Authors: Logan Thomas Snyder
“This is bullshit.” Theresa pushed Mack away roughly, stalking over to their collection of prisoners. She picked one at random. “Up!” she snapped. When the man hesitated, she gave him a helping hand via a clutch of his hair. Frogmarching him in front of Mack, she drew one of the blades taken from the hunters and looked down the line of it menacingly. “Tell me what it is right now or I’m taking this one’s eyes.”
“Theresa...”
“We tried it your way, Will! He’s playing you! He’s playing you and you’re letting him!” She looked back to Mack. “This one’s eyes,” she continued. “The next one, it’ll be his ears. After him, the next man’s tongue. Then I’m really going to start getting creative, and you’re going to have to stand there and see every pleading gaze, hear each and every one of them blubber and beg for you to save the parts I’ll take.” She yanked the man’s head back, leveling the point of the blade against the corner of his pinched eyelids. “You say these are your men now? Prove it!”
The man she had chosen started shaking at the knees. Like Paolo, he was of the younger set. A wet patch blossomed over his groin, growing larger in diameter by the second. “Please, Mack—sir—this isn’t what I signed up for.”
Mack stood by impassively, utterly unmoved.
“Please!”
“Sorry, son. Can’t tell ‘em what I don’t know.”
“Sorry, son,” Theresa mocked as she raised the knife above her head theatrically, ready to stab it down. “You heard the man—”
“Theresa!” Willem had her in his sights, his finger poised over the trigger. Grace lifted her rifle to cover Theresa; Lucas lifted his against Grace. In a matter of moments, the entire company was locked in a tense and uncertain standoff.
“God damnit, Will,” Theresa hissed through gritted teeth, holding the blade in mid-strike. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be!”
“You’re right,” he agreed, “but it’s the way it is.”
Mack’s drawling guffaw didn’t cut the tension so much as slam down upon it like a hammer. “Will, is it? So much for Lucas, I guess. Either way, you’re alright. You get your hellcat there to take her knife off my boy, I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
Willem wasn’t sure who to be more angry with: Mack for putting his own man’s life at risk, or himself for dividing the group over it. Swallowing his anger—and a good dose of pride—he lowered his rifle. “Hear that, Theresa?”
If Willem was angry, Theresa was downright livid. “You actually believe that shit?!”
“Well, look at it this way,” he offered, “it’s not like that one’s eyes are going anywhere. If this doesn’t play out you can strip them for all the parts you like. I won’t try to stop you.”
The others stood their ground resolutely, a powder keg waiting to go off at the slightest provocation from either side. It all hinged upon how Theresa responded to Willem’s overture. She stood taut as a bowstring, every muscle in her body screaming out for action, for her to plunge the knife into the knock-kneed hunter at her side and take him apart piece by piece. She flexed her fingers around the handle, lifted the blade higher… then let her arm fall harmlessly to her side. With it went the rest of the rifles, if not some lingering tension between the more partisan members of the company.
Pushing the man to his knees, Theresa ignored him as he exhaled like a deflating balloon and thanked her breathlessly. It was Willem who was her whole focus as she tromped across the turf; Willem who had once again exerted his will upon her; Willem who had a way of making her question every instinct she ever had. “Next time you draw down on me like that,” she hissed into his ear, “you’d damn well better pull the trigger.” And then, inexplicably, she kissed him almost violently for all to see before stalking off to collect herself. Whatever tension remained among the partisans quickly gave way to open-mouthed wonderment at the sight.
“Hot damn, if she isn’t a fiery one,” Mack hooted at the display. Willem turned, shoveling his fist into the smirking hayseed’s gut as hard as he could. The force of the blow dropped Mack to one knee in a fit of sputtering coughs. “S’pose I was asking for that.” A long rope of greenish-yellow snot trailed from his nostrils past his chin. He addressed it presently with the swipe of a sleeve across his nose, undeterred by Grace’s grimace. “No harm done.”
Willem pulled Mack to his feet by the collar. “Tell me what this is,
now
.” His voice was a tight-lipped snarl, his tone suggesting he would brook no further delay or obfuscation.
“Easy, chief, easy. That there’s what we in the trade call a PIGSI.”
His face a mask of confusion, Willem furrowed his brow as he looked from Mack to the cylinder. “A pig’s eye? I don’t understand.”
“‘Powder-Ignited Guidance System Initializer.’ A distress beacon, basically. In case we have men down or need a resupply or the like.”
Now there was an interesting bit of news. “How does it work?”
“S’like a fancy-schmancy flare. Fit it over the muzzle of one of those rifles, aim straight up, and fire. The barb ignites the powder charge. Once the cylinder reaches altitude, the outer housing breaks apart and the device inside transmits its position.”
“Then what happens?”
“They track the signal and send a helicopter. Won’t do you any good, though. They’ll know y’all aren’t us soon as they lay eyes on you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before then? Why risk a man’s life over it? One of your men?”
Mack shrugged casually. Almost lazily. “You kept him out of it in the end, didn’t you?”
“Do I need to bring Theresa back over here?”
“Fine,” Mack sighed. “In that case, the real question is why I decided to tell you at all.”
“Okay.” Willem spread his arms invitingly. “Enlighten me.”
“Well,” he began, “for starters, I ain’t too fond of being lied to.”
“Who lied to you?”
“Like I said before, whoever hired us said we were testing out some new tech. At first we thought they meant the rifles. Now, though, after the way you and your people bushwhacked us, I’m starting to think we were wrong.”
“If not the rifles, then what?”
Mack smirked, lifting a brow appraisingly. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Apparently not.”
“No,” Mack agreed. “No, I don’t suppose it would be. You see, we were told we were hunting some real shit-heels. Murderers, rapists, pedos—the whole shebang. You people obviously aren’t that, but you’re not exactly soldiers, either. Yet somehow you managed to get the drop on us. Now how do you figure you managed that?”
Willem narrowed his eyes. “So, you’re saying…”
Mack nodded. “Mm hmm. You people are the new tech. That’d be my guess, anyway.”
“Us?” Willem asked incredulously.
“You.” Mack said. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you haven’t wondered about yourself.”
Even as he worked to dismiss the possibility, Willem knew Mack was right. Whatever he and his fellows were, they were not normal. No, they were the truth they had been seeking all along.
“Can I ask you a favor, Will?”
“What’s that?”
He lifted his head just enough to meet Willem’s eyes. “Make it quick.”
“Make what quick?”
“C’mon, Will. You know you can’t let us go. This here business is kill-or-be-killed. And quick as those barbs do their work, I don’t wanna go out like that. So just take one of those blades you grabbed from us and—” He yanked his thumb across the line of his throat. “That’s the hunter’s way.”
Willem felt his hand go to his belt where one of those very blades rested. He fingered its grip thoughtfully, glancing back. Theresa and the others had taken the lengths of cording cut from the parachute rigging and were binding the hands and feet of Mack’s men while the others covered them. Willem turned back to Mack. “Anything else I should know?”
“Just that it’s been a gas, baby.”
Willem laughed in spite of himself. So that’s what it was.
A gas, indeed.
Drawing the knife, he considered it in his hand as he stepped behind Mack. The weight of the grip, the sharpness of the blade. Mercy or malice. Commiseration or cruelty. The golden rule or the false idol of revenge.
The truth was he still didn’t have any answers. Just a knife in one hand and a man’s life in the other.
With a single, clean slice of the blade, Willem opened Mack’s throat to the world, a curtain of blood unfurling down his chest. Even as he felt the rush of life it released and saw the dying light of the stars reflected in Mack’s eyes, he knew he had just killed a little piece of himself, as well.
With Mack and Stone dead it was quickly agreed they had no choice but to dispose of the rest of their men. It was grisly business. Some among them took to the task more eagerly than others. Still, Willem reasoned, it had to be done. They simply couldn’t risk leaving them tied up only to somehow free themselves and warn their employers of what was coming. Better to do it quick and stow the bodies somewhere out of sight before firing off the PIGSI.
The question, then, was not how, but who. Sensing Willem was loathe to take another life, Theresa volunteered to handle the bloodletting along with three others: Arlo, Elam, and Marcus. They proved only too willing to lend a hand.
“Well, that was fun,” Marcus announced when at last the deed was done and the turf freshly stained.
Several yards away, Willem had just finished fitting the PIGSI atop Lucas’s rifle. “Got it,” he said, carefully taking the suddenly top-heavy rifle from Lucas. “I’ve got it. Go help Arlo and Joss get ready. The rest of you get those bodies out of sight. We don’t want to spook whoever’s in that helicopter before it even lands.”
It took several minutes to clear the area and prep Arlo and Joss before they were finally ready to launch the PIGSI.
“Well, here goes nothing,” Willem murmured.
“Or everything,” Theresa whispered back.
Willem shot her the briefest of glances before starting the countdown. “Three… two… one!”
He pulled the trigger.
The PIGSI launched impressively enough, soaring above before jettisoning
its housing. A tiny flash twinkled among the canopy of stars above them as if to punctuate the anticipation of the moment, then winked out of existence. It was a promising sign. Beyond that all-too-brief display, however, they had no way of knowing if the device was actually working in the fashion Mack had described.
“I swear, if this doesn’t work I’m going to kill that son of a bitch,” Theresa mused dryly. “Again.”
Smirking, Willem just shook his head. “C’mon, let’s get hunkered down before whoever is coming sees us.”
Twenty minutes later, they were still hunkered down, waiting.
“How long is it supposed to take?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Doesn’t that seem like something you should have asked before—”
They heard the helicopter before they saw it, the conspicuous
whump-whump-whump
of its rotors chopping at the air as it vectored inbound. It crested low over the lip of the stadium before doubling back and circling just over the field. Even hunkered within the container, they could feel the sound and the fury of it, whipping all about them.
“Now?” Theresa bellowed into his ear above the cacophony.
Willem signaled for them to wait while he peeked out, eyes squinted against the maelstrom besieging them. He watched as two medics hopped out of the helicopter’s open sides. Ducking their heads against the tempest, they looked about for the source of the distress beacon.
“Now?!”
Willem nodded. At his signal, Arlo and Joss emerged from within the container. They staggered forth as if grievously wounded, swathed in blood donated posthumously by the hunters. The medics were taken wholly aback by the sight, just as Willem intended.
“What happened to the rest of your team?” one of the medics yelled above the clamor.
“Inside,” Joss said, “what’s left of them anyway! C’mon, hurry!”
The medics hurried ahead of them, only to be set upon by a healthy company of the hunted. The struggle was short-lived, as were the medics. Emerging unscathed from within the container, the company moved as quickly as they could against the buffeting mass of air projected against them. The force of the squall shook their rifles in their hands and caused them to squint and screw up their faces, but still they persisted. They had nearly succeeding in surrounding the roosting bird when at last the pilot realized what was happening. Too late he tried to lift off to safety.
Theresa and Grace, only a few yards away, threw down their rifles and sprinted forward. Together they leapt and caught the skids by a finger’s distance, hoisting themselves with some effort into the open body of the helicopter. The rest of the company could only watch as the women drew their blades, forcing the pilot to relent. The helicopter reversed course, hovering close to the ground again. As Grace reappeared, the others sent up a victorious cheer.
“Nicely done,” Willem complimented once they were on board.
Grace reclaimed her rifle as it was offered, grinning fiercely. “Thanks. Didn’t know I had it in me.”
Willem grinned back knowingly. “Seems to be a lot of that going around lately.”