Hunters: A Trilogy

by Paul A. Rice

  Ken had not had a single dream since the last one, the big one about dying. He remembered seeing Jane in the light, but after that it seemed his mind’s only need was some rest, and it didn’t permit any interfering dreams to interrupt its healing process. Ken slept a lot – long, deep, restful sleeps. He remembered the dreams about the wonderfully bizarre things he’d encountered whilst unconscious. If that is what state he’d actually been in. Which, it has to be said, Ken severely doubted.

  He also remembered everything about Red, too. The pebble and the Zippo lighter that Mike had left for him on the bedside table only served to deepen the mystery, had it really happened? The whole thing confused him because it was too real, much too tangible to have merely been a dream, definitely. He wasn’t sure, but strangely enough he felt quite logical about it; deep inside, Ken knew it wasn’t over. Half of him wondered what the next move would be.

  The thought was such a vivid one and it wouldn’t seem to leave his mind, there would be another move, of that he was absolutely sure.

  In the meantime he intended to enjoy his life and have some good times with Jane – it had been a long while since they had shared so much time together. Ken spent hours watching her paint, she was a natural artist and simply watching the flowing strokes of her brushes would send him into a near trance. It was so relaxing, just sitting and watching her as the pictures appeared like magic from the finely bristled tips of her tools.

  He also looked forward to seeing Mike again, Ken had only seen him the once during his time in hospital, but at the time had been so spaced out on painkillers that the only memory he had was one of Mike giving him some abuse about being scrawny. Ken hadn’t spoken to the Australian since then and the only communication had been in the form of a text message he’d received from a weird number, one that he didn’t recognise.

  The text message had read: ‘All well, business taken care of. I’ll be with you soon. George will be in touch.’ It had ended with one word: ‘Mike’.

  When Ken had tried to return the text, the screen on his mobile flashed once, turned green, and then as he watched in disbelief, the message deleted itself. Yeah, he was pretty damned sure there was more to come – in fact, Ken relished the idea. However, he was still trying to figure out a way in which to explain everything to his wife. ‘She’s gonna think I’ve lost the bloody plot!’ The thought worried him, but he needed to share this with her, needed to get it out of his own head. Finally, he just decided to just give it to her straight; tell Jane exactly what he thought had happened, the whole fantastic tale, all of it.

  ***

  The depths of winter were upon the Scottish Highlands, wonderful frosty mornings making the beautiful place seem even more like a postcard than was usual. The white peaks of surrounding hills framed the shimmering lochs as they lay dourly below the hills’ lofty stance. Dark grey clouds scooted past overhead, bringing the promise of snow in their wake, their fantastical shapes playing tricks with the mind, conjuring up images of dragons, clowns’ faces, and that man on a skidoo, perhaps. Amongst such beauty, husband and wife were out early once again, as they were every day, the steam-filled breath flying in long ribbons from their mouths, the cutting freshness of icy air reaching into their souls. The pair were racing down the gravel track, knobbly tyres slipping and sliding as they fought to keep their mountain bikes from throwing them into the verges.

  Jane laughed, saying: ‘Please be careful, Kenny, if you crash then we’ll be back to square one, you maniac!’ It didn’t stop her from trying to pass him up the inside, though. Her long legs pumped furiously as she and Ken tore back to the lodge, bumping and jolting down the track to their house. The loser had to make breakfast. Sometimes, Ken truly lost the race and sometimes he simply felt like cooking.

  The one thing he had definitely lost, amazingly, was the desire to smoke. He had been a heavy smoker for years, but now it never even crossed his mind. The hospital had said it was probably the length of time he’d been without a cigarette, but may have been as a direct result of the accident. He laughed about it with Jane. ‘Now, there’s a good business for us,’ he said, ‘the ultimate smoking cure: we smash ‘em on the head with an iron bar and then they give up smoking. It’s simple…we’d make a fortune!’ She gave him such a scowl that Ken burst into laughter again.

  Gradually, over the weeks, Ken had begun to tell Jane his tale. Little-by-little he let her in to his mind, and then, before he realised it, his story had become a rush and he couldn’t stop telling her. He spent a lot of time explaining to her about the Hyenas and their greed – he talked about water and oil, and of the device that George had said would have cured all their problems. Ken told her in detail about George, and of the insane things he had been shown by him. He spoke of the Light Maker and the awful future he had been so casually shown by an unknown old man who wore some shiny-buckled sandals.

  He told Jane everything. She always sat motionless to allow his tale to enter her deepest thoughts; occasionally, she would ask a question or, perhaps, get him to clarify something in particular. When Ken told her about the Zippo and the Stone, she raised her eyebrows. ‘I wonder what they mean,’ Jane murmured, ‘seeing them in the dream was one thing, but now…’ She looked across to where the two very real items sat on the mantelpiece.

  Ken glanced at them and replied, saying: ‘I have no idea, sweetheart. George told me the lighter was like a token, you know, something real to hold onto? But the Stone, Jesus…it even has the mark where Red spat on it!’ He looked up at her in disbelief.

  Jane said, ‘When Mike left them on your table at the hospital, I didn’t realise their significance at all.’ She had shown them to Ken soon after he had awoken, in the hope that maybe they would cheer him up a bit. But, by the expression upon his face at the time, Ken had been anything but ‘cheered up’.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘this time I don’t have the fear like before. It was just the shock of seeing them, I guess.’ He smiled at her, and nodded towards the Stone and its guilty partner. Those two items had definitely made him think, yes, Ken thought about them right enough, he thought about them a whole lot.

  Jane smiled back, saying: ‘Fear?’ She knew there were things that she still didn’t know about Ken, things that she would probably never know.

  ‘Yeah, it was a kind of fear, but not really,’ he replied, ‘all the time, last time, I just had this deep sense of unease inside of me – I knew it was wrong, the whole thing felt bad in my gut! It just felt like it was all gonna go wrong at any moment; I heard myself, inside, and I wasn’t happy!’ Ken laughed, shrugging his wide shoulders and saying: ‘Now, well… I don’t know that it did go wrong, I’m here and I feel good, better than I’ve done for a long while, to be honest. Mikey is alive and kicking, although God knows where…I wish the bugger would call me.’ He looked across at where his mobile telephone lay on the side, then shrugged once more and lay back on the rug.

  Jane threw some more logs on the fire and they talked for a while longer until Ken reached the end of his current chapter. Reaching his limit, he smiled at Jane, yawned, and slumped back onto the cushions where he soon dozed off. She looked down at him and shook her head. The way in which he managed to simply fall asleep, anywhere and at any time, was amazing.

  It was later that night, whilst doing some more sleeping, that Ken had a dream. It was the first dream he’d had in a long time, and it had been even longer since the last time he’d encountered this particular dream. It was the one from his past, a nightmare from long ago, one he was kind of hoping that he had forgotten.

  He smelt it coming…

  3

  Old Odours

  It seemed as though he hadn’t forgotten those days after all. Well, certainly not the smell…It was an odour that Ken remembered vividly, one he had tried to shut out of his life without success. He knew what that particular smell meant, and where it came from, too. A place he hadn’t been for many years, a place from his past, an awful place he used to visi
t in his nightmares. With reluctance, he let his eyes open, let himself be propelled by the Dream Maker through the blackened door in front of him. The one marked: ‘Bad Memories’.

  He heard himself deny it. ‘Please, not this again! I’ve finished with this, dealt with it, it’s over, finished…please, no!’ Ken listened to his voice echo forlornly in the blackness, and then he was running – the sound of the explosion still ringing in his ears – sprinting toward the cloud of smoke and dust as it rose above the market place. The distant screaming of voices bounced around his head and mixed with the pounding of his feet. They, and those of his comrades, hammered the cobbles as they raced into the square, raced headlong together into hell once more.

  It was right there and then, back then, back in the real world all those many years ago, when the young Kenneth Robinson had decided that ‘Life’, as such, was shit. As he had stood amongst the remains of bodies and fruit, standing and watching the blood and juice run in thick rivulets between the cobbles, Ken realised his life would never be the same again.

  The smell of cordite and death had filled his nose with its awful burnt, visceral stench. Right now, right here in this dreaming present, he had to go through it once more. He was back on the street, back in the market.

  Burnt fruit and shattered flesh littered the ground, the fleeing survivors leaving bright red footprints in a pattern so crazy that, perhaps, it would have won some strange award at one of the Tate Galleries. The madness of the blood-soaked footprints tracked to-and-fro in an insane red web that linked each shattered corpse to the next. People were being dumped into the empty boots of cars, laid across the bonnets and shoved onto the back seats, their blood running down the faded paintwork, flowing onto rusty chrome grills and dented bumpers, pooling on the carpets, dripping – their blood was everywhere.

  As the drivers of the cars raced away with the dead and dying on board, their departure simply added to the craziness by leaving the awful addition of red tyre-marks imprinted onto the street, their terrible, bloody tracks glistening in the smoke-filled half-light. Ken and his men had done what best they could, administered as much first aid as was possible, called for back-up, directed people, reassured people, and…and not really done anything at all. There is not a lot can be done for a woman whose torso is split in two.

  She lies there looking up at him with her eyes full of fear and knowing. He tries to prevent her from looking down at the red and black mess that had been, up until a few minutes ago, her own lower body. The scream of sirens and voices fades into his subconscious. Ken’s hands work automatically as he applies shell-dressings to her wounds, each one absorbs a pint of blood – the three he’s used are already soaked through. She’s bleeding to death and there’s nothing he can do. Radios crackle and everywhere people are running, running like ants to an upturned honey pot, only this isn’t honey and it’s anything but gold in colour.

  The woman holds his hand with a wire-like strength, blowing a thin whistle of blood-spattered breath onto his combat smock as she tries not to die, tries with all her might. The yellow dress clings to her sculpted shoulders, its flowing lines shattered below the waist. Bright yellow and crimson, the colours embed themselves into his mind as she utters some unintelligible plea to him; those wide blue eyes of hers, looking deep into his soul.

  In his helplessness, Ken tells her: ‘It’s okay, it’s okay – we’ll get you a doctor!’

  She understands those two words, repeats them: ‘Okay, doktorrr…’

  Ken looks over his shoulder in vain hope, perhaps a white-coated saviour was going to appear through the smoke and dust. ‘No chance, nobody gives a fuck around here, any doctors are either dead or up to their necks in guts dealing with the others!’ Ken hears his own thoughts and looks back down at the woman again. It’s too late… with a long belch of blood, which sprays onto her beautiful, alabaster throat, she dies whilst looking right into his eyes.

  He saw himself looking down at her and that terrible feeling of helplessness washed over him once more. In his mind he became one with the scene again. He stared deeply into himself, but he still couldn’t help her. Her fingernails had remained forever seared into his palm – they were nearly as painful as the memories.

  ‘She really didn’t want to go – this wasn’t her time to go! But you just couldn’t help her to stay, could you?’ The thought scrapes the inside of his head with its own, vicious fingers. His mind had pleaded with her: ‘Go then, go and escape this terrible thing!’ He will always have a deep, haunted feeling about those thoughts. ‘Did you want her to go for her own sake, or was it for yours? Because you couldn’t deal with it, because you’re a coward!’ No, there’d not been a lot he’d been able to do, except try not to go crazy, not just yet. Save that for later.

  After a while, when the madness had calmed down a bit, when all that remained were the pools of blood and a certain never-to-be-forgotten smell, an awful stench that wormed its way into the pores and clung like glue to the nasal mucus, an odour which crept into their very souls, they had been given the revolting task of cleaning up the area. And so, with shovels grating upon those crimson cobbles, Ken and his men had scraped up the blackened flesh that lay in forlorn lumps amongst the wreckage of reality. The gathered grotesqueness was plopped into black plastic bags, and that was that: job done and game over, nothing else left to do or to say.

  The moment had changed all of them in some way. For Ken it had brought about a hard-edged cynicism and he never believed in anything much after that day. ‘It was all a load of arse, everything boiled down to the choices you made, choices and luck. Make your own luck!’

  His mind had shut the realities away, chucked them into that black box in the far corner of his mind. The woman had stayed with him, though. Sure, she had faded a bit over the years, but she was always there, hiding behind a façade of madness and fear with those blue eyes looking into his soul, the lifeless blue eyes of a beautiful, unnamed, dead woman. Ken saw them, they still didn’t blink.

  Some of his friends had left the forces soon afterwards, they had all seen bad stuff before, people get shot and friends die, it came with the territory. But the market bomb…no, that one had been different for all of them, it had been almost personal and had changed them all in some way, changed some of them forever.

  A couple of the lads had lost all sense of reality and the only relationship they’d wanted from then on had been an intimate one with a certain Mr Jack Daniels, or maybe his close cousin, Mr Smirnoff. If those two weren’t available, well, there were several other members of their extended family who would’ve been more than happy to stand in. Some of the boys didn’t want a relationship with anything ever again – not even life itself.

  Yeah, it had changed them all right and Ken hated the bomb for that, he hated the morons who, for some self-indulgent excuse of a cause, had planted it in the market on that beautiful, sunny day. ‘Did they know what it would do? Did they revel in it, believing so much in their cause that it didn’t matter, did they even care?’ There were no answers to those questions and the thoughts had cooked his head for years. He hated them, the bombers, wished he’d been able to ask them just the one question.

  ‘Why?’

  Maybe then he would have understood, maybe…

  It hadn’t been long after the incident when Ken had decided to apply for duties with the Special Forces. He had been a natural and flew through the selection process, he loved the job and the job loved him. He was made for the life, and besides, it gave him more of an opportunity to get closer to the types of people who planted bombs in sunny market places, much closer. In the years that followed, many such people came across the wrath of Ken’s market-bomb memories.

  In the depths of his dream, he was filled with those violent emotions once more. He was back on the big black roller coaster ride again, the one he had managed to stop and disembark from a long time ago. He let the feelings wash over him whilst he waited for it to stop. Ken knew he wouldn’t have any problem
s getting off this time, he had managed it once before and he would do it again. He had too much to live for, other things to do and other places to go, of that he was certain. He let his inner thoughts take charge.

  ‘Just stay calm and see what else the damned Dream Maker has in store for you this time, old son.’ Getting off was his choice and it would be an easy one to make, especially since he saw George standing at the siding and waiting for him.

  ***

  The old man stood with hands thrust deep into the pockets of a dark brown sheepskin coat, the white woollen collar turned up against the bitter cold. As Ken spiralled through the blackness towards him, George turned and his ruddy face broke into a genuine, wide-grinned smile. He opened his arms out wide and Ken almost saw the words he uttered, hanging within the breath as it escaped his lips in a pall of steam.

  ‘Kenneth, greetings my dear boy, how good it is to see you!’

  They embraced, the familiar George smells were there, whiskey and some sort of spicy, cinnamon aroma, both reassuring but somehow overwhelming. Ken felt the blood and emotions flow through his head. The feelings churned through his mind and he felt the strange rush of having been here before.

  He realised that he had been here before, not exactly ‘here’ as such, but more a case of being in the same situation – there was fear, a fear of the unknown, perhaps. There was kind of joy, too, he wasn’t sure exactly what he felt but he knew that he had to make sure he maintained a tight grip of those whirling emotions. He didn’t intend to let the unknown blow him away like it had the first time he’d met George.

  ‘It’s not unknown, I’ve been here before and I did what I had to do…what does he want me for now? Stay calm, Ken, stay calm – it’s only a dream.’ His thoughts raced. There was excitement, a sense of recognition and no real feeling of madness, either. He knew this game now, he was familiar with it and felt exhilarated by the anticipation it brought. Ken knew that he couldn’t be mad because he remembered too much. He stared at George, the old man standing and smiling at him, back against the wall of a long, grey building, its dirty windows giving only a shadowy glimpse of the old man’s reflection.