HUNTER Page 18

  I could just imagine Chesney bringing me into his office, sitting me down, huffing and puffing about the damned media. After mumbling a bunch of expletives, he’d say something like, “Pack your stupid bags. We’re sending you back to your stupid little town.” Before letting me out of his office, he’d make sure I knew what I had to do. He’d want me to stand in front of the reporters and say, “I’ve been at a PTSD clinic for the past six weeks, Greg was there, too, but he killed himself with his belt in the bathroom. And we really were just peace-keeping in the Congo, Sammy died trying to save everyone, and as far as I know, Lieutenant Meraux died in a roadside bomb and those really were a bunch of filthy terrorists in that little Iraqi town. And there really was a radicalized Chinaman there, too, as far as I know.” It wasn’t just what the government wanted. It was what Kyla wanted to.

  Had the opportunity been given to me, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. I’d be down there in Nintipi with Kyla and that would have been enough for me.

  Now, I needed a different plan. I couldn’t just walk down into town, say my little speech in front of one-hundred reporters and call it a day. It was too late for that. The story had become too big, and the media had managed to poke too many holes in the government’s cute little PTSD-treatment tale. There would be too many questions that I couldn’t answer. And I only knew a tiny fraction of the story. Not to mention, if I turned up alive now, it wouldn’t be the military killing Kyla; it would be the troop-loving American purists.

  The Nintipi Times was only a six page newspaper, and it was a notoriously biased paper at that. I didn’t know what they were saying on CNN or ABC. I just knew what Tim Gliggles of the Nintipi Times had to say. Gliggles was the kid who wrote the article for our school’s newspaper after Sammy’s UFO trick. “Aliens are among us, unknown radioactive substance found at crash site.” The substance was a mixture of formaldehyde taken from Mrs. Ziegler’s biology classroom, and green Gatorade.

  Near the back of the paper was a picture of Chesney, trying to cover his face from a crowd of reporters. “When asked, General Chesney refused to comment,” the article said. You could practically see the veins in Chesney’s forehead throbbing in that still, black and white photo. His jowls hung low like a frustrated bulldog. Even the cigar hanging from his mouth looked defeated, curving downwards as if Chesney was some defeated Looney Tunes character.

  With me M.I.A., the government was clueless. They couldn’t do shit. They couldn’t put out a warrant for my arrest without admitting they’d been lying. They couldn’t deal with Kyla without proving to the world Kyla was right. They couldn’t claim I killed myself, or that I ran away from my PTSD treatment because they knew I could show up at any second and prove them wrong. And with every day that went by that they did nothing at all, they sunk deeper into their hole. More and more evidence was popping up every day and their situation was spiralling out of control.

  It was the perfect fucking situation. We were in control. We had them by the balls. I just needed to get to Kyla and find a way to sneak out of town. If Kyla suddenly disappeared, then the military was seriously fucked. The story would really burst open at the seams. To make things especially damning, I would stage it to look like a secret military operation.

  That night, I snuck down into the town. I wasn’t too worried about being recognized, seeing as I was hardly recognizable with my thin face and thick beard. Still, I kept my distance from Kyla’s trailer park. The little shack that they’d given me had been trashed, probably raided by some desperate reporters looking for some juicy evidence. The place was a mess, drawers were left open, my things were scattered all over the ground. Nothing was missing except for the coffee maker but I didn’t miss it.

  In the closet, where I left it after taking it down from the wall, was the framed special ops outfit. I put it on, along with the military-issued boots, and the black face mask, which was difficult to slip over my beard.

  The next stage of my plan was shit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  It wasn’t a sound that woke me up. It was a smell—a horrible, rancid odour that became stronger and stronger until I finally sprung up from my bed.

  As I did, someone grabbed my face and muffled my scream. The hand on my face felt strange, like gritty rubber—some bizarre cross between latex and Velcro. I tried to fight back and pull my face away, but every little facial movement hurt, burned, like I was rubbing my face against sandpaper. Worse than the burn was the smell. Lord, that smell made my eyes water and my stomach turn.

  When I stopped fighting, I realized the attacker was waiting for me to relax. I couldn’t see his face. All I could see was black. It was like I’d been grabbed by a foul-smelling, invisible man. Even with both of my hands, I couldn’t pry his single muffling hand loose.

  “Relax,” said a voice. “I’m not going to hurt you.” It was a male voice, too low to distinguish. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  I could make out the contour of a hand as it rose up and pulled back a mask. He was a thin, sick-looking man. His black and grey beard was thick and unkempt. His eyes were—Hunter’s eyes.

  It was Hunter.

  I let go of his hand and wrapped my arms around his body. He released my face and hugged me back, lifting me off the bed. The foul smell suddenly ceased to exist, along with all of the pestering reporters. Nothing else mattered. Hunter was back, alive, holding me in his arms. I could feel his ribs through his black suit. He’d lost a lot of weight since I’d seen him last, two months before.

  “We need to get out of here quickly,” he said. “Pack some clothes.”

  He tossed me a bag. That’s when I noticed the house looked different, strangely neat, curiously perfect. Hunter had moved things around for seemingly no reason at all. The pictures on the mantle were sorted in a perfect line, the couch cushions were neatly placed—he even spaced the candles on my dresser in a perfectly spaced line. He’d made it look like the house had never been lived in, like it was some uninhabited show home.

  “Leave that,” he said as I picked up my favourite coat, the coat I’d worn everywhere for the past eight years.

  “I love this coat,” I said.

  “I know. Leave it.”

  Bag packed, he took me by the hand and led me out the back door. He checked the coast before taking me to the open sewer hole in the center of our lawn—the putrid hole the landlord had promised to fix many months before but never did. The cover was moved aside, exposing the ladder that went down into the sewer.

  It wasn’t the most pleasant forty-five minutes of my life, navigating those Nintipi sewers.

  We emerged at the far end of town. Hunter helped me out from the hole. I had the sudden urge to hug him again. “Oh my God, Hunter. I’m so happy you’re alive,” I said. “I love you.”

  “You smell like shit,” he said. My face was nestled into his chest but I could still feel him smirking.

  He explained how he escaped from the army base and what his plan was, now that we were off the radar. I wasn’t surprised when he said, “I didn’t think that far ahead.”

  Hunter was a cowboy, a bad boy, a reckless vigilante. He got things done his way, and he didn’t let anyone tell him what to do. Nothing had changed since we were younger. It was no different than when we were in high school, and Hunter would get caught smoking in the bathroom. He never had a plan, but he never even got so much as a slap on the wrist.

  Hunter was a survivor. He’d managed to prove that time and time again, in the Congo and in that military base.

  He led me up the hill to the woods. “Are you okay to hike ten miles or so?” he asked.

  “I think so.” It was surreal, looking back and seeing nothing but Nintipi’s faint glow at our backs, knowing that we’d probably never return. For years, I was so sure that Nintipi was going to be where I would live and die. My tombstone would read, “The Witch of Nintipi, and never anything else.” But now, to think there was a whole life ahead of us…

  “We�
�ll get on the train and go north. I know where we can cross the border into Canada. They won’t find us there.”

  “What about Greg?” I asked.

  Hunter was silent. He heard me, but he had no intention of responding. Unfortunately, his silence answered my question.

  A gunshot rang out from behind us. We both crouched down, instinctively covering our heads. Hunter reached down at his waist, at an empty side-arm holster. “Shit,” he muttered, realizing he was unarmed. He shook his head.

  I was terrified, my heart nearly exploding through my chest. Hunter looked more frustrated than anything, like a man who just lost everything in Vegas. He turned to face the gunman. Once my heart had calmed down some, I turned as well.

  I didn’t recognize the man pointing a heavy-looking rifle at us. But he looked like a soldier, buzzed head, clean-shaved, dressed in grey camouflage. He was standing behind a tree, which split in two at his chest. His rifle was propped up in the split, anchored for an accurate shot.

  My guess was that he was one of the Reserves, out looking for Hunter. I wondered if he would kill us. We were still so close enough to Nintipi that people would have heard the shot. But it was still dark enough that they wouldn’t be able to see anything.

  But it was their chance—their chance to “neutralize” us, to get rid of Hunter without raising too many flags.

  But the man didn’t shoot. He just stood there with his finger on the trigger, aiming in our direction.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The son of a bitch didn’t shoot. I wasn’t putting up a fight, I wasn’t protesting, I was just waiting. I couldn’t figure out why he was hesitating. Hell, he told me back in high school that he was going to kill me. Now, he was just standing there like an idiot.

  “What are you waiting for, Roger?” I called out.

  I felt like a total failure. I was letting America down. I was letting the world down. Worst of all, I was letting Kyla down. The sick bastard would shoot me, but he wasn’t going to shoot Kyla. He’d waited years for this moment, fantasizing about sticking his filthy cock in her. Whenever someone uttered the name Roger, I had to fight that horrible image of him jerking off in the bathroom from my head.

  Roger Patrick never liked me. He thought I was a bad influence on Sammy, that Sammy was a good kid before he met me. Maybe it was true. That didn’t make Roger any less of a bastard. It wasn’t his decision; Sammy wasn’t his property or his responsibility.

  I should have figured the pervert had eyes on Kyla—probably waiting for the crowds to die down so he could time his attack, rape her, dispose of her body somewhere. And fuck, he was successful. All he had to do was pull that trigger and Kyla was his to do what he wanted with. He had her all to himself, out in the woods, outside of town. I’m sure Kyla would put up a fight, but Roger was much bigger, much stronger…

  All he had to do was pull that trigger.

  Why wouldn’t he pull that fucking trigger? I couldn’t handle the anxiety any longer, like being stuck in that moment when you lean too far back in your chair and you aren’t sure whether you’ll catch yourself—only the chair in the case is on the edge of a goddamned skyscraper. “Roger, you fucking piece of shit, I hope you rot in hell.” I closed my eyes, thinking that would be enough for him to shoot, to get it over with.

  Nothing.

  He just stood there, motionless, upright, like the dumb prick he was, leaning against that tree with his finger on that trigger.

  “Get out of here,” a voice called out. The voice wasn’t Roger’s. It was too far away to be Roger’s. I scanned the forest and noticed a man waving his arms. He was holding a long military-issued sniper rifle. “Go!” he yelled.

  That’s when I noticed the blood pooling around Roger’s feet—lots of blood. His body wasn’t standing upright at all, it was slumped against the tree. The bastard was dead—a corpse with a rifle.

  “Liam?” Kyla called out.

  The figure moved closer. Sure as shit, it was Liam, with a military-issued magnum sniper rifle. There was still smoke billowing out the barrel of the weapon. I looked back over at Roger’s body, realizing it probably wasn’t just slumped against the tree, but it was probably pinned against it, too. Those magnum rifles were for stopping goddamned armoured tanks. The hole in Roger’s back must have been a foot wide.

  “Get out of here. I’ll deal with this,” he said. His eyes were red. He kept them down at his feet, unable to look Kyla in the eyes.

  “Liam, I’m so sorry,” Kyla said.

  “Don’t be. I hurt you. I’m sorry. Now get out of here.” He still couldn’t look at her.

  “Kyla, let’s go,” I said, taking her by the hand. That gun blast was loud enough to wake up half of Nintipi. It was only a matter of time before they came to investigate.

  “Go,” Liam said again.

  “Thanks,” I said. I didn’t know whether Liam had been following me, watching Kyla, or if he’d happened to randomly notice us fleeing town. But it didn’t matter one way or the other. He did the right thing. He didn’t just stubbornly do what some general told him to do. He wasn’t fighting for whatever the government wanted him to fight for. He didn’t care about protecting their dark secrets. Maybe he wasn’t such a piece of shit after all.

  Kyla’s lips parted like she had something to say, but whatever it was, she didn’t say it. She turned and we trekked into the woods.

  “People can change, Kyla!” he called out. “Don’t ever think people can’t change!” His voice echoed through the forest and then was gone.

  We hopped on the train before the sun was up, and we were halfway to South Dakota by noon. How long would it take for them to realize Kyla was gone? How long after that before they figured she was taken? As far as we knew, they were already freaking out, looking for her. We had no way of knowing either way.

  And then what would happen with the whole Black Knight scandal? Would the government be forced to admit the truth with Kyla and I out of the picture? Would they keep trying to cover their tracks.

  Or was there never a Black Knight, never a raid in Al-Nukhib, never a roadside bombing in Iraq? Maybe that Meraux never existed. Maybe he was just an idea, some fucked up ideology. But why?

  Maybe, high up in the military ranks, there was someone just like Sammy Boy, weaving complex scandals to make life seem more interesting than it really was. Maybe the Black Knight was just pipe insulating-foam, rigged with wires and light bulbs, being held over Al-Nukhib by some spray-painted kite. Wouldn’t that be something?

  Whatever was going to happen, once we were out of Kansas, it didn’t even cross on our minds. If it had, we probably wouldn’t have fucked like damned rabbits all the way from Nebraska to the Canadian border.

  I think Liam was right. People can change. Liam changed. Kyla changed.

  And it occurred to me while I was fucking Kyla from behind, listening to her tits slapping together with each penetration, that even I changed. I kind of liked the idea of only fucking Kyla for the rest of my life. It didn’t hurt that she was the only girl I’d ever met that couldn’t just handle my cock. Not only that, she actually loved being slammed raw by the thing.

  But was I changed? Or was that always what I’d wanted? Hell, I had a great time fucking half of Nintipi. It was a scary thought, leaving that all behind.

  Kyla pushed herself off of my cock and rolled onto her back. She spread her thick, beautiful legs wide. “Hold them,” she said. I did.

  It was the same exact position I’d fucked her in five years before. Judging by the sly smile on her face, she knew it too. “Fuck me,” she said. So I did. I watched her eyes slowly roll into the back of her head. I felt the warm juice swell up in her pussy, ready to gush as soon as I pulled out.

  Fuck Nintipi and fuck all the other girls. Kyla was all I ever wanted and there wasn’t any sweeter pussy out there. There was something else about her, too. Something I couldn’t quite place. She made me feel warm, safe. My whole life, I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. I
didn’t feel that way with Kyla. It was the strangest feeling.

  Shit, I guess I loved her.

  THE END

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