Hunters

by Whitley Strieber

  So this was it. He was down to one choice, and it was a really bad one.

  He checked his straps, then reached down and twisted the fuel shutoff valve, stopping the engine. The warning horn sounded as the wing went into autorotation and the ascent stopped. The autopilot was still controlling it, though, and as soon as Morris realized what he’d done, he would try to crash it, no question.

  Working quickly, he flipped circuit breakers, hoping to kill something crucial, like the autopilot’s telemetry. Turning off its power supply wouldn’t matter. Autopilots have backup batteries.

  As he flipped more and more switches, the instrument lights went dark, then the instruments themselves ceased functioning.

  He was now on straight visual in a dead black night, with only the distant lights along the shore, and those of the various fires below, to orient him.

  Once again, he brought the UAW back to his shoulder. As the chopper lost altitude in uncanny silence, he searched for the truck.

  It was moving at breakneck speed, not a hundred yards shy of the main road. Flynn didn’t care whether this bastard’s bank accounts had been hacked or not, or what had happened to him. He needed killing.

  As the chopper continued to descend, the truck grew in the UAW’s sight, until finally the crosshairs began flashing yellow.

  A few more feet. He dropped the chopper’s nose. Maybe they would die together. Fine, he didn’t care.

  The crosshairs moved closer and closer together. Then, very suddenly, they were red, and in the center of their cross was the truck.

  He fired the rocket, which left the tube with a ferocious roar and a kick.

  He tossed the tube behind him out of the way and concentrated on piloting the chopper, which was now rapidly losing altitude.

  A blinding flash of white fire announced the end of the truck, and Flynn roared, “Abby, baby, Abby baby, I love you!”

  He couldn’t bring her back, but this was the end for the evil bastard who had destroyed her, and that felt damn wonderful.

  Police procedures didn’t matter. Morris was not human, therefore the only law that applied was the law of jungle, and Flynn did that kind of law as well as any of the criminals he so despised.

  Using the cyclic, he got the chopper aimed straight toward the dying fires of the village. As he came in, he heard both Magnums being discharged.

  Adjusting the collective to decrease lift on the rotor, he dropped down as fast as he dared, hitting the ground approximately a hundred yards from the village.

  His jaw snapped, a flash went past his eyes.

  The helicopter became still. His ears rang from the shock of the impact.

  Before moving, he checked himself: hands okay, arms, feet, legs. If he was going to go into a firefight with impact injuries, he wanted to know where he was impaired, and what it would do to his effectiveness.

  He jumped out of the chopper and approached the village. To the west, huge flames still gushed up from the ranch compound. Further south, a smaller glow marked the position of the truck.

  Diana and Mac came out of the underbrush.

  “I thought you crashed,” she said.

  “No. What were you two firing at?”

  “The tiger’s out there.”

  “Has it charged?”

  “You can’t ask us to take a chance like that!”

  She was right, but he was also relieved when, very suddenly and in absolute silence, Snow Mountain appeared. His stripes were such perfect camouflage in the flickering firelight that it almost seemed as if he had materialized out of clear air rather than walked out of the shadows.

  He came closer. Mac readied himself to shoot again.

  “No,” Flynn said.

  Broken only by the crackle of flames, the silence the tiger brought with him was as strange as a cry from a distant world.

  Flynn reached out and laid his hand on the lion’s head—a small human hand lost in the fur of the immense animal.

  “You could sell that thing for a damn fortune,” Mac said.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  The tiger looked off into the dark.

  Flynn was relieved that Diana wasn’t the traitor he had thought her to be. “We’re a good team,” he said.

  Snow Mountain turned and slipped into the darkness.

  Mac ran after him. “Hey!”

  “Leave him be, Mac.”

  “I don’t get my skin or to sell him to a zoo or nothin’. Shit!”

  “He’s got his own demons to deal with, that one does.”

  “He’s part human, isn’t he?” Diana asked.

  “Be my guess. And who knows what else?”

  “What’ll happen to him?”

  “He’ll roam the land, make some kind of a life for himself.” He looked off in the direction he had gone. “That’s the loneliest creature in the world.”

  A cathedral silence settled, as they all contemplated together the plight of Snow Mountain. In the distance, a dull explosion echoed from the direction of the compound.

  “How did you ever get out?” Flynn asked Mac.

  “I had to do a good bit of killin,’ tell the truth. Is that murder, doin’ those little gooks?”

  “There’s no law to cover killing aliens, if that’s what they are. There will be, but not now.”

  “Well anyways, it was self-defense.”

  He thought of what had been happening at the compound, of the fate of the captured. “It sure was. I thought you were a goner.”

  “I was acting.”

  Flynn recalled that he’d been a terrific Dracula in junior year at Menard High.

  But for the crackle of fires, everything was quiet.

  Mac looked from one of them to the other. Slowly, a smile came into his face. “Have we won?”

  Flynn noticed that Diana’s hand had slipped into Mac’s. For a moment, he felt shock. Disappointment. Then he forced it back inside. He’d been lonely for a while, so he’d stay that way. Fine. Abby was with him and she had no plans to take up with some damn crook.

  He reflected that whole worlds can change in a moment on the battlefield, and that had happened here.

  He smiled back at the two of them. “Right now, we’ve won.”

  Above the sirens, because it was so close, there was a sound that made Flynn freeze. “Back to back, brace the pistols!”

  Dogs came leaping and snarling in at them from every direction at once, their bodies speeding like liquid fire, their teeth flashing, their human eyes filled with human hate.

  With the care and expertise of a man, one of them grabbed Flynn’s throat with its long claws. Its mouth opened and it was slashing with its teeth when he blew it in half. For a moment, the jaws continued snapping with shark-like fury, then, its blood gone, it dropped away like a stone.

  Behind him Diana’s shot went wild. As she screamed and another dog leaped on his back, he turned and blew off the head of the one attacking her, then killed two more at her feet.

  All the while others piled on him, until their weight staggered him and he fell forward between Mac and Diana, then forced himself to turn into the ravening pack that was on his back, and fired four more times, taking all of them out, leaving them in pieces on the ground around him.

  Then they were gone.

  Mac hung his head.

  Diana sat on the ground covered with blood and sobbing.

  Flynn said, “There are eighteen. We did twelve. The others won’t try again.”

  Diana dropped her pistol into her backpack.

  “Unless we disarm ourselves. You love your gun, remember.”

  “It’s too hot to hold.”

  “It’ll cool off. Mac, you okay?”

  “I’m alive.”

  “We’re done here,” he said. He could hear pumpers churning over at the compound, but great masses of smoke were still pouring skyward, lit by the fires in the underground chambers.

  “Those guys gotta be wondering what the hell was going on out there,”
Mac said.

  “Probably think it was some kinda drug factory. Probably figure it belonged to you.”

  “Me? I don’t have any penetration into Travis County. I’m way west of here, buddy.”

  “It’s time for us to go on down the road,” Flynn said. “Morris and his operation are done.”

  As the three of them walked out to the highway, Flynn saw that Mac and Diana were still hand in hand. In silence, Flynn walked on ahead.

  Once they were on the road, Mac directed them to the parking lot of a closed strip mall. The Range Rover was there, pulled up behind a dry cleaners.

  “Backup transportation,” Mac said. “We stationed it here last night.”

  Last night seemed like a thousand years ago.

  Moths and bats swarmed around the floods that lit the parking area. In the far shadows, a young couple necked in a convertible. Music echoed in the distance.

  “I thought we’d go on over to the Oasis, knock back a few,” Mac said. “Sounds like there’s a band goin’. ”

  On the far distance, Flynn heard country music, the wail of a violin, the frantic twitter of a mandolin.

  He preferred blues to bluegrass.

  They drove to the bar, which overlooked the lake. In the parking lot, though, Flynn hung back. He’d seen a taxi rank, cabbies trolling for kids too drunk to drive, and smart enough not to.

  He watched Diana and Mac disappear into the lights and the crowd. He’d thought she was his, and it was going to take him time to get easy with the truth.

  This battle had been won, but there was a war going on, and they needed to be prepared for whatever might come. They needed a bigger operation, more and better-trained personnel, more equipment. More of everything, and better.

  He got into one of the cabs. “Take me into town. Motel 6 be fine,” he said.

  The driver worked in silence, which was good. To Flynn, silence was home.

  The cell phone buzzed. He looked at the number, did not recognize it.

  “Yeah?”

  “Flynn, where are you?”

  “Kicking back,” he replied. “Catch up soon.”

  “You don’t want to celebrate?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Flynn—”

  “Diana, you be careful. I know Mac well. He’s a professional criminal and he breaks hearts for fun.”

  “Flynn, I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  Silence fell. Extended.

  Finally, Flynn added, “But you want him.”

  “He wants me.”

  Pretty as she was, she was too hard along the edges to have been wanted very much in her life. Mac went for powerful women, though. He enjoyed demolishing them.

  “I’m here,” he said, “and you’re gonna want a shoulder in the end.”

  “Mac is a lovely man, Flynn, that’s what you can’t see.”

  “If you say so, Diana.”

  He hung up as the driver pulled up in front of the Motel 6’s tiny lobby.

  He checked in with his own credit card, a small but sweet satisfaction. In the room, he flipped through the channels. Nazis, cartoons, girls, the usual late-night stuff. Still, he left it on in the background. The mutter of artificial excitement relaxed him.

  Toward three, he decided that sleep was not in the cards for him tonight.

  He pulled on his jeans and a sweatshirt and went out into the parking area, then up onto the shoulder of the empty highway.

  He walked, listening to the rhythmic whisper of his shoes on the tarmac. When an eighteen-wheeler thundered by he didn’t vary his pace or even glance at the drama of its passing, so deep had he gone into his thoughts.

  His memories of this extraordinary experience followed him as shadows in the wind. Whatever happened, he was going to stay with this thing. In the end, whatever these creatures were, he would banish the bad ones from Earth, and create conditions that would enable the others to share the richness of their minds openly with mankind.

  Flynn Carroll walked as he henceforth always would, with his secrets buried in his silence. He walked his own path, but not alone. Abby was there by his side. He chose to believe in the prevalence of the soul, and that she was, as are all decent people, part of the essential goodness of creation, of which he was soldier, servant, and ally.

  In the silence of his heart, he embraced the people he had loved, and those he had lost. The moon had set, and the Milky Way in its majesty spread across the great vault of the sky.

  He paused, looking up into the vibrant beauty of it all, and imagined other eyes and other minds perhaps returning his gaze, and thought on the richness of the weave of good and evil he had touched, and what dark secrets must still be undisclosed. Had Morris been the only criminal of his kind? Were there more, as yet unsuspected, or would there be? And what of the alien police? If there was more crime to fight here, would they be willing, this time, to send enough support? And if not, then how would he proceed on his own?

  He walked on down the dark highway, alone and content to be alone. His battle was won, and that was good. A good feeling.

  A meteor flashed in the sky, then descended in blazing grandeur.

  Or was it a meteor? He stared along the horizon where it had fallen, looking for some new glow or some other hint that it had been, perhaps, a conveyance from the deep beyond.

  Nothing glowed, though, and no more meteors appeared.

  Fine, then he would go on down the road, and see what might develop. The questions, however, of who these creatures were and where they had come from and what their true motives might be—these questions had not been fully answered, not in his opinion. He had wrecked the enterprise of one of their criminals. But the greater mystery that they represented had not been solved.

  But that was tomorrow’s problem. Today’s had been solved. Whoever they were, their good guys now knew they had a friend here on Earth, and their criminals that Flynn Carroll was somebody to be reckoned with.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Anne Strieber, who always insisted; my editor, Robert Gleason, who always understood; and Eliani Torres, whose attention to detail extracted my story from my prose.

  Turn the page for a preview of

  Alien Hunter:

  Underworld

  WHITLEY STRIEBER

  Available now

  from Tom Doherty Associates

  A TOR BOOK

  Copyright © 2014 by Walker & Collier, Inc.

  CHAPTER ONE

  As he did every morning, Flynn Carroll was going through police reports on his iPad, reading them quickly. Then he stopped. He flipped back a page. As he re-read, his eyes grew careful.

  He didn’t look the part of a careful man. His appearance—ancient chinos and a threadbare tee—was anything but. Duct tape repaired one of his sneakers. His hair was sort of combed; his beard was sort of shaved. But the stone gray eyes now stared with a hunter’s penetrating gaze.

  In two respects, the report was right in line with the others that were of interest to Flynn. A man had disappeared, in this case two days ago. This morning he was discovered murdered in a characteristically brutal and bizarre manner. What was different was that the body had been found very quickly. Usually, corpses were located days or weeks after the murders.

  Not only was this a case for him, it represented a rare chance. The killers would generally do two or three or more victims over a period of a few days. The first body would rarely be found until at least two or three more killings had been done. There had been no other disappearances or characteristic murders reported anywhere in the area. If this was the first in a new series, it represented both a major change and perhaps a major opportunity.

  The change was that this victim wasn’t an anonymous homeless person picked up off the street. This was a citizen with an identity and people and a place in the world. The opportunity was that the killers might still be operating in the area, and Flynn might have a chance to get them.

  He unfol
ded his lean frame and got to his feet, striding off between the rows of consoles and neatly dressed technicians who manned the command center.

  As he passed one of the linguists, he asked, “Got any new messages?”

  “This week? Two lines.”

  He stopped. “And?”

  “A complaint, we think. They seem to be saying that you’re too brutal.”

  “Me? Me personally?”

  He laughed. “All their messages are about you.”

  They’d been asking their counterparts on the other side for six months for more information about these killers. All they had been told was that it was a single, rogue band. From the amount of activity Flynn guessed that it consisted of about seven individuals.

  Another of the techs sat before a strangely rounded device, beautiful in its gleaming darkness, but also somehow threatening, a glassy black orb that seemed to open into infinity.

  Flynn went over to him.

  “Jake? Got a second?”

  The man was intent on his work, peering into the blackness. Within this small, very secret working group hidden deep in the basement of CIA headquarters in Virginia, this device was known as “the wire.” It provided communication with their counterpart police force. This other police force was headquartered on a planet our experts had decided was called Aeon, the government of which was eager for open contact with mankind. Supposedly.

  The problem was—again, supposedly—that they weren’t entirely in control of their own people. Aeon, our experts had decided, had evolved into a single, gigantic state, but it was free, and so, like any free country, it had its share of criminals.

  Flynn’s take: let’s see this place before we decide what it’s like. Nobody had ever been to Aeon—unless, of course, the people who had not been killed, but had instead disappeared without a trace … like his wife, Abby.

  “Let Aeon know we’ve got another murder.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And if there’s any response, anything at all, get it translated on an extreme priority basis.”

  As far as Flynn knew, only one alien—a creature that looked human—was responsible for the original crimes, which had been the disappearances. These new crimes—all killings—were being done by things that looked, frankly, alien. They weren’t the “grays” of popular imagination, with their huge eyes and secretive ways. Flynn had never encountered one of those creatures. Apparently they weren’t from Aeon. With such a big universe, so incredibly ancient and complicated, who knew what they really were or where they were from?