Death Hunt. James Axler

he could see Rachel and young Jolyon, the children he had never seen grow to maturity, and who had been dead for longer than he could know—longer, indeed, than he had been alive. How could a father so outlive his children? It wasn’t natural. But then, what had happened to him hadn’t been natural.

      They couldn’t see him like this. They couldn’t. He turned his head away from them as they approached, tears streaming down his face, his body shuddering in convulsive sobs.

      “You okay, man?” the rider asked him, a worried note creeping into his voice.

      Doc didn’t answer. It took all his effort not to turn to look at his wife and children as he heard the Brougham approach, gaining with every second. If he could only…if he could just…just wait until the sound was on the wane. If he could only keep his will intact for that long, then surely his sanity would also follow?

      It was no good. As the Brougham approached, he felt compelled to turn. It was a force far greater than his meager willpower could cope with—the force of longing, despair and loneliness. Everything he had ever held dear to him had been snatched away—or else he had been snatched away from it. His wife, his children…

      Doc gave in to his longing and turned to face the oncoming Brougham. His eyes were wide, tears coursing down his cheeks. As the vehicle passed him, he could see Emily, Rachel and Jolyon turn to look at him. They were the ages they had been when he had last seen them, but changed. Their eyes were empty and their skins were dry and mummified. They were husks. As he, himself, was now…

      Doc looked away, crying out in pain and rage. The rider in front tried to keep his eyes fixed on the path ahead. He had heard nothing, seen nothing. There was nothing…

      The other riders exchanged glances and shrugs. If they were expecting any of the companions riding with them to explain, they would wait in vain.

      Jak had questions of his own. He was riding behind a wide, fat-bellied bald man whose apparent bulk wasn’t just due to excess weight. Underneath, there was a lot of muscle, as Jak had found when he had almost fallen from the horse early in the journey, the horse stumbling in a rut and throwing both riders forward. The bald man had moved with the motion, but Jak had been taken unawares and almost thrown. As he’d toppled, the man had shot out an arm and grabbed Jak. The albino youth had, in turn, taken grip of the arm. He had expected soft flesh. Instead he’d gripped muscles and tendons that were like barbed wire wrapped around brick.

      “Thanks,” he had said simply as he clambered back.

      “No problem—name’s Stark,” the man had replied with an equal simplicity.

      Both were men of few words, but had found a respect for each other in that seemingly inconsequential moment. Jak had thought the man a blubber mountain and had found hidden depths. In return, Stark had been impressed by the albino’s lightning-quick reaction, and the wiry strength with which he’d flung himself back into the saddle; all the more remarkable after the firefight he had just been through.

      Since that moment they had conducted a conversation that had been drawn out not by the lack of things to say, but by the natural manner of both. Jak would ask an elliptical question and Stark would pause for a long while, considering an answer that wasted no words. He would then phrase a question of his own and Jak would reply in kind.

      Neither had passed comment on Doc, but Jak chose that moment to ask what he felt was an important question.

      “Why you hunt stickies?”

      Stark waited for some time, then said, “Like Ethan said.”

      “So why follow so far when they move on? No sense if they not cause damage. Waste of energy and ammo.”

      “Mebbe. But like I say, it’s as Ethan says.”

      Jak pondered this. There was a coded message in there, if only he could unlock it. His keen senses were jangling with the rush he always felt when there was danger ahead. It wasn’t like Krysty’s mutie doomie sense, it was something altogether more instinctual, a preternatural development of his instincts that had been honed by years of survival, years of hunting.

      “Ethan always tell how it is?” Jak asked finally.

      A long pause. “Ethan always tells it how he sees it.”

      Jak considered that. Stark picked his words very carefully and he hadn’t actually agreed with what Jak had said.

      Their conversation lapsed. The pauses lengthened into silence as they rode on through a night that was now approaching dawn. The other companions were having trouble keeping conscious as fatigue and lack of sleep tried to claim them. But Jak, who had spent so many hours in a state of inert awareness waiting for prey, was able to focus and to stay alert.

      So it was that he noticed something very strange, something that made his instincts quiver more than ever.

      As the mounted party traversed the trail ripped up by the stickies, the ville of Pleasantville became visible in the distance. A shattered metropolis lay beyond, remnants of old skyscrapers and buildings dimly visible in the early-morning haze. But the ville itself seemed to have been constructed in an old suburban area. It was still too dim for him to fully distinguish, even though his red albino eyes found the twilight of evening and dawn more conducive than the bright light of a daytime sun. However, there was something that made no sense if what Ethan had told them was the whole truth. For, to reach the ville, the riders now left the track that had been carved by the pack of stickies. A track that veered off to one side of the farthest outcrop of the ville, past the last buildings and signs of life that Jak could see.

      Surely they had been told that the pack had attacked farms on the edge of the ville, which was why they had been chased. But the track, clearly visible because of the devastation it had caused, veered off way past the last sign of tilled land, cutting across an area that could only be described as a wilderness.

      Why had Ethan lied? It looked as though the stickies had passed close to the ville, but hadn’t actually made contact. So why mount the chase at all?

      Jak was sure that the answer to this question would also provide an answer to the churning sense of anxiety gnawing at his guts. They were riding into a danger of some kind, of that he was certain. What it was had to be determined, but as he cast a glance at the rest of the companions, tired and battered on the backs of their mounts, in no condition to fight, he was concerned that they were riding into trouble when they were least capable to deal with it.

      The ground was now softer under hoof, less rutted and destroyed. The movement of the horses became more fluid, lulling the already exhausted companions into a stupor, with no bone-jarring ruts to shake them out of their torpor. Jak wondered if any of the others had noticed that they had left the stickies’ path, and that it deviated from the ville.

      Why? Why had they been lied to? Why had the stickies been hunted so ruthlessly? Was that what had whipped them into a frenzy, or had something else happened to make them that way…perhaps so they could be hunted?

      Jak felt the movement of the horse begin to lull him. A sense of fatigue and exhaustion swept over him, making it hard to concentrate.

      Shit, whatever faced them, he needed to sleep first. He had no choice.

      He jolted awake suddenly. What had caused him to stir? His head was pounding, his heart racing. The last thing he could remember was the ville coming into sight and feeling so, so tired.

      Jak raised himself on one elbow and took a look around. First thing to strike him as weird was that he was lying down. How the fuck had that happened without his realizing it? His eyes adjusted easily to the gloom and he could see that the other companions were also in the room with him. There were two windows, with thick hangings that kept out the light, apart from at the very edges where they weren’t flush to the windowframe. Through these gaps, Jak could see that it was a bright light, but not the intensity of midday. Probably late afternoon, early evening.

      The room itself was plastered and painted in a light color that trapped whatever could get through the hangings and magnified it. In this half light, Jak could