Ike Hamill - The Hunting Tree Trilogy

“Also one per night,” said Mike. “Like he has to kill. He’s compelled to kill each night.”

“And he travels fast, like he’s headed for something,” said Morris.

“The signal,” added Mike.

The conversation died. Mike tried to resuscitate it several times on the remainder of the drive, but Morris remained silent, lost in thought.

THE PREVIOUS FEW NIGHTS had resulted in little progress for Crooked Tree. He spent hours carefully navigating around settlements—the population density increased steadily as he moved east. But his lock on the boy had grown much stronger. Side distractions—local infections—no longer clouded his vision. When he reached out to sense the boy the signal was many times stronger, aided by the proximity and because the infection had spread to more people.

His pursuers hadn’t managed to renew their fix on his position. Crooked Tree’s careful pace competed with his growing unease that the boy’s infection had begun to spread to others.

Crooked Tree sat on the branch of a pine tree atop a tall hill and looked towards a lake in the distance. The lake covered a huge span from north to south and brought a large concentration of houses and people. Further to the north, another lake wasn’t nearly as wide, but he couldn’t see how far stretched. Earlier that evening, he had tried to cross a thin spit of land between the lakes, but the heavy nighttime traffic kept forcing him back into the forest.

He pondered three choices: wait to see if the traffic on the road abated in the deep hours of the night; try his luck south where more people lived; or travel north to skirt both lakes. The boy was so close. He thought that before the next full moon he could locate and remove him, perhaps fulfilling his final duty as a loose spirit roaming the earth. He opted for the cautious approach and headed north—around the lakes—to avoid more contact with gun-wielding police.

The tree shook as Crooked Tree dropped to the ground next to its thick trunk. He started down the hill, moving from shadow to shadow. He had adjusted to this world—he could creep within a dozen yards of a house, stepping over a shaft of light projecting down through a window, and remain undetected. Halfway down the hill, he crossed a narrow private road and toured the outskirts of a well-maintained yard. A half-dressed man paced the living room. Crooked Tree saw him through the windows, walking back and forth. The bare-chested man talked into a phone and paused at the mantle to rearrange his curios.

Crooked Tree sniffed the air and approached the house. He sensed no other people in the house, and no dogs to reveal his trespass. He stopped a few feet from the window, not wanting to reveal himself in the light from the house. As he watched, the man’s shoulders slumped and he spun slowly, speaking low into the phone.

In the quiet night, the man’s conversation was just barely audible through the glass. “…just seems like it’s time. You know?” the man asked his phone. The man stopped in the center of his clean living room and looked up at the ceiling as he listened. Crooked Tree studied him. He wore only pajama bottoms; his bare feet were planted in the soft carpet. His torso sagged and bulged.

Crooked Tree tried to summon some emotion. He thought he should feel anger or even hatred for this soft, solitary denizen of the ruined landscape his family had once called home. At the very least, Crooked Tree thought he should feel offended that this man didn’t surround himself with his progeny, fulfilling his mandate to build the largest, strongest clan he could during his years. Crooked Tree’s education on the purpose of life was short and simple. His father had taught him to fight and propagate; anything less was failure. He just didn’t feel enough connection to this man who stood before him to even try to hold him to the same standards.

While he watched, the man neared, step-by-step, until he was only a pace from the window. Crooked Tree shrunk back. The man reached down and retrieved something from the table next to the couch, but continued to look out the window. Concern spread across the man’s face. He held up the device from the table. Crooked Tree recognized it from his stolen memories—this device was a remote control. With that realization, Crooked Tree took a half-step back from the window. The giant had suddenly grown concerned, but remained unsure why.

By stabbing his thumb into the remote, the man triggered his outside lights. The yard lights came on with an thump as relays closed. Light spilled all around Crooked Tree, as if the sun had jumped into the night sky. He turned to flee into the woods, but stopped himself before he could take another step. Beyond the buzz of the lights he recognized that the man in the house hadn’t uttered a word into his phone since he’d turned on the lights. Perhaps he was stunned at the sight of a mammoth, naked, dirty man standing in his yard. Crooked Tree recognized both the danger and the opportunity. He would spend the remaining hours of the night trying to flee to safety if this man managed to call the police.

Crooked Tree pivoted back towards the house, fell forward, and sent a burst of energy through his leg muscles, launching himself towards the window. He crashed through the glass hands-first, with one hand opening and deftly plucking the telephone from the stunned man’s dropping hand. The handset was crushed by Crooked Tree’s right hand as his left hand curled around the back of the man’s neck.

The half-naked man’s phone-talking days ended forever as Crooked Tree snapped his neck—closing his fist around the vertebrae. Still horizontal, Crooked Tree’s momentum carried him fully into the living room where he landed on his latest victim and skidded briefly, bunching up the carpet before coming to rest.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, focusing his senses once again to tune to possible threats. Detecting nothing, he retrieved the remote control from the man’s limp hand and studied the buttons. Most didn’t make sense, but he found a large button in the corner that he could identify. He pressed the button and the outside lights shut off instantly.

CROOKED TREE DRAGGED THE BODY deep into the woods before opening the soft man to examine and consume him. It rankled his sensibilities to taste healthy flesh, but he ate defensively. Even with limited understanding of this time, Crooked Tree intuited that this man warranted extra care. He scooped soft dirt from forest floor and fashioned a grave as memories and images from the dead man’s organs leaked into Crooked Tree’s consciousness. Before he finished covering the new corpse with the damp dirt, he knew he had to return to the house. The house contained video surveillance, which the man had doubtlessly triggered with the lights. Crooked Tree didn’t know exactly where to find the device in the house, but he could picture it through the dead man’s eyes.

Walking on the balls of his feet, Crooked Tree gripped the dead man’s boots between his oversized toes. The prints behind him weren’t perfect, but he thought they disguised his giant bare feet. He had found the boots next to the back door where he had also located a broom to clean up the glass from the living room floor. In a cabinet in the basement, he found the video system. He carefully took the components to the woods, where he smashed each piece before burying them far away from their former owner.

Crooked Tree glanced around the living room one more time before shutting off the lights. It nearly matched the residual version in his head, so he turned off the lights and exited through the kitchen door. He tread carefully, balancing on the borrowed boots until he found a patch of rocks where he could remove the shoes and toss them up into a tree. His crime wasn’t perfect. His understanding had caught up enough for him to guess that the police would eventually uncover the details, but he figured it was good enough to buy him time. With any luck, by the time anyone discovered the murder, he would have already dispatched the boy and moved on to the afterlife to join his family.