Hunters: A Trilogy

by Paul A. Rice

  Hunters

  A Trilogy

  Paul A. Rice

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author

  Copyright.

  Copyright © Text Paul A. Rice

  ISBN: 978-1-78301-024-0

  The author has asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work

  Published in paperback by FeedARead.com Publishing Arts Council funded

  Hunters – A Trilogy

  Edition One

  Earlier editions were released as single novels under the title ‘Parallel’ by Paul A. Rice

  All Rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  This Trilogy has been my labour of love, my journey of discovery, my awakening. The tale has been my constant companion for the past five years. Together we have climbed steep learning-curves, fallen into bottomless pits of blinding naivety, struggled against the endless tides of our own imperfection, and fought many battles against the Demons of our own design.

  Finally we lay here, our journey complete. In this moment of time, this micron of eternity, with our efforts wrapped between these simple covers, we bow before you. Holding our breath in trepidation, we wait in the hope that our voyage was to be worthy of your audience.

  We are yours – do with us as you will.

  PAR

  November 2012

  Contents

  Book One - The Awakening

  1 - Chained

  2 - The Storm

  3 - Aftermath

  4 - Frying Pans and Fires

  5 - The Others

  6 - The Funny House

  7 - Room for Insanity

  8 - Old Friends Return

  9 - Private Show

  10 - Side-Order of Fear

  11 - Unanswered Questions

  12 - Parallels

  13 - The Edge

  14 - The Ghosts of Yesterday

  15 - The Bad News

  16 - The Tale of Mike

  17 - Darkness Revealed

  18 - Disappearing Digits

  19 - Fatal Collaboration

  20 - The Red Puppeteer

  21 - House of Cards

  22 - Spears

  23 - A Sudden Goodbye

  24 - Looking for Trouble

  25 - Killing Time

  26 - Seeing Red

  27 - Turning Tables

  28 - The Bigger They Are…

  29 - Death of Friends

  30 - The Awakening

  Book Two - The Gift

  1 - Not My Problem

  2 - Recovery

  3 - Old Odours

  4 - Rights and Wrongs

  5 - Reunited

  6 - Red’s Last Dance

  7 - Honey-Trap

  8 - Gifts and Changes

  9 - Learning Curves

  10 - Monkey See – Monkey Do

  11 - A Rock and a Hard Place

  12 - First-Timers

  13 - A Problem Shared

  14 - A Problem Shared

  15 - Goodbye, Mister Peters

  16 - Goodbye, Mister Peters

  17 - Not so Sweet

  18 - Not so Sweet

  19 - Precipice

  20 - The Plan

  21 - One-Way Ticket

  22 - Down on the Farm

  23 - Changing Red

  24 - Tori

  25 - Boots and Dreams

  26 - Fate Recognised

  27 - Gifts

  28 - Written In Stone

  29 - Bad Blood

  30 - Hidden Relations

  31 - Maggie’s Tale

  32 - Eye for an Eye

  33 - Saying Goodbye

  34 - 23:55 – Exactly

  35 – Michael

  Book Three - The Last Hunt

  1 - One Last Dance

  2 - Michael meets the Demon

  3 - The Tale of Mary

  4 - Michael gets the Message

  5 - A Full House

  6 - Train Hard to Fight Easy

  7 - Maggie’s Song

  8 - Discovery and Defence

  9 - Back-to-Back

  10 - A Stitch in Time

  11 - Missing Pieces

  12 - Reality or Imagination

  13 - No More Yesterdays

  14 - The Trek

  15 - Memories and Darkness

  16 - No More Tomorrows

  17 - Finale

  Epilogue - Never Too Late

  Book One

  The Awakening

  1

  Chained

  Only the chosen may render battle unto the Darkness.

  But first – they must be chosen.

  2006

  They punched him again, and again, and again. And then again one more time, just for good measure. Or fun. After they had finished beating him, the man lay in the sogginess of his own blood and faeces. Warm urine pooled, a brown tide lapping upon the torn shore of his weeping feet. He assumed brown, for by now it would have mixed with his own droppings, surely. No underwear here, only a boiler-suit to provide unfettered access, bowels to feet.

  It was dark, darker than a black night on the inside of Lucifer’s crack with all the curtains drawn. And in a crack he most certainly was – the deepest, smelliest crack of all time. It wasn’t entirely due to his own stupid fault that he’d ended up here, either. Stuck in the black crack of hell’s master, chained and beaten, paying the Devil his keep, his board, his rent. Other people needed to take their share of blame, for this, his most dire of situations.

  ‘Perhaps they’d like to come and pay their share of the bill?’ he thought.

  ‘Dark taxes…’ The feeble grin was a big mistake, a grimace that served only to send more blood spilling from his mouth. Acres of chipped teeth firing a barrage of their psychopathic opinions, lasers, into the very depths of his creaking jawbone. The hood never helped. Filthy thing, imprisoning his mind more effectively than the chains holding his ankles, he was incarcerated, mind-and-body, stinking blackness.

  The fetid rankness of suppurating body-fluids caressed his nostrils, their reminder gentle, yet brutal. He was here, and here he would stay, stay until death. Stay until, until they cut his...

  ‘Until they cut my head off…’

  His mind screamed: ‘NO!’

  Deep breathing, he was able to do that, if only just. Tepid air sucked deep into bruised lungs. Broken ribs freely-moving, like pick-up-sticks on a wind-rushed pond. Wait for the pain, the grinding, grating crepitus. What little of his body they had not yet violated now seemed to be in someone else’s possession. The rest, the parts they’d punched and cut, bitten and slashed, burned and electrified – splashed with lighter fluid – those parts definitely belonged to him. He wished they did not. The pain was beyond pain. It was his world.

  Yes, he was imprisoned in a World Of Pain.

  The thoughts whirled by on their merry-go-round of anguish.

  ‘Am I a pain-prisoner?’

  No, he was just a prisoner-prisoner. Chained and hooded in his world of pain. His mind drifted, struggling to remember the name of the film where he’d first heard those words. ‘If you don’t do as I say...then you, mister, are gonna be in a world of pain!’ Maybe it was a book, he wasn’t able to think cl
early, memories blurring, a murky backdrop to the fear and pain.

  He slept. Not for long.

  He cried again, hot tears casting their salty tracks down his lacerated cheeks, searing his cracked and feathered lips. And yet, even whilst drowning in the depths of such anguish, his blinding naivety, the rushing arrogance, still failed to allow the reality of the situation, and his own part in it, to register.

  ‘It wasn’t just my fault, no. The security advisor was as much to blame, the stupid bastard! Why hadn’t he been more forthright, why hadn’t he made sure we never went downtown unaccompanied?’ He blubbered inside the hood. ‘Why, it was his job to take care of us, why hadn’t the guy done something? Look at what’s happening now. Look at the mess I’m in. Look at it – stupid bastard!’

  His blindness knew no bounds. He’d always been the same and it had been observed on more than one occasion.

  ‘John McGuire? Arrogant little prick, damned know-it-all!’

  He’d heard it said. He didn’t care.

  His own thoughts ruled the roost around here. ‘We paid them to take care of us. I’ve been in more dangerous places than this, Pakistan is really not as bad as they make it out to be, the stupid bastards!’ But it was. His thoughts brushed the admission away. ‘It wasn’t as bad as they made it out to be, it just wasn’t – I was simply unlucky!’

  He’d had plenty of experience, plenty. He knew the score. He’d drunk gallons of beer in Kabul, taken hundreds of hookers in Rwanda – taken hookers everywhere – he’d partied like a gypsy in Yemen, fornicated like a king in Baghdad, rocked the darkest corner of the Congo, and drank himself senseless in a scintillating Syria.

  ‘Pakistan was just another place of work, why the hell can’t I venture into downtown Karachi to check out the scene, why? One little trip downtown in a taxi, it’s no big-deal.’

  The crystal-green eyes of the ex-pat security chief bored into his dark, pain-filled world. Those softly spoken words, the clear warning, seared through the blackness of his purgatorial prison. ‘Under no circumstances are you ever to use taxis, gentlemen – that’s why we pay a fortune for our own cars, are we clear?’ Looking at them without a smile whilst proceeding to point at the map, indicating the forbidden areas, the dangerous spots, the out-of-bounds places.

  McGuire’s thoughts had been idle.

  ‘They seem interesting, definitely worth a little trip down there…’

  The ex-pat’s words hammering home endless other procedures to be followed ‘in case of emergency.’ Apparently, he’d been doing this stuff for more than thirty years, ex-special forces, or something. Who cared? The briefing droned on. ‘Blah-blah-blah…’ The man’s gravel-filled voice faded into white noise as McGuire had let his thoughts return to the girl from the bar last night. The Russian, the blonde one, she was something else.

  ‘Dubai, party town,’ he thought, mind wandering.

  Here and now, in the present, whilst drowning in the bitter blackness of his prison, he barely remembered the man’s name, the security chief.

  ‘Old whatisname...yes, what was his name?’ He tried to think.

  ‘Ken?’

  ‘Yes, Ken, that was it.’

  ‘Ken...something-or-other…’

  ‘Robertson?’

  His mind seemed disjointed, throbbing fear knocking on the door of his conscious, niggling, disrupting his ability to think clearly.

  ‘Perhaps it was Rob-in-son?’

  ‘Robinson, yes, that’s it, Robinson…’

  McGuire couldn’t seem to remember the man’s face, only the eyes. They were green. Green eyes, icy eyes, emeralds.

  ‘Who cared?’

  He tried to hide the restless chain of thought, resting his temple upon the knuckles of a bloodied hand propped between head and floor. It was a cold and damp floor, a black and stinking floor.

  Thoughts drifting like a sleepwalker. ‘Who cares now?’

  He sniffed miserably, a droplet of snot shooting back up his nose.

  ‘No-one, that’s who cares now, no-one.’

  More tears, a gentle cascade of soft, helpless admittance. Stinging, wet truth. He and the others, those who wouldn’t care, just as long as this wasn’t happening to them they wouldn’t, had sniggered silently. Casually leaning against the doorframe as the big man gave them his ‘security’ briefing.

  ‘Yawn, yawn – yawn! The guy’s a bloody dinosaur; making things sound worse than they really are, too busy justifying his job!’ And as for his side-kick, Noman, the cocky Asian fool, he was just another local henchman who was too busy licking the security chief’s boots to really know the score – the guy had never even been outside of Karachi, what the hell would he know? Well, those two and their stupid rules weren’t a problem, because dollars buy everything, especially the favours of a skinny gate-guard and his taxi-driving cousin.

  But, there was, apparently, a major difference between favours and loyalty.

  Yes, well, McGuire knew that now, didn’t he? Now he did – now he knew. But now it was too late. He knew that one for sure, and the knowledge burned him.

  Wished he’d listened, wished he’d taken the advice, wished…

  He slept again, but not for long.

  They awoke him.

  Rattling steel, squeaking hinges, footsteps. More pain, the shocking agony of a hard-soled boot stamping down on his unsuspecting fingers. Something hard, viciously wooden, clacked off his skull with a hollow, thunking sound, its impact ushered his mind to the front row of a fantastical firework show, a rather agonizing display of lights and sparkles. The ticket was VIP.

  A voice spoke in the dark, its words thick, guttural.

  ‘Food...you...eat...food!’

  The fireworks subsided, if only slightly. He groaned.

  Iron fingers, steel claws digging into his armpits, dragged him into a sitting position. Head forced towards the steel bench – it was steel, he knew that much, his legs were chained to it and he’d explored every inch of the bench. Escape was impossible, chained like a dog, a mad dog, and twice as rabid – face shoved at the food, the same plate of barely warm, sweaty food as before.

  ‘The stew again, no doubt spicy and twinned with naan bread, a single flop, surely not the same piece of floury, flaccid naan bread again, surely not?’ He preferred to think of it as faeces bread: eminently palatable. The stench of his cell overwhelmed any feeble aromas the food may once have possessed.

  ‘Oh, how wonderful, faeces bread and sweaty stew again…’

  The rusty voice, its words thick, spoke once more.

  ‘Close eyes – very quiet, shsshh...you eat!’

  His own voice croaking, words wheedling through broken teeth.

  ‘Water...please?’ Not his voice, the sound of a stranger, hollow, detached.

  A curse and then a blow, more of a chiding cuff than a blow, a little slap for the insolent, a reminder of who exactly was in charge around here. Then a pause...followed by some rustling and a shout, dialect unknown. Screaming hinges and more footsteps, pause...whispered words, a soft laugh. The clank of tin, a hollow sound, empty like his soul. A moment of silence, soft breathing and the smell of sweat, was followed by a rolling drumbeat of pouring water. The final clank of tin preceded one more slap to the back of his head, just for good measure. The blow was unexpected and made his head jerk forward to greet the bench’s cold caress; its steel greeting was merciless, mocking. Yet more pain.

  ‘Eat!’

  Heavy footsteps, hinges wailing, door crashing, tomb sealed.

  Hear the silence, a deep and thick silence, a sleep-like, black silence.

  But not total. He cocked his head, straining to catch the noises.

  Banging and shouting.

  ‘A rescue, have they come for me?’

  No. Faint laughter, mirthful sounds, floating through the prison’s thick walls. They would have been of more use were he at the bottom of a well. At least he would have been able to shout in the well. No shouting here. Maybe a scream, just one,
final scream. The sound of their laughter was bitter-sweet, a sound of happiness being enjoyed in some other world by some other people. People who would never come, not to come and help they wouldn’t. No, all they were going to do, when at last they came, was...

  ‘Yes, all they would do was cut my head…’

  ‘No!’

  Shuddering panic, a tide of fear raced towards the matchstick boat of his sanity, he drifted helplessly in the face of its black wave, a tsunami of unstoppable horror. The darkness swelled, he felt himself wrapped within her terrible arms, bound by his fear.

  He was a fear-prisoner, a prisoner-prisoner.

  ‘Breathe!’

  He turned to the bench and lifted the hood, that wretched dominatrix, over his mouth and rested its chafing edges upon the bridge of his nose. Wincing, fingertips cautious, gently stroking the unfamiliar, misshapen lump of his broken, nasal slope. He prised a kernel of snotty blood from his nostrils, holding it in his fingers, half-contemplating whether to eat it or not.

  At least he knew where it had been.

  With a groan, he flicked the morsel away and stared down through the bottom of the hood, vision blurred by a curtain of loose-hanging, cotton strands. He left the hood covering his eyes. Something inside of him knew the heavy price that would be paid if ever he tried to remove it. Fear taxes, pain invoice. No twenty-eight days’ period of grace around here; he would pay and pay immediately. Of that he had no doubt because...because they watched him. They watched him, he knew they did, and he knew that it was better to play safe, better to stay in the darkness. McGuire felt their eyes upon him, rapists, scouring his mind and body. They watched him, all the time they watched him. He felt those eyes – they were just like Ken Rob-in-son’s eyes, relentlessly boring into his soul.

  He ate the food and drank the water – the food was tasteless, he may as well have been eating air. The water was aluminium, cold and metallic, sandy. It smelled of urine. He pushed the plate away and lowered the hood. With his stomach already starting to grumble, sphincter complaining like an old woman with the shakes, McGuire eased himself back down onto the floor, pushing his legs nearer the gaoler – the closer to the bench his legs were the better. It seemed to ease the pain of the iron clasps fixed to his ankles.

  He lay back and listened to the obscure grumblings of his bowels.