Brothers (The Last Colony Book 1)

by William R Hunt

  Copyright © 2017 William R. Hunt & Stephen M. Truax

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.

  Front cover image by Octagon Lab

  www.WRHunt.com

  To the Hunt and Truax families—

  Without you we would not be the men we are today. We love you all.

  PS: Please excuse the language.

  Part 1: The Kidnapping

  Chapter 1: Brotherhood

  Life is like a game of Chess, changing with each move - Chinese Proverb

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper - T.S. Eliot

  Victor was the older of the two, and on a crisp October morning when the ragweed was dancing in the wind, he decided to teach his brother Dante how to kill.

  This was a family tradition of sorts. Their father had taught Victor to hunt way back before the first hairs sprouted on his chin, but Dante had always been closer to his mother. All that was different now. The old rule had changed from “If a man doesn’t work, he doesn’t eat” to “If a man doesn’t kill, he doesn’t eat.”

  Victor had been doing all the hunting until this point, but now it was time for his little brother to start pulling his weight.

  Dante raised the barrel of the rifle, a Winchester Model 1873. The brothers had found the old replica two years back when they first came to the cabin. The firing pin had been removed, but, by a stroke of unusual good luck, Victor had later discovered the pin in a drawer upstairs, along with a few boxes of ammunition. That was how they came to possess the “Gun that Won the West.”

  “Remember,” Victor murmured to his brother, “it’s just you and him out here. Nothing else matters.”

  The “him” was a mature eight-point buck, probably three or four years old, with a stout neck and broad shoulders. At two to three hundred pounds, this whitetail would last the brothers for a long time—long enough, perhaps, to ride out the country’s turmoils.

  Victor kept his eyes on his brother as Dante nestled the walnut stock of the Winchester against his shoulder. Victor was thinking how his own first kill had been like breaking the spell of some deep magic, and with that breaking had come a sense of power—not just of strength, but of immortality, as if the act of killing another creature proved in some way that he himself could never be killed.

  The buck raised his head. His ears twitched, his tail fluttered. His glassy eye caught the glint of the rising sun, but it did not turn toward the two men crouching in the weeds. It did not notice Dante’s breath as he slowly inhaled…exhaled…then took half a breath and paused.

  The world went quiet. Victor’s heart thudded in his chest. For just a second, he could sense the magic of that first day so many years ago when he had been fully vested in one act and one now, unaware of the moments passed or those to come. It stirred something primal in him, deep down in that place he could only reach by chance or wandering dream.

  He remembered the cool touch of the wind. He remembered the sound of his father’s breathing, the earthy smell of his soap. He remembered the wonder and the fear, the two inseparably bound together.

  And then, with a percussion that savaged the still forest, the memory vanished.

  _____

  “Damn,” Dante said, lowering the rifle. “I thought I got him.” He opened the lever and closed it again, chambering the next round with a satisfying click-clack. He watched his hands to make certain they completed the ritual properly.

  The buck had shifted at the last moment, turning so that the bullet struck closer to the shoulder than the heart. Victor had advised Dante to aim for the lungs or the heart, because he was not confident the caliber was large enough to penetrate both shoulders and bring the animal down.

  Victor adjusted his backpack and crouched where he thought the buck had been standing. As he surveyed the area, he saw a spill of pinkish, frothy blood a few yards away.

  “You did,” Victor answered. “Looks like a lung shot.”

  Dante grinned. “He seemed pretty close to me.”

  Ever the joker, Victor thought. Still, he was happy to see Dante was more relaxed than before. When Victor had handed his brother the rifle before they left the cabin, he had sensed something tentative in Dante, as if he suspected Victor was only looking for the opportunity to embarrass him. This uncertainty, however, was nothing new. Dante had been this way since their mother’s death.

  Dante stooped over the blood. “What if he doesn’t go down?”

  “You have somewhere else to be?”

  Dante grinned again, but there was a touch of disappointment in his eyes. Victor had reminded him that there was no normal life to return to once their hunt was finished. There would be no kicking back on the sofa with steaks and beers while they watched the next Die Hard. No, Victor thought, this is more normal than normal life. At least out here, it’s not strange to feel alone.

  “Well,” Dante said, “what do you say we catch this meal on wheels?”

  While Dante took the lead, Victor kept his eyes on the forest. Sometimes those oaks seemed too quiet, as if he still expected to hear the heartbeat of civilization—the rumble of traffic on the highway, the toll of a church bell marking the hour, the flicker of streetlights at dusk. Sometimes, when he sat at the window and read by the light of a candle, he wanted nothing more than to let that silence fill his mind.

  But then there were other times when the quiet seemed empty, as if he could cross the entire face of the earth without hearing the sound of a human voice or seeing the light of a single fire. That was when the loneliness of his new life closed around him. It was almost as if they could have been the last people in the world.

  Almost.

  “You coming, Victor?” Dante’s eyes, blue as a cloudless summer day, studied his. He had his mother’s eyes. He also shared her ability to light the room with humor or warmth—or just as easily darken it with anger.

  Victor ran a hand through his dark, shaggy hair. “Hold up.”

  “What is it?” Dante asked, turning around. He adjusted his baseball cap, which was decorated with the word “Boston” on the front in white cursive letters set against a green background. The hat was faded and had a permanent sweat stain, but Victor knew why his brother still wore it. Their father had bought it for Dante at a Celtics game, right before Dante went on his adventure around the world. It was the last time the three of them had had any fun together.

  “He turned,” Victor answered, gesturing at the line of indented leaves dotted by the occasional drop of blood. The sight brought to mind a line from a Robert Frost poem: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. Frost was one of the good ones.

  The buck ought to have reached the stone wall and followed it. Deer, Victor’s father had told him many years ago, usually preferred to go along an obstacle rather than across it. But this one, Victor could see as he studied the stone wall,
had planted its feet and leapt right over the obstacle without leaving so much as a tuft of fur behind.

  “Holy shit,” Dante said. “Why would he do that?”

  “Fear, I suppose. An animal will do just about anything when it’s afraid.”

  Dante scrambled over the wall. It was easier for him than for Victor. Dante was naturally leaner, more athletic, whereas Victor had more of a boxer’s build. Victor knew he could beat his brother in a wrestling match, but Dante would probably have the edge in a footrace.

  Victor stared past Dante into the woods that sloped downward toward a rutted dirt road overshadowed by untrimmed branches. Another line from that poem drifted into his consciousness:

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

  “You coming, Vic? Or are you too old to climb a wall?”

  Victor sighed and set his hands on one of the stones. “Keep talking and you’ll get to butcher that animal by yourself.”

  On the other side of the wall, he planted his hands on his hips and stared down through the trees. He could not see the dirt road below them, but he knew it was there because he had scouted the property carefully before he and Dante moved in. It had been a while since the last time he ventured past the wall.

  Dante gave him an exaggerated frown and cocked his head slightly. “If I take one more step, it will be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”

  Victor shook his head, unamused.

  “Seriously,” Dante added, “I’ve been saying for the past year we need to explore a little. If it takes a wounded deer to get you to leave your nest, so be it.”

  “Just keep the rifle handy.”

  Dante looked like he was going to let the comment pass, then thought better of it. “Just what do you think is out there?” he said, lowering his voice a little so it sounded less like a challenge.

  But Victor did not answer. He was not sure he could put the thought into words, and even less sure he would like the sound of it.

  “I get it,” Dante said. “It’s like that movie where everyone gets one day a year to commit any crime they want. You think the rules are different now, but it’s not necessarily going to bring out the bad in everyone.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Victor answered, giving his brother a long, thoughtful look.

  “You really think everyone has gone bad?”

  Victor shook his head. “Not that. You’re wrong to think there ever were any rules.”

  Chapter 2: Dealer of Death and Destiny

  Victor was a few paces behind Dante when Dante stopped and tightened his grip on the rifle. Victor took this to mean he had discovered the deer. “Is he down?” he said, moving to join his brother.

  The buck was there alright, propped against a mossy oak. Blood ran down the animal’s side and seeped from its nose and mouth. But there was another shape beside the animal as well. Victor’s first thought was that it might have been an opportunistic wolf or a young bear—the wolves, once hunted to near-extinction in Massachusetts, had been coming down from the mountains to reclaim their territory, and it had become common for bears to ransack the many abandoned homes in the area.

  Thinking it might be necessary to fight for their meal, Victor’s hand went instinctively toward his belt. Not until he touched his waistband did he remember he had forgotten his Colt 1911 back at the house, and a shot of adrenaline, like liquid panic, sped through his system. It wasn’t like him to make that kind of mistake.

  As he joined Dante and the full picture became clear to him, he realized it was neither a bear nor a wolf beside the buck, but a man. He was kneeling there, his hands already reaching inside the buck’s belly through a jagged cut, even though it had not been more than ten minutes since Dante shot the animal. The man’s hands came out with a lump of organs, including a length of intestine that coiled around his wrist like a shamanic bracelet. A smell came with the organs—the heady, rank odor of decaying vegetation. Dante covered his mouth.

  Victor reached across and took the Winchester from his brother, who appeared to still be in shock at what he was seeing. He stepped forward, as much to shield Dante as to get a cleaner shot, and leveled the rifle. “Hey!” he shouted.

  Victor was surprised at the stranger’s speed. The man planted his foot and spun around, reaching Victor in one rangy step. There was a spring-loaded knife in his hand, bloody as the hand itself, and it hovered in the space between the two men as the cold barrel of the Winchester pressed against his chest.

  The stranger’s face was a ridge line of prominent bones where the flesh had sunken away. His hair was knotted and greasy, and several strands drifted across his left eye to lend a touch of madness to the picture.

  Victor’s finger was already tight on the trigger. He could feel his own strength wound tight inside him, along with the cold resolve of the rifle, that dealer of death and destiny. His shoulder ached to feel the buck of the rifle’s kick. His finger began to clench like a vise.

  A few more seconds of hesitation and the man would have been no better off than the dying buck. Before Victor pulled the trigger, however, the stranger lowered the knife and stepped back, his face breaking into shock. “Please don’t shoot,” he said.

  Victor let a few seconds pass before he relaxed his finger and lowered the rifle from his shoulder to his waist. Now he studied the stranger as if seeing him for the first time, noting the winter coat that ballooned around his shallow frame, the ring on his left hand, the torn sneakers. Except for the ring, he looked like your run-of-the-mill wino, a bum who spent his unemployment checks on lotto tickets and booze. Not the kind of person to trust with your kids, maybe, but not a surefire sociopath either.

  But what did I see in his eyes? Victor asked himself. What was that look just before he lowered the knife? It came to him that maybe this bum had been ready to do to him what he had done to the buck. Then again, what can’t the madness of hunger drive a person to do?

  “That’s our deer,” Victor said, “and this is our land. Who the hell are you?”

  “Please,” the stranger whined, spreading his hands, “I haven’t eaten in days. Please—” He had been looking into Victor’s eyes, but now he shifted his attention to Dante. “Show some compassion. I can’t go back, not without—” He glanced at the buck, whose glassy eye was beginning to dim. Victor was surprised to discover the animal had just died—not when the bullet hit it, not when this man disemboweled it, but just now. It made him feel sick.

  “Go back where?” Victor asked.

  The man glanced down toward the dirt road Victor could not see but knew was there. “Just up the road. There’s a cow farm, the one with a rooster…” He looked at the ground and snapped his fingers, trying to remember.

  “A wind vane,” Victor offered.

  The stranger’s eyes widened with excitement. “That’s it!”

  “I know the place.” Last time Victor had gone down that road, he had felt certain the farm was abandoned. But that had been weeks ago—this man could have moved in more recently.

  “And what were you doing in our neck of the woods?” Victor asked. “Don’t tell me you were hunting with that.” He gestured at the knife, which was now dangling casually in the stranger’s hand. Victor had lowered the Winchester so that it pointed at the stranger’s feet, but there was enough space between them to raise the rifle long before the other man could reach him with the knife.

  “Just looking for food,” the man said, pawing at the curtain of hair hanging over his eye. His fingers left a stripe of blood along his eyebrow that did nothing to improve his appearance. “I’ve tried everything—carrots, peppers, potatoes. Hell, I even tried cabbage, but the only things that seem to grow for me are rhubarb and soybeans. Soybeans! Maybe it’s the soil. What about you guys?”

  It was not the question Victor disliked so much as the tone. The man seemed to think talking about crops might bridge the differences between them, as if they might soon be holding hands and singin
g “Kumbaya” over roasted marshmallows.

  While Victor quietly measured the stranger, thinking he looked more like the kind of man to take things than to grow them himself, Dante, who had so far remained silent, stepped into the circle of conversation and cleared his throat. “You should try wheat,” he said.

  “Wheat?” the stranger repeated, relaxing at the prospect of further conversation. Victor sensed the conversation had been deliberately diverted from a topic considered less safe…but for now he would keep his silence and let Dante say his share. This was his hunt, after all, and that was his kill bleeding on the ground. He had earned his place at the table.

  “Wheat and corn,” Dante said, nodding. “Seems like the staple food crops weren’t hit as bad. Some of the root vegetables still grow, too.”

  “You don’t say…” The stranger looked at Dante closely, and for the second time in their conversation, Victor saw something in the man’s eyes he didn’t like. The man was studying them as if he expected to recognize them.