Aftershock

There’s things we still don’t talk about, not even to each other.

We’d been walking opposite paths when we first met. She knew there were people like me in her world; I never thought there could be anyone like her in mine.

Dolly must have known what I’d been doing in that slaughterhouse—my skin color alone would have told her that much. She probably thought she knew why I was there, too, but she would have been wrong.

I would have told her the truth—I
wanted
to tell her everything—but I didn’t know how.

After a while, I decided Dolly must have been some kind of dream—the kind people say you have when you come close to death. The tremors that keep coming, even after the earthquake has passed.

If I’d had a childhood, it had been wiped from my mind before I woke up in that hospital so many years ago.

I’d run away from that hospital without knowing why, or even whatever I thought I’d been looking for. An old man found me while I was rooting in garbage bins every night just to stay alive—it was the best of the few choices a street boy like me had. Luc was long gone, too, but I can remember every minute I spent with him.

Even if ex-legionnaires had clubs, I knew I wouldn’t be welcome—I was no good at pretending to be loyal, not to anything.
And mercenaries don’t have friends; that’s the unspoken contract.

All those years, anytime a problem came up, I’d talk it over with myself. I’d had a lot of practice doing that.

But when Dolly happened again, I knew it couldn’t be an accident. When she left
that
time, I chased the dream of being with her.

It was a long, hard time, but I never stopped, never lost faith. Whatever drove me, it was something I trusted. And that trust proved true. Finally, Dolly took my hand, giving up her past to join a man without one.

She found a way to keep to the path she had chosen. I’d never had choices before. And now the only path that matters to me is any one we can walk together.

K
illing a deer—what they call “hunting” around here—is like fishing with sonar. Or climbing a mountain while a team of Sherpas walks ahead of you to build a base camp before you arrive. Time enough to take off your oxygen mask and warm yourself by the artificial heat before you have some champagne and turn in for the night.

All that’s needed is money. Of course,
other
people with money sneer at them for doing it: “They wouldn’t be hunting deer if the deer could shoot back.”

They sound like they’re on opposite sides, but they’re really standing on one side or the other of a line that runs right through the center of their “circle”—the same circle that surrounds their club like a fortress wall.

People with money might disagree on how it should be used. There’s only one rule: it can never be used
up
. If that happens, they kick you out of their club.

Whether members pay to go on a catered safari or watch wars on television makes no difference. “They’re all cut from the same cloth,” a guy I served with told me once. I thought he was Irish, but I never asked—that was one of the rules.

When he said “cut from the same cloth,” he meant that people who watch violence from a safe distance can never know the reality of it. They only know what people like us tell them. And we never tell them the truth—why would we? So they read books, or watch television, or see a movie.

That’s where some of them got the idea that taking body parts off enemies started in Vietnam. Like those ear necklaces. Some say those prove how war turns people into beasts. They’re as stupid as those who believe they’re looking at the work of a genuine hard man.

Those last kind, they’re the buyers. They never think of what they buy as anything but the real thing. How would they tell?

The hardest men aren’t soldiers—they’re the ones who push the war buttons; they hire the soldiers, and tell them who to kill.

Men like us, we make a lot more money than soldiers who fight for a country. We know things, too. Taking body parts didn’t start in Vietnam. And it was never about souvenirs.

I know this because I heard it from soldiers who heard it from other soldiers, all the way back. No matter where in the world, you always needed proof if you wanted to be paid in anything besides money.

Maybe you were forced to fight; maybe you were the aggressor—that doesn’t matter. If you wanted to be paid in respect, the highest peak was to show a piece of the enemy, prove you were close enough to touch him.

You can still see this: rotting heads mounted high on stakes surrounding a village. That’s a blood art. If you impale the heads skillfully enough, the weather will eventually reduce them to bleached skulls.

Those pieces have a story of their own. That’s why they’re more prized than gold. When you return with your proof, the whole village scatters the enemy’s body parts all around their border, a warning to whoever thinks of being the next attacker.

In some places, this is the only kind of safety there ever is, or ever can be. And that spell only holds as long as the children of the village grow up to take the place of those who planted the stakes. And their children’s children.

That’s where “raising the stakes” came from. No matter how big the gambler, there’s stakes only a very few will play for. Broke,
you can always get some more money and play again. Broken, you’re done playing.

I know this because I saw it happen. I watched jungle fighters carve still-beating hearts out of fresh-killed enemies and gnaw on them like starving leopards.

The men watching with me, they were older, more experienced. They told me I wasn’t seeing savagery; I was seeing tradition. Been going on for centuries, they said. Eat your enemy’s heart and you take his power for your own.

Like any belief, any religion, it started before anyone alive could actually remember. So it has to keep generating its own power to keep creating new believers.

So far, it has.

I saw some of my own kind chop off fingers from corpses to make amulet necklaces. But in the jungle, it’s never what you did, it’s always why you did it. If the finger-choppers ever showed off the trophies they took to the heart-eaters, it would make them suspicious.

In the jungle, suspicious is the same as scared.

If the heart-eaters got too suspicious, they might take some lives to calm themselves.

But they’d never eat
those
hearts.

T
here were two of them this time. Waiting inside one of those prefab deer blinds. Lightweight, easy to carry strapped to your back; you can snap one together on-site, using just hand tools.

Finished, the blinds stand about eight feet off the ground, with narrow openings that let in plenty of fresh air during the night. No glass in those windows—that would interfere with the mossy netting covering the protruding barrels of tripod-mounted zoom-scoped rifles.

The hunters get up before dawn, crawl out of their Gore-Tex sleeping bags, deposit their own urine in tight-capped plastic jugs so the smell won’t conflict with the deer estrus they sprinkled all around. Then maybe chew quietly on an energy bar while they wait for the prey to show up.

I’d been there for three twenty-fours, waiting for them. It had taken them more than one trip to get everything in place. They hadn’t been worried about leaving a trail—deer don’t pick up human smells the way flesh-eating animals do.

I had to wait for dawn—they didn’t have nightscopes or suppressors. I had both, but that was no guarantee I could finish both of them before they got off a few bursts.

Gunfire during the deer season wouldn’t make the police nervous, so long as it was daylight hours. Jacking deer with a salt lick and a searchlight—now, that would be illegal.

People who called themselves real hunters would say it wasn’t sportsmanlike, either.

T
he doe showed up right after the sky lightened. A good-sized one, but they weren’t hunting for meat—it was heads they wanted. Heads with antlers, the kind that look good on a wall.

But I couldn’t wait for a buck—there might be other hunters too close by then.

Their cheesy blind was on four legs, so it only took one crack from the hammer side of my tomahawk to topple the whole thing.

Like I said, the good thing about hunting season is that nobody spooks at rifle fire so long as it’s during daylight. When the store-bought blind came crashing down, the two men were too busy cursing to pay attention to anything but themselves.

One thought his leg was broken. The other was just shaken up,
but that didn’t stop him from going on about suing whoever they’d bought that blind from.

I was so close I didn’t even need the scope. They never saw me. I put a round into each of them. Head shots—I wasn’t worried about spoiling a trophy.

It only took another few seconds to spray a bright-green “X” on each of their orange jackets.

That brought the total to seven. Two the first year, three the second, and now these two.

I hoped that would be enough. There’s no rules of engagement in the only kind of war I’d been trained to fight. An enemy is an enemy, asleep or awake. They’re all threats, some more immediate than others.

I
watched the press conference on TV. The local politicians all had something to say. Even the dough-faced District Attorney weighed in with his standard little speech about how only “collaboration” between agencies was going to solve
any
crimes. He proudly announced that a statewide task force was already on the job.

One of the reporters asked why they didn’t call in the FBI. How could they hope to catch a serial killer without a profile?

That’s when a beefy guy in a dark suit stepped to the mike. He said he was going to release information previously withheld from the public, because the last two kills confirmed their earlier conclusions.

“We’re dealing with terrorists. I don’t mean the kind who blow up planes; I mean those ‘animal rights’ extremists who think hunting should be outlawed.”

He went on to explain how the homicides were all “signature
kills.” The green “X” sprayed on each victim. The
NO MORE!
posters scattered throughout the woods.

He told the audience there was an entire movement of such people out there, hunting the hunters. “They have the same mindset that believes torching a bunch of SUVs is going to save the planet. We know there’s a significant underground of ecoterrorists in America, especially in this part of the country.”

The man looked straight into the forest, as if he was daring those terrorists to come out and fight.

“There’s no way a group like this is going to stay under the radar forever. Which is why we’re appealing to you, the public. One or more of you may know one of the killers. If you have information, any information at all …”

A phone number kept scrolling across the bottom of the screen as he talked. Nothing about a reward, though. That would keep the calls down. And there was no missing baby to search for, so nobody would be walking the woods. You know how they do that: holding hands so they don’t overlook a single inch of ground, all trying to stay within range of the TV cameras.