Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  It was a ball cap, snagged on a branch. He felt the blood coming to his face and his breath catching in his throat. The ball cap was

  purple, with faded white lettering just barely showing. He thought he could make out one mud-splattered letter, the letter L. Lynn owned a ball cap like that.

  She wore it all the time, perched high up on her hair, the way the kids did now. That same color. With LHS embroidered on the front, for Langley High School.

  He resisted the impulse to break cover, dash across the fifty yards of open grass, and tear into that tangled mess to retrieve the cap. He forced himself to sit perfectly still instead and deliberately slowed his breathing.

  It had to be hers. He pointed the telescope again, but now the cap was obscured. He closed his eyes and listened hard. Birds. Breeze. Crickets and other insects. Water splashing along the creek. No more vehicle noises. Now he had a decision to make.

  He could go down there and get that cap, which is what he desperately wanted to do. But if there were people watching, he’d be at their mercy.

  Or he could wait for dusk. But then, if the watchers had a night-vision device, and they also were willing to wait, he would again be at their mercy. He visualized the area of the creek bed again. It was lower than the surrounding woods. He could wait until it was full dark, when the creek bed would subside into even deeper shadow. A night-vision device was a light amplifier: no light, no vision. Not like the infrared devices he’d used when he was active, which worked on contrast between warm objects and colder background. The hat was just inside the tangle of trees and roots, and just to the left of the leftmost waterfall. He memorized its location, took a deep breath, and began looking for a spot to hole up.

  He decided to climb into the dense bottom branches of a big pine for the rest of the afternoon and wait for sundown. He still couldn’t be positive someone was watching, but if they lost patience and came out of hiding, well, that would be all right, too. He couldn’t think of a reason for someone to be skulking through the woods on this abandoned installation, unless there was something illegal going on, something that might account for the kids’ disappearance. If that was Lynn’s hat, he reminded himself. Another part of his brain tried not to think of all the possible ramifications of that last thought. Every hunt was a sequence of decisions:

  when to move, when to wait, where to watch, and when to sleep, which was as close to motionless as one could get. This was a time for sleep.

  Janet Carter was finishing her lunch when the idea hit her. She had stopped for lunch after her Saturday-morning post doc seminar at Tech.

  The place was a vegetarian street cafe. Janet, a devoted carnivore, visited the nuts and twigs scene once in a while to salve her conscience. The seminars weren’t terribly interesting, but at least they filled the beginning of the weekend. Over lunch, she had been thinking about Barry dark. The kid was an insolent, slovenly pup, and Kreiss undoubtedly had applied exactly the right kind of pressure to make the little shit talk. On the other hand, he was probably still immobilized, and perhaps an unexpected act of kindness on her part might spring something loose. So why not take a pizza over there and see if she could get him to tell her what he had revealed to the headless horseman the other night.

  She gathered up the paper plate and her Coke. It had to have been Kreiss, of course. Big bad bogeyman in the dark; in and out without a trace, and the kid scared shitless in the process, paralyzed physically and mentally by an encounter that probably had taken all of ninety seconds. Professional bogeyman. He must have learned some interesting things from those people at the Agency. She dumped her table trash and went across the street to the pizza place, resisting an urge to get some real food.

  Twenty minutes later, she was banging on dark’s door. It took him a few minutes to answer the door, and his appearance hadn’t changed much since the other night: dirty T-shirt, baggy shorts, flip-flops. His face was sallow and there were pouches under his eyes. The beginnings of a scraggly red beard covered his face. His arms still hung straight down at his sides, although he could move his hands now. He blinked at her for a moment, long enough for her to get a whiff of the apartment within.

  “What?” he said, screwing up his face, as if the midday sunlight hurt his eyes.

  “I’m Janet Carter,” she said.

  “Still with the FBI. Brought you a pizza.”

  He blinked again. He must have been asleep, she thought.

  “Felt sorry for you,” she said.

  “Want me to cut it up for you?”

  “Damn,” he muttered.

  “Yeah. Thanks. But, I mean, like, why?”

  She took her last deep breath of fresh air, toed the door open, and stepped past him into the apartment. It hadn’t improved.

  “Leave the door open,” she called over her shoulder.

  “You need the fresh air. Where’s a knife?”

  He followed her across the room. She stopped at the kitchen threshold and let him pry a knife out of the sink. He could pick it up in his fingers but not lift his arm.

  “Why don’t we just wash that,” she suggested, taking it from his limp fingers and running it under some hot water. He just stood there. She cut the pizza into thin slices, scraped and washed a plate, and set him

  up in the single living room chair. She put the plate on a stool in front of him and watched him eat hungrily, bending over the stool and slurping it up like a dog. The light streaming in from the open front door showed more of the mess than she wanted to see.

  “Actually,” she said, “that’s a bribe.”

  “Cops can do bribes?” he said around a mouthful. Now there was a hint of his previous insolence in his eyes. Must be the sudden carbo load, she thought. She no longer wanted any pizza.

  “One-way rule,” she said.

  “We can’t take bribes; but we can do bribes, especially for information, see?”

  He kept chewing while he watched her.

  “I still want to know what you told the headless guy the other night,” she said.

  “Like I said—” he began.

  “No, wait. See, last time I asked you what he wanted. That was the wrong question. This is a different question. What did you say to him? Exact words.”

  He sucked another piece of dripping pizza into his mouth. His eyes were definitely wary now, seeking some advantage. She pressed him.

  “Look, lemme lay it out for you. If you told him what he wanted to know, he’s never coming back, so it won’t matter if you tell me. If you didn’t give him what he wanted, he will come back, and you’ll need me to protect you. Us to protect you.” She gave him a moment to absorb that “us.”

  “So, what did you say to him? Exact words?”

  He studied her face.

  “For a fuckin’ pizza?” he said.

  “You’re out of your league, Barry. Way the hell out of your league.

  Think about how big he was. How much stronger he was than you, and that’s when you had arms. Now think about other parts of your body, Barry. Soft parts.”

  He blinked at that, licked his lips, and then sighed.

  “Site R,” he said.

  “He wanted to know where Lynn and the guys went camping. All I knew was Site R. That’s what I heard Rip say. They were going to ‘break into’ Site R. I don’t know what that means. I told him that.

  And I still don’t fuckin’ know, okay?”

  She looked at him.

  “Okay. And has it ever occurred to you that if you’d told someone this a lot sooner, maybe we’d have found them?”

  He looked away. Janet got up and left.

  Just before sundown, Browne McGarand watched the reaction on the last copper sponge fizzle out. The light coming through the four skylights of

  the control room was turning sunset red. He shut off the acid drip and was beginning the purge sequence when he heard two distinctive taps on the metal door, followed by two more taps. Jared was back. Browne turned out the single work light, got his fla
shlight, and went to the control room door. He tapped the door once.

  “It’s Jared,” Jared replied from the other side. They had arranged a duress code when the project began. If Jared ever said, “It’s me,” Browne would know that Jared was not alone and that he should get out of there through the vehicle bays. Browne opened the door and Jared came through.

  His grandson was a hefty-shouldered man with a large paunch and a heavy black beard. His job with the local telephone company had him spending days by himself checking the more remote lines in the county, where he tended to roadside tree falls, so-called backhoe interrupts, when customers or the other utilities unwittingly dug through a phone line, and feeder-box problems in the isolated cabins and trailers off the main county roads. His clothes always smelled faintly of pine needles and tobacco. Jared was perpetually suspicious, and he had a habit of squinting his eyes at people and things as if he expected them to lunge at him. Browne closed and locked the door and turned the work light back on.

  “The security people stop anywhere?”

  “Nope. Drove around like always. You could hear their damn radio goin’ a block away—some damn rock and roll crap. Windows rolled up with the AC goin’.” He sniffed.

  “Some security.”

  “Be thankful they’re not real professionals,” Browne said.

  “I’ve always wondered when they might start random building checks.”

  “Not that pair,” Jared said, easing his heavy frame into one of the console chairs.

  “But we may have us another problem.”

  Browne finished the purge and began to set up the retort for cleaning.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “You know how sometimes you see something’ outta the corner of your eye? You wonder if you really seen it or you just imaginin’ things?”

  Browne eyed his grandson.

  “Things?”

  “I was watchin’ that there security truck from the rail sidin’ control tower. I’d a sworn I saw a man crossin’ that little ravine, joins the creek just below that big logjam? You know where I’m talkin’ about? You can just see that stretch from the sidin’ tower. But something’ was off about it, what I saw, I mean.” He shook his head.

  “Like he was wearin’ a hood or something’. That’s it—wasn’t no face. I don’t know. I think I saw it. But maybe not.”

  Browne rubbed his jaw.

  “A man, though? Not a deer or other animal?”

  Jared nodded thoughtfully.

  “That tall grass out there along the creeks?

  Looked like he’d been down in that there grass, but had to stand up to jump that brook, comes through there. Then he was gone.”

  “What did you do?”

  “When the security truck went out to the back bunker area, I went down there, to the north side of the creek. Hid out in the tree line.

  Waited for a coupla hours, see if he came out of the woods or showed himself somehow. But nothin’. And it didn’t feel like there was someone there. Not like when you know there’s deer movin’ around in there, you know? Birds wasn’t yellin’. No bushes were movin’, no other noises.” He rubbed the back of his leg.

  “Got into some damn chiggers, I think. Hell, I don’t know. Prob’ly nothin’.”

  “A single individual,” Browne said as he closed the retort back up.

  “Those traps still set?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll skip taking the girl her food tonight. Maybe we’ll go out there and see what happens. If she ate those apples I fixed for her, she’ll still be out of it anyway.”

  “You want me to go check on her?” Jared asked, a little too casually.

  Browne wasn’t fooled.

  “No, I don’t think so, Jared,” he said.

  “Besides, we shouldn’t go near the nitro building, especially if there’s someone here.

  He might be here because of those kids going missing. Wouldn’t want to just lead him to her, would we, now?”

  Jared nodded but said nothing. He continued to rub the back of his leg while Browne closed off all the valves to the truck in the next bay.

  “We’ve got pressure showing on the truck tank,” Browne announced, trying to distract Jared from thoughts of the captive girl. Jared didn’t need to be messing with that girl.

  “From now on, we’re building power. But I’m almost out of copper.”

  “Got me some back in the central office yard,” Jared said.

  “Pallet of cracked switch plates. They’re flat. We can grind ‘em, or just put ‘em in there and use more acid.”

  Browne nodded. Acid they had, in vast quantities. No government agency would be putting a pattern together on missing copper. He thought about the pressure. Maybe another thirty batches, if they

  could keep the process going. Pretty soon, they’d have to switch to the big pump. He finished up securing the hydrogen generator.

  “All right. Let’s go down there and look around,” he said.

  “Maybe it was just a late-season turkey hunter sneaking around; those guys cammo up pretty good.”

  Edwin Kreiss made his move forty-five minutes after the sun went down behind the ridges to the west of the arsenal. He felt refreshed, having slept for a couple of hours in his hiding place. He had crept out to the tree line just before sundown and again memorized the features in the pile that were closest to the cap. Once darkness just about obscured the opposite tree line, he crept down on his belly through the tall grass, moving directly toward the creek. Mindful of that copperhead, he probed ahead with the rod, parting the grass carefully and probing the spongy earth on either side before slithering forward. The ground was not wet, but it was very soft, with occasional round rocks embedded here and there. It took him ten careful minutes to get down to within six feet of the creek bank, where he stopped to absorb the night sounds around him. His plan was to get into the creek itself and move upstream to the logjam, then get out and crawl sideways until he could retrieve the cap.

  The sky above him was clear. A drone of night insects and frogs had begun and the creek bur bled peacefully right ahead. What if it isn’t Lynn’s cap? Wrong question, his brain told him. What if it is her cap? Then what? He forced himself to concentrate on the ground directly ahead of him. He no longer had the sense that someone was watching up in those trees. Even if someone was watching, no one would be able to see him.

  Had all that been just a spook on his part? He thought maybe he should cross the creek, go up to the opposite tree line, and check it out for watchers.

  No. Focus. Get the cap.

  He probed ahead with the rod while he inched toward the creek bank.

  The grass had a muddy smell. The cuff on his right sleeve hung up on something resistant in the grass. He pulled gently and heard a tiny chinking sound, like metal scraping on a rock. He froze. Metal? He backed up a few inches, turned his head very slowly to look into the darkness with his peripheral vision, but it was almost night now and he couldn’t see anything at all. His sleeve was free, so he rolled very carefully to the left and began collapsing the rod down to a two-foot-long staff. Then he pointed it into the grass at his right

  and began parting the thick stems, moving the rod from side to side, advancing it an inch at a time, until he heard another clink. He put down the rod and snapped on one of his cuff lights, which threw a tiny red beam of light into the base stems of the grass. A sheen of steel reflected back at him. He parted more of the grass to expose the trap and gave a mental whistle. Had he been upright and walking through here, he might have stepped into that thing.

  He considered his position. There were traps along the creek, big steel traps, capable of seizing, if not breaking, a man’s leg. He directed the tiny bead of light at the trap again and found the step trigger and the tie-down chain. This trap was much too big for small game: These were man traps

  So why in the hell were there man traps out here? He carefully rolled the other way and began explorin
g the bank, going upstream until he found another trap. As long as he came at them low and from the side, they posed no threat. But for anyone walking along the creek, or down to the creek, to cross maybe… well… Then he wondered if there were any in the creek.

  Browne and Jared walked quietly down the path toward the creek. The ghostly buildings of the industrial area were swallowed up behind them by the dense trees. Jared led, with Browne twenty feet behind him. They did not use lights, having used this path before. Browne trusted Jared’s woodcraft instincts; his grandson had been hunting the foothills of the Appalachians since he was a young boy and he was a natural woodsman.

  Browne was also pretty sure that Jared’s skills had more than a little bit to do with his penchant for comforting some of the lonelier women back up in those gray hills. Jared was a big boy now, and if he wanted to take chances like that, it was on his own head. If nothing else, fooling around with some of those mountain women had probably sharpened up Jared’s defensive instincts. If Jared thought he’d seen something, then they needed to go take a look down along the creek area. That’s where those kids had come in.

  Jared slowed as the trees bordering the path thinned out. They were getting closer to the banks of the creek. Browne patted the Ruger .44caliber revolver on his hip and began to pay close attention to his surroundings.

  Kreiss finally reached the edge of the logjam pile and began to feel around for the hole of the big tree that had impounded all the flood debris in the first place. He was thirty feet away from the creek, moving back toward

  the trees on the south side of the water. The cap ought to be about six feet south of the root ball on the big tree, maybe five feet off the ground and a foot or so back in the tangle. He found the edge of the root ball and retraced his handholds on the trunk, using the rod to estimate the distance.