Hunters

by Chet Williamson

  The height still terrified him, but he had the advantage over his fear of not being able to see what lay below. He would be going down the side of the tower in nearly total darkness. If he was lucky, he would be able to see the beams off which he would have to kick.

  He opened the trap door, gave Pinchot a quick pat, and said, "Your only way out boy. Go for it."

  Then Ned climbed up onto one of the flat panes and crouched so that he could get through the opening. He grasped the upper part of the rope with his right hand and the lower with his left, took a deep breath, and stepped backwards into the darkness, into the air.

  The steps of the tower ran diagonally across the square that its four corners made, and Jean Catlett went up them as fast as she could, not bothering to look up. She kept her eyes fixed on the snow covered steps before her, and on the footprints of Ned Craig and Chuck Marriner that the fast falling snow had nearly filled in. In her right hand she carried both her pistol and her flashlight, and she clung to the thin metal rail with her left.

  Still, she often stumbled, and was thankful that Michael was right behind her. With both his gun and flashlight wedged into his pockets, he had his hands free, and had kept her from slipping several times.

  The wind became more terrible the higher they climbed, but her fury drove her upwards, the light scarcely illuminating the treacherous steps ahead. She had no idea where they were, but thought that they might have climbed halfway up the tower by now. The steps grew slick with ice, and the traces of the footprints disappeared. It was colder up here too, and she shivered inside her down-filled jacket.

  All she could hear was the panting of her own breath, and Michael's equally labored breathing behind her. At one point she thought she heard a dull reverberation, as though a fist had pounded on the tower, or a gong had sounded far away, or high up in the sky.

  She didn't know how far behind them Sam was, and she hardly cared. All she cared about was getting to the top and finishing Ned Craig.

  Sam stopped again, wincing. Her leg throbbed painfully, but she sighed and kept climbing the stairs. She'd catch up. She wasn't going to give that bitch Jean any more ammunition against her. Not today.

  Sam muttered obscenities under her breath as she climbed. She had been too much of a pussy about her leg, and she'd get to the top now if she had to do it on one foot. Still, she didn't like it, not one bit, climbing this fucking tower in the middle of this fucking storm. She hoped that Craig shit hadn't done anything to Chuck.

  The steps were getting icy now, and she wasn't sure how far she had climbed. She paused on the tiny landing between flights and shone her flashlight straight up. She thought she saw Jean or Michael moving two flights up, but it could have been just the snow in the wind.

  Just as she turned to start the next flight, from the corner of her eye she glimpsed something large coming toward her from behind. She swung around, and her flashlight shone upon a white, swooping ghost just as a foot exploded into her face, catching her under the jaw and knocking her backwards.

  She hit the steps, slid, and fell, her flashlight dropping from her hand and shooting comet-like toward the ground. Blindly she fumbled in the air as she slowly slid off the landing, and wrapped her gloved fingers around the thin horizontal steel of a railing support. Her legs dangled in the air, and she hugged her body against the edge of the landing, afraid to move. She kicked with her boots, moaning as her injured calf stretched, trying to find a foothold where there was none. Then she tried to pull herself up, but discovered that she lacked the strength.

  "Help!" she cried as loudly as she could, but not loud enough to be heard by her comrades over the wind.

  And then, as she clung between the dark sky and the darker earth, she remembered the face of her vengeful, malevolent ghost, and thought with crystalline clarity, Craig.

  Ned Craig was coming down the tower.

  "HELP!" she shrieked, even more loudly, crying now for all of them.

  Jean felt Michael grasp her shoulder, and she swung around, roaring, "What?"

  "Did you hear that?" He glanced downward. "I think Sam was calling."

  "I heard the wind, Michael, just the goddamned wind, all right? Now let's go!" She turned and started climbing again. If that little whore Sam was calling, she could just keep calling, for all Jean cared. She wasn't stopping for anything or anybody now. She had Craig, and she would shoot the bastard right in the chest the way she had shot his woman. Only with Craig she would fire and fire again until her gun was empty, and then she would spit down into his dead face.

  Two flights away now, that was all. She was certain that when she looked up she could see the flat black slab of the cab's bottom. Then she looked down again at the steps lit by her flashlight's beam. She paused on the landing, breathed heavily, and then looked up the next to last flight.

  And saw a black nightmare plunging down.

  She knew it was the dog only a split second before it hit her, shoving her to one side. But she had seen him coming, and had time to clutch the railing tightly. Michael was not so lucky.

  When he saw Jean stagger he reached forward to grab her, and was clinging to nothing when Pinchot hit him. His feet slid out from under him on the ice, and though his fingers madly flailed, nothing came into his grip before he slid under the railing and into the air.

  He fell twenty-five feet before he hit the first steel support beam. It broke his hip and twisted him over so that he hurtled toward the ground head first, and it was with his head that he struck the next piece of steel. His limp body flopped from beam to beam like a pachinko ball, and he was dead by the time he hit the ground.

  "Michael!" Jean cried out, knowing that it would do no good. She had heard the soft impact of his body against the steel as he fell. She knew he would not answer.

  Still, she called his name again, and then she screamed a wordless cry of rage that tore her throat, and she looked upward to the cab where Ned Craig was, and she screamed again, and kept screaming as her tired legs carried her upward, step by step, to that dark glass box in the stormy sky.

  He would have to kill them all.

  If he ever hoped to find where Megan lay wounded or dead, he had to kill them first. And the only way was to take down the tower, now that they were all up there.

  As he had lowered himself down the side of the tower, letting his heavy boots bounce him off the big corner beam, he had seen their lights going up, seen, for only a second at a time, their forms picking their way up the steps gingerly, turned away from him, thank God, except for the one he had kicked.

  He didn't know who it was, and let himself drop more quickly, more recklessly, if such a thing were possible, expecting at any second to hear a ripping series of shots falling down about him, a leaden rain amid the feathery snow.

  But the shots never came, and he continued in his controlled fall, the coarse hemp tearing through the gloves and burning his hands, scraping his hip and shoulder. He didn't know how far he had come, nor how far he had yet to go, and when he launched himself out one final time, and his legs, instead of hitting the beam with a jarring impact, sank into deep snow that embraced him like a feather bed, he gave a cry of relief and despair and let himself fall into it.

  He lay there for only a few seconds, then pushed himself to his feet and hauled in one end of the rope until the other went up and around the cab and fell next to him. The killers would not come down the way he had. Then, ignoring the pain in his hands and body, he stumbled back along the path that had been made to the cabin, the path where Chuck had so proudly shown him the detonator. He found the hollow in the snow easily enough, and brushed away the new layer that covered the device.

  It was a simple box detonator, and he steeled himself, then pushed the red button on its top. When nothing happened, he turned it over, popped off the back, and saw that one wire had been detached. He hooked it around the terminal so that it made contact, and, just as Pinchot came bounding to his side, pushed the button again.

  Sam
Rogers's fear of death kept her clinging to the thin steel far longer than she had imagined she could. She hung on even when the body fell from above, when it bounced off the beams and struck near her so that she could hear the sound of the breath leaving the lungs. She didn't know whose body it was.

  Seconds later, the big dog had stopped on its way down the steps, sniffed at her once, and moved on. "Please..." Sam had called, but no one answered, and she continued to hang on, and began to cry. She hated to cry, because it made her feel weak, and she had to be strong, be strong and hang on until Michael or Jean or Chuck came down from that fucking little room up there and helped her. At least the snow seemed to be falling less heavily, though the wind still buffeted her. She clung to her perch, crying and wishing that she had never even come to this fucking place.

  Then the charges blew.

  Ned knew enough to close his eyes and look away. But even so, the flare of the igniting plastic lit the insides of his eyelids a hot orange, and the sound of the explosions tore through the storm like twin strikes of thunder, so that Ned dropped the detonator and clapped his palms to his ears. If the dog reacted, Ned never heard him.

  A split second later came the force of the concussion, like a far greater wind behind the wind. It threw him to his knees, and buckets of hot snow blew over him.

  When the flash faded, he got to his feet, turned, and looked at the tower with nearly blind eyes. It was hard to make it out by the feeble light that crept from the open door of the cabin, but he could see it, black on black, lurching, bowing away from him, toward the cliff.

  The two cliffward legs had been blown out, and the wind was pushing it toward the edge. The other two supports struggled to hold it, and Ned was struck with the incongruous image of a giraffe with only two legs, an animal that the laws of physics would forbid to stand for long.

  The wind shifted, blowing obliquely across the tower, and the metal twisted. Ned heard its cry, high and piercing, like a woman shrieking. The wrenching metal continued to scream in the wind, and Ned thought he heard the harsh, ripping sound of the bolts of the surviving legs pulling out. And the tower began to fall.

  Just before the charges went off, Jean Catlett had climbed into the cab, her pistol and flashlight both held out in front of her like protective totems. She swept the tiny room with her light, and its beam caught Chuck Marriner struggling to his feet and rubbing the back of his head. There was a cut over his right eye from which dark blood ran down his nose and lip.

  "Where is he?" Jean shrieked, shining her light everywhere, floor and ceiling, as though Ned Craig might be clinging to it bat-like.

  "Dunno..." Chuck muttered, wiping away the blood that had gotten in his eye. He looked around slowly. "The rope..."

  "There's a rope here!" she said, kicking the small coil Chuck had carried up the tower.

  "No, no, the long one, the one I was gonna..."

  Then Jean saw the two open windows, one on the cliff side of the cab. "Shit! That fucker!"

  The truth slowly came to Chuck. "You mean he...oh Jesus." He headed around the alidade to the trap door, tottering, still dizzy from the two blows to his head. Jean pushed past him and started down first.

  But going down was more hazardous than coming up had been, and she slipped on the steps, righted herself, and continued down more slowly. She heard Chuck coming behind her.

  And then the dark night burned, and a fist of air nearly knocked her off the steps. She dropped light and gun and clung to a metal world that now swayed like a carnival ride. "Oh fuck..." she heard Chuck say weakly. "Oh fuck..."

  Something screamed like a huge, dying monster, and she felt gravity slowly shift. In a breathless moment that held both all time and no time, she knew the tower was falling.

  "Jump!" Chuck yelled, and when she turned her head, slowly, as if it were sunk in the thickness of dreams, he was no longer behind her, and the wind blew upward now, and she dove over the rail, down into the dark.

  And as Jean fell, free of the tower, Sam Rogers clung to the rail that had so far saved her life, not knowing what was happening, feeling the blast throw her upward, and thinking that she was falling up, and then her body was over the rail, and the thin steel was across her stomach, smashing the wind out of her. She swayed with something more than her own vertigo, and clutched the rail with her elbows, letting herself slide slowly backwards and extending her legs so that they were on the landing again.

  She sat, still holding the metal rod, not understanding any of this, still crying, listening as the steel screamed all around her, knowing only that she had to hang on, hang on to live.

  She hung on, as her world cried and twisted and turned. She hung on all the way to the bottom of the cliff, until the crushing metal and rock wrenched her dead hands away.

  "Megan!" Ned cried. "Megan!"

  He looked at the disturbed snow where he thought they had been standing, but then remembered that they had moved somewhere else. The trees came close to the tower on one side, and he went there, thinking that maybe that was where he had seen them, where they had gone to get a better view of his hanging.

  Tracks were impossible to follow, since the wind covered them so quickly. The only way to find her was to search the entire area, and he had to do it as quickly as possible. Even now she might be lying half hidden in the snow, bleeding to death.

  He started to give a moan of despair, but quickly choked it back. She was alive, she had to be. She could not have died like this.

  Sure. And neither could all those others, but they did. Lunatics had the power to change reality, and remake it into their own nightmare world.

  He went to the cabin for a flashlight, then went back outside to search. It did seem a nightmare world, he thought as he hunted for Megan. Darkness, cold, the wind still whipping the fabric of his clothes, icing his cheeks, turning his hair crystalline. And somewhere out in the darkness, over the cliff's edge, the bodies of those who had died with the tower. They deserved nothing better.

  And somewhere else, Megan.

  He walked and called and listened, and heard nothing.

  Jesus, but he ached. Every muscle in his body felt as though it had been stretched and pulled by some sadistic trainer, and then whacked with a stick.

  Chuck Marriner rolled over in the deep snow into which he had fallen, and tried not to groan. As soon as he had felt the tower start to sway uncontrollably, and known that it was going over, he had jumped. The thought had come to him fast, and he'd have been dead if it hadn't. Stay with the tower, end up at the bottom of the cliff. Jump, and you had a gnat's whisker's chance of surviving.

  He didn't know how far he had dropped in free fall. It felt like one hell of a long time. But then he had hit the tops of the trees that hugged the west side of the tower, tall evergreens whose snow-heavy boughs slowed his fall. He had smashed into some hard limbs on the way down—Christ, his ribs ached like a bitch—but he had landed in a drift of snow right at the edge of the cliff. If he had waited another second to jump, he would have missed the trees entirely and gone over the side.

  Just like Jean.

  He wondered about Sam and Michael, and then figured that since Jean had come tearing up the tower, the other two wouldn't have been far behind. No, they were probably all dead now, and he was the only one left, and the tower had gone over and he hadn't even seen it, because his ass was falling through the trees at the time.

  That fucker Craig.

  All that was left now was his hatred of Ned Craig. He would kill the sonovabitch, that he would do. He had no idea what he would do next, but he would kill Ned Craig.

  He pushed himself to his feet, and started walking though the snow.

  Ned had been looking for Megan for fifteen minutes, calling her name all the while. Pinchot accompanied him, seemingly puzzled by Ned's strange behavior. He had run off into the woods behind the cabin when the charges blew, but had come back when he heard Ned calling.

  Ned was by the edge of the woods near the base of t
he fallen tower when he thought he heard Megan answer his call. He turned around toward the source of the sound, and something exploded in the side of his head, knocking him to the ground. When his head cleared enough to see, Chuck was standing over him, his coat ripped in a dozen places, and caked blood forming a brown crust under his nose. He was holding a piece of dead wood four feet long.

  "I dunno what happened," Chuck said, "but it's your fault."

  He picked up the flashlight Ned had dropped, placed it in the snow so that it shone on Ned, and then raised the piece of wood again and brought it down. Ned tried to hold up an arm, but he moved far too slowly, and the branch caught him in the neck. He coughed, and felt thick phlegm bubble into his mouth.

  "Hadn't been for you," Chuck said, raising the stick for another strike, "I wouldn't even be here." He brought it down again, and Ned twisted so that the wood hit his shoulder instead of his head. Still, he felt something break, and a yelp of pain escaped him. He knew that he had to get to his feet, but he was still dizzy from the blows.

  Ned turned so that his back was to Chuck, and started to push himself up, but the branch came down on the back of his thighs, and he fell face first into the snow again. Then Chuck went to work in earnest, like a man putting up firewood for the winter, pummeling Ned on the back, buttocks, and legs, as though he wanted to cripple him rather than kill him.

  Ned was helpless. He could only lie there taking the blows, thinking how everyone made him more exhausted, more anxious to sleep, to have it over. In minutes his body was a mass of pain. He could move, but he could not fight.