Hunters

by Chet Williamson

  HUNTERS

  By Chet Williamson

  Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2011 by Chet Williamson

  Edited by Paulo Monteiro

  Cover designed by David Dodd

  Blood on Cover image courtesy of: http://jiangshi.deviantart.com/

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  OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY CHET WILLIAMSON:

  NOVELS:

  Ash Wednesday

  Soulstorm

  Lowland Rider

  Second Chance

  Reign

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  As author & Narrator:

  Ash Wednesday

  Soulstorm

  Lowland Rider

  Second Chance

  As Narrator:

  Blood: A Southern Fantasy – by Michael Moorcock

  Fabulous Harbours – by Michael Moorcock

  War Amongst the Angels – by Michael Moorcock

  Nightjack – by Tom Piccirilli

  Blood Lust: Preternaturals Book I – by Zoe Winters

  Save My Soul: Preternaturals Book II – by Zoe Winters

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  The following occurred ten or fifteen years ago, long enough that some of those who survived have almost forgotten about it.

  Almost.

  BEFORE THE HUNT

  The sound of the shot startled him. He had expected to hear some shooting today, but not this far from any of the camps.

  Boys would be boys, and hunters were often the biggest boys of all. They got jittery waiting for the first day, and blasted away at tin cans and bottles with their deer rifles or the pistols they had brought into the woods for just such plinking. And of course they fired innumerable times if they hadn't been able to sight in their rifles before coming to the mountains.

  But they didn't sight them in two miles from the nearest deer camp, and they didn't fire only one shot from a high powered rifle.

  Ned Craig started walking in the direction of the shot. He rested his hand for a moment on the butt of the Ruger .357 revolver the Game Commission had issued him, thankful that he had never had to use it against a man and hoping that he never would. Fortunately, hunters were also like little boys when they got caught breaking the rules, chagrined, embarrassed, and a bit hostile. Sometimes they tried to talk Ned out of citing them, but only once had someone given him a hard time, and that had been years before.

  He didn't carry the sidearm against hunters, though. He did it for the animals. During his first year as a Wildlife Conservation Officer, six years earlier, he had come across a long-shot buck. Whoever had shot the deer had apparently lost its trail, and it had lain there in agony, struggling to breathe. Ned had had to use a rock to end its suffering, and after that unpleasant duty he swore to himself that he would never be in the woods without a pistol again. He had found two such animals since then, both during bow season, and had killed each of them quickly and painlessly, with a single shot to the head.

  Now he trudged on through the thickly grown trees, but slowed when saw a spot of blaze orange. It was a man, old enough to know better, carrying a 30.06 and walking slowly through the brush away from Ned. Ned hailed him with a not unfriendly, "Hey!" and the man turned.

  When he focused beyond Ned's own bright orange chest patch and saw the green Stetson hat, the forest green Refrigiwear coat with the Game Commission patch on the arm, and Ned's name plate, his already pasty face went even paler. Then his cheeks turned pink with something more than the cold. He lowered his rifle wearily.

  "Getting an early start?" Ned asked, smiling.

  "I, uh..." The man was grizzled, and Ned thought he had seen him before. A local, probably. Ned guessed that he was in his mid-forties. He was wearing an old tan hunting coat, and holes revealed the quilting beneath. His rifle showed a lot of wear on the stock. "Just checkin' things out," the man said.

  "With your rifle? Making sure it fires okay?" Ned let a practiced grin of gentle reproach slide over his face. After all, the people he cited nearly always carried guns. "Do you know that by just walking out here with a loaded rifle, you're breaking two provisions of the Game and Wildlife Code? Carrying that loaded weapon is prima facie evidence of hunting, so you're both hunting out of season and hunting on a Sunday. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to cite you. Let me have your license, please."

  Always polite but firm, just like a state trooper when he stops you for speeding. Ned always added a touch of regret as well, as though he'd rather not be giving them a citation, but he had no choice in the matter, and they had no choice but to accept it. He wrote up the man, then handed him the paper.

  "Okay, this is a field acknowledgment. The fine is two hundred dollars, and that must be paid to me now, either by cash or check."

  The man nodded, but then his lower lip started to quiver like a child's, and tears rolled from his rheumy eyes over the pocked cheeks. He struggled to keep himself in check.

  "Problem?"

  The man shrugged. His attempt at nonchalance was pitiful. "I don't have two hundred dollars, officer."

  "Then I'm going to have to confiscate your rifle in lieu of payment. You can come by my place within thirty days to pay, and you'll get your rifle back."

  The man handed the rifle over to Ned, who worked the bolt and removed the cartridges. "I won't have it in thirty days, sir. Maybe not even sixty." He cleared the phlegm from his throat. "Got laid off from Gleason last month. Been kinda rough...with the kids 'n all. I guess I just wanted to get a step up on the other guys. Get some meat for this winter. Wasn't fair, though."

  Gleason Homes was a small concern near St. Mary's that built manufactured housing. Ned knew a few families who had been hurt by Gleason's downsizing. "That's tough," Ned said. "I'm sorry." It was too late to change anything now. He'd already written the citation. "You in a camp?" Ned asked.

  "No, come out on my own."

  "Tell you what. This is my stomping ground tomorrow. So I'll give you tomorrow." He held out the rifle to the man. "You get one tomorrow, you keep it, I won't say anything. If I see you, I won't see you, got it?"

  The man nodded dumbly, as though he couldn't believe it, and took the rifle back.

  "But that's just for tomorrow. Whatever happens, you bring that rifle to my place by sunset, or you're going to be in even worse trouble. My address is on the citation. Got it?"

  "Yeah...yeah."

  "And don't say a word about this to anybody. This gets back to me, you're going to be very sorry. Okay, now take that rifle and get out of here."

  The man did as he was told, and didn't even say thanks. Ned shook his head as he watched the blaze orange vanish through the brown brush. He'd been a chump. Maybe the guy didn't even have any kids. More likely they were grown and had their own trailers or shabby apartments now.

  Still, it couldn't do any harm. The guy was a veteran hunter. Odds are he would have taken a buck tomorrow anyway, and after all, Ned did cite him. He'd get his deer tomorrow, and have meat for his family. And he'd eventually pay the two hundred. Ned wouldn't forward the rifle to the Game Commiss
ion unless he was sure the man had no intention of reclaiming it by paying the fine. But Ned believed the man would pay when he could.

  Hell, hunters weren't a bad lot. Oh sure, there were a few idiots who hit the woods. Some just came out to whoop it up in their camps, drink, and blow things away and there were others who compared their firepower like it was a dick measuring contest. But most of them were okay, just working Joes anxious to get some venison in the freezer and maybe hang a trophy on the wall, happy to get out into the woods, be together with their friends and alone with nature.

  The thought made Ned Craig stop and appreciate his surroundings. The woods of north central Pennsylvania were darkly delicious this time of the year. The burning reds and golds of autumn had faded away to a mulatto tint, a uniform coffee and cream shade that spoke of stillness and desolation and the kind of decay that new life would spring from in the months ahead. Ned had often traveled through the southwest, and he thought that early winter was the only time of the year when these forests had a desert feel to them, dry and crackling, when the trees seemed more like giant cactus and the carpet of leaves underfoot neared the spongy consistency of sand.

  But there was no openness here, none of the vastness of the western deserts. This was a desolation you could hide in.

  Ned breathed in the cold air and felt the lining of his nostrils prickle. He loved the desert, and often thought about retiring there when the time came, but he knew that he would miss the forests too much, the changing of the seasons, the pageant of green life and brown death the woods silently put on every year.

  But one thing he would not miss was tomorrow's pageant of violence.

  The first day of deer season always depressed him. He knew the annual kill was necessary, for otherwise the deer population would grow too large, and starvation was a far more miserable death than being shot. He had witnessed one snow-covered winter in which he had come across the slat-ribbed carcasses of starved deer every few hundred yards, and did not wish to see another.

  But there was something about seeing these gentle, graceful animals hung up for slaughter, or finding their piles of entrails cooling on the ground that saddened Ned. He was not a hunter, though he had hunted with his father when he was young. The trips had inspired a love of the outdoors in him, but that love had not encompassed the act of killing game.

  The pattern was set the first year Ned went deer hunting with his father. Ned was positioned next to an oak tree, crouching among the acorns on which the deer loved to feed. His father was a half mile away, and Ned, his heart beating rapidly, waited, feeling youthful erections of excitement come and go. An hour passed, during which he stood up several times, stretching his legs.

  He was standing when he heard the deer approach. He froze, felt the wind on his face from the direction of the sound of breaking leaves and snapping twigs, and saw a buck and two doe push through the brush less than fifty yards away.

  He raised his rifle with what felt like the slowness of a watch's second hand, and by the time the buck had cleared the brush, Ned was looking at it through the notch of the open sight. Its smooth coat made it look as though it were carved of wood, and its brown eyes stared into his like some spirit of the forest. He felt, holding the deer's life in his fingertip, as though he were defying God, a vandal in a cathedral. If he pulled the trigger he thought he would violate a far more solemn contract than the one forged between him and his father.

  He lowered the gun, and never willingly raised it to an animal again.

  And though he never begrudged those who enjoyed hunting, he could not easily share in their enthusiasm as they proudly displayed the dead deer tied to their roof racks or hanging at their camps, hind legs downward as though they were walking like men, gutted and empty. Tomorrow there would be hundreds taken, and a few less the next day as the deer grew more frightened and cautious and moved deeper into the woods, and even fewer the next, and so on through the week, until the hunters went home fulfilled or disappointed, waiting for next year and another deer.

  It would be a week of great carnage, Ned thought, and if deer could grieve, many survivors would weep musky tears.

  "I weep for these animals. We all do." Andrew Kenton looked at the five other people in the room with him. Then he squeezed Jean Catlett's hand, and she smiled up at him. "And that's why we're here. Let's not forget that. What lies ahead of us is going to be pretty awful. And I mean that both in the sense of being terrible and in inspiring awe in those who see it. It will have a tremendous impact on what happens here, and in our efforts to liberate wildlife from the encroaching hand of man."

  "Nice speech," said Chuck Marriner, his booted feet propped arrogantly on the single table in the motel room. "Who do we kill first?"

  "Okay, Chuck." Jean Catlett's voice was as rough as she could make it. It still sounded like soft fingers brushing velvet. "That's enough."

  "I'm serious, Jean." Chuck took his feet off the table and slammed them down with a thud that shook the floor of the room. "I mean, hell, we're beyond the talk crap now. We're hyped, we're ready to go, ready to take a couple scalps for Bambi, right?"

  Of the six people in the room, only one, Sam Rogers, laughed at the joke. "Righteous," Sam said, and high-fived Chuck. "For Bambi—and his mom!"

  Chuck laughed in return, and then looked challengingly at Jean. "We're already believers, so Andy's preaching to the choir. Now we got guns, we got ammo, we got plastic, and I'm itching to use them. So can we just cut to the chase?"

  Jean frowned. She wasn't used to being ordered around, especially by somebody like Chuck Marriner. After all, this was her mission, and it was her money that was financing it. But she had to admit to herself that he was right. The time for talk was over. Now it was time for action.

  "Okay," Jean said, looking daggers at both Chuck and Sam. "Tomorrow is reconnaissance. We'll stay in the county, split up, and look for a camp that fits our parameters. Chuck and Sam, you'll go south. Chuck, drop Sam off at Moshannon State Forest, and you go to Elk State Forest. Andrew and I will head north. I'll drop him at Game Lands 25 and go up to the northern state forest. Tim and Michael will go to Allegheny National Forest."

  She looked at the two men sitting on one of the two double beds the room held. Timothy Weems nodded sharply, but Michael Brewster only lowered his eyelids slowly to indicate that he had heard.

  "Take hunting rifles only. We've got to blend in. Wear the gear we bought in DuBois."

  "That stuff sucks," said Sam.

  "It'll make you look like a hunter," Andrew said stiffly, "At least it'll help." Sam flipped Andrew the bird and giggled. Jean ignored the interruption and went on. "You'll look for a camp, isolated, far from any others, with no more than half a dozen members."

  "We could take more," Michael said softly. It was the same tone, Jean thought, that he had used in bed when they were lovers.

  "No," Jean said. "There's enough risk as it is. Besides, six of them will send the message just fine."

  "Along with the others," Timothy Weems added, pushing his glasses back up. "The single kills."

  Jean nodded in agreement, and Andrew quickly followed suit. "So let's get to bed. We've got to start early in the morning. The hunters get out before dawn, the camps will be empty, we can find what we're looking for." She looked around at all of them and tried to feel as though they were her family. "For the wildlife," she said.

  "For the wildlife," they responded, although Chuck Marriner split the last word into two distinct words, and chuckled.

  Chuck was the wild card in her deck, Jean thought as she watched the others go back to the rooms they shared, Tim and Michael in one, Chuck and Sam in another. The motel was cheap, but that made it the kind of place where nobody cared much who came and went.

  When the door closed behind Michael, Jean put her arms around Andrew and hugged him. "Tomorrow," she said.

  "Tomorrow," he answered, and kissed her. He tried to make it passionate, but her closed lips made it chaste.

 
"Let's go to bed," she said. "Practice what I preach."

  They showered quickly and climbed beneath the covers. He knew her well enough to realize that she would not welcome any overtures to lovemaking, and simply put an arm around her. She turned so that they nestled together like spoons in a drawer. Andrew went to sleep quickly, but Jean stayed awake for a long time, listening to her lover's soft breaths, feeling them rustle her hair.

  The next day would be the start of their operations, and the fulfillment of her dream. It had been hard work to find enough people, but she had done it. Now if she could only depend on all of them. She knew that Andrew was a given. He would do anything she asked. And Tim Weems was a real straight arrow, totally dedicated and brilliant as hell. She thought she could depend on Michael as well. He had loved her once, and, she thought, probably still did. But Sam and Chuck were still question marks.

  She had met Chuck when they had simultaneously thrown buckets of red paint over the fur-wearing wife of a studio owner during the L.A. run of Sunset Boulevard. The woman was taking in a matinee of the show, and had used one of the days when the temperature had dipped below sixty as an excuse for wearing a short fox coat. What had impressed Jean the most was when Chuck not only landed his bucketload dead center (hers had missed), but then proceeded to spit on the sobbing woman as, eyes full of paint, she tried blindly to run away. They both escaped before the cops came, and found themselves laughing together in an alley. Chuck talked a good talk about animal rights, but she suspected that he was in it more for the mayhem than the principle.

  So far she had overlooked his lack of dedication, since Chuck Marriner was big and mean and not afraid of anything, and knew where to get not only their deer rifles, but also automatic weapons and plastic explosive. "After all," he had said as he placed the box full of small cubes of concentrated explosive into their gear trunk, "if you're gonna be a terrorist, you can't be afraid to make things go boom." Jean Catlett just hoped that nothing went boom before it was time.