Hunters: A Trilogy

by Paul A. Rice

  They walked past those places they had all seen with their own eyes, places where they had watched the enemy running in madness, seeing them hacked down by the bullets they themselves had fired. That small outcrop of rock over there, the one where the grenades had so accurately rained down from Ken’s devastating aim, the bodies had been piled thick and high there – yes, right there at that very spot! And yet, all that was there now were some fresh scars sitting in silent witness on the weather-beaten face of the old rocks, they and the nervously bobbing yellow-headed wagtail, which sat waiting until they had passed safely by before going back to the business of digging out some more grubs from the surrounding grass, were all that remained.

  The contrast was insane – ugly scars and beautiful birds.

  Ken found the whole thing to be completely surreal, and the little bird only served to highlight the sensation. It should have been a huge, red-throated vulture, or maybe some filthy hyenas, sitting on that scarred rock, sitting there and slavering as they stared with yellow eyes at the piles of putrefying cadavers, cackling and giggling at the prospect of such a feast.

  He shook his head, walked on by and looked up at the clear blue sky.

  The only thought he was able to muster with any form of coherence was: ‘It’s just a game, Ken – just a game. We’re alive, and that’s all that matters! Let’s just see what happens later on, shall we, my old son?’

  He wasn’t alone in those peculiar emotions.

  Without knowing it, as they walked past those terrible places, the group unconsciously drew itself closer, the need for physical contact pulling them together – Red placed his arms around the shoulders of the two boys, whilst Tori stretched out and grasped both Ken and Jane by the hand. Arm-in-arm and hand-in-hand they made their way down to Mike’s Tree.

  It was always this place they came to when the need to reflect became too strong. Sometimes they came to be alone, and sometimes, like today, they came to be together. The innocuous mound of grass-covered earth, topped by the graceful apple tree, seemed to offer a deep sense of hope, a sense of inner-peace and the funny feeling of somehow having been refuelled. Whenever they spent any time there, the occupants of the farm were always left with the bright orb of optimism burning freshly in their souls.

  It was a good place to be, a place of peace and hope – Mike’s Tree.

  Whilst they sat under the tree, casually munching on of some of the apples that were irresistible no matter how bad a person felt, the Hunters listened as Tori elaborated upon the mind-boggling things that George had so recently told them.

  She said, ‘When George said we didn’t exist, what he meant was, well, it’s…’ she paused and then, unusually for her, Tori cursed. ‘Damn it! It’s just so very difficult to explain, and nearly impossible to put into words that have any real meaning, but I have to try, you need to understand, I can feel it in my mind, you don’t really understand, do you – not really?’

  She looked at them and saw in their faces that she had been right. They did understand, but not really. How was it that she was here in the flesh, if she didn’t exist – how? She was almost able to hear their unsaid questions.

  Taking a deep breath, Tori did her level best to try and explain.

  ‘When my grandfather told you about how everything is relative,’ she said, and looked at Ken with a wry smile. ‘Well, he wants for you to understand the all-encompassing meaning behind that particular phrase. It applies to everything – every single aspect of our lives is related!’

  She told them to think of all the things they had been through, of how Red had been in that other place, the terrible man he had been, and the horrific things he had done. How did they think they had been there, and how had they come to this place to save him? Come to save the giant of a man, one who now rested casually behind her with his hand resting upon her shoulder as Tori sat, cross-legged, and tried to tell them the truth.

  Tori reminded them about what her dead brother, Mikey, had told them of how the past always affects the future, of how all things are linked. She said their perception of the world was based upon familiarity, the natural order of things, and the way in which for most of their lives those things, as such, had always been in the expected order. They had always been that way – in the way they had become used to things being – everyday things in their everyday order. It was all about perspective, all about what you knew. But, what they didn’t know…

  ‘Ah, now therein lays the secret to everything!’ Tori said, smiling. She paused to think a while, and then said, ‘Listen, don’t quote me on the exact figures here, I can’t remember them precisely, and anyway it’s more about the scale of things that I want you to concentrate on.’ Frowning as she tried to recall the information, Tori then gave them some more things to think about…

  ‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that a human hair is about one million atoms in diameter? And, for instance, did you know that there are more atoms in a glass of water, than there are glasses of water in every ocean, lake and river on Earth?’ They listened intently as she continued. Tori smiled, saying: ‘A single drop of water contains about two sextillion atoms of oxygen – that’s the number two followed by twenty-one zeros, Mikey!’ She grinned as Michael sarcastically counted his fingers, then cheekily reaching across for Jane’s hand to continue the count.

  Looking back at them, blue eyes deadly serious, Tori said, ‘And to make things even crazier – just so you know – water contains twice as many hydrogen atoms as it does ones made of oxygen, try and imagine that, if you can.’ She paused whilst they did try and imagine it, the sheer scale of the numbers was staggering.

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘most important of all is this fact, which you should remember because it will help explain all of this. Yes, what you should remember above all else is the fact that there is much more space in-between the atoms, than there are atoms themselves!’ She raised her thick, perfectly-formed eyebrows, saying, ‘This means that you and I, everyone – everything we can see, smell or touch, and indeed, everything else in creation, all of it, everything, consists of mostly nothing!’ Once more, Tori raised those eyebrows, the movement causing delicate wrinkles to scrunch up at the corners of her eyes.

  The others nodded. The simple explanation had been delivered in typical, Tori style. Straightforward and to the point, reasonably easy to understand, and by far outweighing the sometimes abrupt and tangled way in which George often gave them such crazy things to think about.

  Tori hadn’t quite finished. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘imagine all of that space, all of the nothingness that lies between everything else, but imagine it as though you were the size of an atom – imagine the space you would have to move around in… Remember, I said that there is more space in-between the atoms than anything else. It would be like looking at a billiard table, one with thousands of miles in between each ball, the number of balls would be innumerable and the scope for movement between each ball would be many times greater!’

  Then, somewhat more seriously, she said, ‘Imagine the force it would require to push one of those balls hard enough so that it would roll into another ball, never mind straight through it!’ She drove her clenched fist fiercely into the palm of her other hand, the movement made a sharp cracking noise and did a really good job of accentuating her description.

  After staring at them for a moment, she continued, saying: ‘Well, we have learned over the years how to generate such a force, of how to move people and objects from one dimension to the next. That is how you are here; it is how we are all here, tucked safely into this slice of time, this piece of empty space between everything. That gap is the thing in between everything else, a space that doesn’t exist to the eye and yet remains the largest thing of all. The space that exists between all things is what rules our existence, and it has been here since the dawn of time, since we were formed in the white heat of the most ferocious event ever known – the birth of everything that we are!’

  Tori stopped talking, turned
away and sat silently for a while, staring out across the lake, head held high, piercing blue eyes gazing into the distance with her dark hair glowing in the mid-afternoon sunshine.

  Junior said, ‘Wow, Mum! How come you know all this stuff, I knew you were smart, but not that smart!’ He reached across and hugged her fiercely. ‘Don’t worry, I’m only joking – we’re getting it you know, you’re doing a good job!’ he murmured.

  She laughed with that sound of tinkling bells and lay back so her head rested against Red’s thigh; he reached down and brushed her hair back, his giant hand easily the size of her face. She looked up at him and smiled.

  Ken sat and watched them, his Hunters, and once more felt the strong tide of understanding wash over him. Most of what Tori had said made sense to him, everything he had seen made sure of that; her explanation of space, the places in between places, fitted neatly into the box in his mind. He knew they would never truly understand most of this, but he also knew that it wasn’t imperative for them to do so, as long as they were alive and that he was able do his best to keep them that way – Ken would be happy.

  He didn’t need a degree in inter-galactic physics; just the knowledge that he would be given a fair crack of the whip to protect them, would be fine by him. The realisation of those thoughts gave him a surreal sense of calm. He clung on to the feeling as he watched Tori sit up.

  With a smile, she leaned back against Red’s chest, and with Junior’s hand firmly clasped in her own, continued where she had left off. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘now, when George says that we don’t exist…he doesn’t mean it in the literal sense, he means that we don’t exist in the dimension that you exist in. We are real, very much so, but we have been moved here, all of us have been moved here to this place where we are now. You, yourselves,’ she remarked, looking pointedly at Jane and the other two, Ken and Michael, ‘would not exist in our world, either. But, by using the ability to manipulate atoms, and more importantly, manipulating the gaps between them, we can make you exist in any dimension we want you to exist.’ Reaching across, Tori patted Red’s shirt pocket. ‘Do you have your cards on you, my love?’ she asked.

  Red said that he did, which wasn’t surprising as he always had them on him somewhere. Card tricks were one of his favourite pastimes, and his skill with the faded pack had become almost legendary. Red was able to perform tricks that would make the others wonder for days afterwards.

  Reaching into his pocket, he passed the cards to his wife.

  In a short time, Tori had managed to prop at least a dozen of the cards in between the lush blades of grass that lay all around them. She laid them on their sides, long ways, and made sure that only a tiny gap remained between the delicately-balanced cards – the way she placed them made it appear as though she had laid the foundations for a fairly large house of cards.

  ‘Now…’ she said, nodding at the row of carefully-arranged playing cards below, ‘…imagine, if you will, that these cards are the fabric of time and space, within each card lies the parallel in which we exist. Each one is different and each one is separated by the spaces in-between.’ She used a small twig to indicate the gap between each card. ‘Like the vast expanse of baize on our massive billiard table, each gap is filled with nothing; they contain nothing but the darkness, empty space is all that lies between.’

  Seeing their nodded acknowledgment, Tori continued. ‘Now imagine that there are many thousands of these cards, an almost uncountable number that stretches out forever. They go as far as the very fabric of time and space do. Reaching out forever, perhaps, but certainly too many cards, or dimensions, to even consider counting.’ Unintentionally, they all found themselves looking out and gazing at the never-ending line of imaginary cards, which stretched from here to eternity, and beyond. She laughed, saying: ‘Quite a thought, isn’t it?’

  It was definitely that.

  Turning back to them, Tori said, ‘Now, imagine firing a projectile so that it penetrates through the cards, through the parallels – at exactly what stage would you be able to you determine when the projectile was in a particular card?’ She grinned, saying: ‘You couldn’t, because some of it would still be in one card, some it would be in the voids on either side, and yet more of it would be entering the next card – things can be made to go so quickly from one dimension to the next that it is almost impossible to tell the difference. The dimensions are so similar, and yet so very different! The point I want you to realise is that we are all but a short jump away from another place – what you may see as your world is really nothing but a single card in a long line of similar cards.’

  The picture she painted for them by merely using her words, and a few of Red’s faded playing cards, was a devastatingly simple one. They were all able to imagine something hurtling through the cards, screaming its way through time and bursting through the walls of the neighbouring cards. The path of its velocity, melding the cards and the gaps in between them into one single thing; in a flash the passing of such a projectile would be lost in the myriad of cards and voids.

  Tori went on to explain that what George had meant about dimensions, about how everything was so near and so related, that to the normal human being…she looked at Ken and winked when she used the word ‘normal’…the thought of there being anything outside their own dimension, their own world, would be unheard of. And, no matter how fast man managed to travel, whether on land or water, in the air or, indeed, in space, they would never achieve the velocity required to burst through the thin fabric of their own dimension. They would forever remain trapped within the bounds of their own reality, until such day as they developed the ability to do otherwise.

  However, George’s people, and many others too, had learned the art of inter-dimensional travel a long ago. In discovering such a wondrous ability, and all the amazing things it had brought with it, they had also discovered some other, not-so-wondrous, things along the way – foremost amongst them being the existence of the Darkness.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ Tori said, ‘and I’ll show you what it looks like.’

  As one, without any question, they all lay back and rested underneath Mike’s Tree, feeling the soft caress of a warm breeze as it blew across them. Then, with the smell of wild flowers wafting into their noses, and the warmth of the sun caressing their faces, they closed their eyes and waited for Tori to show them the Darkness.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said, softly. ‘It’s not like you imagine it will be!’

  She was, of course, perfectly correct.

  Tori’s picture slipped into their heads, like the dawn light making the outline of a darkened bedroom take shape, her vision began to softly engulf their minds. They watched as the blurring outline of unrecognisable objects gently started to take shape. A sandy-coloured rock whirled silently through the empty blackness that filled their heads, myriads of pockmarks lay across its glass-like surface – it seemed to be covered in them. The rock must have been huge as it filled their vision, almost menacing in the way it silently rotated through its world of darkness.

  They heard Michael whisper, his voice only audible in their minds, the young man’s inner-thoughts hailing them through the loudspeakers of their new found ability. ‘It’s a meteor, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘That’s what it is – a massive meteorite, I’ve seen them in science at school and on the TV!’ His voice was filled with awe.

  ‘Ssshhh,’ Tori said. ‘Have patience, Mikey. Don’t try and second-guess things, just watch and see!’

  The others stared at the vision. Mikey appeared to be right, though – it did appear to be a giant, beige meteorite. Then they heard Tori’s voice again.

  She whispered: ‘What you are seeing is nothing more than a grain of sand, a grain of sand so miniscule that you would need a microscope to see it, a very powerful microscope.’

  Upon hearing that remarkable piece of information, they all focused their attentions a good deal more closely onto the proceedings. The markings on the sand became much more self-explanato
ry, they weren’t pock marks on the face of its tiny glass-like body at all, but simply the makeup of the sand itself, they were looking at something so greatly enlarged that they were very nearly seeing the atoms of its existence. As they watched, the silent audience began to see something quite unbelievable.

  Whilst looking closely at the grain of sand, they began to notice some much smaller grains surrounding it. Much smaller than grains, they were tiny particles, little black dots, but there were so many it appeared as though they themselves were the darkness. The darkness was made up of these particles and there were thousands of them. They all looked again and realised that it wasn’t thousands, it was millions. No, no, no… not millions, either. There were trillions of them, trillions and trillions and… they were uncountable, impossible and unimaginable, but they were there, definitely!

  The miniscule particles were not surrounding the grain of sand, like they’d thought at first. Instead they noticed that the little black dots were bombarding it. Looking like some never-ending torrent of black rain the tiny dots hurtled through the grain of sand – straight through it as though it wasn’t there – continuing upon their merry way without losing any momentum whatsoever, leaving no trace of their passing behind in witness to their almost invisible invasion of the little grain.

  Red broke the spell. Sitting up with a start, he said, ‘Holy cow – what in the hell is that stuff?’ The noise of his loud voice snapped the link between the Hunters and Tori’s telepathic broadcast.

  With a dizzying swirl of white light, they all found themselves back in the warm comfort of their own minds. One-by-one they opened their eyes and looked at the sky above, only the endless depths of a clear blue heaven lay before them, no grains of sand and no little black dots, either. Well, none they were able to see with the naked eye. After a while, when they had all finally resumed their sitting positions and were now gathered around the cross-legged Tori, she gave them the answer to her husband’s startled question.