“We can get a tarp. Roll him onto it. Hopefully, he'll be dead by then, and we’ll drag it back.”
She’d thought about a wagon, but dismissed it because of the rough path. She’d thought about tying the animal’s legs to a sturdy branch, the way the old deer hunters did. Then she and Cage could lift it across their shoulders and heft it home.
But the deer hunters weren't being hunted by the deer. She and Cage needed their hands free.
They did not discuss the option of leaving one of them to guard it while the other went home for the tarp.
They stuck together.
They stayed in formation.
And they never let anything get behind their backs.
She wasn't used to being so callous about life. But even while she was recording, she'd almost made several comments that the creature wasn't dead yet, and that they would just wait. With a look over her shoulder, they left it there to bleed out and breathe its last while they trudged home.
By the time they grabbed a tarp and a spare, they’d decided a shovel would be a good idea—to help roll him onto it. So they didn't have to touch him. Adding to that thought, she shoved extra lab gloves in her pockets for both of them. Twice more, they went back for just one more thing.
She wasn't looking forward to the march back into the woods. She was tired and she wanted to sit down. She wanted to make savory food and eat dinner watching a TV show before it got dark. But they had a fresh sample and they had a huge freezer and there was work to do.
However, when they arrived back at the spot in the woods, they could not find the hunter.
Joule turned a circle, looking all around her. It had been a brindle dog, but it should not have been camouflaged. “He's not here… Did he get up and walk away?”
“He couldn't have,” Cage replied, his eyes still scanning the ground.
“Are we in the wrong place?” It was the only other logical solution.
“Maybe,” her brother said, the word hanging before he seemed to realize that he still had the frequency reader in his pocket. Turning on the receiver, he held it out and immediately picked up the signal. The noise indicated they were clearly right on top of the tracker. There was only one tracker out, only one activated, and it was here.
This was the same place.
“Look,” she said, “there's blood.”
It had bled plenty when Cage had stabbed it. This time, Cage asked, “Could it have gotten up and walked away?”
It seemed the only reasonable answer, since the dog had been lying in this spot, bleeding heavily, and now he had vanished.
But Joule knelt down to check the ground. “Watch my back.”
No, he hadn't gotten up and walked away. He had been dragged.
She pointed the marks out to Cage and, without her saying anything, he seemed to catch on. They’d lost their find.
But as they headed back to the house, Joule wondered what could possibly be big enough to drag away a big night hunter. An even bigger one?
Only a bear, she decided, and there were no bears here. At least, not that she knew of. The only remaining scenario was that at least a second—if not a third, and maybe even a fourth—night hunter had come out and dragged the first one away.
Which meant the creatures were definitely out during the day.
56
Cage hopped up the front steps to check out the package that had been pushed between the storm door and the heavily locked front door.
He walked past the front window, still boarded with the solid particle board he and the veterinarian had put up. He would need to get that replaced, and soon. The task was another thing on a to-do list bigger than he’d ever intended to own.
He and Joule had just come back from school, having stayed for the whole day. There were only one and a half days left, and he and his sister had decided to attend. It was possibly their last chance to spend time with some of their friends.
Without being able to stay out after dark, and with the work that the two of them were trying to accomplish during the daylight, they hadn't gotten to see much of anyone recently. Cage supposed it would make leaving easier in the fall. In fact, many of their friend groups had already fallen away. It was hard when a clique lost a member—especially when that member disappeared, with the suspicion of having been eaten by wild animals—so even the school social hierarchy had been suffering.
Joule had parked the car and walked around to see what he had gotten. “Who is it from? And what is it?”
“Dr. Brett,” he replied, picking up the box that rattled when he shook it. “It wasn’t mailed. Looks like it must be the rat poison. He must have come by and we were at school.”
“Good thing he boxed it,” his sister mused. At least it doesn’t look like poison left on the doorstep.”
Cage hadn't thought about that, but it made sense. Dr. Brett had left them a supply of the Warfarin in a large enough quantity that—if it had been of the human variety—it would have required a prescription and an explanation.
He pushed his key in and unlocked the door. The house was blessedly cool and he took a deep breath. The heat had kicked up this week, and sleeping in the attic was getting rough.
He set the box on the table and it rattled oddly again. He had to wonder just how much was in there. “Do you think he included dosage for eighty-pound canines?”
“If not, we'll email him.” Joule was dumping her own things onto the table.
“If we don’t get a quick reply,” Cage countered, “then we can't start poisoning them tonight. We don't want to waste it. So we can’t start until we know what the proper dose is.”
“We could maybe find the dose in the textbooks. I'll bet the drug—Warfarin—is in there. But we can't start poisoning them tonight anyway.”
Joule was pulling items out of her backpack and piling them in the middle of the kitchen table, things she had packed up from her locker and was bringing home for the final time. She held up a locker shelf and frowned at it as though it held no more purpose in her world.
The table was usually heaped with their things, and periodically cleared to run experiments. They'd been eating dinner in front of the TV and leaving the kitchen table for all things school- and night hunter-related.
But there were fewer than two more days of school.
“What do you mean we can't start poisoning them tonight?” Cage’s own bag was much lighter today, after handing in four library books.
Joule was standing at the table looking at him like he was nuts. She pulled out her laptop and laid it down and then picked it up again and looked around. “I don't want to put this where it might get damaged if one of the night hunters gets in. But I don't think I need to carry it to school anymore. Maybe I will, just to have something other than my phone…”
But she switched topics rapidly and without warning. “We can't poison them. It doesn't work immediately. They're not going to fall dead in our front yard so we can come out and clean up the bodies. We need to know where they go first, so we can follow them and be sure that they're dead… Otherwise, we're just wasting our drugs and we get to wait for months on end to see if we've made an effective dent in the population.”
Cage had another thought then, and it shifted the conversation. Their topic zigzagged in a way that no one else would have been able to follow. “We should ask Dr. Brett if we need to pay him back for all this. It might have been expensive.”
He grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the box open. He figured the dose was probably listed on the box, but for rats. That small amount wouldn’t do anything more than help the night hunters with blood pressure problems. They weren’t trying to medicate their canines; they were trying to kill them.
Boxes of rat poison fell out. One of them had a note taped to it. “Dogs and other mammals like the taste, so you shouldn’t have to worry about getting them to eat it.” He did comment about keeping it away from other wildlife and how much he recommended they distribute into the bait.
/> As Joule lined the boxes up on the table, turning all the labels one direction, Cage asked, “Then what do we do? Do we put the next piece of meat out with a tracker in it and try again?”
“I think we have to. We have to find where they go, so we can be sure they’re gone. We also need to get these—” she picked up one of the boxes, “off the table and somewhere safe. If the hunters get in and knock everything over again, they might eat it, but we’ll lose all the information.”
He understood. She wanted to control how it went down.
Normally, he’d say it didn’t matter, but control would let them duplicate what worked… until all the night hunters were gone.
They cleaned up the boxes and put them in a low cabinet behind the pots and pans. If anyone came by—if anyone even cared what they were doing—hopefully they wouldn’t even see the poison. And the hunters couldn’t smell well enough to root it out.
Doing his regular check, Cage pulled up the camera footage from the night before. This time, the man down the street was out again, though he didn't come as close. Cage could tell it was the same person over and over. He just couldn’t tell if it was or wasn’t his father.
He was losing any last thread of hope that the mysterious prowler might be Nate Mazur. Even if that body had once belonged to his dad, the man wasn't coming near his own home. That indicated a severe head injury, or madness. If that was Nate, it probably wasn't the man he’d known anymore.
Cage truly thought it was someone totally different. He and his family couldn’t be the only ones to think about fighting back. He knew for a fact they weren’t the only ones to lose a family member.
“We need to clear the table,” his sister announced as she looked over his shoulder. She saw the footage and commented, “I’m becoming more and more afraid to watch him. One night he will go up against the dogs and lose.”
Cage moved the things from the table and pulled out the tarp they were now keeping handy. Joule chose one of the other huge pieces of meat, this one a section of ribs, from the freezer. Hauling it to the newly prepped workstation, she worked on stringing it up.
She began to jab it with another huge fishhook, but sighed. “Last time, they broke the cord. Maybe I shouldn’t put the hook in. Maybe I should just drill a hole in the meat and loop the cord through. Can we do that?”
Cage joined her as they tried to rework the initial system. What had been a thirty-minute project became an hour and a half. But they got the meat strung up on the pulleys, which luckily had not broken, and ready to go for the evening. If the neighbors saw them hanging huge pieces of beef or pork from the tree in their front yard, they didn't say anything.
The two of them ate dinner and headed upstairs into the attic—where the air was now almost unbelievably hot.
Turning to his sister, Cage said, “We've got to figure out how to sleep in the house again.”
She whispered back, “I think we can sleep in your room. You have two beds in there, and you have access to the bathroom. That means we can barricade your door and the bathroom door and have a room to move through. It means if they get in, we have another door we can barricade if we have to.” Clearly, she’d been thinking about this. “Also, you have windows.”
He’d been thinking about windows, too. “Let's rig the windows with some kind of method to get up to the roof rather than down to the ground.”
“Maybe.” She rolled over, hands behind her head as though she were looking at the stars and not at old attic beams.
Camping, he thought. Lying outside and looking up at the stars. Gone forever—unless they could kill the hunters.
Joule interrupted his thoughts. “Maybe we should just put attic access in your room, you know, as a backup.”
“We’d also need something from the bathroom, in case they breach and get into the bedroom and then we’re stuck in the bath…” he was thinking out loud. So many options, so many precautions necessary, just to sleep in his own bed.
But they’d watched their mother, he thought. They'd watched her install the attic access in the hall. “I think we can do it.”
His sister was right. This house was never going to sell again. Still, he'd not seen a notice from the bank.
He had one and a half days of school left. How many days until they found where the tracker had gone?
They had to get one to work. Joule was right about that, too. They couldn’t poison the dogs until they could follow them.
It took him a long time to fall asleep that night. His brain was churning with questions about dosage, about whether or not the large piece of meat on a pulley system would still work as bait, or whether the night hunters would figure it out…
As he fell asleep, he heard a series of growls and deep barks. He heard them close to the house. The night hunters were always close.
57
Joule surveyed the yard in the afternoon light, hands on her hips, a frown pulling her brows together at the mess.
They’d managed to sleep through their alarm that morning, probably due to the heat of the attic. The two of them had thrown off their covers in a rush to get ready, and a few minutes later, squealed out of the driveway heading for school late.
They’d considered skipping, but it was the last full day and now not even a full day for them. Yearbooks were coming in. So Joule had gotten hers signed by everybody who was left to offer a word of encouragement for the future or fun memories of the past.
It hadn’t been quite the joyous day she'd been looking forward to, and she reconsidered skipping tomorrow. There was plenty to do here, and she thought maybe it was better not to say goodbye.
Now, they had to make a decision. They needed to find a barricade for the bedroom, clean up after the night hunters took the bait, and track the device that appeared to have been eaten. There wasn’t enough daylight left for all of it. So they were going to spend another night in the attic.
The yard clean up had been more than she’d bargained for. The hunters must have played with the food. She admitted to herself that the mess was a bitch, but she didn’t really care. She cared that the hunters ate the tracker and that their meter could track it. This gave her a second chance.
They could fortify the room tomorrow. Or even the next day. They had gotten their yearbooks signed today. So at least that was done.
But now the yearbook was in her backpack, sitting on the kitchen table, full of the multicolored scrawls and signatures. Her classmates’ handwriting was crappy, while hers and Cage’s were neat and precise. Their mother had read up on handwriting and development, then handwriting and memory, and she and her brother were homeschooled in penmanship. So far, Joule had only found the skill useful when signing yearbooks.
But she quickly pushed those thoughts aside as she surveyed the yard. Her brother stood beside her, looking at the once-again broken nylon cord. Cage leaned over into the grass and produced a glove from his back pocket, snapping on the blue nitrile like a pro before picking something up. He held it up for her. “Piece of rib.”
Joule looked at the slightly curved bone with tiny bits of beef still hanging on it and agreed. She joined him, searching around for others.
“Well, I'm glad we took the hook out of it, or one of them would have eaten it,” Joule said.
“I'm not really sure that's such a problem,” he countered, speaking downward to the grass where he plucked up something else. “We're trying to kill them. Even though we're trying to kill them in large numbers, getting the occasional one as a side gig doesn't seem so bad to me.”
“It's not that.” She was still looking around while she talked. “If we hook it, it might very well wind up hanging here. What if the rope didn't break? If it was caught like a fish, what would happen? It wouldn't die. It would almost definitely thrash and lash out. We’d probably have to shoot it, and the neighbors haven’t asked any questions, but shooting one hanging from a hook in our front yard might very well raise some eyebrows. Or even worse, the other hunters might stay w
ith it, and we'd wake up to a yard where we couldn't even get to the car.”
From the look her brother gave her, he hadn't thought all those options through. She knew she did not want to catch hunters like fish. Not until she knew what to do with one.
“Okay, no hooks.” He turned and surveyed the other damage. “It looks like they ate it all the way up the cord this time.”
There were no snapped pieces, only a frayed end that looked like it had slid out of the pulley. It now lay like a snake across the yard, the bright color like a warning. Luckily, it hadn't seemed to draw any attention to the motor twenty feet away that was still running. While everything was hooked up, the motor had pulled the meat up and down.
Joule analyzed the whole scene. “Only a few bones left. It looks like they took the bait.” She paused, “That means we go out and track again.”
“Clean up first,” her brother said, turning and heading over to the cord. Coiling that around his arm, he next picked up the machine and set it inside the front door. There was every possibility they'd put it out again tonight. But if not, they weren't leaving anything valuable out to get trampled, chewed, or dragged away.
Joule was not looking forward to going out after the tracker. The last time that hunter had appeared behind them, seemingly out of nowhere. And when they'd gone back to get it, the body was gone. The creatures seemed to be hauling away their dead. At least, something was.
Honestly, Joule didn't think she wanted to find out what that something might be. Even if it was just a standard issue Black Bear, that was more than she could handle. Hell, she was growing more certain that the night hunters themselves were more than she could handle.
“We need a backpack,” Cage said
“I've got my quiver. No more room on my back,” she replied. “Why?”
“Tarp, spare tarp, folding shovel,” he went on, and she realized he was right. They wanted to be ready to haul an animal back if they found one. They didn't want to lose it like last time, and making a trip back home for supplies was clearly the way to do that.
The Hunted Page 24