Hunters: A Trilogy (11 page)

A sick race held between the trench, which was trying to close, and the scavengers who were giving everything they had to make it into the pit before it slammed them out. He watched, transfixed, as the beasts hurled themselves into the rapidly diminishing mouth of oblivion. The most bizarre thing was that many of them wore suits, finely made suits, which shimmered and rippled as their huge shoulders bulged beneath the material. The beasts never hesitated in their charge, their tufted tails whipping in fury as they leapt into the darkness, yellow eyes blazing with a madness that lay far beyond any form of logic.

Ken began to notice that many of them had mouthfuls of money, a stream of paper notes fluttered in their slipstream. There was never to be any halting their headlong assault – yelping and giggling madly, they plunged into the void. He almost smelled their fetid rankness; it seemed to ooze from their very being.

Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over. The trench emitted one final mournful cry – Ken caught a glimpse of a single powerful tail being sucked into the ground – then they were gone, all of them: trench, oil-blood, insane slavering carnivores. One second they were there and in the next, gone. This time the silence was total. It surrounded him.

The desert’s warm breeze blew into his face; a small bird cart-wheeled above and flew into the sunset that was starting to form around him. Shaking his head, Ken sank to the ground, he let himself flop onto the desert floor, half-sat and half-lay there with his mind stuttering, disorganised thoughts tumbling through his head. ‘What the hell had that been about?’ He knew George had told him to watch. ‘Watch and learn,’ is what Ken figured the old guy had really been saying.

George must have been listening to his racing mind because Ken received an answer almost immediately. Over a period of the next few minutes...it may have been hours, perhaps days, or even weeks, Ken didn’t really know anymore...he was treated to an experience that made him feel rather like some nether-world version of Ebenezer Scrooge during a macabre showing of A Christmas Carol.

As he sat upon the sandy stage, a never-ending parade of images began to flash overhead like a giant slide-show. Ken lay back and watched them as they flew past above him in all their horror. The images were rather like the trailer for a forthcoming movie and his eyes tried desperately to follow each one, constantly being drawn to the next picture as it appeared overhead. He wondered what it was they illustrated. That was
the
question.

There were scenes of war, horrific acts of destruction with long lines of bodies being bulldozed into lime-filled graves. Scenes of famine: the fly covered faces of the victims looking up with the dull eyes of those who have no hope. There were tribes of warring Africans, hacking with their machetes, slashing and bludgeoning the women and children of their vanquished foe, relentlessly dispensing with all those who were not of their own. There was a scene where a chain of nuclear blasts, one after the other, exploded in endless synchronicity. Sub-surface, surface, and airborne blasts, played over and over. Such was the perfect roundness of its fireball that the final brilliant flash of light looked as though it had been in space; so fierce was the brightness of the explosion that Ken had to turn away.

Pictures of terrible slums played over and over, the poor grovelling through the waste bins. More pictures of poverty: half-naked children wading through drains in bare feet and picking through the rotten scraps that lay festering in amongst the collection of filth. Terrible images of women and children being stoned or having their hands cut off whilst on-looking crowds jeered with delight. It was then that the awful addition of his newly acquired inner voice took it upon itself to decide to help Ken out with a commentary on this cinematic preview for the insane.

‘Hey everybody, look at what we have in store for you at next week’s matinee, yes siree, get yourselves a bargain bucket of popcorn and make sure that you’re early. This is gonna be a show that you simply can’t miss! Book online and we’ll throw in a treat. Yes, indeedy, we’re gonna let you kill your own kids in the aisle, right in front of us...those little bastards...and we’ll watch and we’ll cheer! And hey, guess what, if you get the audience vote, well...then you can come and do it all again next week for free, winner takes all!’

The droning voice echoing in his head made Ken feel like shooting his imaginary mental partner. He felt his sanity think about leaving, but there was to be no respite, the show rolled on.

Every now and then there would be a slide showing great geysers of oil, spewing up hundreds of feet into the air – Ken must have seen that one at least five times, and yet it still fascinated him. Many times there were images of the hyenas, ripping, tearing and slavering, their beautiful handmade suits dripping in the remains of their victim’s guts. Yellow eyes rolling in their powerful heads as they gorged upon a menu of dollar bills and piles of raw meat – meat from a species Ken knew. They sated their obvious thirst in the pools of oil-blood and Ken almost recognised some of their insane, canine faces. They reminded him of people, people whom he knew, but not quite, they mesmerized him with their grotesqueness.

Every third slide or so would show a small, silver box that resembled a cigarette case. It had a glass lid – Ken couldn’t quite determine if it was glass or not, as the case whirled past overhead almost faster than the eye. There were long, snake-like leads flailing from its rear, two of them. This vision was always followed by one of the ocean, which he himself had so recently stood upon – the perfect blueness seemed to radiate an unfathomable calmness and peace.

Ken saw so many images that they became an almost undecipherable torrent. There were fat women stuffing bowls of caviar into their Botox-filled faces, huge smoke stacks belching fumes into the leaden skies above the Earth. There were scenes of destruction and chaos, wars, murders, fires and riots.

These were followed by the image of a lone Fallow deer standing in a blackened field. He watched its slender flanks quivering in fear. It turned its graceful head toward him and Ken watched as a tiny ruby of blood ran from the corner of its eye, dangling precariously as it hung from a slender hair on the animal’s eyelid. The creature blinked once and the movement sent the tiny red gem free-falling down towards its charred landing place. As it hit the ground, the little drop of blood splashed up, erupted, with such force that the deer was instantly drowned in a torrent of crimson.

It was quite horrendous to see – all of it horrified him.

Finally, the show slowed and then stopped, but not for long. As he looked up into the darkened sky, Ken saw a terrible storm suffocating the planet in the picture. It was the same red cloud that had imprisoned him what felt like aeons ago. The ghastly beast rolled across the Earth’s surface and Ken saw that every living thing before it was instantly turned to dust. Then the image of the storm ended with the suddenness of a TV being turned off – one second a full picture, and in the next, just a fading white dot.

His horizon became filled with the last slide. It was a scene of the desert, a red desert, one whose endless dunes stretched into the distance. Walking through the sands was a man, a solitary man. He was tall and extremely well-built across the shoulders. His rippling forearms were offset by a pair of long, skinny legs that ended in a set of large feet clad in a pair of scruffy, white basketball boots. The boots had a black star on the ankle, a thick rubber lip around the toes and were fastened with a pair of garish yellow laces. Their tight fit made his feet appear even bigger. Ken hated those shoes, especially on middle-aged men.

‘They make you look like a bloody hippie…’ he thought.

He also felt as though he knew the man but couldn’t quite put a name, or a place, to the fleeting memory. The man was wearing a pair of blue Levi jeans and a khaki shirt. Below his breast pocket, dyed into the khaki, there was what appeared to be a black rose. The man had a wide, rounded face and a broken nose, which supported a pair of dark sunglasses. His ginger hair was pulled tightly back from his forehead and tied into a long ponytail that dangled and flapped below his shoulders as he walked.

There was a holstered pistol on his left hip, in the reverse position with the butt facing forward. In addition to the pistol, the man held an assault rifle in his right hand. Ken saw the weapon’s under-slung grenade launcher, its stubby barrel glinting dully in the strange red light that surrounded the man. The expression on the man’s face was one of an arrogant defiance. As Ken watched, he saw him tilt his head forward and spit a stream of tobacco-filled saliva into the fire.

All of a sudden he saw that the entire desert surrounding the man was on fire – liquid flames rippled by on all sides. As the picture zoomed out and went to an overhead position, he saw that the whole, strange, burning-desert scenario was actually slipping under the man like a giant, pyrotechnic tablecloth. It was flowing beneath his yellow-laced boots, and yet he walked on almost without noticing.

As he walked, the fiery floor beneath him was being sucked into the giant void, which Ken noticed spinning in the distance behind the huge man. The burning floor became faster and faster and the man began to jog as the blazing ground rippling away beneath him started to pour into the black whirlpool behind. The swirling monster was becoming larger by the second and Ken heard it humming as it started to pull everything into its gaping mouth.

As he ran forward, the unknown man reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and took out an object, it looked to be made of a glowing metal – the small object was egg-shaped and had rounded pebble-like flanks. It looked like a stone but Ken couldn’t quite see. However, the one thing he definitely saw was the green light the object emitted through the man’s hand. He was now sprinting for all his worth, but the vacuuming plughole behind him was too strong and he was inexorably being dragged backwards.

Then, with a terrible
‘Rrrrriiiippp’
sound, which Ken felt in his mind, the tall man was lifted upwards into a lazy, uncontrollable tumble through mid-air towards the spinning hole. As the man tumbled, Ken saw him drop the rifle, watching as it flew into the whirling monster behind him. He saw the man raise the pebble above his head in defiance, as Ken craned his neck upwards to see the image, there was a sudden, brilliant flash of green light.

It was so bright that the light felt as though it had burned in the core of his brain; it burned his soul, almost. The power was so pure that Ken was not able stand before it. He cringed downwards with an overwhelming feeling of numbness sliding into his head – it filled him with a sensation that made him feel as though everything had started slipping away. Then, with that awful sliding numbness filling his world, Ken did slip away. The last thing he heard was the uninvited commentator’s voice, with its dry, sarcastic drawl once again wheedling its awful remarks over the loudspeakers in his mind.

‘Thank y’all for watching our show, Ladeeees ‘en Gennlemennn, that’s all we have for you right now, but be sure to c’mon back next week, won’t yo’all. Oh boy, you gotta c’mon back because have we got another peach for you to share with us, or have we gotta peach for you? It’s a goddanged peach-of-a-peach, yessiree – yore definitely gonna need to watch this one!’

As the words echoed through the dark corridors of Ken’s fading consciousness, he felt himself spinning uncontrollably – spinning, slipping, falling. Then, like a flower at sunset, his mind closed itself and carried him fluttering back into the welcoming blackness.

The pain in his stomach awoke him. It wasn’t merely a pain, it was a hole and it growled at him with its need to be filled. He sat upright and looked around the darkened room. He was back in the bed and everything looked about as normal as it had done last night. He was starving and his stomach kept knotting itself with pangs of hunger. Sliding out of bed, Ken padded over to where the coffee machine had miraculously appeared before.

He spoke to the wall, saying: ‘Err, hello...room service? May I have a full English breakfast, please?’ He paused, and then said, ‘Also, may I have some fresh orange juice and about a gallon of tea, as well?’ just for the hell of it.

He laughed softly – this was absolute madness.

Ken whispered: ‘Seriously, guys, I’m starving here, and if we’re going on any more ‘little trips’, then I’m gonna need some strength.’

In his mind, Ken heard someone singing about
‘Lunatics and Grass’
, he couldn’t quite remember who had done the original song, but the tune suited his mood just fine. He felt good, hungry, yes, but otherwise really good. The images from the last few days, and last night in particular, were clear in his mind, he felt as though he had addressed them and they were now where they should be, in a logical order and ready to be used later, maybe.

He questioned this because he still didn’t understand them, well, not fully anyway. He had a good idea what they were saying but he still felt small when looking up at the huge meaning which he knew they must have. ‘Why am I coping so well?’ he thought. Half of him felt insane, whilst the other half felt able and willing.

Turning back to the wall, he noticed that a previously unseen shelf had glided out. Upon it, magically presented, lay the feast he’d asked for a few minutes earlier. A white stool had also appeared as if from nowhere and was standing in innocence by the bedside table. He stood and stared for a second and then, with a shrug of resignation, Ken answered his stomach’s call for sustenance.

‘Man, that was awesome, compliments to the chef…’ he said, after demolishing the food. With a satisfied grin, Ken raised the heavy mug of tea in a one-handed salute to the wall opposite. He took a sip. ‘Bloody perfect,’ he said, and then began his slurping assault on the hot brew. Jane called him ‘asbestos gob’ and was always amazed at the speed in which he made a mug of scalding hot tea disappear. Ken realised how much missed his wife and his nose was filled with her smell. With a wry smile, he shook her out of his mind, promising himself some time with the memories of her later on.