Hunters

by Whitley Strieber

  She opened her mouth, seemed about to speak. Remained silent.

  “We’ve got a choice of prime rib or mahi-mahi,” the steward said after they took off.

  As Flynn ate, he saw that silent tears were running down Diana’s face. He said nothing. What was there to say, that it would be all right? It would not be all right, it would never be all right.

  Maybe she was going to be relieved or disciplined. Maybe she already knew that. But what was most likely was that she was remembering the men she had lost, and feeling a torment of regret.

  “You need to eat,” he said.

  Listlessly, she took a bite of her fish and chewed.

  “Flynn,” she said. Then she stopped. He’d seen grief many times, the way it takes a while to hit. Hers had hit. “Flynn,” she said again, “you’re a good cop and you have some outstanding skills and a lot of investigative experience in our area of concern, but things have changed, Flynn. We’re going to need to take a different approach now.”

  “I’m not leaving voluntarily, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  She closed her eyes and he saw the tears well again, and realized to his astonishment that she was crying not for her lost men, but for him. She leaned toward him. “It’s a trap,” she whispered. “It’s always been a trap and I’ve gotten you tangled up in it, too.”

  He added this to the long list of things about this case that he did not understand.

  “They feel that you’ve gotten too deep. You can’t be released.”

  He waited, but she said no more. “Well that’s certainly damn mysterious.”

  “Security is very, very tight and for good reason, Flynn, as you will find. The thing is, there’s no going back from this. It’s marriage with no divorce allowed. You didn’t get a chance to make a decision and that’s not fair.”

  “I made my decision when I walked out on the Menard Police.”

  She turned to the window. But not for long. Very suddenly she turned back and said to him, “You’re going to meet people different from any you’ve ever encountered.”

  “And you can’t tell me one more thing.”

  “I want you to prepare yourself for the unexpected. I don’t need you gaping like a hick and asking little boy questions.”

  “Do I do that?”

  “When you’re in there, you may. This is going to be the strangest experience you’ve ever had. Beyond imagination.”

  “I have to admit, I’m curious.”

  She said no more, and the flight continued uneventfully, a plane swimming in featureless darkness.

  Once they’d landed and collected their weapons and equipment, Flynn found that they had a rental car waiting. She drove, and he noticed that she didn’t use a GPS. She’d been here before. A lot.

  He watched the gray sky and the gray of Lake Michigan, and wondered if there was any way to prepare to face a total unknown.

  They’d been on Lake Shore Drive for some time before he understood from reading road signs that their destination was Evanston, just north of Chicago itself.

  “I think you need to talk more, Diana. I’m a pro but I’m not a psychic. Narrate this a little bit.”

  “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Excessive secrecy and compartmentalization just killed three men. And yet you keep it up.”

  “I have orders, I follow my orders.”

  “Following orders is good. But what that means is making them work. Your orders were to stop a dangerous criminal. You didn’t make those orders work, so whatever it was you thought you were doing, it wasn’t following them.”

  After a few turns in Evanston, she drove down a street lined with big old houses that looked like they were worth a lot … and Flynn became concerned. There were no official buildings around here.

  They passed those houses and drove into a less grand neighborhood. Here, there were stark oaks lining the street, and the tall row houses were as dreary as the sky.

  They pulled up in front of one of the houses. In the driveway there stood a Chrysler 300. Other than that, the place was silent, the windows dark.

  “So where are we? Not your ancestral home, surely?”

  “Police headquarters.”

  “Not a good answer.”

  He got out of the car when she did, and followed her up the front walk. The air was bitterly cold, tanged with the sharpness of chimney smoke, a gusty breeze coming off the lake.

  When she pressed the doorbell button on the jamb, there issued from deep inside the house the faint bonging of an old-fashioned bell.

  This was not a police headquarters of any kind, but there was certainly something unusual involved here, because as Flynn had stepped out of the car, he’d seen a flicker of movement from a window in the house across the street.

  “Does it bother you that we’re in gun sights?”

  “You’re very observant.”

  “Always been my problem.”

  She rang the bell again.

  “What’re they doing, sending our faces to Washington?”

  She glance at him, frowning.

  He continued, “There’s a camera in the door. Another one between the bricks to the right. Whoever’s in there has been able to watch us since we turned onto the block.”

  “I did not know that.”

  “Yet you’ve been here before.”

  “As I said, this is our headquarters.”

  He thought, “you look, but you don’t see,” but didn’t comment further. No point. Noted, though, was the fact that her lack of practice as an observer was a liability that must never be overlooked.

  The door swung open on a woman of perhaps thirty. She wore an orange jumpsuit and had a plastic net on her hair. Her skin gleamed and Flynn realized that her face was covered with a film like petroleum jelly. On her hands she wore latex gloves.

  He was still trying to make sense of this when she stepped back and let them in. She ushered them into a living room with an old couch, a coffee table, and a couple of easy chairs. A gas log burned in the fireplace.

  “Sorry,” she said, “we’ve been working on him.”

  “Anything?”

  Whoever they were interrogating, her expression said it all: they were getting nowhere.

  “Flynn, just try to be open. I can’t tell you anything about what’s going to happen because no explanation would do it justice. I can’t even answer any questions, because any question you would have would be unanswerable.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “I don’t believe that. Tell me what you think.”

  Flynn said nothing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Two more of the jumpsuits lay folded on the couch. On the coffee table was a silver canister about a foot tall.

  “We need to put these suits on over our clothes,” Diana said. “And do this.” She dipped her hand in the canister and scooped out clear gel. “Put this on your face and neck. Make sure you’re well covered. Don’t forget your ears.”

  “What is it?”

  “Something that’s necessary.”

  He wasn’t objecting. He was here to learn. He slathered the stuff on himself.

  “First, you’re going to meet the person our agency has managing this case.” She paused. “This is a unique person.”

  He pulled on the jumpsuit, which was supple and light and felt like paper. But it was a lot stronger than paper. Sort of like silk with a paper-like finish, he decided.

  Diana slathered herself with the salve and put on an elastic cap of the silken material.

  Flynn finished by putting on his own cap.

  The woman reappeared. Flynn said, “Hi, we didn’t get introduced. I’m Flynn Carroll, Menard City Police, Menard, Texas.” He put out his gloved hand.

  She looked down at it, then back up at him. Usually, people’s faces told him something. Not this time.

  “Follow her,” Diana snapped.

  Shuffling along in his baggy jumpsuit, his face covered with Vasel
ine that smelled like cinnamon, he followed the woman down the central corridor of the old house, past an umbrella stand and a photograph of a family from about fifty years ago.

  “Whose house is this, anyway?”

  “A sublet,” Diana said. “We found it on Craigslist.”

  “Craigslist?”

  “We move a lot.”

  The woman opened a big oak door at the end of the hall. He followed her into a large room that Flynn guessed must have once been a solarium. It was on the back of the house and full of tall windows, but as dark as a cave. The expansive windows were covered by curtains.

  In the middle of the room there stood a man of significant height, six three at least. As they came in, he glared down at them out of eyes sunken so deep in his head that they were like craters. His hair was completely white.

  “Sorry to be meeting under these tragic circumstances,” he said. “And I apologize for the—” He gestured, indicating the costumes. “I’m allergic to everything.” He sighed. “I can’t even leave the house.”

  Slowly, then, he turned to Diana. Some kind of electricity passed between them, and Flynn thought that this was the person she had reported to from Montana. He also thought that they were more than coworkers.

  “My name is Oltisis,” he said, and at that moment he walked into a shaft of light, and Flynn saw that he had compound eyes, many-lensed like the eyes of a fly.

  He sucked breath, but instantly controlled it. Let it out slow. As he did, the face turned toward him. Unhurried. The eyes seemed blank. But they also told Flynn that this was an alien. Okay, that explained all the secrecy.

  “I don’t surprise you?”

  “You do.”

  “You’re very contained, then.”

  “As are you.”

  “I’m a cop, Lieutenant Flynn.” Oltisis crossed the room in two sleek strides. Flynn saw more than cop in the way he moved, he saw military. Lethal military. This alien might or might not be a cop, but he was certainly a professional killer.

  As he sat on a broad leather couch that almost fit him, he gestured toward two wing chairs.

  Flynn could hardly tear his own eyes away from that face. The lips were narrow and precise, the skin was as slick and featureless as plastic, and the deep-set eyes gleamed in the thin yellow light that filled the room.

  No question, this was not a disguise. He was face to face with a real alien. But he also had a case to deal with. Men were dead. He said, “We need more people, and we need them now. We need help.”

  Oltisis looked toward Diana. “I put together a cleanup crew to go back to the Hoffman place. Air Police. They’re totally out of the loop.” His English was perfect. Not the slightest accent.

  “Did they find any trace of Hoffman and the daughter?” Flynn asked.

  “Doctor Hoffman was in a snowdrift two hundred yards from the house. Frozen to death. Looked exactly like he’d wandered away and gotten lost. Nice touch, he had a bag of garbage with him.” He made a gravelly sound that Flynn realized was laughter, but it was bitter, that was very clear. In fact, it sounded like defeat.

  “We need to break this case,” Flynn said.

  “Ah?”

  “You look beaten. Sorry.”

  “And you don’t, Flynn.”

  “Am I a fool, then?”

  Oltisis met his eyes with his own glittering jewels. “No,” he said carefully, “you are not. Flynn—may I call you Flynn—this is a new kind of police operation. We’ve got a criminal element operating here and we can’t move freely among you. Thus the liaison effort.”

  “You could surely devise some sort of disguse.”

  “The allergic response is too deep. We’d need to create human bodies for ourselves.”

  “So do it. You must be loaded with high tech.”

  “If one of us is to acquire a human body, one of you has to die.”

  “I see.”

  “Criminals steal bodies.” He lowered his head. “That’s what happened to your wife.”

  Flynn went silent inside. For the first time, he knew that she was dead. Believed it. Images of her raced through his mind, too fast to track, but of her in her happiness. He swallowed his thrashing sorrow. “Did she suffer?”

  Oltisis stared into Flynn’s pain, his eyes as blank as a shark’s. Flynn thought, “This alien has seen a lot of violence, a lot of death.” He continued to question him. “How many other field units do you have? How many officers on your side of the fence?”

  “We need more, I agree.”

  What the hell? Could this be true? “Don’t tell me it’s just the three of us.”

  Diana said, “If it gets out that this is happening and not even the aliens can put a stop to it—”

  “Jesus Christ, you need a whole damn division on this! The FBI and Interpol, at the least!”

  “This gets out, mankind panics and contact gets set back fifty years. No, Flynn, secrecy is essential.”

  Cops sure as hell couldn’t keep secrets, that was true enough, and the public would sure as hell panic, no question there, either. “People need to be warned. Otherwise they have no chance.”

  “Help us get this cleaned up.”

  “My wife was kidnapped eight years ago! So how long is it going to take? There are hundreds of people dead. You’re wired into the government, you just moved around a unit of Air Police, so put some resources on this or I’m going public.” But even as he said it, he knew that it was hopeless. Nobody would believe him, not without this creature in tow, and that was obviously not going to happen.

  “You signed a secrecy agreement, Flynn. Don’t forget that.”

  “He’s fine,” Oltisis said. “He just figured it out.”

  “But he said—”

  “You’re on board, aren’t you, Flynn? You’ve seen the problem.”

  Flynn nodded. Oltisis was so sharp, it was almost like having your mind read. “I understand the need for secrecy. But there have to be more resources.”

  “Rebuild your team. I can do that.”

  “Bigger. And top people. Delta Force operators. CIA field officers. The best of the best. And better equipment. Jesus, you people must have some incredible equipment, not crap like that MindRay.”

  “That’s one of ours.”

  “Is it a toy, because if that’s the best you can do, I have a real problem with your technology.”

  Again, Oltisis laughed, and this time Flynn got it loud and clear, the cynical laughter of the cop who knows only one truth: every single piece of equipment he possesses is inferior to what the crooks have.

  “What’re you, fifty years ahead of us? I expected aliens to be, like, a million years ahead of us. But you’ve got powerful crooks and shitty equipment just like we do.”

  “Budgets are budgets, Flynn. And we’re about a thousand years ahead of you, if you want to know. Among other things, we can manipulate gravity and you can’t. But you will. We’re helping you speed up your development, because there needs to be an alliance between our species. We’re similar and that’s rare and valuable. It strange out there and it’s dangerous. We need a friend, and so do you.”

  Flynn said, “You use your connections to get us the best cops and the best operatives you can find, and I am with you.”

  Oltisis said, “We’ve been doing that.”

  “So you came up with a small-town police officer like me. I think I’m a good cop, but let’s face it, my skill set is limited because my department’s needs are limited. We don’t train up supercops in Menard, Texas.”

  “You have an IQ of two twenty. Did you know that?”

  “I did not.”

  “And you’re also highly motivated. We are doing our job, Lieutenant.”

  “So let’s get on with it.”

  “We have someone in custody.”

  He was stunned. Then he wasn’t. “But he’s not the perp we’re looking for?”

  “No,” Diana interjected. “This is one of his customers. My unit got him.” She paused
for a long moment. “My old unit.”

  Oltisis said, “He was a thrill seeker. Among us, life is all too predictable. It’s one of the major reasons we explore as we do. In any case, he came here, bought a human body and just basically went wild, indulging his every fantasy, and he doesn’t have pretty fantasies.”

  “I thought aliens would be—well, different.”

  “There’s greed and self-indulgence everywhere.”

  “And the crime committed?”

  Oltisis looked steadily at Flynn. “He raped fifty-six of your women, killing forty of them in the process.”

  “Jesus.”

  “If he’s sent home with the evidence we have, he’s going to walk. We have a real problem on Earth gathering forensics to a level our courts accept. In our system, a case cannot be presented until guilt is certain. The only judicial issue is the sentence. We need a confession out of him, Flynn.”

  “Now, are you saying that this thing—being, excuse me—has two bodies, one human and one like you?”

  “Let me explain a little further.”

  “That would help.”

  “Every living body contains an incredibly dense plasma that bears all its memories, even every detail of its physical form. It’s the template, and it’s effectively eternal. In our world, doctors can move this plasma from an aged body to a young one. It’s also possible to cross species, but it’s highly illegal. I could enter a human body. I could live among you. At home, I’m just another person. But here, with my knowledge and my power, I’d be a god.”

  “So what about death? Do you die?”

  “If you wish.”

  “If you wish?”

  “When a human dies, your soul will linger on Earth if you have unfinished business here. Eventually, a new body will come along—an infant—that fits it, and you’ll enter the new body and return to life. With us, the process is no longer natural. I have a stem cell packet that can be grown into a new body.” He gestured toward himself. “If this dies, I can simply move to a new version of myself.”

  “Will you?”

  The face—horrible and strange and yet somehow deeply human—took on an eerie, concealing expression. “You can’t have known this, but that’s as rude a question as one of us can be asked.”