Quietus Read online

  “We need to warn the rest of the camp. We have to combine our resources and get as many weapons together as possible. I know a way into the Cut Off. If we leave now, we can—”

  “Not so fast.” Luka holds up a hand to hush her. “I agree with you: we need to go after it. A Lurker—even just one—poses a threat to the safety of the civilians here. But we’re not going anywhere on our own, and we’re not doing anything until Jimmy comes back.

  Silver rejects that. “You’ll kill our advantage. We need to strike now, while we have the benefit of daylight.”

  She tries to push past him, but he stops her and shoves her back against the shed.

  “You can’t breathe a word of this to the other campers.”

  “Wh—”

  He covers her mouth with his hand. “They’re not Hunters, Silver. For you, this is entertainment. For them, this is a brush with death. You know as well as I do that they’d panic, and panic isn’t going to serve our advantage.”

  “So you want to just sit here and do nothing? What if it comes back?”

  “Lurkers won’t venture into human territory unless they have to—you know that. It just stole ten pounds of meat, so it’ll spend the next few hours feeding. After that, it’ll sleep like a baby. We’ve got at least twenty-four hours before it needs to feed again.”

  He’s right.

  She hates it when he’s right.

  Despite her impatience, Silver agrees to wait until Jimmy returns before embarking on any kind of hunting trip. She watches the sun begin to set over the horizon, checking her watch every five minutes until the fishing group finally returns—bearing dinner.

  While the fish are cooking on the campfire, Silver, Alex, Luka, and Jimmy convene privately in Jimmy’s office. After the obligatory rounds of ‘are you sure?’ and ‘it can’t be!’, followed by a quick reprise of ‘are you sure?’, the conversation moves on toward something that vaguely resembles a plan.

  It’s decided that Silver will lead a hunt in the Cut Off at sunrise. Until then, a constant vigil will be kept over the campsite.

  “We’ll take turns keeping watch,” Alex proposes, still looking apologetic. He feels bad that he disregarded Silver’s claims, no matter how fantastical they might’ve seemed.

  “Fair enough.” Silver nods. “There are four of us and twelve hours until sunrise. We’ll each take a three-hour shift as look-out. Not that I could sleep a wink tonight anyway.”

  Famous last words.

  *************************

  Silver wakes up to a scream. And bright sunlight.

  She overslept.

  Damnit. She wasn’t meant to sleep at all.

  She tries to get up to explore the noise, but her foot gets caught in her sleeping bag. Unable to put one foot in front of the other, she topples over … and rolls down the peaked roof of the Rec Zone HQ.

  THUNK.

  Silver, her arms and legs still tangled up in the sleeping bag, hits the ground in a cloud of dust.

  Silence.

  Rolling over onto her side, winded and in pain, she comes face to face with half the campsite, all staring at her. Amidst the faces, she spots Jimmy, Alex, and Luka, and all three are giving her death stares.

  “What’s going on?” she rasps.

  The crowd parts slowly, pulling back to reveal …

  A corpse.

  Silver’s chest feels tight, and it’s got nothing to do with the fall.

  “Where did that come from?” She eyes the naked corpse suspiciously.

  “Lot twenty-three.” Alex points to the tent beside the felled sapling. “Mr. Popular.”

  Silver extricates herself from the sleeping bag and picks herself up off the ground, dusting herself off. “What happened to him?”

  “Good question.”

  His eyes are locked on her, but she can’t bear to meet his gaze. This isn’t the first time she’s fallen asleep on a stakeout, but it is the first time that someone’s ever had to pay for it.

  She crouches down beside the corpse, scrutinizing the man’s wounds. “I don’t need you to tell me that this is my fault.”

  Alex crouches beside her while Luka shoos away the gathering crowd of civilians and Jimmy disappears inside the Rec Zone. She’s expecting a reprimand, but as usual, his first concern is for her wellbeing.

  “Are you all right?”

  “This man is dead and you’re asking me if I enjoyed my nap?”

  “I’m asking you what went wrong. My hope is that it was a sudden bout of narcolepsy, and not simply that you got bored and drifted off.”

  “I’m obviously more exhausted than I thought.” She points at a mark on the man’s shoulder. “Are you seeing this?”

  A bite mark.

  Not human.

  Not Chimeran.

  She shares a glance with Alex, making sure he’s drawing the same conclusions in his own mind.

  “Are you still buying Luka’s theory?” she whispers. “You think the Lurkers are wearing custom dentures, as well as boots and gloves?”

  Alex shakes his head. “I don’t know what to think anymore.” He rolls the man over and shows Silver a very human hand-shaped bruise on his blanched back. “None of the facts are adding up to anything that makes any sense at all.”

  Jimmy drops a homemade stretcher—two fighting staffs with a sheet of tarp tied between them—down on the ground beside the corpse. “We have to move him before he starts to cook in the sun.”

  Silver looks up at him. “I think now’s the time.”

  “For what?”

  “To throw all that nonsense about a life without a gun out the window.” She holds him in her determined eyes. “Time to hunt.”

  *************************

  Jimmy leads Silver, Alex and Luka to a locked room at the back of the Rec Zone HQ, and Silver couldn’t be any happier.

  “I knew it,” she squeals. “I knew you had to have weapons somewhere.”

  “Don’t get too excited. It won’t be what you’re used to.”

  Jimmy unlocks the room and lets them in, making a beeline for a large steamer trunk on the floor beside all of the other Rec Zone equipment: bows and arrows, staffs, blunted swords, and javelins.

  Of the four, Silver discounts three of them immediately. The blunted swords aren’t good for anything except bashing your opponent over the head, and if you’re that close to a Lurker—or a Chimera, for that matter—it’s already too late. The staffs are inherently impractical. They’re heavy and cumbersome, and are more likely to get in the way than to subdue anything. Likewise, the javelins are awkward to carry. Besides that, Silver cares little for one-shot weaponry. If you launch your javelin at something, what’ve you got left? Dick all.

  That just leaves the bows and arrows, and Silver can see some potential there. The quivers can hold up to twenty arrows, and that beats her usual handgun by eight shots.

  But Jimmy’s got more.

  He opens up the trunk to reveal his pride and joy …

  Four semi-automatic rifles.

  Silver snatches one up, immediately surprised by its weight—or the lack thereof. Alex grabs one, too, and has the same reaction. Inspecting his further, slightly confused, he tests a theory by pulling the trigger.

  SPLAT!

  A blob of white paint smacks against Silver’s thigh and begins to dribble down her leg.

  Great.

  Paintball guns.

  “I told you it wouldn’t be what you’re used to,” Jimmy mutters.

  *************************

  Standing at the edge of the Cut Off, each wielding a paintball gun, with bows and arrows slung over their shoulders, Silver, Alex, Luka, and Jimmy look more like Academy rejects than the trained professionals they’re supposed to be.

  Jimmy is wearing Hunter Division boots, torn jeans and a muscle tee, with his old Hunter Division dog tags around his neck. Luka is in regulation Police Division uniform, including the empty holster for his gun. Alex is stuck in civilian clothes:
sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt. If you didn’t know, you’d have no clue that he was the Commissioner of the Police Division.

  Of them all, Silver is the only one who really looks the part. From her Hunter Division boots, combat pants, black spaghetti strap tee, and the dog tags around her neck, right up to the grin on her face, she looks every bit at home with a gun in her hand—albeit a paintball gun.

  Wearing one of Alex’s shirts over her tee, she conceals her hunting knife holstered at her hip. The quiver on her back contains the maximum number of arrows, and a bow is slung over her shoulder.

  She’s ready for the hunt.

  After finding a safe way to dismount from the toppled tree and navigate the ruins beneath it, the group emerges into the street. They haven’t even started yet, and already Luka is pessimistic.

  “It’ll take us too long to cover all this ground alone. We should call for reinforcements.”

  “You want me to call in the Hunter Division for one solitary animal?” Silver snorts. “Do you want the entire city to think we’re pussies?”

  “I want to get back home before nightfall, that’s all.”

  “Duh. You think I wanna be stuck out here all day? Look, whatever this thing is, it’ll be sleeping. All we have to do is sneak into its nest and kill it.”

  “It’s not the killing part I’m having trouble with, it’s the finding part.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be good at this?” Alex sighs. “Tracking, I mean.”

  “Yeah, well, last time I checked, the presence of tracks was a pretty vital component of tracking. And I don’t see anything here but cracked tarmac and crumbling concrete.”

  “Don’t worry.” Silver starts heading south. “I know where it sleeps.”

  *************************

  Back in the area where she had her first close encounter with the beast, Silver leads the group to the Old World home with the pile of clothes and blankets and rags.

  The dirty sock is still where she left it in the street.

  From a vantage point on the rooftop of a neighboring building, the foursome look down into the window of the bedroom where Silver said they’d find the nest.

  And she’s right.

  The nest is there … and somebody’s home.

  Jimmy can see the back of the animal, curled up in the fetal position, its chest rising and falling in rhythm.

  “You knew this was out here.” He turns to scowl at Silver. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Excuse me?” Affronted. “I’ve been trying to tell you people about this since day one.”

  “You didn’t say there was a nest.”

  “You were too busy telling me I was crazy.” Silver gets to her feet. “I’m going down there.”

  Without thinking, she pulls her knife out of its holster.

  Jimmy glares at her. “Lost, huh?”

  “Don’t be bitter. Just be glad that one of us has a real weapon.”

  She leaves, and no-one tries to stop her.

  She enters the building alone, watched by Jimmy and Alex from the rooftop, their bows drawn in preparation. Making sure that she’s covered from all angles, Luka watches her from the ground, concealed inside the shell of an Old World car, his paintball gun in hand.

  Creeping slowly, her feet crunching on Old World debris, Silver makes her way through the downstairs shell and up the hazardously rotted staircase.

  Not a sound.

  Taking one step at a time, she approaches the bedroom …

  Remembering the layout of the room, and eagerly anticipating a kill, Silver strides into it with her knife in her hand. She plans to march over to the nest, pull back the creature’s head, and slice open its throat before it even wakes up.

  But she’s never going to get that chance.

  The nest is empty.

  She freezes.

  She’d been so certain and so confident. She’d entered the room expecting to find the beast still sleeping. She hadn’t considered the thought that it might wake, and she’d broken a cardinal Hunter rule: she hadn’t sliced the pie.

  Early on in the Academy, Hunters are taught how to enter a room. You begin close to the wall on the outside of the room, two or three feet away from the doorway, gathering as much visual information as possible. Then, you take a step. Just one small step away from the wall, at approximately a ninety-degree angle, always keeping your front foot parallel with your line of sight.

  If you observe no hostiles, take another step.

  And another.

  One slice of the pie and then the next. Get eyes on as much of the room as possible before you enter, because a doorway can be the perfect choke point for a surprise attack.

  The fatal funnel.

  And Silver just waltzed right in.

  Big mistake.

  She doesn’t hear a sound until the creature is so close that she can feel its breath upon her neck. It reeks of rotting meat, and she holds her breath, feeling its cold, damp nose press against her skin as it takes in her scent.

  It gurgles.

  It fed recently, so it’s not hungry. Otherwise, she’d probably be dead already. So if it’s not food it wants, then maybe it’s in the market for a plaything. It flicks out its tongue and takes a quick lick of her, a string of saliva dripping from its lower lip and trickling down over her shoulder.

  She strengthens her grip around her knife, mentally preparing herself for the action needed to plunge the blade in somewhere fatal.

  One, two, three …

  Whoosh!

  Silver feels a flash of panic.

  An arrow sails by, within inches of her head, and strikes the creature in the shoulder. The creature immediately lets out a high-pitched squeal that jars Silver’s senses. She swings around to finish the job with her blade, but … it’s already gone.

  It’s fast.

  Silver makes chase, exiting onto the street just moments after it takes flight east toward the shoreline. From the protection of the vehicle shell, Luka fires pink paintball pellets at it. It’s moving too fast to waste time drawing arrows.

  From the rooftop, Alex fires white pellets at it while Jimmy fires blue.

  Silver is the only one to draw her bow. Trying desperately to remember the lessons she took during summer camp when she was fourteen years old, she adopts an archer’s stance and pinches the fletch between her fingers. She slips the string into the nock and pulls back on the arrow until the bow begins to creak under the pressure.

  Steady.

  Aim.

  Release.

  Strike!

  The arrowhead spears the creature’s thigh. Upon impact, the creature falls to its knees and Silver makes chase—but this creature won’t be taken down so easily. It’s back on its feet a moment later and it’s running again.

  Silver fires another arrow.

  A miss.

  Another.

  A strike in the thickest part of its tail. Still, it’s not subdued. Silver continues to run behind it, with Luka in tow, while Jimmy and Alex anticipate its direction and take a short cut. Limping, Jimmy is several paces behind Alex.

  Alex darts out into a side street and manages to get in front of the creature, but it’s too late. The creature bowls him over and the two of them tumble over the ground together, both of them winded. Though Alex is disoriented, his weapons scattered, Jimmy is ready to take advantage of the inadvertent take-down.

  His raises his bow and fires three rapid shots at the growling, drooling, panting creature. All three strike it in its torso, sending it back to the ground with a heavy thud. It’s fallen, but not for long. Gathering up its strength, the creature defies the odds and gets back on its feet. It begins running again, Silver now almost caught up to it.

  She chases it into a dockyard.

  The old wooden jetties are rotten and unstable, and Silver has to watch her step. For a moment, she loses sight of the creature. Without a visual on it, she follows its blood trail.

  Sidestepping broken p
lanks and gaping holes, she tracks the animal to the last jetty, where it suddenly finds itself cornered. It paces back and forth, searching for the best escape route.

  Gotcha.

  Silver tosses aside her bow and paintball gun. Reaching behind her, she draws a handgun from the back of her pants and locks a bullet into the breech.

  The only bullet.

  One shot.

  Can’t miss.

  At the far end of the jetty, the creature turns back to face her. Covered in blue, pink, and white paint, it looks pathetically undignified. Bleeding from wounds all over its body, it should be in crippling pain, but it’s not. If it feels any pain at all, it’s showing no signs of succumbing to it.

  In all, it has six arrows sticking out of it. There’s one in its leg, one in its shoulder, three more in its torso, and one in the thickest part of its tail—none of them fatal.

  It’s almost time for the quietus act.

  In the daylight, the creature is just as Silver remembers it from the tent, only slightly more grotesque. Its veiny, gray skin is glistening with sweat and it’s frothing at the mouth. Its tail is rough, and covered with razor sharp scales. Its feet are definitely webbed, and the talons on its hands are retractable. It doesn’t have ears, just holes on the side of its head. And on its neck, behind its ear holes, are those gills? Silver’s not close enough to be certain.

  She raises the gun—Luka’s gun—and staring the beast straight in the eye, she fires.

  Bullseye.

  Massive brain trauma.

  Quietus.

  The creature topples off the end of the jetty into the water.

  Gone.

  It’s dead and gone, and Silver feels such a release. She finally killed something!

  Alex appears at her shoulder. “Better now?”

  “Yeah. Now I can relax.”

  Behind them, Luka and Jimmy have caught up and they’re dumbstruck by the whole experience. On top of that, Luka looks horrified.

  “My gun!”

  “I’m sorry.” Silver hands it back to him without argument. “Your clip only had one round in it and I wanted to make sure that it counted.”

  “You didn’t think I could make the shot?”