The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  Did the hunters smell blood? They didn't smell humans, it seemed, but he hadn't been a bleeding human before. As he and Joule took off across the backyard, aiming the short distance to the door at the back patio, the hunters took off, too. As though the jolt of movement triggered the canines to come running, the hunters aimed directly for them.

  The hunters were fast. Heads lowered, they lengthened their strides and ate up ground. They were built for the run; he and Joule weren’t. It seemed the fifteen feet to the door took all of fifteen minutes to cross.

  Everything happened in slow motion. Cage was watching the canines bounding across the yard, their mouths open. The moonlight glinted off of all those canines, ready to shred him further. He was not ready to be shredded.

  They hit the patio, the jolt of the cement beneath his feet reverberating up his leg. Ducking around the table and chairs was a nuisance—the patio furniture was a good idea when there had been evening barbecues, but now those items were just obstacles for the humans. Probably not for the hunters.

  Joule grabbed him and threw him into the door, where he slammed with a little “Oof” of his own.

  “Open it,” she demanded as she spun to face away from him. While he got the door, she was going to defend his back.

  Once again, they hadn't locked the house. Besides, they'd not known of a night hunter actually opening a door, only breaking them down. So he turned the knob, slid inside, and reached out to grab the back of his sister’s shirt.

  She yelled a war cry and stabbed at the dog in front of her even as Cage pulled her backwards.

  “Fuck!” she yelled, and they tumbled inside into a heap with the door still gaping in front of him like an invitation to the hunters. Leaping up, the pain shooting through his leg, Cage pushed the door closed. He saw the hunter then, the one Joule had stabbed, on its side and gushing blood. But there wasn’t time to look, and he threw the bolt, holding the door against the weight that smacked hard up against it.

  Leaning in, he hollered to her. “Get a chair! We've got to brace this shit.”

  Why hadn't they added braces in the first place? It seemed obvious now. The front window was a failure point. And so were these back French patio doors. Who’d thought that was a good idea to make doors that opened inward?

  Now he was leaning heavily on his left leg, acting as the brace until she came back. As Joule darted upstairs, he pushed back against every hit and waited for one of the small panes of glass to explode inward, a snout pushing through. He’d seen the hunter she slashed. Whatever she’d hit, it was vital and he was bleeding out. Joule herself looked like a survivor of a massacre, black powder running along her clothes mixed with animal blood. Surely none of the gore was her own.

  They had intended to come home quietly. Lock the door. Turn off the lights and climb into bed. That was not happening now. The house would not be secured. It would be broken into yet again. These hunters were mad. They knew the twins were inside, and the two remaining ones were determined.

  Joule was thumping down the stairs, the chair behind her. Though their mother would have had a fit at the way she was banging it into the walls, no one was around to get upset now and the house would survive a few more nicks here and there.

  Cage grabbed the chair from her and jammed it under the pair of doorknobs, pushing against it several times to brace it tightly.

  Standing back, he watched it hold against the next hit, but he wasn’t sure how many it was good for. “The attic!” he cried.

  She nodded and together they raced up the stairs, but as they reached the top landing and heard the crack of glass from downstairs, Joule ducked into the bathroom and then into his mother's office.

  “What are you doing?” he hissed as he pulled down the attic stairs. The heat had never felt so welcome. But they had only moments before the hunters were inside and skidding around the corner. He wanted the door pulled up and the two of them gone before that happened. If the hunters saw them, there was no telling what they might do.

  “Just go,” Joule told him and pushed him up the stairs.

  67

  “Pull, pull, pull!” Joule quietly hissed the command at her brother.

  Her hands were full as she cleared the top step into the attic and she prayed he understood. But Cage had already been standing with the rope in his hand, and was hauling the extended staircase up behind her even as her foot left the ladder.

  She would have turned and helped because the door wasn’t lightweight, but she couldn't. Holding the heavy contraption with one hand—his leg still bleeding—Cage reached down and pulled up the dangling cord. He locked the staircase in the closed position, without a means for anyone—or anything—below to reach up and pull it down.

  Crossing her legs, Joule quietly sat onto the floor, her heart thumping from their run. No dogs had followed her up the hallway, and for that she was grateful. But now the two of them had to sit, unmoving, and wait.

  She wanted to ask Cage how his leg was, if he was bleeding freely. Was it enough to make a puddle and drip through the ceiling? She would think he would have to bleed a good amount before that happened, but the truth was, she didn’t really know.

  She was covered in carbon black powder and the night hunter blood was slowly drying on her. In their plan, they would have come home and taken a shower. Although that had been a stupid idea, she thought now.

  No matter how they had come home—quietly, victorious, or running as they had—there would be no showers until morning. No noise, no light. No alerting the hunters they were in the house.

  Of course, they’d led the small pack right back to their door. That was another missing piece of the plan that would have to be rectified. Maybe it was a good thing that they weren't in the bedroom shedding black powder crystals all over the almost-white carpeting. Carbon Black rubbed into the rug would prove impossible to remove.

  Joule breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. The over-warm air of the attic heated her lungs from the inside, feeling as though it expanded them. She wished she had a fan. She wished she had even a dim light and that she knew sign language or something better than Morse code to communicate with her brother. She wanted to know, Was he putting pressure on the wound? She needed to clean and treat it.

  The pounding of her heart finally subsided and she listened for noises beneath her. Though she'd heard the glass break, it was possible the chair had held and the hunters hadn't come into the house. Or maybe they’d decided it was in their own best interest to drag their dead friend away, for surely he was dead.

  She'd cut the hunter—badly—and he’d leapt at her while she did it. But, by the time he was close, he’d had no muscle tone left. Her slice had been wide and deep. The Warfarin, the medicine in the rat poison, was a blood thinner. Hopefully, it would make the hunters bleed out internally or from small wounds. If that hunter had eaten some of the poison they’d set out, he was likely on his last legs.

  Joule’s slice had filleted him wide open. There would have been no possibility of any alternate circulation. He’d bled all over her. She shuddered as she remembered it, uncontrollable shivers wracking her spine. So she didn't think of it.

  Cage had a cut that needed her immediate attention. She began moving as slowly and quietly as possible, praying she didn't squeak any of the rough floorboards beneath her. She and Cage had done what they’d planned and sat themselves on opposite sides of the attic entry door. She would have loved to have climbed into bed, but surely it would have made some kind of noise. And she was not getting into that bed covered in blood and carbon powder—not unless she was burning the whole thing in the backyard tomorrow.

  “Don't move,” he told her. But it was too late. She reached across the space.

  “Water bottle. Soap.” She ignored him, and said each item as she pressed it into his hand by feel. She’d been prepared to be nearly invisible in the woods… but not here. “Clean it out.”

  She could see an outline of his form, and a few
spots here and there where the carbon powder had rubbed off or had not lived up to its hype. But it was hardly like seeing her brother—more like psychically intuiting the presence of a ghost.

  From what she could gather from the dim visuals, he reached behind himself and pulled the pillow off his bed, quietly tucking it under his leg. She heard the top of the water bottle. The slow, faint scrape of plastic and a slight, unavoidable chug as he poured told her he was following her instructions. The pillow would absorb the excess water and it wouldn’t make a puddle or drip through the ceiling, thus alerting any hunters below to look up.

  Joule could almost hear his teeth clenching and wondered if he had made a real noise or if she’d just grown so in tune with the only other human she now had regular contact with.

  “How deep?” she whispered. She wanted so badly to apologize. They'd run into each other, unable to see, but it was her stiletto that had pierced him. She was the one who’d not aimed her weapon correctly, and she’d hurt the only family she had left. Joule had not been worried about the shoe polish going into one of the hunters with a deep cut. It had never occurred to her it would go into her brother.

  “Half an inch,” he whispered back, the words so soft they were only a hint of movement in the dark, thick air. “Hurts like a bitch, but it isn’t bad.”

  If she started apologizing, she would cry. She would get noisy and sob in great gulping noises for all her losses. For the fact that her blade had gone into her brother, that her mother had been killed, and that her father was missing seemingly of his own accord. Her only consolation was that her blade had gone into her brother first and that she had not contaminated his wound with night hunter blood.

  She heard faint shuffling sound from him and tried to make out his movements in the dark. She watched his outline as he went through the motions of cleaning the wound a second time. Grabbing her fleece blanket off of the bed, she offered it up to him to stop the bleeding he’d surely restarted with his ministrations. Their clothing was dirty, and his pillow was too now, but her favorite fleece was not. It was an adequate sacrifice for the mistakes she made. She held it across to him, whispering, “Dry it.”

  When she’d given him a few minutes to get the blood to stop, she handed across the one thing that she thought to grab at the last minute. She was grateful she’d remembered where it was in her mother’s craft supplies.

  Pushing the tiny tube into his hand, she said, “Be careful. It’s superglue.”

  68

  Cage stood in the shower, letting the water slide over him, impressed at the way the super glue held his leg together. The cut was much smaller than he’d originally thought it was. Good.

  It appeared the tip of the blade had just poked him, maybe half an inch deep. It did exactly what a stiletto was designed to do, slide in easily. Luckily, Joule had pulled back before it went in even further, but it still hurt like a motherfucker.

  The hunters had not made it inside the house. For that, he was supremely grateful. Less cleanup, no need to sleep in the attic again. The big canines had broken several of the tiny panes of glass in the window but had not been able to push the door open.

  It seemed they'd given up. Cage began wondering if that was because of the Warfarin in their systems. Joule had mentioned that this morning, and he could only agree. The hunters weren't quite acting up to snuff. Some had wobbled when walking, and even the bigger, steadier ones had not been quite as ready to attack—as though they knew something was wrong inside them.

  They hadn't even dragged the body of their slain pack mate away.

  Once he and Joule were clean, they would go pick it up. His intent was to throw it into the freezer and forget about it for a while. He couldn’t deal with another autopsy right now. Maybe Dr. Brett would want this one…

  Cage thought through the matters at hand. He would need to bandage his leg. He wasn't sure it needed it, but he didn't want the super glue to pull open, either.

  A moment later, he emerged from the shower and into the steamy bathroom. That part at least felt normal, and he could entertain a fantasy that it was still last year and the neighbor’s dog still barked too early on Saturday mornings and his parents would be downstairs when he went.

  But it wasn’t a year ago. He hadn’t lingered in the hot shower, but had cleaned up quickly because of the wound. Joule would be standing just outside, still covered in carbon black powder and blood.

  Wrapping himself in his favorite fluffy towel, he pulled the door open. He intended to say, “It’s your turn.” But one look at his still-filthy sister and what came out of his mouth was, “You look like Stephen King's Carrie.”

  One corner of her lip pulled up. “I look like Carrie met Cujo.”

  He laughed for the first time in a while, and he couldn’t decide if it felt good or weird.

  “I called Dr. Brett,” she said, breaking the moment of light mood. “I asked him about the super glue and about the shoe polish.”

  She drew out the last couple words, indicating how bad she felt about it. But Cage was shaking his head. “Don’t worry. That could have gone either way. And if I had nicked you with the dagger or the short sword… well, it would have been much worse.”

  Her nod said she agreed, but her expression wasn’t quite there yet. “He said not to worry about it but to watch it. Since we super glued it together—which was a good thing—it’s not wise to open it back up. He gave me instructions, but he also said he'll come by later with antibiotics for you.”

  Cage motioned for her to head into the shower she so desperately needed. They’d both taken out the black-wash contact lenses, but she still looked like something from a horror movie. The door clicked shut behind her and Cage turned his attention to bandaging the glued wound. Hopefully, with the antibiotics, it would be okay. Surely the vet wouldn't give them to him unless they were safe, but he wasn’t up for explaining a stiletto puncture at a walk-in clinic.

  When she was clean, and looked like his sister again, Joule apologized once more and made him breakfast. They watched cartoons as though they were ten again.

  “You're inside until that heals.” She motioned toward his leg between bites of pancakes and sausage. “Which means both of us are.”

  They made mac and cheese for lunch and wound up feeding the vet when he stopped by. Cage thought it might be in part to show the doctor they could take care of themselves—puncture wound notwithstanding.

  “This is good mac and cheese. Better than mine.” Dr. Brett ate everything Cage had hoped to have as leftovers. But it was a small price for a medical visit and a bottle of the right antibiotics.

  “You did a good field medic dressing. Totally acceptable and excellent under the circumstances,” the vet told him before leaving him with the amoxicillin, instructions on dosage, and a reminder to not worry.

  They packed up the dead hunter and loaded it into the back of Dr. Brett’s truck and waved good-bye. As they entered the game room, Joule spotted the blinking light on the answering machine. They'd maintained the home line to have 9-1-1 access but had permanently turned it to silent more than a year ago. Occasionally, messages came through that were actually something of value. Though Joule was hitting her way through most of the charity calls and spam by jabbing the delete button, one message stopped her.

  “Cage.” She turned to him, suddenly quiet. He stepped up to listen as his grandmother's voice came over the digital recording. She was simply checking in wanting to know how they were doing.

  He looked to his sister then. The fluffy, light-hearted afternoon dissolved around them. He’d managed to ignore the wound in his leg and the black streaks that remained around his sister’s ears and had somehow wound up on her toes. He took the first dose of amoxicillin without thinking about how he needed it because he’d been running from a pack of wild canines that would readily rip him limb from limb and had probably done exactly that to his father.

  But his grandmother’s voice, calling to ask about the kids, was too much.
She was clearly leaving the message for their father.

  “I'm glad we didn't pick up.” Joule’s voice was low and Cage didn't say anything in return.

  If Grandma Mazur had talked to them, she would have wanted to know about her son. And there was nothing to tell. There was no point in letting the woman grieve his loss when they weren't fully positive yet that he was lost.

  Joule jabbed the button once more, quelling the blinking light and erasing the message—as though, if it wasn’t there, they wouldn’t have to deal with telling their grandparents.

  The twins split up then, going to two different sides of the house. Cage spent the rest of the daylight playing online video games with whoever showed up. Joule took her tablet into the living room and draped herself sideways in one of the big, comfy chairs and drew. He wasn't sure how long it had been since she'd added to her portfolio, but he didn’t ask. They stayed on separate ends of the house until dinner time.

  Telling himself that the carrots he’d eaten as an afternoon snack sufficed as a solid dose of vegetables, he decided to order a pizza. While they waited, they boarded up the small, broken windows in the door downstairs, although they kept the chair shoved under the knobs.

  That night, they slept safe and clean in the bedroom. On real beds. With air conditioning.

  Cage slept in hard the next day, waking to find Joule already having gotten up and eaten. Her guilt was gone or she was hiding it—he’d had to make his own breakfast—and he stayed quiet and numb most of the day. But over dinner, Joule asked how he was doing and Cage had to say much better.