The Hunter Read online

  Her parents visited. Sandra, my girlfriend, too. But their voices were never as strong as Rachel’s or Amanda’s.

  “Ben, it’s been two months,” Rachel said out of nowhere. Then her hand disappeared from mine, the physical connection lost. Her next words came out muffled. “They want to take you off life support. You’re not dying or anything, but they’re not convinced you’re all together up there. Mom’s fighting it, but…”

  She’s only fighting it for Amanda. So Amanda doesn’t end up truly alone.

  I’m here! I shouted into the void. Maybe if I yelled loud enough, my words would make it through. Even a single whispered proof of life might have been enough. Rachel, please! Don’t let them do it!

  “If only you could squeeze my hand,” she said. “Not like before. Not some twitch or muscle spasm, but a real response, Ben.”

  I’m trying! I cried. No tears came, not in the void where everything human lacked existence, but if I were there, if I wasn’t stuck in the darkness, I’d have cried. My chest heaved, but my breaths were shallow. Good. Maybe all of this would register on those machines of theirs.

  “I need you, Ben,” she said. “Things… Something’s happened.”

  My heart stopped. Not really, but that was sure what it felt like.

  “It’s not Amanda or anything, so don’t worry about that.”

  Relief flashed through me but didn’t wash away all my fears. Amanda was fine. They could pull the plug on me, but if she and Rachel and Michael were okay, I’d maybe get through this to accept my death.

  “I’m… different now,” she said. “I don’t know how else to explain it. But since you… You can’t talk. So I want to tell you.”

  Lightning flashed on the void’s horizon with her words. Honest-to-god lightning. The crack of it lit the shore and for the first time, I was able to see I was standing on an island surrounded by water. Lake water. I glanced down—no, it wasn’t an island I stood on. It was a boat, big enough to pace back and forth on. But waves and thunder rolled between me and the shore Rachel now stood on, and in the blink of an eye, the lightning flash disappeared. And so did my vision.

  “The doctors said you took the full lightning strike,” Rachel said. “That somehow you grounded it, and you alone were struck. The rest of us got thrown because of the boat capsizing. But I’m not sure I believe them.”

  Silence followed like she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell me, the person in a coma, what had happened. Like she thought she was crazy. Or maybe I was projecting because for the first time in what was apparently weeks, I’d made progress in the void. Maybe I could even leave it.

  A steady beeping sounded in the back of my head.

  “I think I was struck too,” Rachel said. “Then I almost drowned. They said if Michael had taken even a minute longer to get me to shore and perform CPR, I’d have died. Died, Ben. But not once did I feel like I was drowning. The water felt like home, as stupid as that sounds. It didn’t feel harmful.”

  More silence.

  “I also never had water in my lungs.”

  But if they thought she drowned… if they didn’t release her for a week…

  “I was out overnight but not in a coma. I never drowned. The water… I think it saved me. Somehow. I don’t know.”

  Well, it sure sounded crazy. But since my current home was an edgeless void of darkness covering a lake, I couldn’t judge.

  Lightning streaked across the void’s sky again, illuminating my surroundings. Waves crashed along the boat’s side as thunder boomed overhead.

  Rachel’s hand returned, squeezing mine tightly. “You need to make it out of this so you can tell me I’m crazy. Michael… It doesn’t work coming from him. He’s my brother. He thinks everything I say is crazy. And I can’t tell Amanda. So you’re it, buddy. Wake up. Please. I need you. Mom and Dad… they’re not handling this well. Neither is your sister. Even if none of the rest of us matters, she should.”

  What, did she think I didn’t care for her or them the same because they weren’t my immediate family? Her parents had raised Amanda and me since we were little kids as if we’d been their own children.

  Anger flashed hot, a frustration that bore deep into myself, but for a single moment it chased away the chilling cold that normally numbed my mind.

  Rachel gasped and squeezed my hand. “Ben?”

  My heart leaped. Did she feel that? Was anger the key?

  I tried again, thinking of that time Larry Sims had cost us the state championship in high school. The idiot had temporarily lost all common sense and run straight down the middle of the other team’s defense with the ball in hand. Like a moron. We’d lost because of Larry and I’d never been so mad in my entire life. We’d worked our asses off that year to go into the state championship undefeated.

  Rachel squealed, gasping. “Ben. Are you doing that on purpose? Squeeze twice for ‘yes.’”

  Larry. Football. His dumb ass running for the defensive line.

  Red flashed on the horizon, anger squeezing my lungs and chest. But Rachel didn’t respond to it. I must not have moved my fingers.

  More. I needed more anger, more frustration. More of any extreme emotion. That had to be the key, right?

  Courtney Summers. She’d dumped me freshman year for my best friend.

  Rachel thinking I didn’t count her as family because she was my cousin. Rachel and Michael had always been more like siblings to me. Always. How dumb could she have been to think that?

  My parents dying young. Young and innocent, leaving behind two children because someone else had decided to drive after a night of drinking. So stupid. So awful.

  A brilliant crimson strike of lightning passed by overhead as thunder crashed all around me. Through me. Became a part of me.

  Rachel screeched and her hand was gone. A quick moment and nothing.

  The red light vanished and I waited. And waited.

  The void moved to swallow me again as darkness returned. Silence. And nothing.

  Silence and nothing.

  And then: “What was that?”

  What was what? Did I squeeze too hard or something?

  “Holy crap,” Rachel said. “Was that lightning between your fingers? That was no static electricity… Shit. I think you burned my finger.”

  Guilt crashed down over me. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. Just show her I was still here.

  “Ben. You just shocked me with electricity? I…”

  More silence. More crazy. Shocking someone with lightning, how stupid an idea was that?

  But then Rachel’s hand returned, looser in grip this time, and she must have bent down because her next words were louder than ever, as if she were saying them directly into my ear: “I can control water. Like a magician. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  Excuse me? Nope. No way. That made no sense.

  Except… if what she said were true, if I’d shocked her, that implied I had some measure of control, right?

  Did I keep that lightning strike from hitting everyone else when we were on that boat?

  “I think the—”

  Her voice cut off and disappeared into the void. She was gone for so long, I thought she’d left me hanging with all the questions that swam around my head, written on the void’s sky like golden clouds made of words. What did she mean by controlling water? How had I shocked her?

  Then her voice trailed back to me. “It’s okay, Sandra. Spend all the time you want with him. I have to get going anyway. I need to pick Amanda up from school.”

  Sandra. My girlfriend and high school sweetheart. We’d gone to the same college and had made it together for all three years without even thinking of breaking up. I honestly thought she might be the one. Until this void had come and stolen my life.

  It was Sandra’s voice that next sifted into the darkness. “I love you, Ben. Please wake up. We have our last year of school to get through, and I can’t do it without you.”

  I’m trying, I wanted to say. I’m tr
ying so hard, but no matter what I do, this void won’t let me go.

  It might never let me go.

  I forced my legs to move. Not in the real world—inside the void. If I could just get off this boat or somehow get to shore, I might be able to find a way out. But I’d been stuck here for what Rachel said was three months now, and I hadn’t yet found a single way off this damn dinghy.

  It sounded stupid. It was just a boat. But the darkness constantly encompassed me and without light, my eyes couldn’t adjust. The small bursts of lightning that appeared whenever Rachel visited weren’t enough. And when she was here, as she was the only person I ever really heard consistently, I didn’t try to escape. I was too busy listening to what she tried to say.

  She’d somehow convinced her parents to keep me on life support over the past month. I assumed that meant she’d proved to them that I’d grabbed her hand, if not that I’d also shocked her that one time.

  But I’d grown tired of this void. Of listening to life continue outside of it without me, and without any sort of life jacket being thrown my way. I didn’t often rely on others, but something deep inside of me said I’d need other people to get out of this alive.

  But words weren’t flashlights or weapons or rope. I had to do this on my own.

  So I forced my legs to move. Foot by foot, I inched along the middle of the rowboat up to the stern and faced the shore. I pulled in a deep breath, the dark void filling my lungs, and poised to jump. Judging by the last lightning strike, I wasn’t that far from the beach. About a hundred yards, at any rate.

  One jump. A hundred-yard swim.

  It couldn’t be that hard. Could it?

  “One,” I said, getting ready to jump. “Two.” Another deep breath. “Three.”

  I pushed off the boat’s wooden floor with everything I had, then pulled some extra strength from Rachel’s words about Amanda needing me. There was a whole world outside of this void and I needed to be in it. For Amanda and Rachel. For Sandra and Michael. For my football team. This quarterback was needed for the national college championship, dammit.

  I pushed off the stern and jumped, leaping just far enough to make it over the edge of the boat and—

  I slammed into the surface of the lake with a force that knocked the breath from my lungs. The freezing cold water shocked my body, clenching up my muscles and arms and legs. My feet didn’t touch the bottom even as I sank.

  Swim.

  The command rang like a gong in my head, echoing and vibrating against my mind.

  Swim, Ben.

  So I did. Up, up, up. I gasped for air as soon as my head breached the surface and forced my arms and legs to get to work. Kicking and paddling, anything to reach the shore, holding on to this desperation as I did so.

  A wave the height of a car roared toward me. I ducked my head under the water and kept swimming, letting the wave pass even as it shook my body. Coldness seeped into my bones, but at least I was aware of my bones and body and chest now. Before, I hadn’t felt anything but my mind and emotions.

  Slowly, I made my way to shore. Yard by yard, one freezing cold car-sized wave after the next. My feet hit bottom, and I walked, struggling to remain upright in the waves as they ebbed and flowed from the ocean. They tried to pull me with them, tiny hands clinging to my pants and feet, but I kicked them off and kept walking.

  Red lightning struck the sky overhead. No thunder this time.

  I gritted my teeth, took it as a sign, and kept going, one foot in front of the other until my feet were no longer splashed by waves.

  I collapsed onto the sand face-first. I’d made it. I’d gotten out of the boat. But as I forced myself to roll over instead of being suffocated by sand, the void above still remained.

  I’d gotten all the way here for nothing. Darkness held me close like a blanket, its void drowning me now, holding me down, enveloping me like a cocoon instead of the endless abyss it’d once been.

  I’d angered the void by trying to escape, and now it was coming for me.

  “Fuck off!” I screamed at it. “Stay the hell away! You can’t have me!”

  I screamed and screamed, but it closed in, rushing around me and squeezing tight until I couldn’t breathe. The darkness slipped into my nose and mouth, wrapped around my arms, my hands, my throat. Pulling. Squeezing. Tighter. Something snapped. Another crack.

  Lightning overhead. A bright white streak of it. I screamed louder, “You cannot fucking have me!”

  The lightning blinded me, a full-on white wall of light. I tried to throw my hand over my eyes but couldn’t. My hand was still bound by the darkness.

  I slammed my eyes shut against the light.

  “Ben?”

  Rachel.

  No. It was a trick. If I opened my eyes, the darkness would blind me forever. And then I could never escape again. I’d never see anything, even with the lightning flashes and storms. It’d never be enough. I’d never be free again.

  “Oh, my god! Ben! Ben, it’s me, Rachel. You can do it. Wake up.”

  I squeezed my eyelids tighter together. I’d never fall for this. Ever.

  “Ben, please!”

  The darkness yanked on my throat. Tingles sprang up all over my body. If I didn’t breathe soon, I’d die.

  Shit. I didn’t want to die. Blindness I could handle. But death? After the fight I’d put up?

  Death or blindness. Death or that void, that abyss.

  I stilled, no longer fighting the darkness’s hold on me.

  I don’t want to die.

  I opened my eyes.

  And found myself in a hospital room.

  Rachel’s smile greeted me. She stroked my cheek and grinned down at me, tears slipping down her face. “You’re awake.”

  Chapter 3

  My muscles refused to listen. I couldn’t reach up to hug my aunt and uncle back, or Amanda, and even smiling took effort. So I had to sit there, unmoving, as they fawned over me and my apparent miracle recovery.

  Some miracle.

  The longer I was awake, the more the memories sifted through the strainer in my mind, but I remembered being stuck on that rowboat in the middle of an ocean of darkness. My escape from the void hadn’t been a miracle, it’d been an epic quest for freedom—in one form or another.

  But I didn’t tell them that. I let them ogle my awake form and freak out and shout for the doctors.

  Which they did. The doctors had come and assessed I was more or less okay—somehow. Now we were just waiting to hear how long I’d be stuck in the hospital.

  “School starts next week,” Sandra said from my bedside. Since I’d woken up earlier today, she hadn’t left my side a single time. Her worried eyes were hard to meet. I couldn’t imagine the fear she felt as I laid in a coma, but I couldn’t knock away my own feelings about it long enough to assure her with more than simple words that I was fine.

  I wasn’t sure I was. Not after the things I’d seen in that void. The things that slipped through my memory and into a new darkness with every passing minute.

  Except for one distinct memory: Rachel saying I’d shocked her with lightning. As if that were possible. Maybe I’d dreamed it, maybe not. But one thing was for sure: Rachel wouldn’t lie about something like that. I just had to convince the doctors and everyone else to leave me alone long enough to ask her about it.

  “You’ll need to stay here for another few days, maybe a week,” said Dr. Cohen, the one who’d been in charge of my medical case since I’d been admitted. Apparently. This was still all so weird.

  I rubbed the back of my neck as though it’d ease my memories of the void into something easier to remember. I needed those memories so desperately to make the last three months make sense, even if they were dark and painful. I needed time alone to write those memories down.

  “Ben?” Sandra asked. Behind her, my aunt leaned in, examining me as if they were all terrified I’d break again and slip back into a coma.

  I’d never let myself go back there again. No way
.

  Nodding slowly, I said, “Sure, no problem. Can I play football this season?”

  Amanda snickered from the other side of the room. “Yeah, he’s okay.”

  My aunt hushed her and glanced up at the doctor. “Will he be fine? Any lasting effects?”

  Dr. Cohen studied me, then looked at my chart with a carefully-measured expression. “In time, yes. You should recover fully; however—”

  “What about football?” I was the varsity quarterback. The team needed me to take them to the national championship, and I needed a way to make it to the draft. And sure, maybe I hadn’t thought about football while in the darkness of the void—that I could remember, anyway—but it hadn’t seemed as important as my survival. And the doctor had just said I’d be fine, so…

  Dr. Cohen frowned. “If you listen to us and don’t push yourself too quickly, I believe so. You’re lucky to be alive, quite frankly.”

  His words bit into my mind, carving away another chunk of my void memories. Another slap of reality on a ridiculous situation. Struck by lightning. Lost to a coma for three months. I mean, come on. Who did that actually happen to?

  You, apparently, shithead.

  I groaned and scrubbed my face with the palms of my hands. The skin there was dry and covered in stubble that had grown out after three months of not seeing a razor. Good to know I could actually grow a beard after all. It might be the single good thing that’d come out of this entire situation.

  Dr. Cohen tapped a pen on the top of his clipboard. “You’ll need physical therapy for sure. But with it, you should be ready for this season if you don’t push yourself too hard. Your fine motor skills might have been—”

  I shook my head. “They’re not. Give me a football and space to throw, and I’ll show you.”

  The doctor’s mouth fell into a grim frown again. “Let’s just get through this next week first, okay?”

  I nodded, accepting that my fate regarding football hadn’t yet been decided. But you know what? I’d already performed some sort of miracle. I’d woken up. I’d fought the darkness of the void, swam one hundred yards in sticky, lethargic blackness to shore.