“Hi, Sam,” Hunter said.
Sam froze.
Hunter sat up. “What are you doing here?”
Sam looked around like he was searching for an answer. He seemed weird to Hunter. He didn’t look like Sam usually looked. He looked like animals sometimes looked when Hunter had them cornered and they knew it was the end.
“I’m just…um…walking,” Sam said.
“Are you running away?” Hunter asked.
Sam looked startled. “No.”
“I smell fire.”
“Yeah. There’s been a fire. In town,” Sam said. “So. Is that a deer?”
It seemed like a stupid question to Hunter. “Yes.”
“I was getting hungry,” Sam confessed.
Hunter smiled his lopsided smile. Half of his mouth didn’t work quite right. “I can cook us a bird. But I have to give the deer to Albert.”
“Some bird would be great,” Sam said.
He sat down cross-legged on the pine needle carpet. He’d been hurt. There was blood on his shirt and he moved his shoulder stiffly.
“I can cook it with my hands. But it tastes better if I cook it with fire.”
Hunter gathered dried needles, small branches, and a couple of larger chunks of wood. Soon he had a fire going. He cleaned one of the colorful birds, burned off the pinfeathers, and cut it into smaller pieces. These he skewered with a wire clothes hanger he carried in his backpack and propped them over the coals at the edge of the fire.
He split the meat with scrupulous fairness. Sam ate greedily.
“This isn’t a bad life you have up here,” Sam said.
“Except when there are mosquitoes. Or fleas,” Hunter said.
“Yeah, well everyone’s getting fleas since most of the dogs and cats are…um…gone.”
Hunter nodded. Then he said, “I don’t have much talking.”
When Sam looked puzzled, Hunter explained. “Sometimes my head doesn’t want to give me words.”
Lana had healed him as well as she could, but the skull had never grown back all the way right. She’d fixed his brain well enough that he didn’t pee in his pants like he did for a while after the beating. And when he talked he could mostly make himself understood. But Lana had been unable to return him all the way to normal.
“It’s okay,” Hunter said, not realizing that he hadn’t said any of this out loud. “I’m just different now.”
“You’re important,” Sam said. “You’re a lifeline for kids. Do the coyotes ever bother you?”
Hunter shook his head and gulped some more of the hot bird meat. “We made a deal. I don’t go where they’re hunting. And I don’t hunt coyotes. So they don’t bother me.”
For a while neither of them said anything. The fire burned down. The last of the bird was consumed. Hunter pushed dirt onto the fire, smothering it.
“Maybe I could work with you,” Sam said. He held up his own hand. “I can hunt, too, I guess.”
Hunter frowned. This was confusing. “But you’re Sam and I’m Hunter.”
“You could teach me what you know,” Sam said. “You know. About animals. And how to find them. And how to cut them up and all.”
Hunter thought about it, but then the idea slipped out of his brain. And he realized he’d forgotten what Sam was talking about.
“If I go back I’m going to do things,” Sam said. He looked down at the ashes of the near-dead fire.
“You’re good at doing things,” Hunter said.
Sam looked angry. Then his face softened until he looked sad. “Yeah. Only I don’t always want to do those things.”
“I’m Hunter. So I hunt.”
“My real name is Samuel. He was this prophet in the Bible.”
Hunter didn’t know what “prophet” meant. Or “Bible.”
“He was the guy who picked out the first king of Israel.”
Hunter nodded, mystified.
“You believe in God, Hunter?” Sam asked.
Hunter felt a sudden stab of guilt. He hung his head. “I almost killed those boys.”
“What boys?”
“Zil. And his friends. The ones who hurt me. I was hunting a doe, and I saw them. And I could have.”
“Could have killed them.”
Hunter nodded.
“To tell you the truth, Hunter, I wish you had.”
“I’m Hunter,” he said, and grinned because it struck him as funny. “I’m not Boy Killer.” He laughed. It was a joke.
Sam didn’t laugh. In fact, it looked like he wanted to cry.
“You know Drake, Hunter?”
“No.”
“He’s a boy with a kind of snake for an arm. A snake. Or a whip. So he’s not really a boy. So if you ever saw him, you could hunt him.”
“Okay,” Hunter said doubtfully.
Sam bit his lip. He looked like he wanted to say something else. He stood up, knees popping after sitting so long. “Thanks for the meat, Hunter.”
Hunter watched him go. A boy with a snake arm? No. He’d never seen anything like that. That would be something. That would be even weirder than the snakes he’d seen in the caves. The ones with wings.
That reminded Hunter. He pushed up his sleeve to examine the spot where the snake had spit on him. It hurt. There was a little sore, a sort of hole. The hole had scabbed over, like any of the endless number of scrapes Hunter had suffered tearing through brush.