Hunters: A Trilogy
Read Hunters: A Trilogy Online
Authors: Paul A. Rice
A Trilogy
Paul A. Rice
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author
Copyright.
Copyright © Text Paul A. Rice
ISBN: 978-1-78301-024-0
The author has asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work
Published in paperback by FeedARead.com Publishing
Arts Council funded
Hunters – A Trilogy
Edition One
Earlier editions were released as single novels under the title ‘Parallel’ by Paul A. Rice
All Rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the
British Library
This Trilogy has been my labour of love, my journey of discovery, my awakening. The tale has been my constant companion for the past five years. Together we have climbed steep learning-curves, fallen into bottomless pits of blinding naivety, struggled against the endless tides of our own imperfection, and fought many battles against the Demons of our own design.
Finally we lay here, our journey complete. In this moment of time, this micron of eternity, with our efforts wrapped between these simple covers, we bow before you. Holding our breath in trepidation, we wait in the hope that our voyage was to be worthy of your audience.
We are yours – do with us as you will.
PAR
November 2012
Book One
The Awakening
Chained
Only the chosen may render battle unto the Darkness.
But first – they must be chosen.
2006
They punched him again, and again, and again. And then again one more time, just for good measure. Or fun. After they had finished beating him, the man lay in the sogginess of his own blood and faeces. Warm urine pooled, a brown tide lapping upon the torn shore of his weeping feet. He assumed brown, for by now it would have mixed with his own droppings, surely. No underwear here, only a boiler-suit to provide unfettered access, bowels to feet.
It was dark, darker than a black night on the inside of Lucifer’s crack with all the curtains drawn. And in a crack he most certainly was – the deepest, smelliest crack of all time. It wasn’t entirely due to his own stupid fault that he’d ended up here, either. Stuck in the black crack of hell’s master, chained and beaten, paying the Devil his keep, his board, his rent. Other people needed to take their share of blame, for this, his most dire of situations.
‘Perhaps they’d like to come and pay their share of the bill?’ he thought.
‘Dark taxes…’ The feeble grin was a big mistake, a grimace that served only to send more blood spilling from his mouth. Acres of chipped teeth firing a barrage of their psychopathic opinions, lasers, into the very depths of his creaking jawbone. The hood never helped. Filthy thing, imprisoning his mind more effectively than the chains holding his ankles, he was incarcerated, mind-and-body, stinking blackness.
The fetid rankness of suppurating body-fluids caressed his nostrils, their reminder gentle, yet brutal. He was here, and here he would stay, stay until death. Stay until, until they cut his...
‘Until they cut my head off…’
His mind screamed: ‘NO!’
Deep breathing, he was able to do that, if only just. Tepid air sucked deep into bruised lungs. Broken ribs freely-moving, like pick-up-sticks on a wind-rushed pond. Wait for the pain, the grinding, grating crepitus. What little of his body they had not yet violated now seemed to be in someone else’s possession. The rest, the parts they’d punched and cut, bitten and slashed, burned and electrified – splashed with lighter fluid – those parts definitely belonged to him. He wished they did not. The pain was beyond pain. It was his world.
Yes, he was imprisoned in a World Of Pain.
The thoughts whirled by on their merry-go-round of anguish.
‘Am I a pain-prisoner?’
No, he was just a prisoner-prisoner. Chained and hooded in his world of pain. His mind drifted, struggling to remember the name of the film where he’d first heard those words.
‘If you don’t do as I say...then you, mister, are gonna be in a world of pain!’
Maybe it was a book, he wasn’t able to think clearly, memories blurring, a murky backdrop to the fear and pain.
He slept. Not for long.
He cried again, hot tears casting their salty tracks down his lacerated cheeks, searing his cracked and feathered lips. And yet, even whilst drowning in the depths of such anguish, his blinding naivety, the rushing arrogance, still failed to allow the reality of the situation, and his own part in it, to register.
‘It wasn’t just my fault, no. The security advisor was as much to blame, the stupid bastard! Why hadn’t he been more forthright, why hadn’t he made sure we never went downtown unaccompanied?’ He blubbered inside the hood. ‘Why, it was his job to take care of us, why hadn’t the guy done something? Look at what’s happening now. Look at the mess I’m in. Look at it – stupid bastard!’
His blindness knew no bounds. He’d always been the same and it had been observed on more than one occasion.
‘John McGuire? Arrogant little prick, damned know-it-all!’
He’d heard it said. He didn’t care.
His own thoughts ruled the roost around here. ‘We paid them to take care of us. I’ve been in more dangerous places than this, Pakistan is really not as bad as they make it out to be, the stupid bastards!’ But it was. His thoughts brushed the admission away. ‘It wasn’t as bad as they made it out to be, it just wasn’t – I was simply unlucky!’
He’d had plenty of experience, plenty. He knew the score. He’d drunk gallons of beer in Kabul, taken hundreds of hookers in Rwanda – taken hookers everywhere – he’d partied like a gypsy in Yemen, fornicated like a king in Baghdad, rocked the darkest corner of the Congo, and drank himself senseless in a scintillating Syria.
‘Pakistan was just another place of work, why the hell can’t I venture into downtown Karachi to check out the scene, why? One little trip downtown in a taxi, it’s no big-deal.’
The crystal-green eyes of the ex-pat security chief bored into his dark, pain-filled world. Those softly spoken words, the clear warning, seared through the blackness of his purgatorial prison. ‘Under no circumstances are you ever to use taxis, gentlemen – that’s why we pay a fortune for our own cars, are we clear?’ Looking at them without a smile whilst proceeding to point at the map, indicating the forbidden areas, the dangerous spots, the out-of-bounds places.
McGuire’s thoughts had been idle.
‘They seem interesting, definitely worth a little trip down there…’
The ex-pat’s words hammering home endless other procedures to be followed ‘in case of emergency.’ Apparently, he’d been doing this stuff for more than thirty years, ex-special forces, or something. Who cared? The briefing droned on. ‘Blah-blah-blah…’ The man’s gravel-filled voice faded into white noise as McGuire had let his thoughts return to the girl from the bar last night. The Russian, the blonde one, she was something else.
‘Dubai, party town,’ he thought, mind wandering.
Here and now, in the present, whilst drowning in the bitter blackness of his prison, he barely remembered the man’s name, the security chief.
‘Old whatisname...yes, what
was
his name?’ He tried to think.
‘Ken?’
‘Yes, Ken, that was it.’
‘Ken...something-or-other…’
‘Robertson?’
His mind seemed disjointed, throbbing fear knocking on the door of his conscious, niggling, disrupting his ability to think clearly.
‘Perhaps it was Rob-
in
-son?’
‘Robinson, yes, that’s it, Robinson…’
McGuire couldn’t seem to remember the man’s face, only the eyes. They were green. Green eyes, icy eyes, emeralds.
‘Who cared?’
He tried to hide the restless chain of thought, resting his temple upon the knuckles of a bloodied hand propped between head and floor. It was a cold and damp floor, a black and stinking floor.
Thoughts drifting like a sleepwalker. ‘Who cares now?’
He sniffed miserably, a droplet of snot shooting back up his nose.
‘No-one, that’s who cares now, no-one.’
More tears, a gentle cascade of soft, helpless admittance. Stinging, wet truth. He and the others, those who wouldn’t care, just as long as this wasn’t happening to them they wouldn’t, had sniggered silently. Casually leaning against the doorframe as the big man gave them his ‘security’ briefing.
‘Yawn, yawn – yawn! The guy’s a bloody dinosaur; making things sound worse than they really are, too busy justifying his job!’ And as for his side-kick, Noman, the cocky Asian fool, he was just another local henchman who was too busy licking the security chief’s boots to really know the score – the guy had never even been outside of Karachi, what the hell would he know? Well, those two and their stupid rules weren’t a problem, because dollars buy everything, especially the favours of a skinny gate-guard and his taxi-driving cousin.
