was the knife Peter had been unable to find in the morning.

  Peter stared at his father. “Dad?”

  Fallows stood over Stockton, his back to the boys. He was tugging Stockton’s rifle off the dying man’s shoulder. Stockton didn’t make a sound, didn’t gasp, didn’t cry out. His eyes strained from his head.

  Peter lunged past Christian and grabbed for Fallows’s big CZ 550, which was leaning against the wall. His fingers were stiff and clumsy with shock, and he only knocked it over.

  Fallows couldn’t pull Stockton’s rifle away from him. The strap was still snagged over his shoulder, and Stockton himself was clutching the butt, in a last, fa
iling effort to resist.

  Fallows glanced back at the boys.

  “Don’t, Peter,” he said.

  Peter finally grabbed the CZ. He slid open the bolt to make sure it was loaded. It was.

  Fallows stepped over Stockton and turned to face them. Stockton still had the strap of the rifle over his shoulder and was clutching the butt, but Fallows had one hand under the muzzle and a finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at Peter.

  “Stop,” he said again, his voice almost toneless.

  Peter fired. From so close the blam of the gun was deafening, a great roar followed by a deadening whine. A chunk of blazing-white wood exploded from the tree trunk to the right and just behind Fallows. As the splinters flew past him, Fallows slapped Stockton’s hand away and squeezed the trigger of his gun. Peter’s head snapped back, and his mouth dropped open in an expression that had been common to him in life: a look of dim-witted bewilderment. The red-and-black hole above his left eyebrow was big enough to insert two fingers into.

  Christian heard someone screaming, but there was no one left alive in the blind except for Fallows and himself. After a few moments, he realized he was the one making all the noise. He’d dropped his sketch pad and held up both hands to protect his face. He didn’t know what he said or promised, couldn’t hear himself through the ringing in his ears.

  The trapdoor rose about a foot, and Charn looked in on them. Fallows wrenched the rifle free from Stockton at last and turned the barrel around to point it at the old man. Charn fell, just as quickly, the trapdoor slamming behind him. Christian heard a leafy crunch as the tall man hit the ground below.

  Without a look back, Fallows flung open the trapdoor, dropped through it, and was gone.

  Christian in Flight

  It was a long while before Christian moved. Or at least he felt it was a long while. In that half-lit world, the passage of minutes was difficult to judge. Christian did not own a watch and had left his phone, by command, in the other world. He knew only that he’d had time to dampen his crotch and then time for that dampness to grow cold.

  He trembled in convulsive bursts. He lifted his head and peered through the lookout. The fauns had long disappeared from the steps. The hill was silent in the gloaming.

  It came to him, with a sudden, sickened urgency, that he had to get back to the little door. He picked up his sketchbook, hardly thinking why—because it was his, because it had his drawings in it—and crawled across the plank floor of the blind. He hesitated beside the corpse of Mr. Stockton. The big man stared at the ceiling with wide, startled eyes. His thermos lay close to hand. The coffee had spilled out and soaked into the floorboards. Christian thought he should take the knife and he tried to pull it out of Stockton’s chest, but it was buried too deep, the blade jammed between two ribs. The effort made him sob. Then he thought he should crawl back to Peter and pull the CZ 550 out of his hands, but he couldn’t bear to look at the hole in Peter’s forehead. In the end he left the blind as he had come, unarmed.

  He made his unsteady way down the rope ladder. It had been easy going up. It was much harder going down, because his legs were shaking.

  When he was on the ground, Christian scanned the gloom and then began to move across the face of the hill, toward the flight of rough stone steps. A black silk ribbon caught his eye, and he knew he was not turned around.

  He had hiked far enough to work up a good sweat when he heard shouts and a sound like a herd of ponies running through the trees. Not a dozen feet away, he saw a pair of fauns dart through the shadows. One carried a curved blade. The other had what looked like a throwing bolas, a mass of hanging leather straps with stones tied at the ends.

  The faun with the scimitar leaped a fallen trunk, scrambled with the vitality of a stag up the hill, and bounded out of sight. The one with the bolas followed for a few yards—then caught himself and looked down the hill, fixing his gaze on Christian. The faun’s leathery, scarred face was set in an expression of haughty contempt. Christian screamed and fled down the slope.

  The trunk of a tree rose out of the darkness, and Christian slammed into it, was spun halfway around, lost his footing, and fell. He rolled. His shoulder struck a sharp stone, and he was spun again, continuing to tumble down the incline, picking up speed. Once it seemed his whole body left the ground in a spray of dead leaves. At last he struck hard against another tree and was jolted to a stop against it. He found himself in the bracken at the bottom of the hill. Just beyond the ferns was a mossy path and the river.

  Christian was too afraid to pause and consider how badly he might’ve been hurt. He looked up the hill and saw the faun glaring down at him from fifty feet away. Or at least that’s what he thought he saw. It might’ve been a gaunt and hunched tree, or a rock. He was mad with fear. He sprang to his feet and ran limping on, breath whining. His left side throbbed with pain, and he had twisted his ankle coming down the hill. He’d lost his sketch pad somewhere.

  The lanky boy followed the path downstream. It was a wide river, as wide as a four-lane highway but, at a glance, not terribly deep. The water rushed and foamed over a bed of rock, spilling into dark basins before hurrying on. In the blind their shared body heat had created a certain stuffy warmth, but down by the river it was cold enough for Christian to see his own breath.

  A horn sounded somewhere far off, a hunting horn of some sort, a long, bellowing cry. He cast a wild look back and staggered. Torches burned in the almost-night, a dozen distant blue flames flickering along the mazy staircases that climbed the hills. It came to Christian there might be dozens of parties of fauns in the hills, hunting the men. Hunting him.

  He ran on.

  A hundred yards along, his right foot struck a stone, and he went down on hands and knees.

  For a while he remained on all fours, gasping. Then, with a start of surprise, he saw a fox on the far side of the water, watching him with avid, humorous eyes. They gazed at each other for the length of time it took to draw a breath. Then the fox bayed at the night.

  “Man!” the fox cried. “Man is here! A Son of Cain! Slay him! Come and slay him and I will lap his blood!”

  Christian sobbed and scrambled away. He ran until he was dizzy and seeing lights, the world throbbing and fading, throbbing and fading. He slowed, his legs shaking, and then shouted in alarm. The light he’d been seeing at the edge of his vision, a wavering blue glow, was a torch. A man stood on the hill, a black shape against a blacker background. He held the torch in his right hand. In his left was a gun.

  Christian acted without thought. Because the man was on his right, Christian swerved to the left and crashed into the river. It was deeper than it looked. In three lunging steps, he was up to his knees. In moments he had lost all sensation in his feet.

  He ran on, and the ground dropped away, and he plunged in up to his crotch and cried out at the shock of the cold. His breath was fast and short. A few desperate steps later, he fell and all but went under. He struggled against the current, had not expected it to be so strong.

  The boy was halfway across when he saw the dolmen. A plate of gray stone, as big as the roof of a garage, stood on six tilting, crooked rocks. Beneath the roof of gray stone, in the center of the covered area, was an ancient, uneven altar stone, with a girl in a white nightdress sleeping peacefully upon it. The sight of her terrified him, but fear of his pursuers drove him on. Fallows had moved out from beneath the darkness of the trees. He was already up to his ankles in the river, having removed his shoes before stepping into the water. While the boy had stumbled, sunk, and half drowned, somehow Fallows knew just where to step so he was never more than shin-deep.

  The water along the bank was hip-high, and Christian grabbed at handfuls of slippery grass to pull himself up. The murder-weed hissed “poison, poison!” at him and came out in clumps and dropped him back into the river, and he went up to his neck and exploded into sobs of frustration. He threw himself at the bank again and kicked and squirmed in the dirt like an animal—a pig, tryin
g to struggle out of a mire—and floundered onto dry land. He did not pause but ran beneath the dolmen.

  It was at the edge of a grassy meadow, the nearest line of trees hundreds of feet away, and Christian understood that if he tried to make it to the forest, Fallows would easily pick him off with the rifle. Also, he was shaking and exhausted. He thought desperately he might hide and reason with Fallows. He had never shot a thing. He was an innocent in this. He felt sure that Fallows had killed the others as much for what they had done as for what they had intended to do. The unfairness of it raked at him. Fallows had killed, too. The lion!

  He ducked behind one of the standing stones and sat and hugged his knees to his chest and tried not to sob.

  From his ridiculous hiding place, Christian could see the child. Her golden hair was shoulder length and looked recently brushed. She held a bouquet of buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace to her chest. Everything Christian had seen in this place was dead or dying, but those flowers looked as fresh as if they’d just been picked. She might’ve been nine and had the sweet pink complexion of health.

  Firelight cast a shifting blue glow across the dolmen as Fallows approached.

  “Have you ever seen a more trusting face?” Fallows asked softly.

  He stepped into view, the gun in one hand, the torch in the other. He had collected Christian’s drawing pad and carried it under one arm. He did not look at Christian but instead sat on the edge of the stone, beside the sleeper. He gazed upon her like one inspired.

  Fallows set down the sketchbook. From inside his camouflage coat, he produced a small glass bottle, and another, and a third. There were five in all. He unscrewed the black top of the first and held it to the little girl’s lips, although it was empty, or seemed empty.

  “This world’s been holding its breath for a long time, Christian,” Fallows said. “But now it can breathe again.” He unscrewed the next and raised it to her mouth.

  “Breath?” the boy whispered.

  “The breath of kings,” Fallows agreed, with a mild nod. “Their dying breaths. Breath of the lion and the elephant, the leopard and the buffalo, and the great rhino. It will counteract the work of the poisoner, General Gorm, and wake her and wake the world with it.”