Hunters

by Whitley Strieber

  Of course it was all crazy. What Flynn was doing. Was it rebellion? A desire to find something of himself that didn’t belong to the Two Bar? That’s what Abby thought.

  Now, as they walked their horses into the deepening evening and their long shadows stretched out behind them, he saw her smile at him out of the edges of her eyes.

  “You be careful on WC,” Flynn’s father called. “He’ll throw your ass, he gets half a chance.” They had left the corral and were heading out into a vast natural prairie, this time of year studded with flowers and rich with their perfume.

  “WC can’t throw me.”

  “The hell, that horse could throw Jesus Christ and the twelve goddamn apostles. Shit. Sorry, Abigail! Sorry!”

  “Eleven goddamn apostles,” Abby called back. “Remember Judas was a Judas.” Her father was a hard-shell Baptist who’d brought his family out from Abilene ten years ago because of a schism in their church. Abby had left his rigorous beliefs behind, but Harry Carroll didn’t really grasp that. He still saw the tightly pious little girl who Flynn had fallen in love with when they were thirteen. In fact, she had strayed so far from her childhood beliefs that she was barely welcome in her father’s house.

  They rode on.

  As it became obvious that they were definitely heading out, War Chief whickered angrily and tossed his head. Outbound, he’d sidle along snorting. He’d try to nip Flynn or scrape him off on one of the scrubby trees. But on the way back, they’d thunder across the land, a lurching giant on a flying horse.

  “Let’s go up the north way, get over that draw where the flowers’re so thick.”

  She laughed a little. “Why go way up there?”

  “Well, why don’t you just hazard a guess.”

  She laughed more. They’d kissed for the first time on one of those long hills this time of year. They’d been fourteen, dating for a year. She’d had eyes like the sky, lips like roses light as air, skin as pale as a cloud.

  Now, things were different. There mission was more serious than a kiss. Now, it was the right time of month. Once she was pregnant, they would not ride again, not for a long time.

  He wanted the baby conceived here, on the Two Bar. He wanted to do it lying on the land, embraced by the earth of it, by the life of it.

  Once their child was born, he thought he’d probably return to ranching. He just needed to find out first if there was anything else in him.

  When they were about half a mile out, Abby called out, “Race you!”

  Flynn made WC rear, the horse’s one trick. If anybody but Flynn tried it, WC would tumble them out of the saddle and head for the barn.

  Abby took off, Serena’s hooves spattering dirt as she soared away into the lingering evening.

  “Darn, no fair,” Flynn shouted. He snapped his reins. WC picked up his pace, working into his gut-pounding trot. Flynn had first sat on a horse at age three, but WC knew how to cause even a good rider pain.

  A quarter horse like Serena takes off like a Ferrari in heat, and she was three lengths ahead of WC inside of half a minute.

  “You go, girl,” Flynn shouted.

  “Eat dust, dude!” Serena and Abby plunged ahead, surging into the last whisper of light. Bouncing along behind her, Flynn just laughed. He knew his horses, and he knew that Serena would tire soon. Once that happened, she could not be forced, not if you respected your animal, which Abby certainly did.

  WC was now sort of sidestepping. Slithering.

  “Your horse trying to put out a campfire?”

  “My horse is trying to neuter me!”

  “He better not!”

  He finally got WC going and they were off again, but this time Serena didn’t take off like she had at first. She was past that quarter-horse burst. WC had become aware of the competition and was finally thinking about galloping.

  The wind rushed past, the first stars wheeled above, the Big Dipper and the Great Bear. Scorpio ranged across the firmament. The western horizon was deepest red, blood on the edge of the world.

  They swept across the night, young and in love and in the fertile dark. And were watched.

  They could never have imagined, in their excitement and the running night, that they were being observed by somebody at once as far away as eternity and as close as a breath.

  Or perhaps that wasn’t entirely true. Perhaps he should have realized it, for nothing about Flynn Carroll was as it seemed. First, that wasn’t his name. Second, he was already married, although not under the law of this land.

  The watcher measured the flashing patterns in their brains, listened to their tumbling blood, comparing what it saw to patterns that had been etched in secrets deeper than man may know.

  The watcher was aware that they would sense the danger that it brought, and so stayed well downwind of them. Humans can smell danger, they just don’t know it.

  Flynn reined in WC. “Evening star,” he said, pointing to the strip of green that had replaced the blood in the deep west. A jewel lay there, silver against the last glow.

  “Venus,” Abby said, “Venus this time of year.”

  He dismounted. She was a lithe girl, graceful and cheerful and as mysterious to him as the sky, and as grand. The elegant logic of her curves made him long to hold her, to reenter the balance that was their delight.

  She looked like something you’d see in heaven. She smelled like sea foam. As she swung gracefully off her mount, her hair floated around her.

  He said, “Know where we are?”

  “The ridge. The flowers.”

  “Exactly where.”

  “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Yes you can. You see those boulders over there?”

  She drew close to him. “What did you bring me here for, you naughty man?”

  Gently, he leaned down and kissed her on the neck. He drew her down into the mat of flowers. They swam in their perfume. The air shimmered with the music of crickets.

  “Flynn, we’re out in the open.”

  “The horses won’t care.”

  “What if your dad rides out?”

  He turned her face to his and kissed her. For a moment, she was stiffly unwelcoming, her churchly modesty causing her to push at his chest. When the kiss went deeper, she finally sank into it.

  Venus rode low in the west, chasing the sun. The gibbous moon was rising in the east. Somewhere in the dark, coyotes called to one another.

  They lay back, side by side. He would have her naked, but he would take his time.

  “What’re those?” she asked, pointing to a triangle of stars.

  “I don’t know. Not a constellation.”

  The watcher was now close enough to feel their heat and smell their breath. It saw not only their young bodies but also the dark fates that had already been written for them, part of the mystery to which all belong.

  Flynn said, “I was going to spout that poem you love, but I forgot it all.”

  “ ‘I went out to a hazel wood because a fire was in my head, and cut and peeled a hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread.’ ”

  “I can’t memorize worth a damn.”

  She sighed. “It’s so pretty here,” she said.

  She took his hand and laid it on her chest. He felt the sweet softness curving under the cotton of her blouse. “Squeeze that,” she whispered. “I like that.”

  Instead, he lifted himself up and began unbuttoning the blouse. He opened it and, recalling their backseat days, reached around to unsnap her bra.

  “They’re moving,” she said.

  “What?”

  She sat up and pointed. “Those three stars. They’re moving.”

  The watcher stopped. Drew back. They must not become afraid, they must not leave, not now. Time was of the essence, and if it ran out, then this complex effort would all have to be repeated. The watcher was not alive, but it was intelligent, and it would do whatever it must to fulfill its mission.

  “I want you,” Flynn said.

  “I’ve never do
ne it outside.”

  “Abby … ” He kissed the cream of her naked breasts. His hands went to the button on her jeans.

  She laughed again. “You are so dirty.”

  “This is beautiful. It’s pure.”

  He drew down her jeans and she lay naked in the night, an angel glowing in the flowers.

  He raised himself on his elbow. His heart was bounding, his whole body opened to every detail of the moment. He was aware, with sudden clarity, of the world around them, the sleepy horses grazing nearby, the night wind filling the air with the scent of the flowers, the nearby snuffling of some night creature, the heat of her and the scent of her, musk and gardenias and sweat.

  He looked down into the gravity of her face, seeing in it the religion of life, and then he laid his lips upon hers again and was at once lost in the taste of her and the tentative flicking of her tongue and the rising of his heat, his member now a sword, questing ferociously, making his own jeans into a drum skin.

  Then her eyes were looking past him. In passion, he thought, but her breath shuddered and her throat worked, and then she tore away from him. In his fright and surprise, he leaped to his feet.

  “Sorry,” he shouted. “Sorry!”

  Then, and to his complete amazement, she screamed. She grabbed her temples. Her eyes were white terrified pools in the dark. He stared down, watching her, not understanding.

  “Abby, I’m sorry! I’m so—”

  She took another breath, opened her mouth, and started to scream again. He clapped a hand across it.

  “Abby, it’s okay, we’ll go home, we’ll do it at home.” He glared into her face, willing her to come back to herself.

  Her nostrils dilated, her eyes bulged—and he understood that something was strange here. He could see her face too clearly. But why, when it was so very dark?

  He whirled and looked up into the strangest thing he had ever seen.

  To the west there were three bright stars in a row, stars that were not present in any constellation. Overhead, instead of the soft glow of the Milky Way, there was a riot of stars in a million colors, a sweeping massive horde of them, gold and yellow, blue and red, silver and green, more stars by far than he had ever seen before, so bright that they lit up the land brighter than the moon.

  Where there had been grass bobbing with flowers, there were long creepers, thick masses of them. Their leaves were pale and feathery.

  He leaped to his feet. They were in a vast field of waving plants, long tendrils in the night wind, which brought a sweet scent that pierced Flynn’s heart with an entirely unexpected nostalgia, but also gripped his blood with icy claws.

  On the ground, Abby gasped and sobbed, choking. He went down to her and put his hands under her arms and lifted her. She trembled in a way that reminded him of some gentle little animal, a quail desperate in his hands that he had caught in an Indian snare as a child.

  Then, above the whipping ocean of leaves, he saw a figure. It was a stocky darkness, little more than a shadow. But it was there, and now it was moving, edging toward them. It was the careful stalk of a hunter.

  The lives they had been living a second ago had become, in the tiny drop of time it had taken for this change to occur, something that belonged to deep memory and the emptiness of ages.

  The way she huddled against him, his dear little bird, he knew that she felt it, too.

  The figure was now quickly coming closer, and Flynn somehow knew that it was coming for Abby. In an effort to conceal her, he drew her down, but she stiffened, frozen like a mouse under the gaze of a snake. He whispered, barely a breath but full of wild intensity, “Down!”

  She came with him and they were two rabbits crouching.

  Something was buzzing now, the sound of a fly, but enormous, close, then torn away by the wind.

  Then it was there, right in front of them, its cobalt-blue work clothes gleaming in the strange starlight, its face that of a pinched frog, its eyes two bulging, expressionless domes of insectoid lenses.

  It was a fly the size of a child.

  Abby fell to her knees, spread her arms, and looked up to that mad sky.

  “Abby?”

  “That’s a demon, this is hell!”

  A female voice said, “Not really, sweetie.”

  Flynn turned toward the new—and so familiar—voice.

  “Flynn, come with me.”

  The voice was indeed familiar, but the face was in shadow. Not only the voice, but the place. “Don’t look so damn confused. You’re where your soul was born.”

  Abby was still on her knees, her hands now clutched together, her head bowed. She was praying hard.

  “Listen to her calling on her gods,” the other woman said. She came closer. She was beautiful in the night, with dark, flowing hair and skin like cream.

  “Who are you?” Flynn asked, and was instantly washed with the most powerful sense of loss that he had ever known. It struck him and lifted him like a great wave into its surging grip.

  Her face was … so very, very dear. And this place, the shimmering, waving fronds, the three stars—he loved this place terribly, with his blood, with his soul, which now felt as much a part of his body as his skin and his humming heart.

  “You tell me who I am.”

  “I—I’m sorry.”

  “Tell me!”

  He looked down toward Abby. “She’s naked. Don’t leave her like that.”

  “You took her clothes off.”

  Flynn was at a loss. He did not know this place, and yet he loved it. He did not know this woman, but her face was palely familiar, and her dark hair as it flowed in the wind was a lovely and haunting thing to see. Desire, until a few moments ago wrapped up in Abby, scalded him with unexpected intensity.

  “Flynn,” came a tiny voice from below. “What’s going on? Where is this place?”

  “Don’t you dare tell her,” the woman hissed.

  “But I—”

  “You’re under orders just like the rest of us.” She gestured with a slim arm toward the crouching Abby. “This is so dangerous, this whole situation.”

  And then came a great thunder in him, the crashing roar of recognition. Memory flooded in, memory so strong and so complete—but so entirely unexpected—that he gasped from it and reeled away.

  Then he locked eyes with her, in the wind and the shadows of a racing little moon. He reached a trembling hand toward her. She did not move.

  “Something’s wrong, Diana.”

  “You can say that again. And thank you for remembering my name.”

  She took his wrist and drew him away. Hearing the rustle of their departure, Abby shrieked and leaped to her feet. She came bounding after them, leaping through the rough fronds.

  Diana, who he knew now was his wife—his real wife—threw back her head and laughed, the sound at once as raucous as the voice of a crow and as dear as the giggle of a lover.

  Abby flung herself at Flynn, her hands grasping frantically. Flynn watched, all his passion gone. She was just an instrument, part of his mission. Or so he told himself. When dark blue figure carried Abby away, her shrieking became an awful, despairing cry.

  “Don’t hurt her,” he said to Diana. “I’m the one you should be angry at.”

  “I’m not angry, I’m jealous.”

  “Don’t hurt her.”

  He watched Abby disappear into the darkness, struggling and crying out, tearing helplessly at the thing that gripped her in its thickly gloved hands.

  Diana kept moving.

  Finally, he followed her. He didn’t see a choice. As they went up a long rise, Abby’s cries faded into the nasty, hissing wind. The closer they came to the crest of the hill, the brighter the sky became, until, as they mounted it, a view exploded into Flynn’s consciousness that swept everything else away: his fear for Abby, his confusion at what was happening, his questions about Diana—all of it—in a tide of memory as keen as a cold blade and as sweet as a summer song.

  Before him there spre
ad a vision of lights, and he at once knew that this was the great city of his birth and his upbringing and his soul’s deep home. This was the Aerie, known across the land of Aeon as the City where the Truth Is Known.

  Home.

  She had stopped. She had turned to him. She stood with her arms tentatively open, a tall silhouette against the blazing lights of Aerie and the magnificent drama of Aeon’s sky.

  He went to her in silence, and in silence they embraced. He felt the warmth and soft scent of her, this woman who was so many things more to him than any woman on Earth is to any man. Still, though, Abby was there in his heart, dear.

  Arm in arm now, they went along a familiar path, to their home and office, Social Police Division 211, the headquarters of the Police Protective Unit that was tasked with keeping criminal elements from exploiting Earth.

  He was an officer. He was on mission and had been recalled.

  He did not have a good feeling about this.

  He followed Diana through the contemplative quiet of the central office. As he did so, the faint, dry-straw scent of the air, so familiar, the sounds of quiet conversation between man and machine, the soft footsteps as officers went from one station to another—all of it combined to induce a flood of memories.

  He’d become a policeman on Earth because he was a policeman here. He’d taken form in the Carroll family because he would one day need a great deal of money. His childhood was in the record of the state of Texas and in the memories of his earthly parents and friends, but he had actually come in just two Earth years ago.

  Earth was in terrible danger. His job: protect them.

  In this work, you could not take such memories with you, but you could take your orders, so deeply encoded that only a few police specialists could extract them from your unconscious.

  “Have I gone off mission, Diana?”

  She walked faster. He saw her fists clench.