The Hunt

by Andrew Fukuda

  Strange, I think, looking at the pile of clothes. All I see on the ground is the SunCloak. No sign of her other clothes: shoes, socks, pants. Just the SunCloak. Maybe she was naked underneath the way Beefy was? I head over and kick at the cloak, expecting it to be sodden and sticky with yellow fluid and melted skin. But there’s nothing at all. No sign of any yellow fluid. Then it hits me.

  She’s in the library. Somehow she was able to escape inside in time.

  But when I spin around towards the library, I see something that—

  My mouth drops. My eyes widen.

  The rays of the descending sun saturate the outside of the library – the walls, the shutters, the brick pathway – in a sea of purple and orange. And standing in the midst of this colour is Ashley June. Colour radiates off her pale skin, mixing with the orange of her hair, the green of her eyes. Her mouth is slightly parted, full and whole. And she is not screaming, not disintegrating.

  We stare at each other, speechless, my eyes helplessly agog.

  She reaches into her mouth, tilts back her head, pulls something out.

  A set of fake fangs.

  She holds them out to me like a peace offering.

  The first thing she asks for when we walk in is water.

  “Of course,” I tell her, remembering how parched I was a couple of days ago. “You’ve gone this whole time without water?”

  She doesn’t answer but downs a whole bottle of water. That’s answer enough.

  “That’s why I collapsed outside,” she says, eyeing my other bottle of water.

  “You want more?”

  “Yes, but not to drink.” She grabs the bottle. “In case you haven’t noticed – the others certainly have – I’m beginning to smell. Really bad.”

  “You should wash up inside. Sun’ll give you a sunburn, your skin’s so fair.”

  She shoots me a look as if to say, Really? I haven’t survived seventeen years by accident, buddy.

  “In the back,” I say quickly. “There’s a place with a drain in the floor.” She walks around the circulation desk and disappears. Leaving me with my tangled, bewildered, searching thoughts.

  When she comes back ten minutes later, I haven’t moved. Her hair is slick wet and her face freshly scrubbed. She looks paler and drained, but her eyes are brighter. “I hope you don’t mind,” she says timidly.

  “What?”

  “I said I hope you don’t mind. I had to put on your clothes. My own stuff is . . . there’s too much of a smell in them.”

  “No,” I say, eyes looking down, “it’s OK. All that stuff they gave me are a few sizes too small. I’ve never worn that outfit before, it’s yours now.”

  We stand at a slant, looking at everything but each other.

  “I’m sorry for using up two bottles of water.”

  “It’s OK. We still have a half bottle left.”

  As soon as I say the word we, it’s as though something breaks in her. Her head turns to mine; when I meet her eyes, they’ve welled up. She snaps her eyelids shut, and when she opens them again, her eyes have dried. She’s good, she’s practised; just like me.

  “Have you lived alone?” I ask her.

  She pauses. “Yes,” she answers gently, sadly. “For almost as long as I can remember.”

  Her story, told to me after we sit down, is not unlike mine.

  She remembers a family: parents, an older brother. Cheerful conversation at home, laughter, feelings of safety once the shutters came down at dawn and the world was locked outside, meals around a table, warm bodies asleep around her. Then she remembers the day. She was bedridden with a fever and stayed home while her parents and brother hiked to get some fruit. They left ten minutes after dawn. She never saw them again.

  One day in a family, the next day alone. Solitude and loneliness her constant companions, their presence so enervating and cold, like two damp socks worn on a winter day.

  That was ten years ago. She was only seven. At first it was incredibly hard. To live. Not an hour went by that she did not consider giving herself up at school. It would be so easy. To succumb. Stand in the middle of the soccer field during recess, prick her finger, let a droplet of blood seep. Watch them come flying at her. The end would be brutal but swift. Death would be an escape from this unbearable loneliness.

  But her parents had taught her two things. Ingrained them in her. The first was survival: not just the basics, but the nuances, the minutiae, every conceivable situation she might find herself in. The second was life, the importance of it, the preciousness of it, the duty to persevere and never let it end prematurely. She hated how clinically they indoctrinated her: by the time they were gone, she had become a reluctant expert at survival.

  Her beauty was a curse, especially as she – and classmates around her – hit puberty. Attention, something she was repeatedly told by her parents to avoid, came her way with the force of a testosterone-filled tidal wave. Boys would write letters to her, stare at her, converse with her awkwardly, throw spitballs at her, join the same clubs she did. Girls, seeing the social advantages of befriending her, flocked around her. Nothing she did to minimise her beauty helped. Clunky, self-cut hair; an abrasive, caustic personality; aloofness; feigning disinterest in boys; even outright stupidity. But none of these helped. The attention kept coming.

  One day, she realised her approach was all wrong. Her defence was too . . . defensive. It didn’t fit her, and this kind of faux defensive life would eventually be her undoing. She saw that. And she decided the best defence was offence.

  Instead of tamping down her beauty, she played it up. She threw off the meek, stupid persona and instead exuded confidence and poise. It was an easy act mostly because it didn’t feel like one. More than anything, it gave her power. She controlled the pieces, and instead of being pushed about by the horses and knights and queens about her, she turned them all into pawns. She grew her hair long and in a way that complimented her svelte figure. She’d stare down the boys who gazed at her, grab the social knives meant to backstab her and use them to cut down her competition. She was ruthless until she was needed.

  Eventually, it became clear she had to get a boyfriend. As long as she was unattached, the boys would continue clamouring after her like magnet maggots. And too many questions about her would arise if she didn’t.

  So she plucked the varsity quarterback, an obnoxious and surprisingly insecure senior who played it cool when with her in public but in private boiled like lava. Killing him turned out to be easier than she’d thought. For their one-month anniversary (teens can be so sappy), she suggested a picnic at a secluded spot a few hours away from the city limits. He was all over the idea. They brought wine and blankets. Once there, he drank too much – she kept pouring – until he passed out. She tied him to a tree that was, in the late autumn, stripped of leaves and would provide no shade once the sun rose. She left him passed out and walked home.

  She never saw him again. When she went back to the tree the next day, there was only a pile of clothes hanging off limp lines of rope, slightly bleached by the toxicity of melted flesh. She took the clothes and rope and burned them.

  As with most “disappearances”, the subject was taboo and spoken of only in hushed whispers. A perfunctory search was conducted and then abandoned after only twelve hours; the matter was filed away as a DBS (disappearance by sunlight). She pretended to be devastated by this tragedy, her heart cracked by the loss of her “soul mate”. At his funeral, she professed her undying devotion and love to him, promising that her soul was forever bonded with his.

  It achieved everything she hoped it would. Boys largely left her alone; girls sympathised with her tragic loss, and her stock rose even higher. Nobody questioned her lack of a dating life even as the other girls in the Desirables necked, armpitted, and otherwise hooked up at parties. She was the tragic figure in need of time and space. Give her a few years, she’d eventually come around, her friends thought.

  She continued to build the deception. She jo
ined the HiSS (Heper Search Society), a group that operated under the theory that hepers were still at large and had infiltrated society. The members of the HiSS sought to flush out these heper infiltrators.

  “Why put yourself in the midst of the very people most keen to sniff you out?” I ask.

  Because, she answers, the HiSS was the one place no one would ever suspect you. Membership in that club was the eye of the storm, where neither suspicion nor accusation would blow your way. And there was an added benefit: she would be the first to know about another suspected heper. Her plan was simple: first confirm that that person was a heper, then snuff out the suspicion as baseless.

  “Then what?”

  She turns to look at me, her mouth fashioning words and then stopping. “Establish contact,” she finally says. She sits on one end of the sofa, a leg bent under her, half turned towards me.

  “You were good,” I say. “I never suspected. Not for a second.”

  “You weren’t so good.”

  “What?”

  “You slipped a few times. I’d see emotions breaking out on your face. Or falling asleep in class. Granted, it was only for a split second – but the slight head nod of sleep was unmistakable.” Her eyes light up, remembering something. “I saved your butt more than once. Like in trig class a few nights ago, when you couldn’t read the board. Even last night, here in the library with the Director. Your hands started to tremble.”

  “I remember that.” Then something occurs to me. “Why didn’t you ever approach me? At school. And here. When you had me all figured out? Just tell me you knew what I was.”

  “Because it could have all been a ruse. You might have just been trying to bait other hepers into coming out. It was a real possibility. So I just kept watching you. Even snooped around your house during the day.”

  “So there was someone outside!”

  Her shoulders slumped forward. “You should have come out. I was hoping you would. I stood waiting, hoping you’d open the door, step out into the sunshine. See me, standing right there in the sun with you. All mystery gone, everything out in the open, just like that.” She pauses. “Just think how things would be so different. If that really did happen back then instead of just now.”

  I pick up the bottle at my feet, uncap it, and hand it to her. She nods her thanks. I watch her mouth as she tilts the bottle towards her, her upper lip pressing into the opening as her lips slowly part. Water pours out; a thin trail snakes down her neck and gathers behind her collarbone.

  “Well,” she says, recapping the bottle, “here we are.”

  I shift my legs under me. “You have a plan,” I say. “I saw you up to something in the Control Centre, snooping around, asking questions.”

  “What was a plan,” she says with mild frustration. “It wasn’t going to work, I quickly saw that.”

  “Which was?”

  “I knew going in that I couldn’t let the Hunt take place. It would completely expose me – there’s no way I can keep up with the pace, the running. And even if I could, I’d be breathless and sweaty by the time we reached the hepers. And even if I weren’t hot and sweaty – and I most definitely would be – there’s no way I could eat the hepers. Kill them, yes, I could do that, but eating them? No way.”

  I nod. That’s exactly how I see things.

  She continues. “So then I thought: what if I could somehow sabotage the whole Hunt? What if I could find a way to lower the walls of the Dome at night? The hepers would be left out there exposed and for the taking. Everyone would be flying out there, hunters and staffers within seconds. Just like that, in one fell swoop, and no Hunt anymore.”

  “Except?”

  “Except there’s no way to lower the Dome walls. No button to push, no lever to pull, no combination of buttons to press. It’s all automated by sunlight sensors.” Her voice, which has been rising, suddenly stops. Then quieter: “So that took me to Plan B. That was what happened today. Except it turned out more like Plan B Fail.”

  “You used the sun protection equipment,” I say quietly, finally understanding why she and Beefy ran outside. “You used them to convince him. That with the equipment, he could get to the heper village even in the daytime. Where he’d have the hepers all to himself.”

  She nods. “That’s what I told him. That’s what I was hoping for. I knew the equipment wouldn’t work for long, not against the afternoon sun. But if it got him halfway there, close enough to see and smell the hepers, it wouldn’t matter anymore. His desire for heper flesh would take over, he’d choose the taste of heper even if it meant dying in the sun.”

  “You were right. That’s what happened. He totally lost it.”

  “He wouldn’t believe me at first. But then I told him I didn’t care what he believed, / was going out to get the hepers all for myself, he could stay inside and eat leftover pasteurised blood and processed meats for all I cared. He saw me flying out with the protective blanket, saw how the equipment seemed to be really working. So then he came out himself.”

  “It almost worked,” I say quietly.

  “How close did he get to them?”

  “You didn’t see?”

  She shakes her head. “I fainted, completely blacked out. When I came to, you were walking back already, the Dome closed. I mean, I could see he didn’t make it.”

  I’m glad she didn’t see. She would be asking me why I tried to stop Beefy. And I wouldn’t be able to answer her. Because even I don’t know. “Do you have a Plan C?” I ask.

  She scratches her wrist. “How about I tell you after you tell me your Plan A?”

  I pause. “Break my leg.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Hours before the Hunt begins, fall down a flight of stairs.”

  “For real?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s pretty lame. There are so many holes in that, I can’t even begin.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for starters, breaking a leg without spilling blood is possible, perhaps, but I wouldn’t want to stake my life on those chances. For starters.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Any other plan?”

  “Well, I just thought of another one. We have FLUNs now. We can just take out the other hunters.”

  She stares incredulously at me.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You’re not serious?”

  “What? What’s wrong with that plan?”

  “Where do I start? Ten seconds into the race, they’ll be out of range. Leaving us behind. With the hundreds of spectators gawking at us, wondering why we’re so slow. We’ll be barely out of the gate before we’re mauled to death.”

  I raise my hand, then stop. Ever so slowly, it falls back down.

  “Should I go on?” she asks, a friendly smirk on her face.

  “No, it’s OK—”

  “My Plan C, then,” she says. “I also only recently thought of it” – a flash of humour in her eyes – “so we’ll need to work out the kinks. But do you remember when the Director was telling us about the start of the Hunt? How an hour before dusk, the building will be locked down to prevent any bandit hunters? Well, that got me thinking. What if we were somehow able to disengage the lock-down? With all the hundreds of guests already here for the Gala, there’s—”

  “Going to be a chaotic free-for-all,” I say, nodding. “Disengage the lockdown, and suddenly everyone’s going to be tearing out of this building, hunting down the hepers. Sheer pandemonium as all the guests and staffers rush out into the Vast. Nobody’s going to even notice our absence.”

  “And two hours later and all the hepers are dead. Hunt over. We survive. Us,” she whispers. And her eyes hook into mine. Something stirs in me.

  I stare at her, nodding slowly. Then I stop, shake my head. “There’s one flaw.”

  “Which is?”

  “We don’t know how to disengage the lockdown.”

  Her eyes twinkle. “Yes, we do. And it’s easy. For us, anyway. The o
ther day, when we were visiting the Control Centre, I was snooping around. A guy started telling me about how the lock-down works. Can you believe it’s a button? Push the button down, and lockdown is set for an hour before dusk; push the same button again and the setting is cancelled.”

  “No way. Can’t be that simple. For security, they’d have to—”

  “And they already have a fail-safe system. The sun. They don’t close the shutters in the Control Centre in the daytime, remember? To keep people out. So that means the only time you can cancel the lockdown setting – before dusk – sunlight is pouring in. You can’t get to it. They can’t get to it. More effective than if that button were surrounded by laser beams and a moat of acid. It’s genius.”

  “And so is our plan.”

  “My plan,” she adds quickly, the suggestion of a smile on her lips.

  “It really might work,” I say, excitement uncharacteristically slipping into my voice. “That really might work.” We rack our brains, trying to find weaknesses in the plan. By our silence, I know we can’t find any.

  “I need to wash up. Shave.”

  The water feels good on my face. I scrub my neck, my armpits, and then there’s no water left. I take out the blade, graze my skin just so. My nails are chipped in a few places, but nothing to worry about. Just a few more nights, then I get to go home. That’s the plan, so it seems.

  When I walk back, she’s gone. I glance up at the clock. Just past six, ten more minutes of daylight.

  Only she hasn’t left. She’s in the reference section, where the sunbeam is. She’s holding a book up in the air, her back to me. The beam of light is hitting her square in the chest.

  “So you found the beam.”

  She spins around and the sight of her face – haloed by the light – stills me. There’s a gentle smile on her face, a daring display of emotion. I feel walls between us crashing down, dirt bricks and cement chunks hitting the ground, the feel of fresh air and gentle sunshine on pale, deprived skin.