Hunted

by William W. Johnstone

  * * *

  The hunt was on, and Vlad knew the men of the village planned to kill him. Unknowingly at first, Vlad shape-shifted and quickly outdistanced his pursuers. Then he loped straight into a pack of wolves. They were at first hostile, but that lasted for only a few seconds until they realized that this interloper was really no stranger to them. Then came the happy, ritualistic greetings: muzzle biting, face touching, and body gestures. The younger and subordinate members of the pack stood with legs bent, ears back, tails low, signaling to the big stranger that they recognized his superiority. Then they came forward, one at a time, and pressed their noses against the bigger wolf’s face, after that, sprawling on their backs, legs in the air. Total submission.

  Vlad signaled danger, and the wolves headed out, quickly pulling away from the humans in pursuit, the alpha male and alpha female leading the way. They ran with ease and without harm through thick bramble and brush that would rip and tear a human’s flesh. They ran for miles, deeper and deeper into the darkening forest, until they reached an area so foreboding the pack knew no human would dare enter. There, they fell to the ground and rested, safe.

  The pack watched as Vlad shape-shifted; then they again went through the welcoming ritual. When the pack had rested, they went on a hunt, leaving Vlad alone by the tiny spring. Vlad ate bread and cheese from the packet of food his mother had given him, and then slept. The pack returned to find him asleep on the ground. The alpha male and female snuggled up close to him, to provide him warmth while in his human form, and all was well.

  * * *

  Darry lay in thick brush on a hill overlooking the camp and watched for an hour. He had circled the area before approaching and had spotted the guards. They were in good positions, but Darry bypassed them easily. The wolf in him knew by instinct to become one with his surroundings. Back in the old country, so many, many years ago, Darry had played with the younger wolves at their fun but still serious games of survival, sometimes abruptly shape-shifting in front of them and literally scaring the shit out of the pups. The pups would then scamper yelping and yipping back to the adults, pouring out their tales of fright, while Darry rolled on the ground, laughing at their antics. Then the adults would all rush to Darry and jump on him, play-biting and tussling, for a wolf is almost always ready to play . . . with his or her own kind.

  Darry counted forty men and women in the camp, and they were not here for fun and games. Darry could sense their seriousness: they were training, and they were very, very good at practicing for war.

  But war against whom? People not of their race? The government? Darry didn’t know, and wasn’t really sure he should attempt to find out. These people had not made any attempt to harm him or his hybrids. Darry had a hunch the people below him would not be very friendly toward him; but so far they had made no hostile moves against him, and until they did, what they were doing was none of his business.

  Darry had learned the hard way not to get involved in other peoples’ affairs . . . although he still did on occasion. He’d almost lost his head when he fought against Vlad Tepes, known as Vlad the Impaler, escaping his native country only by the barest of margins. On the hill overlooking the camp, Darry recalled that night he swam the river Dimbovita and eventually left his home country for good. The year was 1460, he thought.

  Darry had so much history it was sometimes difficult to separate the jumble of events in his mind.

  He backed away from the hill, skirted the guards, and began the hike back to his cabin. If those paramilitary types left him alone, he would leave them alone. But if they chose trouble, he was more than willing and able to give back ten times what he received.

  For the man who now called himself Darry Ransom was the world’s consummate and eternal warrior.

  And had been for almost seven centuries.

  2

  “How far down the river are we going to go?” the boy asked his father.

  “To here, Paul,” Dr. Ray Collier told his son, pointing to a spot on the map. “We’ll camp on up these bluffs, and then we’ll spend a week exploring.”

  “All right!” Paul said.

  “Radical!” Terri Collier said, two years younger than her older brother’s seventeen years.

  Both kids loved camping; their parents had seen to that. They had started taking their kids camping when Paul was three and Terri was one, and had been doing so at least three times a year ever since.

  That was not to say the kids weren’t normal, healthy teenagers, with a love for junk food and music loud enough to raise the dead. But they also loved camping and could do without pizza, ice cream, and rock and roll for extended periods of time.

  “Will there be any other people, Dad?” Terri asked.

  Doctor Collier shook his head. “I don’t think so, honey. That’s pretty much a wilderness area.”

  “Good,” the girl said. “Peace and quiet.”

  The parents smiled at each other. Paul and Terri had turned out well. Both were straight-A students in school, Paul was an above average basketball player, and Terri had a flare for the dramatics and was the youngest member of her school’s drama club. Both kids were well-liked.

  Karen Collier, who was a partner in a very prestigious L.A. law firm, took her husband’s hand in hers and gently squeezed. She was looking forward to getting out of the city for a few weeks and spending some quality time with her family.

  * * *

  Vlad lived in the forests with the wolves for several years. A year after he left the village he learned both his parents had been killed by angry villagers, accused of being werewolves. The charge was brought by Vlad’s older brother, Octavian, whose life was spared because he had cooperated with the village elders.

  Now Vlad truly was cut off from any human contact in the world outside the forest.

  He occasionally stole articles of clothing from clotheslines to cover his nakedness, and at night, when he could, he slipped into henhouses for eggs and chickens, which he cooked. The wolves Vlad lived with never understood why he insisted upon cooking his food; to them the meat had no flavor when cooked. Sometimes he would watch a house until he was certain all the family members were gone, and he would go inside and take bread and cheese to add to his rather meager diet. Mostly he fished and trapped for his food.

  And he would occasionally be sighted by some hunter, running with wolves. The legends grew about this strange young man who lived with wild animals. Bounties were placed on Vlad’s head, but not even the king’s soldiers cared to venture very deep into the dark woods in pursuit of him.

  The average life of a wolf is between seven and nine years, although some live to be fourteen or fifteen years old. As the years rolled by, the older wolves in the pack that had adopted Vlad began to die. Vlad noticed that if death came naturally and there was time for such rituals, the old dying wolf would be left food by others in the pack, in a comfortable place in the woods, and when the dying was complete, they mourned for a time, just like humans.

  When Vlad realized that he was no longer aging, he sensed it was time for him to leave the pack and once more venture out into the human world. He thought he was about twenty-five years old, but he was not certain of that. He joined the pack in a howl, then rolled in play for a time, and touched faces and muzzles; then without another gesture, he walked away, leaving one world behind him, and began his return into the world that had rejected him. He did so with the tears of sadness in his eyes.

  * * *

  Darry knocked on the door of the ranger station just after dawn. He had been watching for the first signs of smoke from the lodge to signal that Rick was up and making breakfast.

  “Come on in, Darry,” the ranger said with a smile, for he liked this strange young man. Rick thought he was a few years older than Darry and had mentioned that to him once. To this day he could not understand why Darry had found that comment so amusing. “I thought it was about time for you to come in and get your truck. You running out of supplies?”

 
; “Yes. The winter was especially hard. And I need to pick up some dry dog food for Pete and Repeat.”

  “Some breakfast?”

  “Yes. Thank you. That would be nice.”

  Rick broke the eggs on the edge of the cast-iron skillet and said, “Those dogs of yours are hybrids, Darry.”

  “Yes. I know. Probably abandoned by some fool who didn’t know what he was getting when he got them and didn’t have the patience to learn.”

  “They stay in your cabin, Darry?”

  “They sleep on the floor right beside my bed.” Darry sugared his coffee and took a sip. Just right.

  “A wolf in the house,” Rick muttered, laying out strips of bacon on a paper towel. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll turn on you someday?”

  Darry smiled. “No.” His thoughts were flung back centuries to a huge female wolf he had named Shasta, who used to snuggle up close to him during the winter months to help keep her adopted human warm. “I am not afraid of wolves, Rick. No human has to be afraid of wolves, if only he will take the time to understand them.”

  Rick grunted. “You’ll never convince most ranchers and farmers of that.”

  “Many of them have legitimate gripes about repopulating the wolf. The wolf is a predator. But the answer to that is simple. And you know what it is.”

  Rick chuckled. “Keep the hunters out of selected areas and let the wolves maintain the balance of nature.”

  “As God intended it to be.”

  “Something tells me you are not a member of the NRA, Darry.” Rick slid the eggs on a plate, added strips of bacon and fried potatoes and set the plate before Darry.

  “I’m not a member of anything, Rick. But I am a hunter. Genuine hunters have nothing to fear from men like me.”

  Rick sat down with his own plate of food and said, “How many trophy heads do you have on the walls of your cabin, Darry.”

  Darry smiled, shook his head, and Rick laughed. “Yeah. That’s what I mean,” the ranger said. “You hunt for food and survival, not for sport.”

  “There is no sport in killing, Rick. I use every part of the deer I take; every part that is possible to use, that is. It’s an argument that will probably never be really settled.” He started to say “in our lifetime,” but cut that off short, thinking: Not in your lifetime, Rick.

  “You mind picking up a few things for me in town, Darry?”

  “Not at all. You have a list?”

  Rick fished in his pocket and handed Darry a short list and some money. He wondered how this young man earned a living; where he got his money. Darry could certainly keep an engine running. He wondered where he’d learned to do that.

  Rick would have been amazed to learn that Darry had helped build the first assembly runs of Henry Ford’s famous Model-T. Any color you want, as long as it’s black.

  * * *

  “It’s bullshit, Stormy,” the man said, tossing the weekly newspaper to the desk. “And you know it. The people who write for that . . . rag”—he pointed to the newspaper—“wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them on the butt.” He laughed. “The Man Who Could Not Die,” he read the glaring headlines. “Sounds like an old movie title.” He frowned. “As a matter of fact, I think it is an old movie title.” He paused, looking at the woman who stood before his desk. Stormy was one of his top reporters. Blond and beautiful and sometimes arrogant, the viewing public loved her. She didn’t have the temperament to become an anchor—not yet anyway; maybe in a few years—but she did have a very large following. He sighed. “All right, Stormy. All right. I guess you want Ki to go with you?”

  “That’s right. She’s the best there is, and we work well together.”

  “Two women, alone in the wilds of Idaho,” the department head muttered.

  “You’re a sexist pig, Bobby,” Stormy said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, right. What are you going to do if you stumble upon Big Foot?”

  “Interview it,” Stormy said with a toss of her blond mane. “See you, Bobby.”

  * * *

  “What did the President want?” the deputy director of Central Intelligence asked the director of Central Intelligence. Also present in the room were the deputy director for Operations and the deputy director for Intelligence.

  The DCI blinked a couple of times, as if confused, which was a normal condition for the DCI, since he was a political appointee and seldom actually knew what was really going on. He looked around him at each man. “What the hell is a man who could not die?”

  “Johnny McBroon,” the DDO muttered under his breath. Nobody heard him.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” the DDCI asked.

  “That was the President. He wants to know what we know about the man who could not die.”

  “Who is the man who could not die?” the DDI asked.

  “That’s what I just asked you.”

  “What are you talking about?” the DDCI asked.

  The DDO held up a hand. “Wait a minute. Hold on here. I’m getting confused.”

  “I am confused!” the DDCI admitted.

  The DDO looked at the DCI. “The President wants to know something about a man who could not die—correct?”

  “That is correct.”

  “But no one here, in this room, knows anything about a man who could not die—correct?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Good,” the DDO said, picking up a phone.

  “Who are you calling?” the DCI asked.

  “DDST.”

  The DCI furtively slid out a panel on his desk to look at a sheet of paper he himself had typed, to see what part of the CIA that was. He had a hell of a time keeping up with all the departments. Deputy Director of Science and Technology.

  “Say what?” the DDST said, after hearing the question.

  “Forget it,” the DDO replied, and hung up.

  “Before we call anyone else, and make idiots out of ourselves, I have an idea,” the DDI said. “Let’s ask a secretary.”

  “It’s an article in this week’s edition of the National Loudmouth,” she told the men. “It’s about a man living somewhere in Idaho who is rumored to be hundreds of years old.”

  “What does he do?” the DCI asked.

  The secretary shrugged her shoulders. “Just gets older, I guess.”

  “Thank you, Miss Lawrence,” the DCI said.

  When the door had closed behind her, the DCI looked at the men seated around his desk. “The President wants us to investigate this person.”

  “You have got to be kidding!” the DDO blurted.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  The DDO sighed. Then he smiled. “I have just the man for the job.”

  “Who?” the DDCI asked.

  “Johnny McBroon.”

  “You’re not serious! The man’s an alcoholic and a lunatic. Besides, we haven’t used him in several years. Officially, we don’t know him.”

  “Then he’s perfect,” the DDO said. “If he screws up, we can’t be blamed.” Then he shook his head. “The President of the United States actually reads the National Loudmouth?”

  “Of course not. Don’t be absurd,” the DCI replied quickly and a bit stiffly in defending his boss and his friend. “I’m sure it was one of his junior staff members who brought it to his attention.”

  “I would certainly hope so,” the DDO replied.

  * * *

  Darry drove into the small Idaho town and pulled into the parking area by the side of the town’s only grocery store. He sat for a time behind the wheel, wondering if his cover was about to be blown—again. Darry had developed a sixth sense about that.

  “But why would I think that now?” he muttered to himself.

  Nothing untoward had happened. But something had triggered the thought.

  Don Shepherd, the county deputy assigned to the area, and who lived in the small town, drove by and waved at Darry. Darry returned the friendly wave from the young man and watched the sheriff’s car until it was out of sight
.

  No warning bells went off in Darry’s head, and with a sigh he relaxed and walked across the street to the tiny post office. The only mail in his box were three checks from a bank in San Francisco. He walked over to the small branch office of a bank and deposited the checks, keeping enough cash to buy his groceries and other supplies.

  When gold had been discovered in Colorado, Darry had struck a nice vein and had carefully invested his money, his attorney setting up companies and corporations for him. Darry never touched the principal, and over the decades his investments had grown. He was by no stretch of the imagination a wealthy man, but he was comfortable. The law firm that handled his money was one of the first to open up in San Francisco, and descendants of the original partners still ran the office.

  Darry also had small amounts of money in banks and investment houses all over Europe. He often thought, with typical dark humor, that if a man couldn’t set aside a nest egg over a span of nearly seven hundred years, he must be doing something wrong.

  Darry bought his supplies and the articles for Rick, and loaded his purchases in the back of his pickup, covering them with a tarp and securing it tight. He walked over to a cafe and ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. The cafe was a favorite gathering place and, at mid-morning, filled with men and women taking a coffee break and gossiping.

  Darry knew a few of the men and women gathered there and spoke to them as he walked to a table in the corner. Over pie and coffee he listened to the people talk.

  “I hated to see those damn nuts come back in again this spring,” a rancher said. “I thought maybe we were rid of them.”

  “Maybe we’re the ones who are nuts,” a man in a business suit countered. “At least they’re getting ready to cope with what we all know is bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “Oh, come on, Ned!” a woman said. “Sam Parish and those with him are a bunch of dangerous kooks. Sheriff Paige told me they probably have a million rounds of ammunition buried in bunkers up there. They’ve got emergency food and radios and God only knows what else cached in the wilderness.”

  “That’s their right,” another man spoke up. “And the goddamn government has no business interfering with them. What happened to Randy Weaver should have been a lesson to us all.”