Hunters: A Trilogy

by Paul A. Rice

  It was a fair point they supposed, after all it was hard enough just trying to get their heads around the small part it looked as though they were going to play.

  Mike now spoke to them in a very business-like manner. ‘No, the way it works is like this: we get the call from George, if we accept the initial offer then we will receive the full briefing. After studying the details we’ll then do a reconnaissance, and if we still think it’s a goer then we’ll carry out some rehearsals if need be. After that, we receive a final briefing from George, get the equipment, and do the job.’

  ‘How do we get to meet George? I can’t wait!’ Jane said, her eyes lighting up.

  Mike had bad news for her. ‘Ahh, now for the nasty part, Jane…You’ll need an implant, which is no big deal in itself, but it’ll make you feel poorly for a while,’ he said, grimacing.

  ‘Urrghh, an implant, what implant? I don’t like the sound of that at all!’ she said, looking at Ken for reassurance.

  He pointed to the scar on his cheek and raised his eyes towards the back of his head in an indication to the hidden plate, which lay there. ‘Show her yours, Mike. Wait ‘til you see this for a scar!’ he said, whilst looking at Mike.

  ‘Mate, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ Mike said, shaking his head.

  Ken winked at him behind Jane’s back. ‘It’s only a little one, go on, show her the transplant scar, go on Mike… don’t be shy!’

  Mike grinned in acknowledgement. ‘Well, if you insist,’ he said, starting to unbutton his shirt. Their teasing backfired on them, somewhat…

  ‘Excuse my French, lads, but you can all piss-straight-off if you think I’m having anything as horrible as any one of those!’ Jane pointed in horror at Ken’s head with a slender forefinger. It was very rare for her to swear, but when she did then Ken knew he was approaching the edge. ‘No bloody thanks, count me out. Yuk!’ she said, crinkled her face and then stuck her tongue out at the two men, who by now were laughing out loud.

  Mike fastened the loose buttons on his shirt and leaning across, touched the screen. A tiny device appeared for them to observe. It looked like a miniature Ladybird, one without any limbs or antennae. It reminded Ken of a minute teardrop, ‘A mercury teardrop…’ The thought trotted through his mind as he heard Mike speak to Jane again.

  ‘You won’t be getting anything like the ones we have, they just used our injuries as a place to insert our transplants,’ the Australian said, with a smile. ‘Plus, there’s the fact that now they have embarked upon this plan, the implants have been massively refined!’ He pointed at the screen, saying: ‘This particular one is no larger than the head of a pin, and it will be inserted into your inner ear – it takes ten seconds to insert, and about two days to get used to.’

  Jane sat and looked at him, breathed out, and then asked: ‘Does it hurt, and what does ‘get used to’ mean, exactly?’

  Mike strove to set her mind at rest. ‘It doesn’t hurt at all, not in the slightest, and getting used to it means, well…it means just that,’ he said. ‘You might feel a bit dizzy at times, like you most probably felt in the pub tonight, and you’ll have some amazing dreams, too!’

  Ken said, ‘Except they’re not dreams, are they? No, not at all, they’re when you travel, or ‘jump’ to other places, see George and probably go and look at the next job, I’d be right in that assumption, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Almost spot on, I would say, my friend – almost spot on!’ Mike smiled at him. ‘Anyone would think you’ve had previous experience at this game.’

  Ken grinned at the pointed sarcasm and rose to his feet. ‘The one thing the implant will do, if I remember rightly,’ he said, ‘is to make you feel bloody tired. I didn’t even know I’d been given one, but I do remember feeling knackered a lot.’

  ‘Talking of which…I don’t know about you,’ Mike said. ‘But I’m bushed! I reckon we should finish off tomorrow, if that’s okay?’ He yawned, making a failed attempt to cover his mouth as he did so.

  They were all in agreement, as Mike headed for the downstairs room, where his belongings had been dumped previously, Jane and Ken padded up the stairs. Within ten minutes the old building was in silence and almost total darkness, almost total darkness except for the dim green lights that the device sitting on the coffee table began to emit.

  Even at this late hour, George was still busy – the data he sent caused the machine to glow softly as its inner mechanism began to decipher the stream of information it received from him. Of all the secrets the old lodge held, these new ones must have been amongst the most bizarre.

  10

  Monkey See – Monkey Do

  The child’s father was large, an enormous tree of a man, one who stood towering over the boy cowering before him. The child himself was a huge specimen in his own right, and that was half the problem. Well, almost the entire problem, if the truth was really to be told. His father had never forgiven the boy for being the perceived cause of his wife’s premature death. Yes, indeed, if he hadn’t been unfortunate enough to inherit most of his father’s oversized genes, then his mother wouldn’t have died during childbirth.

  Certainly, if it wasn’t for his fault, for being so damned large…‘Then you’re Momma would still be alive, woodent she now?’ That little ditty always pre-empted the usual lecture on: ‘How Goddamned difficult thangs are tryin’ to raise a boy o’ your size on my own!’ The man always followed the lecture by dragging the boy around by the ear, or hair, and giving him a guided-tour of the empty cupboards. The trip would usually end with him shoving the child’s large head towards the few slices of stale bread, which lay moulding in the cracked earthenware container. ‘I ain’t gonna buy no more bread ‘til you finish what we already have, now eat it boy, eat it!’

  The musty taste of mould stayed in the child’s mouth for hours afterwards. The boy didn’t mind listening to the lecture – he would have quite happily stayed a thousand times and listened to it over, and over again. He would much rather the lecture than endure one of the far more regular beatings his father dished out.

  They weren’t really beatings, as such – it was more like a fight with a giant bully. A beating would have been a damned sight better; at least it would be over quickly. Bang-bang, one-two, and down you go. No, his father’s method was much worse than any old beating. It consisted of nipple twisting, hair pulling and all manner of other painful things, handed out whilst the tear-filled sneer upon that beer-sodden face looked unmercifully down at him. Ball-crushing blows to his groin, solid, leg-deadening punches to his thighs and calves. Skin-wrinkling ‘Chinese burns’ seared his arm to the bone. And then, worst of all, the dreaded arm-lock. It always ended in the arm-lock, always.

  When the child had finally been pummelled into a tearful submission, his father would then encircle the boy’s neck within a giant forearm and drag him to his feet. With his windpipe crushing beneath that thick, ginger-haired forearm, the child would stand shaking and wait fearfully to be told to say the words.

  It always ended this way, always.

  ‘Now…you tell your Momma that you’re sorree, and you tell her loud, now, you hear me? She is uppen heaven and she needs to hear that your sorree, boy!’ It was the same thing every time, every time. ‘Say the words, an’ say ‘em loud, boy. Say ‘em!’ The vice around his neck would slacken, and with mouth open he would gasp a lung full of air and then say the words, say them over and over again.

  ‘I’m sorry Momma, I’m sorry Momma – I never meant to kill you, Momma. I didn’t know I was being bad, Momma, Momma, Momma!’ But his anguished shriek only fell upon the deaf ears of the old farmhouse, his father seemingly unable to hear the words, or see the abject sorrow and terror within his son. On one occasion, the boy had been held upright by the hair and made to say the words repeatedly for fifteen minutes, before finally being hurled to the floor with his father’s words still ringing in his ears.

  ‘Git the fuk outta my sight before I do somthang I’ll regret!’
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br />   Those words still haunted the child to this day.

  They were his father’s words.

  At eleven-years of age, the boy already stood at just less than six feet tall. His broad shoulders were already starting to show their promise, alongside his rapidly-forming pectoral muscles, their bulk straining the buttons of the old khaki shirt, flapping above his torn and faded Wrangler jeans. His upper body would have made many a grown man proud. Bulging biceps, gained from hours of working on the dilapidated farm, writhed down to thick, wirey forearms that ended in callused, work-hardened hands. His long, lanky legs were the only giveaway as to his real age.

  He was, in many ways ‘a child in a man’s body, a poor boy who should be in some other place – the poor child!’ That’s what old Mrs Jones down at the store had said. And she was right, because, except for one thing, he was definitely a poor boy, a poor boy in almost every sense of the word.

  His one saviour, the one treasured secret he held close to his chest, was the total passion he felt for all the creatures that flourished in every corner of the farm. He found joy in every hidden knot-hole of the barn’s wooden walls, every blade of grass and unturned stone held yet more of nature’s bounty.

  These days the boy lived for the quiet moments of grace when his father was either in town or sleeping off the drink, which he’d gone to town for in the first place. The boy possessed an extraordinary empathy with any and all living things – except humans – and the wildlife came easily to him. Not in a spooky, horror movie sort of way, no, it was more as though they recognised the child’s inner self. They knew he meant them no harm and happily crawled, jumped or flew across his hands and arms without a care in the world.

  He knew of every nook and cranny where his friends hid, worked and lived, and he spent hours simply lying still and watching them go about their business. Not just the insects or slugs and snails, either. He also spent many a happy time in observing much larger creatures, too. Deer, rabbits, even wolves, all came under his caring eye. Once, whilst lying in the red dust of a seasonally-dry river bed, he had been inches away from a snake. The husky lump on its tail made little rattling noises as it briefly stopped and flicked a forked black tongue in his direction.

  The boy didn’t know what most of the things were called, but he had taken to sketching them whenever he could. His brown notebook had long ago become filled with their images, and so the child had learned to find an alternative source of paper. The stack of unpaid bills, which grew in a daily mountain underneath the letter box by the back door, provided him with just what he needed.

  Ripping the envelopes open, he carefully used the blank reverse side of the letters to draw upon – even the big portions that were unmarked on the envelopes were put to good use. And now, stacked neatly within the safety of his battered suitcase, the one he had never used, nor probably ever would, there lay a large pile of beautifully-detailed, pencil sketches. Many a professional artist would have been more than happy to have such fine works in their portfolio. The intricate detail of each subject spoke not only of how much time it must have taken, but also of the great talent that lay hidden within the large hands of the long-haired youth.

  However, his father didn’t care for such nonsense – he felt that if the boy had time for such things, then he obviously wasn’t being kept busy enough around the farm. Leaning forward, he clasped the child around the throat with a huge paw and drew him towards his lowered face. His son focused on the hairs springing over the chest-line of his father’s dirty blue dungarees as he felt himself being pulled inexorably towards the sweating face. The smell of tobacco and beer cascaded onto him. The man had found one of the child’s sketches – a minutely detailed drawing of a centipede, which the boy had stuffed into one of his baseball boots when his father had unexpectedly come into his sparsely-furnished bedroom. The centipede’s finely-sketched body was now grasped in the man’s hand, its delicate antennae poking out from behind his thick wrist. Screwing it into a ball, he held the crumpled paper in front of the child’s face.

  ‘What’n the hell do you call this sheeit, boy?’ he taunted. ‘You don’t have the time for scribbling, and ifen you do…well then, I guess we should find sommat else for you to be gettin’ on with!’ That big hand rose high into the air.

  ‘I ain’t bin lazy, Poppa! I just’ see stuff sometime when I walk the land, I promise I ain’t been lazy, I promise!’ the boy screamed, waiting for the blows to come.

  It was afterwards when the child realised that he no longer loved the man who had ruled his life since the day he was born. In fact, he had the idea that, perhaps, he may well hate him. He wasn’t quite sure as his adolescent thoughts never really focused for too long on such things. Still, it was something he would think about later, maybe. As he sat alone in his room, massaging the pain from his thighs, the child wished he was back at school, even though he had fought and beaten almost every boy there, even the teenagers, he still craved the company.

  His father had stopped sending him almost a year ago. ‘I cain’t afford the fuel to be goin up there an back two times a day, boy – we need to make sum munny here on the farm before you all go and do your fancy book studies.’ That had been the end to it. The older man was adamant and had even thrown the Headmaster down off the porch when he had come to the farm and asked after the child. The man had scrabbled around on his hands and knees, frantically searching for his cracked spectacles, before running to his car – batting the dust and chicken shit from his suit as he went. His father had laughed hysterically at the man’s plight. ‘Next time it’ll be some buckshot in your ass, muthafuka!’ he’d screamed. The white Chevy had roared off their land in a cloud of dust and was never seen again.

  Yes, it was a lonely life and a hard life that the child endured. One day soon it would be too late, because the child would become the man his father was, and then the circle would be repeated. The boy was aware of this and subconsciously his greatest fear was being like the father, whom he had now begun to despise.

  But he knew he was trapped, his voice had even started to sound like his father’s, words and phrases the older man used, were starting to become firmly lodged in the boy’s everyday vocabulary. He heard himself do it and didn’t like it, but he couldn’t stop it.

  Monkey see, monkey do.

  ***

  As the years passed by, the child became a man. By the time he was fifteen the child had become a man in a man’s body. A very large body it was, too. He continued to work the farm and continued to suffer the abuse of his father. The beatings had become less frequent these days, perhaps because he was starting to get bigger than the older man. However, he still stoically accepted the abuse. ‘That’s the way it’s always been, it’s just the way it is.’ That was the excuse he made, anything to stop the other dark thoughts from entering his mind. He hardly ever saw the old bastard now anyway, and he was glad. Instead, his mind was filled with thoughts of joining the Army and then the CIA, or something.

  He had read about them whilst he’d been in the shop. On one of the rare occasions that he accompanied his father into town, the boy had been dispatched to the grocery store with the stark instruction ringing in his ear. ‘If’n you wanna eat, then you best get yourself to the shop, boy!’ his father said, holding out a five dollar bill. ‘If I ain’t here when you’re done, then you best had get back to the farm on your thumb. I maybes going for a little get together with the boys!’

  ‘Maybes’ always meant definitely, the boy had heard that tale before, many times. Nodding, he turned and strolled back up the street to where the shop lay. His tired baseball boots, now size fourteen, kicked up some of the leaves that the passing of winter had left. He picked up a few of them and flung the dry leaves high into the cool air, smiling in childish amusement at their twirling descent, before stepping up onto the boardwalk and entering the shop with a loud tinkle from the doorbell.

  Mrs Jones had made him take a seat whilst she fixed him some lemonade. ‘Oh, my Lord’s�
�look at the size of you, young man,’ she said, ‘where have you been? It has been months since I saw you last! Are you well, how is the farm? Are you eating, are you…?’ As was usual, the questions simply streamed out of her wrinkled mouth. The boy sat and smiled, he didn’t mind at all as Mrs Jones was very kind to him. Besides which, she made mighty fine lemonade and always had some of her ‘special cookies’ hidden away, too. He guessed it must have been like that all the time for someone lucky enough to have a Momma – one that happened to be alive.

  He loved being in the shop with all its neat rows of goods: bright jars of sweets, tins of soups and strange meats. Packets containing all sorts of wonderful things, things he had never even seen or heard of, never mind tasted. And the smell, oh, now that was something else. Fresh ham, smoked bacon, and a German sausage that came in a long, dark roll – the sausage was so spicy that it always made his eyes water. Mrs Jones used the whirring electric blade to cut slices of meat and cheese for her customers. She would put them in paper and then slide them onto her new weighing scales.

  ‘Digital they are, my dear,’ she would say. ‘There you go; it’s a little bit over, if you don’t mind?’ Her charming smile would always get them to part with the extra cash for that ‘little bit over.’ She winked at the boy when they weren’t watching. Every now and then she would give him an off-cut from the meat and cheeses which she dispensed. They were so tasty and the boy would have been quite happy to sit there all day, every day, for the rest of his life.

  It was whilst he sat perched at the counter, sipping on cool lemonade and nibbling on spicy sausage, that he’d laid eyes upon a magazine, one that rested on the counter by the jar of black-and-white Bull’s Eyes. Mrs Jones had no idea the magazine was there, and if she had known, the old woman would never have let him see it. She knew the child, and she also knew the contents of that magazine were exactly what the boy didn’t need in his life. In fact, they were the last thing he needed. This particular magazine had a lot more laying between its covers than just some colourful pictures of wildlife – this magazine had something else altogether, something that she should have seen, seen and hidden immediately. But she missed it, and more importantly, she missed whoever or whatever had placed it there.