HUNTER Read online

  “Hunter?” Anders prodded.

  I smiled and shrugged. He wouldn’t have been able to handle my answer. It was too politically-incorrect for his fragile generation.

  Anders turned to Bremkin. “What do you make of all this? How much shit are we in?” he asked.

  Bremkin thought for a moment, peered out the window, and returned, still scratching his chin. “It’s not good,” he finally said. “And I have more bad news.”

  “Jesus Christ… Okay. What?” Anders said.

  “Someone vandalized the Veterans Monument last night. The media found it before we could. It’ll be on every news outlet by the evening.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No. I haven’t even told you the worst part. Whoever did it spray-painted over Sergeant Samuel Patrick’s name. I’ll spare you what they wrote.”

  Anders looked at me slowly with narrowed eyes, as if it was me. I scowled right back. How dare he accuse me of spraying Sammy’s name; Sammy was my best friend.

  “It wasn’t Sykes,” Bremkin said. Anders’s eyes became wide and his face became red. He looked away from me, probably realizing how big of a dick-head he was. “We have intel on Hunter through the whole night. As a matter of fact, he was on his house phone with Corporal Greg Cherovitz precisely when he’s been accused of having done it.”

  “Accused of having done it?” Anders asked before I had the chance to.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot to mention, Sergeant Patrick’s brother, a Roger Patrick, made a statement this morning, claiming he saw Hunter on the street last night with an empty can of spray-paint.”

  “Damn it. This is bad,” Anders said, as if it needed confirmation.

  “Yeah.”

  Roger Patrick. There was a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. He was a real stupid motherfucker. He was a few grades above Sammy and I, and he always had the hots on Kyla but was always too much of a pussy to do anything about it. He was a creepy kid, too. I remember going into the bathroom during class to have a cigarette and seeing him hunched over a urinal, hunched jerking it like a wild man. He told me he’d kill me if I ever told anyone, and I believed him, too. He had those freaky, dark eyes that never blinked—the same kind you see in old pictures of Charles Manson. Of course I told everyone, and he often reminded me that he was going to kill me. Again, he was too much of a pussy to actually do anything.

  “Where does Roger live?” I asked.

  Anders and Bremkin snapped their heads towards me and they both scowled in near-unison. “Don’t even think about it,” Anders said.

  I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. If they would’ve released the proof that I was at home when it happened, people would have cheered me on while I whipped the shit out of Roger Patrick. Instead, Anders and Bremkin seemed completely fine with me being booed every time I left the house.

  “So what can we do?” Anders asked.

  “Hunter leaves town. Until all of this dies down, he disappears. We can say he went for treatment.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Treatment? What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

  “PTSD.” Bremkin said.

  “What about Greg? We can’t keep him alone, not after last night. With Hunter gone, the media will turn to Greg. Then we’ll have a real problem.”

  “What? He phones my house a few times, you can’t leave him alone anymore?” I said.

  Bremkin looked at me, laughed, and shook his head. “At 0400, Greg broke into my house, Hunter. I caught him digging through my filing cabinet. When the police asked him what he was doing, he said he was looking for proof I was a Congolese Rebel. He said he found it, too—and he showed the police my dog’s vaccine records.”

  I didn’t have a response. They were right, Greg was not only a media nightmare, but he was potentially dangerous. He needed treatment.

  “We can send Greg away, too,” Bremkin added. The plan was too perfect for them. They got rid of Greg and me, didn’t pay a dime, and looked like the most caring, compassionate people on the planet. In reality, they were too damn cheap to really pay for the PTSD treatment that Greg really needed. Bunch of white-collared cunts.

  “Okay. That’s what we do. Hunter, pack up your things.”

  I didn’t even get a say in the matter. I was their pet dog—their unwanted, pain in the ass pet dog. Fuck ‘em. If they wanted me gone, so be it. I was just happy to get out of Nintipi.

  They wanted to send me out into the bush to Greg’s uncle’s old cabin. How they even knew about the thing was beyond me. Greg’s uncle had been dead for a decade, and the place had been empty since we were teenagers. It was an hour drive from town. Their plan was to drop me and Greg off, leave us there without a car, and drop off food once every two weeks. At first, they said it would only be a month. When the topic came up a second time, Anders said, “It won’t be more than two months.” The third time it came up, “Four months and you’ll be back in Nintipi.”

  Bremkin and Anders were a couple of bastards, but the plan wasn’t a bad one—it was actually a pretty good one. I was looking forward to spending the winter in that old cabin. Let things settle down, maybe bag a few bucks.

  My only hesitation was Kyla. With me out of the picture, who knows what that Liam prick would try to pull.

  That girl really knew how to pick ‘em.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As soon as Greg and Hunter left for PTSD rehab, the media turned to me. I got a visit from a military lawyer named Matthew Bremkin, who advised that I “refuse to comment on any reporter’s questions,” which I’d already been doing.

  Nintipi was a quiet town. That was the one thing it had going for it. At night, you could hear crickets and coyotes and if there was any other noise, it meant something was wrong. One time a truck blew a flat at 3AM and everyone on my block was out on their lawns, wondering what happened, investigating. Someone sneezing outside was enough to wake up a Nintipian.

  Understandably, when there were thirty-five reporters buzzing through the streets, cameras flashings every time the pilot light on my coffee maker flickered, sleep wasn’t so easy. It kept me up for most of the night.

  It kept Liam up for the whole night.

  He didn’t even lay in the bed. He spent his nights pacing the house, cursing the reporters under his breath, uttering threats that made me scared we had his old military-issued rifle in the house. Some nights, I thought he was going to take the thing and blast a reporter to pieces. It didn’t help that the occasional reporter broke the rules, ran up to the house, and took a picture through our window. It wouldn’t be long before one of them got a bullet right between the eyes.

  Liam should have calmed down with Hunter out of the picture, but he didn’t. Couldn’t blame him with all the media attention and whatnot. Each day he would leave the house to look for a new job. I knew that he was just going out to the bar because he would come home late, always smelling like whiskey. He continued to get angrier and angrier. He would yell at me if I said anything. He would yell at me if I said nothing, thinking I was hiding something.

  Again, I couldn’t blame him. He wasn’t sleeping, the reporters were pushing him towards the edge. Two weeks after Hunter and Greg left town, I decided I couldn’t take any more. But I had an idea to get the reporters off his back.

  I packed a bag, snuck out the back, and made my way to the edge of Nintipi, catching a ride with the first trucker heading north. I left Liam a note that said, “Gone to my aunt’s in Kansas City until things calm down.” I knew he’d be mad, and I knew he’d suspect I was sneaking around behind his back, but it was the only way to make the reporters leave us alone. And, it was the only way I could think to get away from Liam.

  I was headed to the only place I knew there would be no one: Greg’s cabin, where I went after the first media frenzy, after Sammy died.

  The isolation would be a welcomed change, and Liam didn’t know about it. It was a small cabin, about an hour and a half drive fro
m Nintipi, and another hour hike out into the woods.

  The trucker that picked me up didn’t say much. He kept looking at me with narrowed eyes as if he somehow recognized me. I gave him a fake name, not wanting him to realize he hated my guts like everyone else who lived within fifty miles of Nintipi. He seemed more confused about the fact I asked to be dropped off in the middle of nowhere, where there was nothing but trees and a rusty deer-crossing sign with three bullet holes in it—the sign that marked the start of the old trail to the cabin.

  I’d always thought I was the only person alive who knew about the place. I walked in the front door expecting everything to be the way I left it, unmoved under three years worth of dust.

  That wasn’t the way I found it.

  It looked as though squatters had found the place and made a home there, though no one was home when I showed up. As I walked in, the sun was setting and the temperature was dropping. The cabin was as cold as the air outside as if it had been empty for days. But whoever had been squatting couldn’t have been too long gone, as there was a carton of milk in the fridge that had yet to expire. How a bunch of vagrants found the place was beyond me; even if you knew where to pull off on the highway, you still needed to hike nearly three miles to get to the place. It had no driveway, no nearby street.

  And the forest was so big, so dense, it was hard to believe that anyone could possibly find the place without already knowing it was there. Unless they were hunters, familiar with the area. That’s why Greg’s uncle built the cabin—those woods were prime buck hunting woods. Greg, Sammy, and Hunter spent entire summers out at that cabin.

  Then it dawned on me.

  I tried to push the thought out of my head. It couldn’t be. Were the squatters actually Hunter and Greg? Did they lie about going to PTSD rehab? There was only one way to find out.

  I explored the house, looking for signs of the boys.

  Hanging on a drying rack in the bedroom, I found exactly what I hoped I wouldn’t—Hunter’s clothes.

  So where were Hunter and Greg? Their things were still there, but they weren’t. And by the looks of it, they’d been gone for at least a few days.

  The hunting rifle that normally sat on the mantle was gone. I figured they must’ve been out hunting.

  I wanted to run back to the highway. I wanted to get in the first truck on its way back to Nintipi. But I couldn’t, and not just because the temperature had fallen well below freezing and I wouldn’t make it halfway through the woods before it was pitch black. I couldn’t go back to Nintipi because there was no question on my mind that Liam had already discovered the note, and was probably as angry as all hell. He needed a few days to calm down—a few days for all of the reporters to trickle out of town so he could get some rest, get his sanity back.

  My other option was to keep going in the other direction, towards Nebraska. But what would I do there? I didn’t know anyone in Nebraska. And despite what I wrote in my note, I didn’t have an aunt in Kansas City. I didn’t know anyone outside of Nintipi. I hardly knew anyone inside of Nintipi.

  Besides—even if there was somewhere for me to go in Nebraska or Kansas City or some other town somewhere in the world, I was stuck in that cabin until the morning, until there was enough light that I could get back to the highway.

  Even if I bundled up and found a flashlight, I was still too exhausted to make the trek back to the highway. Days had gone by without a proper sleep, and the three mile hike through the snow took the last of the energy I had in me.

  So I went to sleep.

  I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of heavy stomping on the front porch. By the time I realized that it wasn’t Liam and I wasn’t in my own bed in Nintipi, the stomping had made its way inside the house. The rusted hinges on the old door squealed as the newcomers closed the door behind them. I could hear their muffled voices through the cabin’s thin walls, and over the loud thudding of my heart against my ribcage.

  Though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I knew it was Hunter and Greg. I’d hoped they wouldn’t be back until later the next day, so I could have snuck out and they would never know I was ever there. That plan was out of the window now. I had to make myself known, but thanks to a paralyzing sense of dread, I couldn’t.

  I wanted to just yell, “Hey, I’m in here,” so they wouldn’t walk in and freak out—and God forbid, blast me dead with that hunting rifle. But I didn’t yell anything. I just sat there and waited for them to find me. And then the door opened.

  I pulled the blanket up to my chin. Hunter’s eyes found mine and he froze. Without saying anything, he turned back down the hall and walked away, closing the door behind him. Of all the reactions my mind, turning and walking away was not one that I’d anticipated.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I had no idea why Kyla Rose was in my bed, how she found me, or how long she’d been there. As the door closed behind me, I stood still and racked my brain for even a hint as to why, but I had nothing. She knew about the cabin—she came along with Sammy, Greg, and I from time to time, in the summer when the nights were warm enough that she could sit out and watch the stars. The stars were perfectly clear from that cabin. If they’d been any more clear, you’d be able to see their planets and the little aliens walking around on them,

  But it was the middle of winter, and it wasn’t even warm enough to sit outside in the middle of the day, never mind watch the stars at night. I thought, maybe she was just getting away from the media frenzy like we were. Anders must have made up some bullshit story and sent her here while the reporters moved on to the next big controversy.

  I could figure out the hows and whys later. Now, Greg was coming down the hall from the sitting room. He still had his hunting knife in his holster, and I wasn’t willing to see how he would react to a surprise guest, given his state of mind. I don’t think he would’ve hesitated lunging that six inch blade into Kyla’s chest, like he did to the camp guard in the Congo.

  “Greg,” I said, stepping in front of him.

  “Yeah?”

  “You remember Kyla Rose, right?”

  He stared blankly at me. Greg didn’t remember much, unfortunately. It was a miracle he was alive at all.

  When our platoon was ambushed, half our squad was killed by a hand grenade, tossed into the window of the hut we were sleeping in. The Kongies slipped passed our night watch unnoticed. It wasn’t hard, seeing as our night watch was Sammy, and he was off fucking a prostitute, halfway across the village. When the grenade went off, everyone in the room died—everyone but Greg. The son of a bitch was built from steel, I swear to God. He walked out of that room with no more than a few cuts and bruises. At least, it only looked like a few cuts and bruises.

  That grenade did something to his brain. Greg wasn’t the same after that. He was quiet, he forgot things, and he became terrifyingly ruthless. The Greg I knew before the war had no intention of shooting his rifle. None of us really thought we’d be shooting anyone. But after the ambush, he had blood on his mind. And hell, if he didn’t, maybe we would’ve never gotten out of that camp. I couldn’t have done what he did, stabbed that kid—even though the kid was pointing a gun at our heads, I couldn’t have done it.

  “You remember Kyla, Greg. Right?”

  He shook his head, his eyes completely hollow. He was trying. You could almost hear the name pinging around inside of his head: Kyla Rose, Kyla Rose, Kyla Rose. But he had no idea. He just shrugged.

  What I’d been beginning to realize was, Greg didn’t know he had an issue. He didn’t know his Kongy hallucinations weren’t real. He didn’t know that he couldn’t remember things. That’s what made Greg Cherovitz so dangerous. He didn’t trust anyone. If you told him you were an old friend, he’d think you were a Kongy trying to trick him. Couldn’t blame him either. The second we touched down in the Congo, there were Congolese tricksters trying to dupe us on every street corner and in every bar.

  “Kyla is an old friend of mine,” I said. “She’s in
that room. Anders sent her to stay with us.” I made sure to say it loud enough that Kyla could hear. All I could do was hope that she caught on.

  Greg looked towards the door. “She’s here now?” His eyes narrowed.

  “She showed up while we were out.”

  “You knew about this?” he asked, eyes still narrowed. His hand was uncomfortably close to his hunting knife.

  “No. But she’s an old friend of mine.”

  He looked back down the hallway. Greg didn’t trust anyone, except for me—and even I wasn’t so sure he trusted me sometimes. He told me he thought Anders was working with the Kongies, and that he hadn’t decided about Bremkin yet.

  He was convinced that the Congolese Rebels had made their way to America while we were in the camp. “First, we reclaim Brazza, then we take your White House,” our captors would remind us regularly. Sometimes they would say things like, “Our troops, we’ve taken Chicago.” They only knew a few American city names. Sometimes they would even get those wrong. “Alaska is now burning, Americans. Washington is next,” they would say, not realizing Alaska was an entire state, up in the middle of nowhere. Greg always knew better than to believe their bullshit, but after we escaped, he didn’t seem so sure anymore.