Hunters

by Whitley Strieber

  The match went out. Flynn lit another.

  Mac groaned. He lifted himself up on his elbows, he saw what was standing over him and started to roll away, and at once the thing began striking him with a nasty little sap, which caused him to throw up his arms in defense of his face, and to scream a gargled, quickly stifled scream.

  Now Flynn did draw the Magnum, holding it in both hands, bracing it in front of him.

  Another of the things jumped toward him.

  The Magnum was gone, taken with such extraordinary quickness that Flynn had no chance to react. One instant, his hands were hard on the gun, then next they were empty.

  He backed away, then he turned and blundered across the small interior space, in the process upending what felt like furniture and causing something to screech in anger—more than one something. In fact, the space seemed to be filled with these beings, five, ten, who knew how many?

  This was their home.

  He came to the back wall. Feeling along it, he attempted to understand what is was made of. From the outside, the building had looked like nothing more than a loose construction of dried branches. In here, though, it was slick and hard, cool like stone.

  He kept feeling along the wall, seeking some kind of hinge or latch or some sort of opening.

  Across the room, he could hear Mac screaming, and could hear the screams becoming more and more muffled, as if he was being enclosed in something.

  Until he was also helpless, Flynn realized that they intended to contain him, not risk attempting to overpower him.

  This told him that, while they were faster, he was stronger. Also, they either didn’t want to kill him or didn’t have effective weapons of their own.

  Understanding that they were treating him like a rampaging animal gave him some room for maneuver. Not a lot, because, just as was true of a cop facing a knife-wielding drunk, there would be conditions that would force them to risk attempting to overpower him.

  He mustn’t try to fight them. He mustn’t be destructive. He continued feeling along the wall, until he came to what seemed to be an intricate mass of twigs and branches woven together.

  The Russian boar he caught on his place up in Tom Greene County never understood the trap. But he was human, surely he could understand.

  Methodically now, he felt among the twigs. The structure had been wide open at both ends.

  Twigs. Wood. He had matches. Could he set it on fire? No, they’d put a stop to that the same way he would if a drunk with a knife started trying to use it.

  They were close around him now, but why didn’t they get more violent? What were they waiting for?

  In one of Mac’s gun flashes, he had seen a beam about six feet up, and above it what appeared to be loose thatch. Thinking that he might be able to break out that way, he raised his hands upward and felt for purchase. Holding on with the tips of his fingers and pushing with his feet, he went up the wall faster than he had expected—or than they had, because there was an immediate rush of scurrying below him, and rough, guttural whispering. His fingers throbbed, but he kept climbing until he felt the beam.

  Long, pealing cries rose, full of complicated, haunting undertones, like the wind on a winter’s night, like somebody crying in the dark hills of childhood, like wolves howling.

  What was really going on here? How were these people—or things—connected to Oltisis? Could it be that there were two species of alien on Earth?

  He swung out onto the beam, and immediately saw before him two of the creatures. In the next instant, the closer of them leaped at him, screaming and clawing.

  As he pulled it off, the second one slammed a sap into the side of his head and he fell from the beam, forcing his arms up to protect his head as he fell. When he hit he rolled and bounded to his feet. One of the creatures was crushed and broken beneath him, writhing and screaming with a warbling banshee madness. Lightning-fast hands grabbed at him.

  One after another, he pulled them off, but the pummeling saps kept coming until finally what felt like a sack of iron slammed him in the right temple.

  Then the dark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Something hit Flynn in the forehead so hard his eyes flashed. Still, though, he didn’t wake up completely. He tried to turn over, but something else scraped his shoulder, preventing him

  When he opened his eyes, it didn’t help. This was absolute dark. Again he tried to sit up and again he slammed his head.

  His lay still. His temple throbbed, his forehead ached, his shoulders were compressed and the air was thick.

  Twisting, he raised his left hip until he could free his arm. He felt upward—and encountered a ceiling not even a foot above his face.

  So this was no floor he was lying on. He’d thought himself in some sort of tight crib, but this was not a crib. The ceiling could only mean one thing: he was in a box.

  For a moment, he was out of control. He kicked, he hammered at the lid, screams burst out of him.

  No. Keep your head. Right now, your mind is the only weapon you’ve got.

  This was what Abby had experienced. Steve. All of them.

  Poor damn people, above all, poor Abby.

  He pushed at the top of the thing. No give whatsoever. Steel? Thick wood? What did it matter, he wasn’t going to break out, it was far too strong.

  Panic hit him again, causing him to start gasping, causing his stomach to twist against itself and his heart to fly.

  No, no! You will go silent inside. You will slow that heart rate. You will stop that gasping.

  Okay, breathe evenly, let the heart rate drop, focus the mind. No matter how hard it is, do it.

  He visualized an open space. Dark but open.

  The air was thickening fast but still breathable. So far, no frantic waves of suffocation were overwhelming him. Yet.

  Keep the breaths even but shallow, don’t move unless absolutely necessary.

  All right, let’s get our bearings. You’re in what appears to be a coffin or a box.

  First thing you need to know is, have you been buried alive or are you still aboveground?

  He had fallen to the floor, fallen on one of the creatures or aliens or whatever they were.

  What he had to do now was change his situation or, if that wasn’t possible, face it. If he’d been buried alive, he was going to die here. It wasn’t pretty, but he’d damn well died in a good cause. On the other hand, if he was aboveground, maybe there was a way out.

  The air was getting very bad very fast. He felt along the join between the lid and the sides of the box. Seamless. Might as well be welded closed, and maybe it was.

  Long ago, he had reconciled himself to the idea that death might come to him during the course of his work. But not now, not before he had gotten to the man who had killed Abby.

  He inventoried himself for tools. He was still fully dressed, so maybe he still had some of his possessions.

  The rifle and the pistol were gone, of course, but he could still feel his wallet. Only by raising his shoulders and wriggling his hips could he manage to push his hands down into his pockets.

  Frantic surges of air hunger coursed up and down his body.

  He got his right hand into the pocket, and to his surprise it closed around his pocket knife. It had been with him since high school, and contained a blade, a fingernail file, and a small scissors. As he scrabbled at it, attempting to get it out, he tried to think what he might do with it.

  It was then that he noticed that the air hunger was getting less. He was beginning to be able to breathe again.

  That could mean one of two things—either his twisting and turning was opening a crack somewhere, or somebody on the outside was introducing oxygen into his air supply. He remembered something about the Chinese doing this during some distant war, perhaps Korea. The objective was to so terrorize the victim that he became open to brainwashing.

  If this was torture, then they were out there watching and listening. They had a use for him and needed him
to be so broken that he would follow their orders.

  So what needed to happen in here to get them to open the lid?

  The answer was clear: once they were sure that he had completely lost it, they would bring him out.

  He began having trouble breathing again. His mouth opened, he gasped, but he also remained totally still.

  Finally a surge of need went through his body that was so intense that it made him kick. His chest heaved, he sucked air through his open mouth. Tormenting urgency swept his body.

  He cried out, he slapped the lid, he threw himself from side to side, he wailed.

  And the anguish receded a little. His head cleared. He was still breathing frantically, he heart hammering, his chest pumping, but it was getting less.

  He forced himself to calm down. So it wasn’t that he was opening a crack somewhere in the box by pushing against it. Somebody was indeed out there, and they were intentionally torturing him.

  His breathing was labored now, but no longer terminal.

  Once he had completely panicked and completely despaired, he was going to be taken out.

  Fine, he would deliver the panic they were looking for. It wouldn’t be hard, he was nearly there already. He knew that what at first would be an act would quickly become actual terror, because his screaming would flood his body with adrenaline.

  He uttered a groan.

  Soon, the air was getting stale again.

  Another groan, but this one turned into a scream, and that opened the subconscious gate that he’d been holding closed with all of the inner strength he possessed.

  There came boiling up from his dark interior a gigantic, roaring explosion of sound. He hammered, he kicked, he raged, he bellowed.

  No escape.

  Tears came. He found himself sobbing like a child.

  His idea that he was being tortured was a fantasy. There was nobody out there and the coffin was underground. He had been buried alive, and everything else was just rationalization and wishful thinking.

  Another scream burst out of him, then another and another and another. He smashed his head against the lid until he was reeling with pain, he clawed and screamed until his nails bled and his voice broke. He collapsed into the suffocated, gasping sobs of a dying man.

  He lay, spent but still panting and ever more frantically. He began to float away on a lurching, tormented sea.

  Again the cries came, so hysterical that they sounded like somebody else, an unknown version of himself, possessed of vast rage and fear and a hunger for life that was stronger by a factor of a million than the strongest love or terror he had ever consciously known.

  His lungs churned, his tongue lolled, his hands began to weaken, and the clawing turned to scrabbling and helpless slapping at the unyielding lid.

  There came a ripping sound. Then a click. Then light flooded him and air as pure as dew.

  He writhed, he uttered choked sounds from a place in his mind so deep it had no words, he saw only the glare of the light and then, within it, a shape.

  The shape focused.

  A face stared down at him, softly intent, the eyes as pale as snow. “Hello, Flynn.”

  Flynn gasped, frantically sucking air, unable to stop himself. As relief washed through him, he realized that he’d been just moments from death in there. Much closer than he thought.

  He recognized the face immediately. But the security camera had lied. The oddly plastic skin and the too-perfect hairline were not a disguise. This was not a human face, but something that had been made to look like one.

  “You’re Morris.”

  An arm like a piston thrust him back down into the box.

  “Yeah,” he said, “you can call me that. It’s a name on a suit, put there to confuse the garbage.” His lips lifted away from his teeth, as if in a smile. “I’ve got an offer for you, and I’ll kill you slow if you don’t do my little job for me. Is that understood?”

  Flynn said nothing.

  “All right, if that’s the way you want it, fine.” He put his hand on the lid.

  “What’s the job?”

  “Too late, Flynn. You’re done.” He murmured something to somebody out of sight, but Flynn heard it: “Take him out and bury him.”

  With an earsplitting crash, the lid came down.

  Flynn hammered at it, he couldn’t stop himself. “Don’t do this! Jesus, let’s talk, come on!”

  The box scraped and Flynn felt his weight shifting. He was being moved.

  “For God’s sake, give me a chance!”

  He had thought that he had been broken. But now he discovered that he had not yet understood what that was.

  As they maneuvered the box, he could hear grunting. Who was it? Not the creatures from the village, surely. No, there was a murmured word in Spanish. People, then. Henchmen.

  He thought that you could not be more deeply a traitor, than to betray mankind itself.

  The box lurched so far to one side that he rolled over, then was hurled back as it hit something with a dull, hard thud.

  He’d been slid, then dropped into a grave.

  “Listen to me! For God’s sake!”

  And what will you do, little man, he asked himself? Will you, also, trade your species for your life?

  There was a crash. Another. Then more and more. Dirt was being shoveled in. They were doing it for real this time, and the air was getting thick fast, and this time it would not be refreshed.

  He bellowed, he kicked, he hammered at the lid, he rocked from side to side trying to break open the coffin.

  The sound of dirt being shoveled in ceased to crash against the lid. As it got deeper, the sounds became more muffled.

  This was it. He was now underground.

  He went to another level of terror, one far beyond where he had been before, deeper yet, more raw than anything he had ever known. It was a savage, blind animal fear that caused him to scream like a desperate infant, slicing away layer after layer of toughness and strength and hard-won inner composure, leaving in its wake a panicked, shrieking rat.

  Where had he gone wrong, what had he said or hadn’t? There had been no bargaining, no time.

  “Give me a chance,” he screamed. He hammered on the lid, he kicked. “For God’s sake what do you want me to do?”

  There was a sound.

  He froze. What was that? He listened.

  It went in and out, in and out, and he thought it was the whisper of breathing.

  “Please!”

  “I want you to do what’s needed, that’s all.”

  The voice was in his ear, right in his ear, so close, so intimate that instinct made him attempt to turn toward it.

  “Then tell them to dig me out! I’m smothering fast!”

  “You will do the work I have for you.”

  “They’re still filling the hole, tell them to stop!”

  “I have work for you.”

  It was a choice. The choice. Die here like this or do the monster’s work.

  There could not be a traitor more profound. But if he died, there was no chance at all that Abby’s destruction would ever be avenged.

  “All right!” he shouted, “I’ll do it!”

  Nothing happened. He waited, sweating it out.

  His heartbeat grew rapidly more irregular, his mouth lolled open, his tongue hung out, and his breaths came faster and faster, more and more uselessly. He was breathing his own breath.

  “You will do this work?”

  He tried to answer.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  A gasped whisper: “Open … open …”

  The digging stopped.

  “Open …”

  There was light all around him, and air flowing like grace into his very soul. His body flushed with relief and his head swam as his blood reoxygenated.

  He hadn’t even been underground.

  Morris chuckled. He reached down and drew Flynn to a sitting position.

  Flynn looked at the box he had been confined it.<
br />
  “Not a coffin,” Morris said. He was a man of about six feet, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a weathered Stetson on his head. “Coulda been used as one, though.” He lifted Flynn under his arms. “Still shaky?”

  “No.”

  “You lie like a child.”

  Flynn took quick stock of his surroundings. He was in a barn, its big door open wide to a sunny morning.

  “Come on, let’s get you something to drink. I got Coors, Lone Star, Shiner.”

  “Just a cup of coffee.”

  “Nah, you want a Shiner.” Morris snapped a finger at a man standing nearby, who Flynn recognized as Jay Elder. He sauntered over to a dark blue cooler and opened it. As he reached in, ice rattled.

  “Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  “I have to admit that it does.” He estimated that he was forty feet from the door. He couldn’t bolt, though, not yet, because Elder was coming back with a frosty longneck.

  The animal in him wanted that beer in the worst way.

  “Flynn, you gotta understand that you’re all mixed up. We’re the good guys here! That thing you met in Chicago, that was evil.”

  “Okay.”

  Elder arrived with the beer. “It’s gonna be a new era for mankind,” he said. If he thought that he wasn’t evil, he was a fool.

  He took the bottle. Shiner is a rich brew, and he could smell the sweetness of it, and practically taste the cold relief it would bring to his throat.

  “Go ahead,” Morris said. “You’ve earned it.”

  He lifted it toward his lips, calculating carefully, moving slowly to buy time. A quarter-second delay, a wrong half-step, and he was going to end up back in that coffin, this time for good.

  Using all the strength in his arm and shoulders, he reached back and swung the bottle into the side of Morris’s head.

  The bottle exploded with a wet crack and foam and glass sprayed across Morris’s head and face.

  He stood there staring. He didn’t even blink.

  Flynn cried out in shocked surprise—under the coating of skin there must be steel or something.

  Then Morris made a sound of his own, a low growl that reminded Flynn of the voice of the tiger.

  He broke and ran. He was thirty feet from the door when Elder, thin and wiry and quick, leaped at him. He was light but fast as hell.