Hunters (20 page)

"I don't give a damn about getting into
anybody's pants. I came out here to fight for something I believe
in, and I
did
that, and I think it's had—or
will
have—a hell of an effect. And I
don't
want to screw it up by
doing something stupid!"

"This is great," Chuck muttered. "Go for the
jugular, Sam."

Sam looked at him and had to laugh at the
dopey grin on his face. She was about to say okay, whatever, but
Michael kept talking.

"What we have to do tomorrow is perform an
execution. One of us was killed, and if we have any loyalty to each
other, the killer has to pay. Now you two can stay here in the
morning, and Jean and I will—"

"No," Jean said. "I want Chuck with me on
this."

"Chuck?" Michael's voice nearly squeaked, and
Sam giggled at the way his bubble burst.

"Sure, asshole," Sam said. "That way she can
make sure that Chuck and I don't get into any
twouble
"—she
spoke the word like a little girl—"while she's gone."

"Nah," Chuck said. "She just picked me 'cause
my dick's bigger." Sam and Chuck both exploded into laughter, but
Jean went white.

"My reason's my own business. Chuck, I want
you at the jeep at 5:00 tomorrow morning. We'll sit out in front of
his house and get him as he leaves for work."

"Who does the shooting, boss lady?" Chuck
asked.

"We both will. Twice the chance of killing
him."

"So what do I do?" Sam asked. "Play dominoes
with Dickless here?" She hated being reprimanded, even if the other
person was right.

"Why don't you kiss my ass?" Michael
said.

"Maybe, when the boys are done fuckin'
it."

"
Stop it!
" Jean shouted. "My God,
we've come this far by working together, let's not blow it now! If
you have to do something in the morning, Sam, pack. We'll be
leaving as soon as Chuck and I get back. Michael, you can do the
same, and settle up at the front desk. Now let's call it a night.
And be sure you set your alarms."

"Will there be a fine if we get up late?" Sam
said.

"Don't worry, babe," said Chuck. "I'll nudge
you."

She put an arm on his shoulder and squeezed.
Chuck was a sweetie, though he packed a lot less meat than he
thought he did. Still, in this godforsaken piece-of-shit neck of
the woods, you made do with what you had, and Sam was feeling more
than a little horny.

All the slicing and dicing today had aroused
her. She never felt more alive than when she looked death in the
face, and today she had made its acquaintance half a dozen times.
In the Goth underground of L.A., phony death was rampant, but the
real stuff was rare. It wasn't until she had met Chuck that she had
experienced the hot, crotch-burning thrill of shedding someone
else's blood beside your own or your lover's in little
dribbles.

What was great was when it jetted, when it
just fucking
ran
out of them, like it had today. Jesus, it
made her hot. She wished that she and Chuck would have had time to
stop and do it then and there, right on the red ground in that
freezing cold weather that would have coated their bare asses with
goose bumps. But that bitch Jean was pushing them, telling them
that it was getting dark, and how they had to hurry and get to a
phone and call it in. Hell of a murderer, Sam thought, reporting
yourself.

Chuck was the only one who knew, although she
thought the others suspected, that Sam didn't give a shit for
animals. Deer blood was just as red and nearly as cool as human
blood. Sam liked wearing leather, which she couldn't do when she
was with these animal freaks, and she thought fur was pretty
radical too, even though it was a real kick to toss those buckets
of paint on the rich bitches wearing them. During the few times she
had joined in, Sam always aimed for their faces rather than the
furs. The dumb cunts always gasped, and the paint went right in
their mouths. God, cool.

She did like puppies and kittens, though.
They were so damn cute. Sam had never done anything to hurt a puppy
or a kitten, though grown cats and dogs were a different story. But
even though she wasn't an animal nut, when Chuck had told her that
there was a rich chick who was willing to finance a mayhem run with
a chance for some real blood to flow, Sam had jumped at the chance.
To go far away from her own stomping grounds, live out a fantasy of
commando babe, and then run when the cutting was done had sounded
just too good to be true.

And sure enough, it was. Jean had been a real
shit to put up with. In fact, everybody other than she and Chuck
were uptight assholes. But that jerk Andrew was dead, and old Timmy
had been blasted and was out of the picture too, so that was
cool.

Only two assholes to go. Then she and Chuck
would be on their own, to do whatever the hell they wanted.

She and Chuck went back to their room, where
they did a few lines of coke to get the booze out of Chuck's
system. Then she stripped him and rode him until she came in a
dizzying rush.

"What we gonna do tomorrow?" she asked him as
they lay there, exhausted from both the sex and the strenuous
day.

"Well, old Jeannie and I are gonna take out
the Boy Scout, and then I don't know, I guess it's up for
grabs."

"This has sure been fun."

"I am to please, missy."

"Not you, moron. I meant today."

Chuck barked a laugh that told her he had
been joking, rolled over, and buried his head in his pillow.

After a while she said, "Chuck? You really
wanta blow something up?"

"Mmm-hmm..."

"One of them towers?"

"That would be very cool," he said sleepily,
and in another minutes she heard him snoring gently.

Damn, she thought. That
would
be cool. She
thought about it for a while, then she thought about how cool it
would be to see that bitch Jean get hers, then she thought about
what they had done that day, and with those pleasant images of
deeds done and yet to be done swirling in her head, she went to
sleep.

T
he phone rang at
Larry Moxon's house just before ten o'clock that evening. Ned was
getting a shower before joining Megan in bed. They had decided to
retire early so that they could go home, pack, and get started for
Potter County before dawn.

Ned heard the bathroom door open slightly,
and for a second thought that it might be the very people that he
and Megan were getting ready to run from. Naked and wet, he had
never felt more vulnerable. But Larry's voice calling his name
brought him back to reality.

"Ned," he said. "Camp Kessler?"

It was a pristine non sequitur. "What?" Ned
shouted over the shower's blast.

"Camp
Kessler!
Which one is that?"

He thought for a moment. "That old place that
Ed Travis and Jim Lincoln have. Down in the state forest near
34."

"You know how to get there?"

"Yeah."

"In the dark?"

Ned stuck his head out from behind the shower
curtain and looked at Larry's face. It was pale and grim, and Ned
knew something was wrong. "What is it?"

Larry shook his head. "Finish up and come on
out."

Ned toweled himself dry, put on an old robe
of Larry's, and joined him in the kitchen. Megan, once again fully
dressed, was sitting there too. Larry was holding the telephone
handset, his hand over the mouthpiece.

"Statler's on the line," Larry said. "The
police got a call from somebody calling themselves the Wildlife
Liberation Front. They claimed responsibility for the killings
yesterday. And apparently the guy you shot was one of them. They
said that the cops should go to Camp Kessler right away—I guess to
see what they did today. But Statler's rounded up all his boys and
none of them know where the camp is, and they sure as hell don't
want to contact any members of the family until they go out there
and see what's what. Can you give him directions?"

"No. I'll take them out there." He started to
the bedroom to change back into his clothes.

"They only
need
directions," Larry
said meaningfully. "You don't need to get involved in this,
Ned."

"They'd never find it in the dark. There are
half a dozen wrong turns they could take, they'd wander around all
night."

"Then I'm going with you," Larry said.

"Me too."

"No, Megan," Larry said. "This could
be...pretty bad."

"Then I'll close my eyes," she said. "But I'm
not staying here alone."

From her tone, Ned knew it was no use
arguing. "I'll just be a minute."

They found Chief Statler and three of his men
at the entrance to Moshannon State Forest, where Ned had told them
to meet. Ben Sloan was also there with two medics. "I'm expecting
the worst," Statler said by way of explanation. "I'd have brought
the Feds, but they're not due here till tomorrow."

"Maybe it's just a hoax," Larry said
hopefully.

"And maybe a ten-point will gallop out of my
butt," Ben Sloan said. Nobody laughed.

They took down the fire emergency gates, then
got into three vehicles: Ned's Blazer, the police car, and the
medical van, both of which were equipped with four-wheel drive.
They drove a mile over the dirt road that was covered with dead
leaves, until they came to a side road almost hidden by brush. As
they descended into a deep ravine, the first large flakes of snow
dropped onto the windshield. They melted quickly, but Ned's wipers
could not whip them away quickly enough to keep the primitive road
ahead visible.

"Shit," Larry muttered. "A wet, heavy snow.
This is gonna be lovely by morning."

"It's supposed to get colder," Megan said.
"Not a good prognosis. It'll all freeze up then, with new snow on
top."

"Woods is probably the safest place to be,"
Larry said.

"Unless you're at Camp Kessler," Megan
replied. Ned kept gazing through the windshield like a man
hypnotized, and said nothing.

Ned stopped his Blazer at the top of the
other side of the ravine and got out. They took large emergency
flashlights from the trunk and waited for the others to do the
same.

"We walk from here," Ned told Statler. "A
drag trail parallels the creek for about half a mile. The camp's
along the trail."

Each of the ten people in the party carried a
large torch, but the heavy snow made the path in front of them a
mass of solid, churning whiteness. It seemed to Ned as though the
huge snowflakes were a flock of white birds, constantly darting
around their faces and into their eyes, a world of swirling doves.
The ground beneath them grew soggy with the accumulating snow, and
their feet squelched in the leafy mire with every step.

"We're soon there," Ned said to Megan and
Larry, who were walking on either side of him. No sooner were the
words out of his mouth than he thought he saw a light ahead that
was not made by the reflection of their torches on the snowflakes.
"Wait a minute," he said, and stopped. "Turn your lights off,
everybody."

They did, and ahead, fifty yards through the
dancing flakes, they saw another light, surprisingly bright even in
the storm, and Ned knew that it must be a kerosene lantern. He
could see the outlines of the cabin, the shed next to it, and
figures hanging between the two. It looked like a cottage in a
shaken snow globe.

They turned their lights back on and kept
walking. By the time they got to the little bridge that crossed the
creek to the cabin, they all could see exactly what the things were
that were hanging from the iron pipe, the wet snow clinging to the
dead skin.

The skin was white, for all the blood had
been drained from the carcasses. The blood lay in large, red,
partly frozen puddles beneath the bodies, very near the mounds of
bowels that had once hotly filled the empty men. "My dear God," Ned
heard someone murmur reverently. Their flashlights played across
the scene, but most of the light came from a Coleman lantern
sitting on the porch, sheltered from the snow by the small, peaked
roof. The light the lantern made was bright and white and pure, and
made the entire tableau painfully easy to see.

When Ned could look away, he saw Megan, her
eyes wide, as though she could not believe what she was seeing, but
was unwilling to turn away from it, wanting to encompass it all
with a gaze, and understand the reasons behind such savagery. Then
he heard one of the policemen retch, followed by the spatter of
vomit on the wet snow. He tasted bile, but knew that he would not
throw up. He had seen enough two days before.

"This is bad," one of the medics said. "God
knows I've seen my share, but..."

Ben Sloan, who as coroner of Elk County had
seen decades worth of corpses in various states of decay and
disarray, finished it. "This takes the prize."

"Amen," breathed the medic.

"Oh
Jesus
," Chief Statler said, and
they all followed his horrified gaze to the door of the rustic
shed. It seemed as though a man's head was sticking through the
wooden door, his body on the other side. But Ned had seen, as they
all had, that one of the hanging bodies was headless. That head had
been secured to the door, the obscene parody of a mounted
trophy.

"That's Jim Lincoln," said Ned, the taste of
bile now rushing into his mouth. He shone his light on the upside
down face of one of the corpses. "And I think that's his son."

"I know," said Ben Sloan. "The boy was named
after me." He shook his head. "Hell's not hot enough."

"I'm not sure," Ned went on, "but I think
that one's Ed Travis. I don't know the others."

"Christ," Larry said, "that one his own
mother wouldn't know. I can't
stand
this..." He walked
closer to the iron bar, his steps reluctant. "Let's get 'em down,
for crissake."