You Only Die Twice - By Christopher Smith Page 0,43

to alleviate any tension was to whistle back.

And so he did.

“You can drop that laser,” came a deep voice from within the shelter. “Nothin’ goin’ on here. Just a fellow hunter waitin’ for mornin’, that’s all.” A beat passed. The man’s left arm seemed to disappear behind himself. “You two ain’t poachin’, are you? ‘Cause that’s against the law. So is holdin’ a laser on someone who already has identified himself. So, I’ll ask again. Drop the laser.”

But Ted didn’t. He seemed confused as how to handle the situation.

“Put down your gun, Mike,” Kenneth said in a raised voice to Ted. “Don’t get freaked out. It’s just another hunter―”

Ted fired his gun.

In the goggle’s ghostly green light, Kenneth saw splinters of wood burst like fireworks and pinwheel into the darkness, but the man inside didn’t fall because he hadn’t been hit.

Ted fired again and the man appeared to drop to his knee and swing his arms around himself. The shelter was too thick for a Glock to penetrate it. It was made of thick logs that could absorb a bullet’s impact, which is what it did.

The man moved his body in Ted’s direction.

“He’s got a rifle,” Kenneth said. “Get down!”

Ted dropped for cover just as the side of the shelter blew apart, exposing a ragged hole through which Kenneth now could see the man inside. He was somewhere in his fifties, wore goggles of his own and rushed the hole with his rifle held in front of him.

He took aim at Ted, who was scrambling to get to his feet and run, and fired a single shot. Ted’s head exploded upon contact. His face caved in on itself and blew out the back end. Unbelieving, Kenneth watched his longtime partner drop his gun and fall hard to the ground, his unseeing meatface exposed to the heavens and to the map of stars that shined down upon him. He was dead. Dead.

Dead. He can’t be dead.

In the trees that surrounded the shelter, the women appeared again and they started to move toward Kenneth. They tittered at him. Others clucked their tongues at him. Maria Fuentes led the group forward in such a way that suggested their feet weren’t touching the forest floor. Like a fog, they rolled over it and drifted forward while Fuentes, in what was left of her stripper costume, turned to look at him.

“It’s all falling apart for you, Kenneth,” she said. Now, her pink feather boa was tied around her waist. Now, her bedazzled pasties were removed so her pert, silocone-filled breasts were revealed to him. “Right now, your friend is in hell, where he belongs. You’ll be next. This is the natural order of things. I told you it would happen. I told you you couldn’t kill us all and get away with it.”

Kenneth looked at the hunter, who was turning left and right, searching for him. “You ain’t the only poachers out here, assholes,” the man said. “Now, come on. Come on, baby. I know you’re out there. Let’s see what you got.”

Ted is dead. Ted is dead. Ted is dead.

“Kill them!” Kenneth shouted. “Kill the women! They’re all around you! Don’t you see them? It’s not me you want―it’s them!”

The hunter shifted his rifle in Kenneth’s direction.

Shaken, Kenneth raised his gun and fired first. It was a blind shot. A wasted shot. But the man didn’t know that. The sound of a gun going off could render a man useless for a moment. And this man didn’t have the Lord on his side.

(Ted didn’t, either.)

Instead, he reeled back, stopped, checked himself, then quickly took aim. Before he could shoot, Kenneth stormed the shelter in a rage

(Ted is dead. Ted is dead. Ted is dead)

and fired in rapid succession until his gun went silent.

The magazine was empty. He looked dumbly at the gun, then reached into his pocket for another magazine while all around him came a caustic chorus of cruel laughter.

He willed himself to ignore them. He wasn’t sure if the hunter was dead or alive or bleeding out and thus somewhere in the in between. Feeling exposed, Kenneth fell flat to the ground, but when he did so, his chin hit the earth and the force knocked his goggles free.

Now it was pitch dark.

Ted is dead. Ted is dead. Ted is dead.

He could hear movement in the shelter.

Ted is dead. Ted is dead. Ted is dead.

He heard feet start to knock against wood.

Ted is dead. Ted is dead. Ted is dead.

Kenneth patted the