The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  Contacting someone on a cell phone would be their best bet, but neither of them had one on them. They’d made the mistake of coming up here without anything on them. No chain mail—which was too time-consuming to make happen even if they’d thought of it. But they’d come with no communication, and no protection, and maybe worst of all, no weapons.

  Eventually, they would have to open the attic door and pray the house was empty.

  Slowly, light seeped into the attic. It was just enough for her eyes to adjust, to see that her brother still sat across from her, his hands in hers, both of them cross-legged. Joule desperately wanted to move. Her legs were dead asleep. If she had to jump up and run, she wasn't sure she would be able do it.

  But she hadn’t dared. Flexing her legs might have meant killing them both.

  Seeing her brother’s outline indicated that there was light outside enough to get into the attic. It meant daylight had arrived. But did it mean the hunters were gone?

  She lifted her watch to check the time.

  The attic had been more tightly built than she’d thought. It was already well into the daylight hours. She looked to Cage and mouthed, “Can we move?”

  He nodded, and slowly they began moving one leg each. Soundlessly, carefully, she lifted one leg and flexed it in the air. When that didn’t bring any sounds from below her, she leaned one hand behind her and slowly put her weight on it, not knowing if the attic would creak below her. Or whether she would suddenly hear the hunters jumping up, growling, hissing, and calling for her death.

  She had a sudden vision of the creatures being angry and aggressive enough to climb onto the bed and jump upward until they came through the thin subflooring here. But she heard nothing.

  It must have been an hour later that they were stretched out toes flexing, moving relatively freely.

  Joule quietly asked, “Should we head downstairs?”

  Cage frowned at her slightly and pointed to his ear.

  She shook her head back at him, not understanding. But his hand came out flat, suddenly stopping her. Freezing, Joule waited, listening for whatever she could hear. At first, she heard nothing.

  But then she heard the noise.

  Something near the door.

  Her head snapped back.

  What was at the door? Had the night hunters not left?

  But next she heard footsteps, the clear sounds of heavy—human—feet bursting through the house.

  Reaching out for Cage—she could see clearly now and she wasn't waving her hand blindly, as she had the night before—she grabbed her brother and held his hand firmly in hers again as they listened.

  Whoever it was was reasonably big.

  Whoever it was was running through their house slamming doors open or closed, she couldn’t tell.

  As she looked to her brother, Cage shrugged frantically. She had no idea who it could be.

  It occurred to her then that the front window was obviously smashed in. Clearly, the hunters had come into the house overnight and done their best to find a meal. If they left, they’d left an unsecured property.

  Joule wondered why it hadn't happened before, or why she hadn’t heard of it before.

  But she turned to Cage and whispered, “Looters.”

  50

  Cage stared at his sister in the dim light of the attic. It was growing brighter every moment, and normally that would have made him happy, but the feet pounding through the house below scared the crap out of him.

  He thought he was ready for night hunters, though he really wasn't. He and his sister had darted up here with only the thought of getting away. The attic entry had been prepped and ready, but they hadn’t thought beyond getting out of reach.

  If someone could have come and safely scoped the house out for them before they came down, that would have been a huge help. But it wasn’t an option. Now they’d survived the night only to face an unexpected threat from humans during the day.

  Cage didn't even breathe in.

  But then he heard it.

  “Joule! Cage!”

  The voice called out their names, making Cage frown as his sister froze, at the obvious recognition.

  “Nate?” it asked loudly into the echoing silence.

  Cage could only try to piece together the hint of recognition he had. But friend or foe? He couldn’t tell.

  It occurred to him then, the biggest loss from both their parents being gone: If something happened to both him and Joule, who would look for them?

  The voice yelled out again, “Mazur family! Is anyone home?”

  Clearly, it was someone who knew them. As Cage tried again to place the voice he knew he’d heard before, Joule leaned over and whispered, “Only one set of feet.”

  He thought about calling out, “Who is it?” but even as he thought that, the feet pounded down the hallway to the other end of the house.

  “It's me! It's Dr. Brett Christian! Are you home? Are you okay? Make noise, any noise, if you can!”

  His lungs expanding suddenly, Cage felt his head snap toward his sister and they both sprang into action. He pounded on the plywood flooring beneath him. “We're up here! We're in the attic. Is the house clear?”

  But even as he said it, Joule was reaching for the handle to the attic entrance and she was pulling on the door, releasing the mechanism to let the stairs down. She did it carefully, so the stairs didn’t drop on the vet’s head and damage the one person who had come for them.

  “What? Where?” the doctor’s voice called back, and the sound of his feet changed direction, aiming back toward them. The short, barked words were still frantic in their tone.

  “We're okay,” Cage hollered back. “We're in the attic. We're coming down.”

  Joule ran down first, her feet pounding down the steps, and though the attic ladder stairs weren't designed for it, Cage started down before she’d even hopped off.

  Dr. Brett appeared at the base of the short staircase, his eyes wide, his expression still alarmed. Looking up at them, he sucked in a deep breath and then suddenly fell forward, his hands braced on his knees as he sucked in labored gulps. He looked as though he had run a marathon and finally hit the finish line.

  “Did the hunters get in last night?” He followed that with a now almost-out-of-place “Thank God, you're both okay.” But then he looked around. Up the attic stairs, as though waiting for more. “Where's your dad? Is he—?”

  The expressions on their faces must have answered.

  “Oh no.” Just when he had started to stand up straight again, the vet’s shoulders collapsed inward with the perceived loss.

  It was Joule who shook her head when Cage couldn't find the words. She answered clearly. “It was a week ago.”

  Cage thought it through then. They should not be telling an adult that they no longer had any known parents. In front of him, he saw Joule suddenly stiffen as though she, too, had suddenly realized the problem, but moments too late.

  “He’ll come back!” she blurted out, but the sad expression in Dr. Brett’s eyes was clear even from over her shoulder. Cage knew the doctor wasn't buying it.

  The question was: Did he buy that Joule believed it?

  Stepping forward, Cage put a hand on his sister’s shoulder, and decided to go for honesty. He hoped that would keep this from becoming yet another shit show. “Our father isn't coming back. He disappeared a week ago. He'd been going out at night to hunt the hunters. Apparently, he'd been doing reasonably well for a one-man crew. But eventually, he didn't win one.”

  Cage watched as the man's eyes seemed to acknowledge their loss and notice that Cage and his sister had been working through it for a while already. What Cage was concerned about now was what the veterinarian was going to do about it.

  Rather than waiting and letting the man get some ideas of what should happen, Cage decided to head it off. “We're just a few months from eighteen—” more like seven, but he didn’t say that. “We're graduating with honors in two weeks, and we're going to St
anford. We've got this. Please don't throw a wrench into it.”

  He watched as the vet stood upright, looking between the two kids and seeming to make some kind of decision. “I understand.”

  Attempting to put them into foster care would be crazy. Even just getting the courts to declare them emancipated would take so much time and effort, it probably couldn’t even happen before they reached legal age. It would just be a mess and might ruin the last of their schooling.

  “Would it be okay if I check in on you?” the doctor asked, and Cage nodded. He felt relieved, both that the man wasn't going to make trouble for them and that it was good to have someone checking in on them. It hadn't occurred to him until just that moment that it might be good to network a little.

  The vet was the first person they’d told that their father was gone. They hadn’t even called their grandparents and let them know what had happened to their son. Not yet, anyway.

  Joule nodded. “I'm sorry I lied,” she offered quietly. “We know he’s not coming back.”

  That, at least, made the veterinarian smile just a little. Dr. Brett seemed to appreciate that she was trying to protect herself, but also that she could acknowledge that she'd done it.

  He gave a small, tight nod in return, but then everything in his stance changed. He waved his hand at the living area. “They got in last night,” he said. “It looks like they got everything.”

  For the first time, Cage looked around the house. Dinner had been knocked from the TV trays, one of which was broken now. Splinters of wood stuck out like broken bones.

  The macaroni and cheese had been licked up, the plates clean, one broken into several pieces. The large window into the living room was shattered, with glass shards and bits of blood everywhere—both inside and out on the front porch.

  The floor would need to be swept. The dinner table looked like it had been run into and rammed across the floor. It was definitely out of place, and the deep scratches in the wood indicated the movement had not occurred gently.

  Joule was leaned over now, her head down low, worrying Cage that she was struggling to catch her breath, or that she was crying, but she was doing neither. Instead, it turned out she was examining the floor.

  “Look.” She pointed. “They scratched it with their nails.”

  With a wry voice, Cage looked between the other two, and said, “Well, this is really going to devalue the house.”

  Luckily, both of them laughed.

  It was Joule who then looked up at the Doctor. “What are you doing here?”

  “I sometimes come back into town. There's a vet who still works here. She takes care of the exotics—the ferrets, birds, turtles—the ones who remain inside. And sometimes I come by and offer a hand with surgeries or such.” He paused. “I was going to go in this morning but woke up to my lower floor flooded… again. I told her I’d make it in if I could. I came out to see if you had any more data. But, if you'd like, I'll stay and help clean up.”

  Joule nodded. As Cage watched, he noted his sister’s movement was a little bit restrained. What was she thinking?

  But then she asked, “So you just came by to check?”

  Cage caught it. When Dr. Brett had last seen them, they'd had a father. There was no need to see if they were doing okay. For a moment, his thoughts tripped, wondering what the doctor knew that he didn't.

  But Dr. Brett looked between them, standing straight, ignoring the glass on the floor around his feet, the tipped chairs, the general disarray of the house that would have to be cleaned up before dark.

  “Well,” he said, “I only have Joule’s phone number, or maybe it’s the house number. I don't know. I don’t have email for either of you. And I got some information I would have sent. But, since I was halfway here, I thought I'd bring it to show you.”

  That was the first time Cage noticed the folder in his hand.

  51

  Joule looked over the printed pages of notes that Dr. Brett pulled out of the first manila envelope.

  “You printed them out?” she asked.

  “I didn't have an email address for either of you. It seemed easiest to print it.” He waved the now-empty envelope, “I thought I could leave it in the door or on the porch if I didn't see you.”

  She nodded. He was running old-school style. She could deal with that.

  Holding the pages, she read down the lines. A lot of the information sounded familiar. Looking at Cage, who was reading a different page, she asked, “Do you want to go grab Mom’s notes?”

  With a nod, her brother darted down the hall. She wondered what he would find, and whether the hunters had destroyed their mother’s things as well. They hadn’t checked everything before sitting down at the table, amid the broken glass on the floor and the window letting in the outside air and a few bugs.

  The three of them tipped the chairs upright and pulled the tablecloth back into place. It looked like one of the hunters had tugged at the tablecloth their mom had always put out. The things that had been on the table were skewed at best. Much of it had fallen onto the floor—her backpack, the plaid shirt she liked, and scattered school books that were now so damaged they would have to be paid for.

  “My mom found this out,” Joule pointed to a spot in the list about circulation in dogs bypassing the carotid arteries in some cases. “It was in her reading. That’s why she went for the femoral arteries.”

  “Good call,” Dr. Brett said calmly, as though they weren’t talking about the night her mother was killed. “If you go back another couple pages, I listed some things I think might work. One option is rat poison.”

  “We thought of that. It will kill them, right?”

  “Probably. It works on most mammals. But if we’re right, and these guys are a new species, they could be one that’s immune.”

  “That would be an odd coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

  For a moment, the doctor thought, and then he shook his head. “I don’t know. It depends on what evolutionary pressure created them.”

  “Is it normal for something like this to develop so fast?”

  The vet nodded. “People think evolution is a slow roll, but it’s really a series of snap revolutions. So things change that aren’t expected.”

  That made sense. “But the poison will still most likely work, right?” When she got a nod, Joule continued. “What we don’t know is how to get them to eat it. And I don't know how to keep all the other creatures from eating it—which is our main concern with just laying out poison.”

  She sighed. “Our other wildlife populations have already been decimated by the hunters.”

  There was something about the look on Dr. Brett’s face that said he was impressed with either her vocabulary or conservancy concerns. But this was merely the way she'd been raised—on a five-and-a-half acre lot with herons and snakes, both of which her parents had given equal reverence. They had foxes and groundhogs and mice and voles. Once, an otter had swum up their creek.

  “The bird populations seem to be mostly okay,” she told him. “We still see owls and peacocks and crane in mostly the amounts we’d seen them before the night hunters came. But we did get pelicans earlier this season, which is really weird. They shouldn't migrate through here.”

  He'd once again raised his hands, palm up, as if to say, What are you going to do? His words said, “Climate change has messed everything up.” As if that were enough.

  She could only agree. “So what can we use that will only get to the night hunters?”

  “That's a hard sell,” he replied, thinking again. “Most of these things will affect most mammalian animals. So we can’t let it into the ecology, either before the hunters get it or after.”

  “After?”

  “Anything that consumes them after they’re dead.”

  That was a new thought for her. She hadn’t ever found a dead hunter in the wild, and hadn’t followed up to check on the ones they’d killed with their dad. Were the bodies still there? Or—as Dr. Brett had
suggested—had something come along and eaten them?

  Looking for something a little less system-wide harmful, she asked about the poison.

  “It’s Warfarin. The ingredient in the human medication Warfarin. In low doses, it’s a blood thinner. It's not the fastest, but eventually a decent-size dose will kill them. They'll bleed out easier, which also means anyone who encounters them has a better chance against them in a fight.”

  She thought again, always looking for holes in the game plan before she called it. “If we gave the Warfarin to the raccoons, would it then get into the hunters—” Before she even finished the sentence, she was holding up her hands, warding off the idea she’d just thrown out. “I would never do that. I can't stomach the idea of using a live animal as bait to get another animal. But I'm trying to think about how it would pass from animal to animal. How do we get it into the hunter’s system? They seem to only eat other live animals.”

  “I don't know. For reference, I think if you dosed a raccoon for it’s size, even if the hunter ate the whole raccoon, the dose wouldn’t be big enough to also kill the hunter. So you’d kill the raccoon trying to get enough into your actual target. Vice versa, I’m hoping if it kills a hunter, then a vulture or something that ate it wouldn’t get enough to kill them. It would make them more vulnerable, but would eventually pass out of their system. The upside is that dogs, at least, like the taste of this medication. That’s part of why I picked it. If you can deliver it, they should eat it.”

  “Nice!” Joule said and almost smiled. Then she looked up the stairs and listened for a moment, hoping Cage wasn’t having too much trouble finding their mother’s papers.

  But the vet was talking again. “I still haven't figured out what the older gentleman in the video had that made the animals turn away. I did reach out and contact him. But most of his answers don't make sense—not as something that would cause that kind of reaction. At least, not if we're looking at the hunters as canines or standard domestic dogs. But I listed what he said on one of the pages.” He pointed to the manila envelope Joule was still holding.