The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  “Ten seconds,” he hollered, but she was already around the corner to the private entrance he had to the hallway bathroom. She was sliding around the corner and bouncing off the sink, before she hit the door like there was already a hunter on the other side.

  She pushed her shoulder against the top as, once again, she slid the piece across under the doorknob. Though still the most important bar, this one had had to be jury rigged. The bathroom was not wide enough to slide the whole piece across. So she slipped in into notches they’d designed and he watched as she considered what to do next. They hadn't pre-planned this.

  These had locks, since they dropped in from the top. Joule didn't lock them and instead slid in the other three. Cage hollered to her, “Eighteen seconds!” but she waved him off as she set the linchpins in at last.

  She stepped back then, breathing heavily.

  “Total twenty-two seconds.” He grinned.

  She nodded as she spoke. “Possibly survivable for one of us, if they don't figure out to try the other door first. But it’s a good time if there are two of us.”

  “I saw what you did at the bathroom door.” He smiled as though that was enough. It wasn’t. They still had to get the attic access.

  Though he wanted to believe the hunters wouldn’t have a way into the room, Cage refused to sleep in the room until he had a way out of it, too.

  They were well-barricaded in. It made him smile until he heard the knocking at the front door.

  Joule turned to look at him as though to say she had no idea who it was.

  His first thought was that it was Dr. Brett, but his wasn’t the voice that called out.

  “Hello?” Sweet and gentle, female and older, it called out again as the person knocked.

  Cage and Joule practically clawed at the barriers. Getting out fast was not something he’d anticipated a need for. But it was obvious they were home and while Dr. Brett seemed to have no problem leaving the Department of Child Services out of the equation, Cage knew nothing of the kind about anyone else.

  “Hello, is anyone home? I'm your neighbor from down the street.”

  60

  Joule opened the front door, bursting through as the woman walked down the front sidewalk and hung a right hand turn onto the driveway.

  “Hello,” she called out to the woman’s back.

  The woman turned around before Joule could say anything else, a frown marring her face. Her white hair was pulled back harshly into a headband and her sweater had some kind of design that Joule couldn't make out but she was pretty sure she didn't want to.

  Joule was trying to hide the fact that she was breathing heavily from running down the stairs. So she stood, just barely onto the front porch, and waved as she fake-smiled.

  Act normal, she reminded herself.

  “No one answered the door.” The woman’s tone was flat. As though not answering a door was criminal.

  On the one hand, she was stating the obvious. On the other hand, Joule thought, Actually, I did answer the door and I'm standing right here. She felt her lips press together, but tried to maintain the smile. “What can I help you with?”

  Somehow, the woman's expression soured just a bit more. Maybe she’d wanted to walk away with nothing so she could bitch about it later. Joule wasn’t going to let her. Counting in her head, she waited as patiently as she could.

  The woman motioned with one hand, flipping it toward the space in the front yard. “I just wanted ask your parents about what was here in the front yard.”

  Shit, Joule thought as she felt her brother step up behind her. She wondered if he might be better able to maintain a happy face than she was, but the answer was probably not.

  “Oh,” Joule replied, as cheerfully as she could muster, “You can see we cleaned it up.” She wasn’t going to say what it was.

  “But it was out all day.” Her tone sharpened to a fine edge.

  Joule replied, still internally talking herself down from a good verbal bitchslap, “We had to go to school this morning. It was the last day. It won't happen again.”

  This time, the woman's eyes narrowed, and she began walking back up the sidewalk toward them. Joule didn't like it.

  “Well,” she started in with a tone that said she was about to say, I don't mean to be rude, but then she was going to be. “I've seen it several times but didn’t say anything.”

  Joule knew that smile wasn’t hitting her eyes. “It shouldn't be a worry in the future.”

  That was probably a lie, but she wanted the woman to go away.

  “May I speak to one of your parents?”

  “My father is at work right now. He had to stay late tonight.” A lie, for sure.

  The woman's eyes narrowed. “Well, I would love to speak with him when he's home.”

  “Absolutely. Which house are you in? And what’s your name? I’ll send him down later. It might be after ten, though.”

  It was hard to fight the cackle that rose up in her. This woman was a blazing idiot if she thought anyone was wandering out after ten. Surely, she wouldn’t open the door then, even if Nate Mazur did knock. But if she called Joule on the issue, then Joule would force her to admit that what happened on the Mazur’s front lawn was none of her fucking business. Joule’s smile tightened.

  “I'm the green one, three doors down on the right,” the woman pointed.

  Interesting. No name given. And Joule thought that the woman whose grass often remained un-mowed was not in any position to be bitching about other people's yards. In fact, Joule had thought… “Oh, I thought maybe that house had been abandoned, too.”

  She normally would have had a snappier comeback. Would have said that no, no one was going to give out any answers about their yard. It’s not your place to judge. But she didn't have a parent to back her up and she had a handful more months before she turned eighteen. She tried the smile again.

  If this old hussy called Child Protective Services, Joule and Cage could just disappear. But if they went missing, it would be that much harder to turn up at Stanford in the fall.

  In her head, she thought of several different replies about that mess in the yard.

  That mess was to kill the things that are going to kill you, old lady. Whoever this woman was, she didn't look like she could run very fast, and she didn't look like she would handle a sword or even a good, hand-size hammer very well.

  When no one said anything because Joule was biting her tongue, the old woman said, “Well, if it happens again, I'm going to have to file a complaint.”

  “To whom?” Cage asked from behind Joule on the porch. He seemed to have finally jumped into the conversation. Maybe he’d been standing back there as the muscle and just giving dirty looks. Joule didn’t know.

  At the same time, Joule opened her mouth. “Listen, if you'd like to file a complaint, I don't know who you would even file it with. There's not a homeowner's association here, and the police don't care. Half the people in the neighborhood have gone missing. And if you're going to file a complaint, you need to mow your own lawn first, and then you need to get a pressure washer to clean your house and fix the windows!” Joule finally snapped her mouth shut. She’d had enough.

  It was a dumb move. The woman could conceivably make trouble for them. They didn't have parents anymore, and they could be thrown into foster care.

  But high school was done now, and she would graduate and go to Stanford. And hopefully, this woman would shut up. Joule decided then that, since she’d started a fight, she needed to finish it. All pretense of the smile dropped. Fuck this shit. “Be sure to let us know who you file that complaint with, so we can file one on your house. Wouldn’t want to be un-neighborly.”

  It was Cage who took over the conversation then with far better tact than she had. “Look,” he said, “the yard may have a few messes here in the future and that's just the way it's going to be. No one's yard has been beautiful, not in this neighborhood. Not this last year. You’ll have to file one on everybody.”
<
br />   “We’ll make sure they all know who started it,” Joule added. This time her smile was genuine, even though Cage elbowed her slightly in the back. She held the grin even though her brother was right and she should shut up.

  Before the woman could say anything else, he pointed to the sky. “It's turning into dusk and beginning to get dark. Would you like me to walk you home?”

  No! Joule screamed inside her head. Don't! Don't get caught out late. Reaching out, she grabbed at her brother's wrist, luckily, behind her back so the woman didn't see. Also luckily, the woman didn't seem to like them very much and she said, “I'm sure I'll be fine.”

  Joule wasn't so certain. She'd been caught outside when the dark came on quickly. So they stood on this front step and watched the woman walk all the way until she made it to her door. Even though Joule wouldn’t miss her. But even as the front door on the dingy green house swung shut, Joule looked up. It was dark enough to feel uncomfortable.

  “You shouldn't have said that,” Cage chided as they slipped back inside. He threw all the bolts while Joule closed the curtains, clipping them shut. They turned off the lights and headed upstairs and Joule pulled down the attic entry, still lamenting that there was no way to close off the hallway so that they could just use this entrance and sleep in their own beds again.

  Tomorrow, she told herself. There were no classes, they could put in the attic door, and they could figure out how to spread the rat poison.

  She was pulling the door up behind her—once again, bringing the cord up with them, so that no one and nothing below them could open it. But, even as she did it, she heard the howls and the barks outside.

  Quietly, they climbed into their beds. No light. No noise.

  But then she whispered to her brother.

  “We did it. We didn’t mean to, but we've been baiting them right into our front yard.”

  Hopefully, she hadn’t baited them right into the house.

  61

  Cage lowered the attic door. Though he wanted to watch his steps as he descended into the middle of the hallway, he was mostly paying attention to breathing in. Fresh, air-conditioned air. Cool oxygen flowing into his lungs.

  A weight lifted from his shoulders, and in that moment, he was determined to get to sleep in a bed that night. The temperatures had been climbing, and it sucked to have the air conditioning on but not getting to him.

  Joule looked at him with a smile and her own deep breath in.

  “It can't wait another night,” she said, turning her head and looking at the medieval barriers they had installed on the door. “We’re going to suffocate in our sleep up there if it gets any hotter. And I’m not willing to die over something so stupid.”

  They spent the morning installing the rest of the attic door. They had everything ready, so the work went pretty quickly. When he went up and down the steps to check it, he felt his lungs constricting at the hot air in the attic.

  “Should we leave everything up there?”

  Joule thought for a moment. “Yes to the beds, so they’ll be ready if we need them. We should have backup weapons up there… and Mom’s cell phone, in case we forget or can’t get to our own.”

  Though his lungs balked each time he climbed up into the reservoir of heat and humidity, he did it anyway. Before eleven, it was all done, and he wouldn’t have to sleep up there again unless something went wrong. He hoped that was never.

  The afternoon was reserved for poison. They had to figure out how to distribute it. Dr. Brett had given them dosing information and they’d watched several online videos, educating themselves about how other people had set it out and what designs they used to be sure the poison only got to the intended creatures.

  “Well,” Joule had told him. “At least the hunters are top of the chain. That means we don’t have to worry about owls eating our poisoned carcasses. But we do need to worry about the vultures and the scavengers…”

  “I don’t know that we can. We can only hope they don’t eat enough from any one source to get too sick. And that they learn to stay away.” He hadn’t heard of scavenger problems with poisons in the past, just up the food chain. He made a note to ask Dr. Brett. So they'd sat at the table, sketching and talking as they worked through their design options.

  “We have big hunks of meat,” his sister pointed out. “I don't think we need as big of a hunk as we used to hide the trackers. We don’t have to bait them to the yard, and we want the rat poison all mixed in. So I think we need smaller pieces.”

  “That means we get to butcher up one of those sides ourselves.” He wasn’t sure if he was looking forward to that or not. There was a certain glee in imagining his work taking out a human predator though.

  “I also don't think we should use the last of the trackers. We know where the hunters are now—at least one pack of them. I’m hoping we'll find the next pack once these guys are dead.”

  “So we go out,” Cage reiterated, “and we take the meat and the rat poison and we put it all near their burrow.”

  “That's what I'm thinking,” his sister said. “Dr. Brett says that they love the taste. I'm concerned about the other animals eating it. I’m still trying to figure out how to make it so a squirrel or a raccoon can’t eat it.”

  It took a few minutes for the solution to come through. “Maybe we hang something from a tree.”

  This time, though, Cage knew they'd be hanging the bait right near where the tracker had signaled them—. They would no longer be in their own front yard. Hopefully, they would nail an ideal location on the first try, and the night hunters would come out of their burrow, see the meat, and eat it first. That would deliver maximum dosage and the least likely case of something else getting to it.

  “If we hang it from the tree, squirrels can climb down to get to it.” He sighed. It had seemed like such a good idea, but it was hard to keep the other animals out. He wasn’t sure what he would decide if they couldn’t come up with a design that would only target the night hunters.

  “Can we put one of those cones on the chain? Like an umbrella, or a dog’s neck cone. Then the squirrel can’t get around it.”

  He sketched a cone into their idea. They decided on chain, so the hunters couldn’t chew their way through rope and spill the poison on the ground—thus ruining all the design plans.

  “We have to make it work. Poisoning the smaller animals won’t deliver enough poison and the results will take so long. I don’t even know how we would measure if it worked.”

  Being raised by two scientists had created the need to always measure results. They’d been taught this from a young age. They had charts that their parents had marked with good and bad behaviors and rewards when the numbers improved. The twins hadn’t known it at the time, but their parents had been training them to create measurable parameters and track their data.

  Cage looked at the online pictures of the squirrel cones and agreed this was the trick. Placing an order of ten—more than they needed, and because they were cheap enough it wasn’t worth a trip to get more—on hold at the local hardware store, he looked back at the design.

  Do lots of iterations, try again, and brainstorm until you’ve got it right—another thing Kaya and Nate Mazur had taught their children. Even if they were both gone, they’d left a lot of legacy for the twins to carry.

  They scoured the designs, searching for flaws, problems with setups, and the need to deliver the poison only to the hunters.

  Cage thought it through. The rat poison came in blocks and pellets. Dr. Brett had given them several of his most preferred options. Later, they would purchase their own, once they'd seen what worked best with the hunters.

  “So do we make a trough like a bird feeder? With slots? I’d thought about that, because if we put it in a mesh bag… well, one, we're going to lose the bag. The hunters will chew it and the poison will fall out and get onto the ground.” With a gloved hand, he held up one of the pellets.

  “I’d thought that, too, but more like a hay f
eeder for cows. But it doesn’t matter at all if the cows or horses get hay on the ground. Even scattered bird seed isn’t a big deal, but this is.” She paused. “Maybe a hanging trough? Made of wood. High sides. If it’s not on the ground, smaller animals can’t scale it.”

  They sketched it out and liked the design. It was going to have to do. The day was wearing on, and they had to pick something if they were going to have it out by tonight.

  They grabbed a fast food lunch on their run to pick up the squirrel-stopper cones. And in a short while after that, they’d gone into the barn and pulled out their father’s tools. They set up saw horses and the tabletop that Nate would spread across them to make a work station under the carport. Cutting plywood, they then nailed and screwed it together until they had a two-by-four-foot feeding trough with eight-inch-high sides that they hoped would keep the food inside, even if the hunters pushed it around.

  “I hate the thought of rat poison spilling onto the ground,” Joule lamented as they built.

  Though Cage agreed, he had to play the devil's advocate. “I do too, but it needs to move and a few dead squirrels is better than if we let the hunters live.” He wouldn’t choose it, but he wanted to give Joule the option. “Do you want to wait? Go back to the drawing board and maybe try to find a better design?”

  To his relief, she shook her head. “We need to be sure the hunters stay in the same place. Honestly, I think there's every possibility we go out this evening to hang this and they’ve moved. We may have already missed them. It’s been a few days.”

  Cage had not considered that the hunters might periodically change their location. But the twins had been fixing the bedroom and installing yet another easy attic access, and the hunters might have been making just as good of use of the time. Especially if they’d come out and smelled that humans had been around their home more than once.

  He only hoped they couldn’t smell well enough to know.

  Luckily, the day had gotten off to an early start. It had not been hard to construct the trough. They had chain. Though their father was a physicist and a mild mannered pacifist, he’d maintained an excellent workshop in the barn.