Last night, I had resigned myself to stay out of this little competition. I am too old, I have lived too long and seen too many dead before me to be a "winner" of this game. I said that I will not be forced to kill, not for this unseen Game Master, not for anyone.
How quickly this notion was disabused of me.
This morning, I awoke to find myself looking at the edge of a knife. A man, wild-haired and wild-eyed, was holding it to my throat. He gestured to the remains of the campfire I had built. "Found you with the smoke," he said. "Lots of people don't know that. Makes it easier for us to find them."
"And who would 'us' be exactly?" I asked.
The man squinted, as if he didn't expect me to respond, or he expected a different respond. Perhaps pleading or screaming of some sort. "The hunters," he said, "the killers."
"And you are one of these hunters?" I asked.
"Yeah," the man said. He licked his lips and pulled his knife a little ways back. "I've already killed two and I only got here yesterday."
"That makes you a killer," I said, "not a hunter. Did you find them like you found me? Asleep and unprotected? Did you wake them just to taunt them, as you do with me? That is not hunting. That is as far from hunting as I can imagine."
"Shut up," the man said and brought his knife back. Unfortunately for him, I had already gotten a grip on my rifle, hidden underneath my blanket, and I brought it forward with a crack, hitting him across the temple.
He awoke several hours later to find the situations reversed.
"Did you mean to frighten me?" I asked him, as he took in his surroundings and his eyes widened in shock. "Son, I have seen more than you ever will. I have seen friends die and enemies live. I survived the Battle of Shiloh and it haunts me still. I have seen my sons die before I and that was probably the worst of all." I picked up my gun. "I have killed before. Men younger than you, men who were merely trying to serve their country, to do what they believed was right. You call yourself a hunter, but a hunter kills without taking the sadistic glee you took. A hunter would kill someone in their sleep to give them mercy, rather than wake them and give them terror." I loaded the rifle and aimed. The man started crying and blubbering, a most unmanly sight.
I stopped and set down my rifle again. "Do you swear?" I asked him. "If I do release you, do you swear you will not kill another soul here?"
He did. He swore on his mother's grave and upon all the graves of his family and friends. I did not want to kill him, so I almost believed him. Almost.
I went over to the supplies I had found on him. A large knife, serrated on one edge. A smaller pocket knife. Some small food in bar form (I took a bite of one and found it actually tasted particularly good). And a notebook. A diary.
It was the diary of a young girl. In the morning sunlight, I read of how she was tormented by shadows and how she fled them across the country. And then how she woke up to find herself here, in this Hellish landscape. The rest of the diary was splattered with blood.
I turned back to the man. He had calmed a bit, now thinking I was not going to kill him. I lifted my rifle again and asked, "Do you swear?"
He looked surprised when he died. Almost as if he didn't believe it was going to happen until the last second. We never believe it's going to happen, not until the last second. The last moment before dying.
This will be more difficult than I thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment