The Rabbit Hunter

105

DJ sits down heavily in one of the armchairs in the foyer and leans back against the headrest. The rain is drumming on the windows and roof. On the table in front of him lie three of the five hunting rifles.

His heart is beating far too fast and his body is twitching spasmodically. His neck tenses, as if someone were holding it tightly. His narcolepsy threatens to overwhelm him.

He’s destroyed all the phones, the wireless router and every computer in the hotel.

He’s trying to think strategically, keeps asking himself if there are any other preparations he needs to make, but his thoughts devolve into peculiar fantasies each time.

DJ was planning on finishing them all off inside the enclosure, but only managed to get rid of one of them because of the storm.

He had stood in front of the deep ravine, watching the rain sweep in towards the valley.

Over the course of nineteen minutes, Kent Wrangel had begged for his life something like a hundred times, and had sworn he was innocent almost as often.

DJ hadn’t wounded him particularly badly, just stuck his hunting knife into his stomach, just above his pubic bone, then held his shaking body upright on the edge of the deep ravine.

He stood there with the knife in Kent’s stomach, explaining why this was happening.

Kent gasped for breath as his gut filled up with blood.

DJ had tilted the sharp blade of the knife upward, and whenever Kent got tired or slumped to the ground slightly, the knife cut higher into his guts.

Towards the end Kent had been in agony. One knee almost buckled several times, and the knife had slid up diagonally towards his ribs.

Blood filled his boots and started to overflow.

‘And now the kite string breaks,’ DJ said, pulling the knife out, looking Kent in the eye and shoving him in the chest with both hands, out over the edge.

DJ wipes his mouth, glances over towards the hallway leading to the hotel rooms, and starts to remove the cartridges from the rifles. He opens the duffle bag on the floor in front of his feet and drops the ammunition into the compartment next to the underwear.

It’s time to bring this to a conclusion.

First Lawrence, or possibly James, and then, last of all, Rex.

Maybe he’ll have time to kill one of them before all hell breaks loose, before the screaming starts and they start running.

But fear has never saved the rabbits.

He knows that their panic follows simple patterns.

His hands tremble slightly as he fits the silencer to his pistol, inserts a fresh magazine, and puts it back in the bag, next to the short-handled axe.

If they don’t come out soon, he’ll have to start going from room to room.

He takes out his black SOCP dagger, wipes the grease from the blade, and checks the cutting edge.

His mother was left pregnant after the rape, but it probably wasn’t until he was born that her psychosis really hit her.

She was only nineteen years old, and must have been horribly lonely and frightened.

DJ doesn’t remember his early years, but now knows that she gave birth to him alone, and kept his existence a secret. She hid him out in the barn. His first memory is of lying under a blanket, freezing, eating beans from a tin.

He has no idea how old he was then.

Throughout his childhood her chaotic psyche became part of his life, part of his perception of reality.

His maternal grandparents didn’t move home for good until Lyndon White Holland’s long stint as ambassador to Sweden came to an end.

DJ was almost nine when his grandfather found him in the barn.

At the time he spoke a mixture of Swedish and English, and hadn’t really understood that he was a human being.

It took time to get used to his new circumstances.

His mother was looked after at home. She was kept heavily medicated and spent most of her time in bed with the curtains drawn.

Sometimes she got frightened and started screaming, and sometimes she hit him for leaving the door open.

Sometimes he told her about the rabbits they had shot that day.

Sometimes they would sit on the floor next to the bed together, singing her nursery rhyme until she fell asleep.

A year or so later he recorded the whole rhyme for her on a cassette tape so she could listen to it if she felt anxious.

His mum never wanted to talk about his dad, but once, when he was thirteen and her medication had just been changed, she told him about Rex.

It was the only time that happened during his childhood, and he can still remember those few sentences by heart. As a child, he clung to every little word, building whole worlds of hope around what she had said.

He had learned that they had been in love, and had to meet in secret, like Romeo and Juliet, before she came back to Chicago.

DJ couldn’t understand why he didn’t go with her.

She replied that Rex didn’t want children, and that she had promised not to get pregnant.

At first DJ believed her, but then he started to think she was hiding from Rex in Chicago because she was ashamed of the way she looked after the truck accident.

He still doesn’t know where the idea of the accident came from. He has no memory of her ever having talked about it.

When he was fourteen years old his mum saw a picture of Rex in an article in Vogue, about the new generation of chefs in Paris. She went straight out into the barn and tried to hang herself, but Grandpa climbed up to the beam on a ladder and cut her down before she died.

Grandma and Grandpa had her committed to a psychiatric hospital and he was sent to the Missouri Military Academy, which took younger boys.

DJ tucks the dagger under the tablecloth when he hears someone coming down the hallway.

He closes the duffle bag with his foot, leans back again, and wonders which one of the men the fates have chosen to send out first.

His head crackles and he can see his mother huddled on the floor in the stall, covering her ears and whimpering in terror as one of the rabbits they thought was dead suddenly jerks and starts running again.

DJ remembers catching it under a green plastic bucket, sticking his hand inside to grab it, then nailing it to the wall. His mother was shaking uncontrollably, then threw up in terror and screamed at him that he wasn’t allowed to bring the rabbits inside.