Hunters

by Chet Williamson

  "Maybe it's just a hoax," Larry said hopefully.

  "And maybe a ten-point will gallop out of my butt," Ben Sloan said. Nobody laughed.

  They took down the fire emergency gates, then got into three vehicles: Ned's Blazer, the police car, and the medical van, both of which were equipped with four-wheel drive. They drove a mile over the dirt road that was covered with dead leaves, until they came to a side road almost hidden by brush. As they descended into a deep ravine, the first large flakes of snow dropped onto the windshield. They melted quickly, but Ned's wipers could not whip them away quickly enough to keep the primitive road ahead visible.

  "Shit," Larry muttered. "A wet, heavy snow. This is gonna be lovely by morning."

  "It's supposed to get colder," Megan said. "Not a good prognosis. It'll all freeze up then, with new snow on top."

  "Woods is probably the safest place to be," Larry said.

  "Unless you're at Camp Kessler," Megan replied. Ned kept gazing through the windshield like a man hypnotized, and said nothing.

  Ned stopped his Blazer at the top of the other side of the ravine and got out. They took large emergency flashlights from the trunk and waited for the others to do the same.

  "We walk from here," Ned told Statler. "A drag trail parallels the creek for about half a mile. The camp's along the trail."

  Each of the ten people in the party carried a large torch, but the heavy snow made the path in front of them a mass of solid, churning whiteness. It seemed to Ned as though the huge snowflakes were a flock of white birds, constantly darting around their faces and into their eyes, a world of swirling doves. The ground beneath them grew soggy with the accumulating snow, and their feet squelched in the leafy mire with every step.

  "We're soon there," Ned said to Megan and Larry, who were walking on either side of him. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he thought he saw a light ahead that was not made by the reflection of their torches on the snowflakes. "Wait a minute," he said, and stopped. "Turn your lights off, everybody."

  They did, and ahead, fifty yards through the dancing flakes, they saw another light, surprisingly bright even in the storm, and Ned knew that it must be a kerosene lantern. He could see the outlines of the cabin, the shed next to it, and figures hanging between the two. It looked like a cottage in a shaken snow globe.

  They turned their lights back on and kept walking. By the time they got to the little bridge that crossed the creek to the cabin, they all could see exactly what the things were that were hanging from the iron pipe, the wet snow clinging to the dead skin.

  The skin was white, for all the blood had been drained from the carcasses. The blood lay in large, red, partly frozen puddles beneath the bodies, very near the mounds of bowels that had once hotly filled the empty men. "My dear God," Ned heard someone murmur reverently. Their flashlights played across the scene, but most of the light came from a Coleman lantern sitting on the porch, sheltered from the snow by the small, peaked roof. The light the lantern made was bright and white and pure, and made the entire tableau painfully easy to see.

  When Ned could look away, he saw Megan, her eyes wide, as though she could not believe what she was seeing, but was unwilling to turn away from it, wanting to encompass it all with a gaze, and understand the reasons behind such savagery. Then he heard one of the policemen retch, followed by the spatter of vomit on the wet snow. He tasted bile, but knew that he would not throw up. He had seen enough two days before.

  "This is bad," one of the medics said. "God knows I've seen my share, but..."

  Ben Sloan, who as coroner of Elk County had seen decades worth of corpses in various states of decay and disarray, finished it. "This takes the prize."

  "Amen," breathed the medic.

  "Oh Jesus," Chief Statler said, and they all followed his horrified gaze to the door of the rustic shed. It seemed as though a man's head was sticking through the wooden door, his body on the other side. But Ned had seen, as they all had, that one of the hanging bodies was headless. That head had been secured to the door, the obscene parody of a mounted trophy.

  "That's Jim Lincoln," said Ned, the taste of bile now rushing into his mouth. He shone his light on the upside down face of one of the corpses. "And I think that's his son."

  "I know," said Ben Sloan. "The boy was named after me." He shook his head. "Hell's not hot enough."

  "I'm not sure," Ned went on, "but I think that one's Ed Travis. I don't know the others."

  "Christ," Larry said, "that one his own mother wouldn't know. I can't stand this..." He walked closer to the iron bar, his steps reluctant. "Let's get 'em down, for crissake."

  "Not yet." Statler's voice sounded thick with phlegm. "I got to have pictures first."

  "But, Jesus, to leave them up there..."

  "I got to have the pictures. And I'm calling the state police in. We don't touch a thing until they get here."

  Chief Statler contacted the state police on his cellular phone, then directed one of his men to start photographing. For a few minutes the bright, quick lightnings of the camera's electronic flash illuminated the victims even more harshly than the controlled, white fire that clung to the lantern's mantle. The snowflakes seemed frozen by flash after flash, but the quick heat did not melt the snow that was beginning to fill the empty cavities of the torsos, or the valleys between the folds of what had inhabited those cavities.

  Megan spoke for the first time since the discovery, and her voice sounded pitifully weak. "Was it like this?" she asked Ned. "The other man you found?"

  Ned shook his head. "It was bad, but he hadn't...gotten this far." He put his arm around her shoulders, and wondered if she was trembling from the storm or from the sight before them. Either would have been reason enough. "I'm sorry you had to see this. God, I'm sorry that anyone has to see this."

  "It's all right," she said, though he could hear that it wasn't. He was amazed that she could still look and hadn't turned away or begun to cry. It was one strong woman who shared his life. "This way," she went on, "I can see what we're up against." She looked up at him, and he could easily see the pleading in her face as the snowflakes lit on it, making her blink them away. "We have to get out of here, Ned. These people...whoever did this... they'd do anything."

  "We'll leave first thing. There's no way I can deal with something like this..."

  "All right," Chief Statler said. "Larry, Ned, Megan—you can come back to the main road with Ben and me. We'll meet the staters there, and you can take off. No need for you to be here any longer." He stepped closer to Ned. "If this is how these people...do what they do, you get outta here right away. These bastards will get caught. But until that happy day, you and Megan head for the tall timber. Go someplace these lunatics will never find you." He looked at the hanging, gutted bodies, then back at Ned. "But I swear to God, we'll find them."

  THE FOURTH DAY

  Nearly everybody in his deer camp was mad at Earl Pierce. Earl was a worrier. The prospect of snow had worried Earl, and now that the snow had finally started, Earl worried if they would be able to get out on Friday, or if they would be trapped, and if they were trapped, what they would eat if they couldn't get out for days and days.

  His friends had told him not to worry, that they had plenty of food for any emergency, and besides, they were only a quarter mile walk from where their cars were parked, and even if they couldn't get them out the access road, it was only another mile to the main road. As Nick Serrano told him, there was no way they were going to end up like the Donner party.

  Earl hadn't known what the Donner party was, so when Nick told him, Earl started to worry about cannibalism. And when the news came on the radio Wednesday about hunters being purposely killed, Earl's worry quotient increased a hundredfold. Everyone told him not to sweat it, that even if there were a bunch of nuts running around, there were literally millions of hunters in the woods this week, and the odds that one of those few nuts would wander near their camp were astronomical.

  This a
rgument didn't sway Earl, who responded by saying that if one person was going to get shot, then either it was you or it wasn't, which made your chances fifty-fifty. Though his buddies tried to explain to Earl the errors in his calculations, it didn't ease his mind.

  The camp retired around eleven, but Earl sat up for a long time, looking out the window near his bunk. It had begun to snow, and Earl thought he could hear the flakes landing on the cabin roof. By morning the cabin would probably be buried in snow. They wouldn't be able to get the door open. They'd be trapped here all winter, and after the food was gone, they'd start looking at each other like that Donner party. He listened to Tony and Frank's breathing. They seemed to be asleep. Frank was snoring slightly, so Earl put in his ear plugs, and finally went to sleep.

  He woke up when it was still dark. The only light was a gentle red glow from the wood burning stove that kept the cabin warm. Earl slowly got out of bed, put on his slippers, and padded over to the window. It was pitch black outside, but he imagined that he could see a huge mass of encroaching white in the darkness.

  He turned from the window and went to the table where they ate. Tony had brought his big shortwave radio along, but they kept the dial tuned to an FM station in Meadville. Earl sat on the bench, felt in the near dark for the volume slide, and pushed it all the way to the left, then turned on the power. The radio's clock showed him that it was 4:00 in the morning.

  He slid the volume up until he could just make out music. Then he began to spin the tuning knob until he got a human voice. What he wanted was the weather, to find out how many feet of snow they had by now, but what he got was the news.

  A few words gripped him, and then he slid the volume higher, so that he wouldn't miss anything. He sat there fascinated and horrified by what he heard, and slid the volume up some more until finally he heard Tony's voice from out of the darkness, and jumped, startled by the sound.

  "Shit, it's not morning yet, is it?"

  Earl tried to slow the pounding of his heart. "I, uh, couldn't sleep, so I thought I'd get the weather report."

  "Aw jeez, what they say?"

  "Whaz gone on?" Frank mumbled.

  "Earl's listening to the radio."

  "What for?"

  "He can't sleep."

  "Listen!" said Earl, turning the volume still higher, but there was only a story on a state politician caught taking bribes. "Aw, it's over. You're not gonna believe this!"

  "What?"

  "You know those murders? Well, there were more, and they're all connected. A camp—a whole damn camp—was slaughtered today. And mutilated too!"

  "Where 'zis?"

  "Elk County. Just a few counties away!"

  "Don't sweat it, Earl. Still snowing?"

  "Hell, yes! I bet there's a couple feet out there!"

  "And I bet you're exaggerating. At least the snow'll keep the axe murderers away."

  "It's not funny, Tony—they killed six more people. They're anti-hunters, like terrorists."

  "And they're not in this county, Earl."

  "Not yet," Earl said. "Doesn't mean they won't be. They had somebody from the Game Commission on, said it might be dangerous to hunt until they get these guys, and that with the snow and all, it might be better to go home."

  "I'm not going home," Tony said. "Not without my buck."

  "Well, this guy said if you stay to be real cautious with strangers."

  "Earl," Frank said with an edge of impatience in his voice, "you're always cautious with strangers. Hell, you're cautious with toothpicks. Now will you please turn that damn thing off and come back to bed. I got my buck, so if you want me to I'll hunt with you tomorrow to watch your back."

  "Ah, bullshit," Earl said. But it took him a long time to get back to sleep. Every groan of the cabin roof as the weight of the snow piled on it sounded to Earl like the tread of madmen come to kill them all. And then mutilate them.

  Ned Craig woke up at the same time that Earl Pierce drifted off into another fitful sleep. Ned's own sleep had been light, and he had awakened several times throughout the night.

  The luminous dial of his wristwatch read a quarter of five. He gently shook Megan to wake her, but from the immediate response, he assumed she had already been awake. "Ready to go?" he said.

  "Sure."

  The sounds of their preparations woke Larry, who had been on the phone most of the night with Game Commission officials in Harrisburg. Ned had involuntarily overheard much of Larry's end of the conversation—

  If you'd seen what I did, you'd clear the goddam woods...

  These people will stop at nothing...

  Hell, with the snow and these terrorists, I think we should just chase them the hell out...

  There's no buck born worth more lives...

  I'm serious, more people are gonna die...

  "How'd it go last night with Harrisburg?" Ned asked as he put their overnight bags next to the front door.

  Larry sounded disgusted. "They're suggesting that hunters clear out. Blaming the weather as much as the terrorists."

  "What do you expect, Larry? They can't close the woods. No locks on 'em."

  "Yeah, but, Jesus, you think they could do something more than just give a warning."

  "I wish they could," said Megan.

  "Could what?"

  She looked at Larry with eyes that reminded Ned of a Pieta. "Close the woods."

  Ned knew what she meant. Their woods seemed a battlefield now, a site of terrible carnage that should somehow be sanctified. He hoped he could once again think of it as a domain of the living.

  Ned and Megan thanked Larry for his hospitality, and stepped outside into a world of chill gray slowly brightening to white with the first light of morning. It took several minutes to brush the snow off the Blazer, and a thick, stubborn layer of ice was underneath the two inches of snow on the windshield. With the front and rear defrosters roaring and all three of them scraping, it eventually cleared.

  Once they got going, they found the roads treacherously slick, and it took them over twenty minutes to travel the five miles between Larry's house and their own. Ned's Blazer could get through snowdrifts as well as any vehicle in the state, but only chains would improve traction on the hard, slick surface the road had become. He would put on his chains at home while Megan got them packed.

  There were only a few other cars on the road, and most of them were creeping as well. When they pulled into their driveway, the whole area seemed tomb-like, with the material of the sepulchre still falling as if it had no intention of ever stopping. No neighbors seemed to be up yet, and the only vehicle that the snow had not yet made part of the landscape was a pickup truck parked a good way down the street. Probably a friend of a neighbor who got stuck and had to stay the night. There would have been a lot of that last night.

  Ned pulled the Blazer into the garage next to Megan's little Toyota, unlocked the door into the kitchen, and helped Megan carry in their bags. Then he went back to the garage and started to put on the snow chains, while Megan packed and brewed coffee for their trip. In this weather, it might take hours more than usual, and they would be better off stopping as seldom as possible.

  After he had the second set of chains on, he glanced at his watch, and saw that it was nearly 6:30.

  "Where the hell are you?"

  Chuck's voice came back muddy, as though he were still asleep. "Whuh? What the...'m in bed, man."

  "I told you five o'clock!" Jean shouted into the mouthpiece. "Didn't I say five o'clock? It's six-goddam-thirty, Chuck!"

  "Whoop-de-shit, you can tell time. So where the hell are you then?"

  "I'm in my room, I just woke up, my fucking alarm didn't work. What's your excuse?"

  "I didn't set my fucking alarm, okay? I was a little hammered, you know, and—"

  Jean heard Sam's voice behind Chuck's. "And a lil' horny too. Whozit, the bitch?"

  "Yes," Jean said. "You tell Wondergirl that this is indeed the bitch, and if you want to get back to L.A., you ha
ve your ass out at the jeep in five minutes ready to go hunting!"

  Jean slammed the phone down and breathed heavily, trying to calm herself. Then she dressed quickly, not taking the time to shower or brush her teeth. Every minute more that she wasted increased the chance that Ned Craig would be on his way to the woods, for God's sake, and she didn't want to wait until he got home tonight. She wanted him dead, and she wanted it as soon as possible, so that they could leave this idiotic backwater and get back to civilization.

  But god damn it, she would not leave until that bastard was a corpse. And his woman. And, she thought with a Margaret Hamilton smirk, his little dog too, if he had one.

  Outside, the snow had fallen heavily, even on the covered walkways, and she kicked through the stuff, squinting to see if Chuck was at the jeep. When she saw he wasn't, she trudged down to his room door and battered on it until he opened it. His wool hunting shirt was unbuttoned, and his hair looked like squirrels had nested there the night before. "Jesus," he said, "at least lemme slap some deodorant on..."

  "No time. Let's go. Now."

  In the bed, Sam sat up, letting the covers slip from her large breasts. "Morning, sweetie," she said to Jean, who turned her back on her. "No time for a threesome?" she called. Her mocking giggle followed Jean back to the jeep until Chuck slammed the door.

  "Oh, this is nice...what we got, two feet of this shit here? Beautiful..." He started to open the passenger door, but Jean stopped him.

  "No. You drive."

  "Hell, Jeannie, I'm hardly awake yet. And I'm not used to driving in this shit."

  "You're awake enough, and you're a better driver than I am."

  "Can we at least stop for some coffee?" he said as he got into the jeep. Then he stared straight ahead. "It's gonna take us a half hour to get this fucking windshield cleared off."

  "Then we'd better start." Jean started to brush off her side with her gloved hand, while Chuck started the engine and turned on the defroster. Then he got out and started to clean his side. "It's ice underneath," Jean said.