Hunter/Prey

Chapter 14

This was it.

The straw that broke the camel’s back.

The end of the road.

The light at the end of the tunnel.

The…

Jesus, he couldn’t even come up with four clichés? If he didn’t know he was in deep shit before, then this pretty much confirmed it. Not being able to come up with four clichés about how up a creek without a paddle he was—

Number four!

He laughed. LOL? Maybe. Or perhaps just a light chuckle at the least. Then again, he might have just opened his mouth and wheezed out some labored breath that had nothing to do with laughing or anything beyond breathing. It was hard to tell at the moment.

He wasn’t even convinced he was actually still alive. All of this could have been a figment of his imagination, something his fevered mind had conjured up just to occupy him as he lay in the front yard of the cabin, dying from his wounds.

Buckshot in the side.

Broken nose.

Right hand…

Did he even have a right hand anymore?

He peeked at it now, not sure he wanted to actually see what was down there, if anything. His hand seemed to still be attached under the khaki shirt he was using as a tourniquet. It looked more like a giant loaf of bread, albeit one that was drip-drip-dripping blood as he trudged through the woods without any real direction. Or a shirt on, for that matter. For some reason, though, he barely felt the cold. He blamed (thanked) his body’s general numbness for that.

Apparently this was his life now — staggering through unknown woods while trying not to bleed to death.

What a life.

At least it was still night out, if the suffocating darkness around him was any indication. And he was far, far from the nearest highway, so all those gunshots probably went unnoticed. It was why he had chosen this area — or, well, the general vicinity, anyway — to do his work in the first place. It was even more desolate two miles down the road where everything would have worked out fine if he had taken her as planned. Of course, he’d had no idea she had come prepared.

Goddamn, she had come prepared!

And yet, things were working out anyway despite all his bungling. He had convinced those college kids (Kids these days are dumber than bags of rocks, amirite?), somehow managed to get the upper hand on Allie (Who’s in charge now, bitch?), and was about to have a little fun with not one, but two people who perfectly fit his ideal type when…

The two hunters.

What was that one of them had said back at the cabin?

“We found your vehicles near the highway! Wanted to see if anyone was hurt and needed assistance!”

The truck.

My truck.

He stopped for a moment and looked around him. Really, really looked around him instead of just stumbling along like a blind fool. He focused on his surroundings for the first time since he had crashed into the woods back at the cabin.

Every tree looked like the other hundred trees he had walked past, and every stretch of ground looked identical to—

I’m lost. I’m so lost.

Christ on a stick.

If he could only find his truck again. His, or the hunters’. Or maybe even Allie’s car. It didn’t matter as long as it worked. All he had to do was get to one of them. That, unfortunately, was easier said than done. Especially out here, at night, with no signs of—

There!

It was the sound of a car moving somewhere in the distance. It came out of the blue, like a sliver of hope, and then it was gone again. But it had been there just long enough — maybe half a second — for him to turn in its direction.

The highway. It was a car driving down the highway.

He began moving toward the origin of the sound. Or where he thought it had come from.

Let me be right. Come on, God, just this once. Have I ever asked you for anything? Besides letting me kill those girls, I mean?

He might have laughed then.

Or cackled.

Or maybe just let out another haggard wheeze.

The truck.

All he had to do was reach it before he bled to death in this godforsaken stretch of abandoned woods. Well, not abandoned, exactly. There was that cabin, and those two hunters clearly knew the area, so maybe they lived around here. Maybe he could find their house or cabin or hideout and rest for a while. Wouldn’t that be ideal?

Now that was worthy of an LOL.

And he would have laughed out loud too, if not for the fresh jolt of pain that made his entire body quiver for a few seconds. Who knew getting shot, then having your nose smashed in, and then getting mauled by a dog could hurt so much?

He did, now.

He pushed on anyway, because there was no other choice.

Keep moving, chum. That’s right, keep moving.

One foot at a time.

One foot at a time…

Whenever he thought he might have gone in the wrong direction, he heard what sounded like vehicles moving in front of him. Not right in front of him, of course — that would have been way too easy — but further away.

Cars.

Or, at least, he thought he was hearing cars. Which didn’t really make a lot of sense. This was a lonely stretch of road that cut through the middle of nowhere. The last piece of civilization was almost twenty miles back up the road, and there wasn’t anything on the other side until twenty-five miles later. That was why he had chosen this area, after all.

Not completely true. The cabin, remember?

Right. The cabin. He hadn’t known it was there until tonight. This wasn’t prime hunting ground, so most people stayed away, which meant those hunters had to have stumbled across the vehicles while they were driving on the highway, but for some reason decided to stop and investigate.

Good Samaritans with rifles. And a dog. Just what he needed.

Pfft.

They had ruined things, not just with the college kids, but with Allie, too.

He still remembered the taste of her sister, Carmen. Everything about her had been perfect. The blonde hair, the blue eyes, and the slender figure. Carmen had been twenty or twenty-one (Which one was it? Can’t remember) when he took her…how long ago now? Too long ago, back when he was still young and new at this. He had been sloppy back then. Was that how the sister tracked him down? Using those early days, finding mistakes he didn’t know he had made?

She was smart, that one.

And feisty. Just my type.

Too bad he’d have to kill her. He would have liked nothing better than to keep her around a little longer, but that wasn’t going to happen. At least, not if he wanted to get out of this with his head still attached to his shoulders.

Now that she’d failed to kill him, he had no doubts she would settle for exposing him. He would have to go on the run. Start all over again somewhere. Maybe Mexico. He was fond of Mexican beer. It tasted like piss, sure, but you could fix that with a little Tabasco sauce…

He found it.

The truck.

It was parked in the woods with the highway in the background exactly where he had left it. The white Ford was also there, with its shattered driver-side window. In the moonlight, he fancied he could actually see his own blood spatter along the hood of the vehicle where he had done his Dukes of Hazzard slide to keep from being perforated by her shotgun blast.

He expected to see all those things, but not the two state troopers.

One uniformed figure was shining a flashlight into the front seat of his truck through the window, while the second one was inside the Ford going through the glove compartment.

He thought about turning and fleeing back into the woods, but then what? He was weak, half-dead, and he wouldn’t have gotten far. At least this way he could beat Allie to the punch. He had been pretty damn convincing with the kids, and he didn’t even know them. These guys, on the other hand, they were his brothers.

Hey, it worked once before…

Beckard stumbled out of the woods, crunching grass under his shoes and making as much noise as possible. The last thing he needed was to get shot again.

The trooper peering into the truck saw him first and shined his flashlight into Beckard’s face while at the same time drawing his sidearm. “Hold it right there, mister!”

Beckard stopped and threw up both hands, even though doing so caused a tremendous tidal wave of pain to wash over him. He gritted his teeth through it and shouted back, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

The other trooper back-crawled out of the Ford and rounded the hood, his hand resting on the butt of his sidearm. He also shined his flashlight in Beckard’s face before lowering it to Beckard’s right arm, then finally down to his exposed gauze-wrapped side.

“Stay right there until I reach you,” the first trooper said. He stepped closer before a spark of recognition spread across his face. “Holy shit. Is that you, Beckard? Where’s your shirt?”

Beckard lowered his arms and sighed with relief. “Yeah, it’s me, Pratt. Can you guys get me to a hospital? I think I’m about to bleed to death here.”

He sat down on the ground and leaned back against a tree. Gnarled bark pricked at his bare back, but it was nothing compared to the pain coming from the rest of his body, so he easily ignored it.

He was tired. So, so tired.

Pratt and the other state trooper, whom Beckard recognized as Barnes, moved toward him. Barnes was talking into his radio while Pratt crouched next to him and shined his flashlight in Beckard’s face again before lowering the beam to his bare chest, then to the shirt wrapped around his bloody arm.

“Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to you?” Pratt asked.

Yeah, I can definitely make this work…

“There was a woman,” Beckard said. “She’s dangerous, and she has a shotgun…”