by Star, Amy
“Dylan, we have to go!” Sarah screamed at him, plying the collar off her neck and chucking it away like it was a leech. “C’mon, Chris!”
The bear held his position, anchored to the ground with his burly tree-trunk paws that seemed to be rooted to the soil. His large hump on his back rose, bristling with fur, even as he maneuvered himself to block any incoming shots. Dylan must have seen the resolve in his old friend’s eyes because he was up in an instant, wiping dried blood off his chin and grabbing Sarah’s hand and pulling her back into the woods, trying to put some distance (and trees) between them and the poachers.
“But Chris!” she said, trying to fight back.
Behind them she could see the first poacher, the ugly one with the knife, level a shot. She couldn’t tell if it hit Chris or not. There wasn’t any movement, just a low thrumming growl that followed into the tree branches. The other poacher was nowhere to be seen, and suddenly, Chris turned at last, barreling down one of the side paths, only the snap of twigs and branches under his paws to signal his whereabouts.
Dylan took a sharp right, heading back toward the cabin. Something in Sarah’s periphery glinted and she had just enough time to push her right leg forward, crashing into Dylan’s back and sending them both hurtling onto the path. The sound of a bullet whizzed over their heads, inches above them, shattering a small moss-covered stone beside them. Too close. The other hunter must have been trying to cut them off.
“Up,” Sarah said.
The two of them ran again but somehow they both knew it was useless. Another shot rang out, cracking into a cedar tree beside them with a gaping hole in the trunk and both Sarah and Dylan stopped dead in their tracks and slowly raised their hands. That shot had missed them on purpose – the next wouldn’t.
“Turn around,” they heard a gruff voice.
The other poacher had a sallow look to him, indented cheeks, like the skin had been shrink-wrapped over him. There was the same hard edge to him though, a trained and calculating killer. The rifle was pointed at Dylan, who merely sneered back at him.
“If you let us go right now, you might have a chance,” Dylan warned.
“I have the gun, you have shit,” the poacher retorted, “now turn around. You, boy, it’s the end for you. Girl, move aside.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Collect what we came for. He’s not… not human. He’s a bloody goddamned monster. Turn around I said! I don’t want you looking at me for this,” he commanded, bracing the rifle. “As for you, girl, you stay quiet… maybe we’ll have a use for you.”
Sarah realized what he was planning and took a step in front, opening her arms wide. The poacher hesitated only for a moment. “You’ll have to kill both of us.”
Dylan pulled her aside by both shoulders. “No,” he hissed. “Sarah… listen…”
“I’m not going to let him shoot you!” she half-screamed.
“He’ll kill us both, now stop!” he shouted at her. No, he was no longer a boy at all. There was fear in his voice but the fear wasn’t rooted in self-preservation, or in the expectation of pain, it had elevated itself to something outside of himself: he was terrified for her.
She started to cry, clutching at his jacket, which had ripped in their escape. “No… I’m not… I’m not going to let…” she pleaded, her cheeks scrunched up, tears rolling hot against her skin, and Dylan embraced her, pulling her head under his chin.
“You run… when I tell you, you run,” he whispered through her hair.
“I won’t leave you,” she insisted, but the strength had left her.
“C’mon! Move, back away, or I’ll put a bullet in both of you. Move!” the poacher said gesturing with the barrel of the gun. His face had gone a clammy kind of pale, but Dylan had no doubt that the killer had little compunction about pulling the trigger, whatever part of him that was human had been overwhelmed by the hunt.
Dylan himself had known that kind of pure unbridled instinct. But he had never let it control him so deftly. I’m going to die, he realized, and gently disentangled himself from Sarah’s arms, even as she pulled at him with her fingers.
“No,” Sarah pleaded.
The poacher raised his gun and cocked the trigger as Dylan threw Sarah aside in one harsh movement, causing her to stagger back a few steps and give his murderer an opportunity. He closed his eyes, waiting for the shot.
“You should have listened to him,” Sarah said in a low gravelly voice that didn’t belong to her. It was full of contempt, a bitter rind of syllables that couldn’t have come from such a sweet mouth. Even the poacher arched his eyebrows, confused by the ice in her tone.
Her shoulders were hunched, and her head drooped toward him, eyes thin as shards of flint.
“Shut up!” the poacher said.
Sarah twisted her head. “You might’ve had a chance… but now…”
“Shut up,” he pointed the gun at her instead.
She didn’t move an inch, merely smiled, a cunning smile that cut her lips like a sickle. “If you’re going to shoot something, then shoot. The problem with you,” she paused for half an instant, “is that you talk too much. Missed your chance.”
He was obviously puzzled by her words but there was no time for contemplation. It was all over in an instant. A brown blur flashed behind him, scattering leaves and twigs and neatly severing his head from his neck. Dylan gaped, trying to reconcile the imagery of the poacher’s last expression as his head sailed through the air, landing with an unceremonious thud against the rocks on the path. His trunk staggered, arms going limp as laundry, and the gun clattered uselessly onto the ground. Bright spurts of arterial blood jutted from his neck and drooled down the front of the camo outfit.
The edges of the neck were frayed and the image of an overused rubber eraser on a pencil entered Dylan’s mind. The comparison almost made him sick, even as the corpse plummeted to its knees and landed on its chest. The fingers on the poacher’s right hand pulsed, twitching in the last of his death throes, and more blood clotted against the path.
Less a bear than a shape conjured from the forest itself, Chris plodded from the bushes behind, each movement of his paws an effort that seemed to waste him further away. Blood was stained on his fur in several places and his claws were dark with the ichor.
He turned his head toward Dylan and there was a look of amiable reticence, as if the old bear wanted to say something aloud but had lost the ability to enunciate it in any meaningful way. He simply growled and butted up against Dylan’s leg.
“You pirate, you,” Dylan gasped, rubbing the bear’s head.
“You saved us again,” Sarah breathed, collapsing to her knees and trying to avoid looking at the corpse – or the severed head – which had become dumb as any other artifact on the island.
”He’s hurt, Sarah,” Dylan spoke over the bear’s head, “I think… I think badly. I don’t…”
CRACK.
Sarah ducked, plucking the fallen rifle from the ground even as she rolled to one side and flattened her back against a tree. Can’t get one fucking break, she wanted to scream. It was like a bad joke, some ironic twist of fate that had to keep them on their toes, except she wasn’t laughing. Dylan staggered back as well, trying to coax the monstrous weight of Chris against a sheltering pile of stone and fallen logs.
“Shit! Can you see him?” he shouted across to Sarah.
In her hands, the rifle felt like a toy, large and unwieldly. She’d been trained in the use of firearms but to actually have one gripped against her chest, and the sudden impetus to actually use it against a living creature, a human no less, was too overwhelming. She peered around the trunk, her dark doe eyes scanning the terrain, looking for any color, any movement, that did not seem to belong. A glint of sunlight peeked out at her from under two moss-covered logs and she pulled her head back in just as another rifle round clipped the edge of her tree trunk.
“He can see me,” she snarled, and pulled her knees up. The r
ifle was a Remington, bolt-action. What she would have given for a semi-automatic. Even a .22. With a bolt action she would have to reload manually each time to eject the empty shell. A good weapon if you were following a prey that didn’t know you were there. For a shoot-off like this, it was a distinct disadvantage.
“Can you shoot?” Dylan asked. He was crouched over Chris, still in bear form. The stubborn man refused, even now when he was bleeding from at least two other bullet wounds, to revert to human form. As long as he stayed in bear form, his healing powers were magnified, but it must have been sheer agony.
She nodded in response, and checked the clip. Ten shots. Ten chances. She cocked back on the lever and shoved another of the large copper bullets into the barrel. Dylan was still watching her, and when she nodded some unspoken accord signaling him, he stood up quickly, waving his arms and giving a loud whoooeee.
He ducked down again, just in time to miss being scalped by an errant shot by the poacher. He hasn’t moved on his hide, she realized. He was used to hunting prey that didn’t think like a human. He should have switched his position the moment he missed her but he’d chosen the same spot.
While she was still cursing Dylan for lingering too long above his shield, she turned and planted the rifle firmly against her shoulder, staring down the sight at the last place she had seen the glint. One second; that’s all she’d get. She saw the small hole, the platform between the two fallen logs, and squeezed off the shot. It rang like church bells in her ears and the force of the gun going off against her shoulder was almost enough to spiral her back out of the line of sight of the poacher. She groaned and massaged the divot in her shoulder, pulling down the strap of her tank-top. An ugly purplish-red bruise was already hemorrhaging under the skin.
“Can he move?” she shouted back at Dylan, even though there was no need for it. Aside from the burst of gunfire, the forest remained calm in the wake of each shot. She found herself contemplating it like a kind of passive rebuke; the forest announcing the perpetuity of its silence, its sovereignty over us, no matter how this turns out.
Her mate shook his head fiercely, the gash on his head having opened in the turmoil, and a small trickle of blood plastered to the side of his brow where it disappeared, sopped up by the black hair that covered his ears.
Even as he reached over the bear, he could feel a slow and tangible regression. Chris had held his shape as long as he could. The heavy brown fur began to recede, almost like watching a time-lapse of the seasons, the growth and death of grass and plants. In moments, there was a halo of brown hair covering Dylan’s pant leg and Chris’ naked body was propped on his knees.
“Got ’im,” Chris mumbled through his lips and coughed blood.
Dylan reached down and supported his friend’s head. “You got him, alright. It’s okay, now.”
Chris shook his head. “I was supposed to… to protect you.”
“You did,” Dylan said smiling, forcing back his own tears. “Oh, you did, old bear.”
“I think… I think I’m ready… to see Suzy again,” he breathed. “It’s been a pleasure, Dylan. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend. I’m… I’m really going to miss this island, y’know.”
Now, as a human, Dylan could see where the poacher’s bullets had bit into him. Below the old wound in his shoulder there was another, right above his left chest cavity, and the way Chris was laboring to breathe, it was more than likely he’d punctured a lung. Not much blood, but a wet sucking sound, and Dylan squirmed, placing his hand on the wound, trying to buy Chris whatever time was left to him. The other wound was in his leg, and it must have clipped an artery the way it was bleeding. His Atlas thigh was coated red, as if he’d painted it.
“Sarah! Sarah, I can’t… there’s too much blood,” he said, but Sarah couldn’t help him. She leaned out and another bullet ricocheted off the trunk of the tree and she cursed, wiping sawdust out of her eyes. “Chris, stay with me… we’ll get you back to the cabin, okay?”
His big bovine eyes looked up through blood loss and a pleasant vision that was beginning to unfold. “I took the satellite radio… it’s… it’s where you didn’t think I would look. Thought… it would be safe there, when they started… hunting me…”
“Don’t speak.”
“Suzy’s waiting for me,” he said. “You know what they say, when you start seeing the dead.”
Dylan nodded. “You’re too close to them.”
“Thing is, I’m not scared. I feel happy… how’s that for weird?” the old bear laughed, his voice a hacking sort of sound that reminded Dylan of branches scraping together.
“She’s waiting,” Dylan choked on the words, bracing Chris’ head under his lap, “go to her.”
Chris smiled, the biggest smile he was capable of, something that transformed his whole face, and his eyes closed gently with a knowing sort of expression, like wherever he was going he’d be sure to wait there, for whenever it was Dylan’s time. That’s what a patron’s for, ain’t it?
Carefully, Dylan set Chris’ head on the ground and brushed the hair off his pant leg.
CHAPTER NINE
Sarah could barely register the fact that Chris was dead. She saw Dylan put the patron’s head onto the ground and felt like throwing up. A huge grin was on the giant’s face, like he’d gone out the way he’d always wanted to. She looked up at Dylan, but he wouldn’t look at her. His face was changed, a mask of anger and hate that made her feel as if she’d lost him, too.
She pulled back on the bolt of the rifle and loaded another: seven more shots. The poacher still hadn’t learned to shift his position after each shot, which meant it was easy to calculate from where the next bullet would come from. She hissed at him and he turned, his face a mess of emotions and confusion, as if he’d only just realized she was there.
“I can’t get in a good shot,” she whispered. “He’s got me pinned too well.”
“If we stay here, he’ll just pick us off,” he said, looking above the stone wall quickly and ducking down again. “What do you think? Should we run for it?”
She looked down the path. It didn’t offer much cover. If they could make it to the grove of tightly growing cedars off the bank, then maybe they’d have a chance. She winced and held the gun in front of her. “One of us might get away.”
Dylan snarled. “Both of us or none of us. I’m through losing people today,” he grated.
“Do you have a better plan?”
Without looking, Dylan reached down and touched Chris’ shoulder with his fingers. “This bastard wants a trophy and he was expecting bears. I say we give him bears”
She thought about it. It would mean abandoning the rifle, the only real form of protection they had against the poacher, if they both turned into bears. But it might just give them the speed and opportunity to outrun the poacher in his nest. They could make better distance as bears. But it was still chancy.
“I have a better idea,” she said.
***
From his perch, Arthur had a perfect 180 degree angle on both of his quarry. He hunched down, feeling the stone under his legs start to wear into the muscle, but kept his eye firmly locked on the sight. He would get one chance, one chance if he was lucky, and he refused to miss it. Through the magnification of the scope he could make out Kyle’s body. The shifters had killed him too, he suspected. There was a dark patch of blood but he couldn’t see the rest of Kyle’s body.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he muttered, his finger resting lightly on the plastic trigger.
The girl was a good enough shot. She’d managed to fire off two rounds at him, and if he hadn’t been slipping in another clip, that first one would have got him through the forehead. She knew how to shoot, which troubled him. These weren’t ordinary prey. Besides the fact they could change at will between bear and human, and he’d seen that well enough to know it wasn’t fiction any longer, at least one of them had training with a rifle.
He looked down his scope again. All he had
to do was wait. If the girl was using Kyle’s rifle, there were only a couple more rounds left. Meanwhile, he had at least a hundred bullets and two extra clips. Let them get weary, and it’ll be their end, he thought.
Two minutes passed. Nothing. No movement at all. He craned his eye through the scope, trying to get a glimpse of anything that would signal their presence. He hadn’t seen them leave. To the left and right, it was open trail, he would have noticed. Were they playing coy or had they managed to sneak past him somehow? He felt worry gnaw at his stomach and started to chew on a twig. The muscles in his arm were starting to cramp.
Then, there was a flurry of movement – not from the tree trunk or the rock shield, but to the right. A brown movement. He tried to readjust and saw a bear-like form trying to lumber off. So, abandoning your sweetheart, huh, he wanted to mock. He looked down the graphite muzzle and prepared to shoot. Just then, another shot boomed to his right, and several chips of the boulder beside him sparked against his face. He flinched and turned back. A ruse!
Another shot, and he ducked, heard the ozone of a bullet swim above his head and snarled. He was leading away his aim while she took a shot. It didn’t matter, Kyle’s rifle was a bolt action, and his was a semi-automatic, which gave him at least a four or five bullet lead on her if it came to speed. He aimed down his sight again. The girl was running. A shame, but he wasn’t about to give up a good shot. Maybe he could just clip her, she was beautiful and the combination of the hunt and his mad lust for revenge had stirred other feelings in him, dark primitive feelings that bubbled in his loins.
“You’re on your own now, pretty,” he said, aiming for her ankles.
But the narrowness of his scope had suddenly been used against him. He saw a black shape move in the opposite direction, putting his aim off balance, and was forced to look over his scope with his own two eyes. He saw the black grizzly returning from the other angle, and saw the woman wrap one arm around his neck and swing her leg over his hump as if he were a horse. It was all one fluid movement, one second earlier or later, a slip of the foot, and they both would have tumbled hopelessly into the breach of trees. But somehow, she’d mounted him, coming from the opposite direction!
