ONE
***
He follows his prey from a distance. Wouldn't want them to know about him. Not yet, at any rate. Not when there is still fun to be had.
He is in his thirties. Some would say plain, some would say handsome; his is the kind of face that attracts many, but repels just as many.
He knows the woman ahead of him will be attracted. He knows. And smiles.
He watches them walk for almost a quarter mile. At one point they almost spot him, but he manages to look behind a street vendor's produce stand in time, and they continue on unaware.
The woman is in her late twenties. He knows this, for he knows everything about her. He knows that she is twenty-eight, just as he knows that she loves to watch butterflies in the spring and her favorite food is chocolate chip waffles with real maple syrup.
He also knows everything about the boy. The boy is only a few years old, but beautifully precocious. One of the boy's hands holds onto his mother's hand; the other clutches a pad and a handful of crayons. Both the pad and the crayons were a gift from the boy's father: a man who does not deserve either the woman or the boy.
The man increases his speed, coming to within a half block of his quarry.
He reaches into his jacket, his fingers brushing the cold steel of the gun that he always holds there. But now is not time for a gun. Instead he reaches past it. He brings out a cell phone; dials.
Ahead of him, he can barely hear the electronic chirp as the woman's own cell phone rings. He knows her number.
She pulls her phone from her purse, and he hears her click the button to answer. "Hello?" she says.
The man does not answer. That would not be fun. Instead he merely...breathes.
"Hello?" she repeats.
"I see you," he whispers, and sees the woman stiffen for a moment.
"What?" says the woman. "Who is this?"
The man breathes heavily into the phone. Perverse. "You know who it is," he says, and knows from the way her posture changes that she does indeed know. She knows him well. A moment later he says, "Who's the little boy?"
It's a game he likes to play. He knows how she will answer.
"It's," she says, and pauses as she thinks of a lie. "It's the gardener's kid."
The man's face changes suddenly, drawn long in a gross parody of surprise as he shouts, "I knew it! I knew you were sleeping with him!"
The woman laughs up ahead, a tinkling laugh that could cut through the worst fears of the worst day like a Ginsu knife. The man laughs, too.
"Don't tell my husband, though," says the woman into the phone, still laughing. "It'd break his heart."
The man laughs all the harder at this. "You're killing me, Elizabeth." And ahead of him, the woman, Elizabeth, laughs even harder, great belly laughs now that are causing the few passers-by on the street to look at her in askance. "And after I did all that sexy breathing for you and everything." He pants into the phone some more.
"Stop, Jason, not in front of our son," Elizabeth answers. "Aaron's getting too smart for you to keep pulling this kind of nonsense."
"I know," answers Jason. "He almost spotted me cold a few blocks ago. Gonna be a police detective like his daddy someday."
And upon hearing his name, the boy shouts, "Is that Daddy?"
"He's on the phone," says Elizabeth, and hands the boy the phone.
"Hi, Daddy," says Aaron. "Where are you?"
"Right behind you, kid," answers Jason. Aaron turns and sees his father. He waves the hand with crayon and papers at Jason. "I drawed you a picture, Daddy," he shouts into the phone. Jason laughs at the confusion his son still has regarding the cell phone: he knows it is to help you talk to people far away, but still thinks he has to shout to be heard.
"Can't wait to see it, bud," answers Jason. "Your pictures are the best."
And ahead, he sees his son thrust the phone back to his mother, then grab her hand and start pulling at her. "Hide from Daddy, Mommy! Hide from Daddy!"
Jason can hear his son's laugh, and it warms him like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter's day. Elizabeth has barely a second to say into the phone, "Looks like you're going to have to chase us, honey," before she hangs up and runs with her son.
Jason puts his own cell phone back into his pocket, almost scratching himself on the LAPD badge that hangs from his belt. He laughs and gives chase, going slowly so as not to gain ground too quickly - wouldn't want to disappoint Aaron - but catching up, bit by bit.
His family disappears around a corner, and he follows the laughter, bright as sunlight in this moonless, starless city of the Angels where the city has chased away the sky. He turns the corner as well, moving quickly onto an adjoining street, laughing like the worst kind of madman: the kind of man who has somehow managed to find a way to be truly happy.
Then the laughter dies in his throat. Like most cops, Jason has a kind of sixth sense that often activates before his other five senses have picked up on anything; a subconscious feeling that something is amiss.
He casts his gaze about, looking for his family.
They are nowhere to be seen.
Then he hears a short yelp. A child's cry.
He looks to the sound and sees...his wife's feet, kicking, flailing as something drags her into a dark alleyway.
Aaron is nowhere to be seen.
"Elizabeth!" shouts Jason, and draws his gun at the same instant. He flicks the safety off, which is technically a violation of LAPD rules, but dammit this is his family and he's not going to wait until the last second to be ready to kill or be killed.
He runs to the alley.
And as he does, time...
...slows...
...down....
All sound fades. All Jason can hear is his own tortured, panicked breathing; his own arrhythmic heartbeat.
Elizabeth's feet disappear into the darkness of the alley.
Jason is almost there. But too slow. Moving too slow.
Something rolls out of the alley: a single crayon. Black.
Complete silence, save only the sound of blood pumping in his ears.
He runs as though through syrup, cloying and nasty, pulling him one step back for every two steps that he takes.
He can hear his watch ticking. Slow. Everything is slow. Tick...tick...tick....
Then, at last, a pair of hard, fast sounds pierce the night: two gunshots.
Jason screams. And riding the crest of that wave of sound, he feels it end as it always does. He feels time speed up again, feels sound return to the universe. But only for a moment. Not long enough to see their faces, thank God. Just long enough to know that all is gone, just a single moment of terror and loss before...
***
...Jason Meeks, ex-cop, ex-husband, ex-father - ex-everything - woke up.
He looked around. As they always were when he awoke from what he thought of as The Dream, his fingers were stretched out in front of him, reaching toward the sky as though hoping to grasp the fleeing souls of his family before they escaped to a Heaven he no longer believed in.
How could there be a God when He has taken everything from me? he thought for the thousand-thousandth time. And for the thousand-thousandth time, he got no answer.
He closed his fingers, which were cramped from the exertion of his night terrors, which were the worst kind: the kind that are real. Memories were more fearful to Jason than any kind of fictional concoction his subconscious could possibly have discharged.
They're gone.
He sat up, feeling the gnarled bark of the tree he had been sleeping against bite at his back ruthlessly, as though he had offended it by taking his rest at its base. He cricked his back, feeling old, older than his years warranted. He flexed his fingers, working the cramps and stiffness out of them, then stretched in the gray twilight of predawn, the first singular shards of sunlight slicing across the horizon like blood in dark sand, not illuminating so much as highlighting the darkness that still remained.
Jason's mood matched the ambience perfectly, whatever joy he had felt at the beginning of The Dream marred and overshadowed by the darkness of the end.
He felt stinging tears at the corners of his eyes and wiped them quickly on his jacket, the rough fabric of his camouflaged hunting jacket scraping at his skin, waking him up through the heady salve of discomfort, the healing balm of pain. He reveled in the pain, let it hold him like a mother holds a child, let it take away the greater pain of his memories, leaving him exhausted and broken in its wake...but alive.
For what? he thought. Why go on?
He looked around him for an answer. He was in the forest outside of Rising, the thick foliage his only ceiling, the trees his only walls. No cell phones, no radios, no nothing. Just him and the hunt.
He came out here every year. Every year on the anniversary of his loss, he got as far from city life - as far from everything - that reminded him of that night as he could. Came away to hunt and be alone. He usually came back with some kind of animal, which he dutifully had the town butcher cut into portions that he doled out to the less affluent members of Rising's populace, saving only the roughest cuts - the only parts he deserved - for his own freezer.
This year, he was empty handed. For the first time since he had begun this strange hideaway practice, he had yet to see anything more than a few small squirrels and rabbits, game that would make no sense to kill, and would provide him with little meaning in his hunt. Sometimes he felt like the food he brought back for the poor was the only real reason he had for going on.
He looked down at his rifle, a Browning A-bolt that gleamed in the trace scratches of daylight. It was a bolt-action rifle, one round already chambered and ready.
Ready.
Almost without thought, Jason tilted the rifle and pressed the barrel against the hollow of his jaw, where his neck and head joined. He could just reach the trigger with his thumb.
Ready.
He had no conscious thought of wanting to die. Indeed, that was perhaps the worst thing: the absolute lack of feeling, the complete sense of isolation from everything that had wrapped him like a thick shroud ever since he had seen his wife and son lowered into the ground.
He felt himself as though watching another person. He felt himself turn off the safety. He felt himself whisper a last "I love you" to a wife long-dead. He felt his hand clench, and felt his thumb pull on the trigger....
It was the sound that almost killed him. It was a sharp, brittle snapping sound that reminded Jason of the noise a perp's arm had once made when Jason had caught him in the act of robbing a corner liquor store. The perp had been a kid, only sixteen, but he had had a gun and drug-crazed eyes that clearly shouted his intentions to kill anyone who stood between him and his next score. Jason had rushed him, grabbed his gun, and ended up breaking his arm across the counter of the liquor store. The sound the arm had made when it broke, the bone itself exploding out of the man's - no, the boy's - skin like a yellowed stick, had haunted Jason's dreams for weeks after. And the sound he heard now was just as unpleasant.
Jason jerked, and nearly pulled the trigger.
He did not, however. Not quite. He didn't pull the rifle away from its resting spot, but looked around for the source of the noise.
He saw it almost instantly.
The buck was beautiful. Tall and graceful, a survivor of countless battles for supremacy, a warrior of its kind. Its antlers almost glistened in the dawn's waxing glow, the many points illuminated like stars. Its chest heaved, bright white against the green of the forest, its breaths measured and strong.
It looked at Jason. Their eyes locked.
It was a moment out of a storybook, out of a fairy tale. A magical moment. For a split-second, Jason truly understood what "communing with nature" meant: not some hippy retreat into the woods to defecate into leaves and eat grubs and concentrate on "finding yourself," but a real sense of...of...Jason struggled to find the right word and finally settled on one that he almost never used any more, a word as alien to his existence as almost any other: connection.
He and the deer were connected. He could almost feel the wind through his fur, the clash of antlers as mating challenges issued, the rutting flesh as the prizes were taken. He could feel himself running noiselessly over the earth, the ground almost goading him on to ever-greater speed.
He felt himself...alive.
The tears came now, the tears that Jason had successfully quelled after The Dream, falling from cheeks that had not known such moisture since the funeral. He saw the deer, he felt the deer, and he wept for all that it was, because he knew that the deer was more a part of the world than he was, and would be more sorely missed when gone.
The moment shattered, though, when the deer did something Jason had never seen such an animal do in all the time he had lived in the small rural town of Rising, Washington: it snarled at him. At first, Jason couldn't believe his eyes. Deer, even the large ones, would almost uniformly flee when confronted. The only reason they wouldn't was when one of their offspring was threatened, and even then such a visible outpouring of viciousness and rage was something the likes of which Jason had never heard of before.
The deer mewled, a cold, ugly sound in the crisp air, then stomped its hooves...and charged.
Suddenly, the magic of the moment became dark magic. Twilight was not blessing, but curse. Jason felt the rifle fall from fingers made numb with sudden terror.
The huge animal was only ten feet away.
Jason scrambled to right himself and grab the fallen rifle at the same time; scrambled to get into position to save himself while at the same time marveling that he suddenly cared so much about living.
Eight feet.
Jason's searching fingers touched steel.
He brought the rifle up in a slow arc, time slowing just as it had that night...
(No, don't think of that, not now, not here.)
...slowing and preventing him from doing what he had to do, from doing what had to be done if he was to save himself.
Five feet.
The deer's eyes were dark, possessed.
Four feet.
Now the whites showed as the buck's eyes rolled back.
Three feet.
It dropped its chin.
Two.
The tips of the stag's antlers still shone in the light, no longer like gleaming stars but now more like daggers that had been dipped in blood.
One....
***