Hunters

by Chet Williamson

  "There were two other shootings in Pennsylvania's woods today, one of which left a Potter County youth dead—"

  Michael punched the knob and the TV went off, leaving them in a silence broken only by Jean's seemingly endless and breathless moaning. She sat on the edge of a bed, her head hanging down so that it nearly touched her knees. Though her hair hid her face, the others could see that the knuckles of her clenched fists were gray-white. "That's it then," Michael said softly.

  "What's it?" Chuck asked.

  "That's it. The plan. It's over."

  "Hell it is." He snorted and looked around at the others. "We gonna pussy out like that? Just 'cause one of us goes down? Shit, no." Chuck sat on the bed next to Jean and put a big hand on her shoulder. She didn't respond at all. "You want that? Hey, Jeannie? You want us to just forget it now, go on home, just forget about Andrew? Make it mean nothin'?"

  She took a shuddering breath and let it out slowly. He knew he had broken through, and he worked on her.

  "We got more than just the animals to get payback for now, Jeannie. We got Andrew too. He jumped the gun on us, but hey, that was Andy, always right out there, you know? Probably saw some guy shoot a deer and that was all it took—bang—the guy's history, and then Andy starts doin' what we all planned, cuttin' him up, and along comes the Man." He spat out the name. "Ned Craig. Goddam redneck warden pig. And he takes our Andy down, the sonuvabitch. I bet he didn't even give him a chance to go for his gun, just popped him where he stood..."

  She sat up now. Her eyes were red, and her cheeks were wet. She snuffled, and Sam grabbed a handful of tissues from the bedside box and handed them to her.

  "We're not going," said Jean in a harsh voice, then cleared her throat and said it again. "We're not going."

  "We gonna stay and get the job done?" Chuck said.

  She nodded jerkily. "Yes. We're going to start tomorrow."

  "Jean—" Michael started to say, but she stopped him with a look.

  "We're doing it, Michael."

  "Attagirl, Jeannie," said Chuck. "I found just the place, the perfect camp."

  "No," she said. "Not the camp, not yet." She looked at Chuck in a way she had never looked at him before. "We stick to our original plan. Tomorrow we split up. And we do what Andrew did. One at a time. All over the place, so they don't know where we came from or where we're going to hit next. And then, the next day, we do the camp."

  Chuck slowly felt a smile twist its way over his face. "I like that," he said heavily. "That is very, very nice." He looked around and saw Sam grinning lopsidedly, saw Timothy Weems nod, his thin lips pursed in appreciation, saw Michael's weary frown. "You still got a problem, Mikey?"

  "Don't call me Mikey, and yes, I have a problem. Andrew tipped our hand, people will be wary now, looking for us."

  "Hell they will," Sam said. "The maniac's dead, get it? The forests are safe for the assholes again. Sure, a few wussies might bag it, but ninety-nine percent'll stay. That's how they prove they're real men. You're a real man, aren't you, Mikey? You'll stay, won'tcha?"

  "Don't you push me, you—"

  "That's enough," said Jean. "We're all staying. There was always a risk, but it's not any greater now than it was before. Andrew has no fingerprints on file, and by the time they find out who he is, we'll be long gone."

  "But if they run a picture," Michael said, "hell, he's been on television, someone will recognize him sooner or later. And when they do, they can connect him to us."

  "They can always connect him to us," Chuck said with a sneer. "They go back to L.A., they can connect all of us together. But what's done is done—unless you want us to go to the cops now and say that yeah, that's our buddy, and gee, he musta gone crazy, 'cause we all just came out here to hunt, oh yeah, they'll really believe that once they start checkin' with the LAPD."

  "We could say we came out here to protest," Michael said, "and Andrew just went off the deep end."

  "We're gonna protest," said Chuck, "what we got guns and C-4 for? I can't believe you, Brewster, you're a goddam termite, a goddam chickenshit pussy, didn't you know what you were gettin' yourself in for or what?"

  "You're with us, Michael," Jean said. "The only way anybody leaves this group now is in the trunk." That one caught Chuck by surprise, and he gave an appreciative bark of laughter. "Tomorrow," Jean went on, "we split up and make our kills and meet back here. The next day we do the camp. But tomorrow we do it..." She paused. "...on our own."

  Chuck Marriner eyed her sleepily. "Who you doin', Jeannie?" he said, although he thought he knew.

  She looked as tough and as determined as he had ever seen her. "Ned Craig," she said. "I'm going to kill that fucking Ned Craig."

  Ned was dreaming of the fall again. He had the same dream every few months, always when something had upset him. Although he knew it was a dream while he was in it, he could do nothing about it, could not change it, could not make himself wake up. The dream was not a creation of his brain, but a memory, and while he never relived it in his waking life, it replayed itself in his dreams, so clear and filled with color that it seemed like life, and he always found himself admiring the quality of it, the technical proficiency of his brain that could retain the occurrence so precisely after all those years.

  Everything around him was a bright, brilliant, blazing green, so intense that his eyes stung, and in another second he knew that it wasn't the color that blinded him but the bits of dirt and vegetation thrown up into the air by the blades of the helicopter hovering overhead.

  Then he remembered what he already knew, and had remembered over and over again, that he and Dave were there because they had been found planting mines along the VC supply route, and had, after a brief firefight, run like hell to the river and radioed for help, the way it had been planned. And now here came the chopper like the chuffing breath of God, while bullets whisked through the high grass around them and covering fire raked the area of the VC fire.

  And then the fingers of God came down to them, harnesses on which they could be plucked to salvation, and they wrapped the straps around themselves and gestured to the pilot with the thumbs-up signal that said fly me away to the heaven of safety, and in another second they were jerked off their feet. Now the gunshots came more urgently, and as he swayed in the air he heard the bullets buzz past him like angry hornets of the jungle, and as the ground dropped away from him and he looked down at the river dotted with dozens of rocky islands, he was suddenly afraid, and knew why, remembering what would come.

  He could not stop it, could not call back the bullet that ripped through the cable that held them both in the air, could not wake from the dream of falling, falling next to Dave, only a few feet separating them, a few feet that would mean the difference between life and death when the earth met them.

  Dave was slightly lower than he, and he watched him plunging toward the river, watched the river coming closer, watched as Dave struck the rock and opened like a pumpkin, and watched the dirty brown water close around him.

  When he struck the water his eyes opened, and he came up out of his dream gasping for air. It entered his lungs faster than he expected, and he coughed chokingly. In an instant Megan was next to him, her eyes sleepy but alarmed, and he knew he had shocked her out of her slumber.

  "It's all right," she said, "it's okay..."

  He breathed deeply for several seconds before he realized that he was not in his bed, but sitting on the lounger in front of the fire. He had been listening to music, a Del McCoury CD, and he had let the high, keening tenor woven into the latticework of the bluegrass instruments carry him into sleep. But it had been the day that had carried him into nightmare.

  "Just a dream," he said. "Sorry."

  "No no..." She patted his leg gently. "About today?"

  "No. The usual."

  "Oh God." She curled up on his lap and rested her head on his shoulder. They watched the fire for a few minutes. "You still planning to go out tomorrow."

  "Mmm-hmm." He nee
ded to hear some music again, something light and fun to take his mind off bullets and blood and death. "How about playing something for me?"

  "All right," she said, and stood up and crossed to a corner of the wood-paneled room. There she took her fiddle and bow from its case and quickly tuned it. "What do you want to hear?"

  "Your pick. Something peppy. 'Fire on the Mountain,' 'Hell Among the Yearlings,' even 'Cripple Creek.'"

  When she began to play, he started to grin. It was ever thus, he thought. He could not help it. The music was so infectious, so alive and full of joy, that it drove all thoughts of death in rivers in Vietnam or the woods of Pennsylvania from his head.

  Megan had been playing the fiddle when he had first seen her, at the old-time fiddle contest at the Ridgway Independence Festival five summers before. She had played "Ashokan Farewell" before it had become a cliché, and the tenderness with which she delivered the haunting and, at that time, new ballad to the crowd endeared the lovely stranger to him forever. She placed second in the judging, losing to a man who had come up from Pittsburgh just to compete, and whose rapid technique was astonishing, though Ned thought he showed a total lack of feeling compared to the woman's intensity.

  Afterwards, Ned introduced himself and told her how much he had enjoyed her playing. They chatted, and Ned discovered, with a mixture of guilt and gratification, that she was newly widowed. When he learned that she had just moved from Ridgway to St. Mary's, he thought that God was good indeed. Before too long he was running into her around town, and one thing led to another until they were living together, an arrangement that hadn't changed for the past four years. She saw no reason to remarry, nor did he. At first some of the townspeople were dismayed, if not shocked, by it, but gradually Ned and Megan were treated like any other couple in St. Mary's, married or not.

  The thought of his first wife crossed Ned's mind as Megan played, and he wondered wistfully where she was, who she was with, what she had done with her life. At least they hadn't had any kids before they realized their mistake, hell, before he had realized the mistake his whole life had been, teaching high school science, stuck inside a classroom ever since he got out of the army, first as a student, and then as a teacher. It wasn't until he took a job one summer with the Pennsylvania Game Commission that he realized where his heart was.

  The knowledge had cost him his job and his marriage and another year of training and living in a one-room apartment, but it had all been worth it, now more than ever, with Megan as part of his life.

  And that life had almost ended today. If he had been a moment slower, he might be lying out there now, cut open by the madman he had killed. That thought and the memory of Pete Diffenderfer's ravaged corpse made him shift in his chair. Megan stopped playing.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah, fine. You've gotta be tired, though. Let's call it a night."

  "Okay." She put the fiddle in its case. "You want in the bathroom first?"

  "No, I'll read until you're finished." When she went upstairs, he took one of the Foxfire books from over the mantel, sat on the gray stone hearth, and opened the dog-eared volume at random. He had read all ten of the books innumerable times, finding in their pages what he found in the old-time fiddle music that Megan played, and the bluegrass CD's and tapes he listened to, the sounds and emotions of what he imagined as being a simpler era, when men and women were closer to the land, the trees, and the sky. He did not kid himself that times were better back then, but he thought that they were simpler, and simplicity was what he sought tonight.

  He read part of a chapter about building a wagon until Megan called him. When he came to bed he found her still awake. They both took a long time to get to sleep.

  Sheldon Lake didn't see one familiar face in the sports bar in Bradford. He had found it easily enough, but neither of the bartenders were the one he'd seen in there six years before. He didn't see Terry either. In fact, there didn't look to be a single fag in the place.

  The bar seemed pretty crowded. There were a lot of guys who Sheldon guessed were hunters, probably staying at motels, hitting the bars at night, getting a few hours sleep, and then tearing off to the woods at daybreak to blast away again. City boys, probably didn't know a buck rub from a totem pole. But none of them looked like fags beyond what city boys usually looked like anyway.

  When the older bartender brought Sheldon another draft, he gathered up his courage and asked, "Terry been in lately?"

  The bartender was too busy to pretend he was interested. "Who?"

  "Guy named Terry? Kinda short and skinny, blond hair?"

  "Don't know him."

  "He used to hang out here, I think. Maybe five, six years ago."

  Sheldon thought the bartender's expression changed. The man seemed to think for a moment, then said, "What you want him for?"

  "Owes me some money."

  The bartender shook his head. "Hope it's not a lot."

  "Why?"

  "You're gonna have a tough time collecting it. He's dead." Sheldon must have gone pale, because the bartender added, "He a friend of yours?"

  Sheldon shook his head angrily. "No...no, bastard just...borrowed money from me once, that's all."

  "Sorry about that," the bartender said, and went to the other end of the bar, where he started talking to a young couple he apparently knew.

  Nothing was going to make Sheldon ask what Terry had died of. He knew. What the hell else did young faggots die of anyway? He wished he knew where the man's grave was. He would have gone and pissed on it.

  Sheldon finished his beer slowly. He could feel the beads of sweat on his forehead, and wiped them away with his fist. He thought about Terry and damned him, and hoped he was in hell, and that thought made him wonder if he would go there when he died, because he was going to die, sure enough, and he figured that maybe he was going to go to hell, and almost wished he would if that was where Terry was going to be. He was sure the devil wouldn't mind a little faggot-bashing in his domain. After all, the people there sure as hell weren't going to be nice to each other.

  Too, if he was already going to hell, then he had nothing to lose. And he wanted, more than anything, to make somebody pay for what had happened to him. All those months of guarding his ass, and then something as stupid as beating up a queer, and before you know it you're a dead man. Shit, it just wasn't fair. If he just hadn't gone into that bar in Bradford in the first place...

  If he just hadn't been so pissed at those meat jockeys in prison...

  If he hadn't had to go to prison in the first place...

  If he hadn't been pissed enough to try and take out that goddam warden...

  And then he stopped thinking back. He had just found the prime mover, the person who had sent him not only to prison, but to his death.

  Ned Craig.

  "Fucker," Sheldon said through gritted teeth, loud enough to make several people near him look at him. The bartender looked too, and then said something to the people he was with, probably figuring that the stranger was pissed because he'd loaned fifty bucks to a dead guy.

  Ned Craig, that high and mighty son of a bitch who had arrested him for shooting a doe in buck season, and when Sheldon had told him he swore to Christ he thought he had seen spikes, and it must have been some branches sticking up in the air, and goddammit, it wasn't his fault, and he shouldn't have to be fined two hundred bucks over what was just a mistake, even after Sheldon told him all that, the pompous prick still told him he had to be cited, and if he couldn't pay right then and there, for crissake, Craig would take his goddam gun.

  More than anything else in the world, Sheldon hated people who wouldn't listen to reason, who just went by the rules whether they made any sense or not. His teachers had been that way in school, and his daddy had been at home, and now that he was finally on his own, Sheldon had just about had enough of it.

  So he took a swing at Ned Craig's stupid, stubborn head with the butt end of his rifle. He only connected well enough to knock that dumb hat o
ff, but it felt great to see that slimy smirk wiped off the asshole's face. Sheldon dropped his gun then and went after Ned Craig with his fists and feet.

  Craig had surprised him, though. Sheldon had thought he looked big but soft, and quickly found out that he was big and hard. He'd read him wrong, that was for sure, and Craig wasted no time in punching Sheldon right out. When he came to enough to know where he was and what happened, Craig had him tied up with the nylon cord he had been using to drag his deer, and pretty soon the police that Craig had called showed up and took him out of the woods and into a cell.

  Sheldon had been assigned a public defender who didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, but at least he was able to get the original assault with intent reduced to simple assault, and the sixteen to twenty-four month sentence down to eight months. Still, it had been hard time in a state prison, hard enough to convince Sheldon that he never wanted to go back in one again. Only that once, when he beat the shit out of Terry, had he waltzed with the law, and that had been enough to get it out of his system.

  But now there was something in his system that nothing could get out, only the death that was, he felt, now creeping up on him with drawn knives.

  Well, goddammit, if he went he wasn't going alone.

  He tossed down a bill, barreled out of the sports bar, and ran to his car. As he backed out, he thought that his eyes in the rearview mirror looked like the eyes of a dead man.

  It took a long time to make their plans for the next day, and it wasn't until midnight that they started leaving Jean Catlett's room. They had decided that each person would go to a different county bordering Elk County, all except for Jean, who wanted to try and find Ned Craig. Sam Rogers would go southwest to Jefferson County, Michael Brewster north to McKean, Timothy Weems west to Forest, and Chuck Marriner would head south to Clearfield County.

  As they folded up their maps and left the room, Chuck and Sam were the last ones out. "Excuse me, Chuck?" Jean said.