The Hunt (The Hunt 1)

I head over to the leather couch and plop down. My head: still poundi

ng, spinning. Outside, a hint of dawn presses against the windows. The shutters will close soon.

I throw my elbow over my eyes, not wanting to think but knowing I need to face reality. Plan A seemed perfect not so long ago: fly under the radar during training period, break a leg right before the Hunt. But now, things have changed. With my body sending out eat-me smells and my tongue as dry and coarse as sandpaper, I won’t make it to the Hunt four nights away. I’ll either die of thirst or be savagely devoured. Probably the latter.

Lying on the couch, a numbed alarm pressing down on me, I begin to drift. Actually, it’s more like a plummet into a deep canyon of sleep.

Thirst awakens me. I cough: a thousand splinters pierce my parched throat.

Slowly, I peel my draped arm away from my face. The library is dark: the shutters have closed. But something is odd. I can still see, with a dim clarity, the interior of the library. As if a candle is burning.

Impossible. I spin around, drowsiness quickly shaken off. I see the light source.

It’s right there. A single, thin beam of sunlight shooting from a hole in the shutter behind me. The beam shoots past my ear, reaching to the far wall of the library. It is a piercing line of light, laserlike, seeming to carry a physical heft. I hadn’t noticed it yesterday. But then again, I was on the other side of the library, fast asleep during the day hours.

I walk over to the shutter. Tentatively, I reach towards the hole. I half expect the light to sear my skin. But there’s just a pinprick of warmth where the beam hits my skin. The hole in the shutter is a perfect circle, smooth along the edges. Very strange. This is no accident, no result of the building’s aging process. This hole was intentionally made – drilled – through a two-inch steel-reinforced shutter. But for what purpose? And by whom?

The kooky Scientist. That part is not difficult to figure out; no one else has ever lived here. But why would he do it? A beam of sunlight like this would not only keep a person from sleeping, but cause permanent retinal and intestinal damage. None of this makes sense.

Or perhaps the Scientist had nothing to do with this. Perhaps the hole was drilled by the staffers later, after he’d disappeared. But why? And if they knew they were going to house me in the library, surely they would have patched it up before I moved in. Again, none of this makes any sense.

And then a thought blizzards into my mind, chilling me.

I shake my head, as if to banish the thought. But it’s latched on to my brain, irrevocably now. And the more I think about it, the more likely it seems.

Somebody drilled this hole. Tonight.

To test me. To flush me out.

To find out if I’m a heper.

It makes sense. Tonight, with my unwashed body giving off an odour, suspicion is aroused. But more proof is needed before I can be accused. Sending a surreptitious sunbeam into the library during the day is perfect. Subtle yet dispositive. A sunbeam so small that it wouldn’t awaken a heper, but enough to jolt any normal person awake, making him flee to the far side of the library and demand a new room at first dark. The perfect litmus test.

I pace down the aisles, trying to keep fear at bay. My fingertips brush against the dusty spines of leather covers. There’s a flaw in my thinking, I realise. The only people who could possibly be on to me are those who’ve been in proximity. That would be the hunters and the escorts. But they’ve been with me all night long; we’ve never left one another’s sight. Nobody has had the opportunity to slip away and drill a hole through two inches of reinforced steel.

I head back to the hole and study it even closer. The edges are weathered and dulled, not shiny or sharp as they would be after a fresh cut. I bend down to the floor, looking for any fresh shavings. Nothing. This hole has been here a while.

That leaves me in a bit of a pickle. If I feign anger tomorrow and complain about the hole, staffers will come over to take a look before sealing it up. But that hole will invite questions about my first day of sleep – why hadn’t I complained after that first day? On the other hand, if I say nothing and this is indeed a ploy to trap me, then I’d be flushed out.

Then something clicks inside my head. Perhaps the beam is just a side effect of something more important. Maybe it’s the hole – and not the beam – that is really the key to this whole mystery.

I peer intently at the hole now, taking in every tiny scratch near it, its height from the floor, its small diameter.

But of course. It’s the perfect size.

To peer through.

But when I look through the hole – the light outside blinding – it’s a nothing. Just the bland, monotonous Vast, stretching endlessly in front of me, the hot sun bleaching whiteness into it. Not even the Dome is in sight. Dust and dirt and sand and light. That’s it. There’s nothing to see.

For the next hour, I pace the floor, study the sunbeam, peer through the hole; but it’s useless. I can’t figure it out. What kills me is the feeling that I’m so close, that I’m actually staring at the answer. Eventually I sit down, my aching feet worn to the nub. I close my eyes to focus; and when I pry them open some hours later, the sunbeam is gone, the shutters have opened, and somebody is pounding at the door. Dusk has arrived.

Hunt Minus Three Nights

HEPERS ARE BELIEVED to be anywhere between five and ten millennia behind us on the evolutionary ladder.” The Director’s voice drifts from the lectern with antiseptic detachment. “Certainly, hepers display the more primitive behavioral traits that our ancestors discarded many centuries ago. Think, for example, of their exceptional swimming ability. That trait harkens back to their relatively recent amphibian origins, when they dwelled in the sea from which all life derives. Their fishlike ability to manoeuvre in water testifies to the relative lack of evolutionary progress from that elementary stage. Think, too, of their beastlike ability to endure the sun’s rays. This ability to withstand sunlight is a genetic relic from the pre-cave era, when land-roaming animals lacked the intelligence to seek shelter in caves. They built up a resistance to the sun, although said resistance inhibited the evolutionary development of the brain. A shame, that.”

His words float to me like seaweed in murky water. I am sitting near the back of the lecture hall, as distanced from people as possible. I had a quick change of clothes (while my escort banged away at my door), but I’m worried about my odour. Nobody seems to have smelled anything – everyone is stationary, no one twitching. I got through breakfast, early evening lectures, and a tour of the grounds, lunch, without anyone noticing. A large window to the left of the podium is thankfully open, a breeze blowing steadily in, dissipating any odour inside. So I hope.

“Their facial expressions – so slippery with unrestrained and unfettered emotions – harken back to the pre-linguist, pre-language era, when expressions served as a kind of sign language. Next slide.”

A photo of the legs of a male heper, covered in hair. Everyone leans forward. Drool starts to line slowly downward from their fangs, like spiders descending to desktops.

“A vestigial genetic artifact from an era predating the discovery of fire. Without the capability to build fire, hair was their only mechanism to ward off the winter cold. Elite scholars have postulated that this evidence of body hair predates even the stone era, when primitives would have been able to fashion rudimentary weapons to hunt and then use fur for clothes. I have written a book on this topic, the first in my field to postulate this now well-supported theory. Next slide.”

A photo of a heper eating a fruit, red skinned with yellow substance inside. I see heads flinch back in revulsion.

“Ah, yes. Quite inexplicable, this trait, to say nothing of its ghastliness. It bespeaks their lack of predatory skills, their inability to really kill anything larger than vermin. So they must hunt those things that do not flee: the things of the earth, vegetables and fruits. This trait in time became in extremis to the extent that their bodies eventually required fruit and vegetables. Deprive them of vegetables and fruit, and their bodies begin

to break down. Reddish spots appear on their bodies, sores attack their lips, then gums, leading eventually to the loss of teeth. They become immobilised, fall into a depressed, vegetative state. Next slide.”

A photo of the group of hepers under the Dome. They are sitting around a campfire, their mouths open, heads cocked to the side, eyes closed.

“Nothing has mystified and beguiled scholars as much as the hepers’ ability to warble their voices with words, and with such remarkable consistency. Studies undertaken at the Institute have found that hepers are able to duplicate these ululations – what they call ‘singing’ – with astonishing accuracy. In fact, a song can be replicated minutes, days, months, even years after it is first sung with near identical sonic frequencies. There are a plethora of theories out there; none are satisfactory save one, which I presented at the Annual Conference on Heper Studies last year. In short, hepers developed this ‘singing’ ability under the mistaken belief that it helped the growth of vegetables and fruits. That is why we see them ‘sing’ most commonly when tending to the farmland or plucking fruit off trees. Some scholars posit that hepers may also believe ‘singing’ helps to sustain the burning of a fire and to cleanse the body better. This is evinced in their tendency to warble their voices when assembled around a fire or when bathing at the pond.”

I sit in my seat, hiding my inner amusement. Everything the Director says about hepers has the ring of truth and a learned authority about it, but I suspect it’s nothing more than speculative nonsense. I suppose it’s easy to so widely miss the mark when it comes to hepers, to quickly slide from honest scientific inquiry to unsubstantiated theories. After all, if the roles were reversed and it was people who became extinct, people theories would likely be rife with exaggerations and distortions: instead of sleeping in sleep-holds, they’d sleep in coffins; creatures of the night, they’d be so invisible to the eye that even in front of mirrors, they’d lack a reflection; pale and emaciated, they were weak and benign beings who could coexist peacefully alongside hepers, somehow restraining themselves from ripping hepers to ribbons and sucking down their blood; they’d all invariably be incredibly good-looking with perfect hair. There’d probably be some outright confabulations as well: their ability to swim with dizzying speed under water; and ludicrous and laughable notions about people-heper romances.