Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

He would probably just scream, though, or get all weepy, like the last female. How could this happen to me? She asked that over and over. Perhaps you were a bad girl. Though you didn’t taste bad. Lots of good fat.

When the sun came up, Hunter lumbered around the perimeter of his camp checking the alarm devices. Monofilament stretched at toe height. When he first set it up, touching the lines would ring little chimes. Now the system was more sophisticated; lights on a computer map inside would show where the intruder was.

If it was just one, he could shoot him from the dark. If it was a group, he would arm the trailer’s timer and drive off in the van. The trailer would blow up after five minutes. The van would unroll two mats of nails on the gravel road to slow down pursuers, and where it intersected the state road, he’d buried a hundred-pound crate of dynamite topped with buckets of rusty nails.

Still, he might be caught. He hadn’t decided whether to be taken alive. An autopsy would immediately reveal that he wasn’t human, which would displease his masters. If he were captured, he would have a good chance of escaping before they found out the truth. But in the process of escaping, he might reveal his superhuman strength.

Exercise time. Hunter squatted over a truck axle, red with rust except for the two places where he gripped it, and smoothly he lifted it over his head. He pressed and curled it silently fifty times and let it drop.

Breathing a little hard, he crossed the clearing to where an ancient live oak had grown a stout limb about eight feet off the ground. He grabbed it and did twelve pull-ups, the tree groaning in protest, and then reversed the position of his grip and did twelve more. Then he did three with his right arm alone, grunting.

He could not run like a human, not in this gravity and atmosphere, but he staggered around his property three times in a well-worn figure eight path.

It made him hungry. He had a few cuts that had gone straight into the refrigerator’s meat compartment. He took out two arm steaks and smeared them with chopped garlic in olive oil, then sliced an onion and fried it up in butter. Seared the steaks on both sides and lowered the heat to braise them in red wine with some rosemary. He took the jug of Gallo burgundy and sat on the steps, drinking from it while attacking a large can of Sam’s Club potato chips.

Once each minute, he would stop chewing and listen. He could hear birds and animals going about their business and the quiet simmer of the steaks under the heavy cast-iron skillet top. The smell of rosemary and garlic and sweet flesh was intoxicating.

A large car or small pickup whispered by on the state road, more than a mile away. A human would not have heard it, he was sure; nor could a human smell the cooking so far away. Hikers were his only worry.

It smelled so good, we had to come and check.

You must join me, then.

Ifinished the short chapter and quietly got dressed. Peeked through the blinds and it was full daylight outside.

“Time to?” Kit muttered, half asleep.

“Sleep,” I said. “I’m gonna go back and get the van.”

“I could come with,” she said, half sitting up.

“No way. Get some rest.” She grunted and fell back with a thump, and mumbled thanks into the pillow.

I pedaled off into the bright cool morning. This was going to be the pattern of my life, I realized, a lark married to a dove, and I liked it. Almost all my writing, I did while she slept through the morning. True, I wasn’t much of a party animal at night, but neither was she. Our nights often ended with me snugged next to her while she read a book or watched TV or a movie on her pad, but I think she liked that. Part of her independence from the conventional world. Her parents’ world.

The morning sun had dried everything off and it was perfect bicycling weather. A slight breeze at my back, a hard smooth bike lane. I pushed it up to twenty and kept it there, enough to break a nice sweat.

I stopped once to carry a turtle across the road, feeling kind of stupid. He’d probably just turn himself around and get squashed on the way back. Turtles bothered me more than most roadkills, though. The pathos factor. They thought they had everything covered, and then these mammals evolved to where they had eighteen wheels and hurtled along at ninety miles per hour. Your shell might just as well be tissue paper. Be patient; we’ll evolve up over the road and leave you alone again.

The turtle was once my “totem animal.” In high school, a friend had read about the idea, or come up with it on his own—that we should all adopt some species of animal that stood for what we wanted to be. Among all the ferocious and fast and clever menagerie my friends allied themselves with, I was the lone turtle. Slow, careful, observing everything. Safe within my shell.

I wasn’t much different now. Faster, at least to the outside observer. A slow brain, that tried not to miss anything.

That had been my big beef with the army, at least in training. Everything fast, by the numbers, hup-toop-threep. Until I found my niche.

A sniper doesn’t do anything fast. Watch and wait, wait and watch, don’t move. Total zen, except for the bit at the end. You squeeze the trigger and someone a half a mile or more away falls over dead.

I read a library book by a woman who had interviewed all kinds of combat veterans. Before my war, but she had guys from the Gulf and Vietnam and even WWII, and she came up with an unsurprising generalization: the farther away you were from the person you killed, the less fucked up you were by the killing. Seems pretty obvious. You choke some poor bastard to death with your bare hands, it’s going to bother you more than squeezing a trigger a half mile away from him.

I don’t remember whether she talked to the guys who pushed the button on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Pretty remote, but times a hundred thousand? Maybe they had bad dreams. Worse than mine.

I didn’t usually see the results of my “sniper craft,” as they called it. They’d drag them away, or there’d be a pile, your victim one among many. Twice I was sure, though. One guy looked like TV, lying back with his eyes closed, a dark wet spot on his chest. The other had the top of his head popped off, like if he’d worn a helmet he might have been okay. My big moment of fame in the platoon—confirmed-kill head shot, a raghead sniper.

I never told anybody I hadn’t aimed for the head. It was a long shot, about five hundred meters, and the bastard was prone, aiming at some of our guys off to the left. I had a solid braced position, and aimed about four feet over his chest. Maybe a breath of wind caught the bullet. “Head shot,” my spotter said. “You da man.” I made E-5 the next week, for one week. Then got busted back for boozing.

Then got the stripe back and lost it again, I’m still not sure how. I supposedly got into a fight and knocked out some E-8 asshole. But I didn’t get into fights, not then, and I don’t know how I was supposed to’ve knocked out a bruiser a head taller than me without even hurting my knuckles. But it was his drunken word against mine. So we both got busted, but I had to clean out latrines for a week. Officer latrines, so of course it didn’t smell bad at all.

My supposed head shot, though. The bullet hit his head about two inches above the ear, and it was like a sledgehammer. Blood and brains everywhere, bone chips. But if the wind had gone the other way I would have hit him in the butt, or not at all.

What did all this have to do with Hunter, I wondered as I pedaled along. I was a hunter then, in the broadest sense of the word. Civilians who do it for fun sneak around with a high-powered rifle like mine, looking for woodsy “targets of opportunity,” though theirs don’t shoot back. Less sporting, if you ask me.