by Joe Haldeman
A lot of people drink beer while they’re driving in Alabama. He decided not to take the chance. He drank both quarts sitting there, and finished off two bags of hot peanuts and a bag of bacon rinds. Life was good.
He put the empties and wrappers in a plastic bag and washed his hands and face. He ignored the faint sounds from the back and headed for the interstate.
2.
After I finished that little chapter, I checked the e-mail and lo, there was an $8,500 PayPal deposit from my agent, Duquest’s down payment minus her fifteen percent. I actually clapped my hands together.
Duquest sent an e-mail, too, all lower case: “good so far.” Hey, don’t give me a swelled head.
Of course once the novella was in Duquest’s hands, he could screw it up any way he wanted. But hell, he was paying for the privilege. I didn’t much like surrendering control, even if it was a work done for hire. But I wrote HALF A MILLION BUCKS on a three-by-five card and taped it over the computer, in case I started to get depressed.
I decided to go buy a nice bike, like the private eye does in the story. Maybe I’ll go buy a pistol, too; see how a 9-mm feels. But if somebody calls and tries to hire me to find a fat guy who kills joggers, I’m so outta here.
I printed out the first chapter and quit to clean house. Kit said her parents wanted to meet me, and I had ignored the voice inside, screaming “Ah-ooga! Ah-ooga! Dive! Dive!” and invited them over for dinner. So I had to weigh my options: good impression or self-defense food poisoning. I opted for the former, but took the chicken out of the fridge a tad early. Let the gods decide.
Maybe it’s odd that I haven’t met them, since they’re only like ten miles away and I’ve been seeing Kit for almost a year. The first couple of months you wouldn’t have wanted to take me home to Mother; some asshole decked me with a Jack Daniels bottle, which broke my nose and knocked out a tooth under a split lip. The VA fixed me up, but it took a while.
That was a good bar, but I don’t go there anymore. The bartender turned out to be the owner. He bitched about the damage, and I sort of picked up the broken bottle and offered him a colonoscopy. He went for the phone and I decided to go bleed somewhere else.
Kit met me about a week later at a branch of the library, where I was giving a reading from my second novel, which I think I will retitle The Fucking Albatross. It had to be the worst reading in the history of literary indecent exposure. I sounded exactly like a guy with a nose full of cotton, and with the temporary cap on my front tooth, I whistled every time I tried to pronounce “s” or “th.” We had a beer afterwards and she took me home for a mercy fuck that turned out to be a yearlong hobby, maybe more.
So now to meet her parents. Shave, clean shirt, find some socks. Hide the porn. I left my desk a random hellhole—I probably couldn’t find anything if I neatened it—but closed the office door.
Kit once asked me why male writers had offices and female ones had studios or writing rooms. Maybe it’s so we can pretend we’re working.
I clicked “random classical” on the living room pod and made a salad and put it in the fridge. Dumped some coals in the grill and soaked them with starter fluid and waited. Normally, I’d make a drink at five, but that might not be a good idea. Wait and offer them one. I had a wild impulse to roll a joint; they’d be almost old enough to be hippies. No, that was the sixties and seventies. They were probably just born. Besides, Kit didn’t smoke, so her parents probably didn’t either. The family that smokes together croaks together.
They were exactly on time, and of course dressed down, for a picnic. Her father, Morrie, was wearing a T-shirt that half exposed a Marine Corps anchor tattoo on his beefy bicep. But it was a Princeton crew shirt, a little cognitive dissonance. Her mother, Trish, was delicate and quiet. Quietly observant.
Kit had brought the ingredients for sangria and took over the kitchen to make a pitcher. So I dumped a bag of potato chips in a bowl and escorted her parents out to the patio. That made things a little awkward, with no mediator. I braced myself for the usual “so you’re a writer” excruciation.
It was worse. “Kitty says you were a sniper in the war,” Morrie said. “In the army, was it?”
“Guard unit, actually.”
“Same same.” Not a good sign when a civilian uses military slang. “How long did they keep you over there?”
“Sixteen months.”
“Not fair.” He shook his head. “Ain’t it a bitch, as we used to say.” He glanced at his wife, and she gave him a tiny nod. “It would’ve been less if you’d gone RA.”
“That was often a topic of discussion.”
He smiled a kind of Princeton smile. “I can well imagine.”
“Morrie was in the Marines,” Trish said, somewhat unnecessarily.
“Just a grunt,” he said. “We didn’t get along with the snipers too well.”
“We heard about that. They had a high opinion of themselves. Their school was a lot harder than ours, though.”
“Yes. No question it was a difficult job. A lot of lying in wait.”
“Like an alligator,” I said.
“Alligator?”
“I used to spend a lot of time watching them, down in Florida. They lie still for hours, until all the other animals accept them as part of the landscape. One gets too close and they strike, fast, like a rattlesnake.”
“Have you seen that?” Trish asked.
“Once. He got a big blue heron.”
“I like alligators,” she said. Why was I not surprised?
“Did you watch him for hours?” he said.
“Yes, I did. With a camera. But it happened too fast. All I got was a picture of his tail, sticking out of the water.”
“Drowning the bird?”
“That’s what they do.”
“Are you guys talking about the war?” Kit brought out a tray with the pitcher of sangria. Three glasses with the wine punch and one of ice water. Her father took that one. “Two vets get together—”
“Not the war,” I said. “Alligators.”
She handed me a glass. “That’s good. Some of my favorite people are cold-blooded animals.”
“You even vote for one every now and then,” her father said.
“Morrie . . .”
“Sorry. No politics.”
“I’ll get the coals going.” I escaped to the lawn and squirted some fresh starter on the charcoal, then lit the pile in several places.
Nobody said anything until I came back. I picked up the drink and sipped it; extra brandy. “Thanks, sweetheart.”
“Kitty says you write books, Jack,” her mother said.
“I’ve written two and a half. Taking time off right now to do a purely commercial one, a kind of novelization.”
To their blank look Kit said, “That’s normally when they make a book out of a movie. In this case, Jack’s writing the book first.”
Her father tilted his head. “I would’ve thought that was the usual way.”
“Kind of. Nobody seems eager to make a movie out of one of my books. But this isn’t actually a movie yet; just a pitch.”
Her mother shook her head slightly, with a blank look. “A pitch is a sales job,” her father supplied.
“My literary agent actually came up with the deal,” Jack said. “She was talking with a producer/director, Duke Duquest, and my name came up. He had a vague idea about doing a horror movie with its roots in present-day war. My war novel had just come out, with good reviews.”
“It has a sort of horror angle,” Kit said.
“Well, I’d call it fantasy. This one is real horror, though, a monster who hunts people.”
“Like you,” her mother said.
“What?”
“Isn’t that what you did?” She looked honest and sincere and not judgmental. “Like a hunter after deer? With a rifle?”<
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“I suppose it is.”
“If the deer had guns,” her father said.
“It’s good money,” Kit said. “As much as a thousand dollars a page.”
“My word. How many pages can you write a day?”
“Four or five, on a good day. Two or three’s more common.”
“Still damned good pay,” her father said.
“I was lucky to get it.” I decided not to mention that it would only be fifty pages. Kit said nothing to disillusion them, either, so the rest of the evening passed convivially, the Majors mistakenly thinking that their daughter was dating a budding millionaire rather than a starving artist. After they left, Kit rewarded me with a night of uncharacteristically inventive sex.
I didn’t sleep well. Dreams about hunting.
CHAPTER TWO
Hunter crossed two state lines and wound up in backwoods Georgia. Then he drove an extra hour so he wouldn’t be working too close to his own home. Following a smudged penciled map, he got off the interstate, then went a few miles down a pot-holed blacktop road, then turned onto a lime-rock road, and finally off that road, through crackling low brush for a few hundred yards, into a sunlit copse surrounded by thick forest. He backed and filled so that he would be able to drive straight out. He pulled on surgeon’s gloves.
He opened the side door of the van and with a grunt lifted out the huge cooler. It held eight twenty-five-pound blocks of ice. He set it down so a rock tilted it up at a slight angle, and opened a petcock so that the excess water drained out. Then he set it squarely in front of a large tree.
He pulled the bound and gagged man out through the back door and dropped him next to the cooler. Then he returned to the van and brought back a large hook on a chain. He stood on the cooler and secured the hook to a stout limb. He pulled on it with all his weight, and it creaked but held.
The man was trying to scream, but with his mouth sealed by duct tape, he could only make a nasal whine. Hunter made sure the duct tape around his ankles was secure, and then easily lifted him up by his feet and hung him upside-down from the branch, the hook going between his ankles, holding him up by the tape.
He took the razor-sharp clasp knife from his pocket and sliced off the man’s T-shirt and then his running shorts. He was wearing a jockstrap. He snapped it playfully and cut through the waistband and both leg straps, and tossed it away. The man had soiled himself, which was understandable and not unusual.
He put the knife away and delicately lifted the man’s scrotum and testicles and looked underneath. The penis had retracted so far it was almost invisible in the nest of pubic hair. That was not unusual, either.
He walked back to the van and returned with a 12-gauge pump shotgun. He spoke for the first time, his voice curiously high-pitched and musical: “Don’t be afraid. This is not for you.” It was in case of interruption. He’d never had to use it.
He got a quart of beer from the cooler and twisted it open, and sat on the cooler with the shotgun in his lap. He sipped the beer slowly, studying the man.
When he’d finished the beer, he spoke again. “There’s not a living soul within miles. If you scream, you will only annoy me.” He reached down and carefully pulled an inch of tape away from his mouth. “What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a minister. But my father’s a millionaire! He could—” Hunter pressed the tape back into place.
“A man of God. I respect that. I will be gentle.” He opened the knife and with one sweep deeply cut the minister’s throat, severing both carotid arteries. The man was probably dead before the gush of blood could blind him.
He didn’t always do that. It wasn’t necessary to bleed the corpse; the meat was going straight into the cooler. It was probably kinder to kill them quickly, but that wasn’t much of an issue. Sometimes he played with them to see how they would react to his ministrations. Sometimes he even told them his life story, since they would never be able to pass it on, and their reaction to that was interesting, too.
A joke he played on the police was to dress out their bodies exactly as one does a deer, hence the name Hunter. But he had never killed a deer; he’d copied the instructions out of a library book, not wanting to leave a web trail, and practiced on roadkill until he was fairly expert, burying the remains to avoid suspicion.
He brought out his box of tools and supplies. He felt for the pubic bone and did a long ventral incision from there downward, using a sturdy plain hunting knife from Sears. He guided it with his fingers, careful not to nick the stomach or intestines. He cut through the pelvic bone with a Craftsman hacksaw, and cut away the diaphragm so he could remove the liver and heart, which he put in separate Ziploc bags and set in the cooler. Then he remembered the thymus gland and put it in a small bag to take home and add to the eleven he had in the freezer. Almost enough for a nice appetizer of sweetbreads.
He cut around the anus and severed the windpipe, and the offal slid out in a steaming pile at the base of the tree. He carefully stepped around it while he finished the job, skinning the man from ankles to chin. He left the head untouched, for his collection. He draped the skin artistically around the tree branches, tying it in places so an animal couldn’t easily drag it away, then slipped a large yard bag over the blood-slick body and cut it down. Best to finish the job at home, where he had proper tools and plenty of time. He lay the body on the ice and dragged the cooler back to the van. Retrieved the hook and chain.
Tired. Lean people are harder to skin. He took a beer out of the cooler but put it back. Best to make a few miles first. There were already two turkey buzzards circling, and more would come. He stripped off the gloves and bloody clothes into a laundry bag and washed up, using the van’s side mirror and a hand mirror to make sure there were no telltale speckles. He got a small erection but ignored it, then dressed in old clothes and quietly drove away.
3.
I woke up out of a terrible nightmare, reaching for Kit, who wasn’t there; she left early to go to Chicago on family business. The nightmare wasn’t about the cartoon monster in the script, but a related horror I saw in the war.
Artillery support had gotten the new “shock” rounds for the 175s, and the first one they fired fell way short, and it went off above a thing like a Muslim day care center or orphanage. Our camp was right on the edge of town, a place we called Honeypot, so they ordered most of us to run over and render aid.
It was all children except for four women, and all but one were dead or barely twitching. The shock round had blown off all their clothing and most of their skin. Most of them must have died instantly of cardiac arrest, but one was walking, a girl of ten or twelve who looked like a medical-school diagram, flayed from the waist up, just bloody muscles, and from the top of her butt trailed a bright flag of bloody skin like a gory wedding train. She fell over and died before the medics could do anything, but what would they have been able to do? Whole body skin graft; just grit your teeth, sweetheart.
It was two in the morning. I got up without dressing and turned on all the lights in the kitchen and sat drinking a beer very fast. Then I put some ice cubes in a glass and poured in a few inches of Kit’s vodka. That got me tranquilized enough to go back to sleep and not dream, or at least not remember the dreams.
Woke up groggy and went for a walk. I took the next section of the script and a notebook, so I could at least pretend to be working. Went by a bike shop, but it wasn’t open till ten, so dropped in the twenty-four-hour pool hall and had a healthy breakfast of Slim Jims and beer. I read the paper for a while and then went back to the bike shop.
The Steve in the story gets a really nice touring bike, but I didn’t need anything that fancy or expensive. Just something to replace the old clunker I’d bought from a roommate in college.
The shop’s pretty upscale, and most of the bikes are almost weightless and cost as much as a used car. But they did have a section with cheap kids’
so-called mountain bikes—like there were mountains in Iowa—and adult “commuter” bikes. I can commute to work in ten seconds, barefoot, but I got one of those, a bright blue Cambridge. With an accessory package of lights and lock and saddle bags, it was just under $500. One percent of my eventual Monster money.
It was gloriously easy to ride, compared to my rust bucket. It had automatic shift and springs and nice wide handlebars, so you could sit upright and see the world go by. The old one had dropped handlebars, so you rode hunched over, and was so rigid your ass felt every pebble in the road.
Perfect weather for bicycling, sunny and slightly cool, so I pedaled around for an hour and a half, and wound up on the other side of town. There was a new Italian restaurant with outside tables, so I sat down there and took out the script and notebook. I got a half carafe of white wine and started to work.
CHAPTER THREE
Stephen Spenser thought he had the world by the tail when he left his father’s New York law firm and joined a small one in Florida as junior partner. He liked the little town of Flagler Beach, and was usually inside only half the day, helping to prepare briefs and going over old files with the firm’s gorgeous administrative assistant, Arlene. The rest of the time he was outside in the usually beautiful seaside weather, interviewing clients and respondents—and occasionally doing repossessions, a profitable sideline for the firm.
It was not just picking up and returning delinquent cars and boats, but sometimes children, who legally belonged to the other parent. Sometimes it got ugly, and although Steve was a big man and not easy to push around, the firm thought it prudent to get him a private investigator’s license and a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Half the men in Florida own guns, his boss said, and more than half of the men who break the law.
Steve was no stranger to guns. Like most combat infantrymen, he had carried one everywhere; even eating and sleeping, it was never more than an arm’s length away. It had been a comfort, even though he never fired it at anybody, and ultimately it didn’t protect him from the enemy. On what turned out to be his last day in the army, an IED, improvised explosive device, filled both his legs with shrapnel in the form of dirty rusty nails and screws that had been mixed with human feces. He eventually recovered enough to finish pre-law and law school and join his father’s firm—and then get tired of the other employees’ attitudes and move to Florida.