Hunters: A Trilogy (96 page)

It chilled him to the very core; once again he felt the hairs rise on his neck. Only this time the feeling wasn’t one of some newfound joy caused by the wonderful discovery of an imagined, yellow flower. No, this time it was a sense of abject terror that fetched his follicles to attention. Total and absolute dread filled his soul; an immense darkness seemed to grasp his brain, plucked it quivering and dripping from his skull.

In that single moment, Kenneth Robinson lost his mind to the Demon.

He saw himself running – an overwhelming sensation of freedom seemed to fill his head with desire. He was armed with only his rifle, sprinting naked across the warm grass, leaving a trail of dead friends, covered in blood, in his wake. Firing from the hip at Jane, tracer rounds ripping through her stunned face, hot shell-cases burning his bare skin; running and laughing at Tori as she fumbled with the pistol. Ken watched as his bullets smashed into her soft, white flesh…red blood and white flesh…he saw himself leap upon her; Tori’s awful wounds looked so inviting. Ken thrust himself into them.

Blood and warmth, lust, fear, and awful rage – he was lost to them.

White light, along with a shrieking bolt of noise and pain, filled his head. Ken screamed and fell onto his side; the ringing sound in his skull was almost overwhelming. He was barely able to hear the words that Red was uttering.

‘Ken, Kenny! Are you okay, man? Kenny, can you hear me?’

Ken felt fluid covering his face and running down his neck, hot, sticky liquid. His consciousness faded and left him floating in a sea of red mist, he heard the others shouting but they were distant somehow, he couldn’t see anything and only the sharp pain in his ear gave him something to hold onto.

As he passed out, Ken heard two things. The first was that awful, rusty chuckle, the sound of which reached out for him once more, it was utterly irresistible and filled him with the desire to touch it – Ken couldn’t help himself. The Demon laughed as he extended his hand toward the stricken Hunter. Ken heard the awful voice gloating, and yet he was no more able to pull his hand away than he would have been able to fetch Mikey back to life.

The Demon felt those thoughts and wickedly taunted him.

‘Oh my…’ the voice said, with another horrendous chuckle. ‘What an unexpected bonus, what a treasure this will be…oh my-my-my!’

As his fingers reached out to grasp the extended hand, Ken began to hear a second thing; it was the sound of singing. ‘Someone’s singing, who’s…’ The thought startled him and he felt his mind twist once more, in near-madness he turned to look, but it was to be of no avail. His world was dark red, no sights to see and no other thoughts to have, only the Demon and his soft caress – but there was singing. No doubt at all, it was definitely singing. He stopped reaching for the offered hand and took a break whilst he listened to the words of the song.

It happened to be one of his favourites; he knew the words off by heart.

‘The grass was greener. The light was brighter. The taste was sweeter. The nights of wonder, with friends surrounded, the dawn mist, glowing, the water flowing. The endless river, forever and ever…’

Ken couldn’t quite remember the name of the track, and it sounded as though the singer had somehow missed his favourite verse. As the thought entered his head, he heard the singer deliver the missing verse, and it was a really good rendition. Frozen in time and petrified with fear, Ken had only one choice to make. Remembering the artist, he lay back and let the immortal words of Pink Floyd rock his world. He smiled as he heard those awesome lyrics.

They saved him.

‘So I opened my door to my enemies and I ask could we wipe the slate clean, but they tell me to please go fuck myself. You know you just can't win.’

With Pink Floyd’s magical guitar-notes playing in his head, a sudden realisation filled him with light. The thoughts anchored Ken to some nearly-lost reality. ‘It’s Maggie doing the singing, Maggie!’ Then a field of flowers started to fill his vision, acres of yellow buttercups stretched as far as he was able to see.

Flowers and singing – they were his world.

Ken laughed at himself, thinking more clearly now: ‘Here am I, holding the Dragon’s hand like some wandering hippy! Together we’re gonna go skipping through a field of yellow flowers, happily singing-along to Pink-Fucking-Floyd!’ He laughed again and the sound echoed in his mind like pebbles falling onto a lowering coffin.

The noise broke his frozen trance.

Ken heard Maggie laughing, too, and with that sound echoing in his ears, he turned his mind back to the Dark One. He looked at the Demon’s proffered hand and realised that its caress didn’t seem quite so inviting, not in the slightest. The hand was nothing more than a writhing black eel. Nothing more than a filthy leper’s limb of oily smoke, pus and blackness. Ken’s mind snapped back from the precipice, he began to hear the voices of his friends back on the farm.

‘Kenny…can you hear? Ken!’ Those voices and Maggie’s singing were all that remained for him to hold on to. But, they were momentarily drowned out by a curse of angry despair as the Dragon screamed in rage; the metallic twang filling Ken’s mind.

‘Ohhh, yoo fuckin’ bitch, he was mine – he wanted to be mine! Oh, now yooo’ll pay, now yooo’ll feel what it’s like to be in Hell, you fuckin’ bitch!’ The sound of Maggie’s soft voice ended with the abruptness of a slamming door, a door to a padded asylum cell. ‘Mind your fuckin’ fingers, bitch!’

Ken fell back from the madness.

The last thing he remembered was the howling pain in his ear, and then those terrible, red-misted surroundings turned to blackness.

When he awoke, Ken felt as though someone was shoving a hot needle into the deepest part of his ear – he groaned in pain and opened his eyes. Jane was sitting by his bedside, seeing him stir she reached across and stroked his forehead. ‘How are you feeling, my love?’ his wife asked.

Ken groaned a dry throated reply. ‘Like shit, Jesus, my head hurts!’ he croaked, struggling into a sitting position to accept the glass of water she held out for him. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Do you have any aspirin?’ She laughed and handed him two. After two more glasses of water, he started to feel somewhat more human. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Don’t worry, it’s only the day after, eight o’clock in the morning, to be exact,’ Jane said. ‘You were out for just the one night, and, by the way – you slept like a baby!’ She smiled and stroked his forehead again.

Ken lay back against the headboard. ‘Thank God for that,’ he whispered. ‘I was half-expecting you to tell me that I’d had another one of those six-week holidays…’ The aspirins had started working and Ken began to feel a lot better. He looked at his wife and grinned. ‘It’s crazy stuff, huh?’ he said.

Jane smiled at him and asked what he remembered.

Ken thought for a while. He was able to recall the attack, the smell was still in his nose – blood and heat – and then he remembered Maggie. The old girl had been singing, Maggie! He sat more upright as the full recollection barged into his head. ‘Where’s Maggie, did we find her?’ he asked, looking at Jane and trying to make sense of those smoke-filled memories.

In no time at all, Jane had managed to bring him up to date and told him of what she and the others knew. Ken seemed to have been entranced by the man who lay dying before him, kneeling in some frozen stupor before the man’s strange yellow eyes – kneeling there and giggling insanely. Red had run across to see what was happening and had instantly felt the force of those eyes; they had seemed to be pulling Ken toward the man’s leering face. Jane told Ken that Red had said he’d sensed the blackness, said he felt his mind do a little flip.

As she looked at him with her face twisting in disbelief, Jane said, ‘Red reckons he saw Jeremiah, he said he saw his father, saw him laughing inside his own head, he said it made his brain feel like an omelette!’ Her eyes widened. ‘That’s when he shot him, the man you were looking at – Red just shoved his rifle into the guy’s eye and pulled the trigger!’ She shuddered.

Red’s quick action had apparently saved Ken, the noise of the shot shattering the trance, severing that horrible link the Demon had managed to build between it and her stupefied husband. Jane said that half the man’s head had sprayed over Ken’s face, and that he, Ken, had fallen onto his side and simply laid there with his eyes wide open, staring into space and humming some strange tune or another.

‘It’s not surprising that my head hurts so much, Red must have damned-near burst my eardrum!’ Ken said, gently rubbing the offending organ. ‘What else did I do, nothing terrible, was it?’ The memories of his naked rampage were still fresh in his mind, and he doubted that he would never forget that particular vision: naked and running, blood and lust, Tori’s delicious wounds.

Jane looked at him, saying: ‘You were mumbling something about Maggie, and you were singing, you just lay there humming, laughing, and…and well, then you passed out.’ She passed him another glass of water, asking: ‘Are you okay now, my darling? I thought you’d been shot or something, you were absolutely covered in blood and dirt – look at your hand!’ Whatever had occurred, whatever tale Red had told Jane, seemed to have scared the living daylights out of her.

Ken looked down at his left hand – there were several blisters at the top of his palm and two on his middle finger. He hadn’t even noticed them. Looking back into Jane’s eyes, he said, ‘It’s nothing, don’t worry about it, it’s just some weapon rash, is all – I’ll live!’ He drank the water, then lay back and thought for a while; the events were now up to date in his mind, all except for one thing. ‘How many were they, how many did we kill?’ he asked. Ken remembered counting at least seven.

Her answer shocked him. ‘Seventeen of them altogether’ she said. ‘Thirteen shot and another four, who, by the looks of things, were already dead when they arrived…’ Seeing the confused expression upon his face, she explained how some of the intruders seemed to have been put through a mincing machine or something. ‘They were totally messed-up, heads all popped and hands growing out of their faces, bones with no flesh – very messy and quite grotesque! Frank and Jack have come and taken them all away, they…’ Her sentence was curtailed by her husband’s horrified retort.

‘Frank and Jack…what about…I mean, now everyone is going to ask all sorts of awkward bloody questions! Why did you go and tell them about all of this, why?’ he asked in horror. Ken was stunned. This was going to be a major problem and he couldn’t believe they had been so stupid as to have gone and involved other people. He looked at Jane in despair.

She smiled, saying: ‘Don’t worry about it; I don’t think it’s that big a secret…everybody seems to know, anyway.’

Ken looked at her in total bewilderment.

Jane shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Yes, well…that’s just another little thing that we weren’t aware of, isn’t it? This whole town, maybe the whole bloody dimension, is full of George’s people, all our neighbours: Jack, Frank, Mister Morton at the school, Izzy and her sons, all of them – they’re all like us. All of them have worked for George at some stage; well, that’s what Tori told me anyway!’ She raised he shoulders in confusion, saying: ‘I’m not sure exactly, my head was starting to overload by then, what with you being out like a light and Maggie missing and…’

Jane’s face twisted in anguish as she told him about how they had spent ages whilst they searched everywhere for Maggie. But the old woman was nowhere to be found and only one of her shoes remained in witness to her presence. Michael had discovered the shoe next to a large patch of gooey, black grass, but there was no other trace of the woman to be seen.

‘She’s simply vanished into thin air, we’ve looked everywhere and she’s definitely gone!’ Jane was almost in tears as she said, ‘What happens if she’s been turned into, into that…’ she shuddered, ‘…that mincemeat stuff, maybe the burnt grass is all that’s left of her, maybe she… they wouldn’t have done that to her, surely they wouldn’t have, would they?’

Ken had no idea as he hadn’t seen the horrible remains that his wife had described, and anyway, why would their enemy have gone to so much trouble just to convert Maggie into a pile of dog meat, why? It didn’t make sense. He pulled her towards the bed. Ken reached up, stroked her face and then transferred a kiss from his lips to hers, using the two forefingers of his un-blistered right hand to carry the soft message.

‘Ssshhh,’ he said, ‘it’s okay, Jane. It’s all okay. All part of the plan, you’ll see! Now, come here and give me a proper kiss!’ He grinned and pulled her towards him. Jane gladly did as she was asked.

Later, as they lay in bed, she asked if Ken had any idea what it all meant, would George really have allowed Maggie to have been kidnapped, if that’s what had actually happened? Ken thought about it for a while, from what he’d heard then it would have been doubtful if George would have known anyway, the black mist most likely taking care of all such things.

He sat up and said, ‘I don’t know, let’s get up and go and see what the others know, maybe Tori will have an idea, I’ll get hold of George on the Communicator and…oh, come on, let’s just get our arses into gear, shall we?’ Ken threw back the covers and headed for the shower.

The others were all glad to see him up and about, the thought of Ken not being with them, guiding them and watching over them, had never even crossed their minds. He had seemed almost invincible to them. His strange behaviour, the staring and singing, followed by a bout of unconsciousness, had scared them – it was a wake-up call and they listened to it.

It was as he’d said to them during the training: ‘If you plan for the worst, you’ll be ready!’ The reality of their situation was now fully upon them, and the absence of Maggie only served only to heighten their predicament. As they sat around the kitchen table, each recounting their previous day’s experiences, running over what they had seen and done, it became clear to Ken that they had indeed been lucky. If he and the men had been somewhere else, gone into town or disappeared to do a spot of trout fishing in the big river just the other side of that town, perhaps anything other than having been right next to their weapons, well…then the chances were that it wouldn’t only have been Maggie who no longer sat amongst them.