Hunters

by Chet Williamson

  "We need a scraper."

  "Do we have one?"

  "One oughta come with the jeep." He dug through the forms and manuals in the glove compartment, and came up holding a plastic scraper with the name of the rental company printed on it. The thin plastic bent with the effort, then snapped. "Shit!"

  "What else have we got?"

  "Got a knife, but that'll scratch the windshield."

  "Fuck the windshield," Jean said. "Use it."

  Chuck took out the long-bladed hunting knife that had seen such bloody work the day before, and began to scrape away at the thick coating of ice, cursing at the snow that kept covering his handiwork. Several minutes later the ice was gone, and he and Jean got inside and started off.

  At the first stop sign, Chuck stepped on the brakes, but the jeep kept going, sliding through the intersection as Chuck frantically counter-steered to straighten it out. "Holy shit," he said through clenched teeth. "It's like driving on ice!"

  "It is driving on ice," Jean said.

  "I gotta slow down."

  "Go as fast as you can, just don't run us off the road."

  "That's pretty damn tricky."

  "Just do it."

  Jean tensed every time they took a turn or had to brake, but the jeep did not skid again. She told Chuck where to turn, and slowly they made their way toward Ned Craig's house. She took her eyes off the road long enough to reach into the back seat, unzip the AK from its pouch, and load it.

  As she jammed in the curved magazine, Chuck laughed. "Bringin' out the heavy shit, huh?" She nodded. "Hell, for all those automatics cost, you oughta get a little use out of 'em, right?" When she didn't answer, he went on. "Just like I oughta get some use out of that plastic."

  She looked at him coldly, sick and tired of hearing about his goddamned explosives. "Well, if you're a good boy, maybe I'll let you blow up Ned Craig after I kill him."

  By the time Ned finished putting the chains on, Megan had a thermos full of coffee ready and enough clothes packed to see them through a week of cabin living. She had packed her climbing gear as well. "In this weather?" Ned asked as she threw the ropes in the back of the Blazer.

  She shrugged. "If it turns nice, I might be able to get a little climbing in. I'd hate for this to be my dream cliff and not be prepared."

  "Fine with me," Ned said, and shut the tailgate. They put the thermos and the map to the tower up front with them, and backed out of the garage. Ned closed the door with the remote, and backed out onto the highway.

  "My God, that's it! That's his house!"

  "Where that guy's backin' out?"

  "Yes! Go on, go on, cut him off!"

  Chuck tried to accelerate, but he hit an icy patch, and the jeep skidded again. He swung the wheel, but the right rear tire bounced off the curb, and he lost control. Jean shrieked a curse. Chuck put the jeep in first gear, but when he tried to take off, the tires spun on the ice, so that the jeep advanced only inches.

  "Come on!" Jean shouted again, hammering on the dashboard with her fists, as though that would make the jeep's tires grip the ice.

  "Shut the fuck up! I'm trying!" Chuck yelled back. He let the jeep slip back, while Jean struck the dashboard one final time. Then she grabbed the AK, pushed the door open, and stepped outside. She would run up to them and finish it, if she had to.

  But the Blazer was already out of the drive, and was going in the other direction, away from her. Her first impulse was to run a few steps closer before she opened fire, but as she brought up the automatic, her boots slipped on a patch of ice under the snow, and she found herself sprawling on the street, the gun falling into the snow.

  Jean screamed a wordless cry of rage, and lay there a moment, knowing that it was too late to fire now. The Blazer was far out of range of the weapon. She pushed herself to her feet, grabbed the gun, and shuffled back to the jeep, which Chuck had extricated from the icy curb. Her door was still open, and she climbed in, pulling it shut behind her.

  "Great, Jeannie. Who were you, Nancy or Tonya?" Chuck said.

  She was too furious to respond, and could only shout, "Go, go, go!"

  "Okay, Tonya, let's bust some kneecaps..." Chuck followed the Blazer, now a block ahead and pulling away from them fast.

  "They are following us," Ned said, his glance flicking from the rearview mirror to the treacherous road ahead.

  "Do you think it's those people?" Megan said. "The killers?"

  "I don't know." He kept his eyes on the road, awash in white, and accelerated as swiftly as he could without skidding.

  "Could it be somebody from the police? Or the commission?"

  "Why come after me in this weather when they could call?"

  "Could we go to the police? I mean, just drive there?"

  He shook his head. They were heading in the opposite direction, out of St. Mary's on Route 120, and there was no place Ned could think of to turn around without having to pass their pursuers, who could then cut them off on the narrow two-lane road. The few side roads would be unplowed, and he didn't want to take the chance of getting stuck. If he did, and the killers were able to get their jeep as far as Ned had gotten his Blazer, it would be all over. In spite of his misgivings, he had brought along a pistol, though not the one with which he had shot the still unidentified killer. But one pistol, he was sure, would be no match for the firepower the terrorists were probably packing.

  So the only thing to do was to keep driving and hope that he could outdistance them. He pressed on the pedal until he felt the traction of tires against packed snow slacken, then eased off until he had control again. They were still in his rearview mirror, but were slowly growing smaller, and soon, he hoped, would be lost in the falling snow.

  "Goddammit, Chuck, we're losing them!"

  "You want me to run off the fuckin' road? You want to get stuck out here? Just tell me that's what you want, and I'll send this bastard flyin'..."

  "Catch them," Jean said shrilly. "I don't care what it takes, just do it."

  Chuck shook his head as though he couldn't believe what he was doing, then pressed the pedal down. They skidded, straightened, and he eased off. "They got chains, we don't got chains. Makes a big difference." Then he accelerated again until he found a speed that would keep him on the road, while allowing him to keep up with Craig. "We'll keep 'em in sight, okay? If they start to pull ahead, I'll try and go faster, but there's no way in hell, Jeannie, that I can catch 'em."

  "All right, all right, just don't lose them..."

  The jeep stayed behind Ned and Megan until they reached the hill to Goetz's Summit. It was never less than three hundred yards behind them, and never closer than a hundred. When it got that close, Ned fed the Blazer more gas in spite of the risk of skidding. But now, as they labored their way up the snow covered slope, Ned thought the jeep was falling farther and farther behind.

  "I think we're losing them," he told Megan.

  "God," she said, looking back through the rear window. "I hope so."

  "We're losing them!" Jean shouted, banging on the dashboard with a gloved fist. "Catch up, catch up!"

  But the more pressure Chuck put on the pedal, the slower they went. The wheels spun, but the treads, already packed with snow and ice, couldn't grip the slick road surface. "Forget it," he said, just trying to keep the jeep on the road, "we're screwed."

  "No!" Jean cried. "No no no!" And with her last scream of rage, she hit Chuck hard on the shoulder. It was just enough to make him lose control. The wheel spun, the tires shifted, and the path of the jeep twisted backwards. The vehicle slid helplessly, despite Chuck's frantic efforts to control it, and slipped thirty feet down the sloping road, until the front end, completely turned around, slid over the lip of a ditch. The front tires dropped into the foot deep slot, and the jeep finally came to a dead stop, although the back tires, free of the road at last, continued to spin.

  Chuck and Jean sat in silence for a moment, Chuck furious, Jean stunned by what had happened. Then Chuck reached out and turn
ed off the ignition, so that the only sound was their breathing and the fat flakes of snow plopping on the windshield.

  "That was real entertaining," Chuck said through his teeth.

  Then a new sound reached their ears, and they knew that another vehicle was laboring up the slick road. Chuck opened the door and leaped out, and Jean followed. A pickup truck, plastered with snow so that they could not see its color, was rattling up the hill toward the summit, its tire chains biting into the snowpack with little effort.

  They both waved their arms, though the sight of the jeep, its rear end in the air, made their plea for help redundant. The driver, however, simply waved and grinned through his windshield, and the jerky wipers made him look, Jean thought, like a bad animation of an idiot. The illusion wasn't harmed by the fact that he even seemed to be laughing.

  "Hey!" she yelled when he did not slow. "Hey!" She started to run to the truck, thinking to yank the door open and force the hick to stop and help them, but her feet slipped on the incline, and she fell again. By the time she pushed herself to her feet, the truck was twenty yards away, still effortlessly climbing the hill at about the speed that bastard Ned Craig had been doing. She thought she saw the hand wave again through the back window, but the snow was falling so heavily that it might have been her imagination.

  Nevertheless, she thrust her hand into the air in response, her middle finger extended. "You shit!" she cried. "You goddam shit..."—she searched for the most terrible word she could find—"...fucking hillbilly!"

  "That was good, Jeannie," Chuck said. "I'd give you a 5.8 for that." He walked toward her. "And that whacking my arm in the jeep when I was trying to get our asses out of trouble, that was real good too. You're just full of great ideas, aren't you?" He put a hand on her shoulder that she was afraid to shake off. "And since you're such a strategic genius, maybe you can tell me what you think we oughta do now, huh?"

  Despite her fear, she shook him off and looked at him savagely. "I wouldn't have hit you if you'd been doing your job right!"

  "My job! What the hell did you want me to—"

  "Shut up! We're stuck, so let's get unstuck."

  "I'm not really Ah-nult, sweetie, and I don't think even he could pull that jeep back onto the road."

  "Then we'll call for help."

  "There's no phone, Jeannie. Cellulars are back in your car in nice warm L.A., remember? We're just gonna have to wait here until somebody comes along who can take us to a goddam phone, and then we're gonna have to get the jeep pulled out, and then we're gonna have to go back and get our little chums, and then we can start trying to find out where the hell Craig and his bitch went! Now do you think that'll keep us busy enough for the rest of the day?"

  He stomped back to the jeep and got inside. She thought the vehicle looked absurd tilted that way, but thought too that it would be warmer inside, and that she could put up with Chuck until a car or truck or van came along. And she was sure that someone would come. After all, it was still deer season, and the county was filled with hunters.

  Earl Pierce was convinced the snow would get them if the maniacs didn't. He couldn't believe the amount that had fallen overnight, and son of a bitch if it wasn't still coming down.

  The radio said not to expect a letup until at least tomorrow morning too. That meant maybe thirty-six hours of snow, and figuring an inch an hour, they'd be damn lucky to get out of the woods by June. A mile and a quarter to the main road, Earl, Tony and Frank had kept telling him. But what if it didn't stop when they said it was supposed to? What if it just kept snowing and snowing until they couldn't traverse even that mile and a quarter?

  The one good thing about it was that it would probably slow down those kill-happy lunatics too. The snow was just as deep for them as it was for honest hunters. Unless, of course, they got to wherever they were going last night.

  It was a viable scenario, Earl thought. Kill a camp full in one county, then head out across the state to another county where people wouldn't expect you. Now if he were running things, it would make sense to leave that Allegheny Forest area and go someplace like Crawford County, where there were still a lot of hunters. Like him.

  He swallowed heavily, brushed the snow off his rifle, and looked around him. He felt he stood out like a sore thumb in his blaze orange against the white snow. The deer might not notice too easily, but another hunter would, a hunter hunting something other than deer, maybe.

  More than the weather made him shiver then, and he thought that those people must be really crazy. You had to be crazy to want to kill somebody you'd never even met, and didn't have anything against other than the fact that he was a hunter. Earl shuddered as he wondered what the mutilations were that the radio announcer had mentioned, and decided he was better off not knowing.

  It was a lousy day to still hunt. Stand still for a few minutes and the snow would start to pile up on you. Besides, it was too damn cold to stand still, even with the insulated inner and outer clothing Earl was wearing. So he started walking through the woods. He thought he should have stayed in the cabin. Hell, they all should have, just holed up and built a big fire and eaten and listened to the radio and played cards all day. Deer weren't out in this kind of weather. They sought heavy cover and holed up themselves until it was over. But Tony insisted. Always a chance, he said. Sure, and there's always a chance that a buck would sidle up to their cabin door and beg to be shot, too.

  The whole thing was ridiculous. Here it was, only ten o'clock in the morning, freezing already, he hadn't seen any deer and sure as hell wasn't going to, and there weren't even any tracks to follow, because if a deer was stupid enough to be out in this kind of weather to make them, the snow would cover them up within seconds.

  Hell with it. Just the freaking hell with it.

  Forgoing any attempt at stealth, Earl slung his rifle and started trudging back in the direction of camp. If any deer leapt out in front of him, that was just too bad. Let Tony and Frank freeze their butts off if they liked. He'd throw more wood in the stove, make a nice can of soup, and relax as best he could in the middle of a blizzard.

  But after walking fifteen minutes through the deep snow, he began to think that the terrain didn't look as familiar as it should have. In another five minutes the certainty that he was lost came upon him, and in only another two minutes of lifting his knees chest high to plow through the heavy sea of snow, he was sure that he was going to die out there, and that his body would be found in the spring, what remained of it after the animals and the weather got through with it.

  "Calm down," he said out loud. "Relax...just relax." He took his compass from his inside pocket, opened it, and saw that he had been walking south. That should have been right, since he had walked north when he left the camp. But then why didn't anything look familiar? Or was it just that it was all covered with snow? He tried to imagine it brown and barren, but could not. Everything was white, white as far as he could see. The trees that might have been well-known and friendly guides were now giant strangers in white robes. Earl could almost imagine them with hoods and scythes, ready to cut short his life.

  He called out, "Hello!" thinking maybe that Frank or Tony might be somewhere nearby and would hear him. But the snowfall muffled his cry. The white, wet blanket soaked it up on the ground, and the heavy flakes dispersed it in the air.

  The deadness of his voice panicked Earl, and he began to run as fast as his stocky legs could carry him. In less than three minutes, his efforts had exhausted him, and he stood panting, thigh deep in snow, his heart hammering in his chest. Mustn't panic, he told himself. I can only get out of this if I don't panic.

  Then he remembered. It was so simple, and the first thing he should have thought of. What did you do when you needed help in the woods? You fired three shots in the air, of course, and he had a rifle, and he had bullets.

  Earl laughed then, laughed aloud at his own foolishness, took a deep breath to keep his heart from pounding so hard, and then unslung his rifle. He aimed it in
the air, fired twice, reloaded two shells, and fired once more. The reports weren't as loud as they would have been without the snow all around, but they were still loud, certainly loud enough for Frank or Tony to hear. Now all he had to do was wait, and one of his friends would come and lead him back to warmth and food and safety.

  He wanted to keep moving to stay warm, but he knew that he should not, that he should stay right where he was. If nobody came in, say, the next fifteen minutes, he would fire three more shots, and keep doing that until someone heard. So he brushed the snow off a fallen tree, sat down on it, and tried to make himself comfortable.

  He took off his gloves just long enough to dig out his pack of cigarettes and light one. For all his worrying about smoking's dangers, he couldn't give it up. Whenever he worried, he found a cigarette a reassuring haven. Frank and Tony wouldn't let him smoke inside the cabin, so now he inhaled with as much gusto as the low tar, low nicotine cigarette allowed. At least he had given up his Chesterfields.

  Earl looked around frequently, not wanting to miss spotting his rescuers. Though he stood out in his blaze orange, as would those who sought him, it would still be easy to pass each other, with this beaded curtain of snowflakes between them.

  He had just unslung his rifle to fire another three shots into the frigid air, when he thought he saw some movement to the south. Though the snow was now falling so heavily that it was nearly blinding, a flash of color told him that he was not mistaken, and he bellowed out, "Hey!"

  Earl thought he saw the figure stop and move slowly, as though it were turning in his direction. Then it seemed to grow slightly larger, and he knew that the person was coming toward him. "Tony?" he called. "Frank?"

  But there was no answer from the figure, which kept moving toward him so that he was able to make out the camouflage sleeves and legs that extended from the orange vest. He struggled to see the face, but it almost seemed as though it was in the shadow of a hat. Then, when the man was some thirty yards away, Earl saw the face, and realized, with a shock that chilled him even more, that the man had no face.