Hunters

by Chet Williamson

  The Blazer made it up Larry's long, drifted driveway with no trouble, but when he rounded the corner of his house, he felt suddenly disoriented at the sight of the jeep there. At first he thought it might be Ned's, but then his fuzzy mind remembered that Ned drove a green and white game commission Blazer just like his own. He was sober enough to know that he had not seen any tracks on his driveway, and realized that whoever it was must have been here for some time. He did not yet think that anything was wrong.

  That possibility came to him abruptly when four people appeared in his headlight's glare. No sooner had he seen them than they were gone, and he had no time to wonder where. The door of his Blazer was yanked open, and something grabbed him and tried to pull him out of the driver's seat. But his seat belt was fastened, and the shoulder strap cut into his neck.

  He tried to bat away his attacker, but he was pushed back into his seat and held there with a massive forearm across his neck, while an arm reached across his body and released the belt. It whirred back into its holder, and before he could do a thing, the hands dragged him out of his seat, out of the Blazer, and down onto the snow.

  "Hey," he said feebly, as his head and shoulders were hauled off the ground.

  "Hay's for horses, man," a voice growled down into his face, and Larry heard someone laugh in a high-pitched voice. The only light was from his headlights and the yellow cab light in the Blazer, so he couldn't see much of the face of the man who held him. But he was big and, if his manhandling of Larry was any indication, very strong. The man reached behind him with his right hand, and when he swung it back around, Larry saw a monster of a pistol, and thought it had to be one of those assault weapons.

  Then he knew who these people were, and he drew in his breath harshly, and successfully tried to keep himself from urinating in terror.

  "You Moxon?" the big man said.

  Larry tried to say yes, but nothing came out. He nodded jerkily.

  "Well, howdy, Larry. I'm Chuck. Let's go inside, okay? 'Cause I'm freezin' my nuts off out here."

  Keeping a hand on Larry's coat collar, Chuck let him get to his feet. Larry was no sooner erect than he felt the cold barrel of the pistol pressed just under his ear. "Okay," Larry said, breathing hard. "Okay, I'm going...whatever you say..."

  "Boy, Larry," said Chuck, "you been drinkin'? Your breath smells like a distillery, pal. Well, most likely you're gonna need a drink or two unless you tell us what we want to know. C'mon now..."

  As they moved toward Larry's back door, the lights of his Blazer went off as he heard its door close behind him. The beam from a flashlight held by one of the people he hadn't yet seen illuminated the way to the back door of the house. He saw someone go in ahead of them, a woman, he thought, and turn on the kitchen light.

  "Sorry we don't have time to let you stop and take off your wet boots, Larry," Chuck said, "but we're in kind of a hurry." The man kept pushing him through the kitchen and into the living room, where they turned on a floor lamp. All the curtains in the room had been drawn. "Sit down." The big man pushed Larry into the recliner. The chair's back went down under Larry's weight, but did not topple. "Comfy?"

  The bulb of the floor lamp was set at the dimmest of its three wattages, but Larry could easily make out the features of the quartet, two men and two women, none of whom were familiar to him. One of the women, tall and palely beautiful, stepped toward him. "We need some information from you."

  "Who...are you?" he asked.

  "No," she said. "We need information from you, not the other way around. We're looking for Ned Craig."

  He didn't know what to say. The only thing he could think of was to stall for time, though it made no sense. No one would be looking for him until morning, and if anyone called, his machine would pick it up. "Why?" he said. "Why do you want him?"

  The woman looked at Chuck, then back at Larry again. "There's no point in lying," she said. "You know who we are. We were at that camp yesterday. Where they found the dead men? We were responsible for it."

  "You sick fucks..." Larry said, but he was the one who felt sick at the thought of what they might do to him.

  "Us sick?" said the other woman, no more than a girl. Her red hair was cropped close, and she carried an assault rifle like she knew how to use it. "Hey, man, we're not the ones who kill deer and like, bunnies! You assholes shoot anything cute that hops!"

  "We don't have the time for this," said the taller, thinner man who was standing in the corner. "Where's Craig?"

  "I don't know." Nothing, Larry vowed, would make him tell them. He knew they were going to kill him anyway. They had to. He had seen their faces. Besides, they had already killed so many there was no reason not to kill one more. He wouldn't drag Ned and Megan along. And that determination kept his fear at bay. He felt as though he could spit in their eyes as he died.

  "The hell you don't," the older woman said, and picked up one of his topographic maps. "This is where, isn't it?" She stuck the map of Potter County in his face. "There, where it's circled in red."

  She might have been crazy, but she wasn't stupid. "No," he said, hoping she couldn't read the lie.

  "What is it then?"

  "Just a...where there was an accident earlier this week. Somebody was shot."

  The woman shook her head. "I think you're lying to me, Larry. And believe me, I'm not in the mood to be lied to. The weather is getting worse, and if we have to go far in it, we want to start as quickly as possible. Now you know where he is, and I want you to tell us."

  "He's in Pittsburgh," Larry said.

  "You're lying again. He's not in Pittsburgh, because when we saw him this morning, he was headed northeast. I don't need your maps to know that Pittsburgh is southwest of here. Now I want you to tell us the truth. Where is Ned Craig?"

  "Go to hell."

  She shook her head disgustedly. "You're very stupid, Larry Moxon. You could have made this easy, but now it's going to be hard."

  "You're gonna kill me anyway. Why should I tell you a thing?"

  "To save yourself a lot of pain, baby," said the red-haired girl. She reached into her coat and took out a long, thin-bladed knife, and the smile she gave him made his balls creep up into his body. "Tie him down. I'll make him talk."

  It was then Larry knew he had to act. Once he let them tie him up, he would be helpless, but while his body was still free, he could at least choose the way he would die.

  The two men moved toward him. The tall one was closest. He might be faster than Chuck, or he might not. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that Larry should die quickly and do as much damage as possible.

  He surprised them. Instead of pulling away, back into the chair, he leapt out of it directly at the tall man, who, surprised by the move, started to bring up his gun fast, but not fast enough. Larry batted the barrel away as it fired its first few rounds. In the small room, the contained sound was deafening, and Larry saw the bullets hit the rug. Then he wrenched the weapon from the man's hands, and tried to swing it around on the others.

  His gut and hips and thighs felt as though someone had smashed them with a sledgehammer, and then he heard the sound of the shots that were pounding into him. He fell, sliding his finger around the trigger and pulling it, feeling it buck in his hand as he went down, firing blindly, unable to aim, unable to do anything but fall and hold on to the trigger as though it were the rung of a ladder, and if he held on he wouldn't fall to his death.

  Then he was down on the floor, and the gun flew from his hand, and there was screaming, and a weight was on him, and something that felt wet and cold was going into his chest and his neck, and he thought the screaming would never stop, but it did.

  Everything stopped.

  "You dumb bitch!" Chuck grabbed Sam Rogers's knife hand, twisted her wrist, and wrenched the blade away.

  "He shot me! The motherfucker shot me! Look!"

  "For crissake, relax...it's not that bad."

  "Not that bad? You ain't the one shot!" And with that, Sam
burst into tears and rolled off the body of Larry Moxon.

  "Oh shit," Chuck said, "what the hell are you crying for?"

  "She got shot," Michael said, kneeling next to Sam and tearing away the pant leg over the wound.

  Sam howled. "Quit it! You asshole!" Michael drew away.

  "What the hell did you stab him for?" Chuck said, shaking his head.

  "He shot me!" Sam blubbered.

  "Yeah, okay, he shot you, but Jesus Christ, he dropped the gun! I gut-shot him so's he could still talk, and you stick a knife in his fucking neck, and snick! goes the vein and the bastard's dead!" Chuck kicked at the body, from whose neck blood still slowly pumped. "Ain't gonna get shit out of him now."

  "Well, I'm really sorry!" said Sam with a snarl whose force was weakened by the sobs that followed.

  "I know where he is," Jean said. It was the first she had spoken since the melee. "He's at that tower. I saw it in his eyes." She looked down at Sam with contempt. "Clean her up, and let's go."

  "I wanta see a doctor," Sam whined.

  "No. No doctor. We're going to the tower." Jean walked back to the desk, sat down, turned on the banker's light, and examined the map.

  Chuck sighed, knelt by Sam, and took out a knife of his own. "I'm gonna cut away your pants leg. Mikey, go check out the bathroom, see what you can find far as bandages and antiseptics and stuff. Some hot water too. Now just relax, Sam, for crissake, you're not bleeding bad, so he probably didn't get a vein, okay?"

  The girl nodded and took a deep breath, but never stopped crying softly. Chuck cut away the cloth over her left calf as carefully as possible. Some of the fabric had stuck to the bloody wound, and when he peeled it back, Sam yelped.

  Just then Michael came back in with gauze, bandages, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and a basin of hot water, in which soap and a washcloth floated. Chuck poured some hot water over the wound, and, ignoring Sam's tortured hiss, pulled away the last of the cloth. The entry wound was small, but ragged around the edges. He turned the girl's leg to see the other side.

  "That's good," he said, smiling. "Went right through. Still be in there, it'd be a bitch to dig out. Chewed up the meat, but didn't hit any bone. You're gonna be okay. Won't walk real fast for a few days though." He cleaned the wound with hot water and soap, then held up the alcohol bottle. "This is gonna burn like hell, but only for a little while."

  That started her crying all over again, and Chuck wiped her nose with the bloody washcloth. "What's the matter? I thought you were into pain."

  "Just other people's," Michael said, and joined Jean at the desk. Both of them jumped at the screams when the alcohol hit the wound.

  By the time Chuck got the wound wrapped and Sam had herself under control, it was nearly 8:00. They turned off the lights inside the house and went outside, where they were amazed to see how much snow had accumulated in so little time.

  In the jeep, Chuck drove, with Jean riding shotgun. Michael and Sam sat in the back, with Sam's back against the door and her legs across Michael's lap. The weapons and gear were piled in the back.

  "Thought we'd head back to St. Mary's," Chuck said, "then get on 256 and catch 219 at Johnsonburg. Then we'll head north to Route 6 East, take us into Potter County."

  Jean looked at the highway map with her flashlight. "That's the long way," she said. "We'll take 155." She folded the map with an air of finality.

  "'Scuse me," Chuck said, "but have you noticed that we're in the middle of a snowstorm here? 155 is a dogshit little road that won't be plowed in the middle of the night." He took the map and opened it back up, flicking on the overhead map light. "See? 155 is a thin little gray line on this map. And a thin little gray line is a map symbol for dogshit. And see those two that go north off 155? One of them's like open and the other is speckled or whatever? That's worse than dogshit, that's horseshit. That means the road's made of mud or gravel or fucking pudding. We don't want to take 155. Okay?"

  "It's the shortest way, and nothing else is going to be plowed anyway."

  "Bullshit! Look—256, 219, 6, those are all red on the map. That means like real roads that get plowed, roads that people have to use all the time. They don't have to use those little gray roads all the time, so they'll plow those last—probably sometime after Christmas!"

  "We're taking 155."

  "Fine. You wanta drive?"

  "You're the driver. But we're taking 155."

  "Hell," said Michael from the back seat, "let's just take it. It's going to be terrible everywhere, and we've got a jeep with chains."

  "Easy for you to say," Chuck said. "You wanta drive?"

  "I'll take my turn."

  "Let's just go..." Sam said.

  "Okay, fine," Chuck said. "But if we're taking 155, we're gonna go back in the house and get some food and water and blankets. So when we get stuck in the snow, we have a little better chance of survival."

  "All right, fine!" said Jean, throwing open the door and trudging back through the snow to the house.

  In five minutes they had placed a pile of food, several blankets, and two plastic gallon jugs of water in the back with the gear. "Can we go now?" said Sam, who had remained in the jeep.

  The headlights of the jeep were no match for the blowing snow, and it was touch and go getting down Larry Moxon's long drive. They pulled out onto the main road only to learn that conditions there weren't much better.

  "I can't see dick," Chuck said, but no one responded to his complaint. He hit the dimmer switch to turn off the high beams, and the flood of snow seemed to diminish. But it was still as though every snowflake the sky threw down was hurled directly into their windshield.

  After what seemed like hours, they finally saw the lights of St. Mary's. "So we gonna drive all night?" Chuck said.

  Jean nodded. "We'll drive until we get there."

  "Then I'm gonna need some coffee." Most of the stores had closed early because of the storm, but they found an all-night convenience store and bought a large thermos, which they had filled with the less than fresh brew. Then they headed east on 120. The only sound for a long time was the swish of the wipers, the sound of the chains, and the occasional slurping sound as Sam sipped her coffee.

  "What bothers you so much about snow?" Michael finally said.

  It was quiet again, until Chuck said, "What?"

  "The snow. Any other situation, you're not scared of a damn thing, but the snow's different. I mean, other people with guns, the police, whatever...it doesn't seem to concern you. But driving through the snow bothers you."

  "Well, I'll tell you, genius, so you don't have to try and psychoanalyze me. With people, I know what's what. I know that I'm fast and I shoot pretty good, but most of all I know that I'll pull the trigger or stick in the knife or swing the lead pipe when the other guy won't. But with...what, the weather, nature...snow? Hell, you can't do a thing. If you're caught in it, you're dead."

  "But we're not back in the woods. Not yet."

  "If we were, we'd be ready, prepared, and we'd be all right. But we don't know what we're getting into here. We don't know what these roads are like, or if they close them off for days at a time because the cops figure nobody would be stupid enough to drive on them during a snowstorm. But hey..." He shrugged. "The boss lady says drive, I drive." He glanced toward Jean. "Right, boss lady?"

  Her head jerked up. She had been sleeping. "What?"

  "Never mind."

  Jean looked around her as though she could actually see something through the waves of white that swirled all around. "Where are we?"

  "We're in the snow," Chuck said. "We're driving through a fucking snowstorm, and I don't know where we are."

  It took them over an hour to drive the twenty miles to Emporium. By then, the snow was coming down even more heavily than before. A gas station was open, and they stopped to top the tank and use the rest rooms.

  "Can't believe anybody's out on a night like this," the attendant shouted over the wind as he took the cash.

  "H
eading home to Coudersport," Chuck said through the open window.

  "Well, good luck. 46 is gonna be awful."

  "46? We were thinking of going on 155."

  The man laughed. "You gotta be kidding. That's gonna be blown over by now. You won't even be able to tell where the road is."

  Chuck looked at Jean, "Hear that?"

  "Let's go," she said, looking straight ahead at the snow that had piled up on the windshield.

  "I just want to make sure you heard the man." Chuck turned back to the attendant. "My wife's real anxious to get back home. Got a funeral to go to."

  "You take 155," said the attendant, "and you might be going to four funerals." He gave them a wave and walked to the safety of the building.

  "Thanks for the tip," Chuck yelled after him as he rolled up the window and started the engine. "We're taking 46," he told the others.

  Jean nodded sharply. "All right. But try and get the speed up."

  It was impossible. Route 46, as the attendant had suspected, was awful indeed. Snow had drifted across the road much faster than the local township road crews could scrape it off. They were driving through a sea of whiteness illuminated only by their two headlights. At one point they were relieved to find themselves behind a plow, but it turned off in another mile, leaving them in their featureless limbo.

  Several times Chuck nearly ran off the road, but managed to get back on before getting stuck. They passed through a few small towns that they had never heard of: Lewis Run, Colegrove, and Crosby. The signs with the town names were visible only for an instant before the snow swallowed them up again, and scarcely a light was visible in any of the villages.

  Besides the plow, they saw only two other vehicles on the road, and could not even tell what they were, even at the slow speeds they were moving. Their ghostly lights appeared and vanished so quickly that they seemed more like mirages than real cars.

  "I can't see," Chuck finally said. "I don't know what I'm driving in, if I'm on the road, or if we've been going through a field for the last hour."

  "We're on the road," Jean said.

  "We're going to stop somewhere until daybreak."