The Hunter Inside (42 page)

The world had been saved, but Sandy
was lost. She was lost in a sea of grief that was infinitely larger in size
than even the one she had felt when Shimasou had killed her parents. The
building had darkened again, and the rain had stopped. Shimasou was gone,
defeated. But for Sandy Myers, the rain still fell. It fell inside her heart,
drowning her. It fell harder than it had for the previous hours, filling her up
and spilling out of her eyes in torrents. It filled up the void that had opened
inside her heart, weighing her down with grief. She felt the pain seeping back
into her, and the joints of her fingers stiffened as her whole body ached once
more. Ached with grief and despair.

She opened her eyes, looking down to
where the others stood. The fire that had been ignited by the lightning had
gone out, and there was only darkness, taking the place of the lights of
Shimasae that had been inside the building. Sandy saw only black space as she
looked down.

Blackness, welcome blackness.

She released her hold, and allowed
herself to fall, into the arms of that blackness, into the arms of her
children, and out of the darkness of the world.

Into the light of death.

What follows is an exclusive
extract from David McGowan’s second novel, From the Sky.

It is a story of how a small
Northern Californian town is visited by creatures from the sky, and the
pilgrimage of a band of characters across the mountains to a date with destiny.

Join 12 year-old Tucker Turner
and his dog Samuel, Chief Jim Hoolihan, Barrett Holroyd, Luke Bonalo, and
others as they find their world tipped on its axis by visitors…From the Sky.

Scheduled for release
December 2012, the author presents to you a special offer. You could get From
the Sky completely FREE. All you have to do is post your review of The Hunter
Inside to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and email the author at
[email protected]
stating the name your review
appears under, your email address, and your preferred format, and you will
qualify to receive a free copy of From the Sky one week BEFORE release.

Please visit
http://davidmcgowanauthor.com
for updates

Follow David McGowan at
http://twitter.com/dmcgowanauthor

Why not ‘Like’ The Hunter Inside’s Facebook page at
http://facebook.com/thehunterinside

The damn car had
broken down again.

That young
tearaway, Jim Bonalo, had a lot to answer for. In a small town like Camberway,
it didn’t do old men any good to have to walk along dirt-track roads, and it
didn’t do an old man any good to have to walk through cold February nights when
steady drizzle was falling and the ground beneath his feet was slick and
slippery.

The damn winters
in Northern California were getting worse.

Barrett Holroyd
thought about the time young Arnie Popovich had fallen down the old Cooper
well. That had been in February – five years almost to the day in fact. It
wasn’t as cold now as it was that year – it had been close to breaking the
record low of 24F on that god forsaken night – and Barrett had walked the same
iced-over tracks he walked now, in and around the Camber Valley, along with
everybody else.

It had taken
three weeks to find the 8-year-old’s frozen body, eyes still open and mouth
still open and skin all bloated, folded up like a widowed puppet. Just the
thought of the kid’s eyes reflecting the torch beam when he shone it down the
well was enough to make the hotdogs he’d eaten at Louise Miller’s diner two
hours ago begin to rankle with his belly.

The drizzle got
heavier as he trudged onwards. Damn Bonalo.

Betsy always
told him not to be eating Miller’s hotdogs.

You don’t
know what that two-bit hussy puts in them hotdogs to give you that poison
belly.

But that didn’t
matter now that she was two months in the ground.

The light of the
crescent moon was not enough to allow Barrett an assured step. He walked
slowly, his arms outstretched like any of a million mummies or zombies or
ghouls he’d seen on cable. But it didn’t do an old man (sixty-two years old at
the last count) any good to think of creatures of the night when the night was
pressed right up to his face.

Maybe a million
images flashed through his mind as he inched his way along the single lane,
dirt-track road. None of them were good, and the combination of fear of the
zombies and the image of Arnie Popovich’s doll-like, staring yet unseeing eyes,
doubled the chill inspired by the blustery wind. It was a wind that travelled
with him and against him, swirling all around him.

Fucking Jim
Bonalo, selling him a heap of junk. Taking advantage of an old man was all he
was doing. Barrett Holroyd knew as much. Hell, everyone in Camberway knew it.
All Jim Bonalo had
ever
done was take advantage of people. When he was
eight he was stealing apples from Barrett Holroyd’s tree. By the time he was
fifteen he was stealing the virginity of half the girls in town.

Barrett gritted
his teeth against the gusting of the wind as it drove the heavy drizzle into
his face.

Maybe Bonalo
could be a good mechanic if he ever tried, instead of being too damn busy
chasing skirt all over the county and selling no more than heaps of rusted junk
to people like Barrett who could afford no better than what the little shitweasel
had to offer.

His outstretched
arms did him no good as he slipped on a pile of wet eucalyptus leaves and fell
on the seat of his pants.

‘Owww,’ he
moaned as a clap of pain shot down through his legs to his feet, leaving the
nerve endings tingling, and up through his torso to his already aching head.

Yes, Jim Bonalo
had an awful lot to answer for. If he’d been ten years younger he would have
punched his lights out fast as shit come out of a baby, but ten years ago Betsy
would have been there to stop him.

He clambered to
his feet and began walking again, just as a cloud cut out the little light that
was present from the moon like a candle being blown out. POOF.

Of course, ten
years ago he wouldn’t have had to buy a rackety old shitty heap of metal like
the Ford he left two miles behind him. Ten years ago, when he’d retired from
the military, poverty was the last thing he’d thought about. He’d listened to
the advice Major Rowland had given him.

It ain’t
gonna do you any good as a bit of ink on a bank book.

So he had, for
five years, enjoyed the money he had. He’d ignored Betsy’s continually prudent
outbursts and debilitating nagging, same as he ignored that he knew Linda’s
husband was fucking anything that moved without his daughter having a clue.

Still not even
at the bottom of Sangrew Hill yet, and his arthritic joints squeaked like
hinges that needed a liberal application of oil. The swollen joints of his
fingers would go no further into the pockets of his faded Wranglers than they
already were, but he tried despite this knowledge.

Yep, he’d sure
as hell enjoyed the money for five years, buying little Tucker all the
expensive computer games he wanted, loaning his daughter the twenty grand she
needed for a deposit on a house (even though he knew that bastard Ross was
hiding the snake on both sides of Crystal Lake, not to mention him being handy
with his bunches of fives). Pretty soon the money was gone. Like sand through
his fingers. Then Betsy’s lung cancer had come.

‘Christ, it’s
dark out here tonight,’ he said aloud. It seemed just like he wasn’t getting
anywhere at all – like he’d stepped onto a treadmill.
Maybe that sonofabitch
Bonalo put it out in front of me
, he thought.

One thing he
knew; that he wanted to be out of the damn dark and the damn cold and back home
where he could see his hands in front of his eyes. Where dead kid’s faces
didn’t flutter out of his mind and appear before him in the darkness.

‘Cept home
wasn’t really home anymore anyway. The money hadn’t lasted long, no sir. That
old man poverty came to be his houseguest, more and more quickly as Betsy’s
cancer had grown and they needed it for medicine. She had started to harangue
him for every cent he spent. Maybe it was all her fault. Maybe all his years of
resenting her complaining character was not merely resent, but outright blame.
Didn’t matter anymore though, not with Betsy being no more than worm chow. The
dust was bitten, the cards were marked, the bucket was cancer kicked.

The drizzle was
getting heavier now; turning into rain that was being driven against him by the
wind. He tried to blink it out of his unseeing eyes as he edged carefully along
the slick dirt road. Last thing Barrett needed was to fall down, break a hip,
and freeze to death like the Popovich boy. Just imagining Linda wearing that
same look he saw on Saskia Popovich’s face that day, standing next to the
half-sized casket at her only child’s funeral, made him slow down even more. The
last place he wanted to take a permanent time-out was on Number Five Road.
No-one would likely come up here until morning, when Brett Fishwick, the
mailman, would head up to deliver the Miller’s mail.

Good kid, Brett.
Like his old man, Joe. A family man, a hard working man. Always trying his best
to put good food on the table and smiles on his wife and kid’s faces. Barrett
didn’t want to be a corpse the next time they met. Uh-uh.

The ground was
levelling out beneath his feet now, which meant he had reached, or was about to
reach, the bottom of Sangrew Hill. That was good – it meant he had gone half
the five miles towards Linda’s house.

Linda’s house,
Linda’s house. Why was it always Linda’s house? It was their house.
Their
house. Since she had got shut of that shitkicker Ross and took pity on her old
man, they had lived there as a family. Barrett, Linda and little Tucker. Except
the kid wasn’t so little now. Not to mention the dog; a black lab called Sam to
everyone except Tucker, who only ever called it Samuel. Ever since he brought
the damn thing home from the woods. No-one ever claimed it, so they had been
stuck with another mouth to feed.

He’d paid twenty
grand toward the house. Twenty G’s. Twenty big ones. That bastard Ross Turner
had put in little more than a few sperm, and left Linda with a broken heart
that no man was ever going to fix. Yep, there were too many chicken shits like
Ross Turner around, and not enough Brett Fishwicks.

Barrett rounded
the corner of Sangrew Point and began the final half of his journey, still in
pitch darkness and still freezing cold. An iced wind blustered around his face,
turning the small droplets of rain into missiles that whipped against his
stubbled cheeks. He pulled the collar of his jacket up over his chin and angled
his face to the ground as he pushed onwards.

Damn Bonalo,
damn car, damn winter
, he thought, as the keening sound of the wind in his
ears drowned out every other sound in the forest of conifers that bordered Camberway.

Miller’s hot
dogs seemed a long time ago now. Another lifetime in fact. His stomach rankled
– he could do with some antacids – but that was the only part of being at
Miller’s Diner that still seemed real after walking almost two and a half miles
in the damn dark. He had started to think about a nice warm cup of cocoa as he
came to the halfway point of his journey. That, and the image of putting some
buckshot into Jim Bonalo’s skinny ass, was enough to push him onwards through
the Douglas fir that surrounded their secluded little part of the world.

He was lost in
his thoughts and wrapped in the storm, and the keening of the wind rattling his
eardrums meant that he didn’t hear the odd humming sound above him. He kept his
eyes on the ground in front of him, determined not to wet the seat of his pants
with another slip. If he would have looked up, he would have seen the ship.

*

Linda Turner
(though she hated the Turner part more than any other name she had ever heard) closed
the door of the kitchenette and sat down in the prison cell sized room.

11pm, and still
her Daddy hadn’t come home.

The dryer rocked
violently as it spun her uniform for the job she hated so badly, the job that
ensured their survival, and only just about.

It wasn’t right,
it wasn’t right all, that her Daddy was spending so much time over at that
woman’s diner. Not after…not after what had happened to her Mom. Not after her
heart had been torn this way and that by her Mom’s cancer, after it had been
squeezed until it was almost going to burst by Ross. Left to raise a boy
without a father or a grandmother.

When she closed
her eyes she saw her Mom, thin and gaunt and covered in tubes, barely able to
recognise her family because of all the morphine in her body.

‘She probably
had as much morphine in her as she did cancer,’ her father had said the day
after she died. And she knew he was right, but
this
wasn’t right. Not
two months after she died.

Five nights this
week. Five in a row in fact. She knew he didn’t go there to spend money,
because he didn’t
have
any money. He didn’t go there for the food
either. Everything on the menu made hell of his guts; greasy burgers and fried
onions and fries and chilli sauce.

Roll up, roll
up. Death on a bun. Cholesterol heaven.

But he ate the
food, same as he sometimes drank the whisky later on in the nighttimes, and it
sure as hell wasn’t right to drive a death-trap of a car on wet roads in near
pitch darkness.

She looked up at
the clock that hung on the wall. 11.20PM. The diner closed at 10, and he wasn’t
ever likely to be in a riveting conversation with any of the bums that went to
Louise Miller’s diner. Except, that is, Louise herself. And that wasn’t right.
Not so soon.