The Hunting Tree

by Ike Hamill

  He snapped shut the book and slammed it down on the table.

  Snatching his keys, he stood up, pulled down the biggest map from the wall and headed out to his car. Mike spent the rest of the day in his car, until his back had sweated through to the seat and then dried again in the cool evening air. He drove from one side of the state to the other, starting in the west, near where he and Morris had left off, and continued east until he found himself back at the dam where Gary and Katie had helped him stake out the woman from the water.

  He sat on the hood of his car and looked over the flowing water at dusk. After losing his friend, job, and his financial independence, Mike had latched onto the idea of redeeming his work and himself through tracking down this mysterious killer. At first he’d felt that it was his duty to Gary’s memory to finish the detective work that Gary had started.

  I should’ve stuck to my day job, thought Mike.

  For several years, Mike had split his time between working as a geneticist and investigating paranormal activity. Both obsessions stemmed from the death of his brother, and a deep desire to prove his worthiness to his dead parents.

  Mike walked through the timeline of his own childhood. His family had been doomed to tragedy. When he was seven years old, riding his bike down a quiet suburban sidewalk, he had been struck by a swerving van and thrown into a tree. His spine had nearly been severed, and his family had endured several months of caring for Mike while his body lay in a motionless coma. Years passed before Mike’s young life returned to normal. His parents rearranged every aspect of their lives to accommodate his various therapies and expenses.

  Even at his ninth birthday, Mike understood the dynamic of his family. Their parents worked tirelessly to guarantee that Mike had every chance for a full recovery, and shielded him from anything or anyone that would make him feel strange or burdensome. If Mike had been an only child, their careful act would have been perfectly convincing, but his parents also had Charlie. Younger, mischievous, independent, and healthy, Charlie was almost ignored for the years of Mike’s recovery. Although their energy and money was consistently directed to Mike, he could feel their silent devotion to Charlie. His little brother was the unsung hero of the family, oblivious to any injustice in being the younger brother of an accident victim.

  His parents’ hardened hearts slowly broke when Charlie was diagnosed with leukemia. It didn’t matter that Mike had fully recovered, they couldn’t count on him the way they might once have—he was already fragile and damaged. Charlie was their last hope at an unblemished child, and once he became scheduled to die, Mike’s parents died too.

  After the funeral, Mike knew his mother was already dead. She spent the first half of each week lost in depression, not bothering to dress or even leave her bed. For a while, his father made a good show of resuming a normal life. He kept his job, kept the bills paid, and kept the family going. But when Mike’s mother collapsed with pneumonia, and then drifted off to death, Mike’s dad started down the same slope.

  Mike turned thirteen as an orphan. His grandparents took him in and raised him to value education and hard work above all else. It was also on his thirteenth birthday that Mike vowed to one day help find the cures for diseases like the one that had taken Charlie and the soul of his small family. When Mike first heard Charlie’s voice through the static on the radio, he also committed himself to furthering the research of paranormal phenomenon.

  Now, just a couple years away from his fortieth birthday, Mike had lost his job helping people with genetic disorders, and had failed at paranormal research. It didn’t occur to him until just that moment, but he was almost exactly as old as his father had been when his father had died.

  Is there still time? he wondered. Mike had never placed a high priority on relationships, getting married, or having kids. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he always thought there would be time later for those considerations; after his scientific discoveries, renown, and financial success. He counted back on his fingers—his last girlfriend had been seven years before.

  Sandy had left him over an argument about his priorities. She said that he cared more about maintaining his house as a shrine to his dead grandparents than her. He attempted to argue that point, but knew he was on shaky ground. In fact, between his job, his paranormal hobby, and keeping his house exactly as his grandparents had left it, he didn’t seem to have much time for Sandy. When it came to things that she wanted to do, he participated begrudgingly, or not at all.

  Mike slid off the hood of his car and glanced at his watch, startled by the time. He must have been sitting in that same spot, thinking about his life, for hours.

  I’ve got to think of a way to combine my interests, he thought, then they won’t always compete.

  Mike walked around the side of the car and stopped in his tracks, dropping his keys in the gravel. A new thought formed in the wreckage of his failed ambitions. Connections swirled in his mind. He didn’t need to combine his interests—they were already tied together.

  He realized everything in a flash—the case that Ken had called him to consult on, the one about the boy, and the creature he had been chasing were part of the same puzzle. He had nearly described the entire thing to Ken at lunch, completely ignorant of how correct he had been.

  The last piece fell into place in his mind.

  “Oh shit,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice snapped him into action and he bent over to grab his keys from the gravel. He fumbled for a few seconds, but then jumped in the car and started the engine. His latest realization was something that the creature and the boy already knew: the rogue and the extinction vector were on a collision course. If his latest theory was correct, the rogue wasn’t headed for the dam at all. The creature’s real destination would be wherever the boy called home. Since there wasn’t much land to the east of where Mike stood, it most likely meant that the boy lived west. The creature had already shown the ability to cover ground quickly, and that meant the boy’s life was in immediate danger.

  Mike put his car in reverse and gunned the engine, sending gravel flying. After he backed around, he dropped the transmission into drive and took a deep breath. Getting himself killed in a car accident wasn’t going to help the kid, and he had to find a phone so he could alert Ken to the danger.

  It wasn’t until he was back on the main drag, scanning for a pay phone and cursing himself for letting his cell phone expire, that he realized that he didn’t even have a home number for Dr. Ken Stuart.

  Mike focused back on the road in front of him and sped up; he would have to visit Ken at home to deliver the news.

  * * * * *

  THE DOORBELL HAD NO LIGHT, and even when he pressed his ear to the door, he couldn’t hear the bell ringing inside. Mike resorted to knocking. On his third rap, the door fell away from his knuckles. The porch light came on as the door cracked open.

  “Mike?”

  “Hey Ken, I’ve got to talk to you about something. Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” said Dr. Ken Stuart, opening the door to reveal his foyer. He stood in front of Mike in a full-length robe and bare feet.

  “Did I wake you?” asked Mike. “What time is it?”

  “It’s ten, but no, I was just about to go to bed,” said Ken.

  “Everything okay?” a woman’s voice called from the top of the stairs. She poked her head and robed shoulders around the corner to look down the stairs.

  “Yeah,” Ken called back. “It’s my friend Mike.”

  “Hey, I’m really sorry.” Mike leaned towards Ken as he apologized. “This is really important. You’ll understand when I tell you.”

  “No biggie,” said Ken, waving his friend into the living room. “Have a seat. Are you okay, man? You look kinda terrible.”

  “I’m fine,” Mike said, running his fingers through his hair. “I’ve just been on the road a bunch today, but I’m seriously fine.”

  “Okay,” said Ken.

  Ken waited a few seconds before prom
pting Mike again—“So what’s up?”

  “Okay,” said Mike, showing Ken his palms and leaning forward. He sat back and then leaned forward again. Ken fidgeted too, in response to Mike’s nerves. “You remember that thing I was telling you about the other day?”

  “Which thing? The diagnosis?”

  “No, not exactly,” said Mike. “Well, almost, but not really." Mike began another round of twitches.

  “What is going on?” asked Ken, crossing his legs and tucking his robe modestly around them.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just, I know how this is going to sound. If I had known your phone number and called you when I first thought of it, I would have sounded perfectly natural, but on the way over here I started to think about what I would say and how it would sound.”

  “I’ve known you forever, Mike. Just say what you came to say.”

  “Okay, okay. The other day at lunch I told you about the rogue mutation. At the restaurant, remember?”

  “Yeah, the thing about beached whales? That was kind of interesting.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it is. The whales are more the general case, though. I was talking more about a specific subset of cases. This subset is like the whales that commit mass suicide in that you start with a doomed branch of a family tree that culls itself for the good of the race, but in this fringe case one of the members survives.”

  “Okay?” Ken prompted.

  “So, you’ve got this one survivor—I call it the rogue mutation—and it lives only to pick off other inferior members of the race. Eventually it dies out and everything goes back to normal.”

  “Right. I remember. It sounded far-fetched. Why does that bring you here?” asked Ken.

  “It is far-fetched. In fact, it’s incredibly rare. The reason it brings me here is because of the other side of the equation: the extinction vector.”

  “Didn’t you refer to my patient, the boy, as the perfect extinction vector?” asked Ken.

  “Yeah, exactly,” said Mike. “My theory is that the rogue mutation plays itself out quickly, because it doesn’t have a balance. But the extinction vector is the perfect balance. Do you see?”

  “Not really, no.” Ken’s answer was clipped, his patience wearing thin.

  “Remember, this is beyond survival of the fittest,” Mike said. “Any species benefits from mutation. Combined with natural selection, mutation is the change agent that helps species evolve. That all works in the short term, but in the long term, you might have a dead-end—something that causes temporary benefit, but in the long run will do the species damage.”

  “Like what?” asked Ken.

  “Like promiscuity coupled with a short life-span,” offered Mike. “Imagine if a bunch of people were prolific breeders, but all died by the time they were twenty-five. People need a longer life-span than that because it takes thirty years just to catch up with the world’s accumulated knowledge. If we all lived to be twenty-five, we’d never advance human knowledge.”

  “This is very interesting, but I do have other company at the moment. Can we speed this along a little?” asked Ken.

  “Sure. I’m sorry, Ken, I’ll get to the point. I’ve been tracking something that crawled out of a cave in New Hampshire and it’s headed east. I think it’s one of these rogue mutations I’ve been talking about, and I think it’s tracking an extinction vector.”

  “What?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but if there was a more likely candidate in this part of the state, I would know about him or her.”

  “Forget about if my case is the most likely extinction vector,” Ken made air quotes around Mike’s term, “the whole thing is just crazy. I really think you might need to get some help, man. This whole lawsuit thing has just worn you out or something.”

  “No, no, this is totally testable. You don’t have to take my word.” Mike started to get really worked up, and sat on the very edge of the couch, waving his arms as he talked. “All you have to do is draw some blood from the boy. If I’m right, then he would have to be massively infectious; like aggressively infectious, just look for cells that attack…”

  Ken cut him off, grabbing Mike’s flailing arms at the wrists. “Stop,” he said to Mike. “Just stop. We’re not taking any blood, and you need to stop talking about my case as part of your delusion.”

  “But they’re not…” Mike objected, pulling his hands away from Ken’s grip.

  “STOP!” yelled Ken. “Listen to me. This is beyond reasonable. You’ve always been a little manic during late-night conversations, but this is out of hand. I’m a professional, and I intend to keep acting like one.”

  Mike looked down at the floor.

  “I just talked to that boy’s mother this evening—he’s fine. I’ve nearly ruled out a medical cause for his symptoms. He’s seeing a psychiatrist and he’s better already. This is the last conversation we’re having about one of my cases. You hear me?”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry,” said Mike.

  “Are you going to be okay?” asked Ken.

  “I will be,” said Mike, rubbing his eyes with his palms. “I’ve just had a lot going on. Everything is going wrong.”

  “It will get better. You just have to keep going. Everything will be better,” assured Ken.

  “I know, I know,” said Mike. “Did I tell you I might lose the house?”

  “Oh man, I’m sorry to hear that. Didn’t your grandparents have that house paid off?”

  “Yeah, but I had to mortgage it to buy the equipment and, well, you know. It’s just awful,” said Mike, dropping his shoulders and hanging his head once again.

  “Listen, it’s getting late. Why don’t you hang out in my guest room tonight and we’ll get some breakfast in the morning? Can you do that?” asked Ken.

  “I don’t want to put you out,” said Mike.

  “It’s no bother—seriously. The room’s always made up, and you have your own bath. I miss talking to you. We can catch up some more at breakfast,” said Ken.

  “That would be great, if you’re sure.”

  Ken nodded.

  “You know, you’re the only one left around here that I can really talk to. Like we used to, you know?” asked Mike.

  “Definitely,” said Ken. He stood and gently pulled on Mike’s elbow. “Come on, I’ll get you settled.”

  * * * * *

  MIKE LAID AWAKE for several hours. He was exhausted by the emotions from earlier that night, but he couldn’t stop thinking about his theories, and how Ken hadn’t been willing to entertain them. When they were fresh out of school and sharing an apartment with a third post-grad, they had always given each other the benefit of the doubt. No theory, regardless of how outlandish, would have been dismissed without first establishing a way to test it for validity. Mike wasn’t bothered that Ken was protective of his patients—that fit perfectly with Ken’s personality. Ken and Mike shard the same devotion to helping people, so Mike completely understood that position.

  What bothered Mike was that Ken had been so willing to write off Mike’s theory as absurd when Mike had offered a simple, benign way to test his hypothesis. Mike was offended that Ken hadn’t been willing to apply scientific principles; he had just rejected Mike and assumed he was crazy.

  Twisting in his bed, sleepless, Mike never experienced a moment of doubt. Instead of questioning his own motives, he tried to determine why Ken had so easily come to the wrong conclusion. The most plausible explanation he could draw was that Ken had become indoctrinated into the culture of reactionary science which plagued the modern medical profession. This fit well with Mike’s opinion of most medical doctors, but it saddened him to think that Ken had become one of them.

  Mike pushed up on his side and smiled in the dark. He realized that his old friend might not be completely unreasonable.

  He must have had second thoughts about sharing the details of a case with someone not officially connected to his office, Mike thought. This explanation allowed for all of Ken’s admonishments without assuming
that Ken really thought Mike was delusional. And furthermore, Ken had dropped a pretty obvious clue: he had mentioned talking to the boy’s mother on the phone that evening. Mike threw back the covers and swung his legs to the floor. By the time he got to the door of his bedroom, he was convinced that Ken wanted him to find the mother’s phone number, and he had devised a test to prove his theory.

  Without turning on any lights, Mike relied on the glowing red and green lights from appliances to guide him down the hall towards the kitchen. He found what he was looking for on the wall next to the microwave. Mike lifted the cordless phone from the charger and took the phone over to the window, where a streetlight provided enough illumination for him to make out the buttons. Scrolling to the last number dialed, he pondered the digits and considered the odds that he was wrong. If this number happened to belong to Ken’s girlfriend, perhaps her cell phone, then Mike’s welcome might run out very quickly.

  Mike took a chance and hit the call button. Pulling the phone away from his ear, Mike tried to listen to the handset while also straining to hear if there was a similar ringing from upstairs.

  After four rings an answering machine picked up—“Thank you for calling China Town. Our hours are…” he turned off the phone. Glancing at the counter while putting the phone back on the charger, Mike saw the empty takeout bag with the restaurant’s logo. His confidence began to ebb as he trekked back down the hall towards the guest room.

  He stopped and backed up a step—Ken’s cell phone sat on the side table near the front door. He smiled and lifted the small device. Scrolling back through the phone numbers, he found what he was looking for: only one number was not named in Ken’s address book. The only other calls from that evening were to and from Sharon, who’s picture in the address book matched the woman Mike had seen at the top of the stairs.

  Assuming he’s not sleeping with the boy’s mother, Mike thought as he copied the unnamed phone number to slip of paper from the table. He returned the phone to the state and position where he had found it and slunk back to his room.