The Hunter From the Woods (25 page)

He was stopped somewhere within the village. Torches and oil lamps ringed him. The guns were everywhere, and they were all pointed at him.

The crowd parted once more as Nuri the Fireman approached. He again got up almost face-to-face with Michael. “Village mine,” he said. “People mine. Nuri rules here. You say different, Devil?”

Michael stared into the man’s eyes without flinching. “I say Nuri will soon be on his knees. I say Nuri will soon be begging for mercy.”

That brought a huge smile and a clap of the hands. Evidently Nuri was enjoying the baiting, as Michael had hoped a hardened killer would. He doubted that anyone in this world had ever spoken to Nuri thus. And who else would have the courage to say this to him, but the Devil himself?

“Devil,” said Nuri, “meet my son.”

A boy about fourteen appeared, hobbling on sticks covered with gauze bandages likely scavenged from a dead medic’s pack.

The boy, wearing a loosely-fitting white shirt and a pair of red-dyed trousers, resembled his father. Except his right leg was gone at the hip, and there was only enough remaining of his left foot to grip a small piece of ground. It was, really, the shape of a cloven hoof. Michael recognized the injury. It was what happened when you stepped on a mine. Even if you survived the blast, some body parts did not. Looking into the boy’s sunken eyes, Michael wasn’t sure how much had actually survived. The right eye was a white, rolled-back orb, sightless. That side of the face kept twitching violently as injured nerves spasmed.

“Hasib mine,” Nuri said quietly, up close to Michael’s ear. “Eldest son. Such
pride
. Is handsome boy? Say speak, Devil.”

The boy stared at Michael with as much hatred as Michael had ever dreaded to see. If this boy had a gun, the little play would be over. The hate was a living thing. It felt like a lizard with a skin of spines, and it smelled like a world on fire. Michael knew this boy. He knew him well. This boy was every sufferer that war had made, every orphan, every widow or widower, every amputee, every brutalized corpse in a shallow ditch, every piece of flesh that used to be a man, every silent scream.

He knew this boy well, and he felt terror to his soul.

“Handsome,” whispered Michael Gallatin.

“
Ah!
” said the Fireman, smiling. “Thank you so.”

 Michael felt a night breeze blow past. He heard the rattle of the palms and he smelled the enticing perfume of the waterhole. The urge to drink fell upon him, and still stunned by this vision of war’s corruption he was seized by a moment of rare weakness.

“I would like some water,” he told Nuri.

“Thirsty is the
Devil
? How this?” Nuri’s head cocked to one side. In his eyes evil festered. “Drink,” he said, and he spat into Michael’s face.

The crowd shouted its sincere approval. They hollered and danced, and some of them fired their weapons upward into the night. It seemed to Michael that it was nearly time indeed.

Nuri spoke another series of commands. Hands grasped Michael by the arms—both arms, which caused him to grit his teeth and put his head down so they might not see him on the verge of crying out—and half-pushed, half-dragged him along. The entire Dahlasiffa nation seemed to be out in force, and like a sea in the desert they moved along with him in dusty waves.

They took him to the pit.

He lifted his head and saw that it was about six meters long and three meters wide. Across its length was the trunk of what had been a sturdy palm tree, secured on either end by piles of sandbags. Various clay jars stood alongside the pit. The crowd was festive, the musicians began playing once more, and Michael wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into.

He was able to have a look into the pit. By the light of the flickering torches, he saw it was about a meter and a half in depth and had a short ladder leaning against one side. At the bottom, some scurrying around and others sitting deathly still, were perhaps three hundred scorpions. Pale brown ones, Michael noted. Those gave a nasty sting but were not poisonous. He was pushed and dragged along to one end of the palm log, and standing there with his right hand on his broken shoulder he saw Nuri take up position on the far end.

Nuri motioned to the crowd, and they were quiet. “Devil!” he called out. “Have we a contest!”

Michael remained silent. Two dozen guns from three nations were aimed at him.

Nuri stepped out onto the palm log. His balance was sure. He was grinning broadly. “Devil!” he said. “Meet us in…” He was having trouble with the translation.

“There,” he said, and pointed at the log’s center. “Have us…what call you…a cheerio little war. Me. King of all devils. You. Spit-faced fool.” He translated that to his people and they laughed so uproariously Michael was certain some had peed in their robes. It didn’t take much to keep this crew happy. Reading Michael’s silence as fear, Nuri asked, “Has Devil no brave?”

Michael was watching the scorpions. Maybe more than three hundred in there, he decided. But not poisonous. He knew he had to do this. “The Devil has brave,” he replied.

“Ah! Then well!” Nuri gave an order. One of the men picked up a clay jar and upturned it over the pit, and venomous black scorpions by the dozens began to slide out.

The audience had begun to dance and clap to the rhythm of the music. Nuri reached under his robes and brought out in his left hand the knife with the curved blade. The right hand gripped a piece of iron pipe with a half-dozen short chains attached to its end and a nail fixed on the end of every chain.

A second jar was upturned. Dozens more black scorpions slid into the pit. Some of them had obviously expired during what might have been a long stay in the jar, but enough crawled around twitching with anger to let Michael know the man who fell among them was not going to be loved to death. Another robed Dahlasiffa reached in, pulled the ladder up and threw it aside.

“Devil!” Nuri shouted. “Come, come!” He started out along the log, the knife low at his side and the chains already swinging over his head.

Michael nodded, if only to himself.

It was almost time.

Now…the question was…where were Gantt and the boy?

With extreme caution and in no particular hurry, Michael walked out foot-over-foot above the scorpion pit. This action received a roar of enthusiasm from the Dahlasiffas, who obviously had seen other uneven contests play out over this pit and knew what the final result must be, but surely it was never a dull moment when a hapless enemy either fought for his wretched life or begged for it. Either way, he was going to become a stinger’s pincushion.

“Come, Devil!” Nuri shouted, swinging the chains. “Come, come!” He walked along the palm log as if he could do this in his sleep. When Michael got within range, the nails came whistling at his face and he had to jerk back to keep his nose. His left foot slipped. He was aware of all the small darting movements in the dark piles below him. Now he had to focus on the task and that alone. Nuri walked forward with no fear and no reason to fear. The chains and nails went over Michael’s head as he ducked, and then the knife was coming at his stomach in a glittering blur. Michael retreated, to a chorus of what could only be derisive catcalls. But Nuri was quick and relentless, and with a savage grin on his face he flailed at Michael with the chains and caught him across the left bicep, tearing his shirt and flesh and throwing droplets of blood into the air.

The audience cheered for their hero, the Fireman in red.

Michael dodged another swirl of the chains but now the knife was driving in at his right thigh. He moved the leg in time to avoid the stab but caught a graze, and at close quarters he stepped into Nuri and headbutted the man. Nuri’s nose burst open, and the crowd went silent. Nuri staggered back, almost toppled off the log but regained his balance, and now with blood streaming from both nostrils he gave an animalish snarl and swung the chains and nails across Michael’s chest on the left side. Shreds of bloody cloth whirled up. The knife flashed, but Michael had already shifted his position and was ready for it.

He caught Nuri’s wrist and held it.

They stared at each other, man against man.

Nuri reared his right arm back to strike with the chains.

And Michael knew the time had come.

He opened the soul cage, just a crack, to let some of it free.

His hand, holding Nuri’s wrist, rippled and began to change. Michael directed its transformation, he willed it and controlled it and owned it. Within seconds the hand had darkened with hair; it had altered its shape, and its fingers had curved into the claws of a killer. Black wolf hair ran like strange vines up his arm, twining around and around.

And so too did Michael direct the transformation to his face.

Nuri’s movement with the chains had already frozen, for he saw the commingling of human hand and animal claw that seized his wrist. Blood was already being drawn. The pressure was about to crack his bones. His eyes widened and his mouth opened, but no sound emerged and certainly no laugh to be echoed by his people. The face. The face was what caused Nuri to give a choked cry that flew toward a scream.

For Michael’s features distorted in the space of a shuddered breath. 

With the crunch of bones and the moist slippage of sinews and muscles changing their human position, they submerged and reformed and rearranged themselves like mystic continents on the map of a foreign world. A shadow seemed to pass over Michael’s face, and from its darkness emerged the maw of the wolf, the green eye that was not a swollen slit glaring without mercy into Nuri’s face, the wolf’s new and bleeding fangs promising agony upon agony. Or, at the very least, the Devil’s own justice. Michael held Nuri fast. He swept his one-eyed wolfen gaze across the crowd as the black forest of hair burst free from his facial flesh and flowed along his throat. He felt his back aching to bow down, and his limbs—even the broken one—yearning to take their primal shapes. The Dahlasiffa were, as one, riveted in place. Someone dropped a torch, and an oil lamp shattered on the ground. A woman screamed and a child yowled with fear. The voice of a man—no, several men—rose up gibbering to the night.

Michael Gallatin balanced not only on the palm log but between worlds. The werewolf’s green eye peered into Nuri’s face once more and saw the horror become madness; it happened in the stutter of a heartbeat. Saliva bubbled from Nuri’s mouth and dribbled down his chin. His eyes were scorched. He had truly seen behind the Devil’s mask, and now he was destroyed.

Michael let him go.

Nuri retreated. He slipped and fell. He landed on his back down amid the scorpions, both brown and black, and as he rolled in a mad and entirely useless attempt to avoid being stung the things got into his crimson robes and onto his keffiyeh and onto his hands and his face and delivered enough venom, Michael thought, to kill even the self-proclaimed King of Hell several times over.

Then the crowd of once-gleeful Dahlasiffa turned their faces away from Michael, and though some fell to the ground on their knees to beg for mercy from the merciless, the great majority of them fled for their lives.

An explosion across the village sent up red and white fireworks. Or, rather, pieces of shrapnel. A secondary blast held within it maybe four or five smaller explosions merged into one thunder. Gantt and the boy had obviously found the correct tent. But the work was mostly complete, because now even the Dahlasiffa who’d been on their knees were scrambling up and running. The mass of people ran shrieking and screaming toward the other side of the village. Anywhere, if they could escape the Devil. Even the dogs were getting out. Michael gazed down into the pit and saw Nuri on his stomach, trying to claw his way up the side. His hands had a number of scorpions on them.

Michael decided to leave the Fireman to his impending state of peace. He edged back from the wild just as he edged back along the palm log, and by the time his boots touched earth he was once more only a man. But, as sometimes happened, his teeth ached fiercely and he had to pee in the most pressing way.

The village seemed to be empty. Maybe the Dahlasiffa would stop running when they reached Cairo, or when they ran across the nearest minefield.

Michael walked toward the tent that was burning brightly and sending up deadly fireworks fit for the grandest holiday. Another explosion shot up a plume of orange flame and shook the ground. Mortar shells, perhaps? Other tents under the rain of burning munitions were catching fire; it was going to be a festive night after all.

In the glow of the flames, two figures were approaching. One tall, one small.

“My God!” said Rolfe Gantt when the distance closed between them. “What the devil did you do?”

“Exactly that,” Michael told him. 

“Exactly
what
?”

“Never mind.” He scanned their surroundings and saw no other humans. The boy had begun shaking his dice again; it seemed that Fate knew no resting. “We’d better be careful,” Michael advised. “I think everyone’s gone but for the watchman and three men who went out to look for you two.” They hadn’t witnessed the performance, so they might be still lurking about. “Give me a gun.” He held his hand out.