71
Cage traipsed the woods again. They’d been doing this every night this week.
Joule said they looked like zombies in their black clothing and carbon black powder. But he felt like a vampire, sleeping all day, out in the woods all night, hunting things, even though hunting was not in his general nature.
He was grateful that the last three nights they’d seen no night hunters. Though they had brought meat stuffed with rat poison, they’d ended up taking it back home with them. They’d not needed to refill the trough.
They’d stood to the side of the still-full basket, Joule bringing the back of her wrist to her nose as if to block the smell. It would have left black marks all over her face, if she hadn’t already been covered in the powder.
“It’s starting to smell,” she said from behind her wrist, which was surely doing nothing for the odor. “Do we need to clean it up? Are the scavengers going to come for it?”
He hadn’t thought about it, but vultures might come down and pick at it once it reached a certain level of ripeness. They would ingest the poison if they ate from this pile of meat. “I guess so. Does it look like it’s been touched since last night?”
She shook her head, and then made a full three-sixty degree turn, as she checked the woods.
Shit, he thought. They’d gotten lax. They’d seen no night hunters for three whole nights. They dug another hole, pulling up the second burrow. They found all the hunters within that dugout were already dead, including six pups.
He’d bagged three of them. Separately, of course. He’d carried two, and Joule had carried one. They’d met with Dr. Brett and handed off the puppy corpses. That was incredibly disturbing, he’d thought, but he had a scientific mind. The creatures were already gone. He couldn’t bring them back. Letting them be studied for science made all the rest of this more worthwhile.
Even Joule, who often was logical to a fault, muttered as she stuffed the bag down into her backpack. “Oh yeah, this isn’t morbid as fuck.”
He’d laughed and then remembered to check his surroundings.
Tonight, they weren’t carrying corpses. Tonight, they left the rest where they’d found them. Tonight, they opened up bags and shoved the meat down into it. Trash bags didn’t zip shut, so they’d double- and triple-bagged it, tying the tops off tightly.
“I think we have to take it to the dump,” Joule told him. “I mean, if we put it in the trashcans at the side of the house, we’re just baiting everything to there. Raccoons, vultures, all the scavengers—and whatever eats it will die. It has to go.”
Once inside, they set the bagged meat on the tile floor. He could smell it, even with the job they’d done trying to mask it. Surely, the night hunters could, too. Maybe they only ate their meat fresh, and that was why this was untouched. Maybe they had figured out it was poisoned, and they were staying away. But then, why weren’t they out? The night cameras had not revealed the pack roaming in the dark any more.
The man in the street with the broadsword still patrolled, but for the past few nights, he’d had nothing to fight. He wandered aimlessly now, broadsword double-clenched in his fists, taking practice swings. Mostly, he seemed to watch, but the last nights had been blessedly boring.
The twins took turns showering the black powder away. They dressed like teenagers in jeans and t-shirts and threw the decaying meat into the trunk of the car. Cage pulled out a can of air freshener and sprayed the trunk within an inch of its life once they’d dropped off their stinky cargo.
They stopped for fast food and sodas on the way home.
That night, as Joule pulled the curtains shut, she turned to him and asked, “Are we done?”
But when he watched the videos from the night cameras the next morning, he saw the man out in the street again. He’d was taking a route that was becoming his normal patrol, walking up and down the street, always swinging the hefty sword. There had been no night hunters, no fights. The street was quiet, and Cage wondered—would his neighbors start getting dogs and cats again?
But somewhere around four in the morning—according to the timestamp on the video—the man walking patrol was attacked from behind. A pack of nine or ten night hunters managed to sneak up on him. From his reaction, or lack thereof, he hadn’t heard them at all. They didn’t surround him the way the pack had the night Nate and the twins had gone out.
Instead, they’d crept up as a unit, all from the same direction, all jumping in concert. In seconds, they leapt on him and took him down. In minutes, they had carried off the pieces.
Cage sat stunned and forced himself to watch the video a second time, just to be sure he’d actually seen it. Finishing, he paused before running it again. He was startled to find his sister had appeared over his shoulder and was watching it, too.
“Uh-oh,” she said softly, but the sound was a hurricane of feeling. She mixed regret, sadness, guilt, fear, and more into those two syllables. “I think this is our fault. Because that's not our pack. We took out our night hunters. We did what we meant to do, but instead we made things so much worse.”
72
Joule couldn't help but stare at the video. She spoke into the air, though the words were directed at Cage. “I thought we were done. I thought we had it figured out.”
“I did, too.” Cage slowly closed the screen on his laptop and turned and looked at her. “What do we do now?”
“I don’t even know.” She shrugged her shoulders, shook her head, and felt her eyes glaze over. “I thought we did something good, but what we really did was cleared the way for a worse pack to come in.”
“Is there a worse pack?” Cage asked, now getting philosophical. “The ones we had ate several of our neighbors.”
He had a valid point. “But they didn't eat the guy with the broad sword. He managed to hold them off. It appeared he took a few of the hunters out.” She thought it through. The guy with the broadsword was now dead, too. She’d seen it on the video, no denying it. “But these guys got him. So I guess yeah, they are worse.”
Her brother stared into the middle distance as he thought. He was making plans; she could tell. She hadn't quite gotten there yet, still just dealing with being stunned by what she'd seen.
After a few minutes in which neither of them said anything, Joule announced, “I'm tired. I think I'm going to go to bed.”
It was broad daylight, still morning, her hair still drying after her merely passable attempt to wash the carbon powder out of it. Despite the hat, her hair still had a dulled look, and so did Cage’s. She was tired and thought about her brother insisting they had become vampires. She missed the sunshine. The summer days were gorgeous, but she was sleeping through them.
And now they had a new pack of hunters to find—one that was far more deadly.
“I won't be far behind you,” Cage said, but his focus was back on the laptop. He opened the screen again and began hitting keys. Though she was curious, she was more exhausted and Joule headed upstairs.
She'd gotten used to falling asleep with the daylight streaming in around her. And she fell quickly, deeply asleep. But it wasn't comfortable.
Joule dreamed of running in the back door. Of the night hunter leaping at her. In her dream, she stabbed repeatedly with her stiletto. Though in real life, it had been only once—in her memory and in the evidence when they let Dr. Brett carry the dead hunter away.
But in her dream, she slashed, and stabbed, and cut, but her assailant didn't fall.
The hunter didn’t back off. It didn't bleed out or have its muscles go slack. As with dreams, the scenes faded, one into another. She hacked and fought and blinked, and she was suddenly somewhere totally different, but her dream brain accepted it. It wasn’t jarring, but a bit like changing the channel.
This time, she stood alone on the path in the woods. Looking down, she found herself staring at a puppy. In a moment, it was joined by another puppy, and another. Then another. The scene would have made a wonderful internet meme, or a gif, except f
or the fact that these weren’t puppies. Joule knew what these were.
Looking up, she spotted Cage sitting on the rooftop of their house. Though the form was merely an outline of her brother, all covered in carbon black powder, she still recognized him. Sitting at the top of the roofline was odd. They’d never done that and never discussed doing it, at least not as far as she remembered. But Dream-Joule accepted that he was there.
He held the bow and arrow that he had originally gotten for Christmas the year his parents had decided to weaponize their teenagers. Kaya and Nate Mazur had probably thought of the bows and arrows as a cool physics lesson. Cage and Joule had thought of them as the ultimate—and much more dangerous—Nerf gun. Though Cage had eventually grown bored with his toy, Joule had not. She’d practiced. So while she was the better shot and she knew it, he was now aiming at her.
“No!” she yelled, “No!” as her brother pulled back on the bow string and let fly.
Twisting awake, she threw off the covers as she gasped for breath in the bright sun of the bedroom.
Groggily, Cage sat upright in the other bed. He tossed aside his own covers as easily as she had twisted into hers. “Are you all right?”
“No?” She shook her head. She was awake. Her brother wasn’t sitting on the rooftop trying to pick her off with her own chosen weapon. She explained the dream briefly, and then added, “That sucks. That sucks monkey balls.”
“Well,” he said, “if you can swear creatively, you're probably not that traumatized.”
Joule had to admit he wasn’t wrong. The dream had been no more traumatizing than her real life had been recently. “What time is it?”
“A little after four. Want to get up?”
She nodded; she certainly didn't want to go back to sleep. It didn't seem to be doing her any good. She'd been asleep for far longer than the dreams had taken time to occur. But in her memory, she passed out cold, she went through hell, and then woke back up. She felt as though she'd gotten maybe an hour of rest at most, but the whole day had passed.
His feet now swung down, bare toes digging into the carpet.
Cage looked at her, the expression pulling his brows together telling her he hadn’t yet come to terms with the new—deadlier—pack. “What do we do now?”
They couldn't go out and hunt the pack the way they had before. At least, she didn't think so. The new pack? Well, they didn't even know where it was.
Images flashed through her mind of the dreams she’d just wrenched herself from. As hideous as they had been, maybe they were good for something.
“I think I have an idea.”
73
Joule was once again covered in the black carbon powder and blending into the night. She sat on the biggest branch of the study tree in the front yard. If the branch broke, she was fucked.
But there was only one Y where the trunk split. Because that was the sturdiest position, she’d given that spot to Cage. Her brother was slightly heavier than she was, so she had taken the branch.
He was safer. She was more comfortable.
She didn't really worry about the branch breaking, because if they didn't take care of the problem of the night hunters, they were both going to die.
The two of them had spent the morning climbing the tree, hacksaws in hand. They had crawled out along the strong-looking branches then, and cleared out the dead twigs and smaller branches that would interfere with their shots.
They let the detritus fall to the ground below. Though the intention had been to clear it, they realized the ground cover would make it more difficult for the night hunters to sneak up underneath them. It might even slow them down if Cage and Joule were spotted up in the tree. So the twins left the kindling where it fell.
Because this was the tree where they had built the first ladder, they had relatively easy up-and-down access. The work had been in cutting and checking, cutting and checking.
Now, they sat here, blending into the night. They had hauled the ladder up behind them and waited. The trough no longer hung in the forest. That night hunter den had been empty for a few days now. There had been no activity; she and Cage had checked.
They’d done the heavy, sweaty work of hauling it out and re-setting it in the center of the cul de sac. The trough now sat on a central stilt—much the way many dinner tables were made—in hopes that smaller animals would not be able to climb underneath, around and up over the side to where this contaminated meat sat.
So far, she’d seen no smaller animals even attempt it. Still, Joule kept her eyes on the contents. Two of the pieces of meat held the remaining two tracking devices, and Joule had already placed an order for more.
They'd spent more of their money on cheap, leftover pieces of steak that the butcher had been willing to sell them at a discount. She was keeping a closer eye on the budget, certain that while her parents wouldn’t disapprove, this was not how they’d intended their life insurance money and retirement savings to be spent.
She and Cage hadn't worried about making the bait dance this time, hoping that the food itself would be enough attraction for the new pack. As she sat up here and waited, though, she wondered if that hadn't been a mistake. Still, they had a plan for that, too. If the hunters didn't come tonight, they would rig the table up with the pulleys and make it move.
She was beginning to think that was going to be necessary, as they hit three, then four, then five hours in and she'd seen nothing.
She wanted to ask Cage what he thought. Clearly, this worse pack had moved into this newly emptied territory. But if they had expanded their own territory—maybe doubled it, for example—they might spend one night in one area and one night and another. They might not have even come close enough to know there was a feast for them here.
As she followed those thoughts, Joule didn’t like where they went. The new pack would give birth to more pups if they could defend the larger territory. The pack size would grow with their land size. Given the way this pack fought, that was the last thing Joule wanted.
Her bow sat loosely across her lap. She did have an arrow notched on to the string, and more waited patiently in the quiver she wore across her back. Cage had the gun ready as well as a small crossbow he'd purchased online with overnight shipping and practiced with yesterday in the large backyard.
At four a.m., when her muscles ached and she began to worry that nothing would happen tonight, she saw the shadows appear at the end of the street.
Reaching out, she tapped her brother. He offered only a small, sharp nod in return as they had agreed not to speak and not to move unless it was absolutely necessary. However, some small motions were required. If her legs fell asleep and she fell out of the tree, that was far worse than drawing attention to the tree—a place they at least believed the night hunters couldn't reach.
But what if these new ones could climb trees?
Her heart clenched as the pack of close to ten hunters headed quietly up the street. She'd watched the videos enough now that she recognized the leader with his large, pointy ears, broad shoulders, and thick face. She knew how he attacked and she knew that the others would follow without hesitation, leaping almost as a single, multi-ton unit.
Slowing her breathing—in through her nose and gently out through her mouth—Joule watched as night hunters came up the street toward the trough that now waited in the center of the cul de sac.
She'd been ready to shoot an arrow nearby and scare off a squirrel, raccoon, or possum. But maybe, in putting the trough out in the wide open, those animals were too afraid to even try to snatch any food.
Before, when the hunters had come to the bait, they’d darted between the bushes that lined the front garden. They’d snuck in between the tall grasses at the base of the fence at the edge of the yard. They’d rushed from one hiding spot to another, to the tree, and then to the meat—short bursts of activity that left them in the open but ended quickly with them hidden. This time, that would not be an option. And maybe that was keeping the smaller c
reatures safe. She could only hope.
Joule watched as the lead hunter trotted up to the trough and took a sniff. The others all hung back, waiting for him to make a decision. She crossed her fingers and prayed to several Gods that it worked.
The social interaction between the creatures was fascinating to watch. Most people never got to see a live wolf pack in action. Maybe on video, or on a wildlife show, but not up close. Even then, one could watch the sharks hunt and root for the sharks. One could watch the wolves or the lions take down far bigger prey by acting as a pack, and a person could easily admire the coordinated effort it all took. Right now, though, Joule couldn't admire any of the pack’s maneuvers.
She'd never been the rabbit, the buffalo, or the whale the sharks went after. Not before now.
Joule almost broke their code of silence and hollered out, Yes! when the lead dog leaned in and picked up a steak. It was a signal to those around him. The others moved, circling the trough and leaning their heads in. Piece by piece, they began to pick up the meat wrapped in cotton twine and stuffed with rat poison—and two lucky winners would get a tracker, too.
She watched as they ate, their very presence keeping away the smaller animals. Hopefully, they would eat everything in the trough. She and Cage had slightly understocked it, trying to be sure the hunters swallowed every last tracker, if possible.
Slowly, the creatures examined each piece, picking it up, chewing on it, and picking it up again. Occasionally, they fought over a morsel. But they had gobbled up most of the rat poison that had fallen to the street when one steak was torn in half from a tussle. Joule made a mental note to clean up the spill as soon as the sun came up—and the light was creeping up ever so slightly down at the end of the street.
All around her, the daylight was tiptoeing in, and she was beginning to wonder why the night hunters hadn't already left.
The Hunted Page 31