HUNTER Page 13

  He hadn’t even had his growth spurt yet. He was still so small, but he was cute with his shaggy hair and that confidence that followed him around everywhere he went.

  Carly Jacobson had run home crying just minutes after she stepped onto the school grounds. I wasn’t going to let that be me. “No,” I said. That didn’t stop him trying again the very next week, and the week after that, and the week after that.

  Some people never change.

  And I was one of them. I was like a broken record, repeating that tiny little word over and over. “No.”

  When Hunter finally asked me to hang out with him, just as friends, I couldn’t say no. But anytime he tried to make it into something more, I was quick to turn him down again. I will not become Carly Jacobson, I kept telling myself.

  But despite years of rejection, there I was, a decade later, still feeling the high from coming all over Hunter’s big cock.

  “It shouldn’t be long before we can go back,” Hunter said. “They’ll come get us any day now.”

  It was enough to make my gut turn. “You want to go back?” I said.

  “The sooner we can get on with our lives, the better. They can’t expect us to stay in this cabin forever.”

  My head hurt from the thought of going back to Nintipi. What would people think when they found out I abandoned my ex-Marine boyfriend to be with Hunter? That would bring my American War Hero backstabbing count up to two. They would crucify me. They would hold me down and brand “The Witch of Nintipi” into my forehead. My ears were ringing…

  Ringing so loudly that I didn’t hear whatever had grabbed Hunter’s attention. He was perked up, face against the window, scanning the horizon. “Shit—no, no, no,” he said, darting towards the door.

  “What? What is it?” I asked. I ran to keep up, but he didn’t bother waiting for me. He was already thirty feet from the cabin by the time I had my first shoe on. “Hunter!” I called out. By the time I had my second shoe on, he was gone, out of sight. “Hunter!” I called out again, but there was no response.

  The sun’s first appearance in days was a bright one, made brighter by the even layer of white, reflective snow that covered the forest. I stepped out from the cabin, into the snow, which was up past my knees. I had no idea how Hunter was able to run so fast, or how he was able to see anything in the intense brightness, but thankfully I had his tracks to follow.

  When I finally found him, he was down on his knees. Greg was standing over his shoulder, eyes wide, skin pale, and face sunken. He looked like he’d been out in a blizzard for months without food or water. He was shaking, though it didn’t look like his shaking had anything to do with the cold.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Greg was paralyzed, completely retreated inside of his own mind—and clearly his mind was a terrifying place to hide. Hunter looked back at me. His eyes were as wide as Greg’s, and somehow he was just as pale.

  He was crouched over an immobile black lump. The snow around the lump was stained red. It didn’t take long after that for my mind to fill in the gaps.

  Greg had shot and killed someone. Back in the cabin, Hunter heard a gunshot. That’s what sent him running. But who did he kill? I assumed it must have been one of the reporters that Greg claimed was sneaking around the cabin, trying to take pictures through our windows.

  Hunter was trying to get a pulse, but judging by the number of expletives he was uttering under his breath, he couldn’t find one. I took a step forward to see the dead man’s face. He looked vaguely familiar—a younger, fresh faced man, possibly still in his early twenties. I tried to place the young man, but couldn’t seem to find a name to fit. “Who is he?”

  “He was just a fucking kid,” Hunter said, though I’d already figured that much out. It was when Hunter pulled him up, out from the snow that I was able to place him. He was down at the airstrip with Hunter, when they finally came home from the Congo. He had stood next to Hunter, whispering into Hunter’s ear when the reporters asked questions.

  “Check his pockets,” Greg said, still paralyzed with rigid fear.

  “For what, Greg?” Hunter said, snapping his head up to scold Greg.

  Greg stuttered. “H—He might be working with the Kongies. Check his pockets.” His shaking voice made it clear he didn’t even believe it. It was an optimistic attempt to convince himself he hadn’t just murdered an innocent man.

  Hunter sprang up and grabbed his friend by the throat. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? You killed him, damnit! You killed your own general.”

  “He—He might have been working with the Kongies. Check his—”

  Hunter didn’t let him finish the sentence. Instead, he slapped Greg across the face. “Goddamnit, Greg, wake up! There’s no fucking Kongies out here, man! You killed an American for Christ sakes—a kid!”

  “Just—Just check his pockets.”

  Hunter’s face was dark red now. He punched Greg in the jaw, sending Greg down into the red-stained blood. Greg was slow to look up, blood trickling down from his lip. He was harmless, unarmed, weak, and probably on the verge of slipping into hypothermic shock. That didn’t stop Hunter from picking him up and socking him again.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  Hunter didn’t listen. He grabbed his friend once more by the throat and lifted him up to his feet. I yelled again, but still no response. The only way I could make Hunter stop was by throwing myself between the two men.

  “Kyla, move,” Hunter said, but I didn’t.

  It took Hunter a few minutes to calm down. He paced back and forth through the deep snow, with his hands on his head. Once he had his head straight, he and Greg carried the dead general back to the cabin.

  The general’s name was Anders. He had a wife and a newborn baby, as we discovered when Greg finally checked his pockets. Greg kept saying that he “couldn’t get a good ID on him,” so he panicked and shot. “We’re in deep shit, man,” Greg started to repeat.

  Hunter had his face buried in his hands. “We’ll be fine.” His voice was shaken—a lousy attempt to lie to himself. “We can make it look like a hunting accident.”

  “His friend got away. His friend’s going to come back with backup,” Greg said. “We’re fucked, man. We’re fucked.”

  Hunter perked up, eyes wide. “What friend, Greg?”

  “He ran after the first shot. I couldn’t get my scope on him through the sticks. The snow was too heavy. He got away. I’m so sorry, Hunter. He got away.” Greg was in tears. I wasn’t sure if the tears were over himself or over the fact he let his friend down. “I’m so sorry,” he kept repeating.

  “Shit,” Hunter said. “Bremkin…”

  The name Bremkin clicked in my brain. That was the guy who came to my house a few weeks before to tell me to stay away from Hunter. He was a lawyer for the military, handling Hunter and Greg’s case. I couldn’t think of anyone worse to have witnessed the shooting of Anders but Bremkin, and judging by the sombre tone in the cabin, neither could Hunter and Greg.

  “What do we do?” Greg asked, wiping the streamline of tears from his face.

  “We wait.”

  And we did. We sat in the cabin’s living room and we waited. We waited until it was late, then we went to sleep. And in the morning, we were all awoken by a crash at the front door—an armed police unit storming the cabin. Hunter and Greg were arrested, and I was brought in for questioning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Greg had shot and killed Anders. Bremkin saw Greg just before the shot was fired. His testimony would have been enough to put Greg in prison for life, and me in prison for a good chunk of time, too. But as luck would have it, Bremkin told the police a different story.

  A deer hunter took the shot. A tall, heavyset male with a thick beard and an orange coat. That was the description Bremkin gave to the police. The police let us go, but Bremkin took us straight from the precinct to the nearby military base. He had his own plans for us. At first, I thought he was giving us a br
eak, being a nice guy, understanding Greg’s mental condition.

  On the ride over to the base he told us that his brother was Special Forces, and that his dad fought in ‘Nam—apparently suffered from nasty PTSD, just like Greg. I figured Bremkin had a soft spot for people like us. I thought we were off the hook.

  But when we stepped into the military base, and Bremkin ordered two of the guards to make sure we didn’t leave, I realized I was being hopelessly optimistic.

  They took Greg away but refused to tell me where. Then, they put me in a windowless, cement room, and they left me alone for hours. There was no clock in the room. There was nothing in the room but a locked door, a bolted-down steel table, and a steel-plated security camera that hung in the room’s upper corner. It was an interrogation room.

  I got the feeling that I was better off with the police, that Bremkin saved us from incarceration because he felt that wasn’t a bad enough punishment for killing Anders. If the police lay a finger on you, that’s enough to wave all charges. They have to go through piles of paperwork just to get you into a courtroom, which is a whole lengthy process in itself. Behind military walls, those rules don’t apply. People disappear all the time and no one asks questions. And I hadn’t forgotten that Greg and I were still technically their property, their responsibility. We signed away our souls years before.

  We were fucked. Guantanamo wasn’t the only detention camp out there; it was just the only one gentle enough to make the news.

  I felt nauseous thinking about it—being sent from one prison camp to another. But what really made my heart sink into my gut was thinking about what they were going to do to Kyla. I dragged her into this shit. They told me not to, but I did anyway. They had the rights to my soul, but they didn’t have any right to hers. They didn’t have any legal right to make her disappear the way they were probably going to make me disappear. But she knew more than they wanted her to know. She knew Greg shot Anders and she knew that we weren’t being sent to a “PTSD rehabilitation facility,” whatever the fuck that was supposed to be.

  And they couldn’t just send her along with us.

  They would kill her—the same way they tried to kill Noric Gizenga, AKA Frederick Meraux. They would make it look like an accident. Unlike Meraux, Kyla didn’t have the Special Forces tactical training to survive the United States’ military wrath.

  As long as I was beyond the Nintipi city limit, she was as good as dead, and it was all my fault. I killed her. Sammy asked me to keep her safe, to tell her that he loved her. Instead, I went and put a pretty price on her head.

  I was dozing off when Bremkin finally came into the interrogation room. He said nothing as he pulled up a chair and took a seat, placing two coffees down on the table.

  “You guys fucked up,” he said.

  He wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t make me want to slam his face into the table any less. Greg may have pulled the trigger, but it was Bremkin and Anders that gave him the gun. They knew he was dangerous but they put him up in that cabin anyway. They were the idiots who sent him into isolation where the really dark side of his PTSD could thrive.

  “Why’d you let him have the gun, Hunter?”

  “Were you ever in the military?” I asked.

  “Why does that matter?”

  “It matters a lot,” I said.

  “I was in the military. I worked communications with the Reserves for twelve years.”

  I laughed.

  “Why is that funny?”

  “The Reserves,” I said. “That’s cute.” I would never be able to understand why they gave people like Bremkin and Anders decision-making positions. It’s like letting the lady who washes the sheets in the hotel basement run the whole hotel. Bremkin knew nothing about war except for the fairy tales they shove down your throat in basic training—glorified tales about war heroes like Lieutenant Frederick Meraux and Sergeant Samuel Patrick.

  In basic training, they don’t talk about the PTSD, the devastatingly high soldier suicide rate—they don’t talk about the fact women in the military are raped, that soldiers are forced to drop bombs on women and children, or that half of the goddamned missions they send soldiers out on are to cover up twisted shit they don’t want the public to hear.

  “What? You don’t respect the Reserves?” Bremkin asked, as if the answer wasn’t obvious.

  “Stationed behind enemy lines, would you ever take a gun away from one of your squad mates?”

  “Greg wasn’t behind enemy lines.”

  “You’re a fucking idiot, Bremkin. Greg is always behind enemy lines. If I took away that rifle, he would’ve found a way to get it back. That’s what you trained him.” We were Special Forces, trained to survive under any circumstances. Greg just did what he was trained to do.

  Bremkin was silent. I could tell from the glazed look in his eyes that he didn’t full understand what I was saying to him, but judging by his silence, he understood enough to realize he didn’t know shit.

  But regardless of what he did or didn’t know, he was in control and he at least knew that.

  “Greg’s gone now. The higher-ups approved our request for extended rehab.”

  I shook my head. I wanted to laugh in his face, knowing that he wasn’t only full of bullshit, but that he was using the same pathetic excuse he used before, when they sent us up to the cabin. Stopping me from laughing was the thought that they’d probably sent Greg to a detainment camp, or worse, they sent him to be killed. “I want to see him,” I said. My body was hot, quickly filling with rage.

  Another one of the military’s problems was just swept under the table. Another issue that wouldn’t see the light of day, that wouldn’t be addressed, that would go on to take countless more lives.

  “You can’t,” Bremkin said simply.

  “Why the fuck not?” I was ready to strangle the bastard.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the security camera, as if to remind me that it was recording, that I should be careful not to do anything stupid. I didn’t give a shit about the camera. The thing probably wasn’t recording, and even if it was, they wouldn’t do anything with the footage anyway. They would sooner sweep me under the rug, send me to whatever hellish detainment camp they sent Greg to than to have that footage see any eyes other than those sitting on their thrones in high places, sipping scotch and ordering airstrikes on innocent villages in war-torn countries.

  “If you do anything to him,” I warned.

  “Greg’s fine. Trust me, he’s where he needs to be.” He said it with a calm genuineness, but I didn’t feel the least bit comforted. Bremkin probably believed it, but there was almost definitely someone above him pumping him full of bullshit. Who knows how high up bullshit can trickle down? I guess that’s why they gave Bremkin his job—because he was stupid enough to believe their lies.

  “Why can’t I see him?” I asked.

  “For his safety, and your safety, we’ve put him into a relocation program. New town, new name, new record. He’ll get the help he needs and he’ll get a fresh start.” More bullshit, but there was nothing I could say to dispute it. “Enough about Greg. We need to talk.”

  “Talk about what?” I asked.

  “Talk about relocating you.” He stared at me, waiting for some kind of response—waiting for me to give him the green light to keep talking. He quickly realized I wasn’t going to give it to him. “We want to do the same for you: put you through trauma rehabilitation, give you a new identity, put you in a new town. A new life, Hunter.” He smiled.

  I continued to suppress the urge to strangle the bastard. He waited again for a response, but again, I gave him nothing. This time I was speechless, caught off guard. He was probably full of crap, but there was no way of knowing for sure because I was certain that he believed the shit pouring out from his lips.

  “You would get on a plane today. Even I won’t know where they take you,” he said. That was enough to confirm Bremkin was just another ignorant pawn, being pushed around by some war pig
lurking behind a curtain.

  “I can’t say no, can I?” I said.

  “Unfortunately, the plane is already scheduled to leave in a few hours. You’ll be taken to your house. You’ll be given enough time to get your things. We’ll call up your loved ones. We can’t let you pass off any personal messages, but we have scripts for those calls—they’re very nice scripts, very comforting.”

  Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry about lying to any loved ones because I didn’t have any. The closest I had to a loved one were Greg and Kyla. I couldn’t do shit about Greg, and Kyla was bright enough to see through the lies.

  That’s when it hit me, that I would be abandoning Kyla. If that lunatic, Liam, tried to kill her, I wouldn’t be able to do anything. If the military wanted to make her disappear, she was as good as gone. And if the press wanted to tear her apart, then there would be a mess to clean up.