The Hunting Tree Trilogy

by Ike Hamill

  Mike thought this over and then raised his eyebrows—“So what kind of deal are you offering.”

  “Wait a sec,” said Bill. “You already think you know what’s going on with my device, don’t you?”

  “I do,” said Mike, through a mouthful of breakfast. Between the food and the meeting, he was beginning to feel much better than he had a right to. “Let me ask you—is this interference moving very slowly clockwise on a compass reading?" He studied Bill’s eyes and read an affirmative answer. “So what’s it worth to you?”

  “I’ll drop my claim and get the insurance company and collectors off your back,” said Bill.

  “Keep going,” said Mike.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you get, and what do I get? From the device.”

  “We haven’t proved it’s worth anything,” said Bill. “I can’t even make it work.”

  “It is and it does,” Mike stated. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe that.”

  “Okay,” said Bill. “We’ll split everything.”

  “That’s a good start, but I’m going to need more,” said Mike. “I’ve got some immediate financial issues from legal fees and being out of work. I need cash. And we have to cut in Katie and Gary’s family.”

  Bill pushed back from the table, leaning back in his booth, taking it all in. “Anything else?”

  “Those are the basics,” said Mike. “I’m willing to leave the details until later if you agree on principal.”

  “I do,” said Bill. “So what’s your theory on the device?”

  “You’re tracking my rogue,” Mike said as he bit down on a piece of toast.

  “Pardon?”

  Mike spent the next ten minutes casually explaining his theory and eating breakfast. He had told the story so many times that the details flowed sensibly. For Bill, who had tangible evidence to integrate with the suppositions laid in front of him, the explanation sounded viable enough to pursue.

  “If you’re right we can actually prove this thing works, and we’ll be able to help this kid, too,” said Bill.

  “Yeah,” said Mike, “and the police aren’t going to be any help. They’re already convinced that I’m a charlatan.”

  “They’re generally a little too pragmatic to accept that kind of information,” said Bill.

  “Like engineers aren’t pragmatic?” asked Mike.

  “True,” said Bill, “but I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit first-hand.”

  “So to speak,” said Mike.

  Bill smiled.

  They ate and talked, taking their time once they compared notes and understood that Mike’s rogue only moved at night.

  After paying the check, Bill brought up the question of their next steps—“We’re going to need some high-quality maps.”

  “No problem,” said Mike. “I’ve got every map published in my back seat. Let’s go use the device and see where this thing is holed up.”

  “I’ve got it wired up in the car,” Bill said, smiling.

  The two men adjourned to the parking lot. They spread the maps out on Bill’s hood and powered the detector from Bill’s car. Mike made a dot representing the diner and drew a line from their position in the direction of the strongest signal.

  “What do we do if we find this thing?” asked Bill. “If you’re right, it kills at will. It must be incredibly strong.”

  “I don’t think it moves at all during the day,” said Mike. “If we find it, we might be able to immobilize it completely as long as we get to it while the sun’s up.”

  “I still think we should be able to weaken its energy. If we can detect it, we certainly should be able to counteract it,” said Bill.

  “We don’t have time to experiment,” said Mike. “It’s moving roughly west to east, and from this latest reading, it could be within fifty miles of where the kid lives. That’s only two nights, if it’s moving at full speed. I say we track it down now and go at it with physical restraints.”

  “Well, at least we could figure out what we’re dealing with,” said Bill.

  “Yeah, exactly,” agreed Mike. “I live close to here. Let’s drop off my car and go in yours.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Bill.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Dr. Ken Stuart

  “READY FOR ME YET?” Ken asked his girlfriend over his phone. He stood with a paper bag near the back door to her animal clinic. Sharon owned and ran a small veterinary clinic just a few blocks down from Ken’s practice.

  “Yeah,” said Sharon. “I’ve got Lisa doing a training session. She wanted to run it anyway. You’ve got thirty minutes in the lab.”

  “Can you let me in?” asked Ken.

  “Oh!” said Sharon. She hung up and pressed open the door to let Ken into the lab. “Do you have everything you need?” she asked, standing at the doorway.

  “I think so,” said Ken. “Where does biohazard go when I’m cleaning up?” he asked.

  “Big trash can,” she said.

  Ken laughed. “I’ll be done soon.” He smiled and kissed her cheek. “Thanks again.”

  “Just don’t go bragging to any of your buddies. You’ll have my ass in a sling.” She backed through the door to the examination room.

  Ken pulled the sample from his paper bag and fetched the test tubes and slides he would need to conduct his experiments. For a target, to test to see if there were any factors in Davey’s blood that were actually aggressive, Ken sliced a tiny patch of cells from the side of his finger. He used a scalpel from his bag and then carefully restored the instrument to its case.

  After running a sample through the centrifuge, Ken extracted a clump of cells from the wall of the tube and laid samples out on several slides. He used different dyes to highlight the various types of cells he hoped to find and moved his prepared slides to the microscope to view the results.

  The first slides showed completely normal results. Pulling back from the microscope, he blinked his unaccustomed eyes and nodded to himself. He chastised himself for humoring Mike’s crazy theory and demanding another blood sample from Davey.

  It wasn’t until Ken gave Davey’s cells a fresh sample of his finger that he detected anything unusual. On that slide, instead of simply isolating and attacking the foreign cells, Davey’s immune response erupted in bizarre activity. Ken found a line of Davey’s white blood cells, organized away from Ken’s own cells on the slide. Instead of acting independently, the cells seemed to be moving in concert to plot against Ken’s skin. As he watched, a line of small projectiles moved against the enemy cells, and punctured their outer walls. Instead of killing them, the missiles took over and turned the cells against each other.

  Ken watched in awe as his finger cells on the slide turned from placid skin into marauding attackers. Unable to immediately believe the evidence, Ken flipped back and forth between the slides, comparing the normal ecosystem of a slide consisting of all Davey-cells to the pandemonium that existed on slides combining Davey-cells with Ken-cells.

  He broke his promise and made his way through the examination room to find Sharon. She stood at the back of a pack who listened to a lecture from Sharon’s partner. Ken waved to her, and she excused herself silently.

  “Smooth,” she said when they were alone in the lab. “Thanks.”

  “I just need someone else to look at this,” Ken explained.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”

  Ken prepared fresh samples and didn’t give his girlfriend any hint of what to expect.

  Sharon pulled up one of the tall bench stools and moved her eyes in front of the microscope. “Seems pretty normal,” she said, adjusting the first slide. “Heathy complement of all the cells I would expect. A couple of contaminants here, but a pretty well-prepared sample.” Sharon moved the controls of the scope precisely and canvassed the community of dyed cells.

  “Ready for the next one?” asked Ken.


  “Not quite done,” she trailed off. “Hold on,” she said, “something here seems to have triggered an immune response. I’ve got some pretty aggressive activity here.”

  “Aggressive,” said Ken, remembering Mike’s caution. “Wait until you see this.” He held the fourth slide, wanting to skip to the revelation.

  “Bring it on,” said Sharon, intrigued.

  Mike’s carefully gloved hand passed the glass slide to Sharon’s bare hand. She was accustomed to handling samples and fluids and barely paid attention to what she touched anymore. Very few pathogens possessed the ability to move from pets to humans, so she rarely wore gloves for lab work. In this case, neither Ken nor Sharon could have foreseen the colonizing nature of Davey’s virile cells. Some had moved from the slide cover to the edge of the bare glass and attacked Sharon’s hand as she first touched the slide.

  “Wow,” she said, looking at the new slide. “This is incredible. It’s like they’re staging a coordinated…” A new thought crossed her mind—“Jesus, I hope these things don’t manage to get airborne!”

  “I hadn’t even thought of that,” admitted Ken.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Sharon, returning her examination. “It’s not really even a possibility, but if your patient was here, I wouldn’t want to be in the room if he sneezed. Hand me that bottle, would you?” She pointed at a blue bottle of antiseptic cleanser.

  Ken passed her the bottle and watched as Sharon took a long swab from a jar and dipped it in the blue liquid. Bracing her wrist with her other hand, she gently introduced the tip of the swab to the edge of the slide, and held it there until the blue had spread between the thin slide cover and the sample slide. She dropped the swab in a metal trash can and put her eyes back to the scope.

  “Well that stuff kills it,” she informed Ken. “At least they can be dispatched fairly easily.”

  “So what do you think? Send it off to the CDC?” asked Ken.

  “Yeah, I guess. You’re the people doctor. What’s the protocol?”

  “It’s not like this kind of thing happens everyday,” he said. “I’ll get everything cleaned up here. I’ll hose the place down the blue stuff just to be sure.”

  “You can just pitch the glass. That stuff is cheap. Wrap everything in one of these bags and put it in that container. That stuff gets incinerated.” Sharon pointed to a smaller bin.

  “Thank you, darling.” He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. He started to gather up everything he had brought while his girlfriend washed her hands thoroughly in the sink, taking belated caution around the dangerous samples.

  “Okay,” she said, drying her hands on a paper towel, “you’ve got five minutes before this place will be swarmed.”

  “Thanks again,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said, facing her boyfriend and rising up to her toes to kiss his lips. “I’ll get my payment later.” She smiled.

  “Is that a promise?”

  “You’re too cute,” she said. Sharon reached up and pinched Ken’s cheek. Some of Sharon’s re-purposed skin cells transferred to Ken’s face and began their attack on the new host.

  By the time Ken left Sharon’s veterinary clinic with a sealed plastic bag, Davey’s cells had reached Sharon’s bloodstream and had nearly found the capillaries in Ken’s cheek.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Davey

  “HEY,” A VOICE CALLED from over Davey’s shoulder.

  He glanced back towards the fence and saw a girl clutching the high chain-link, calling to him. His left hand came up automatically and caught the unseen ball rifled towards his face. Davey and Shane had been practicing jumping up from a squat and throwing to second base. The combination of movements made accuracy and speed difficult, but Davey was a natural and Shane was learning quickly. Davey flipped the ball to his right hand and stepped closer to the beckoning girl.

  “Yeah?” he asked.

  “That’s my brother.” She nodded at Shane, who had already started jogging towards Davey and the girl.

  “Oh,” said Davey.

  “What’s up?” Shane asked his sister.

  “We’ve got to go. Mom’s coming.”

  “How come?”

  “One of the girls on our team got attacked or something last night?” she said.

  “Seriously?” asked Shane. He was a full year older than Davey, and the two didn’t consider each other friends, but Shane was the closest acquaintance Davey had in the camp. He joined Shane and his sister at the fence.

  The three stood close, separated by the tall fence.

  “Yeah,” said Shane’s sister. “She got murdered in her house. They didn’t tell us that, but Brittney heard it because her dad is a cop. I didn’t know her, but we’re not supposed to practice. They said we can either go talk about how we feel or our parents can come pick us up. I called Mom so she’d come get me, but now she wants both of us to go. Lots of the girls are really upset.” She scuffed a ragged groove in the grass with her foot as she talked.

  Davey saw through her bluster and phrased his question delicately—“What was her name?”

  “Charlotte,” said the girl. “Anyways,” she continued to her brother, “Mom’s coming in ten minutes to pick us both up.”

  “Okay,” said Shane. “I’ll go tell Coach Peterson.” He took off his cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm before jogging off to find the coach.

  Davey was left at the fence with Shane’s sister, who still clung to the fence and squinted after her brother.

  “So you didn’t know her?” he asked.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “I did,” said Davey. “I mean I met her once. She helped me a couple days ago when I cut my shin.” He pointed down to the scab.

  “She was nice that way,” said Shane’s sister.

  “I’m sorry she got murdered,” Davey offered.

  “Yeah, whatever,” she said. She pushed away from the fence and started off towards the parking lot. “See you later,” she said to Davey.

  “Bye,” he replied.

  Davey sat down in the grass and pulled the sweaty mitt from his left hand. He placed it in his lap. He thought about his dreams from the previous night; about how frightened Charlotte had looked as the monster slowly turned the handle to her bedroom door. She hadn’t been surprised. Davey would have known that even if he hadn’t seen her eyes. She had known exactly what stood on the other side of her door as she sat up in bed.

  Why didn’t she run? Davey wondered as he spun the scuffed baseball in his hand. He pictured the scene, trying to make Charlotte move to the window or run to the closet—anything to get away from the approaching giant. His eyes welled with tears as his imagination failed him. She refused to move even in his rewritten fantasy. Charlotte had known the fate that approached because she had seen it too. She had seen her future as the beast silently killed her parents, stopping in their room first before mounting the narrow stairs. They had been surprised. Davey knew that too.

  Her father had awoken first. He began with curiosity, wondering why their daughter was opening the door to their bedroom, and then jumped to relief that the unexpected visit wasn’t taking place during the matrimonial bliss earlier that night. It never occurred to Charlotte’s father that the thing pushing open his bedroom door wasn’t his lovely daughter. His high-priced security system made intruders the furthest thing from his mind.

  Charlotte’s mom woke next, just as the door swung open to reveal the giant monster on the other side. She gasped as her eyes picked the shape out of the gloomy doorway, and she clutched her blankets tight to her neck, as if the quilt could ward off the attack.

  Both of Charlotte’s parents brimmed with infection from Davey’s cells, passed through his blood to their daughter, and from her innocent lips to theirs. The infection drew the monster, and neither parent had time to scream before their killer crossed the room and silenced their voices forever.

  Locked in this trance, picturin
g the untimely death of her entire small family, Charlotte sat in her own bed as the creature trapped her in her second-floor room.

  “Davey?” The coach crouched in front of the boy. He snapped back from the scene of Charlotte’s death; a remembered dream, forgotten until the news had reached him through Shane’s sister. When he looked up at the coach, several tears escaped from his eyes and made tracks through the dust on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Coach Peterson.

  “Nothing,” Davey wiped his tears with the tail of his shirt.

  As he started to stand, his coach reached out and grasped his wrist. Davey pulled his arm away quickly from the man’s gentle grip.

  “Whoa,” said the coach, “what’s wrong? And don’t tell me ‘nothing’.”

  “One of the girls.” Davey waved with the mitt he held in his left hand. “One of the girls got killed or something. I met her one time.”

  “Oh,” said the coach. “I’m so sorry about that.” He reached out to put his arm around Davey’s hunched shoulders, but pulled back when he remembered how Davey had reacted to being touched. “Do you want to come talk about it? Or should I call your mom to pick you up?”

  “No,” said Davey. “I’ll be okay. I just want to go get a drink first.”

  “That’s fine,” said Coach Peterson.

  “And Shane’s going home, so I need a new partner for drills,” said Davey.

  “That’s fine,” the coach said to Davey’s back as he trotted off towards the water fountain.

  Davey spent the next hour of practice preoccupied with the ramifications of Charlotte’s death. Once he remembered the dream about her death, he started to recall the other gruesome dreams which had haunted his nights the previous weeks. If each terrible nightmare represented an actual murder, Davey wondered how many more nights he would last until the monster showed up at his door. His own death inconceivable, Davey focused on the horror of losing his mother or even his sister.

  Davey still missed his dad, and he was still a little angry with him as well. His dad had turned into the terrifying, mutilated corpse on the stairs. To Davey, his dad’s transformation still seemed like a betrayal. He promised himself that he wouldn’t let something like that happen to his mother.