Hunting Season

HUNTING SEASON

ERIK WILLIAMS

Hunting Season

Copyright 2012 by Erik Williams

Cover copyright 2012 by Carl Graves

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First Electronic Edition by Erik Williams

I AM VISION, I AM DEATH

On the East side of Dallas, Elijah pulled into a Motel 6 and bought a single for the night.  He paid in cash.  He'd wanted to make Shreveport before
stopping, but the caffeine and speed had lost their effectiveness.  He needed to crash for a few hours.

The room was small but adequate.  Elijah brought in his backpack and locked the door.  He slid the curtains closed and flicked the A/C on full.  After a quick shower, he crawled into bed and set the alarm for five in the morning.

He checked the date on his watch.  Two days, he thought.  Two days since he'd gotten the call that Mom was on death's door.  She'd only last a few days, according to the doctor.  A week, tops.  Elijah frowned.  It would be another whole day of driving to get to Jacksonville.

Elijah looked around the room at the sparse walls and small TV and plain art in faded frames.  "I am Loneliness."

Then he took a few pulls off his flask and went to sleep.

*  *  *  *  *

Again, he dreamed he was the stranger, trapped inside his skin and seeing through his eyes.

The dreams were always different.  The settings and atmosphere changed each time.  The stranger, though, always remained constant.  The same cadence in his speech.  The same controlled anger pulsing through his veins.  He had never seen the man's face, since he was always looking out through it, nor had he heard his name, but Elijah knew
him
and knew what he was capable of.

This time he was lying naked on a motel bed, watching the local news, KROU - Channel 9, Baton Rouge, he recognized, but he was humming some song Elijah had never heard.  The previous time he was in Houston, smoking a cigarette and drinking vodka out of a plastic motel room cup.  He knew it was Houston because of the 214 area code stamped on the phone set.  Other places, he could only guess at.

Always somewhere different, a nomad like Elijah, though the similarities ended there.

After a few minutes, he stood and stubbed out the cigarette.  He kept humming as he walked into the bathroom.  Inside, a woman lay in an empty tub.  She was gagged and bound, her eyes wide, her skin pale except for bruises on her breasts and thighs.

The stranger knelt next to the tub, then stroked her cheek with the back of his left hand.  She didn't blink.

"I am Death," Elijah heard himself say through the stranger's voice.

*  *  *  *  *

Elijah opened his eyes and breathed deep.  Sitting up, he glanced at the clock.  He'd only slept forty-five minutes.

Another woman.  In every dream the guy killed women.  Not always the same way, but always women.

Elijah sipped from the flask and rubbed his face.  The dreams varied in length from time to time, just as his visions did.  He thought about how long he'd been having the dreams and wondered if it counted as living two lives.  It sure felt as if it should.

A few more sips and Elijah lay back down.

*  *  *  *  *

The alarm woke Elijah at five.  His head ached and his eyeballs burned.  He wanted to sleep for another day but forced himself out of bed.  After he dressed, he grabbed his bag, headed to the main lobby and checked out.

As he walked to the car, he heard a woman whimper.  He turned and looked around the parking lot.  It was dead quiet with the exception of the buzz of streetlights.  For a minute, he thought he had imagined the sobs, when he heard another.

Elijah slinked toward the side of the motel's main lobby.  The whimpers grew louder and more frequent.  Then he saw the movement of shadows on the asphalt.  Elijah pressed his back against the wall and peeked around the corner.

A large man, well over six feet, had a young girl pinned against the wall, and both had their pants around their ankles.  The man rammed her from behind holding the side of her face against the brick wall.  Her hands were duct-taped together behind her back and a strip covered her mouth.  Blood trickled from her nose and tears soaked her cheeks.

Elijah looked away.  He peeked again and they were gone. 

I am Vision, he thought.

His eyes scanned the parking lot, looking for the large man.  Then he found him, leaning against the front bumper of a semi-truck, picking his teeth with his nails.

Elijah pushed off the wall and walked toward the trucker.  As he did, the bell rang above the motel's entrance.  He glanced over his shoulder and saw the girl walking out wearing a maid's uniform.

He turned back to the trucker.  The man had stopped picking his teeth and was moving toward the girl.

Elijah walked faster and pulled a knife from his back pocket.  He flipped out the four-inch blade and held it at his side.  His pulse remained steady as he maneuvered around several cars and flanked the trucker from the right.

Crouching between two cars, Elijah lunged forward as soon as the trucker walked by, slicing the knife across the right Achilles tendon.  The guy crumpled to the ground and started to scream but Elijah pounced on his chest and covered his mouth with his left hand.

Wide eyes stared at Elijah, saying more than words.  Elijah swiftly slit the man's throat, and blood poured from the wound.  The trucker gagged and choked.

Elijah wiped the blade on the man's shirt and put it away.  Searching through pockets, he found a wad of tens and twenties.  He
stashed them in his jacket and stood.

The girl was in the maintenance room a few doors down from the lobby and was pulling out her cleaning cart.  Elijah breathed easy and moved away from the dying man at his feet, careful not to step in the pooling blood.

He reached his car and took a quick glance around the parking lot.  Quiet.  The buzzing of the lights.  Cicadas singing out in the brush.  Elijah climbed in, started the engine and headed back toward the highway.

*  *  *  *  *

A light mist blanketed the highway just after sunset east of Pensacola.  Elijah slowed, careful not to overdrive his headlights, travelling through a gray cocoon.  Thankfully, hardly any cars were on the road.

Elijah saw the silhouette of a person emerging out of the mist.  As he closed, the headlights illuminated a man with a thick beard standing on the shoulder, his right hand balled into a fist and stretched out toward Elijah, thumb up.

Elijah hesitated for a moment, not wanting to be bogged down with a tag along.  Time was his enemy right now and the fog had already slowed him.  But he didn't feel right leaving someone out in this weather where a passing semi might just as easily hit the man as stop for him.  He contemplated a moment longer, then pulled over a few feet past the stranger.

The man walked up and Elijah lowered the passenger window.

"Thanks for stopping.

"No problem," Elijah said.  "I can take you as far as Jacksonville.  After that, you're on your own again.

"Deal."

The man opened the door and climbed in.  Elijah noticed a small beat-up backpack, the patches of a handful of heavy metal bands sewn to its surface.

"Got a name?" Elijah said.

"Call me Miguel."

"Elijah."  The guy didn't look Hispanic but he let it go.  "Where you coming from?"

"Does it matter?"  Miguel was older, probably pushing fifty, and his voice sounded worn and recycled.

"No."  Elijah shifted into drive and accelerated.  "Do you always hitchhike?"

"Wouldn't travel any other way."

"To each their own."  Elijah couldn't see Miguel's face in the darkness of the car but imagined a smirk planted there.
 
"Been traveling long?"

"Since I left home.  Never settled down.  You?"

"The same."

"You a salesman?"

"Yep.  What about you?"

Miguel chuckled.  "Shit, I'm just a bum on a quest."

Elijah looked into the dark where he thought Miguel's face was then back to the road.  "Quest, huh?"

"Mind if I smoke?"

"Nah, go ahead."

Miguel rustled in his jacket, and a moment later the front of the car lit up.  Miguel's face materialized behind his flickering Zippo.  Then he snapped it shut and the car plunged back into darkness.  For a good while they travelled with the lone purr of the engine.

Miguel broke the silence.  "You're a shitty liar, you know that?"

"How's that?"

"You're no salesman."

Elijah's hands tightened around the wheel.  "I'm not?"

"Nope.  You're a bum, just like me.  Travel from place to place.  Work odd jobs; probably steal when you have to."

"I'm not like you."

"How's that?"

"I have a car."

"That you do."  Miguel laughed and patted the dashboard.  "That you do."

Elijah reached down with his left hand to his side.  He tried to move slow and not make noise on the seat.  If he could get to his knife without drawing attention, he could slip it to his right if Miguel tried anything.

"So how long have you had the visions?"

Elijah's hand froze on his hip.  The voice.  "What?"

"The visions, man.  How long?"

"I don't know--"

"Bullshit.  You see the ghosts of people who aren't dead yet.  That's what you told your momma when you were eleven, right?  'Momma, I see ghosts but the people aren't dead' or something like that.  Visions, man.  Things that are gonna happen."

Elijah's hands shook.  The voice.  "How do you know?"

"I dream about it."

Elijah looked at Miguel and saw only the glowing orange tip of his cigarette.  The voice.  He'd known as soon as he'd heard it, but just hadn't placed it.  The stranger.  The man from his recurring dream, right here next to him.

"I've been having dreams about you for a long time," Miguel said.  "I go to sleep and see you choking some pimp in an alley in Seattle.  Or see you cracking a mom's skull right before she tosses her infant in a dumpster in Sacramento.  Last night, I saw you knife some trucker outside Dallas."

It was hard for Elijah to breathe.  "Who are you?"

"Who are you?"  Miguel chuckled and took a deep drag, the orange tip glowing brighter.  "Figured there was a connection between us.  Something deep, you know, because it was always you and there was something, I don't know, familiar.  Took me a while to figure it out.  When I did, it made all the sense in the world."

Elijah wiped sweat from his upper lip.  "How'd you find me?"

"The date.  I knew where to be because that's where I had been.  Like I said, when I figured it out, it all made sense."

"So tell me what you figured out."

"You'll see soon enough."  Miguel took another puff and blew smoke at Elijah.  "First you got to see Mom.  Don't have much time."

Vertigo swirled about Elijah's head, and he swerved toward the shoulder before righting the car.  "You don't know shit about my mother."

"Oh, yes I do.  I know all about dear Mom.  How your daddy used to beat her, and you.  How she cracked Dad's skull with a bat and watched him bleed out.  How you got orphaned when she went to prison.  Oh, I know quite a bit."

Elijah's lower lip trembled.  There was silence between them for a few seconds. 

"I see things, too, you know," Miguel said.  "Visions, like you.  But I also see things that have already happened.  Past and future, I see it all.  Best of both worlds, so to speak.  You will, too."

"You're insane."

"We're the same, you know.  You just don't see it yet."

"You're Death."

"And you're Loneliness."  Another drag.  "You're Vision."

"I dream about you, too," Elijah said.  "Seen you kill women.  Innocents.  So don't compare me to you."

"Why'd you kill that trucker?"

"To save that girl."

"You didn't have to kill him, though.  But you slit his throat without a second thought.  Doesn't sound like the action of a good man to me.  I think you like it.  In fact, I know you do."

"I use my gift for good."

"You use it as an excuse to kill and it's a curse, not a gift.  I almost went insane when I was fifteen, hearing all their voices.  How old were you when it became too much?  When you realized you had to run away to silence them?"

Elijah didn't answer.  He was instead plotting ways to get Miguel out of the car.

"I guess it doesn't really matter," Miguel said.  "You ran away just like me.  And then you started killing just like me.  So you see, we are the same."

"I don't kill innocent people."

"You want a medal or something?  We'll see how you do when you're completely alone with nothing else in your life.  Because when you've got nothing, when you don't have an anchor for all that hate, you stop pretending to care about strangers.  All you care about then is feeling alive, like you matter.  I matter to those women because I decide if they live or die.  You'll learn soon enough, wait and see.  You're not special.  And before I'm done with you, I'll show you how you die."