The Hunt

by Chuck Wendig

  Babycheeks is back to the world of the living. She’s maybe still a little foggy, but for the most part, she’s alert.

  On the way over, Atlanta told her what happened.

  “They were gonna . . . rape me,” Babycheeks says, those words coming out high-pitched, almost broken apart, as she strains not to cry.

  “I figure so,” Atlanta says.

  But the girl’s brow furrows. “You gave me your drink, though. That means . . . they wanted you.”

  Atlanta nods soberly.

  Damon just stays quiet, staring over the edge of his steering wheel like all this is just too much for him to deal with.

  “What do I do?” the girl asks. “Do I call the police?”

  Damon, for the first time in several minutes, speaks: “Atlanta said the cops around here aren’t that trustworthy.”

  “Not for me,” Atlanta says. To the girl she says: “But you—maybe it’s different. You come from money?”

  “I . . . I dunno . . . I . . .”

  “You do know. Big house? Nice car?”

  A tiny shake of the head turns into a full-bore nod. Atlanta doesn’t know what it is, whether the girl doesn’t think she’s rich or if she’s just traumatized.

  “White girl, got money,” Atlanta says. “You’ll be okay. We’re gonna take you home. You get there, you tell your parents what happened. You call the police. You get that ball rolling. Okay?”

  A small nod and a faraway look. “O . . . okay.”

  “You go to Mason?”

  “N-n-no. I go to Briere. The, uhh, the ch-charter school in Bloomsburg.”

  “That’s good, then. Hey, I’m gonna need your phone number—I’ll check up on you. God, I’m dumb—what’s your name?” It sure ain’t Babycheeks.

  “Skylar. Uh. Sky.”

  “All right, Sky. This is all gonna be fine. You’re fine. You good?”

  “. . . I’m good.”

  “Then let’s get you home.”

  After dropping her off—sure enough, she is rich, living in this old stone colonial house that looks like maybe George Washington hisownself took a dump in at some point—they head back to Atlanta’s place. Damon is still quiet. Like he can’t process it all. She tells him: “You know, the thing happened to me, not to you. And yet you’re all clenched up like cramped toes over there.”

  “It’s just been a long night,” he says, offering a small smile. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “I’m glad I’m okay, too.”

  His hand reaches for hers on the seat, but she pulls it away.

  Not now, dude, she thinks.

  “What are you gonna do now?” he asks.

  She shrugs. “I guess same thing I always do. Burn it all down and see what comes running out of the flames.”

  PART TWO:

  LICENSE TO HUNT

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Morning comes and Atlanta jostles awake at the kitchen table.

  Paul is standing there, staring at her, his mouth agape.

  “What?” she says, and wonders for a moment why everything tastes like strawberries. But that answer is fast forthcoming.

  Sitting there in front of her is an open container of store-brand strawberry ice cream. A whole quart of it. It’s rolled over, onto its side. A pool of pink melty mess gathers beneath it, forming a skin. In her hand is a spoon. Her mouth is ringed with sticky sweet goo.

  “Had yourself a little ice cream social last night?” Paul asks her.

  “I . . .” She swallows hard. “I don’t remember.”

  Then her stomach surges, and before she even knows what’s happening, she’s over at the sink, her stomach cinching up like a hangman’s rope—

  She doubles over and sends a hot pink strawberry geyser into the sink.

  Paul’s standing by her, looking worried. “Hey, listen, if you’re sick or something—we can maybe put off the hunter safety class—”

  That’s today.

  She glances at the clock.

  In an hour.

  “No,” she says, almost puking again. Gotta get my gun back. She presses her fist to her lips and winces, choking it back. “I’m good. It’s not a bug, it’s just . . .” Just what, Atlanta? “I’m cool. Lemme just hop in the shower. Ten minutes, okay?”

  On the drive over, Paul says: “You just had a hankering for strawberry ice cream last night, huh?”

  “I guess.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Sure, I remember,” she lies.

  “Smart money says I know what this is. Listen, when I was your age I did all kinds of drugs—I smoked weed like I was some kind of marijuana chimney. I dropped acid a bunch of times, too, not enough to think I was a glass of orange juice about to spill, but enough to make me think the clouds were telling me my future and enough to make me think one time when I was biting my nails that I was actually eating off my own fingertips. Drugs are weird, and I don’t blame you—”

  She sets her jaw. “I’m not on drugs.”

  She means it as truth, at least to answer the way he means it.

  But then, a reminder: the Ambien. She came home, rattled from the night. Couldn’t sleep, of course. So she popped a pill before bed.

  Can Ambien do that? Shit. Sleep-eating? And since she ended her night—or thought she ended it, anyway—in her own bed, that also means sleep-walking.

  “Well, either way, hope the ice cream was good,” he says, offering a dubious smile. “Where’d you buy it from?”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “Looked like Giant brand.”

  “I didn’t . . . I didn’t buy it. It must’ve been in the freezer.”

  “There’s ice cream in the freezer, and I bought it for your mother and I. Rum Raisin, which she said you don’t like.”

  Atlanta feels like she’s back in Emerald Lakes all of a sudden— like there’s this whole tornado of crazy suddenly descending upon her.

  They pull up a long drive through some pine trees. A sign for the Danville Gun Club is tucked back into the evergreens.

  Atlanta stays silent, wondering what’s going on with her.

  The truck slows, stops, and as she moves to get out, she feels something crinkle in her pocket. Her hand goes there and she finds it.

  A receipt. From the grocery store. Dated last night.

  One thing purchased: a quart of strawberry ice cream.

  In her head she adds to the list: sleep-shopping.

  Atlanta hates school, so she knows she’s gonna hate this hunter-trapper education thing.

  They sit in a wood-paneled room with puke-green carpets underneath them. They’ve updated the decor since Paul’s been here, but that means it looks like something out of the 1970s rather than the 1950s. The animal heads are all scruffy-looking. There’s a mounted bobcat by the entrance that has cobwebs caught in its open mouth and between its mangy ears.

  The guy who comes out to teach them isn’t some manly, rough hunter—she expects someone like Orly Erickson with his big chest and his let’s go on safari vibe, but what comes out is a pair of teachers. First is a scrawny fellow with all the muscle tone of an old Band-Aid: his name’s Wayne Sleznick, and he looks more like an accountant than anything else. Someone who kills spreadsheets, not whitetail deer. Second person is a woman: a broad-shouldered lady, built like a pellet stove. Joanne Kinro. Local park ranger, apparently.

  Atlanta thinks: I’d sure like to take a nap, but she’s wide awake, almost like she’s had a cup of coffee or something.

  And the two teachers start talking and it takes about an hour of the class for Atlanta to realize that she’s listening. Not just listening, but taking notes. Taking notes with interest, as it turns out—and this isn’t the Ambien, either.

  She actually likes the class.

  Today’s not about gun safety but about the hunt: they show different kinds of animal tracks and animal scat (translation: they look at pictures of rabbit, deer, bear, raccoon turds). They go over how to track an animal over distance, h
ow to set traps, how to be mindful of animals. Why it’s necessary to hunt (turns out, cars hitting whitetail deer are one of the bigger reasons for accidents in the state of PA, alongside drunken dirtbags who think they can drive while sloppy on Crown Royal). How it’s important to conserve the wilderness and the animals in it—and how hunting is a part of conservation. Atlanta’s not sure she agrees with all that, though some of it makes a certain kind of absurd sense.

  Not one talk of guns.

  The whole time, she falls into the class. Face forward, eyes up, brain engaged. For the two hours, she forgets all about who she is.

  On the way home, Paul says, “That was fun. You have fun?”

  She gives him a suspicious side-eye.

  “It was all right,” she says, guarded.

  “Uh-huh.” But he’s watching her and wearing this cheeky grin. “It seems to me you took to it like a monkey to bananas.”

  “Do monkeys really even eat bananas or is that bullshit?”

  He laughs. “C’mon, admit it. You liked it. You were all—” And here he does an impression of her. He leans forward against the steering wheel, eyes wide, and with one free hand pretends like he’s diligently scribbling notes. “Right?”

  “It was fine,” she says, but her smile betrays her.

  Stupid smile.

  Stupid Paul.

  Stupid hunter safety class.

  Later, she’s home. The day is cool so she pulls on her jacket, takes the long walk to Guy’s place. Whitey trotting alongside of her, him chasing moths, grasshoppers, even leaping about while trying to catch the first few falling leaves of autumn. Along the way, she rings up Babycheeks—er, Skylar.

  But there’s no answer. Just goes to her voice mail.

  Still midday. Maybe she’s asleep. Or could be she’s with the cops right now.

  Then she texts Josie: I fucked up your dress and I’m sorry. I’ll pay for it.

  Then she texts Bee: We need to talk. Tonight. My place. 8pm.

  At Guy’s place, he’s there heating up a microwave pizza and, unsurprisingly, cleaning. Got a bottle of glass cleaner and a feather duster out. It’s not the first time she’s called him out on it, and it won’t be the last. “You missed a spot, Suzy Homemaker.”

  “Yo, hooker, don’t be rude. I don’t have no damn cleaning lady,” he says. “Actually, my abuela cleaned houses for a living and she took my dopey ass along, put me to work. Cleaning makes me think of her. And hey, if that dog takes an epic dump in here, I swear—”

  “Relax, he’s trained.” She plops down at his little kitchen table. Whitey lies at her feet. “Hey, lemme ask you some stuff.”

  “That’s never good.”

  “Not really. First up: Ambien.”

  “What about it?”

  “I had . . . something happen.”

  The look on his face tells her he knows exactly what’s coming. He says as much, too: “Oh, snap. You had the thing happen. The sleepwalking thing.”

  “Not just sleepwalking, dude.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Uh-oh.”

  “I woke up this morning and things were not as I left them. Last I remember, I went to sleep and popped one of those little pills, but apparently not long after—” She pulls out the receipt. “I walked my ass to the store, walked through the store, found strawberry ice cream, bought it, walked my ass home, and then binged on it with a spoon before . . . I guess passing out again, leaving the rest there to melt all over the table.”

  “That’s messed up.”

  “You don’t say, Doctor Obvious.”

  “It coulda been worse, though. I heard a story of one guy who took Ambien and woke up in the middle of shaving. Except he was shaving dry, and poor bastard had cut open his face.” Guy splays his fingers out on his cheeks. “Blood everywhere. Like something out of a horror flick, man.”

  She wads up the receipt and pelts him in the forehead with it. “You knew about this? Goshdangit, dude! A heads-up woulda been nice.”

  “Sorry! Sorry. It’s a side effect, not, like, the main event. Some peeps actually get high from Ambien on purpose—they say that if you pop the pill but then force yourself to stay awake, you get really gonzo.”

  “You might could’ve warned me.”

  “My bad, my bad.” The microwave beeps. “You want some pizza?”

  Her stomach growls—she hasn’t eaten anything since apparently gargling a bunch of strawberry ice cream last night, most of which ended up in the kitchen sink. She takes him up on the offer. He slides the pizza—a personal-sized one—toward him and cuts the whole thing in half. One half on a plate to her. The other to him. It’s cheap, nasty pizza. And it’s hot and plasticky and good anyway.

  “Lemme ask the second thing,” she says around a mouthful of napalm-hot cheese, dough, sauce. Then a new sensation kicks in—not just temperature hot, but hot sauce hot, too. Like she’s chewing on chili peppers. Eyes start to water. Nostrils flare like that of a cantankerous bull. She fans her mouth as she speaks: “What the hell, man? This is hot. Spicy hot.”

  “Oh, yeah, I slicked that thing good with some pique.”

  “Is pique a word that means ‘battery acid’?”

  He laughs and keeps eating. “You’re tough, you can take it. Whatcha got, c’mon, c’mon, what’s the other question?”

  “You know anything about a . . .” She’s trying to think how to even put it. “It’s like a prostitution ring, but . . . the girls don’t get a choice.”

  “Lot of hookers don’t get the choice. Not streetwalkers, at least.”

  “This is something different.” She tells him the story—or at least the parts of it that matter. As she tells it, his face goes cold and blank as a cemetery headstone. “Know anything like that?”

  “I’m not into stuff like that.”

  “No, I just mean—you’re a player in this area.”

  “I’m a player in the same way the guy who supplies bats to the Phillies is a player. I’m just a link in the chain, ’Lanta—a little link a long way down.”

  She takes another bite. The hot sauce makes her chest feel like a house fire. “Any new players in town? Wayman’s gone and Orly’s quiet. Maybe . . . someone saw an empty hole, decided to plug it.” Or maybe this is old business and has been going on a lot longer than you’d like to hope.

  He puffs out his cheeks while he thinks. “New customers, maybe, but no new players that I can see.”

  “New customers?”

  “Yeah. I’m rolling in it right now with the guys from VLS.”

  “VLS? That supposed to mean something?”

  “Vigilant Land Systems. They’re like, uhh, you know fracking?”

  “You wanna curse in front of me, it’s okay. I got a mouth like a sewer.”

  He laughs. “No, bitch, I mean, like, fracking for oil. Or natural gas or whatever it is they go looking for down there.” He must see the still-bewildered look on her face because he explains further: “I don’t know how they do it, but I guess it’s like drilling for oil except they get natural gas instead. This state’s got a big-ass fracking boom going on right now, and they’re puttin’ in wells north of here by about fifteen miles. Some people don’t like it because it shits up the water supply or something. But they say it’s safe, so whatever.” He grabs a napkin and wipes pizza grease on it. “They got a whole crew of guys and you know, they’re the kinda guys you’d expect to find: most of them travel with the company. Hard-asses who make a lot of money. The company puts them up in a . . . Holiday Inn Express near the wells, I think.”

  “So what do they want?”

  “The guys?” He laughs. “Drugs, man. Some of them want weed, some of them want meth. I don’t have either, but I got pills that’ll get ’em halfway there. Vikes and Xanax to calm down, Adderall to ramp up. Ambien to help ’em sleep after the Adderall ramps them up. They find a proper dealer, most of them will probably ditch me, but they do random drug tests and what I sell? It’s legal.” He clears his throat. “You know. K
inda.”

  “Doctor Guy, in the house.”

  “Got my degree in Getting-Your-Ass-Highology.”

  “So—nothing funky going on there?”

  “Besides taking illegal pharmaceuticals and then probably violating Mother Earth to rob her of her precious resources? I hear they run a card game there—which ain’t legal, but ain’t weird, either.”

  So, what he’s saying is: dead end. Buncha blue-collar joes won’t have the kind of money it takes to pay big money for young, drugged-up girls. Mister Beardo from Samantha’s place—or the Flared Collar guy—didn’t look like they got their hands dirty working natural gas wells.

  Dangit.

  Text comes in from Bee:

  See you at 8.

  All right, then.

  Josie calls her. Atlanta’s on her way home, walking when the phone rings. She doesn’t even say hi, she just picks up the phone and tells Josie just how sad she is, how mad she is at herself, how sorry she is about the dress and she’ll buy another one, and Josie says, “Screw it, Atlanta. It was worth it to see you in the dress.” Then she says she heard there was some kinda kerfuffle at Samantha’s party and does Atlanta know anything about that? Something about a pool? Atlanta hems and haws, then asks: “Did you hear anything about cops breaking the party up?”

  “No,” Josie says. “The cops always seem to leave her parties alone.” Then Josie gets quiet for a second. “You were there, weren’t you?”

  More hemming and hawing, but Atlanta finally nods, tells her that the kerfuffle at the party is how the dress got screwed up.

  Josie laughs, then says it was more than worth the price of the dress.

  Josie, Atlanta decides, is a good friend.

  As night settles in, Paul and Arlene are in the house drinking, laughing, having a grand old time, and there’s a little part of Atlanta that thinks: I should join them. She’s starting to like Paul despite every cell in her intestinal lining telling her to do differently—and Mama, well, heck. Mama’s got a proper job now. She’s helping keep the lights on, keep the roof firmly over their heads.