The Hunter Inside

by David McGowan

  She opened her eyes, looking down to where the others stood. The fire that had been ignited by the lightning had gone out, and there was only darkness, taking the place of the lights of Shimasae that had been inside the building. Sandy saw only black space as she looked down.

  Blackness, welcome blackness.

  She released her hold, and allowed herself to fall, into the arms of that blackness, into the arms of her children, and out of the darkness of the world.

  Into the light of death.

  Did you enjoy The Hunter Inside?

  What follows is an exclusive extract from David McGowan’s second novel, From the Sky.

  It is a story of how a small Northern Californian town is visited by creatures from the sky, and the pilgrimage of a band of characters across the mountains to a date with destiny.

  Join 12 year-old Tucker Turner and his dog Samuel, Chief Jim Hoolihan, Barrett Holroyd, Luke Bonalo, and others as they find their world tipped on its axis by visitors…From the Sky.

  Scheduled for release December 2012, the author presents to you a special offer. You could get From the Sky completely FREE. All you have to do is post your review of The Hunter Inside to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and email the author at gow2002@sky.com stating the name your review appears under, your email address, and your preferred format, and you will qualify to receive a free copy of From the Sky one week BEFORE release.

  Please visit http://davidmcgowanauthor.com for updates

  Follow David McGowan at http://twitter.com/dmcgowanauthor

  Why not ‘Like’ The Hunter Inside’s Facebook page at http://facebook.com/thehunterinside

  The damn car had broken down again.

  That young tearaway, Jim Bonalo, had a lot to answer for. In a small town like Camberway, it didn’t do old men any good to have to walk along dirt-track roads, and it didn’t do an old man any good to have to walk through cold February nights when steady drizzle was falling and the ground beneath his feet was slick and slippery.

  The damn winters in Northern California were getting worse.

  Barrett Holroyd thought about the time young Arnie Popovich had fallen down the old Cooper well. That had been in February – five years almost to the day in fact. It wasn’t as cold now as it was that year – it had been close to breaking the record low of 24F on that god forsaken night – and Barrett had walked the same iced-over tracks he walked now, in and around the Camber Valley, along with everybody else.

  It had taken three weeks to find the 8-year-old’s frozen body, eyes still open and mouth still open and skin all bloated, folded up like a widowed puppet. Just the thought of the kid’s eyes reflecting the torch beam when he shone it down the well was enough to make the hotdogs he’d eaten at Louise Miller’s diner two hours ago begin to rankle with his belly.

  The drizzle got heavier as he trudged onwards. Damn Bonalo.

  Betsy always told him not to be eating Miller’s hotdogs.

  You don’t know what that two-bit hussy puts in them hotdogs to give you that poison belly.

  But that didn’t matter now that she was two months in the ground.

  The light of the crescent moon was not enough to allow Barrett an assured step. He walked slowly, his arms outstretched like any of a million mummies or zombies or ghouls he’d seen on cable. But it didn’t do an old man (sixty-two years old at the last count) any good to think of creatures of the night when the night was pressed right up to his face.

  Maybe a million images flashed through his mind as he inched his way along the single lane, dirt-track road. None of them were good, and the combination of fear of the zombies and the image of Arnie Popovich’s doll-like, staring yet unseeing eyes, doubled the chill inspired by the blustery wind. It was a wind that travelled with him and against him, swirling all around him.

  Fucking Jim Bonalo, selling him a heap of junk. Taking advantage of an old man was all he was doing. Barrett Holroyd knew as much. Hell, everyone in Camberway knew it. All Jim Bonalo had ever done was take advantage of people. When he was eight he was stealing apples from Barrett Holroyd’s tree. By the time he was fifteen he was stealing the virginity of half the girls in town.

  Barrett gritted his teeth against the gusting of the wind as it drove the heavy drizzle into his face.

  Maybe Bonalo could be a good mechanic if he ever tried, instead of being too damn busy chasing skirt all over the county and selling no more than heaps of rusted junk to people like Barrett who could afford no better than what the little shitweasel had to offer.

  His outstretched arms did him no good as he slipped on a pile of wet eucalyptus leaves and fell on the seat of his pants.

  ‘Owww,’ he moaned as a clap of pain shot down through his legs to his feet, leaving the nerve endings tingling, and up through his torso to his already aching head.

  Yes, Jim Bonalo had an awful lot to answer for. If he’d been ten years younger he would have punched his lights out fast as shit come out of a baby, but ten years ago Betsy would have been there to stop him.

  He clambered to his feet and began walking again, just as a cloud cut out the little light that was present from the moon like a candle being blown out. POOF.

  Of course, ten years ago he wouldn’t have had to buy a rackety old shitty heap of metal like the Ford he left two miles behind him. Ten years ago, when he’d retired from the military, poverty was the last thing he’d thought about. He’d listened to the advice Major Rowland had given him.

  It ain’t gonna do you any good as a bit of ink on a bank book.

  So he had, for five years, enjoyed the money he had. He’d ignored Betsy’s continually prudent outbursts and debilitating nagging, same as he ignored that he knew Linda’s husband was fucking anything that moved without his daughter having a clue.

  Still not even at the bottom of Sangrew Hill yet, and his arthritic joints squeaked like hinges that needed a liberal application of oil. The swollen joints of his fingers would go no further into the pockets of his faded Wranglers than they already were, but he tried despite this knowledge.

  Yep, he’d sure as hell enjoyed the money for five years, buying little Tucker all the expensive computer games he wanted, loaning his daughter the twenty grand she needed for a deposit on a house (even though he knew that bastard Ross was hiding the snake on both sides of Crystal Lake, not to mention him being handy with his bunches of fives). Pretty soon the money was gone. Like sand through his fingers. Then Betsy’s lung cancer had come.

  ‘Christ, it’s dark out here tonight,’ he said aloud. It seemed just like he wasn’t getting anywhere at all – like he’d stepped onto a treadmill. Maybe that sonofabitch Bonalo put it out in front of me, he thought.

  One thing he knew; that he wanted to be out of the damn dark and the damn cold and back home where he could see his hands in front of his eyes. Where dead kid’s faces didn’t flutter out of his mind and appear before him in the darkness.

  ‘Cept home wasn’t really home anymore anyway. The money hadn’t lasted long, no sir. That old man poverty came to be his houseguest, more and more quickly as Betsy’s cancer had grown and they needed it for medicine. She had started to harangue him for every cent he spent. Maybe it was all her fault. Maybe all his years of resenting her complaining character was not merely resent, but outright blame. Didn’t matter anymore though, not with Betsy being no more than worm chow. The dust was bitten, the cards were marked, the bucket was cancer kicked.

  The drizzle was getting heavier now; turning into rain that was being driven against him by the wind. He tried to blink it out of his unseeing eyes as he edged carefully along the slick dirt road. Last thing Barrett needed was to fall down, break a hip, and freeze to death like the Popovich boy. Just imagining Linda wearing that same look he saw on Saskia Popovich’s face that day, standing next to the half-sized casket at her only child’s funeral, made him slow down even more. The last place he wanted to take a permanent time-out was on Number Five Road. No-one would likely come up here until morning, when Bret
t Fishwick, the mailman, would head up to deliver the Miller’s mail.

  Good kid, Brett. Like his old man, Joe. A family man, a hard working man. Always trying his best to put good food on the table and smiles on his wife and kid’s faces. Barrett didn’t want to be a corpse the next time they met. Uh-uh.

  The ground was levelling out beneath his feet now, which meant he had reached, or was about to reach, the bottom of Sangrew Hill. That was good – it meant he had gone half the five miles towards Linda’s house.

  Linda’s house, Linda’s house. Why was it always Linda’s house? It was their house. Their house. Since she had got shut of that shitkicker Ross and took pity on her old man, they had lived there as a family. Barrett, Linda and little Tucker. Except the kid wasn’t so little now. Not to mention the dog; a black lab called Sam to everyone except Tucker, who only ever called it Samuel. Ever since he brought the damn thing home from the woods. No-one ever claimed it, so they had been stuck with another mouth to feed.

  He’d paid twenty grand toward the house. Twenty G’s. Twenty big ones. That bastard Ross Turner had put in little more than a few sperm, and left Linda with a broken heart that no man was ever going to fix. Yep, there were too many chicken shits like Ross Turner around, and not enough Brett Fishwicks.

  Barrett rounded the corner of Sangrew Point and began the final half of his journey, still in pitch darkness and still freezing cold. An iced wind blustered around his face, turning the small droplets of rain into missiles that whipped against his stubbled cheeks. He pulled the collar of his jacket up over his chin and angled his face to the ground as he pushed onwards.

  Damn Bonalo, damn car, damn winter, he thought, as the keening sound of the wind in his ears drowned out every other sound in the forest of conifers that bordered Camberway.

  Miller’s hot dogs seemed a long time ago now. Another lifetime in fact. His stomach rankled – he could do with some antacids – but that was the only part of being at Miller’s Diner that still seemed real after walking almost two and a half miles in the damn dark. He had started to think about a nice warm cup of cocoa as he came to the halfway point of his journey. That, and the image of putting some buckshot into Jim Bonalo’s skinny ass, was enough to push him onwards through the Douglas fir that surrounded their secluded little part of the world.

  He was lost in his thoughts and wrapped in the storm, and the keening of the wind rattling his eardrums meant that he didn’t hear the odd humming sound above him. He kept his eyes on the ground in front of him, determined not to wet the seat of his pants with another slip. If he would have looked up, he would have seen the ship.

  *

  Linda Turner (though she hated the Turner part more than any other name she had ever heard) closed the door of the kitchenette and sat down in the prison cell sized room.

  11pm, and still her Daddy hadn’t come home.

  The dryer rocked violently as it spun her uniform for the job she hated so badly, the job that ensured their survival, and only just about.

  It wasn’t right, it wasn’t right all, that her Daddy was spending so much time over at that woman’s diner. Not after…not after what had happened to her Mom. Not after her heart had been torn this way and that by her Mom’s cancer, after it had been squeezed until it was almost going to burst by Ross. Left to raise a boy without a father or a grandmother.

  When she closed her eyes she saw her Mom, thin and gaunt and covered in tubes, barely able to recognise her family because of all the morphine in her body.

  ‘She probably had as much morphine in her as she did cancer,’ her father had said the day after she died. And she knew he was right, but this wasn’t right. Not two months after she died.

  Five nights this week. Five in a row in fact. She knew he didn’t go there to spend money, because he didn’t have any money. He didn’t go there for the food either. Everything on the menu made hell of his guts; greasy burgers and fried onions and fries and chilli sauce.

  Roll up, roll up. Death on a bun. Cholesterol heaven.

  But he ate the food, same as he sometimes drank the whisky later on in the nighttimes, and it sure as hell wasn’t right to drive a death-trap of a car on wet roads in near pitch darkness.

  She looked up at the clock that hung on the wall. 11.20PM. The diner closed at 10, and he wasn’t ever likely to be in a riveting conversation with any of the bums that went to Louise Miller’s diner. Except, that is, Louise herself. And that wasn’t right. Not so soon.

  The dryer continued to shake violently, clanging against the side of the freezer in the kitchenette, and she had to cross her fingers and hope it didn’t wake Tucker.

  When he woke in the night, he always asked for his father. But there wasn’t nothing she could say to him. She just had to do the best she could with what God gave her. If Ross appeared in the doorway now, she was pretty sure all she’d be able to do was burst into tears. Because it didn’t feel like a whole year since he’d gone. It didn’t even seem like a day had passed. Fifteen years together, and yes, maybe he stayed out late. Maybe he drank too much, and maybe sometimes he raised his hands to her. But she missed him. Missed him like hell.

  Jessie Cooper had told her Tucker looked just like his Dad. That had been almost two weeks ago when she had been shopping at Ellen Shawcross’s store on Main (if a row of six stores could be called Main). Just walked over and ruffled his hair like he was a toy. Linda hadn’t even remembered who Jessie Cooper was for a moment, and him standing there grinning like a loon and breaking her heart open all over again.

  The dryer finally began to wind down until it silenced completely, only to be replaced by the ticking of the clock. At least it hadn’t woken Tucker.

  She hadn’t been able to go back to Ellen Shawcross’s, not after dropping her grocery basket and rushing from the store, dragging Tucker behind her in hysterics.

  It wasn’t right. Living in poverty with a fatherless child. Crying every day. Every single day. Just working a shitty job to survive. Scrubbing that schoolhouse every day. It wasn’t right that her Mom had been taken from her, not when she needed her so bad. Daddy wasn’t as strong as her Mom – he’d only been in the army to get away from her – and that wasn’t right either.

  Nothing was right. Nothing at all.

  But how was anything ever going to change? It wasn’t, she was certain of that. One thing she knew for sure was that she didn’t want another man. Not that there were many to pick from in Camberway anyhow. She wasn’t ready, and even if she was, she knew Camberway probably didn’t have a decent one to offer.

  Peter Delore and Tony Evanson were just about the only two single men in Camberway. Without them, Miller’s would have a whole lot less money and a whole lot more whisky, and that hussy Louise Miller wouldn’t have such a big smile across her make-up plastered face.

  The cup of tea she had made had long since lost its warmth, much like the wet and windy night beyond the small, dirty windows. This was as bad a winter as she could remember. Except for the one they called the Popovich winter, that is. She had been forced to pawn her engagement and wedding rings to pay for a new boiler when the old one gave up the ghost a week after her Mom had died, but that didn’t really matter. She knew he wasn’t coming back. All she needed was her Daddy and Tucker now. And Samuel, she couldn’t forget Samuel. That dog was the only thing that really made any of them smile lately.

  A tear broke loose and found its way down her cheek, dripping from her chin into the cold cup of tea on the counter in front of her. It was quickly followed by several more. She looked again at the clock.

  Midnight, and still her Daddy wasn’t home.

  *

  Just the other side of the old-growth Coast Redwood trees that bordered the west side of Camberway sat the (not quite so old) John Clifton Centre. Housing 32 patients at various levels of psychiatric imbalance, life within the walls of the centre was a stark contrast to the free-flowing Kennedy River that the patients, or inmates as Nurse Stevens liked to think of them, were ne
ver likely to see.

  Nurse Holmes had called in sick, again, and that meant it had been left to Nurse Stevens and the rookie, Nurse Campbell, to complete their rounds a man down. It had taken them an extra hour and a half to box off their psycho-session.

  Now, not a half hour after finally sending Nurse Campbell to keep watch over the Suicide Crew and settling down with her latest bodice ripper in the wing she called Land of the Loony-Tunes, she was up and running down the corridor, wiping biscuit crumbs from the corners of her mouth as she went.

  ‘Woo. Yeah. Wooo.’

  Every night was the goddamn same. Midnight, on the dot and without fail, he started whooping and hollering at the top of his voice. Well, maybe not always at the top of his voice, she reflected as she rounded the corner and nearly went flat on her face over a mop, but tonight it sure as hell was.

  ‘Woo, I seen em. I seen em.’

  Nurse Stevens reached the room and peered through the window, fumbling with her keys as she did so. There sat Earl Buckley, staring at the wall and rocking back and forth, his hands clasped tightly together across the back of his head.

  5’3 inches tall, twenty pounds overweight, and a fuse blown in his head.

  Five and a half years she had worked at the Looney-Tunes Meat Factory. Earl Buckley had arrived on her third night and had instantly begun his routine of rocking back and forth (always with those hands clasped that way), and shouting either ‘woo’, ‘yeah’, or ‘I seen em’ at the top of his soprano voice.

  He’d done the same, every night since, and always on the dot of midnight. It drove her absolutely crazy – all she wanted to do was sit at her station, eat her little cookies that she bought at the expensive cookie stand (woman’s gotta have some pleasures) and read her latest bodice ripper, imagining she was one of the characters. But never the heart-broken ones. She didn’t care horseshit for getting her heart broken. She preferred to picture herself like Madelaine Hornby, the character in the latest one she was fantasising her fifty-year-old fat ass through; the tall, dark and handsome Luke Steel providing stimulation with his big strong hands and lips.