It was a letter. Unusual in these days of instant messages and talking electrons, but it had a few newspaper clippings slipped in there that wouldn’t have gotten my way otherwise. Physical proof adds weight to the claims of the crazy, and it takes just enough longer to take a trip to the garbage can than to the ‘delete’ button that you might notice something worthwhile on your way. Three little articles from two little papers, with seven spelling mistakes between them. A missing car, a missing man, a missing hiker. All in the same place, all on the same road, all without a trace. The letter attached to that was an afterthought of information at best. ‘Come here,’ it said. ‘Help,’ it said.
‘Hunt.’
I thought about the options as I looked over my traveling kit.
Bear. No. They usually don’t do serial jobs, and they certainly don’t do cars.
Cougar. The same.
Humans. Could be, could be. Never rule out humans. It’d add to the challenge, sure.
Accidents. A universal. But maybe not this closely-packed. There’s bad luck, and then there’s bad luck.
And then there could be… something else. Which was why I was carrying the special case with the special tools in my left hand when I stepped out the door and left my latest small, meaningless apartment behind.
I’d say that the job finding me was unusual, but that would be a lie. What I do isn’t work. Great-great-granddad called it by a different name.
It’s the purest play there is, he said, a game humans invented a long, long time ago. And I still haven’t found anything that can beat me at it.
I can say the same thing.
It was a quiet sort of place, tucked away in some leafy little corner of the country that no one really cared about or looked at too closely. A hundred houses spread thin on the ground, two franchise buildings that sold grease and clogged arteries, and a late-night hunting supplies store on the highway that some joker had decided to paint in camouflage which might have been the stupidest thing I’d seen in my life. Country folk, god bless ‘em and screw them to pieces. Nothing important lived for a hundred miles around, which was a good sign of whatever problem that was hanging around it being ‘something else.’ That sort of thing usually sticks off the beaten path. Too noisy, too busy, too many people, and they just run. With this few nearby, they don’t run, they stay and fight.
I ate lunch in a terrible fast food chain coated wall-to-wall in plastic, feeling nostalgia for the good old days when I would’ve eaten lunch in a terrible independently owned restaurant covered in dented chrome. It didn’t really matter, as long as the food was bad. It forced you to think, to look at your map and make marks on it, to do anything, anything at all to take your mind off what was crawling over your gums.
Three vanishings over five years on the same stretch of highway next to the ass of a useless little town that hung off the road like a tick. And no traces ever found. The hiker sets off from his home and doesn’t come back. The driver heads into town and never gets there, nor his car. The idiot drunk gets in a shouting match with his friend, gets turfed out of the car to walk the last mile home by himself, and drops off the face of the known universe.
All locals, of course. It’s the only reason the papers – and by extension, me – know where the hell they went missing. I thought idly about how many people vanish without a trace on America’s highways and byways, and wondered how many of them could’ve happened just down by here.
I set up my blind in the edge of the thicket by the hunting store. A good view over the stretch of the highway I’d penciled out as the likely danger zone, and it’d be easier to explain away what I was doing to anyone to that wandered by. A few rednecks stopping by to stock up on bullets and beef jerky saw me setting up and made tsking noises. No way I’d get deer down there, what the hell was I thinking, blah blah blah. Nothing new, nothing useful.
It was mostly bent branches when I was finished, a screen that didn’t look like a screen, a seamless little blot on the landscape just big enough for me to tuck myself and the contents of the special case inside and vanish as far as eyeballs were concerned. Hidden in plain sight, the best and only real way to do it. Sound would be no problem, not unless I came down with the worst cold of my life in the next two hours, or explosive hiccups, or spontaneous Tourette’s syndrome, because all three of those were just about as likely as each other. That just left scent, and where I was sitting the wind wouldn’t reach.
Everything was ready well before sundown, so I went inside (nearly cut myself on the doorframe – rusty, and jagged as a shark’s mouth) and shot the shit a bit with the owner of the store. A fat, pale weasel with too few teeth and barely any eyes. Like a bloated worm. Those tiny little eyeballs nearly bugged out of his flattened skull when he saw the Gun, though. It was a mistake to bring that in there, I thought he’d take no for an answer when he asked to see it but the whining just wouldn’t stop until it came out of its case.
I told him the truth because that was the easiest way: yes, that was my great-great-grandfather’s elephant gun, old as sin and twice as ugly, yes, I knew how to take care of it, no, he couldn’t touch it, yes, it used black powder, yes, I agreed that it was a bit much to use on deer, blah blah. Yes, I knew how much it was worth, now stop talking I’m leaving. At least he didn’t have a problem with me leaving my car in the lot while I hunted ‘deer’; hell, just for letting me see the Gun he’d probably have let me sleep with his sister.
I went back to my blind and sat there in the dusk, watching the stars come out, counting the cars leaving the hunting store’s parking lot (one, two, three, four… only two left) and measuring the darkness. It was straightforward, normal, the sort of lack-of-light you find anywhere in the world. Not the deep black of an old, brooding forest, not the underworld pitch of a cave, not even the forever sleep of the bottom of the ocean. Just your everyday, everynight nighttime, nothing to write home about or quake under the bed in fear of.
Perfect cover for something else. And while I sat there on the cold dirt and branches, I thought about all the something elses out there that might be roaming my way.
Would it be a bigfoot? It’d been a while since a bigfoot. They were the reason I carried around great-great-granddad’s outmoded monster Gun with me, despite the reload time and the monstrous weight of the thing. All that hair and hide was on top of near-solid bone in all the important spots, and it was hard to find anything that could punch through that on demand.
I remembered that first time I saw one. All that arm and leg, lanky as a colt, but on a torso bigger than an entire gorilla. It looked at me as I pulled the trigger, and I think I saw surprise in there somewhere. I sold the feet to an old, old man in Texas, with a lot of old, old money; the things stank worse than a rotten skunk.
Bigfoot ate anything, just like people, but they steered clear of us when they could. We’re better at killing than they are, and they know it. And even a really big old one would have trouble getting rid of a whole car. Probably wasn’t a bigfoot. Unless it was really pissed off and really smart. Those two traits, they don’t go well together.
Now, while I was waiting and thinking all this, my ears and eyes were on the move, prowling the night around me while my body and brain sat lullaby-soft. And here and now, they came back home and told me that there was something out there, and it was standing just where the brush thickened into trees, forty feet from me, surrounded by branches and needles. Its breath was very soft, but deep and full, and it seemed to take forever for each exhalation to end and another to begin. Big lungs on it.
I moved the Gun into position and got my other hand ready on the big spotlight that was another part of the special case. One second was all it took once I had the range and aim. Turn on the light, and then, in that instant between freeze and flight, bang.
Or, since this was the Gun, BANG.
If I missed, there’d be problems. So there weren’t.
The sound of gravel under a tire rasped on the night like glass against a cheese grater, and the quiet breather in the wood chuffed under its breath and left, whump-thud-whump, off at a trot, paws churning through old pine needles and drained soil, overwritten by the wheezing roar of a pickup truck that had last seen maintenance when its owner was sperm as it hauled out of the parking lot of the hunting store.
I swore inside my head. Two seconds. Three seconds. Maybe two seconds and a bit closer. So near to being a one-night hunt too. Just once, just once (wait, there’d been the time in Puerto Rica) just twice, it’d be nice to have a one-night hunt. No chance it’d come back now, not after a run like that.
The car was my bed, the second of the terrible fast-food franchises in town was my evening breakfast, and the slimy little man in the hunting store was my timekiller, if only because the mildewed air in there put me to sleep real easy. He’d known the man that went missing in the car, he said. A good customer, a regular, a friend. Terrible shame. I’d better be careful, because if I went missing so would the Gun, and that would be the real tragedy haw haw haw haw.
Haw haw back at you. Jackass.
I moved for the second night, set up my blind in the trees. I knew where the thing was coming from now, I knew its sound, I knew its tracks – poorly. The shuffle of its run had been too frantic, all the details had been rubbed raw into a blur of claws. It could be a bigfoot, a big clumsy guy with overgrown toenails, a chupacabra, or even a bear. Too damned messy to say for sure.
And so I waited, and this time my thoughts wandered towards chupacabras. Which this couldn’t be. Goatsuckers like it warm, too warm for it to ever come this far north. Not on the hottest summer of this place’s existence. And besides, they were spindly little bastards that went for goats and cattle, and only took beef when it was asleep. An alert human? Probably not. A car? Not on the best day of the biggest, baddest goatsucker’s life. Especially not since I’d shot her four years ago.
One hunt. One night. One shot. The thing’s teeth had been worn down to little stubs from use, her bites were more like rat-gnawing than needle-pricks. Took the teeth for the trophy rack in the special case, sold the head to a man in Japan. He died two days later. I wonder what happened to the head. Wonder if it made it into the will.
There it was again. There was that breathing, soft and slow. Still quiet, but a bit more controlled, tighter. Not as relaxed, are you? Because last night you got scared off, and now you’re back and
Right
There
baBANGng
I jumped as the shot took, aiming and firing on automatic while my body did its thing. A bear’s face in the spotlight, surprised and wide-eyed in the light, a bear’s body falling over with the head a ruined mess. The Gun had spoken, but something else had too. That was a car door slamming, another one of those goddamned hicks nearly spoiling my shot with his late-night exit after one of those useless long conversations with the storekeep about guns and light beer and how his wife’s a goddamned bitch. Nearly ruined two nights now, and all for a goddamned bear.
All that flew between my ears as I turned to the parking lot, Gun still smoking big gouts of black powder, and then it flew away because the lot was empty. No engine had started. No tires had turned. Just the doors, and then a lot empty except for my own car.
Bang.
The bear had been a nuisance, feeding on the garbage over and over, said the store owner. His own damned fault for not getting better bins, probably. But now it was dead, hoorah, hooray, thank you so much, let me get you some more ammo for free, I’m sure I can have it shipped in, what’s your address, don’t worry, I know a guy who knows someone, wink wink. What’s that, man go missing? No sir, didn’t know that. Ain’t that a trouble there, makes me scared to leave the building. Good thing I live-in, huh? Haw haw.
I hated him, but quietly. I was thinking, and I let myself nod and grunt when he wanted me to while I puzzled over that parking lot.
No tracks. Not a one. And it had made off with a whole car in the time it took me to shoot, swear, and turn around.
Without leaving a track, there or in the bush.
A flyer, maybe? The Jersey Devil had traveled abroad now and then, they said. Not that I’d ever seen the bastard, despite my best efforts. Four trips, weeks each time, and not a single cloven hoof or leathery wingbeat in the night. Maybe it had died years ago; it was hard to sort out the genuine sightings by crackpots from the phony sightings by other, more imaginative crackpots.
It could be a bigfoot. A really old one, big enough to hoist a car, smart enough to do it quietly and cover its tracks, filled with enough simmering, built-up hatred to slow-burn through a massacre of decades, man by man. But no, no, no. At that range the stench would’ve given it away, and the bigger they are the worse they smell. No ignoring it. Besides, no matter how strong the damned thing is, it has to lift a pickup truck and carry it through a forest at about sixty miles an hour without leaving a trace.
Maybe it wasn’t physical. Now that thought got the hairs on my neck tingling; the Gun can’t work on what isn’t really there, and I hunt animals, not ghosts. I checked my watch while the owner paused in his gossipy ramble to take a bite out of his burrito, and was relieved to see the minute hand still frozen at noon. Not a quiver, and with anything with enough mojo to move a truck, it’d be spinning for days. I idly wondered if the store owner was a serial killer and had been using the dumpster-diving bear to dispose of his victims, and discarded it. The man weighed four hundred pounds and seemed glued to his chair. And there was still the matter of the vanishing car.
I excused myself and left the hunting store for someplace less damp, brushing myself clean with both hands, and considered my plan for the evening. Whatever the hell was doing this didn’t matter. It was real, it wasn’t dead, therefore the Gun would kill it. I just had to catch it, and judging from how fast it moved, catch it fast. So I’d have to know where it would be. So I’d need bait.
My sleeping bag was a rumpled, sweaty mess, but for good measure I wrapped it around myself for the rest of the day to make sure it stayed fresh. A couple armfuls of sticks and the use of my coat, and I had a hideous scarecrow that wouldn’t have fooled a nearsighted four-year-old.
But propped up and in a laid-back seat, in the poor light given out by the watery lights of the hunting store… well, things would be different. Were different. I didn’t even need the spotlight this time, just both hands on the Gun and a long, slow breath that never quite ended and was soundless as a falling snowflake.
Not much that could do a thing like this. I was ready for anything to cross my sights. A ripple in the air, a glimmer of an eye, a breeze that wasn’t quite a breeze. I almost shot a raccoon three separate times and each time I refused to let myself relax.
This would be so much easier if I knew what it was, even though it didn’t matter. Doesn’t have to be a ghost to be something a bit more out of my comfort zone than a twelve-foot hairy bastard. Might be a Grey. I heard they’ve been creeping back on-world in the last decade, and those shitheads are spooky as ghosts except they shoot back, and shoot hard. But no, there’d been no lights in the sky, last night, the night before, any night at all. Can’t be them.
Could be a wendigo, this far north. I’d heard some of them could fly, and they got big, bigger with each person they eat. And I don’t think they die of old age. Half-spirit, half-monster, but no ghost. Maybe one had come walking down from the north for a holiday.
Fingers bigger than pine trees flexed in my mind, reaching down, down, down to a car smaller than its nail, picking it up with no more sound than the bang of a car door…
The lights went out.
The Gun went off. BANG.
Flicker, flicker, fizz, and up came the store lights from the dark again, showing me an empty parking lot where my car had been.
I spent the rest of the night in a daze, reloading somewhere but otherwise offline as I searched my head for a next step. The car was gone, which meant my coat was gone, and I liked the damned coat, and most alarming of all I’d shot at something and missed. Or I’d shot something and it hadn’t died. I wasn’t sure which was more alarming.
The store owner was full of slimy condolences on my car being stolen. Oh, it was terrible, must be those damned punks from down the road, kids these days, yes there was a power failure last night how did you know, terrible service around here, pity you were doing so well, third time was the charm, better to go home now and so on.
No, I didn’t need a ride. I’d call in a cab. The idea of trusting my life to that fat slug’s ability to press a pedal hidden entirely by his gut made my eyes twitch. And I had a coat to pry out of something’s innards.
The roof of the hunting store was easier to reach than it looked. Up I crawled, hand over hand, Gun dangling. One good thing about that stupid-ass camouflage paint on the roof; it made my blending in a lot easier. Just laying down nice and flat there, I stretched myself out low and looked over the lot, a god on a fifteen-foot throne, eyes a bit bugged and brain a bit strained.
Perfect.
I climbed back down, ran to my blind, broke it to pieces and scattered them every which way, made it look like a cleanup that wasn’t quite careful enough, like an angry man had broken it down in a temper and gone home.
Perfect.
I took a land mine from the special case, instantly lightening it by ninety percent, and breached many international laws by planting it in the parking lot where my car had been, very carefully.
Perfect.
And finally, I took a very small item from the special case. It was an old souvenir from a hunt a long time ago, the littlest tooth from something I’d killed in a lake up in Canada once, years and years ago. It had left it inside my leg, and I needed all the luck I could hold right now.
Perfect.
I went back to my roof and laid down flat as the sun set. No thoughts this night. Nothing for the mind to distract itself with, no letting it wander while the body manages its own business. No, tonight was just for me and my trigger finger, nothing else between us. The thing would be back, it would be back.
The last red slipped out of the sky, and I settled myself carefully into place for the evening. If all went properly, the only part of me that would move anywhere this evening would be my finger. One finger, one gesture, one shot, blam. I had the positioning, I had the light ready, I had the luck, the hidden edge, and as I shifted my elbow I had a very large camo-patterned eyelid roll open next to my hand.
It was the size of my head, and it blinked at me. Winked at me.
Oh, that store owner, I thought, extremely slowly. Oh, how he reminded me of a worm, a big fat slimy worm stuck to his desk like a hook.
I turned the Gun, and was thrown to the ground fast as lightning as the hunting store bucked under me, landing right in front of it on the gravel with a crunch-crack of ribs and legs and arms. Away went the gun, skipping over the gravel as the hunting store heaved itself up in front of me, its lights flickering on and off like an anglerfish’s, doors clattering open and shut with all their jagged old rusty edges, moist, mildewed air seeping out into my face.
Great-great-granddad, times change.
“Hunting,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.