by C A Gleason
Jonah had already been inconvenienced enough today, and that was aside from the disruption of an unforeseen hunt. It wasn’t as if he would have missed the shot he would have taken with his silenced pistol. Then again, Jonah wouldn’t have gone back out in the first place if he wasn’t presently tracking more trespassers.
Losing patience, Jonah headed around a tree and stepped directly into the man’s path. He thought of greeting him in German, but that hadn’t gone so well the last time. Instead, he said, “Howdy.”
This surprised the man, but he didn’t say anything. He was clearly startled, and his dry, cracked lips parted to speak except no words came out. Instead, he glanced at Jonah’s hands, clearly looking for a weapon, but Jonah had only unsecured the clasp on the holster beneath his left arm thus far. He’d cut a hole in the holster for the silencer long ago, just for a scenario such as this one, and he’d also left the silencer attached to the pistol from when he was dealing with the man Doreen had shot. It was ready to be drawn out, quick-draw style, something he’d practiced a thousand times.
Jonah was in a position he never really thought he’d be in again, even though he was prepared to be. Running into other people had eventually become as much a fantasy as moving somewhere safer than the cabin. But to survive, all contingencies needed to be considered, no matter how far-fetched. Jonah didn’t want to have to kill him if he didn’t have to. At least not right away. He needed to find out more about him and his group and determine their threat level.
That level was currently very high because of the man’s silence and the shotgun ready to rise and fire at any moment. He also wore a large, ragged backpack. It looked empty but was probably ready for filling. Jonah noticed a desperation about him, a weakness—maybe he was exhausted, that was probably what it was—as if he hadn’t eaten in days, and he looked like he was about to keel over or just needed to sit down.
There was something else . . . Jonah couldn’t quite put his finger on it until he saw something he recognized. He couldn’t be sure, but the man looked to be a drinker. Jonah knew this because he used to be one, and there were certain tells: visibly flushed cheeks over unkempt facial hair, puffy face, glassy eyes, a certain irritated swagger. He had likely drunk an entire bottle of booze yesterday.
Gesturing his head toward the shotgun, Jonah said, “On a hunt?”
“Yes.”
“What are you hunting for?”
He hesitated. “Birds.”
“Not many around here. I hear them but hardly see them. You been through this way before?”
“No.”
His English sounded as if he were from the West Coast, as American as Jonah was, probably as American as the other dead man at the cabin. He was wary of Jonah, probably thinking he was a threat, as Jonah would also think of himself. Jonah was doing his best not to present himself that way, but he wasn’t sure how well it was working. Difficult to get information out of somebody who was afraid, but Jonah didn’t have a reason to get tough with him yet. He only had his suspicions.
Except it wasn’t as if the present day would create rational and civilized people. It likely twisted them into irrational, desperate, and savage animals obsessed with their own survival, so until he proved otherwise, Jonah would think of him that way. Except he would act as if he didn’t think those things. If he could.
Holding up his hands to seem as nonthreatening as possible, or as if he couldn’t easily reach under his arm where the holster was located and pull and shoot his pistol before the man could aim and fire that shotgun, Jonah said, “I don’t come across others very often.” Not at all, actually.
“You must live nearby?”
“Yes. You?”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re not from here. Originally, I mean.”
“No. Looks like we got something in common,” he said, and smiled a smile that looked like it took effort, was even painful. Seeing his dehydrated, dry, and cracked lips, it was as if he hadn’t smiled genuinely in years.
“That we do,” Jonah said. “Funny how that’s possible with things how they are.”
“Where are you from?”
“California. You?”
“Montana.”
Jonah felt himself grin. It was nice to converse about America with anyone. It made him realize how much healthier he was now as a person. Not too long ago, a little girl’s game talking about what everyone missed had caused him to go for a run in the dark and danger of night.
“What brought you to Germany?” Jonah said.
“Vacation. What about you?”
“Vacation too.”
Their breath clouded the air as both men thought of what to say next.
“Seen any of them today?” Jonah said.
“Last night. Not today. Not yet.”
Good. That was what Jonah always wanted to hear. “Nearby?”
“No.”
He might actually give up some info easily, Jonah thought. Jonah wanted to ask him just how far he’d traveled already, but he didn’t want to push him too much. Jonah wanted to make it seem as if he was making polite conversation. Between strangers. “You drive here?”
“Yeah. On foot too.”
Definitely out scavenging for supplies. Why else? Whether he was decent—as Jonah had been years ago, searching for anything of use that no one owned anymore because they were gone or missing or dead—had yet to be determined. “Any idea how far they’ve spread?”
“Everyone has an idea.”
“What’s yours? What have you heard?”
“All kinds of rumors.”
Getting anything out of civilians is like pulling teeth. “Like what?”
“They’re everywhere.”
Unfortunately, that seemed to be the consensus. The more Jonah heard it, the more he believed every landmass was potentially infested with Molters depending on the availability of hosts. He’d accepted that two years ago. Especially after what he’d discovered about the Behemoths, how they could form—be born—practically anywhere. One thing he didn’t know was if it could happen in all climates.
It would be great if Behemoth cocoons were repelled by white sand beaches or any other places that were sunny and warm or considered comforting vacation destinations. Going somewhere like that was a fantasy Jonah kept in the back of his mind, something to work toward, work for, if it were still possible. He’d love to take Doreen to some resort on a beach, any one of them, and relax in the sun and be healthy enough—have the control—to enjoy some drinks while watching the waves. Hopefully one day, he thought.
Existence for all humans seemed to be reverting back to when they had first emerged from the jungle. As dangerous as it had been for mankind during the Stone Age, and similar to how it had been for them—man’s prehistoric ancestors—everyone was ready to fight to survive. Or even become violent at any time. The stranger had no idea who was standing before him, had no idea how well Jonah was trained.
“Just the mention of a place near home makes me homesick,” Jonah said as casually as possible.
“Me too.”
“Where do you live now?” Jonah waited, but he only stared back at him. “Where’s home?”
The man wasn’t being defiant in his silence, but he seemed to be waiting for something, as if it was for Jonah to say goodbye or give him permission to leave. If it were Jonah in his position, he would have walked away already or threatened him with that shotgun or even pulled the trigger if need be.
It also seemed like somebody else was in charge because he was behaving like an underling. It was only a gut feeling, but Jonah was hardly ever wrong.
“Where do you live?” he said.
“I asked first,” Jonah said, keeping his figurative mask on, the one he had to force himself to wear on occasion so it could offer a friendly smile.
“I don’t think where we live matters anymore.”
“Why’s that?”
The man shrugged. “Everything changes too much.”
&n
bsp; “What do you mean?”
“People. You seem like a good guy. To be honest, I haven’t talked to anybody new in a while.” He stared at Jonah for what seemed like a minute. “Fuck it . . . this is a while back, when we started off with a guy we all liked. Sawyer. Natural leader. Everything was going well. As well as it could with how things were. There were about ten of us then . . . no, eleven—no, ten. That’s right. Artem, he passed away around that time.”
He cleared his throat and seemed to be collecting his thoughts.
“After about a month, I heard yelling. Popped my head out of my tent to see what was going on. It was daytime, but it’s never wise to make so much noise. I’m sure you know what I mean. There’s part of me thinks they sleep during the day mostly but somehow remember what they hear. Then they hunt us down at night.”
“Is that what happened?”
“I don’t know. I’m probably just getting paranoid. They’re just too good at hunting us.”
“I meant was that the cause of the noise?” Jonah said. “Were you being attacked?”
“We were always getting attacked, but not during that argument and not by them. See, Sawyer called the shots, told us what to do, where to go, how far we were going each day. And he always had a few of us behind him, enforcing what he said. But we kept getting killed. We kept dying.”
The man said we a lot, so it seemed he wasn’t on his own much during the Molting and obviously had lost people. Sorrow was human. Better to encounter someone with feelings of loss or regret than just an empty shell of a person. Better that than a killer who wasn’t interested in conversation.
“Then he was practically isolated and would only emerge from his tent to give orders before staying inside it all day and night. But then . . . eventually, they jumped him.”
“They kill him?”
He nodded. “I turned briefly. Wished I hadn’t. Saw him get hit over the head with a rock. A rock. You believe that? Something so small could drop somebody as smart and strong as Sawyer?” He shook his head. “They thought he was going nuts. Probably was. Before they could think about doing the same to me, I left.”
“They were going to kill you too?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I just didn’t want to be with them anymore. Everything got too fucked up. Our social structure broke down. No way we could be strong anymore, not with Sawyer dead. None of us could replace him.”
The wet of condensation was sticking on his beard, contrasting with his blue, chapped lips as he stared through Jonah. He had been shivering since he began his story, but Jonah got the feeling it wasn’t only from the frosty temperature.
“Maybe it’s just the cold, or my patience isn’t what it used to be,” he said, “but you look like a man who has what all men want.”
“And what’s that?”
“You know. Maybe you could . . . share.”
“Share what?”
“I’ve been out here a long time.”
“These woods?”
“No.” He squinted. “You know what I mean.”
Jonah had no idea what he was talking about. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
He exhaled without trying to hide his annoyance. “I need what all men do. Nothing like the warmth of a female to make all this winter go away. At least for a while.”
“It’s spring.”
“Bullshit. It’s going to be winter until the day I die. That’s what it seems like, anyway. Keeps a man cold. Nothing like some pussy to warm a man, don’t you think?”
“No women where you’re from?”
“Sure there are, but not for me. That kind of thing is . . . delegated.” He waited. “No man is as healthy as you without the care of a good woman, and you seem like you haven’t gone without care your whole life. I got things. Money. American money. I can trade. Whatever you want.”
Jonah’s anger had been rising with every word the man said since he said “share,” but he hid it well. “The one in charge of you know you’re out here for that?”
His lips puckered as if he’d just tasted something bitter, and his brow furrowed. “We ain’t out here for that . . . I make my own decisions. Nobody’s in charge of me. I just agree to go along when we go out. You understand?”
We again. “Sure.”
The shotgun raised up a few inches. “Look, man, I’ve been fucking nice. Talking, telling you things about myself. Being generous with personal information and all that shit we’re supposed to do to be normal. All I ask is . . . I just need. I know you know what I mean. I’ll give you whatever you want. Hell, I’ll give you whatever you want from my friends too.”
Jonah stared at him in disbelief. All benefit of the doubt was over. It was clear what type of man the man was. He was the type not to be trusted, who was turning savage whether he knew it or not, just as Jonah was sure the man Doreen had killed at the cabin had been. “Can’t help you.”
“Please.” When Jonah’s demeanor remained, his eyes narrowed angrily. “You got to ask me some things; how about I ask you something? Where’s your place? Obviously close to where we are now.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because you’re acting like somebody who’s got something to hide and protect and doing a piss poor job of acting like he doesn’t! That’s fucking how!”
Jonah had hoped, naïvely, that somehow he was harmless. That everything his gut was telling him about the man had been wrong. But Jonah wasn’t wrong. He was never wrong about people. Not any time he could remember. When he met Henry, who had shot at him, Jonah could tell he was decent.
The man before him now wasn’t decent. He was a piece of shit who wanted to find out where the cabin was located, kill Jonah, then raid the place and worse, and bring everything he could back to his community, to please whoever was in charge. Before that happened, he would do terrible things to Jonah’s people. Because it didn’t matter anymore, Jonah decided to say whatever he wanted to get the responses he needed to learn the information he required.
“Why so interested in where I live?” Jonah said.
“Why do you think?”
“Because you’re a savage. Probably a rapist. And a low-down, piece-of-shit fucking looter.”
The man’s eyes widened but his stare got as icy as the melting snow around them. His grip tightened on the shotgun. “I’m just out here minding my own business—”
“Alone.”
“I’m not alone.”
I know. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that I knew. “I don’t see anyone else.”
His words had grown cowardly, but his grip on that shotgun had turned much more hostile. His finger inched toward the trigger.
“How large is your community?”
The man said nothing.
“How many out here with you? I want a number.”
The man only stared back at him, clearly contemplating what to do next.
“The only reason you haven’t shot at me is because you think I have what you want. If you kill me, well, you’ll never find it. You got a pathetic desperation about you. For what you want personally. But there’s something else. You need to please your boss.”
The man swallowed, and he looked frightened all of a sudden, as if he wasn’t used to confrontation or having his thoughts exposed. Or not having the power. “You shut your mouth.”
“Or what?”
“Or . . .” He raised the shotgun up further. His finger was on the trigger now. “What do you think, man?”
Jonah just wanted to see what he’d do, see what he was made of by way of some harsh words. He probably hadn’t done much killing of his own kind, but all men could be dangerous, and an armed stranger appearing out of nowhere with ill intent was definitely that. Especially to Jonah because he was so close to the cabin.
Though difficult to find and hidden well within the denseness of trees, it wasn’t as if running across the cabin was impossible—as the dead man feet away from its porch had proved—and there was an old
road that practically led straight to it. Things were going to be very different for Jonah and his people from now on, in terms of their treatment of danger levels. They would remain that way until they left the cabin, which was going to have to happen a lot sooner than Jonah had anticipated, according to his inner radar.
“You’re brave to talk that way to me,” he said, raising the barrel of the shotgun with his non firing hand, “seeing as I have this.”
When the barrel was high enough, Jonah reacted quickly. He’d already reached into his unzipped jacket with his right hand and withdrawn his silenced pistol.
Thwack-thwack-thwack.
A bullet hit the man in the head, and the other two hit him in the neck as he fell backward. The snow crunched when he landed, then turned red with blood. The outskirts of the red snow changed to pink.
A snapping sound caused Jonah to turn quickly and raise the pistol.
His hand was shaking, he noticed, the 9mm trembling. That never happened after killing a Molter. His nerves were the result of killing a person, and once again he remembered he hadn’t had to do that since the war. Before everything changed.
The sound he heard was probably the result of his hypervigilance, a twig or branch breaking where he couldn’t see clearly, maybe under the corpse as it settled. Everything seemed to echo slightly in a forest.
Jonah looked down at the body. Jonah hadn’t wanted to kill him, but he was about to fire the shotgun in his direction. If the shot hadn’t killed Jonah, then the blast might have brought his friends. And as far as Jonah was concerned, a weapon aimed was a weapon intended to be fired. To Jonah and his people, all weapons were loaded.
Because there were obviously more looters in the woods, it seemed he might have to pull the trigger again no matter how he felt about having to do it, so he needed to get himself ready. They had probably all arrived together but likely spread out to cover more ground. A mistake on their part. People should travel in twos or a few more, never solo.
Unless you had training, were an ex-soldier but also an expert at hunting down and killing Molters. That applied to hunting down people as well.
