by Clay Martin
At what he felt was a long movement, Mike stopped to listen and put his newly acquired boots on. He gave himself a few minutes to acclimate and watch for light behind him. Maybe the Timmy squad had switched off the torches in a moment of tactical brilliance, but he doubted it. Mike often wondered how more cops didn’t get killed, looking around with a giant target indicator piercing the night. Habits die hard. He couldn’t hear anything but the falling deluge, which was more than enough at present to mask an entire battalion on his trail. Fuck it, time to slap on his spoils of war. He had a funny thought, of many years ago when he was a cherry new guy in the infantry. His new roommate, Garbage Man Raubeson, had passed on a piece of absolute grunt wisdom. “If things go bad at some chicks house, always remember. You can get further with shoes and no pants, than with pants and no shoes.” He smiled, hell of a time to be remembering that.
He forced his right foot in, and silently cursed the son of a bitch he had taken them from. Wishing he could kill him all over again, he forced his left foot in. He must’ve killed the only midget in three counties, the boots were at least four sizes too small. It was better than nothing, but not much. As he moved once again into the darkness, he hoped the previous owners dick had been as small as his feet. He deserved it.
Mike moved now with energy conservation in mind, it was going to be a long night. Long, angled approaches when he needed to cross the small ridges that littered the landscape, and avoiding directly uphill. Not only was he running low on gas, every foot of elevation gain would make it that much colder. When a bolt would light up the sky, he would pause and try to assess the terrain. A flash picture wasn’t much, but it also kept him from stepping off a cliff in the seconds he was blind after. He was near the bottom of a ravine when a lighting flash stopped him dead in his tracks. Was his mind playing tricks on him? He wasn’t exhausted enough to be hallucinating yet, that usually didn’t happen until the third day without sleep. Another lesson he had learned more than his share of times. He felt his way to a tall pine, big enough to keep most of the rain off him for a moment, and waited for another flash of light.
It came, and what it revealed sent a jolt of fear up his spine. Not the new fear. An old, primitive fear, built in at the reptilian level. Even to someone of his mental fortitude, it took a moment to shake off. The floor of the ravine was littered with skeletons. At least a dozen, and probably more. What he had seen was unmistakable. No way to fool himself these was animal bones. What would it be anyway, a great deer graveyard? When the Gods lit up the sky, he found himself staring into the eyeless abyss of a human skull.
He willed himself forward. The dead can’t hurt you, only the living he told himself over and over. Mike was not a superstitious man, but no soldier is totally immune to the ancient notions once in a while. It had been an extremely weird night. Touching the skull, he gently felt around for a long bone, finding a femur. He held it close to his face and hoped the tiny detail his subconscious had collected was just an overlay of a different time and place. As the heavens split again, any doubt vanished. The bone was human, and it had been split longwise. There was only one reason for that. Cannibals.
However bad this had been before, it had just gotten a lot worse. This was a level of savagery not often seen by Western eyes. There was the occasional fruit loop serial killer, but nothing on this scale. He had a better chance of winning the lottery twice in the next fifteen minutes than this being unrelated to his kidnapping. If there was an entire group of men willing to engage in cannibalism, they had gone well and truly off the rails. This supreme taboo act was more than enough to bind them together, and they would hunt him to the last man to keep this kind of secret safe. Whoever the leader was must have some kind of spellbinding control of them, to take them down this path. It was a far bridge, something like this. Amongst civilians, even murder is pretty abnormal. With group murders, most often one of those involved can’t live with it, and comes forward to cleanse their soul. This was something else completely. And given the amount of victims, they had been at it for some time. Anyone capable of keeping a lid on this had absolute god like power over his followers. Eating of human flesh is far enough outside the bounds of normal to get you stoned or hung instantly in most cultures on Earth. To create a group of men ritually bound by a secret so dark as this was incredible. Apologizing to the dead, Mike walked away with the femur still in hand. If he did make it out of here, he needed something to convince the authorities he wasn’t crazy.
With his adrenaline wearing off, Mike knew he was in trouble. He was soaked, and the air temperature was at best in the forties. Even with the cloud cover, these mountains got cold at night. The best way not to freeze to death was to never stop moving, an old recon trick. Like most old recon tricks, that was easier said than done. As a young man, moving all night under a ruck had kept the fires burning hot enough to stay alive. The closest he had come to hypothermia had been in of all places Georgia, during a thirty-five-degree monsoon. He had been fine during the all-night movement. Not happy, but he didn’t get paid to frolic through the daisies. The bad part came in the subsurface hide they built to observe through the day. That had been a long, miserable experience. Wrapped in GORE-TEX laying in three inches of water, trying to hold still while looking out a dug in viewport. Writing report after report as the 82nd Airborne’s satellite communications array took shape, hands cramping with the cold. Finally, the team leader had the sense to scrub the mission. To stay underground was suicide in those conditions. They crept out of the hide and deep into the woods, and ended the day huddled under poncho liners in a kitten ball. That had been one of his first experiences with speaking truth to power too. Command was furious, but his enlisted team leader held his ground. The mission had been scrubbed because to continue it would have meant certain death. Something the officers would never understand, sitting in a warm Operations Center drinking coffee.
Mike stumbled on. His only hope was to keep moving, but that was getting harder by the step. He was exhausted, still half naked, and the temperature was plunging. There is a limit to how much heat your body can make, and if that threshold passes, you die. All the tough in the world won’t save you from that. He was still shivering, which meant he wasn’t quite dead yet. His legs felt like wet concrete. It was becoming an effort just to put one foot in front of the other. Several times he caught himself from falling over, and he knew it wasn’t just the ill-fitting boots. He had to keep his mind focused on the task. Just one more rise, he would tell himself. Every piece of micro terrain became a mission. Just get up there, and then we can rest. He would struggle and fight to complete that short little fifty-meter mission, rewarded with a tiny sliver of accomplishment, and start another. During training, his friend Franco had been fond of saying “I quit everyday, I just don’t ring out.” That was how you finished an impossible task. One brutal step at a time. Just make it to that tree. Just do one more lap. Quit tomorrow if you want, but just survive to the end of today. Many times in school Mike wished he would just die. It was insane that death was preferable to the shame of quitting, but that is how they got you. Running through the mountains of Greece, following a gazelle of an instructor who had recently tagged in, Mike saw the tunnel closing in around his eyes. Not a physical tunnel, the black at the edges of your vision that means you are about to pass out. Desperately he hoped he would fall off a cliff when it happened, so that the pain could be over. For miles he looked at ravines in the rock, willing it to happen and be quick. Like all forms of torture, eventually it ended. He made it. No quit in this boy. That had been a recurring problem in his life, and part of his strength. He was apparently just too stupid to know when to give up. It was the same trait amongst his people that put amputees back on the battlefield in this war, entirely by choice. Goddamn, how that had changed the game. If the guy missing a leg can come back and fight, how the hell are any of you other pussies going to quit? Those were some seriously hard Mother Fuckers, and the M-F was always a capit
al. Mike had seen a bomb maker take a beating from a prosthetic leg on target one time, a Wahabi they intentionally left alive. Not many bomb makers or beheaders made it to detention, no quarter for those fucks. This was an experiment in psychology though, and it had worked. Several weeks later, the chatter picked up across the sector, tainted with a supernatural panic. Not even bombs killed these men, and they came back with metal limbs to exact a terrible vengeance. Enemy morale crumbled, and IED incidents fell dramatically. The original bomb maker died in a Predator strike a few days after his release from Camp Cropper. It seemed none of his proteges wanted to pick up the job.
Mike’s mind was fighting confusion. He kept forgetting where he was, or what he was doing. His body demanded rest, and that call was harder to fend off. Arms wrapped around his core, the goosebumps on his flesh felt like sandpaper. Intellectually, he knew he was done. It was just too cold, he wasn’t going to make it. On TV, the survivor always makes a fire at times like this. Mike had never been good with a bow drill, and there was a snowballs chance in hell of one working in conditions like this. The first rule of survival fires had always been, carry a firestarter and collect tinder in a waterproof bag long before you need it. He had neither. He was going to die. Not a real problem with that, he had come to these mountains with just that intent. Maybe not this way, but the end result was the same. He was proud he hadn’t let the amateur hour cannibals kill him, and had taken one of them to Hell for good measure. His only regret was losing. He cursed himself for not following them back to camp, at least he would have a chance to finish them in the night. Go out in a blaze of glory at the very least. He stumbled and fell. This was it. After all the bad shit and terrible places he had survived, he was going to die like some lost hiker in bum fuck Idaho. When the forest service found his body in months or years, they would probably assume he threw his clothes away in a hypothermic craze. Happened all the time. Mike closed his eyes, too beat to get up, and curled into a ball. The warm mud caressed his face like a lover’s touch.
Warm mud? Was this the last stage of freezing they always talked about? The moment your body releases all the blood it has shunted to your core back to the limbs in a desperate last move to survive? He forced his numb fingers up to his face and dug them into the ground. He felt very real heat. Sweet mother of God, he had fallen near a hot spring. Rolling onto his stomach, he used his fingers as guides to locate the source. Volcanic hot springs are sometimes boiling, enough to cook a man or a dog in an instant. Right now, he didn’t care. Salvation was at hand, and he would gladly scorch his bones, if only to die warm. He traced the path of the warmth and crawled into it, inch by inch. Laughing out loud, he burrowed into the silty mineral dirt that showed the source. He was saved. And that meant some people he’d recently met were going to get a lot more than they had bargained for.
CHAPTER TEN
It was Tim’s flashlight beam that first found the body, and a smile flickered across his face before the realization of who it actually was face up in the grass. Somebody must have gotten the stranger, it would explain the rifle shot, and the head on the body certainly looked like a high velocity rifle round could have done it. Not that Tim would know, he’d never seen anyone shot before. As the rest of the tribe bunched up around him and the pool of light grew bigger, his spine ran cold with the dawning awareness that Dean was at his feet. He was hardly recognizable, only his paunching belly and red hair gave it away. The red hair that wasn’t stained with fresh blood at least. The left half of Dean’s face was completely caved in, a pile of mush that distorted the shape of his undamaged right. Tim was stammering something about an ambulance when Chief slapped him across the face. “ This is your fucking doing Tim. One great fucking idea you had dipshit.” Chief’s mouth was so close his teeth looked like ivory tusks, and Tim was vaguely aware of spittle landing on him despite the rain. Someone in the group was whimpering, a strange sound against the angry yelling for retribution coming from two others. Chaos ensued for a few minutes as flashlights bounced across the trees. Somebody announced they found Dean’s rifle, and a gaggle of feet went that way. Jessup was screaming to set up a perimeter, and finally started grabbing people and setting them in position in a rough circle around Dean’s body, kneeling facing out. Thunder crashed, and Lee fired off a round into the night. The unexpected shot triggered a sympathetic panic, and every man on the perimeter opened fire, rapidly emptying deer rifles in a one sided firefight with the trees. Tim almost jumped out of his skin, and was raising his rifle to fire at the phantom in the trees when Chief ripped it out of his hands.
“Stop goddamn shooting you fucking morons.” Chief yelled, voice just enough to get through the ringing from a volley of rifle fire. The world went eerily quiet. Chief was dangerously close to losing his temper, he never talked to his boys like this. And the last thing any of them wanted to see was the Big Man actually enraged. God in Heaven himself would be afraid to see that. Tim was shaking, and it had nothing to do with being cold. For the second time in as many hours, he wondered if Chief would kill him as an example of screwing up.
“Jessup, Bo, get the fuck over here.” He bellowed. The pair snapped out of the circle and ran over. Chief motioned them into a huddle, Tim unwillingly joining as well. He doubted he was still supposed to be here, and after his mistakes knew he had no business in the decision making process. But he was too afraid of Chief’s wrath to excuse himself and slink into the autonomy of a rifle on the line like everyone else. Jessup had the most military experience of the tribe, and Bo was the lead tracker.
“Bo, how’s the trail look? And how far are we from camp?” Chief asked.
“ Rain has done a pretty good number on the trail, and us coming in here like a herd of elephants didn’t help Boss. I might be able to find it, but it’s getting worse by the second. Clock is ticking for sure. Less than a mile back to camp”
Chief paused a moment to take this in. “Jessup, what’s your take? Keep chasing this guy into the night, or regroup and run him down in the morning?” This was very rare. Tim couldn’t remember a time Chief had asked anyone’s advice. It was like he always just knew what to do. When the Return of Kings was complete, Chief would be one of its legends.
Jessup already stank of whiskey, which seemed to be his default setting. “It’s like this. We got the wrong guns for night work, and most of our guys are more used to daylight hunting anyway. Maximum advantage with us and scopes in the day. Easy to get ambushed in the dark. Gotta figure, this guy is looking to hole up tonight anyway. He isn’t dressed for this shit, and probably scared as fuck too. One more thing to think about, lost people tend to walk in circles, and this bitch is assuredly lost. But some bad luck might be circling his happy ass back to our camp right now, and that wouldn’t be good. Guns, not to mention trucks. He could actually drive out of here, and then we would have a shit show on our hands.”
Chief went white in the face. That was something he hadn’t considered until right now. Addressing Bo and Jessup, Chief’s words were sharp and to the point. “You two, take two others, and high tail it back to camp. Bo, you’re going because you can get back here. Once you get there, Jessup, secure the camp. Shoot this motherfucker if he shows up, but I want him alive. After what he did to Dean, he doesn’t get to die easy. Bo, keep a man with you, and bring a truck back for Dean.”
“And you Tim. You sit your fucking ass right here next to Dean, and think about how you are going to make this better.”
Jessup, Bo, and two shadows bounded off into the night, leaving Tim next to his dead friend, ringed in a circle of LED white and uncertainty.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
An hour later, headlights appeared, ending the apprehension Tim couldn’t shake. Impossible, but he had an ominous thought that maybe the stranger had ambushed and killed the four that had left. No fear at all that he had escaped, that he could deal with. Best case, he just kept on running. Worst case, they all ended up in jail. Tim had been to jail before,
and it wasn’t pleasant. But at least you knew what to expect, and the guards kept order most of the time. The sight of Dean with his skull bashed in had done a number on Tim’s psyche. He didn’t want to end up like this, and it could easily have been him. Or anyone else. Dark thoughts swirled his mind, and right now he just wanted to be home in bed, maybe a nice whiskey drunk to drift him off to sleep. He kept seeing the shadows move, each time fighting down panic that the stranger had returned for him. The sight of the truck brought him back to his senses. Civilization, or at least a product of civilization, a grab at normalcy. Even the grisly task of loading Dean’s stiffening body seemed easier, with the high beams keeping any boogie men at bay. At Chief’s direction, the rest of the tribesmen loaded up after, and Bo slowly drove them back to camp. The distance had seemed immense running around in the dark, but incredibly short in a drive.
Back at camp, Chief seemed to have regained his composure. Leadership means knowing when your troops need an ass chewing, and when they need a pep talk. The tribe was cold, tired, wet, and the reality of taking their first loss was sinking in. Chief needed to shore up morale, before the dam burst.
“Men, I hope you all took a good hard look at Dean. That is part of the life we have all chosen to live. We took a risk every single time we hunted other men, because only when death is a possibility are we truly living as Alphas. We knew that eventually one of us would fall. But he would fall surrounded by his brothers. It’s what makes our hunts the apex of our rituals. What will give us the strength to forge a new world. The fucking, sating the hunger, taking what we want as men- that is the reward only given by the crucible of hunting. It’s not tragic about Dean. He died with his boots on, locked in the trial of combat with another man. And hell, we don’t know, he could have already inflicted a lethal blow that this ambushing coward slunk off to die of in the brush. Dean lived as a true man, and he died as one. He finally got to chase the ultimate prey, and there is no tragedy in that. Mark my words men. The bitch hunts we do, those are for fun, and because we deserve it. I was angry at Tim for grabbing prey without consulting us, but I’m not anymore. Men we hunt to prove we are better. We are the Alpha Males, and we prove it to them over and over. We have not had a worthy adversary yet, and Tim just may have given us one.”