“So the idea is, we’re supposed to shoot each other, right?” Edgar said.
I nodded. “Looks like it. I don’t see anybody else we can shoot around here.” I shifted in search of a more comfortable position on the mossy rock, but no matter how much I wiggled my butt, the mossy rock refused to turn into a cushioned chaise longue. “They did the same thing, what, eight years ago? When they chose that married couple to be the Hunters.”
“At least they dumped those two on a tropical island.” Edgar sat on a log across from me, rifle across his knees, bright orange bulletproof vest doing nothing good at all for his complexion. Apart from the vest, he was dressed in street clothes, just like me, though his shoes were shinier and even less suited to tromping through this heavily wooded wilderness than my running shoes were. “They got to float in the pure blue waters before they tried to murder each other.”
“Are we, ah . . . I mean . . .”
Edgar shook his head. “I can’t shoot you, Gary. Even if I did, I don’t think I could live with myself afterward, not for all the cash and prizes in the world. If it comes to it, you should shoot me. I’d rather have you alive than be alive myself without you.”
“You say the sweetest things,” I said. “And ditto.”
“I mean it, Gary. If it’s you or me, I pick you—”
I shook my head. “Nope. That’s off the table. Just move on. So, instead, what? We just wait it out, and when the Gamekeeper comes tomorrow morning, we let him execute us both together?”
“Go out holding hands, and kid ourselves that we’ll become martyrs or revolutionary symbols or something, the power of love conquering self-preservation?”
We both sighed, simultaneously. Our thoughts often ran along similar lines. It was one reason we’d stayed together after what should have been a drunken one-night stand all those years ago. “At least if we die that way, we’re just victims of the brutal, oppressive oligarchy, and not traitors to our own hearts,” Edgar said.
“Nice one,” I said. Edgar wrote listicles for websites for a living—“9 Ways to Blow Her Mind in the Kitchen!” and the like—so he was good at pithy turns of phrase. I was the more blue-collar of the two of us, which meant I occasionally had to leave my desk to do my work: I serviced Internet connections and made sure the oligarchy’s snoopware was running properly.
“You want to just have sex until death comes for us?” I asked. I wondered if that green stuff over there was poison ivy. We never even went camping.
Edgar looked up at the hovering camera-orbs, which were also loaded with nonlethal (and, eventually, lethal) countermeasures designed to keep us from leaving the field of play. “You know I have trouble doing it with people watching. Even people watching through floating cameras. Besides, I don’t want to give them the satisfaction, you know? I’d rather my last hours alive not be used to get people to sign up for a gay porn site next week.”
“Then we might as well walk around for a while,” I said. “We’ve got almost a full day. Who knows, maybe there are a couple of off-the-grid hermits living in these woods.”
“We can dare to dream.” Edgar rose, cradling his rifle awkwardly. “Where do you think we are, anyway? The northwest zone?”
“Mmm. Maybe. The air’s pretty crisp, though. Probably part of old Canada, or maybe—what was it called, Alaska?”
“Probably not a lot of hermits around here, then,” he said. “They’d die the first winter.”
“Oh, well. It’s been ages since we went hiking.”
“It’s not a bad way to spend the last day of your life.” He spat in the direction of one of the floating orbs, and it bobbed out of the way. “At least we can make sure the show is boring.”
We set off, neither of us expecting to find an innocent human being to kill, but hoping.
* * * *
Edgar liked to trade for those old dystopian novels at the swap market. He liked to laugh at how much worse things really were, in some ways, than what those writers had imagined. Me, I always thought they were implausible, all the convoluted explanations they’d come up with to explain why the government would send a bunch of teenagers to murder each other on an island with automatic weapons, or send a bunch of teenagers to murder each other in a high-tech arena with bows and arrows, or send a bunch of teenagers to run from genetically engineered monsters in a maze, or whatever—there was always some kind of reason. Like, the games were pacification measures to keep the oppressed peoples in line, or the result of some ancient pact with dark forces, or a way to fund a cash-strapped prison system with baroque live executions, or whatever.
When the real reason the people in charge make games of life and death is so much simpler: because they can, and because it amuses them.
So, a few times a year, two Hunters are chosen, snatched out of their beds, given a hasty briefing, and handed weapons—anything from machetes to flamethrowers. They’re dropped in the middle of somewhere—a major city, or one of the lawless zones, or a hidden rebel camp. (They’re never as hidden as the rebels think.) If the Hunters get dropped someplace where there might be real resistance, they probably get full body armor. If they’re dropped on a soft target, like a resort for mid-level bureaucrats or a vocational school for the plebs, they get stab-proof vests or something.
The rules are simple: as a Hunter, you can kill anyone. And as a Hunter, you have to kill at least one person. If you don’t kill someone before your time limit runs out, the Gamekeeper—whichever minor media personality the oligarchs appoint to host a particular show—appears and kills you in some baroque way, often sobbing uncontrollably during the process, since minor media personalities aren’t usually stone-cold emotionless killers. That way, the audience got to see something entertaining, even if the Hunters don’t play along.
Except the oligarchs don’t actually care about the audience; they just care about amusing themselves. My department monitors all web traffic, and ratings are actually a lot lower than you might expect, at least if you get your ideas about human nature from the sort of books Edgar liked to read. It turns out most people don’t enjoy watching snuff films—the incidence of psychopaths in the general population just isn’t that high. (The incidence of psychopaths among the oligarchs, on the other hand . . .)
So, when Edgar and I were roused in our bed in the middle of the night, we had a brief flare of hope that it was just a murderous home invasion but were swiftly brought around to the reality that we’d been chosen as Hunters. We talked about it in the downtime between briefings, and surgeries, and transport—about whether we’d be able to go through with it, whether it would be okay if we picked people who were really old or something—and came to terms with the reality that we would have to kill to live.
Then we were given bright orange bulletproof vests, rifles, and hunting knives, and dumped in the middle of the woods seemingly days away from anyone, and we thought: Fuck it. Maybe doomed token resistance was the best we could do, but it was better than the alternative of turning on each other.
* * * *
“Wait.” Edgar grabbed my arm and crouched down behind a fallen log, pulling me with him. We both awkwardly tried to keep our rifles pointed away from each other and ourselves. I stared into the trees, looking for whatever he’d seen, but all I saw was the occasional flash of a bird—
Then a figure emerged no more than a dozen yards away, leaning with one hand against a tree, head hung low, as if breathing hard. He—if it was a he—looked to be dressed in rags and leaves, and stood with his back to us. I lifted my gun, shakily, and started to lay the barrel across the log to keep it steady.
“Wait,” Edgar said. “If you shoot him, that saves you, but I’d still get killed.”
I was more eager to fire than I would have expected. “What do you suggest instead?” We had a victim in the hand here, and I didn’t want him to slip away.
“Follow him. Maybe he’s part of a camp of off-the-grid resistance fighters or something, and we can kill a couple of them and save us both.”
Our weird woodsman didn’t look like the social type, and I was about to point that out when the figure moved . . . and I saw his tail, four feet long, wrist-thick at the base and tapering to a point at the end, the color of moss, curling and uncurling as he walked away.
“Is—did you—what the fuck is that?”
“Guy with a tail,” Edgar said thoughtfully. “Wonder if it counts as a person for Hunter purposes?” I noticed the switch from “he” to “it” and approved. It’s a lot easier to kill an “it.”
“The genetically engineered weirdos in that nightclub three years back counted,” I said. “That girl with the eyes on the back of her head, remember?”
Edgar nodded. “Let’s try to follow it.” He pulled off his bright orange vest, and after a moment, I did too. The thing we were following didn’t look like the gun-toting sort—more like pointy stick at best—but it was still hard to give up the protection, though if we were going to have any shot at being stealthy, being a color other than bright orange made sense.
We crept through the woods, and I’m not going to lie: it wasn’t easy to track the thing. Not because it was stealthy—in fact, the only reason we kept up at all was because it didn’t try to be stealthy at all. It took lots of breaks to rest, broke lots of branches, even gabbled to itself in something between human language and the chittering of a squirrel. We tried to trail it from a respectable distance so it wouldn’t notice us, and we did a pretty good job. Every so often, it would stop to pick a mushroom, but otherwise it moved in a pretty straight line.
After an hour or so—our phones had been taken, so we wouldn’t know exactly how long we had until we were going to die, because the oligarchs thought it was funnier that way—the woods changed. There were . . . decorations. If you’ve ever seen a backwoods murder cult horror movie, you know the sort of things I mean: mobiles made from bones dangling from tree branches, animal skulls on sticks, half-rotting taxidermy monstrosities, like squirrels with bird wings sewn on the back. Edgar and I looked at each other, wide-eyed, holding our rifles at the ready, and he was probably wishing we’d had more than half an hour of practice on the gun range that morning, just like I was.
The thing we were following lurched forward more slowly, as if reluctant to reach its destination. I was thinking about shooting it, just to break the tension, when my ankle hit the trip wire.
I didn’t get jerked up in the air by a rope. A big spiked log didn’t fall down on my head. There was no explosion. Instead, I hit the wire, and it pulled loose a big string of bells and tin cans and spoons, making a noise of jangling metal they probably could have heard all the way back in civilization.
A harsh voice shouted, “Intruders! The ritual must continue!” and then the thing we were following whirled around to face us.
We’d never seen it from the front before. Edgar whimpered, and I’m sure I did too.
We’d assumed it was a bioengineered freak, but if so, it was the weirdest one I’d ever seen. Its head was entirely faceless, blank as a gourd, topped by a thatch of filthy hair. Instead, it had a face in its torso—eyes the size of pie plates, black-irised and bloodshot, where the nipples should have been; two ragged holes for a nose below that; and a wide gash full of yellowed triangular teeth all the way across the belly at navel level.
The thing ran toward us, arms outstretched, making more of that horrible gabbling noise. One of the hovering camera orbs swooped in to get a better look, and the thing reached out, and—
I don’t know how to explain what its arm did. It reached out, and I want to say it extended, but that’s wrong. It seemed to . . . zigzag, curving in a way that would have been possible if it had possessed a dozen elbows, only parts of the arm seemed to vanish and then reappear. It was like watching the reflection of a reaching arm in the shards of a cracked mirror. (Edgar muttered something about “non-Euclidean motion,” and I don’t remember much of high school geometry, but I think I know what he meant.) The hand snatched the orb from the air, retracted in a fraction of a second, and then the thing shoved the orb into its mouth and swallowed it. (Was the stomach right behind the mouth? Did it even have a biology that makes sense? I have no idea. Maybe its innards were non-Euclidean too.)
Apparently, the orbs enraged it more than we did, because it reached one impossible arm up into a tree and swung through the branches like some kind of nightmare ape, and its other arm and its tail both lashed after the remaining camera orbs, eating one and smashing the other to the ground, where it sparked and sizzled. The cameras should have been crush-proof, melt-proof, altogether indestructible—every other year or so, a Hunter went nuts and tried to wreck them, without success—but the one on the ground looked pretty well destroyed.
The cameras weren’t watching anymore. For a moment, I thought, We can run, but then I remembered the trackers they’d embedded over our hearts. We could try to cut them out with our hunting knives, maybe, but I was squeamish about the idea—what do we know about doing surgery? We don’t even cut meat; we’re vegetarians.
While I was pondering escape and tracking devices—in other words, while I was in denial—Edgar was dealing with the present and the actual. He lifted the rifle, took careful aim, and shot the thing in the head. Or the bulb that would have been a head on a human. The blank knob exploded like a watermelon smashed with a hammer, and the thing fell out of the tree, howling from its vast mouth. By then, I had my gun up, and I shot when it got to its feet, managing to take it right in one immense eye. The thing fell back, all its limbs twitching, but at least in a totally Euclidean way, with no weird disappearing movements.
“So, I guess that’s your kill,” Edgar said.
“I’m not sure that counts as a human. The way it moved . . . unless the Gamekeeper is pumping hallucinogens into the atmosphere . . . there’s no body-mod that lets your arms do that. It’s dead, at least. Should we be worrying about the ones who screamed ‘intruders’?”
“Maybe they’re more like humans.” He nudged the sparking camera orb on the ground. It looked oddly melted on one side, where the thing’s tail had struck it, and I took a step away from the still–mildly twitching body, wondering if its touch did peculiar things to reality. “Assuming we even get credit for kills now that we aren’t being watched.”
“They’ll have us on satellite view or something, won’t they?” I said, then looked up at the heavy tree cover.
“Or they might have surveillance devices implanted on us as well as the tracking devices. I did wake up from the surgery with a wicked headache. Maybe our eyes are cameras now.”
We flipped off each other, simultaneously, and grinned. “Suck it, people watching at home,” I said. “Let’s go see if there’s anyone else we can shoot.”
I wasn’t sure what the point of stealth was and, frankly, was a bit surprised that nobody else had attacked us . . . until we reached the clearing. The people there had plenty on their minds. Siccing that thing on us had probably taken all the attention they could spare.
Five people dressed in ragged robes of moss stood equidistant around a hemisphere of some glittering black rock as big as a picnic table. The stone reminded me of volcanic glass, but it had strange blue highlights, which looked almost like fireflies moving under the surface, and I instinctively felt the rock came from elsewhere—that it had fallen from space, or someplace even stranger. The people had their arms raised up, and they were vibrating, as if every one of them had touched a live electrical wire, and there was this weird hum, low and tooth-rattling, coming from the stone or the figures or both. I moved around to get a better view of the stone—something about it drew the eye—and saw a man sitting on top of the rock, cross-legged, totally naked, staring up at the open circle of blue sky above the clearing.
Suddenly, the humming stopped, and the five standing figures lowered their heads, the vibrations done. “The way is opening,” the man on the rock shouted, in the same voice that had called us intruders.
The men in the ragged moss robes—one was a woman, and one appeared to have spiraling goat horns, but most were men—turned toward us, and Edgar started shooting them.
I was afraid he was panicking and wouldn’t leave any for me, so I lifted my own rifle and shot the one with antlers and one of the men. The other three, Edgar got. They all fell, dead or dying or groaning . . . except the one with horns, who seemed to dissolve into the ground, horns becoming broken tree branches, flesh becoming mossy slime, robe indistinguishable from the forest floor.
“No!” the man on the rock screamed. “Stop! Heart’s blood must touch the stone or the way will not—”
Edgar shot him in the head, which wasn’t that impressive from such close range, and the naked man fell off the rock.
“I don’t think we get extra credit for killing more than one apiece,” I said.
The gun fell from Edgar’s hands and he sat on the ground, then put his face in his hands. His shoulders shook as he wept.
I didn’t feel like crying. I felt numb. (That lasted for a while. It’s wearing off now.)
I looked at the sky, the one patch of blue over the clearing, only it wasn’t blue anymore: there was a hole in the sky, about the circumference of a full moon, with a burned look around the edges. Beyond the hole was blackness. “Heart’s blood,” I said, and didn’t know why.
* * * *
Edgar found the book. A grimoire bound in human skin with a screaming demon face on the spine would have been more appropriate, but this was a battered three-ring binder full of everything from wide-ruled notebook paper scrawled in blue ink to ancient parchment that might have been written in blood. A lot of it was in languages we didn’t read—Latin, Greek, weirder stuff—but about half of it was the journal of the leader of this group . . . the naked guy, probably.
They weren’t rebels or revolutionaries, at least, not exactly. They were “seers of the unseen,” among other things. The leader described rituals and sacrifices, and talked about peeling off the skin of the world, calling up the ancients, overthrowing the hegemony of man. It would have seemed like nonsense . . . but he talked about summoning the “akephaloi,” which Edgar was pretty sure meant “headless ones,” and about calling forth a “goat of the woods,” and those sure sounded like the other-than-human things we’d encountered. If these people could do that, call up things like those, then who knew where the edge of plausibility was?
“Did the oligarchs send us here on purpose to kill them?” Edgar said. “Like the way they drop Hunters on rebel camps sometimes?”
I shook my head. “I think if the oligarchs knew there were things like this, with power like that, they’d drop rocks on them from orbit. And now that they’ve seen them, from before the cameras were destroyed, or through our eyes now . . . I bet that’s what’s going to happen. Any time now. Fire from heaven.”
“No cash and prizes,” Edgar said dully, flipping a page in the binder.
“No being shunned by our friends because we murdered some people and got PTSD, either,” I said. I was thinking, but the thoughts were far away. My inner landscape had become frozen tundra. “That thing in the sky, Edgar . . . That hole. The naked guy said the way was open. What does that mean?”
“The last pages of the journal talk about a ritual,” he said. “To summon up . . .” He ran his finger along a page and recited. “ ‘Gods of nature beyond our nature, vast in comparison to mankind, who will tread on us as carelessly as we tread on grass, cold but not cruel, as indifferent toward the monuments of man as a tornado is to the farmhouse it destroys, or the running deer to the spiderweb it disturbs.”
“Indifference,” I said. “That doesn’t sound so bad, compared to the oligarchs. To be stepped on by accident is better than to be stepped on because somebody thinks it’s funny.”
Edgar climbed up on the rock, holding his hunting knife. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“I mean . . . yeah.” I didn’t feel much about it one way or another.
“Okay, then. I’m glad I got to be alive with you for a while, Gary.”
I saw what he was going to do, and got to my feet, but I was too slow. He plunged the knife into his chest. His eyes went wide, and he gasped, bubbles of frothy blood spraying from his lips. Edgar wrenched the knife out of his chest, and blood spurted across the black-and-blue stone.
The humming came back, louder than before, like trillions of flies descending on a world-sized corpse. I looked up, where the circle of darkness burned and spread and burned and widened. I started to feel something then, like an ice floe breaking up in my chest.
I pulled Gary’s body off the rock, and sat down beside him, and started writing this in the journal with the dead man’s pen. Maybe someone will be left, to wonder why the world changed. I don’t know why, but this is how.
The whole sky is black now, full of blue sparks, and there are structures growing in the darkness.
I’m going to close the journal now and wait for the next thing to happen.