The Hunter; The Chase; The Kill

by L. J. Smith

  “You can’t fight something like this, Jenny,” he whispered. “You know you can’t.”

  Jenny shut her eyes and turned her face up.

  He kissed her and her senses reeled.

  They seemed to melt together. Jenny felt herself sinking beneath his embrace. So soft . . . kissing had never been so soft before. She couldn’t think anymore. She was flying. She was deep underwater.

  Pure sensation overwhelmed her. She was kissing him back as she had never kissed Tom. His hair was loose under her fingers; it must have come out of the ponytail. She wanted to feel all of it. It was so much softer than she’d realized. She’d always thought of Zach as having rather coarse hair, but this was so soft . . . like silk or cat’s fur under her fingertips. . . .

  She heard the wild, whimpering sound she made, and she knew, she knew, even as she was pulling back. Even as she was jerking away, she knew.

  Julian’s eyes were like liquid sapphires under sooty lashes. Heavy-lidded and dark with passion. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt like Zach’s shirt, stone-washed denims like Zach’s denims, and running shoes like Zach’s shoes. But he had a languid, careless grace Zach would never have. His hair looked bright as sand in moonlight.

  Jenny was scrubbing her mouth with the back of her hand. A purely reflexive and senseless gesture. She was too shocked to be angry.

  Did I know? Did I know underneath before he kissed me or while he was kissing me but before I pulled away did I know could I possibly have known . . . ?

  She still couldn’t make out what reality was.

  “How could you know . . . ?” she whispered. “You acted like Zach—you knew things only he would know—”

  “I’ve watched him,” Julian said. “I’ve watched you. I’m the Shadow Man, Jenny—and I love you.” His voice was soft, mesmerizing, and something inside Jenny began to melt at the very sound.

  Then she thought of Summer.

  Anger, hot and bright, surged through her and gave her strength. She looked into Julian’s liquid-blue eyes. Any softness she’d ever had toward him had disappeared. She hated him now. Without a word she turned and walked out of the darkroom.

  He followed her, flicking the garage lights on. He knew, of course, what she was thinking about.

  “She agreed,” he said. “Just like all the rest of you, she agreed to play the Game.”

  “She didn’t know it was real!”

  He quoted from the instructions. “‘I acknowledge that the Game is real. . . .’”

  “You can talk all you want, Julian—but you killed her.”

  “I didn’t do anything to her. Her own fear did that. She couldn’t face her nightmare.”

  Jenny knew there was no point in arguing with him, but she couldn’t help it. In a low, savage voice she said, “It wasn’t fair.”

  He shook his head, looking almost amused. “Life isn’t fair, Jenny. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

  Jenny was raging on. “What gives you the right to play with us this way? How can you justify it?”

  “I don’t need the right. Listen to me, Jenny. The worlds—all nine of them—are cruel. They don’t care anything about you, or about right. There is no ultimate goodness. It’s the law of the jungle. You don’t need right—if you have strength.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Jenny said.

  “That the world is cruel?” There was a newspaper on the bench; he picked it up. “Take a look at this and tell me that evil loses and good wins. Tell me that it’s not the law of the jungle in your world.”

  Jenny didn’t even want to look at the headlines. She’d seen too many in her life.

  “Reality,” Julian said, flashing a smile, “has teeth and claws. And since that’s true, wouldn’t you rather be one of the hunters than one of the hunted?”

  Jenny shook her head. She had to admit the truth of what he was saying—about the world, at least. But she felt sick to her stomach.

  “I’m offering you a choice,” Julian said. His face had hardened. “I told you before that if I couldn’t persuade you I would force you—somehow. If you won’t agree I’ll have to show you what I mean. I’m tired of playing, Jenny. I want this settled—one way or another.”

  “It is settled,” Jenny said. “I’ll never come to you. I hate you.”

  Anger flared like a twisting blue flame in Julian’s eyes. “Don’t you understand,” he said, “that what happened to Summer can happen to you?”

  Jenny felt a wave of coldness. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I do.”

  And she did, at last. She probably wouldn’t have believed it before. Wouldn’t have believed Julian was capable of it, or that she, Jenny, could be vulnerable to it. Dying was for old people, not kids her age. Bad things—really bad things—didn’t happen to good people.

  But they did.

  Now she knew that emotionally. In her heart. Sometimes bad things, the worst, happened to people who didn’t deserve it at all. Even Summer. Even her.

  Jenny felt as if she had learned some secret, been initiated into some worldwide club or community. The community of sorrow.

  She was now one of the people who knew. Strangely, it gave her a sense of comfort to know that there were so many others, so many who’d had friends die, or lost parents, or had other terrible things happen that they never asked for.

  There are a lot of us, she thought. Without realizing it, she’d begun to cry. We’re everywhere. And we don’t all turn hunter and take it out on other people. All of us don’t.

  Aba hadn’t. Jenny suddenly remembered that Dee’s grandmother had lost her husband in a racial incident. And she remembered something Aba had taped to her bathroom mirror, incongruous among all the glass and marble and gold fixtures. It was a handmade sign that said:

  Do no harm.

  Help when you can.

  Return good for evil.

  Jenny had never asked Aba about the sign. It didn’t seem to need explaining.

  Now she felt the community of sorrow strengthening her from all over. As if they were sympathizing, silently. Bad things—the worst—might happen to Jenny, right now. Jenny understood that.

  She said, “You’re right. Maybe things are that bad. But that doesn’t mean I have to give in. I won’t join you willingly, so you might as well try force.”

  “I will,” he said.

  It started so simply. Jenny heard a whining buzz and a bee landed on her sleeve.

  It was just an ordinary bee, dusty-gold. It clung with its little feet to her tissue-linen blouse. But then she heard another buzz, and a second bee landed on her other sleeve.

  Another buzz, and another.

  Jenny hated bees. She was always the one at picnics shrieking, “Is there one in my hair?” She wanted to shoo these bees away, but she was afraid to provoke them.

  She looked at Julian. At his wild, exotic sapphire eyes and his beautifully sculpted face. At that moment, wearing Zach’s lackluster clothing, his beauty was so unearthly it was frightening.

  Another buzz and a bee was in her hair, its wings a blur of motion as it tangled and clung. She could see it in her peripheral vision.

  Julian smiled.

  Jenny heard a deeper sound, a thrumming, and she looked automatically for the source. A swarm of bees was clustered on one of the rafters of the garage, hanging down like some giant, pendulous fruit.

  Jenny took a step backward and heard a warning buzzzzz from her hair. The ball of bees was moving, breaking up. Becoming a dark cloud.

  Heading toward her.

  Jenny looked once more at Julian, and then bees began to fall on her like hail. They clung to her arms, her shoulders, her breasts. She had to hold her arms away from her body in order to keep from crushing the ones on her sides. She knew that if she did that they would sting.

  Then it simply became a nightmare, unreal.

  They were heavy, covering her like a blanket. Too heavy. Jenny staggered. She shut her eyes because they were crawling out of her hair onto her face. S
he was inundated with bees, layer upon layer of them. They were clinging to each other now, because there was almost no part of her body clear of them. Her fingertips, some parts of her face. She felt their feet on her cheeks and wanted to scream, but she couldn’t, she couldn’t scream because if she did—if she did—

  They’d get into her mouth. And then she’d lose her sanity. But she couldn’t breathe well enough through her nose. Her chest was heaving and their weight was crushing her. She was going to have to open her mouth.

  She was crying silently, trying not to move, to disturb them more than she could help. Julian’s voice came to her.

  “Just say the word, Jenny.”

  She could only shake her head slightly. The barest minimum of motion. But what she could manage, she did. She was still sobbing without a sound, terrified to move, but she would not—she would not—give in.

  You can do whatever you like to me, she thought. In the dark beneath her bee-covered eyes she tried to hold on to consciousness, but it was like a thin thread slipping through her fingers. She grasped at it, felt it being snatched away from her.

  She was fainting. Falling. But she wouldn’t give in.

  When I hit the ground and crush them, they’ll go mad. They’ll kill me, she thought.

  But she never said the word to stop it.

  She felt the darkness come as she began to fall.

  CHAPTER 12

  Floating in gray dimness, she heard a clock strike three.

  Wake up, she thought, but she didn’t want to. She floated for a while again.

  No, wake up, she thought. That’s the alarm. You have to go to school . . . or something. You have to go see Zach.

  Zach.

  She was awake.

  She was lying on the cold floor of her cousin’s garage, chilled and stiff but bee-less. She looked at her hands and bare ankles. Not a mark. Julian hadn’t let it happen.

  But now she was stuck in a garage without a door. The light trap had only a curtain. All the other doors—the large one for cars and the regular one to the house—were simply missing, their spaces filled in with blank walls.

  She had no idea what she was supposed to do next, and it was after three in the morning and she was tired.

  Jenny looked at the corner of the studio where Zach took pictures. Zach’s camera stood on a tripod. The tungsten floodlamp was turned on. The backdrop was a sheet of seamless paper from a roll maybe six feet wide. Zach had done a lot of photos by painting paper like that black and throwing handfuls of white flour at it. The result had looked a little like the Milky Way—white splashes on infinite space. Very strange and futuristic; Zach loved that kind of stuff.

  This backdrop, though, had a door painted on it, too.

  A knob protruded from the paper.

  The way out, Jenny thought as she went over to it, but something inside her wasn’t so sure. For some reason this black-and-white door made her chilled flesh creep.

  What choice have you got? her mind asked simply.

  She turned the knob. The door swung out. She stepped inside.

  It was like being suspended among the stars. The door closed behind her, but Jenny scarcely noticed. The sky seemed very low, more like a ceiling. It was black with glowing white splotches. The ground was a velvety black dropcloth that went on forever in all directions.

  It was awful, this sense of infinity all around, pulling at her. It reminded her of a dream she’d once had, where the ground stretched on endlessly, but the sky was close and solid overhead. Did Zach have the same kind of dreams? Was this Zach’s real nightmare?

  The only landmarks in the limitless, featureless darkness were lamps—tungsten floodlamps like the ones Zach used. They formed little islands of brightness here and there, some white, some colored, fading out into the distance.

  Jenny pivoted, trying to get her bearings—and drew in her breath sharply. The door was still behind her. It hadn’t disappeared. She could walk right out again.

  But if this was Zach’s nightmare, he must be in here somewhere. She couldn’t leave without looking for him.

  After a moment’s hesitation she headed for the nearest floodlamp, a neon pink one. It took courage to step away from the security of the door, and once she did she kept her eyes fixed on the island of light ahead. The black velvet ground was perfectly smooth, without the slightest wrinkle. She could practically skate over it in her flats.

  When she reached the floodlamp, she saw it had a pink filter just like the ones Zach used. He got them from the drama department when colored spotlights burned out. And the scene it illuminated was exactly like a print Zach had made—a cardboard silhouette of a neon-pink coyote in the grass. The print had been weird and high tech, like all Zach’s photos, but Jenny had always liked it. Just now the coyote-shape standing alone with pink light blazing on it was unnerving.

  Waiting for the photographer, Jenny thought. It gave the disquieting impression that it had been waiting there forever.

  She headed toward the next floodlamp, a white one maybe forty feet away. It was hard to judge distance here.

  This one was shining on a wall, a single wall standing alone, its windows broken out. Silver dots and swathes decorated the wall. Zach had gone into deserted houses in Zuma Beach and painted and photographed them. Vandalism, the police said, but Zach insisted it was art.

  Jenny looked on both sides of the freestanding wall. It was unnerving, too. Everything was so quiet here. . . .

  Just as she thought it, she heard a faint clanking noise.

  The light from the pink floodlamp dimmed for a moment—as if something had passed in front of it. Standing rigid, Jenny strained her eyes in the darkness. She couldn’t see anything moving. She couldn’t hear anything, either.

  Just your imagination, she told herself—but it was hard to make it sound convincing.

  Glancing back frequently, she walked to the next lamp.

  This one had a neon orange filter. A few years ago Zach had photographed baking soda thrown in the air under colored lights. The problem was that here the baking soda stayed in the air, a glowing orange cloud suspended—by nothing. Jenny could see individual motes in it twinkle and drift slightly.

  God, get me out of here.

  She backed away from it and set out for the next island.

  When she got closer her heart skipped and she began to run. There were two blue floodlamps close together. Zach was under one.

  Jenny opened her mouth to shout to him, but stopped at the last minute. What if it wasn’t Zach? She’d been fooled once.

  She approached cautiously and looked down at the figure in silence.

  Same flannel shirt over same T-shirt. Same denims. Same hair in same ponytail.

  He was holding a fist-size rock over a gray canvas painted with silver streaks. He put the rock down, looked at it, picked it back up. He put it down again in almost exactly the same place.

  “I’m going to call it ‘Rock on Water,’” he said. He looked up. “Because rocks don’t really float.”

  “Zach,” said Jenny. She knelt down and put a hand on his shoulder. His gray eyes were abstracted and a little glazed, just like the other’s had been. But something told Jenny this was really her cousin.

  A stealthy noise in the endless dark made her look up fast. The white spotlight winked out, went back on.

  “Zach, we’ve got to go,” she said and tightened her grip. “I’ll explain later—but there’s something out there, and we have to get back to the door.”

  Zach just gave her one of his absent smiles, the kind that didn’t reach his eyes. “I know it’s out there,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all part of my hallucination.”

  “Your what ? You mean your nightmare?”

  “Whatever.” He picked up the rock again, shifted it slightly, considered it. “I’ve known for a long time that this was going to happen.”

  Jenny was genuinely astonished. “You knew we were going to get kidnapped by the Shadow Man?”


  “I knew I was going to go crazy.” Then, adjusting the rock fractionally, he said, “Actually ‘kidnapped by the Shadow Man’ is a really interesting way of putting it. Really imaginative. I mean, what else is going insane?”

  Jenny could feel her mouth hanging open. Then she shut it with a snap and took her cousin by both shoulders.

  “Zachary, you are not insane,” she said. “Is that what your problem is—why you were acting so strange before? Because you thought you’d gone crazy ?”

  “Brain kidnapped by the Shadow Man,” he told her. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. It runs in the family.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Zach!” She had no idea what he was talking about.

  The orange floodlamp, the next one out, seemed to flicker.

  “Don’t worry,” Zach told Jenny. “You’re just part of my hallucination. It won’t really hurt.”

  “What won’t really hurt?”

  Zach was gazing at the rock on his canvas. “It’s about dimensions. See? The canvas is two dimensional and the—”

  An arrow shattered one of the blue floodlamps in a shower of sparks and glass.

  No, a bolt, Jenny thought, stunned. A bolt from a crossbow. She recognized it because Zach’s father had made it to the National Crossbow Championship three years running. Bolts were even more lethal than arrows—and this one was metal and looked almost futuristic.

  Zach was brushing bits of glass off his canvas.

  “Zach, get up! ” Jenny was frantic.

  Another bolt shattered the second blue floodlight. Jenny jumped away from the sparks. Zach hunched protectively over his rock.

  “Zach, listen to me! This is not a hallucination, it’s real, and you can die for real here, too! You can bring your rock if you want, but we’ve got to leave this minute—this minute! ” Her voice rose hysterically at the end.

  It got through to him. She could barely see him by the glow of the white-splattered sky, but he got up—still holding the rock—and went where she was pulling him.

  Orange floodlight, Jenny was thinking. Orange, and then white, and then pink. The door should be beyond that.

  The orange lamp shattered as they got to it.