The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  She felt the need to add the last part because she was afraid if she said that she and Cage weren't going tonight, Nate might take it upon himself. There was time for the argument now, and she was ready. Cage came up beside her, his arms still crossed. Feeling the frown on her face, Joule fought to relax and used her elbow to subtly nudge her brother. Seeming to get her point, his arms uncrossed and the combative stance shook out a little bit.

  “Dad, we can't go out tonight. Joule and I have to go to school. We have to graduate.”

  They both backed it up with nodding.

  “Friday night, then,” their father countered.

  A quick glance passed between the twins, and Joule picked up the argument again. “No, Dad, we went out once. But now we need to study it. They did not attack the way we expected.”

  Nate frowned. “What do you mean? They attacked, we killed. We have a method now and we can take them out.”

  Joule fought the sigh that wanted to rise in her chest. There was nothing about her father’s statement that was okay.

  “Dad,” Cage jumped in, his voice soft. Joule could tell he was trying to be gentle, though he didn't quite make it. “You could go out and kill seven dogs every single night for years. But we don't even know how they breed. Probably faster than you can take them out. So we can't just go out with machetes and arrows. We need to figure out a mass method to remove or subdue them.”

  Joule hopped in when her brother lost steam. “We need to use last night's information to figure that out. Because what they did last night wasn't the way we've seen them attack before. And we need to know why.”

  Nate looked between the two kids, and as he nodded at their argument, something seemed to change in him. Then he said, “Exactly. Things have changed. And we have to change with it.”

  But it was Joule who shook her head. “No, Dad, things have changed. Things changed dramatically, painfully, quickly, and without our permission. Several times—all the way up until losing mom.” Her voice had a hitch, she could hear it, but she couldn't stop talking.

  “And those kinds of changes, when they come at us… they throw us off our game. Dad, we are off—way off—and now is not the time to make any big decisions. All these changes, they will change us and we will change to accommodate them. But we need to do it later, when we're—” she almost said “sane” but held the word back. “—when we are prepared. We thought about it.” She motioned between her and Cage.

  “So tonight—at least tonight—we need to stay home. Cage and I will go to school tomorrow, and tomorrow night we'll talk about it more.”

  Nate seemed to absorb what she said, and she saw her father's expression slowly changing, forming from a frown to a nod. He’d agreed, and she could only hope she’d actually gotten through to him.

  But there was something about his expression she didn't believe.

  33

  Cage walked in the door after school the next day to find his father standing at the counter pouring himself what looked like a second or third or maybe tenth cup of coffee.

  “Did you sleep?” he asked, wary of the answer.

  His dad nodded as he lifted the mug to his mouth. The nod and the gesture were neither concerning nor reassuring.

  Cage and Joule had been late to school this morning—not that anyone cared. No one was marking tardies anymore, especially when the morning light had been slow to come. It wasn’t as if truant officers were going around looking for all the missing kids. There were more kids missing than anything else, it seemed. But Cage had met a lot of those kids and it didn’t surprise him that they’d gotten themselves in trouble.

  Those kids weren’t like him and Joule. The twins had stayed up most of the night with their dad, reading textbooks and making notes. They continued to search through the notes their mother had made. The three of them lined the hallway, butts pushed into the corners, small flashlights in their hands.

  But whatever they found, they had to just take notes and wait. The rule was always no talking. They could pass notes, and sometimes did, if the question was small. But it was a crappy way to communicate, especially on the level they needed when talking about the dogs. They couldn't use their phones to text, either. The phones had to be off; any alert coming in could be enough noise and possibly signal the dogs outside.

  Cage and his sister had crawled into bed just before the morning hours, and at least he’d managed to find some sleep before carting his ass off to school. Now, he looked at his father and wondered if Nate had slept at all.

  Not surprisingly, he saw his sister grab food from the fridge. Cage followed her lead. Food seemed like a good idea, both because he needed it and it tempered a conversation. So the three of them sat around the end of the table as though it were preordained.

  “Let's talk.” Cage used his best negotiating tone as he put his hands flat on the table. The food in front of him was calling, but his father was more important. “They didn't attack the way we expected. The dogs moved almost one by one.”

  Joule put her hand up. “They're not dogs. We know this and we need to stop calling them that. We need to make a plan, and that starts with distinguishing these animals from dogs. These animals need to experience an Extinction Level Event or an equivalent amount of hunting. Dogs don't.” She paused and then whispered, “I like dogs.”

  Cage smiled. Joule had tried to convince their parents to get a dog, any dog. It had never happened. Good thing now, or it would have been the first of us to go, he thought.

  She didn’t look up until their father asked, “So what do we call this new species? If we're the ones who found them, then we get to name them.”

  “No.” Joule was firm. “I don't want to go public with this. And do you really want those creatures to be called Mazurs? Do you want their scientific name to be Canis Mazuri?”

  It hit Cage that, if that happened, the creature would bear the same name as his mother—the woman they had killed. He shook his head in agreement with his sister.

  “We don't put our own name on this.” Joule reiterated it in case Nate wasn’t fully catching on. “They need a name that everyone will recognize on hearing it. A name that's different from dog, wolf, or coyote. Those are protected species.”

  Cage was impressed with her determination. And he offered up “Drolves.”

  He was met with crickets. “Dogotes?”

  Joule closed her eyes, shaking her head at him, letting him know she was disappointed in his efforts. “The terms wolves, dogs, and coyotes are distinct words. Coyotes aren’t Coyodogs. These creatures get a distinct name.”

  “Assholes?” Cage suggested, and at least that made his sister and his father laugh.

  “Wendigo? Trolls!” Nate offered up a few more suggestions, both as ridiculous as what Cage had said.

  “Those are already things. And people know what wendigo are. That’s not this. Also, giving them mythical names gives them power. So, no.” She paused then offered her own. “I think we should call them Pack Hunters. I think if we say that, then people will know what we’re talking about just from hearing that term.”

  “Night hunters,” Cage offered.

  “That works. Somebody else can come up with their scientific name later. I just don't want our name on it.”

  Cage nodded in full agreement, and Nate seemed to go along. Cage threw out the next question. “Okay, so now that they're night hunters, how do we kill them?”

  “Blade between the ribs,” Nate answered. “It's pretty clear.”

  “Absolutely.” Cage agreed, because it would make his father happy. Both teens were handling their father with kid gloves these days. It didn't feel good. He understood his father was grieving the loss of his wife. He was left alone with two children and a world falling apart at both the macro and micro level. But it didn’t make Cage feel any better about having to hold it all together.

  “The math doesn't add up,” Cage told his dad, echoing Joule’s words from the day before. “We could kill night hunt
ers on a daily basis, but we don't know how fast they breed. And that won't get them gone anywhere near fast enough.”

  “List,” Joule announced, standing up and heading into the kitchen. It took a moment for Cage to process but, when she came back, she had written down Where do they sleep? And What poisons them?

  Cage added to what was clearly a list of things they needed to learn—soon. “Why they attacked differently last night?”

  Joule added his question, speaking as she wrote, and then said, “What are they eating?”

  Cage feared the answer was people.

  “Mass methods for what we did last night,” Joule said, her hand flying as she recorded their questions.

  That one was the first item that made Nate perk up, and that scared Cage. His father was enjoying the fight too much. Nate looked between the two of them. “You’re right. We can train people. Because three of us can't go out and do this. But maybe more of us can…”

  Cage and Joule looked at each other and Cage felt his blood run cold.

  34

  Cage flipped the eggs in the pan as he heard the footsteps tromping down the stairs, startling him. Clearly, it was his father.

  This was not the Saturday morning he had expected.

  “Faraday!” Nate snapped as he turned the corner.

  Shit, Cage thought, he was getting real-named. “Yes, Dad?”

  “It's Saturday.” His father supplied the obvious. “We have no traps. We haven't killed any dogs since Tuesday night—”

  “Night hunters,” Cage said, slipping in the new term they had come up with.

  “Regardless, we haven't killed any since Tuesday night.” Nate looked at the coffee pot and his expression turned sour when he saw it was empty. He started moving around to fill it, but it didn’t stop his little evidentiary tirade. “If they're breeding the way you seem to think they are, then we've let them get way ahead. Every one we take out now stops a future exponential chain of birth. Just like spaying and neutering!”

  Jesus, Cage thought, his father was likening going out in chain mail at night to the local spay and neuter program that had been necessary before all the cats had disappeared.

  It was then Cage noticed his father held his laptop under his arm. He also spotted the dark circles under his father's eyes. He was growing more convinced that Nate wasn't sleeping enough, if at all. He blurted out something he probably shouldn't have. “Dad, have you seen a therapist?”

  Nate waved his hand as though to brush Cage off. It matched the dismissive expression on his face, but then he seemed to catch on to just how worried his son was. He stopped messing with the coffee maker and turned to look directly at Cage. With clear eyes, he said, “I'm okay. This whole thing is crazy. And everything we've been through is crazier. But I'm okay.”

  His father emphasized each of the last words, and Cage could only take him at what he said. But the reassurance did make him feel better.

  “Look at this,” his dad said, motioning to the laptop. “No, wait. Get your sister first.”

  Nodding, Cage turned off the heat under the eggs. “Check the oven,” he told his father. “There’s bacon.” Then he ran upstairs to get his sister, only to find she was already awake, lying in bed, and—shocking no one—reading.

  Cage didn't recognize the book. “What's that one?”

  “New veterinary text I ordered. I'll tell you later.”

  “Come on downstairs. There’s something Dad wants to show us on the computer.”

  When they headed back down, it was to discover their father setting out plates of food at each place at the table. A glass of orange juice was ready by each meal. The only thing abnormal was that there were three seats instead of four. The laptop sat in between and was already queued up as his father emerged from the kitchen with napkins and forks in his hand.

  “Sit down,” Nate motioned as he handed out the goods, “and we'll hit the button.”

  Cage was three bites in as the video got rolling. It was an older gentleman in a wheelchair rolling around his house in the dark. Up and down ramps he went, and then out the front door on a bumpy path to the street.

  “Can't move my legs,” the man said to the camera, almost jovially. “Been in this chair for five years. I’m probably the weakest of any of us. My family's been doin’ a good job protecting me from those dogs that come out at night.”

  Reaching out quickly, Cage slapped at the button, stopping the video. “Where is he?”

  It took a moment and Joule tapping several buttons as she looked for the initial upload information. “Other side of Little Rock,” she eventually said.

  “Holy shit!” Cage looked around the table, but the other two were calmer than him. “They've gotten that far.”

  “Sounds like he's talking about the same night hunters we have here.” Joule looked at him with an expression he could read but his father probably could not. The two of them had talked about the range of the animals, but neither had thought the population had spread that wide.

  In fact, it seemed initially that the night hunters were local. But here he was, seeing a report from a farther place than he’d expected. Cage had gotten caught up in his own neighborhood, in the happenings in his own backyard, and he had not thought to look further. That had been a miss, but it completely reinforced the idea that going out hunting every night wasn't going to make a dent in this creature’s population.

  His father motioned them to start the video again. And as they watched, the old man tooled around his house and talked about his disabilities to the point where Cage wondered where this was going.

  But just as he had that thought, the video cut to an amateur edit into a dark scene. This time, the old man was rolling down the street in the dead of night. The streetlights were just bright enough to illuminate his journey.

  It appeared he was using a phone, recording himself on some kind of a selfie stick. No one was with him.

  “Is this a snuff film?” Joule asked, already appalled. “Is he committing suicide? He has been talking about the night hunters.”

  “Just watch,” their father said, motioning with his fork as though he wasn’t showing his kids an old man about to get ripped limb from limb. Nate’s attitude was the only thing that made Cage think it might be okay to watch, and he kept his eyes on the screen.

  The old man narrated, rambling about empty houses he passed—just like their own neighborhood—people gone missing, no more house pets, and more.

  One thing Cage caught was the old man’s timeline of events. Even though he hadn’t said it that way, he mentioned the night hunters coming into the neighborhood in more recent terms than Cage remembered it happening here. No, he thought, more recent than he knew it had happened here. His mother had started taking notes when the abundance of missing pet signs had grown eerie. Cage didn’t remember specifically, but he could look up exact dates.

  This man talked about it being a few months that they’d been closing the windows, and Cage cataloged that maybe his own neighborhood was the epicenter.

  But then the man said something that pulled Cage’s thoughts back to the video.

  “They don't come after me. They come up close. They growl. They lick me, but they walk away. Don't know if it's the chair or what but look…” and he scanned the phone around, giving a wider view behind him.

  Cage gulped down a gasp and he heard Joule do the same right in time with him as he saw five dogs stalking the wheelchair. They were within several feet of the old man, their lips curled, and as the phone narrowed in on one, the old man did an admirable job of tracking the dog’s face.

  It came within inches of the hand sitting idle at the wheelchair control.

  The old man held still as the dog sniffed around, licked him once, grunted, and trotted away.

  35

  Joule was Sisyphus.

  It had been three days now that she kept pushing the boulder up the hill, telling her father that going out and fighting by hand at night was not the answer. A
nd each day, he turned up again suggesting the same damn thing. It was a constant battle to rein her father in. She ignored the fact that she cried herself to sleep each night, the loss of her mother at times more than she could bear. But she got up each morning and tried to save the parent she had left.

  “Dad, just because that man went out and the dogs didn't attack him, doesn't mean we can do the same thing.”

  Her father countered quickly, clearly ready for her argument. “If we knew what he had, we could. The night hunters wouldn't attack us, and we'd be safe. It would be even better than the chain mail.”

  Joule sighed. “We can't attack them if they won't get close, Dad. If we figure it out and we get whatever he has, they'll just leave before we can fight.” She didn’t even address that the first step hadn’t been made—they didn’t have what that man had, and they knew it because the night hunters had attacked them.

  “You have bows and arrows,” her father countered deftly. “You can get them as they turn away.”

  And then what? she thought. Nate and Cage would run them down, hacking the night hunters with machetes?

  No.

  “We can't do it, Dad. We don't even know what it is. And I don't feel like going out and waiting to see if the dogs attack us is a suitable experimental method.”

  Joule had loved growing up in a family that argued and required that she support her own arguments with evidence. Her parents had trained her to make a case logically. She'd seen other people argue, and it was often just a fight. They would hit below the belt. They name-called. But her mother had been a fierce advocate of a fair fight.

  Right now, her mother would have told her there was a lesson in this—that Joule was using a piece of evidence to tell her father he couldn't go out and he had turned around and used the exact same piece of evidence to say why she was wrong and he was right.

  The sharp, piercing feeling of loss hit her again. She could have been one of the night hunters going limp as the machete hit her square in the back.