Being Hunted

by C A Gleason

  Even if the roof did collapse, Jonah would rebuild it, a taste of his lifelong fantasy of building a house. He possessed plenty of books that contained enough knowledge for him to cobble together a home, and it wasn’t as if there wouldn’t be a foundation left if there were any kind of damage. But repairing a roof was a project he needed to avoid. He didn’t need any additional work to do, and it didn’t take much effort to keep the cabin relatively free of snow. Even so, he was still amazed by the consistent amount of flurries.

  As far as functionality, their living quarters were very basic. The cabin was a dry cabin, so there was no running water. They boiled snow or stream water to drink or drank bottled water. Whatever they prepared they stored in jugs, bottles, jars, or canteens. Below the bathtub and the sink next to it were pipes that ran south at an angle using plain old gravity, allowing water to drain into buckets, and those were accessible through the cellar.

  The kitchen sink functioned the same way, with simple plumbing that also emptied into a jug and then drained into buckets for emptying wherever was best. There was even a soap dispenser made into the sink itself. Traces of their life could always attract what hunted them, so Jonah disposed any hint of them at least a few hundred feet away from the cabin, minimum. That was another of Jonah’s jobs, of course. He wasn’t about to let Doreen go traipsing around in the nearby woods.

  Their current lifestyle harkened back to when Jonah had been in the war, when their living conditions were very similarly minimal. Basic personal hygiene—shaving, washing one’s face, and brushing one’s teeth—was accomplished with whatever treated water was available. Primitive methods were used for washing clothes as well, like scrubbing them in a basin and then hanging them up to dry, but where Jonah and his compatriots had had the desert heat available to aid in drying clothing, he and his people now hung their clothes indoors. Having a bathtub was a luxury.

  Many things had changed since the Molting, especially life for humans, but also the weather in subtle but noticeable ways. Jonah hadn’t realized them until he’d spoken with Henry all those years ago when he’d first met him on the road. In order for the Molters to exist at all, the subtle variations in climate had no doubt taken place over the rest of the planet too.

  Part of him didn’t want to know everything about Molters. That way he could maintain some semblance of hope. That there was a place where they couldn’t survive, which meant humans might be able to live there. Regardless of facts, it was interesting that the ferocity of the Molter threat could be counterbalanced by the weather. The bloodsuckers didn’t care for the cold.

  With everything that had changed in recent years, it was as if nature couldn’t make up its mind. Jonah often wondered if it was the beginning of the next age of ice. If so, how would it affect humanity? He had hoped to find books on the subject already, but he hadn’t located any so far. Then again a library had never been one of his main destinations.

  The door to the tiny bathroom opened, dissipating his involuntary wonderings. “More hot?” Doreen said and closed the door behind her.

  Glad to be brought back to reality and be in the moment, Jonah said, “Sure,” from the tub.

  Doreen walked the tea kettle, heated on the woodstove, toward him, and steam spritzed up from the spout. “Pull your feet back.” He did, and after carefully aiming over where Jonah’s feet had just been beneath the water, she poured.

  “Feels good,” he said.

  “You sure needed a bath.”

  That was for sure. The warm water felt great. To go from filthy, chilled, and damp everywhere to warm and clean was like night and day. It was the second round of tub water for him. The first had been so muddy that he hadn’t been able to even see himself under the surface.

  “Do you want bubbles?”

  Jonah laughed. It was so nice to hear her make a joke. She was in a good mood and happy to see him. She was glad he was home. Feeling their bond made his stomach as warm as if he’d drunk a shot of whiskey. “You know I do but no thanks. Save it for Heike.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  As she poured the last drops of heated water, she gave him a brief smile and then left, quickly closing the door behind her to respect his privacy. He heard Heike ask if she could take a bath after him as the door shut, but she was told no because she’d already taken one earlier in the day. Maybe Doreen’s depression was over? He hoped so, but if not, that was OK. Jonah just wanted everyone to be healthy.

  Jonah blew out all his air, which turned into a sigh of pleasure. The steaming heat of the warm water was very relaxing. It made him want to stay in the tub even longer and even though he was already clean. He’d never really been a bath taker before, but he was starting to enjoy them.

  When he’d mentioned to Doreen that he wasn’t very good at taking baths, she’d laughed. It was true, though. Jonah was never sure if it was best to be lying down or sitting up. When lying down, he made one wrong move and heard that underwater humph sound, lost his grip, and for a few seconds, floated like a detached buoy until he sat up, got his bearings, and then began the whole process over again.

  The cabin didn’t have a shower, how he’d always preferred to wash aside from swimming in the ocean, so taking baths had required some getting used to. He’d realized he was out of practice because he hadn’t taken them since he was a kid. Regardless of how he got clean, the best part was getting warm.

  “If society resumes, I’m taking showers.”

  “What did you say?” Doreen said, muffled.

  Although there were walls, they were practically paper thin, so it was almost as if they were all in the same room. “Just talking to myself.”

  “That’s what crazy people do.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Oh no!” Heike shrieked from somewhere. “Jonah’s gone goofy!”

  “Heike,” Doreen said in her mom tone.

  Even with all the bad going on in the world, he would still do his best to locate a solar shower—one of those plastic bags that needed to be filled with water, then warmed by the sun—and take a shower that way. Hopefully someday. Except that would mean needing to live where the sun broke through the cloud cover on occasion.

  Unless I heated the water and poured it into the solar shower. That would work. I love loopholes.

  The point of his fantasy was that Jonah could use some normal temperatures, some real heat, like a nice day on a California beach during a hot summer. He would love to relax on any beach again someday, enjoying it with Doreen and Heike, and maybe make their family even bigger with another little one or two.

  Daydreams about sand and surf were common for him. He’d always had so much fun and made so many fond memories at beaches when he was younger. He wanted to make more. He wondered how many times Doreen wanted to get pregnant. Whatever that number was, he intended to do his part in repopulating the Earth.

  Deciding the luxury was over, he stood up with a sloshy splash—careful so as not to fall and crack his head open, every bath taker’s worst fear—and his body temperature instantly dropped about fifty degrees. Even though it was expected, he was always surprised by the difference between the sanctuary of a hot bath and the regular air directly above it.

  Outside the bathroom he could hear the familiar commotion of Heike busily deciding which game they were all going to play together. It was one of those nights when he pretended he thought it was a great idea, to make everyone happy. But really, he just wanted to sit on the couch and relax.

  He grabbed the towel off the rack, dried off, and then got dressed with the clothes Doreen had meticulously folded and balanced on the sink. He suddenly felt a familiar daily urge and wished a real toilet was within sitting distance. That was another luxury he looked forward to experiencing again: being able to sit down and do his business inside the cozy warmth of indoors, as opposed to an outhouse.

  When he stepped out of the bathroom, he said he needed to go out and do some paperwork, which m
ade Heike giggle. She knew what it meant. Doreen said Heike in that parental tone again as Jonah put on his cold-weather boots near the door and lifted his jacket off the coat rack, always careful not to kick over the rocket launcher in the corner. Then he grabbed the shotgun—the semiautomatic one equipped with a silencer—and went outside.

  He saw his breath immediately, and it almost hurt to breathe, as if he were inhaling a cigarette, the kind that tasted like mint, which his friend Eric had bought him as a joke in Oberstein—Jonah had never cared for the brand—before everything went bad. The world had gotten much darker, but he could still see well enough to make out some clouds.

  As he made his way across the crunchy snow toward the frosty outhouse awaiting him, he remembered how warm he had been just minutes ago in the bath. It felt like a hundred-degree difference. It was probably close to that. Sure felt that way.

  Shrieking wind suddenly pushed through the icy woods as if it were searching Jonah out, doing its best to knock him over with gusts before he could begin his late-night paperwork. The gusts were powerful enough to cause the eaves of the man-made structure behind him to whine in protest.

  The outhouse was fairing no better, so he lowered the latch that held it closed and opened the door, inspecting the inside with weapon aimed. With nothing to fear, he closed the door behind him as quickly as he could, immediately smelling ancient waste. He set the shotgun against the wall and sat down. There was a latch on the inside of the door, too, to keep Molters out while such necessary business was being done.

  Jonah remembered how they could open some doors all too well, and the last thing he wanted was to encounter one of them inside the outhouse hiding and waiting to attack him. He wouldn’t put it past them to be capable of such a thing, so whenever the outhouse door was opened, a weapon was aimed beforehand, by Jonah when he went or by Doreen when she and Heike went together. It was one of the rules. The ladies silently hated using the outhouse.

  An addition he would have liked to equip to their outdoor restroom with was illumination. Jonah had collected quite a few lanterns, but they were a waste of precious fuel, and they could give away their position at night, so they were used sparingly. He used to hang chem lights on the ceiling of the outhouse so they could see day or night.

  A chem light was a reliable light source, easy to use by bending it in half to produce a glow, and he had collected as many as he could find from all of the military bases he’d cleared out, but after a while, he thought it was best to save them. They had been using them up too quickly, and now they were familiar enough with the interior of the outhouse. Cracking the door allowed some light in, even when it was dark, if he wanted.

  What was he saving the chem lights for? Only Jonah’s future self knew that. At least it was warmer inside the outhouse than outside it. Nothing could be as warm being as submerged into a hot bath indoors, though, nothing else he could think of. A womb perhaps?

  Again his thoughts drifted to pregnancy, babies, reproduction. It happened so often since they’d lost their little one. He hoped it was normal to think of such things, to grieve, probably to figure them out, but it was also something far more powerful. There was quite a difference between choosing to have a child for the family to raise and love and desperately needing one for the human race to battle the enemy presently destroying it.

  Every living human had a responsibility to do their part to help sustain the species. Jonah stifled a laugh after thinking about how serious he must look as he finished what was natural, in an outhouse in a freezing, snow-blanketed forest in the mountains with a shotgun within reach.

  Just do your paperwork.

  That shotgun in hand, he made his way back, giving the area a onceover as the wind rose up out of nowhere to battle him again, as if it had been in waiting. The blasts of air were so forceful he wanted to tell them to fuck off. Going number one or two gave him the opportunity to take in whatever was going on outside the cabin. To spot any trouble if there was any. Typically there wasn’t, but doing so caused him to relax. At least enough to get some sleep for the night.

  Unless he had one of those damn nightmares. He hoped his routine would work so well one day that he could sleep in as long as a depressed teenager, like he had when he was young. Past noon and not even have a care in the world. If only he could reprogram the part of him that was a natural early bird or that, as a soldier, hadn’t gotten brainwashed to get up when he woke up to get shit done.

  The cabin door was always locked after him when he went out, so he knocked the secret knock, and Doreen unlocked and then opened it. He placed the shotgun just inside the door next to the rocket launcher and coat rack, and then he and Doreen stepped back out and past the porch onto the snow. She carried a pot filled with lukewarm water and poured it over his hands as he rubbed them back and forth. He felt warmer almost immediately and watched as the trickles that sloshed over his hands streamed onto the snow, creating clouds of steam.

  “You don’t always have to wash,” Doreen said.

  “I do after paperwork.”

  “You even do it after number one,” she said, pouring the last drops. “You are clean.”

  Jonah shook his hands behind him so as not to get any drips on Doreen and then wiped them on his pants. “I know, but it’s what we do.” Steam rose up between them. “What we do keeps us civilized. Human.” She gave him a look as if she didn’t think it was important. “Everything we do matters.”

  “OK.”

  “It does. Do you see animals washing their hands after they do their business?”

  She laughed. “Animals don’t have hands. They have hooves.”

  It was Jonah’s turn to laugh. “Not all of them. Some of them have paws . . . or whatever. Flippers? What do birds have?”

  “You city man! Hmm. Actually I’m not sure either.”

  “Ha!”

  “We’ll ask Heike when we get inside,” Doreen said. “The only animals I’ve seen lately are rabbits.”

  “Now they have paws.”

  “Definitely.”

  What they feared was also an animal, technically, but a more apt description of them would be a monster. Jonah hated that they crossed his mind so often. Probably because it was possible for them to always be near, and that brought up what he said next. “Speaking of rabbits . . . I’d like to take her hunting soon. She’s ready.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  If she can kill a rabbit, she can kill a Molter. “Because she needs to be.”

  “She’s already practiced shooting a few times. She’s still very young.”

  “Not in today’s world.” Before the last statement veered the conversation off course into a separate debate, or worse, an argument, he said, “I was young when my dad taught me to shoot. She needs to be comfortable with a weapon.”

  “How old were you again?”

  “Six. Younger than Heike.”

  Doreen stared at him. Uncertainty all over her face. “I would think that would be scary for a youngster.”

  “I remember it as being fun. And I trusted my dad.”

  “You shot animals?”

  “No. Targets.”

  “What kind of targets?”

  “Things that didn’t move. Cans and fruit mostly.”

  “Fruit?”

  “Yeah, when you shot them, they’d explode.” Jonah briefly saw the look Doreen occasionally gave him when she saw a boy instead of a man. He wasn’t speaking her language. Most women weren’t too crazy about explosions. None he’d ever met anyway. Even Doreen, who’d served in the German military. “Well, it depended on the size of the fruit.”

  “You wasted food.”

  It wasn’t a question. “Yes,” he said, “but that was then. Not now. There’s no way I’d do that now.”

  “How old were you when you were taught to hunt?”

  Jonah cleared his throat. “Twelve.”

  “See? That’s far older than Heike is now. Maybe she can still just shoot here? There�
�s plenty of trees or . . .”

  “Can’t waste any more ammo.”

  “We have plenty.”

  Jonah shook his head even though she was right. They did have plenty of ammunition, but he’d already taught Heike the basics of how to fire a weapon, so more target practice would just be more of the same and a waste of time. “You have to be comfortable with killing to hunt. It’s something she needs to know how to do.”

  Doreen looked at him for a long time, and he knew she was thinking about saying something about how her daughter wasn’t a killer, but those objections were difficult to support under the present threat. Everyone needed to be ready to do whatever had to be done because of what didn’t need to be mentioned; when this kind of danger arose, it was often kill or be killed.

  They were standing close, and she was holding the empty pot at her side as if she was debating whether to clobber him over the head with it, so he leaned in and kissed her. Her mouth didn’t soften much, and she turned away from his affection far sooner than he would have liked.

  “We’ll talk more about it later. It’s cold out here,” she said and went inside, leaving the door cracked.

  Jonah exhaled a cone of foggy breath. His understanding of her lately was only projection. Doreen was going through a lot more than he knew. She was still hurting obviously and doing her best to hide it. He had no doubt she loved him, but he wanted to fix her and their relationship completely so that there were no noticeable cracks, make it how it was before. But what could he do that he wasn’t doing already?

  Only time could mend what had happened, and time was never in a hurry unless you didn’t want it to be. Time was on its own schedule. Even though Jonah understood that, it didn’t prevent him from feeling impatient. After stomping his feet, knocking off enough snow so as not to get hollered at, he went inside.

  CHAPTER 7

  Jonah closed the door behind him and locked it. Doreen was on the couch, knitting, and Heike stood atop a stepladder, her tongue stuck out of the side of her mouth as she concentrated on placing an ornament just beyond her reach. Doreen had mentioned that Heike’s real father had stuck his tongue out while immersed in projects too.