The Hunter Inside (26 page)

Joe Myers replied in a shaky voice.
‘She’s away at the moment.’

‘Listen, Mr. Myers. I’m not gonna beat
around the bush here,’ O’Neill’s voice had begun to rise, and Myers looked
increasingly alarmed as he continued, ‘I think your wife may be in great danger
and I need to find her. Can you help me?’

Myers sensed that the Special Agent
did not want to repeat his question. He had fixed him with a stony glare that
showed he meant business. His dark, brooding eyes suggested that now was not
the time for games, and that he expected full cooperation from the man who
stood in front of him, shaking like a leaf.

‘She told me you didn’t know what it
was. You couldn’t catch it when it killed her parents because you didn’t know
what it was. She said what was the point in going to you now if you couldn’t
help her? She had to get away from it.’ Joe Myers’ words had come so rapidly
and without pause that they had brought with them several splashes of saliva.
They landed on O’Neill’s face, and he wiped them with his sleeve, grimacing
slightly, before replying.

‘We know what it is, Mr. Myers. We
want to help Sandy, but we need to know where she is.’ His usual method of
beating information out of people had not done him much good as far as Paul
Wayans was concerned. Maybe coaxing it out would prove more successful.

Myers continued to speak; seemingly
oblivious to the hurry the Special Agent was in to get moving, ‘She left
yesterday. She didn’t tell me where she was going, because she didn’t want to
put the boys or me at risk. She thought I’d follow her if I knew.’

O’Neill nodded apologetically towards
the distraught man. He tempered his irritation at being held up in his quest to
find Sandy with the thought of how hard such a situation must be on a family,
and allowed him to continue.

‘It’s been so hard. I took the kids to
school to keep their routine the same. I’ll have to go and get them soon, and I
don’t know what I’m going to tell them. She called earlier and said she was
okay, but I just want her back here with me and the boys.’

‘Did she tell you where she was when
she called?’

O’Neill was desperate for this
information. He wanted to find her before this thing did and save her. A part
of him wanted to achieve every good cop’s dream: he wanted to save the world
from an evil force that was plotting against it. He wanted to be the hero.
Normal life wasn’t usually like the movies though, and he didn’t often get the
chance to ride off into the sunset.

Today, he didn’t know what the sunset
was going to bring. It may bring him the corpse of Sandy Myers, and plunge the
human race further into peril. It may destroy not just the life of the man who
struggled to prevent himself from weeping in front of the Special Agent, but
also the lives of billions of people across the planet.

‘She told me she was at her friend’s
house,’ Joe Myers relented. He couldn’t allow the situation to torture him any
longer without trying to do something positive that may help his wife, and
O’Neill felt as though a huge wave of relief washed over him, submerging him as
he escaped every Agent’s nightmare: the dead-end.

‘Do you have her friend’s full
address, Mr. Myers?’

‘Yes. It’s in our address book,’ Joe
Myers said, before retrieving a small black hard-backed book from the drawer of
a small wooden table on which stood a telephone, and flipping through the first
couple of pages.

‘Here it is,’ he said, and ripped a
page from the book. He handed it to O’Neill, who scrutinized it as if looking
for microscopic germs that may be on its surface.

But he was not interested in germs, he
had bigger fish to fry, and he was working out the fact that he now had another
seventy-kilometer drive to make before he reached Sandy Myers.

That was if she was still there. And
still alive.

Deciding he’d better not hang around,
O’Neill turned abruptly and walked out the door, murmuring ‘Thanks’ as he went.

‘Hold on. What about me?’ Joe cried
out after him. O’Neill walked towards the car where the second man sat waiting.

‘You’ve got to stay here, Mr. Myers.
Sandy was right. You need to look after your boys. I’ll call you as soon as I
have any news.’

Joe watched as he got into the car
without speaking to the second man, and started the ignition. He reversed
backwards out of the drive, not pausing to check if there were any other cars
coming, and sped away down the road without so much as glancing back at Joe
Myers.

Joe heaved a deep sigh as he closed
the door and instantly became imprisoned by the walls around him once more.
But
he didn’t take my number
, he thought disconsolately.

A mile away, Todd Mayhew broke the
silence in the speeding car with a question.

‘What did he say?’ He looked at
O’Neill expectantly, hoping for an answer that would give him some hope about
the future.

O’Neill took his eyes off the road
briefly and looked directly at Mayhew, before saying in a deliberately calm tone,
‘Hold on tight. We’re going to the beach.’

Sandy Myers lay in front of
the sofa in Melissa Dahlia’s lounge. After making the telephone call to Joe she
had curled up into a fetal position and cried herself to sleep.

Opening her eyes, she saw that she was
in an old warehouse. She looked up and saw that half of the roof was missing,
while the rest hung down precariously. On the floor around her were piles of
debris from the crumbling old building.

It’s a dream. I’m still dreaming
, she thought to herself
and closed her eyes.

An image of her mother, battered and
bloody, fleeted across the backs of her eyelids. Sandy gasped and opened her
eyes once more, trying desperately to stand. She remained where she was on the
floor, unable to move so much as a muscle and wondering what was going on. The
possibility that her stalker was toying with her was very real for Sandy, as
she considered whether this was the hideout from where the letters originated.
But if this was its hideout, then where was
it
?

Sandy closed her eyes again and was
confronted by an image of her father, bleeding to death from wounds inflicted
upon his upper body. She fought to keep her eyes closed, in an effort to
comfort him as his life ebbed out from massive wounds. He looked up at her from
the floor of their back yard; his eyes tortured with fear and horror, and Sandy
wondered whether or not he could see her standing in front of him.

From the look in his eyes, Sandy felt
like she herself was his killer. There was seemingly no recognition from him of
the fact that his daughter tried to comfort him, and Sandy opened her eyes
again to return to the warehouse.

As she did so she felt herself rising
up from her prone position on the cold, concrete floor of the warehouse. She
was not controlling this dream.
It
was. As she straightened up she was
shocked to feel like she were ten feet tall, and looked down at two hands that
were not her own.

It held something in both of its large
hands, but Sandy could not make out what it was. She thought it looked like
envelopes, but her vision was clouded and she could not make out either the
detail of the envelopes or a clear image of the large hands that held them.

One thing she was certain of was that
the hands were not her own, and as she watched them they turned over the
envelopes. Both looked as though they had something written on the front, and
she strained to make out what it was. She failed to do so, and was surprised a
second later when she began to move towards a large doorway through which shone
a beam of sunlight.

The sensation was a strange one. She
felt as though she were getting a piggyback ride – such was the distance from
where she looked to the floor, but she realized this wasn’t the case. She was
looking through the eyes of the killer as it went about its business, preparing
to take its next victim; which she presumed would be her. Panic surged through
her, finding every millimeter of her body, and she told herself repeatedly to
wake up.

Wake up. Wake up.

But she didn’t wake up, and by the
time the thing whose eyes she was looking through reached the outside she had
begun to pray, but to little effect; prayers didn’t seem to affect this huge
being. There was nothing she could do; her mind was at its mercy.

The huge figure continued to transport
Sandy towards its intended destination, traveling through streets that were
deserted despite it being early afternoon.

Where are all the people?
Sandy wondered to herself.
Why is there nobody here to see this thing?
Where
is it taking
me?
she thought to herself, scared that she was about to witness another
murder scene like the one she had witnessed in the early hours of the morning.

Except this time, she feared it would
be her own.

As her fear grew her sight began to
clear somewhat, and by the time she had reached the Sleep-Easy motel her vision
had cleared sufficiently for her to be able to see the brightly colored
buildings reasonably clearly. Sandy closed her eyes for a couple of seconds and
saw a man walking near a lake. He was quite a large man who looked dissatisfied
with his lot, and Sandy knew that he must be a target for the thing that had
been hunting her.

This man was in danger.

Upon opening her eyes, she saw that
her vision had cleared totally. Everything had become crystal clear, and she
was now standing outside room number Thirteen B of the Sleep-Easy motel,
looking down at an envelope with the word ‘ARNOLD’ scrawled onto the front.

The name was unfamiliar, and she
wondered whether Arnold was the name of the man she had seen moments ago,
walking away from a picturesque lake. The huge figure stooped and pushed the
envelope under the door. It then straightened, turned, and began to walk away
from the door without pausing to look back. The first part of its mission was
complete.

Sandy was relieved that she had not
been forced to witness another murder by the thing that had hunted her down and
got inside her head. Maybe now she would be allowed to wake up. Maybe it had
shown her all it wanted to for now. But she remained a passenger, as the figure
walked away from the motel towards the road that was still deserted, and she
began to take note of the things around her. There was not much for her to see
however; just the deserted road, the still branches of the trees, and the
motel; as nondescript as a motel could be, despite being painted quite
garishly. Things began to blur, as its pace quickened and it left the area
surrounding the motel.

Sandy Myers’ head spun as it continued
on its journey. Her reluctance to close her eyes for the fear of seeing any
more horrific sights meant that she was forced to keep them open, and the whirl
around her made her so dizzy that she felt nauseated by her experience.

She could make out nothing now as it
progressed on its journey at a frantic pace, and the challenge to her
equilibrium was equaled by the feeling of dread in her stomach as she wondered
what would happen next. She resolved that it was definitely real: the emotions
and feelings that she was being subjected to were not normally present in
dreams, and she knew that she was powerless to stop what was happening.
Somehow, somewhere, this was actually happening.

Just as she felt she would lose
consciousness (and wondered how this could be possible when she was already
asleep), her surroundings began to come into focus as the thing that
transported her began to slow. The spinning sensation that had so dizzied Sandy
left her with a ringing sensation in her ears. Now, she came to a standstill,
and looked at the remaining envelope that was held in the right hand of her
tormentor. The large hand that frightened her so much turned the envelope over,
and she read the name on the front of it.

CARSON.

Oh my god, it’s coming for me
.

Sandy Myers couldn’t move; it
controlled her mind. All that she could do was to look at its hands and be
repulsed by the crooked fingers and the open sores that were visible. As her
fear grew, something strange began to happen. They began to heal. It was like
watching a flower growing, filmed by a time lapse camera, such was the pace of the
healing progress as the sores began to disappear and the fingers straightened,
and it seemed to Sandy that her fear was making this beast more complete.

The large figure began to move at an
almost imperceptible rate. The scraping of twigs against the assumed form of
Sandy Myers made her realize the fact, and she looked up to be horrified by
what she saw. She was outside the home of Melissa Dahlia; the house where she
lay asleep and paralyzed, unable to do anything but wait and see whether the
huge thing that she thought could not be from the same planet as her decided to
take her life and allow her to watch.

Arnold isn’t its next victim
.
I’m its next victim.
It’s toying with Arnold the same way it’s toying with me. And now it’s going to
kill me and then it’s going to do the same to Arnold.