Hunters by Chet Williamson Page B

his climb, his hands clawing for grips, the tips of his heavy,
steel-toed shoes digging into the crevices of granite, displacing
soft shale that her lighter tread had never broken. Her fear drove
her upward, and she wondered for a terrifying instant what she
would do when she reached the top, and there was nowhere higher to
go.
    When she heard the cry below her, it sounded
like a cry of triumph, and she expected to feel, a split second
later, his wiry fingers close on her ankle and yank her from the
cliff, indeed was nearly ready to welcome the fall into oblivion
and darkness. But no angry hand grabbed her, and she heard the cry
again, further away, and thick with the fear she felt.
    She paused, looked down, and what she saw
filled her with both a deep chill and a dark joy. The shale of a
ledge on which she had trod countless times had finally crumbled
beneath her husband's feet, and Butch was hanging from his right
hand over the abyss, his left hand scrabbling for a hold on the
smooth, wet rock. His heavily shod feet dangled like lead weights,
ready to pull him down.
    He tried to grasp the edge of rock that his
other hand clung to, but it was too small, and now he reached
toward her, his hand twitching like a wounded bird. "Meggie..." he
croaked. "Help..help me..."
    There was none of the monster in him now,
only a little boy, fiercely frightened and in peril of his life, a
stupid little boy who was suddenly afraid of pain and death and
falling. Megan's feet were on a granite outcropping wide and strong
enough to support them both. She dropped to her knees, twisted her
body, and began to reach down toward Butch's hand. But what she saw
in his eyes stopped her.
    It was not gratitude or relief she saw there,
but a glare of triumph, of winning once again, of beating her one final time. It was a look that said, Pull me up, you
bitch, and I'll kill you and tear out your guts to climb back down
again.
    She knelt there, looking down at him until he
knew that she was not going to help, that she was going to let him
die. "Help me!" he cried, not fearfully now, but angrily, as if he
feared the loss of his power over her more than his own death.
" Meggie! Help me!"
    She couldn't move. She could only watch him
as his free hand struggled upward to meet her in some way, if only
to grasp her and drag her down with him. It was not like a bird
now, but like a crushed, thrashing snake, and she pulled away from
it.
    Megan stood up, and watched for what seemed like
hours until his white fingers finally weakened and slid on the
moist rock, and he fell, shouting as he flew away from her, words
that she did not then understand, and even though she had heard
them a thousand times since, waking and sleeping, had never
understood.
    A fterward, and even
now, she did not know whether the hatred she saw in her husband's
face as she started to reach for him was really there, or if she
had put it there herself, if, tired of the beatings and the rapes
and the words that hurt even more, she had let him die rather than
saved her own life.
    The police were more forgiving. Butch had a
reputation, and although she had never pressed charges, enough
people had witnessed Megan's humiliations that no time was lost in
pronouncing the death accidental. It helped that the district
magistrate's wife was a friend of Megan's mother, who had told her
tales of her daughter's woe at length.
    And though it had all happened years before,
and half a state away, Megan still kept it with her every day,
wondering what she had done, and why she had done it. Her life was
far better now, that much was true. She had a man who loved her and
never touched her except with gentleness, love, or passion. But she
always had Butch as well, walking just behind her, breathing around
the corner, hanging beneath her on the cliffs of her dreams,
falling away until his grin was only a speck of white in the
darkness, and his cry the faintest murmur of night wind.
    She thought she heard that cry