THE THOUSAND DOLLAR HUNT: Colt Ryder is Back in Action!

by J. T. Brannan

  ‘But there’s an added wrinkle,’ Badrock said. ‘This time I’ll be hunting too; and if I get him, then the money – and the glory – is all mine.’

  He looked across at me. ‘That okay with you, sweetheart?’ he asked with a crooked smile. ‘You want to play the game?’

  I kept my eyes leveled on Badrock’s. ‘It’s not a game when the other players don’t have a chance.’

  ‘Oh,’ Badrock said as he looked at the helpless park workers, ‘I wouldn’t say they have no chance. Sure, they don’t have weapons, they don’t have infrared, thermal or night vision optics, they’re not trained and they have no idea what they’re doing, but don’t consign them to their graves too quickly. Everyone has a chance.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about them,’ I said, ‘I was talking about you.’ I cast my eye over the hunters and the soldiers hired to protect them and let a smile flicker across my features. ‘You get me into that park and come after me, and you’re all going to be dead. I swear I’m going to kill every single last one of you.’

  There must have been something in my eyes – something that told these people on an instinctive level that I wasn’t messing around, that I was deadly serious – because they grew suddenly quiet, their false bravado vanishing into the four winds. The hunters kept their smiles pasted to their ignorant faces, but the Vanguard men – those that had seen me in action – knew for sure that I meant every word that I said.

  Badrock’s laughter broke the silence a few moments later. ‘Excellent!’ he said, applauding me. ‘Truly excellent! You see, ladies and gentlemen, what dangerous game I have captured for you to hunt! What is a lion, compared to this man?’

  The general’s words soothed his guests’ fears, and their old cockiness returned. ‘What about her?’ asked Billy Johnson, the huge NFL quarterback, pointing down at Talia who still lay sobbing at her father’s feet.

  ‘Her?’ the general asked with disgust. ‘Consider her a free gift. She’ll be released into the park with the others. If you find her, do with her what you will.’

  Johnson grinned, and I could only imagine what his plans for her would be.

  ‘What do you think of that, Mr. Ryder?’ the general asked.

  I knew what he was trying to do of course – manipulate me, goad me into a course of action that he could foresee, and therefore utilize for his own ends. He wanted me to find Talia once we were inside the park; all he had to do was watch the girl and I would turn up sooner or later, the good general waiting for me, waiting to liquidize my skull with a 7.62mm long round.

  But I would give the man an answer to his question anyway.

  ‘What do I think?’ I asked in turn. ‘I think that you’re a sick sonofabitch. And I think that I’m going to track down little Billy-boy here, and cut off his dick before he does something he regrets. And then I’m going to find you, General Badrock, and I’m gonna shove that quarterback’s dick down your throat until you choke on it. And then I might bury your dead body in that little graveyard of yours, along with a sign that reads ‘here lies Roman Badrock, choked to death on a dead man’s dick’. How would you like that for your epitaph, fuck-face?’

  If manipulation was good enough for the general, it was good enough for me. And for a second, Badrock’s face clouded over and I could see that my words had angered him. Generals, retired or not, were not in the habit if having people speak to them in that fashion. But he quickly regained his composure and laughed at my words.

  ‘Well that’s the thrill of the hunt, isn’t it?’ he said jovially. ‘Maybe that’s exactly what will happen. But then again,’ he continued, face hard now, ‘maybe it’s you who will end up with your dick cut off, my friend. Sliced off and mounted on my wall with my other trophies.’

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ I responded without missing a beat. ‘Mounted on your wall so you can suck on it whenever you like.’

  Badrock couldn’t even try and disguise his temper now. ‘You arrogant little fucker,’ he growled, ‘you’ll regret that little joke.’

  ‘Who said it was a joke?’

  But the general’s face didn’t change now, it showed no anger, no engineered joviality; it was just deadpan, devoid of feeling and emotion. ‘Hatfield,’ he said, and his servant snapped to attention.

  The general pointed at Kane, who was alert now, the shock of the Taser blast having finally worn off; he was emitting a deep rumbling growl, lips back over his bared teeth, the two men pinning him with the poles struggling now to contend with his colossal strength.

  ‘Kill the dog,’ Badrock ordered. ‘Now.’

  What happened next occurred in slow motion, the adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream altering my perception of time beyond all measure.

  I saw Hatfield smile and unsling his rifle, the SCAR carbine’s barrel rising to point toward Kane; and at the same time I saw the gleeful wrath in Badrock’s eyes, shining bright like a crazed demon’s.

  Even as the barrel was rising, I also felt the men on either side of me tensing for action, bodies reacting reflexively to the movement of Hatfield’s rifle.

  But they didn’t tense fast enough, and I stamped down hard on the foot of the man to my left, twisting from his grasp and whipping my elbow backwards into his face with a satisfying crack.

  At the same time, I launched a low side kick into the other man’s knee, bringing him down instantly; the next moment, I’d pulled him in front of me, wrapped my hands around his neck and yanked hard.

  The spine snapped and the body went limp, and then I had the man’s falling rifle in my hands; but Hatfield had seen my intentions and thrown himself sideways to avoid my shots. It was good that he’d obviously been warned off killing me before the hunt could begin; it gave me carte blanche to do what I needed.

  I snatched off the safety as I moved the rifle around, and snapped off four rapid fire shots, hitting the men holding the catching poles in the chest, two rounds apiece.

  They dropped hard in plumes of spraying blood, and I could see Kane was going to rush to my aid.

  ‘No!’ I shouted, firing off two more rounds near his front paws. I appreciated his desire to help, but there were so many guns here that he would almost certainly get hit within seconds and I didn’t want that happening to my little buddy. ‘Go!’ I shouted louder now. ‘Go!’

  His head cocked in puzzlement to the side for one moment, and then he was gone, running at full speed past the startled onlookers, dragging the poles that were still hanging from his neck behind him.

  I watched him running into the darkness, saw other men raise their rifles and fire off shots at his fleeing form, prayed that they would miss.

  But, still trapped in the otherworldly sensation of slow-time, I was already swinging my rifle around to fire off some shots toward Badrock, hoping to embed some rounds in the great man’s chest.

  But then my entire body convulsed painfully, muscles cramping so hard that I knew I must have been hit with the Taser.

  I dropped to my knees, gasping for breath; felt my hands still on the rifle, and tried with all my might to raise it again in the general’s direction, muscles rebelling but getting there slowly.

  Too slowly.

  I felt the surge of electricity hit me again, right against my body, and knew somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind that almost fifty thousand volts were pouring into my nervous system.

  And then my eyes closed, and I felt nothing.

  Chapter Ten

  I woke up with a pounding headache, and a dull aching in my muscles.

  My head came up and I looked around in an attempt to orientate myself. I was in the back of a jeep, wrists and ankles bound loosely; and the jeep was out in the wilderness, under a brightly moonlit night sky.

  I wondered how long I’d been out.

  ‘You’ve been out of it less than an hour,’ a voice came from the front seat, and I recognized it as the general’s. ‘But the nights come in fast around here. Although it’s almost daylight with that moon u
p there.’

  I couldn’t tell if Badrock’s voice held disappointment or happiness at the fact, but I could see that he was right. Even without electric lighting, I had no trouble discerning the general’s features as he stared at me, his face bathed in a silvery glow.

  ‘Do you think that will make things harder for you, or easier?’ he asked, and I paused as I thought.

  Good light would mean that I would see my hunters more easily than I would otherwise; but of course, they would also be able to see me, and it would make it all the harder to hide or conceal myself.

  But then again, with the thermal imaging and night vision technology these guys would be packing, they’d be able to see me as clear as day anyway.

  ‘Easier,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ the general agreed. ‘It will negate our technological advantage, to some small degree at least.’

  ‘Might be all the degree I need.’

  ‘It might,’ the general agreed, as he took a lungful of warm night air. ‘It just might. As I told the others, we’ve never had a man like you here before.’

  ‘You prefer the easy option.’

  ‘Do I?’ Badrock shook his head. ‘Don’t be so sure. If I liked the easy option, why select you? Why entertain you, why give you a chance? I could have just killed you in your sleep. I could have let Hatfield kill you the first time I saw you.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘Curiosity, I suppose. Boredom, perhaps. Do you know the kind of people we normally hunt here?’ He scoffed. ‘Men and women like the other six targets tonight, untrained and generally useless. Oh, we get the odd surprise now and again, the occasional drifter with a bit of fight in them. But nobody ever lasts long out here.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they would, given the fact that their hunters have rifles and night vision, and they have nothing.’

  ‘Do you think you don’t have a chance?’

  ‘I’m different.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Badrock agreed. ‘Exactly. You’re different. You’re better. An elite soldier, in the prime of life, experienced in combat and highly conditioned. Now, we’ve had combat vets here before, people we’ve pulled in from shelters, soldiers who’ve fallen on hard times, you know the sort. But the trouble is, by the time they’ve got to that stage, they’re a mess – mentally and physically. Most are alcoholics or drug-dependent, and their bodies have suffered for it. We get the odd gang-banger in too, boys off the streets. They talk tough, think that because they’ve fired a Glock or a MAC-10 in the hood, they’re the real deal.’ He shook his head, his skull pallid and eerie in the moonlight. ‘Within five minutes of being out here, they shit their little pants, every last one of them.’

  He stretched out, yawned, and turned back to me. ‘But you can see our problem, of course. We need people who won’t be missed – people who are here illegally, for instance, and therefore haven’t told anyone where they are, or else people from the homeless shelters, or living on the streets. People who won’t be missed.’

  ‘Benjamin Hooker was missed,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Yes, and look what a stroke of luck that was for me,’ Badrock said happily. ‘Because that poor unfortunate boy brought me you. Imagine my surprise, my joy, when I figured out who you really were. The thousand dollar man. A drifter, a myth, not a real man at all. A loner who nobody would ever miss, because nobody even knows for sure if you really exist. But a top solider nevertheless. And therefore a challenge, at long last!’

  The general withdrew a large Cuban cigar from his breast pocket and lit it, pulling in a great lungful of scented smoke. ‘Hmm, that hits the spot,’ he said contentedly. ‘Would you care for one?’

  I was about to turn him down, when a thought occurred to me. ‘Yes,’ I said, and took the cigar from him, slipping it into my own pocket.

  ‘You’re not going to smoke it?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ I replied, aiming once again to unsettle him before the games started for real. ‘I thought I’d smoke it over your dead body, drop the ashes on your bloody corpse. How does that sound?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ he answered evenly, obviously resigned to my verbal attacks. ‘Extremely unlikely, as I think we both know.’

  ‘How could you do that to your daughter?’ I asked, changing the subject, hoping he might provide me with a hint of her location within his answer.

  ‘I’m a practical man,’ he answered, ‘and she was a tool to be used, a resource like any other.’

  ‘Dammit, she’s your daughter,’ I objected.

  ‘Not anymore,’ he said, ‘not after what she did. Oh, I managed to keep her various indiscretions out of the papers of course, but you can never entirely defeat the rumor mill, and word had already spread among my competitors. Proven or not, there was no way the army board would give a fourth star to a man with a crack whore for a daughter. That bitch cost me my promotion to full general rank, destroyed my hopes of making it into the halls of the joint chiefs. What she’s done here is simply pay me back for what she took from me.’

  ‘What she took from you?’ I asked incredulously. ‘What about what you took from her?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean her childhood,’ I said. ‘Absent father, sent away to boarding school, you think that’s what she wanted?’

  Badrock shook his head pityingly, as if to a child who didn’t understand. ‘I never wanted her in the first place,’ he said. ‘Married late, which was a mistake. Never should have gotten married at all. But it looked good for the promotions boards, you know? More stable, more trustworthy.’ He shrugged. ‘Whatever. The bitch was nothing but trouble, a real pain the ass. And then the dumb bitch got pregnant. I tried to love the girl, but I just couldn’t; it was a drain on my emotional resources, and I needed every ounce of energy for my job.’

  He smiled wryly. ‘I killed her mother, you know.’ He nodded his head knowingly, his smile widening. ‘Yes, I killed her one day when I was back on leave, Talia was in kindergarten. And what kind of stupid fucking name is Talia, anyway? I was away on tour when she was born, never had a chance to stop my wife naming her. But anyway,’ he continued, smoking happily on his cigar, ‘I digress. Where was I?’

  ‘You were killing your wife.’

  ‘Of course I was. So I was at home, and it was the same as always, the woman moaning and whining, clean this, tidy that, don’t put that there, you know the sort of thing. So one day I just grabbed hold of her and throttled her, wrung her damned scrawny neck until the life bled right out of her, right there on the living room couch. Poured a quart of vodka down her neck, arranged a nice little DUI crash scene. I was sure to burn the thing right out too, make sure the authorities couldn’t tell what had really killed her.

  ‘I have to admit, I thought about killing the girl too. But whatever you think of me, I’m not a monster – even I couldn’t bring myself to kill a child in cold blood. And so I sent her off to boarding school. She never wanted for anything, what more could I do? And then she repays my kindness by becoming a crack addict and selling her body on the streets.’

  He shook his head, obviously still not able to come to terms with her ‘betrayal’. It was clear that the general was insane, and had been for some time; perhaps had always been. He existed in his own private world, and anyone who questioned it was liable to get hurt, or worse.

  ‘You call killing the girl’s mother kindness?’ I asked in disbelief. I didn’t mind questioning his private world; I was going to get hurt anyway.

  ‘Not killing the girl was kindness,’ he replied. ‘Misplaced kindness, as it turned out. But then again,’ he added, ‘at least she helped me confirm my suspicions about you.’

  ‘That’s why you sent her to me.’

  ‘Of course,’ Badrock said. ‘I didn’t believe you really wanted to work for me, I suspected that you were sticking around to poke your nose further into my affairs. But I knew it would be hard to get you to talk – and if my suspicions as to your true identity were verified, I also
didn’t want you injured. Hence my protection of you during your time here. I wanted you fresh for the hunt. My daughter, on the other hand – her I could use for information. I knew if your intentions were not sincere, you would either volunteer them to your pillow partner, or perhaps even try and recruit her to your cause. And then it would be no problem at all to get her to talk.’

  It was my turn to shake my head now. ‘You really are one sick, sorry bastard.’

  ‘Here,’ he said, throwing me a scrap of cloth that I caught in my handcuffed hands. ‘Part of her dress, torn by my men.’ He smiled at my visible reaction. ‘Keep it as a memento of your time together. It’s unlikely you’ll ever see her again . . . in one piece at least.’

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ I whispered through gritted teeth, putting the piece of cloth away in a pocket.

  ‘Say what you want,’ the general said, ‘but we are similar, you and I, much more so than you probably think.’

  ‘We’ve both got a head, two arms and two legs,’ I agreed, ‘and we both piss standing up. But the similarities end right there.’

  ‘I think not,’ the general said. ‘We both enjoy the thrill of the hunt, do we not? You enjoy your work as the thousand dollar man, of course you do. And why not? You hunt down men like me for your clients, and you love it, you cannot lie to me about it, I see it in your eyes, it’s like poison in your veins. You want to kill me so bad you can feel it in the pit of your stomach, can’t you? Can’t you?’

  I could; I wanted to kill him so bad it hurt. But I stayed quiet.

  ‘Yes,’ he urged. ‘Of course you do.’ He finished his cigar, threw it into the dirt outside the jeep. ‘You’re scared, of course you are; armed men tracking you, wanting to hunt you down and kill you, you wouldn’t be human if you weren’t. But at the same time, you’re excited too, am I right? You’ll be free out there, free to do what you do best, free to turn the tables, track the hunters and kill us instead. A part of you relishes it, can’t wait to get started. Am I right?’