The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  She missed her mother desperately. Truth be told, she missed her father, too.

  This Nate was not the man she had grown up with. Her Nate Mazur was kind and reasonable to a fault. Her father—as he’d been—was actually slower to act than her mother was. Now, he was gung ho and pumped full of revenge. Nothing she or her brother ever did seemed to rein him back in for more than a day.

  It was an ongoing fight to keep her father in the house at night—and to keep the sword and the machete out of his hand.

  She and Cage had sat up in the hallway for a few hours in the middle of the night while Nate slept. They studied and talked and, without saying so specifically, they made decisions without their father involved.

  She’d developed a pattern, and so had her brother: fall asleep, get in a few good hours, and then wake up in the middle of the night. Inevitably, some noise would jostle her from sleep, so she would tap on Cage’s door, or he would tap on hers. Very quietly, they would meet in the hallway with a book or a stack of notes and paper and pen and the small flashlights. When they were set up, they would get to work. A few hours later, they would return to bed, able to get up in time to get ready for school.

  She had no idea if their father knew what they were doing. They'd done it again last night, though they’d gotten a little more lax about being perfectly quiet. She leaned over and whispered in her brother’s ear, “We should get Dad.”

  But Cage shook his head, and she saw in his eyes that he didn't like it, but it was how he felt that had to be. He’d replied, “Dad needs sleep,” his voice as soft as her own words had been.

  She'd felt the tears well. “It’s hard enough doing things without Mom, but doing them without Dad ... well, he's right here!” She pointed at his closed bedroom door. “This is hard, too.”

  Cage shook his head again, talking as though he were the voice of reason. “But what if we tell him and he uses this—” he lifted their notes as a gesture, “as a reason to go out? You know that's what he wants to do. Every day he lets us talk him out of it, but—”

  “Shhhhhh,” she shushed him as his voice rose, but she nodded. It had been said. It wasn’t possible to go on believing that their father just randomly wasn’t in these late night sessions, or that they “just forgot” to tell him some of the discussions they had. They were actively holding back information from their own father.

  Joule realized then there wasn't much they could do. Just wait. They had to hope that Nate worked through his loss and came back around to being himself. She hoped it wasn’t much longer.

  It was Thursday afternoon now, twenty-four hours to the weekend, twenty-four hours until their father tried again to turn them into a pack of merry hunters. They had decided their only recourse was to give their father something else to focus on.

  “Poison,” Joule offered now, dangling the word like bait and praying it worked. “Let's figure out what they eat and use that to figure out how to get rid of them en masse.”

  Cage nodded along with her, as though he, too, thought it might be enough of a distraction to keep Nate from wanting to go out at night.

  “Dad,” she started again when her father didn’t speak in response to her first attempt. She fought to keep the tone in her voice light. “Cage and I were chatting on the way home from school.” That part wasn't true. They'd been talking about it for several days, but she kept going, “and we were thinking we need to run some experiments this weekend. Figure out what the night hunters eat. Then we can make our next move.”

  Her father nodded this time, and they sat down for a few minutes, planning out what they needed to know, what their best experimental setup would be, and what they might need to buy that afternoon to get ready.

  Once it was mostly set, they hit a concerning point.

  “I don't know any other way to do it,” her father had protested.

  Sadly, Joule didn't have a response either. She looked to Cage, but he shrugged slightly when their father wasn't looking.

  Shit, she thought. There was no other way.

  It was Nate who looked back and forth between them, still going. “If we're going to do it, we must observe it. We've got the camera, and we need to know that it worked. We need to know the night hunters are eating what we set out—otherwise, we only learn what gets eaten. That’s not necessarily what they eat. If we’re going to know the night hunters actually ate what we put out, we have to watch it happen. And that means we have to bait them right into the front yard.”

  36

  Cage struggled to keep his eyes open for the first few hours. He was used to sleeping at night.

  Aside from the one night out with his father and Joule, fighting the night hunters, they had been sleeping—at least in part—during the dark. Sometimes, they would review footage from the night camera and see all kinds of things walking through the yard. He now knew the night hunters came right up to the house more nights than he cared to think about

  Their experimental setup, he thought, was wonderful, but no one was showing up. At least, not the creatures he wanted to see. Though it was reassuring to see that many nocturnal animals were still around.

  He and his father and sister had begun getting prepped the night before. They’d bought all kinds of food—chicken, steak, hamburger, pork, vegetables (just in case), and more. Even hot dogs were on the menu.

  This first night was a merely a “What will they eat? And what won't they?” kind of test. But Nate had protested before they even started.

  “It’s all laid out in the front yard and we've got this beautiful window. We need to find a way to watch!”

  “We're not opening the window!” Joule had jumped in before he even finished the sentence.

  “Of course not,” Nate replied, trying to sound reasonable.

  “We've got the camera,” Cage supplied quickly, as though trying to fill cracks in his father’s reasoning.

  But Nate waved him off. “That’s not enough. It's delayed. We can't watch until after the fact and we need to see it live.”

  Cage didn’t agree that they had to. He and Joule had decided a while ago that what they had to do was stay alive. The decision had begun a long debate about how to do make it happen.

  The idea of a periscope had been thrown around and tossed out.

  Joule protested quickly. “The dogs—night hunters—will see the movement and come right through the window.”

  “What if we put it on a window they can't see? Or can’t see well? Like on the second floor?” Nate fired back.

  “It's still movement. It will still attract them to the house. Are we willing to risk that?” Cage had jumped in, not wanting his sister to bear the full brunt of the fight and not wanting his father to think his son agreed. But he regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. He should have said, No, we aren't willing to risk that.

  Nate came at it again, worse this time. “We can get binoculars and lay up on the roof. We’ll stay still.”

  Cage put a hand out, clasping his sister's wrist, silently pulling her back from the brink as he watched her get ready to explode. He replied in the calmest voice he could find. “Dad, we can't lay on the roof. They'll see us. It's even worse than the periscope. I can't imagine we could stay still—”

  “Of course not!” Nate had shrugged, as though the need to not draw attention from the night hunters was no longer of any consequence. That scared Cage to his bones. “But they can't get us on the roof.”

  Cage heard his sister take in a forced sigh, but he spoke so she didn’t have to. “Let's just say you're right. Let's say they can't get us on the roof. They see us up there, though, because there's no way we can stay still enough. Then they barge into the house and wreck all our windows trying to figure out a way to get up to us! We're not going to be safe tomorrow night if we do that.”

  That at least got Nate nodding and thinking, but it didn't shut down his need to watch the action live. In the end, they had bought several small cameras and set them up to
create a live feed to the laptops.

  In the dark, they sat in the hallway, side by side. They’d fed one camera to each laptop, and the three of them each watched a screen there in the dark. There was little enough activity that Cage was beginning to wonder if this was normal. Then again, what was normal anymore?

  After all, they had carefully left various piles of raw meat inside wooden square frames they had built for just this purpose—to maintain a feeding space and to be able to record what was done within it. They needed to see who ate what, how much, what was consumed there in the space, and what might be picked up and carried off. If any food was dragged, then what distance away? The squares were a simple but excellent method to let them have a clear point of measurement.

  But if the night hunters weren’t here, wouldn’t he have seen tons of other animals coming out? There was a feast in their front yard. Cage watched for another hour as a few birds swooped in and picked at some of the meats. Not surprisingly, they left the vegetables and hot dogs alone.

  It was long enough that he was starting to nod off, when Joule whispered harshly, “Look!”

  Finally, something! He didn't see it in his view but noticed her motion to her own screen. Her camera was aimed to the far right of the yard.

  Nate, sitting in between them, watched the camera feed to the middle of the yard. Joule took the right. The three of them had lined up so the laptops made a makeshift panorama of their experiment.

  “Raccoons,” his sister whispered with a smile. “I guess raccoons like hot dogs.”

  Cage grinned, too. Though, as he understood it, raccoons liked everything. He was leaning across his father, watching as Joule tilted her screen toward him, only to hear her say, “Shit, shit, shit. Look!”

  She was pointing toward his own screen now, where he was no longer looking. That was a failure of their scientific method. For some reason—maybe he was tired, or bored, or brain dead—he turned his head expecting to see more raccoons or maybe something cute eating hamburger or such.

  But that wasn’t it. They all watched as a pair of night hunters moved into the yard from Cage’s side of the screen.

  Suddenly, he was more than alert.

  37

  With his back straight now, Cage pushed at his laptop, lining it up with his father's and his sister’s, so they could watch the night hunters as they moved through the camera’s field of vision.

  Slowly, the large canines stalked into the yard.

  Somehow, the raccoons remained unaware, feasting on the hot dogs as though there were no threat closing in on them.

  It was plausible, Cage thought, that they might not know the hunters were there. Cage had been impressed by how much their experiment smelled when they’d first set it out. It could be that the smell of the food overwhelmed any olfactory sense the raccoons might have had that the large night hunters were approaching.

  Cage felt his heart beating hard. He had a bad feeling about what was going to happen next, but he tried to think like a scientist. Even as he reminded himself to stay focused and logical, it was Joule who leaned over and pointed at the hunters.

  “Look how they're staying low to the ground. Moving slowly and steadily. They’re getting as far as they can without any sharp movements. They really are stalking.”

  And they were doing it as a unit, Cage thought as he nodded in reply to Joule. But his sister was whispering again.

  “They haven't made enough noise to get the raccoons’ attention.”

  She was right. He’d thought about the smell, and the fact that the hunters’ movements were smooth enough to not draw attention. But he hadn’t accounted for the fact that their video had no sound.

  These were raccoons that were still alive, despite evidence of the hunters being in the area for over a year now. So they wouldn’t be oblivious to the threat. They truly didn’t know the canines were there…

  It didn't bode well for the raccoons. Sucking in a breath, Cage braced himself.

  He felt his features pull together and his head turn to the side because he didn’t want to watch. Raccoons were cute. He had a general fondness for most wildlife—except the night hunters.

  The three Mazurs sat silently now, watching, not speaking. Even Nate didn't comment, just adjusted his laptop so all three of them could watch as the night hunters passed from the view of one camera to another and came into focus on his screen.

  It was a tense minute or two, but Cage knew it might have just felt drawn out by his own reaction. By the time the raccoons realized what was near them, it was too late.

  They tried. They jumped. They ran.

  “They didn't—” Joule said sharply, cutting herself off as apparently she noticed the same thing Cage did.

  He’d noted that though the raccoons ran, the night hunters did not take that opportunity to bolt after them. They simply continued stalking at a pace that would have let their prey escape.

  It was less than a split second—hence Joule cutting herself off as she saw it—that they all saw the reason why the hunters didn’t pounce. The raccoons ran straight into three others coming from the other direction.

  This time Joule whispered, “They were corralled!”

  Cage sat back, trying to absorb what he’d just seen. There was no doubt that it had been a coordinated attack. That was an advanced tactic. He’d originally thought of the hunters as mindless beasts, smelling food and going after it with vicious dedication.

  Instead, it looked as though almost everything about his original presumption had been wrong.

  “They're very smart,” he said, his voice as low as he could keep it. “Smarter than we even gave them credit for the other night.” He didn’t say the night we went out and fought them.

  Though Nate didn't speak, Joule nodded from the other side of her father and picked up the conversation. “That was a lot of raw meat out there. It’s not warm, and it doesn't fight. It's free food—but the hunters went right by all of it. I thought that would be a feast, but they only wanted the raccoons.”

  “Do you think they're like snakes?” he asked. “They only want food if it’s live?”

  In the dim glow from the laptop screens, he saw his sister's eyebrows rise, as though she were considering that thought for the first time.

  The action on the screen distracted them. He’d not been able to watch as the hunters slowly caged in the raccoons into a smaller and smaller space. He squeezed his eyes shut, grateful that there was no audio, because it appeared the raccoons had squealed. Mercifully, their death was quick.

  Within moments, all the screens were clear. The raccoons were gone—only a few scraps left behind, which Cage tried not to look at. Luckily, it was dark outside and the cameras didn't offer light. They just caught what was there in the greens and grays of night vision, so he was able to ignore the detritus of the fight.

  What he’d not been prepared for was how fast the hunters disappeared, too. They split up and were all out of range before he could even think about what they might have done. Pointing his finger back and forth, he motioned to his sister to look. “They've gone off in different directions…”

  “Are they resetting?” she asked, cautiously. But Cage didn’t know.

  The screens remained clear of wildlife for some time. Another hour or more later, just as he was about to nod off, an owl came in. A typical bird of prey, it swooped down to pick at the meat and was gone almost before he realized what had happened. But no night hunter showed up to make a play for the bird.

  Several bird strikes later, Cage figured the hunters must have concluded that birds weren’t worth their time. Whether that was because of all the feathers, or the speed needed to catch one, or what, he didn’t know.

  It was when another possum came through that they watched the flanking of the hunters’ two-pronged attack work again, netting them another small animal.

  The threat of dawn was evident in the slightly changing light when the third set of mammals—another band of raccoons—came
through. Cage watched with a heavy heart and bated breath as the little animals used hand-like paws to pick through what was left of the vegetables and grab at some chicken. Again, the steel trap stalking strategy of the hunters caught the entire batch.

  Cage looked at Joule, wanting to do anything to distract from what he was seeing, anything to take away the feeling that he’d baited the raccoons to their death. “Do we need chickens with feathers? Butcher items? Legs of cows?”

  Joule was nodding. “We need to dangle them on string or something and make them look alive. They need to move.”

  For the first time in hours, Nate spoke up, and he said something that stunned Cage, something that he never would have expected his father to say. Not Nate the pacifist, Nate the gentle father, Nate the man who had no emotional reactions now at all.

  He calmly looked at his two children and said, “This is easy. What we need is live bait.”

  Cage felt his stomach turn as he shook his head.

  38

  Joule woke up groggy. The three of them had gone to bed in the wee hours of dawn and slept until late morning.

  But then her alarm had gone off and she’d dragged herself awake. They had things to do. It had taken a while for the twins to convince their father not to try to trap live bait. Neither of them had been able to stomach the idea of setting out a live animal for the sole purpose of letting the hunters rip it apart.

  “Those night hunters are going to kill those animals anyway!” Nate had argued. At least his logic remained intact, but his sense of morals seemed to have swayed a bit in the recent weeks. “We’re not doing anything to them, just making their deaths useful.”

  “I know, Dad. We're trying to stop the night hunters so they don't rip up any more people, but we also need to protect those animals. We need our local wildlife! The hunters are already changing the ecology. And I can't be the one to put a live animal into a certain-death situation.”