They would all have an opportunity to take their best shot at Mr. Walker, although the Hunter was sure that it would be his bullet to take the mentalist’s life.
Now all the Hunter had to do was wait for his prey—no—his opponent, to arrive.
Chapter 45
TRENT SWAM for a full minute before coming up for air the first time. The cramped tunnel was dark, but he found that he could easily make out the details of the concrete walls as he grabbed a breath of air and submerged again.
After only two more breaths, he emerged at the other end of the small tunnel and stood in the waist-deep water that swirled all around him.
He sniffed the air again, but already knew what his senses confirmed. The Hunter was further down-tunnel, waiting for him. Trent sloshed through the water and passed the floating body of a small female with blood encrusted in her bleached blonde hair. Her skull had been caved in, and her skin still wreaked of chemicals that offended Trent’s nose.
In the back corner of his own mind, Trent looked on in horror.
At first, the logical part of Trent had thought that it should try to reclaim control of his mind as soon as possible. But after seeing the shattered and bloody head of the heroin blonde, Trent’s civilized self huddled again in the relatively safe recesses of his mind, a horrified observer in his own body.
As he moved as quickly as he could through the downward sloping tunnels, Trent on occasion reached up and ripped one of the caged video cameras off the wall, depositing it unceremoniously into the water around him.
With each turn and every connecting tunnel, the smell of the Hunter grew clearer as he travelled through the water-filled passageways.
Trent paused only briefly when he came upon the fat legs of a man that were stuck in a small space behind the tunnel wall. It looked as if someone had tried to rip a man out of his hiding place, but had only successfully liberated his torso, which was now nowhere to be seen.
Trent looked impassively at the carnage as a sign that he was getting closer.
After another mile or so, running through the now calf-deep water, Trent slowed. The smell of the Hunter was so strong that Trent was having a visceral reaction to the man’s presence, even though he was not yet upon him.
As Trent turned a corner, he covered his eyes instinctively as a bright patch of light infiltrated the darkness ahead.
Trent approached on all fours, careful not to make any undue noise. He looked up and saw another video camera with its blinking red light. He knew it wouldn’t do him any good, but he reached up and tore it off the wall in one fluid motion.
He inched himself closer to the opening from where the harsh light was coming.
As he carefully stepped into the opening while still on all fours, several deafening cracks filled the air, and pieces of the archway above his head exploded, showering him with concrete ash and debris.
He withdrew into the tunnel, but only for a second.
With a grunt, Trent sniffed the air around him, ducked low, and ran out into the giant chamber at top speed.
As soon as he showed himself again, shots whizzed through the air all around him. But Trent moved faster than any man had a right to move, so that he was always just slightly ahead of where his enemies were aiming.
The advantage of his speed did not last for long.
Halfway across the floor, he felt a sharp sting in his left thigh. The impact alone made him lose pace and fall to one knee even as he righted himself with his other leg and kept running.
As he neared the gigantic cylindrical platform upon which his attackers were perched, Trent eyed the stairs that wound up the curved wall in front of him. Even his animal self knew that he would be too exposed if he tried to take that way to the top.
Instead, he slammed into the wall of the platform and flattened his body against it.
He looked up and saw that he was partially protected by a six-inch overhang of concrete that ran along the curved wall about a foot above his head.
He carefully made his way along the wall. Deafening noises resulted in puffs of concrete exploding along the wall above him and on the floor in front of him as he went. In less than a minute, he came to a set of elevator doors that were slightly recessed into the wall. Trent pressed himself against the steel doors, but they did not move.
He dug his fingers in between the elevator doors and pulled with all of his might. Within a few seconds, the doors started to budge, soon revealing a shaft with tightly stretched steel cables that ran to the top of the structure where the elevator car waited.
Trent jumped onto the metal cables and started climbing as easily as if he were ascending a tree in the forest.
With half a dozen mighty pulls, Trent was at the top of the shaft just under the elevator car.
He climbed up the back of the elevator car and perched himself on top of it. Below him, he could smell the Hunter clearly. He tore open the ceiling hatch and dropped down onto the floor of the elevator car, ready to fight for his life.
But the car was empty.
Trent just stood there, barely aware of his bleeding leg, staring at his reflection in the shiny mirrored interior of the elevator car. Dressed only in his baggy black dress pants and his black shoes, his normally perfect black hair was wildly tussled, and his blue eyes seemed to glow in stark contrast with the dirt-smudged grayness of his face.
A small piece of Trent was both horrified and fascinated by what he had become and by what he had done as he observed himself from the back of his mind. The thing that Trent had become simply grunted at his own reflection and started pacing back and forth in the elevator car, struggling with what he should do next.
He could hear voices from the other side of the metal doors, but he could not discern what they were saying. Just like with the female with the black hair, he knew that the people were speaking to one another. He understood that at a base level, but he couldn’t piece together their words so that they made sense. It was as if he was now separate from other humans—merely an ancient shadow of who they now were.
Trent continued to pace back and forth.
Although he was capable of many things in his current state, one thing he was unable to muster was patience.
After only thirty seconds, Trent readied himself and then hit the door open button.
With a distinct ding, the elevator doors began to slide open.
At last Trent, or whatever he had become, would satisfy his hunger for justice, even if doing so might cost him his life.
Chapter 46
TRENT EXPECTED the humans to be waiting on the other side of the door, ready to attack.
They were not.
All that greeted him when the door opened fully was a plethora of flickering party lights, house music being pumped at a low volume from a dozen hidden speakers, and the backs of about twenty people, all gathered at the edge of the platform and focused on the chamber floor below.
The room itself was furnished with fine leather couches and chairs and was dotted with low tables of exotically carved wood. But if the furniture was in keeping with the style of an old-fashioned hunting lodge, the edges of the room and its walls were not. Instead, they were lined with flat-screen computer screens that were so bright, they immediately gave Trent a headache.
Trent focused himself on the back of the crowd in front of him. Some held rifles with wisps of smoke still rising from their tips, others clung to glasses of liquid that reeked of strong alcohol, and still others who were dressed in white serving jackets, clutched at submachine guns with both hands.
All of them were leaning over the wall to watch the action below. The ones holding the rifles seemed excited at having the opportunity to shoot at a live human being.
Trent walked silently across the room and stopped a few feet from the back of the group.
One of the females, who wore a bright blue dress wrapped tightly around her mid-section, turned around and saw Trent—a shirtless wild man with blue eyes.
Bef
ore she could utter a noise, Trent moved in and crushed her throat with one hand.
As her body slumped to the ground, Trent lifted a short man standing at the back of the crowd and tossed him above his fellow gamblers over the side of the glass observation wall.
Trent did not wait for the others to turn around and to figure out the situation. Instead, he pushed his human body as fast and as hard as it would go into the midst of his enemy.
Maybe it was because the people were so closely grouped together, but as the men in white jackets realized what was happening, they did not fire on Trent. They instead swung their guns like clubs in huge flailing arcs that Trent easily avoided. The one time he was unable to get out of the way fast enough, he simply let the butt of the rifle sink into his side as he moved past his attacker—pulling the man backwards and breaking the man’s spine over his knee. As his attacker crumpled, Trent took his submachine gun, but it jammed when he tried to fire it.
Now he too swung the gun like a club, but with much deadlier effect than his enemies. Trent tore through the crowd indiscriminately—a blur of animal fury and blood as he flowed from one person to the next.
Soon, although Trent himself was bleeding from various small wounds and was bruised across his arms, half of the men and women were on the floor, either dead or wounded.
Trapped inside his mind, Trent could not comprehend the horror of his own actions.
The women tried to flee, and the men gave Trent room, but it was only a matter of seconds before one of them was going to forgo the safety of the guests and start shooting.
Trent looked up from his latest kill and saw the Hunter pressing his back against the far glass wall in an attempt to put as much distance between him and Trent as possible. Trent was not surprised that the same man who deserved to die this night was also a coward.
Ignoring the rest of the people, Trent made a dash for the Hunter, but as soon as he took his first step, the man raised his rifle, ready to fire it despite the potential harm to the crowd around him.
Trent was not faster than a bullet, but he was quicker than the Hunter himself, and he ducked in the second before his foe pulled the trigger.
A man behind Trent went down with a gaping hole in his chest, and the rest of the people quickly spread out, leaving Trent and the Hunter alone at the wall.
Trent dove for the Hunter’s legs, but the Hunter was surprisingly quick and moved to the side as Trent’s body slammed into the wall and bounced back, ready to strike again.
A bullet from one of the Hunter’s men ricocheted off the floor near Trent’s foot, but the Hunter quickly yelled something at his man, and no additional bullets followed.
Trent dropped the gun he had been using as a club and crouched down on his haunches, compressing his body into a coil, ready to strike if given the opportunity.
His eyes met those of the Hunter as the man raised his rifle and pointed it directly at Trent’s face.
Trent felt only the slightest tinge of fear—not because of the barrel pointed at him, but because when he looked past the Hunter’s naturally tanned skin and into the Hunter’s eyes, he saw nothing resembling life or kindness.
If Trent believed that he was possessed by two separate spirits at war with each other inside himself, then he saw in the Hunter only a single spirit—one that he had only encountered once before and which was truly evil.
The Hunter was neither man nor animal, but something worse. He was a man who had forgone his own humanity.
Trent stared down the Hunter’s barrel. He waited for the shot to come, knowing that even he would not be quick enough this time.
But there was no noise.
No bullet.
Instead, the Hunter kept his rifle pointed at Trent and barked out a series of orders to the men dressed in the white serving jackets.
Although Trent still couldn’t understand what the Hunter was saying, the piece of him that was still conscious in the back of his mind could easily discern the Hunter’s message. He was telling his men to capture Trent and to take him alive—that Trent had killed the Troll and its offspring, and that he now would have to act in the Troll’s place during the next hunt.
As soon as the first of the Hunter’s henchmen came within arm’s reach, Trent lashed out, grabbing the man with uncanny speed, and throwing him at the Hunter.
A shot finally went off. A burst of red exploded from the back of the man in the white serving jacket as a bullet whizzed past Trent’s right ear.
Trent dove for the Hunter who was trying to disentangle himself from the bloody body of his henchman and to raise his rifle again.
Grabbing both the Hunter and his henchman, Trent swung them both around and launched them over the glass observation wall.
Trent allowed himself a small amount of joy when the Hunter shouted in terror as he fell through the air.
Behind him, Trent heard the sound of rounds being chambered. He heard a loud crack at the same time that his shoulder was slammed forward with such force that he too was almost thrown over the glass wall.
Trent spun around, preparing to launch himself at the three remaining armed men, but he noticed a figure at the edge of his peripheral vision, running across the floor of the chamber toward the main tunnel entrance.
The Hunter was escaping, and Trent had to stop him.
Chapter 47
AS HE ENTERED the tunnel leading back to Las Vegas, the Hunter pulled out his flashlight from his inside tuxedo jacket pocket and flicked it on. With it, he could see clearly in front of him, and he was able to move at a fast pace through the debris-strewn tunnel.
Even though he was running for his life, the Hunter’s primary thought was that he was losing everything he had worked so hard to create.
Second on his harried mind was the fact that he had dropped his weapon when he fell. Now he was unarmed with a madman probably close behind him.
Just a short while ago, he had the mentalist in his sights. He had an unobstructed view of the man running across the floor, out in the open, and he had only been able to hit him once—in the leg.
The mentalist moved more like an animal than a regular man—quicker and more agile than any human he could recall, and this gave the Hunter pause.
His father had spoken of people who moved like that—claimed they were overtaken by the spirits of mighty animals. Of course, he had never before believed his dad when he told those old stories. But now he had seen such a thing in person. And he wondered what else his father had told him that might have had some shred of truth to it.
As he sped along, the Hunter listened for sounds of pursuit, but he heard none.
Despite that fact, he knew it would not be long before the mentalist caught up with him.
His mind raced with possibilities.
If he could make it to the hidden tunnel entrance farther ahead, he would be safe for a while. He could take that short cut almost all the way to the parking garage under the Paradise Hotel, and from there, the surface wasn’t far away. For a moment he considered going after the black-haired girl and using her as a bargaining chip. The last time he had checked, his cameras had shown the woman in the Troll’s lair, still sitting on the floor with her head held in her hands. But in the end, the Hunter’s logic won him over, and he decided that self-preservation was his only goal now.
There would be time to even the score with the mentalist and his girlfriend later.
Soon, the Hunter came to a tunnel running perpendicular to the one he was in. Its entrance was cut into the tunnel wall about four feet off the ground, and he easily jumped up and swung himself into the new passageway. After another few tiring minutes of running on an upward grade, he took a right into another cross tunnel.
Finally, he recognized the location of the hidden entrance to the maintenance tunnel he had been looking for. The Hunter hadn’t been lying when he told the mentalist and the other contestants that there was a secret shortcut in the tunnel—he just hadn’t mentioned how well the shortcut wa
s hidden.
It was so well concealed that he had to look around for a few seconds with the aid of his flashlight before finding the barely recessed button built into the concrete wall near the floor. He kicked the button with his foot as hard as he could and it sunk into the wall, causing a concrete slab to slowly open.
After moving only a few inches, however, the door stopped.
Shining his light around, looking for the cause of the failure, the Hunter saw that a pair of legs was blocking the recessed door mechanism.
The Hunter sighed as he instantly recognized the scene as the Troll’s second kill of the night.
Cursing, he grabbed the fat man’s ankles in an attempt to pull the legs free, but his hands slid off the dead man’s slick skin. He found it impossible to hold on where the blood had congealed on the man’s legs. The only way he could get enough leverage was to reach in as far as he could and pull on what was left of the fat man’s lower body by grabbing hold of the man’s crotch.
The Hunter had done many things in his life—some of which even he was not particularly proud. But in all of his years, grabbing the dead homeless man’s bloody crotch was one of the more disgusting things he had been forced to endure.
His efforts were soon rewarded as the two legs and man’s hips popped free of the recession in the concrete wall.
As the Hunter tossed the bloody legs aside, the door to the hidden tunnel began moving again and was soon fully open.
With a look over his shoulder and a long exhalation, the Hunter stepped into the hidden tunnel. He smiled once inside and flicked a switch that activated a string of emergency bulbs that ran the length of the tunnel. The original lights had long since blown, but the Hunter was always prepared, and he had replaced them all with new bulbs just a few months ago.
As part of his preparation, he had also set a large metal bear trap just a foot or so into the hidden tunnel, as a surprise in case one of his prey ever did manage to find the tunnel’s entrance. He carefully picked up the metal jaws of the trap and moved it back into the main tunnel where he cautiously placed it in the center of the floor. Next, he gently draped the fat man’s legs over the contraption.
The Whittier Trilogy Page 29