to tie nuts into the length of twine. He knotted the heavy bolts on either end of the string. Experimentally, he spun a foot’s worth of string in his fist, the bolt at the end whipping the twine around in a tight arc. Good enough.
The hunter stood, faced Kutkha’s building, spun the weighted twine until it buzzed, and flung it toward the top floor of that building. He watched it fly and then ducked behind the roof unit and watched from the best stealthy angle he could find.
The bolted twine hit the top window. Not hard enough to break it. With just enough force for it to make a sharp report and clatter down onto the window below on the fourth floor, and again onto the third, before falling away, landing in a thick patch of weeds in the yard.
One curtain was pulled away on the fifth floor. One on the fourth. Two on the third. Little bobbing heads trying to see what had made the noise.
Four more people. Also, whoever they were keeping up there. At least one woman being held. The hunter sighed, rolling back out of sight. This had gotten more complicated than it needed to be.
He wondered if the grotesque ever left his position for lunch. The grotesque did not have the shape of a person who was likely to forget about his lunches.
The shipment from New Jersey was obviously going to come through the access road to the yard, in dying evening light. It was a well-secluded space. Unless you were on an adjacent roof, of course, the hunter thought with a quiet chuckle.
His original plan had been to pay for the weapon, leave, return a few moments later, and kill everybody. There were now too many players, all too scattered, for that to work. The hunter needed to make the thing small again. He needed to isolate Kutkha. He did not want everything to balance on Kutkha having made a point of saying he’d take the gun from the car himself to check it over.
That said, the hunter had to admit to himself, that was the sort of thing Kutkha would do, and he’d done similar things in the past. The man did take steps, if not exactly pains, to act and present himself as a courtly criminal, operating in accordance with some mannered tradition that existed for the most part only in Kutkha’s own head.
The hunter looked at the sun and calculated the phase of the day. He looked along the row of roofs, paused to count off his pulse, and matched his internal drums to a beat in his mind. The hunter then, staying as low as he dared, ran and leaped and ran over the roofs until he reached the corner he’d turned earlier. He committed the time elapsed to hard memory and crawled to the edge of this new roof. He had an oblique sliver of a view to the front door of Kutkha’s building; enough that he’d notice someone leaving.
The hunter was very good at waiting. The roof became the gently curved crown of a foothill, and he was looking down into a gladed trail, the patchy blacktop so easily turning into shade-dappled ground that he smiled, broadly and genuinely, at its simple beauty. There were deer mice popping across the grass here and there, and the shadow of a sharp-shinned hawk orbited his head for a short and exquisite minute. There were patches of bladderpod, as lovely a pale violet as a summer evening sky, whose seeds were sacred. All was sacred, in this waiting time. Life was perfect.
The sun had just stepped to its noon summit when the hunter flinched from the wrenching uchronic sight of a twenty-first-century grotesque in a food-spattered orange running suit walking through a pre-seventeenth-century Mannahatta woodland trail. He almost threw up from the perceptual shock.
The grotesque followed the path the hunter himself had taken. He turned the corner of the block. His only possible destination was the food store. The hunter, blinking back history, watched the man’s walking speed, and as he turned the corner, the hunter ran for the roof he had come from, beating out the time in his head.
The hunter was on the ground floor and prepared within four minutes. He prayed it was enough. He moved the display stand and opened the front door. The street was still entirely clear. It wasn’t, after all, a part of town you went to unless you had to. He stood behind the door, put it ajar, and waited again. This time, he was tensed. The grotesque couldn’t possibly have bought food and made it back around the corner in four minutes. The creature just didn’t move that fast. The street had to stay clear. Performing this hunt was risk enough.
The grotesque dawdled past the hunter’s door.
The hunter counted off two more steps, to give himself more space to work in, and opened the door and moved.
A double loop of twine went around the grotesque’s neck, and a vicious wrench pulled a complex knot swiftly tight. The hunter wound the twine into his left hand and yanked the creature backward. The hunter gave him credit for trying to reach for his gun with his right hand even as he tried to get his left hand under the loop. The hunter pulled him in close and drove his own right hand into the grotesque’s temple. The hunter felt the bone give like struck eggshell under the quartz spike.
The prey’s legs turned to mush. The hunter summoned all his strength and dragged the prey backward into the dark of the store. He pressed the prey into the wall face-first long enough for him to close the door as silently as he could.
The prey kicked.
The hunter was off balance and had not yet reached out for his knife, which he’d placed on the display stand. He fell backward with the prey on top of him, bucking like a wounded bull. In past years, the hunter could have throttled his prey by main force. But he had no ego about his age and was fine with jabbing his knee into the prey’s back to increase the power he could put into the strangulation. In this position, the more the prey struggled, the quicker he choked himself against the twine.
The prey’s heels skittered on the floor, and dug in. He paid for it. But the hunter realized the prey was making the space for what could be a successful grab at the gun in the back of his waistband. The gun the hunter had not yet had the opportunity to take.
The hunter heaved and threw the prey onto his belly. Still on his back, the hunter punched him four or five more times in the side of the head. Blood began to pump weakly from a jagged hole in the prey’s temple, and he began to moan and flop. The hunter took the gun. He resisted the temptation to beat the prey to death with it. He had plans for the weapon and didn’t want to damage it.
Instead, he stood and placed the gun on the display stand. He took his knife and turned to the prey on the floor.
The prey was up and going for him. One of its eyes had filled with blood. It couldn’t speak beyond moans and croaks, and the foam in its mouth was red. It had urinated in its clothes. One of its giant hands, trembling spastically, went for the hunter’s face and found purchase.
The hunter drove his knife in and up under its ribs. It made a sound between a choked scream and a whistle. The hunter drove the blade in again. The prey suffered a violent bowel movement. The hunter drove his blade in a third time, higher and harder, and felt down the length of it the resistance of meeting and splitting thick, dense meat.
The hunter twisted the blade.
The prey’s open mouth became a still pool of blood.
It died, and dropped, and leaked, and was no longer interesting.
TALLOW DROVE around the 1st for a while, until he was certain his brain was still ticking along smoothly. It was pushing noon. He knew he should attempt food. It also occurred to him that he should continue to hand-tame his feral CSUs.
People who didn’t know John Tallow well were often surprised when he exercised some spending power, and even more surprised when they found out he lived on the island. Sometimes people assumed he was on the take in some mysterious fashion that didn’t require his energy or interest. The simple fact was that Tallow didn’t spend a lot of money, ever. He even did most of his laundry in the kitchen sink with cheap soap powder. He didn’t go out much. He didn’t eat much. He got his reading and his music inexpensively or free through the Internet.
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline from his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable.
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an
