Michael Grant - Lies

He aimed both hands at the deer. There was no flash of light. Nothing at all that you could see or hear.

The deer took two more steps and fell forward.

Hunter raced to it. The deer was hurt but not dead.

“Don’t worry,” Hunter whispered. “It won’t hurt.”

He held his palm toward the deer’s head. The deer’s eyes turned milky. And it stopped breathing.

Hunter slid off his pack and his bird bag and drew his knife.

He was excited. This was the biggest deer he’d ever bagged. No way he could carry it. He would have to cut it into pieces. It was going to be a lot of work.

He took a long drink from his canteen and sat down, contemplating the job ahead of him.

Hunter hadn’t slept in quite a while, chasing the two other deer. He was sleepy now. And there was no longer any need to keep going. Between the birds and this buck he had two days of butchering and hauling ahead of him just to get it all to town.

There were some shallow caves not far from this spot, but some of them had flying snakes in them. Better not to go near those things. Better to stay out here in the open.

He lay his head on a soft rotted log and fell instantly to sleep.

How long he slept he couldn’t know, he had no watch, but the sun was overhead when he woke to the sound of clumsy movement. Someone trying to be sneaky and not doing a very good job of it.

“Hi, Sam,” Hunter said.

Sam froze.

Hunter sat up. “What are you doing here?”

Sam looked around like he was searching for an answer. He seemed weird to Hunter. He didn’t look like Sam usually looked. He looked like animals sometimes looked when Hunter had them cornered and they knew it was the end.

“I’m just…um…walking,” Sam said.

“Are you running away?” Hunter asked.

Sam looked startled. “No.”

“I smell fire.”

“Yeah. There’s been a fire. In town,” Sam said. “So. Is that a deer?”

It seemed like a stupid question to Hunter. “Yes.”

“I was getting hungry,” Sam confessed.

Hunter smiled his lopsided smile. Half of his mouth didn’t work quite right. “I can cook us a bird. But I have to give the deer to Albert.”

“Some bird would be great,” Sam said.

He sat down cross-legged on the pine needle carpet. He’d been hurt. There was blood on his shirt and he moved his shoulder stiffly.

“I can cook it with my hands. But it tastes better if I cook it with fire.”

Hunter gathered dried needles, small branches, and a couple of larger chunks of wood. Soon he had a fire going. He cleaned one of the colorful birds, burned off the pinfeathers, and cut it into smaller pieces. These he skewered with a wire clothes hanger he carried in his backpack and propped them over the coals at the edge of the fire.

He split the meat with scrupulous fairness. Sam ate greedily.

“This isn’t a bad life you have up here,” Sam said.

“Except when there are mosquitoes. Or fleas,” Hunter said.

“Yeah, well everyone’s getting fleas since most of the dogs and cats are…um…gone.”

Hunter nodded. Then he said, “I don’t have much talking.”

When Sam looked puzzled, Hunter explained. “Sometimes my head doesn’t want to give me words.”

Lana had healed him as well as she could, but the skull had never grown back all the way right. She’d fixed his brain well enough that he didn’t pee in his pants like he did for a while after the beating. And when he talked he could mostly make himself understood. But Lana had been unable to return him all the way to normal.

“It’s okay,” Hunter said, not realizing that he hadn’t said any of this out loud. “I’m just different now.”

“You’re important,” Sam said. “You’re a lifeline for kids. Do the coyotes ever bother you?”

Hunter shook his head and gulped some more of the hot bird meat. “We made a deal. I don’t go where they’re hunting. And I don’t hunt coyotes. So they don’t bother me.”

For a while neither of them said anything. The fire burned down. The last of the bird was consumed. Hunter pushed dirt onto the fire, smothering it.

“Maybe I could work with you,” Sam said. He held up his own hand. “I can hunt, too, I guess.”

Hunter frowned. This was confusing. “But you’re Sam and I’m Hunter.”

“You could teach me what you know,” Sam said. “You know. About animals. And how to find them. And how to cut them up and all.”

Hunter thought about it, but then the idea slipped out of his brain. And he realized he’d forgotten what Sam was talking about.

“If I go back I’m going to do things,” Sam said. He looked down at the ashes of the near-dead fire.

“You’re good at doing things,” Hunter said.

Sam looked angry. Then his face softened until he looked sad. “Yeah. Only I don’t always want to do those things.”

“I’m Hunter. So I hunt.”

“My real name is Samuel. He was this prophet in the Bible.”

Hunter didn’t know what “prophet” meant. Or “Bible.”

“He was the guy who picked out the first king of Israel.”

Hunter nodded, mystified.

“You believe in God, Hunter?” Sam asked.

Hunter felt a sudden stab of guilt. He hung his head. “I almost killed those boys.”

“What boys?”

“Zil. And his friends. The ones who hurt me. I was hunting a doe, and I saw them. And I could have.”

“Could have killed them.”

Hunter nodded.

“To tell you the truth, Hunter, I wish you had.”

“I’m Hunter,” he said, and grinned because it struck him as funny. “I’m not Boy Killer.” He laughed. It was a joke.

Sam didn’t laugh. In fact, it looked like he wanted to cry.

“You know Drake, Hunter?”

“No.”

“He’s a boy with a kind of snake for an arm. A snake. Or a whip. So he’s not really a boy. So if you ever saw him, you could hunt him.”

“Okay,” Hunter said doubtfully.

Sam bit his lip. He looked like he wanted to say something else. He stood up, knees popping after sitting so long. “Thanks for the meat, Hunter.”

Hunter watched him go. A boy with a snake arm? No. He’d never seen anything like that. That would be something. That would be even weirder than the snakes he’d seen in the caves. The ones with wings.

That reminded Hunter. He pushed up his sleeve to examine the spot where the snake had spit on him. It hurt. There was a little sore, a sort of hole. The hole had scabbed over, like any of the endless number of scrapes Hunter had suffered tearing through brush.

But as he looked at the scab Hunter was disturbed to see that it was a strange color. Not reddish like most scabs. This was green.

He rolled his sleeve back down. And forgot about it again.

Sanjit stood at the edge of the cliff. The binoculars didn’t show much detail. But it wasn’t hard to see the plume of smoke. It was like a massive, twisted exclamation point over Perdido Beach.

He tilted the glasses upward. Far up in the sky the smoke seemed to spread out horizontally. Like it was running into a glass ceiling. But that had to be an illusion.

He turned to his right and focused on the yacht. His view traveled from the bow to the stern. The helicopter.

Choo was trying to fly a kite for Pixie. The kite wasn’t really taking off. It never did, but Pixie kept hoping and Choo kept trying. Because, Sanjit reflected, as grumpy as Virtue was, he was a good person. Something Sanjit wasn’t sure he could say about himself.

Peace was inside, keeping watch over Bowie. His fever had stopped spiking. But Sanjit knew better than to think this was a permanent improvement. They’d been up and down like this for a long time.

He stared at the helicopter. Not a chance he could fly it. He was going to have to convince Choo of that. Because if Sanjit tried to fly the chopper he’d get all of them killed.