The Silent Ones

by James Hunt

  The FBI Director had been uncharacteristically jittery on their ride from the city and into the country. He picked at his fingertips. “Grant, I know you and I haven’t always seen eye to eye. And I know you think of me as some guy who’ll do whatever it takes to make it to the top no matter whose neck I have to step on, but…” He shifted in his seat, the leather groaning from his movements, and he finally lifted his eyes and met Grant’s gaze. “I’m not a young man anymore. And the older I get, the more time I spend reflecting on the past. I’ve screwed you over before. I’m sorry for that. I really am.”

  Grant had been in enough interrogation rooms during his career to know the difference when someone was being genuine, when they were lying.

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” Grant said. “Every choice I’ve made, no matter how bad, was my own. I did it because I thought it was right. I did it to protect someone from something terrible. I’ll have to answer for those sins one day. Maybe I’m answering for them now. But I’ve come to terms with it because even after all of the shit I’ve waded through, I can still say I’ve had a good life. Good because of the people I’ve known and loved.”

  Hickem nodded, grinning as he leaned back. “Always the self-righteous prick.”

  Grant tried to repress his own smile. “Always the arrogant asshole.”

  Hickem fished his phone from his inner jacket pocket and extended it to Grant. “Her number’s in my contacts. Thought you might want to talk to her. Just in case.”

  A thousand different emotions flooded through Grant. He had been tempted when Mocks offered. It would be nice to hear her voice. He wouldn’t need to say anything, just listen.

  Grant shook his head. “No.”

  Hickem tilted his head to the side, trying to get him to take the phone. “Grant, you don’t know what you’re walking into out there—”

  “I know exactly what I’m walking into.” Grant turned away from the phone, looking out the window, as if turning his attention away from the phone would make it disappear. “I can’t go back now.”

  “You’re not going back, you’re giving yourself an opportunity to say goodbye,” Hickem said. “Just call her. Tell her what you should have told her before you left. I know you never got the chance.”

  Something blurry drifted past the window. Snow.

  Grant looked up to the sky, the first flurries of winter coming down around them and blanketing the dead world in white.

  “If I call her, I know I won’t be able to finish this,” Grant said, his voice wavering. “The moment I hear her voice, I’ll break. If I survive, we’ll have a chance to talk again. It might be through bulletproof Plexiglas, but we’ll be able to talk. I’ll only be able to face her then. But not before.”

  Grant waited until he was sure that Hickem had put the phone away before he turned away from the window.

  Hickem shook his head. “A man with conviction. If you were in the federal government, I’d suspect you would have been selected for one of our secret black site services. They always tend to go after individuals with a high sense of duty. You’re easier to manipulate.” But then Hickem frowned and shook his head again. “Except you’d never follow through with an order that you didn’t think was right. Because that same iron constitution that makes up your gut would override any orders that you were given, and they’d have to shoot you for treason, even though it should be the other way around.” He tapped his chest. “I’m the crook, Grant. It should be me heading into those woods.”

  “You’re more than welcome to join me,” Grant said, grinning.

  Hickem boomed with laughter, slapping his leg. “I’ve grown up a little, but I’m still not stupid.”

  The snowfall slowed their approach, and by the time they reached the drop-off point in the woods, the snow was coming down in sheets.

  “It’ll be three feet by tomorrow,” Grant said, zipping up his jacket and enjoying the last few moments of warmth inside the car.

  “Remember,” Hickem said. “You text the moment it’s done.”

  Grant nodded and then opened the door. He squinted from the snowfall, which quickly drenched his body in white as he stepped around the back and gathered his weapons.

  The ammunition was there next to the pistol and rifle, just as Hickem had promised, the bullets already loaded into the magazines, of which he was given two. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, clipped the Glock and its holster to his right hip, and clipped the hunting blade onto his left.

  In addition to the weapons, Hickem had packed a backpack with some provisions. Water, food, some medical supplies should he get himself hurt. After he lined the pockets of his jacket with the pair of magazines for each weapon, he donned the backpack and then headed for the tree line.

  “Grant!”

  He stopped, turning to find Hickem with his head out of the window, squinting from the snowfall, which nearly made him vanish. “Make it back alive. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  “No promises.”

  Grant entered the woods, the snowfall dropping visibility to only a few feet. He would be fighting the cold, fighting fatigue, and fighting his own doubt. Because as sharp as his focus had become over the past three months, he was also hunting a man who had made it his life’s work to hunt other people.

  Grant had no delusions of what he was up against. He was heading into the belly of the beast, the gates of hell, and he wasn’t leaving until he made sure the devil finally got his due.

  59

  A deep rivet cut a winding path through the woods, leaving a calling card for Dennis that Grant had no intention of erasing. He wanted the pair to find one another. And the fastest way to make that happen was to make it easy for Dennis to find Grant.

  But he wasn’t on a suicide mission, and Grant made sure to keep to the dense areas of the woods, which provided good cover.

  The temperature plummeted the deeper Grant trudged into the woods. Thick streams of white air jettisoned from his mouth with every labored breath. In the few hours he’d been walking, the skies had dumped almost two feet of snow.

  But while the snow continued to fall, it had finally lightened. Visibility improved, and Grant kept the rifle at the ready. And while Hickem had warned him not to stay out past nightfall, Grant had no intentions of turning around.

  Grant had chosen to keep to the high ground, stopping at the elevated hills and raising the scope to his eye. The snow and cloud cover made it harder to see, but his eyes were still sharp, and he was confident enough to find Dennis hiding amongst the trees and shrubs.

  Wind whistled through the trees, blowing snow against Grant’s back. His hair was dusted with fresh powder, like the top of a freshly sugared pastry, and there were matching flecks that covered his eyebrows.

  After reaching his third elevated point and finding nothing, Grant took a break. A flat rock provided a chair, and he laid the rifle across his lap.

  The backpack that Hickem gave him provided some snacks and water, and he used the opportunity to refuel. The jerky was hard as rock, made worse by the cold, and the water in the bottle was so cold it burned.

  But sitting high on those rocks, looking down at the forest that was blanketed in a fresh sheet of pure white snow, the wind blowing through the leafless branches, Grant couldn’t help but remember his proposal to Sam as they had that picnic on the cliff looking out over the water.

  The food was better than the jerky, but it was the company he missed the most. Her laugh, her smile. He could still see her bathing in the sunlight after their meal.

  Grant knew that there were few moments in life that were perfect, and it was rare to have the foresight to actually know when those moments were occurring, but that day, that picnic, that moment with Sam was perfect.

  “I miss you,” Grant said, his voice raspy and tired.

  A tear fell, but quickly froze against his skin. Grant wiped the frost away and then bowed his head, shutting his eyes.

  He wiped his nose, finished the jerky
, and then straightened his back as he continued his trek deeper into the forest.

  Breathless, his calf starting to ache again, Grant stopped and leaned against a tree trunk. He reached for the wounded muscle, which lay protected under his thick jeans and socks. When he pressed his fingers against it, he could feel the muscle throbbing.

  The medications that they’d given him were starting to fade, the cold accentuating all of those aches and pains that he’d accumulated over the past three months. Every bruise, every fatigued muscle, they all roared their discontent.

  Grant shoved himself off the tree, using the momentum to fall into a steady pace. But with so much of his concentration on keeping himself moving, Grant had sacrificed his ability to see beyond the narrow path in front of him. Dennis made sure to let him know about the mistake.

  The quiet of the dead forest ended with the harsh crack of gunfire. The single shot shattered the frozen air and sent Grant face first into the snow, scrambling toward the nearest tree for cover.

  The surprise of the gunfire triggered adrenaline, and the addition of the shock from the snow momentarily erased the pain.

  Once behind cover, Grant checked himself for any injuries, knowing his adrenaline would mask the pain. He peered around the tree trunk, hoping to find some indication of where Dennis was firing from, but the only remnants of Dennis’s presence were the lingering echoes from the gunshot.

  When silence finally landed, Grant surmised that the shot must have come from the east given the position of his cover. He readjusted his grip on the rifle and searched for another vantage point.

  A small hill with a few low-lying rocks looked big enough to conceal Grant if he lay on his stomach, but it was at least twelve paces from his current position. He could try and crawl, but it would give Dennis too much time to line up a shot. He’d have to run.

  But just to see how much time he might have, Grant reached for the blade of his knife, using the shiny reflective surface as a kind of mirror. He placed a firm grip on the handle and then slowly extended the blade from behind the trunk.

  Grant adjusted the angle of the blade, squinting as he tried to make out the blurred images of trees and snow, and then a bullet connected with the blade and flung the knife from Grant’s hands, the contact stinging his hand and sending vibrations up his arm.

  When Grant looked back over to the rocks again, they seemed even farther than they were before. But at least now he knew Dennis’s position.

  Grant adjusted himself to a squat, ignoring the pain in his calf, and pivoted toward the rocks. Twelve paces, that was all he had to do. Just move as fast as he could, keep low, and then dive for the rocks. He ditched the backpack to make himself a smaller target and then adjusted his grip on the rifle. He took a breath. Twelve steps.

  Grant pushed off the snow with his good back leg and propelled himself from cover. Thankfully the snow wasn’t as deep in this patch of open space between tree and rock, and Grant was on his fourth step when he heard the first gunshot.

  He jumped, but when he planted his right leg down after the noise, he realized that Dennis had missed. Five more steps passed before another gunshot thundered, and this time Grant’s ears warmed from the vibrations of the bullet that missed his head by a quarter of an inch, the surprise of the bullet nearly knocking him to the ground.

  With only two more steps between Grant and cover, he again used his good right leg to lunge forward, and landed on the hardened soil with a thud as he tucked his legs behind the rock before Dennis could shoot.

  Safely behind the cover, lying flat on his stomach, Grant caught his breath.

  Once the dull ache from the harsh landing diminished, Grant managed to work himself into a defensible prone position. The pile of rocks that he chose as cover provided a narrow opening at the base, just wide enough for him to aim the scope through and search for Dennis.

  The world narrowed into the magnified view of the scope, and Grant slowly used the crosshairs to help him scan the area in a grid. “Where are you?”

  Trees, rocks, snow, branches, dead leaves, but no sign of Dennis. The man could have already moved, switching positions now that he knew where Grant had run to.

  Grant lowered the scope and glanced to his right. The rock ledge ran for another ten yards or so. He grabbed the rifle and shimmied in the same direction, dragging his belly across the rocks and snow, ensuring that he didn’t expose any part of himself to Dennis, who was a good enough shot to take advantage of even a few inches.

  He crawled all the way to the end of the ledge and then set up shop again, hoping a new angle would provide a better vantage point to locate Dennis.

  Grant again peered through the scope, adjusting the magnification, thinking he might have been too close, and gave himself a wider lens to search the woods. He gave another slow scan of the trees, searching between the trunks for flesh, and then a flash of gray caught his eye. He blinked, but kept the position of the scope on the artificial color, and then watched it move.

  Dennis.

  The movement suggested that he might be his back, poking up through the snow. He was crawling. Just like Grant. Grant reattached the scope to the rifle, hoping that he would be able to find the bastard again, and then rested the rifle over the flattest portion of the rocks that he could find to keep the rifle level. He knew he’d only get one shot at this, an opportunity to have the upper hand on the hunter that had never believed he could be prey.

  Heart pounding and his hand unsteady from the adrenaline, Grant maneuvered the crosshairs over Dennis. Less than an inch appeared above the snow, and it continued to sink below the snow as it trudged forward, Grant struggling to track it. He just didn’t have enough space to make a clean shot. But he wanted to let Dennis know that he was here. And he might be able to spook him. Grant aimed as close as he could get, then squeezed the trigger.

  In the same instance of the gunshot, Dennis ducked beneath the snow, seemingly dissolving into the earth.

  Grant kept his attention trained on the same location, waiting for Dennis to bolt, to run, to do anything but lie down. Except that was exactly what the bastard did. He was playing dead.

  Grant knew that if he had made contact, that he would have seen some kind of burst of blood, crimson spraying across the white snow. But there was nothing. He had missed. But it had spooked Dennis enough to keep still. They were at a stalemate.

  Wind gusted from the north that blew at the snow that had collected in the barren tree branches, and it started to fill some of the tracks that Grant had made.

  While he lay on his stomach, frozen in the same position, eyes trained on Dennis’s location like a hawk, he thought about how nature had a way of covering up tracks that humans made on the earth. If left unchecked and unchallenged, the grass would grow back into the cities. Ships floating in the seas would sink and dissolve into dust, adding to the sediment on the ocean floor. The world would continue to march on, growing, living, breathing, surviving.

  Given what Grant had been thrust into, he found that thought oddly comforting. After all of the death, all of the pain, all of the sacrifice, it was nice to know that the world would continue to spin, and the people he cared about would continue to breathe.

  He hoped Sam saw the world that way too. He hoped that she didn’t fall into the same crippling despair as he did all of those years ago. And he prayed that she would find someone new, as he did after Ellen died.

  “You’re a patient man, Grant!”

  The voice was distant, traveling far because of the cold.

  “I think you’re starting to take after me!” Dennis laughed, his chuckle shaking more snow from the sky. “How much longer are you going to last?”

  “However long it takes for you to move,” Grant answered.

  “You’re not as nimble as you used to be, Grant. You know how many times I hid out in the cold from my father? I’d be out there for days at a time until that drunken binge finally ended. I’m home, Grant. But you’re far away from yours.”


  Grant shivered, but whether it was from the cold or Dennis’s words, he couldn’t be sure.

  “You should know that it doesn’t end here for me, Grant,” Dennis said. “After I kill you, I’ll be sending your scalp to Samantha. I’ve heard that she’s quite the sharpshooter. First in her class at the FBI school until that trainer got a little to handsy with her. But she seems like a capable woman, I’m sure she’d be able to handle—”

  Grant squeezed the trigger, the gunshot ending the conversation. Grant pulled the bolt action lever back, dispensing the shell, and loaded another one in the chamber. He had four left in the current magazine.

  It wasn’t until after the ring of the gunshot that Dennis’s laughter started up again. “Well, well, well! I think that patience is starting to run thin.”

  Grant clenched his jaw, his entire body shaking from the anger, the cold, the pain.

  “Or maybe I’ll just let her live,” Dennis said. “Wouldn’t that be more torturous for her? I know that you wanted to die after Ellen passed away. There wasn’t anything more satisfying than a bullet to the head for you. Remember that, Grant? It was life that was torture for you, just as it is now. There’s freedom in that pain. It pushes us, makes us stronger, better. Why do you think I killed all of those people?”

  “Because you’re a fucking psychopath!” Grant said.

  Dennis feigned a groan of hurtful woe. “Oh, Grant. Don’t be so mean. You and I both know that I’m not a psychopath. I’m just the other end of the equation. I’m the yin to your yang. Because you exist, I must exist. It’s Newton’s third law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s science. It’s our purpose. It’s why we’re both here right now. To bring balance.”

  It could have been the fact that Grant had spent the past three months sharing the same headspace as Dennis Pullman, but he understood the logic. Afterall, Dennis had done all of this because of what Grant had done to Dennis.