The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  Nate Mazur’s handiwork was obvious around their yard. Several years earlier, they’d gone to a bird show and taken home instructions. Nate had helped them build houses for a specific breed of owl. When it hadn't worked, their father had helped them catch field mice and tuck them into the boxes as bait. They now had owls in the little houses.

  Later, after a conservation discussion in school, the three of them had gone about the very specific and detailed task of building bat houses. Two of those now existed in the yard as well. So Nate Mazur was still here, in his own way.

  When they were done, they piled everything into the trough and used suitcase straps to sling it over their shoulders. It was hot, sweaty work hauling everything to the site. In fact, Joule didn't have her bow and arrows with her—it was simply too much to carry.

  They couldn’t move the parts in batches—a rogue hunter might destroy or carry off anything they left. So it was a basic-training-like hump out to the site. Then it took longer than Cage had expected to rig up the trough. He pushed it and watched it swing, angry that the design wasn’t more stable.

  “I'm not ready to put food into this. They'll spill it everywhere.” Joule echoed his thoughts.

  It took them fifteen minutes of standing there, looking up into the trees, checking the forest floor around them, and waiting for a night hunter to pop up behind them, before they could figure it out.

  Cage eventually pointed up into a tree. “Over there. If we stretch these chains tighter and increase the distance from where they anchor in the trees, it won't swing as much.”

  “If we do it at angles, it will still move, but not tip!” she said, nodding along. “Do we have enough chain for an anchor?”

  Luckily, they just barely did

  They restrung half of it, still hot work, but worth it. Then—while Joule stood guard—Cage opened the plastic baggies and dumped the poison laced meat into the trough. With a quick look around, he whispered, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  They were halfway home when they saw the hunter cross the path at a distance in front of them. Something hanging from its mouth was a dull gray and made a clinking noise.

  Cage froze, saying back, weapons now out and in hand. Joule froze beside him. Now, having left the bulk of the weight back near the site where they believed the night hunters had burrowed in for the day, they were much lighter and their hands were free to fight if it came to that.

  But the hunter walked on by, the clinking gray piece draped from its jaws, and masked any sounds that might have warned it of their presence.

  The sky was starting to turn dark when they got home. They cleaned up, grabbed food, and hurriedly barricaded the doors, eating a quick dinner in the bedroom for once. Cage was grateful to fall into a bed, but his boneless relief lasted only for a moment because Joule turned to him and said, “That hunter? I think what it had in its mouth was chain mail.”

  62

  Joule sat in one of the large chairs in the living room facing the front bay window. She and Cage had replaced the ugly particle board with yet another sturdy window. Once again, she could see the front yard, the driveway, and the long street in front of them.

  The street looked almost normal in the summer light. Though the bait had been cleaned up, she could still see where the ladder hung against the trunk. The nylon cord wound around so that they could unhook it, then string it up again for future use. She could see that some of the houses down the street were falling further and further into disrepair. But on the surface, it all looked okay.

  The days now felt weird and anchorless. It wasn't even like summer, because they wouldn’t go back to the same school in August. This fall, everything would change.

  She and Cage had attended graduation the day before. The numbers were much smaller than last year. They'd always gone to the ceremony; they'd always known someone in the senior class. But this year, when it was their turn, their parents weren’t there. Grandparents were no longer traveling. It was just the two of them sitting with what was left of their senior class. When it was time, Faraday and then Joule had walked across the stage to a smattering of applause.

  And, of course, there were no longer any parties all night long afterwards. Graduation was now held at two in the afternoon and everyone was home before dark. The twins had come home, made dinner, watched TV, and taken pictures of the diplomas, which they then saved to an email. They’d immediately put the documents into their father’s fireproof closet safe, no longer able to leave them on the table to admire. Because what if the night hunters broke in?

  She’d been eating scrambled eggs and toast with the plate on her lap, looking out the window and admiring the sunshine. Down the street, four kids ran in the front yard. Joule tried to stay positive. She tried to keep the thoughts out, but even looking at the pretty day before her, they pushed in.

  The chain mail in the night hunter’s mouth still bothered her. She hadn't been close enough to see if it had stripes of mail interlaced with carbon fiber material. If it did, then she would know it had belonged to her father. But even if it wasn't that clear, it could still have been Nate’s. It could have come from the shirt or some other piece. And the problem was, who else would even be out in chain mail?

  Cage had slept in this morning, almost as though they had gone out and partied after graduation last night. She almost felt like she had the house to herself. Like it was the weekend and her parents had just run out for an errand or a breakfast by themselves. Joule turned on the TV and caught the tail end of a TV show.

  She checked her recorded shows and found a queue full of baseball games her father had input. Though not a sports guy, Nate had met a Major League player during a travel assignment and the two had become friends. Nate was now following the Atlanta Braves.

  Frowning at her thoughts, Joule turned on the game. She watched it in fast forward, as the game started in daylight but continued into the dark. The floodlights came on, and the players and the fans continued to cheer. People came, stayed into the night, and walked out of the stadiums in the dark.

  The Braves were in Philadelphia this week. The night hunters had not gotten that far.

  Had they originated in this area? she wondered.

  They were spreading out. She knew that much. But clearly, people in other areas were not worried about getting torn limb from limb if they were out past dark. They had their own problems, she knew—mudslides, tornadoes, blizzards, and more—but not this. It gave her pause.

  Maybe she and Cage could, in fact, eliminate the night hunters. All new species started in an ecosystem that supported them. Maybe the twins could eradicate this one.

  She had her own moral qualms about that. It wasn't her place to play God. But on the other hand, she was a species too, and she wanted to be dominant. And that was the way of species: when two fought for an ecosystem, one species won and the other one went extinct.

  Flipping channels, she wound up watching a show that offered bite-sized information about new scientific discoveries when Cage finally woke up.

  “I made eggs,” she said. “You can heat them back up and make yourself some toast if you want.”

  He came into the game room a few minutes later and sat on the couch next to her. Three pieces of toast and a precarious pile of poached eggs graced the plate he balanced on his lap.

  They didn't talk about their dad or the chain mail, but her thoughts ran circles around the idea. Clearly, the chain mail wasn't enough, but she felt she had all the evidence she should need.

  Nate hadn't come back the next morning to pretend to be there for them, which meant he must not have survived that first night. The alternative only created crazy options. Why just stop lying to them one day? He could have had a psychogenic fugue but—despite Joule’s willingness to claim one when she forgot her homework—she knew such mental breakdowns were actually incredibly rare.

  The chain mail piece told her the hunters had had the garment long enough to chew it into manageable chunks. It was on
ly more solid evidence that their father was never coming home.

  The other thing it meant was that the chain mail was not good enough protection: Nate had died wearing it. She and Cage would not make the same mistake.

  It was fifteen minutes later, on the science show, that she saw it. “Cage Look, look at that! That's what we need.”

  “What do you mean? How does that help us?”

  “It’s not that we need to survive the night hunters if they attack us. That’s the wrong problem to solve. It's that we need them to not attack us at all. We know they don't have a good sense of smell. They hear and they see. And if we have that, they can't see us.”

  63

  Cage opened the mail he’d brought in from the box. He and Joule had let it pile up a little this week. Luckily, most of it was crap, but he pulled one piece aside, thinking it looked important.

  Sure enough, in said in bold red letters that the mortgage was overdue. He wondered now if maybe the company had been emailing his father and he and Joule simply hadn't seen a paper notice because it didn’t yet exist.

  Whatever the reason, it was here now. He calculated it out. The paper was giving them thirty days to pay up or else the lien holder might begin procedures. He held onto the “had the right to begin” as some wishy-washy language.

  He’d been told that the lender always wanted you to pay. Eviction and foreclosures were very expensive for them. He was counting on it.

  He figured out the legal ninety days before the mortgage company could kick them out. Plus the thirty days to fail to pay up before that ninety days started and he arrived at one-hundred and twenty days. That would be the first day anyone would be able to legally show up on the doorstep and kick them out. By then, he and Joule would be long gone.

  It was a gamble, certainly. What if his father came back? What if his father had simply lost some of his chain mail that a night hunter then carried around? Cage knew how ridiculous that sounded, but at some point, Nate Mazur could come home.

  Looking at the letter, he tried again calculate the odds. They were too long to be worth paying the mortgage now. He would show it to Joule, get a second opinion, and almost definitely not pay.

  As he double-checked the date, he realized he had no idea what day of the week it was, only that it had been seven days since the nasty neighbor had threatened them. She’d not returned and they'd seen no kind of action—no notices, no messages, nothing from anyone, let alone any authority. He didn't consider them entirely out of the woods on that yet, but he figured Joule’s threat of retaliation probably played better than he'd given them credit for at the time.

  A thump at the front door had his head snapping up, and he turned to see the delivery man walking away, waving at him through the large front window. Even now, Cage was calculating the cost of the window and how many more times they might have to replace it. It didn't seem like something they could just ignore.

  Sunlight was hard to come by, and he appreciated it.

  He headed out the front door, feeling the heat on his skin and lingering a moment before he picked up the box. They had ordered six.

  His brain was working the numbers and he couldn’t make it stop. The odds on this, the cost of that, the likelihood of having to fix something else a second or even third time.

  They had ordered extra squirrel cones. They ordered extra food and stuffed it into the freezer. They bought extra wood when they went to the home store. They didn't pay the mortgage—so that was extra money they kept. But it was past time to start budgeting.

  They had to have enough to get through at least four years of Stanford. What if one of them decided to stay an extra year? Or both of them did? What if Nate Mazur came home? It was their father’s money they were spending left and right.

  Like Nate, Cage was much more of a duck than either Joule or Kaya. Things rolled off of his back easily, and Cage was certain that if his father came home and found the money was missing, his only concern would be that his children had lived well and ate frequently while he was gone. But the looming college years concerned Cage now.

  He'd managed to get most of the money distributed from Nate’s accounts to his own and Joule’s various accounts over the past month. Hopefully, he hadn’t moved enough at any one time to raise flags. Perhaps he should leave a little bit of it in the original account. Perhaps not. If Nate Mazur turned up dead, it would then become a huge pain in the ass to get his hands on the rest of it. Maybe he should leave a little bit, Cage thought, but a little bit less than they'd been planning.

  Another conversation for Joule.

  She came down the stairs then, bare feet soft on the wood, hand in her curly hair. “What was that?”

  “Delivery.”

  Her sleepy eyes flew wide. “Is it the carbon?” She’d been waiting for the substance the science TV show had told her about.

  He nodded, but he waved the mortgage papers in front of her. For a few minutes, they sat down and discussed how they wanted to budget the money they had. Luckily it was a huge chunk: their parents’ savings, what was in their checking accounts, and the life insurance Nate had collected when their mother died.

  Yet it would be easy enough to burn through it now if they didn’t think ahead. They had to plan. What could they spend each month? How much for themselves and food and gas and bills and general life and how much on the fight? Would they pull back if they felt they were close to killing the night hunters, but were running out their budget? How much more were they willing to spend to be able to achieve that?

  Joule ended the discussion by holding up one of the plastic containers. It was the kind you might get a very large amount of spice or salt in. Plastic screw on lid, heavy to the touch. “I don’t think we can budget for this kind of thing.” She shook the black powder inside. “We don't know how much of this we’ll need. Maybe it won’t work and we’ll have wasted the purchase of five of the six jars. Or maybe we’ll need so much that this—” she motioned to the other plastic containers still sitting in the box, “—will barely cover an outing. We can’t plan for what we can’t plan for.”

  “Well, we should at least keep track and see how much we are spending.” They put together a primary list of what they’d spent on the fight against the hunters. There was meat, wood, chain, pulleys, and more.

  “At least Dr. Brett bought us the rat poison. But if we run out, we’ll be buying more.”

  “And all this was not including what Dad spent.” Cage waved his hand across the list written in his small, relatively neat print. Turning his attention back to the black powder, he said, “My hope is we’ll spend less and less as we go out. That we’ll get the hang of it.”

  Nodding, Joule agreed, but added, “We have to try it. We don't know that it will work. We’ll figure it out. But we can’t budget for it, not until we know more.”

  Still, Joule was Joule, and she wasn't willing to wait. Though she might not be able to figure out how much she would spend on it, she could run her initial tests. Unscrewing the lid, she dipped in a finger and they both watched as it turned inky black with the powder.

  It snuck into her fingerprints and into the grooves of her knuckles. She rubbed it a little more, between her thumb and forefinger, leaving charcoal-like smears as she went.

  “Get a light,” she told him and continued to look at her finger. She smudged it onto paper, producing a mark not unlike a pencil. Though she continued to rub her fingers together, the stuff didn’t rub off. It only rubbed in.

  “Be careful,” he told her. “What if it’s toxic?”

  “It’s just carbon.” She finally looked up at him, and saw his serious expression.

  “You remember in Bio Two? Back in Curie? We were studying cyanide. Dr. Pohng told us, ‘Carbon is the basis of all life, but it’s also the basis of some of the things most deadly to life.’”

  Joule was still looking at her blackened fingertip. “Good. Carbon made them. We’ll use carbon to help kill them.”

  He wasn’
t going to change her mind, so he pulled out his cell phone, shook it to activate the flashlight and they watched together as her finger absorbed the light into almost nothing.

  64

  “How do I look?” Joule asked, grinning at her brother. At best, she looked like a banshee and she knew it. But that was the point.

  This was their first full test run with the carbon black powder on them.

  The powder had been developed in recent years, and was known as the darkest substance on earth. While black things—like her t-shirt—absorbed a wider spectrum than other colors, the carbon black took in all light that touched it and conceivably bounced none of it back. If a person took a picture of something covered in black carbon, it would look as though there was a hole in the picture. And that was Joule’s plan.

  They'd coated themselves in it—their clothing, their hair, their exposed skin, and more. They’d done it on several occasions, to get the hang of it. Joule had even visualized her way through the process when she first thought of it, and had already ordered black contact lenses, because the whites of their eyes showed. Their teeth were another problem and, ironically, it was a tooth whitener that best turned their teeth dark as it was charcoal based. If they left it in their mouth, their teeth were mostly covered. Now she grinned at her brother, a ghoulish look at best.

  Today their run was in the late afternoon—a chance to check the feeding trough they’d filled with meat and poison. They had to see if it was still standing, to see if the night hunters had eaten anything or everything in it, and to see if it needed repairs or more bait.

  Their plan was to go out in the last of the good afternoon light, and return just after darkness fell. There was no good way to test whether the carbon powder worked other than to put it up against the hunters and the dark.