"Sure! You're the target!" the red-faced man yelled above the turmoil. "You lost the game—now we have the hunt!"
And suddenly, frighteningly, Hendley knew why the big table was almost always empty, and why the mention of the hunt had always created such a feverish interest. He saw with terrible clarity what he had unconsciously guessed all along.
The prey of the hunters was human.
12
The darkness of the woods in the hour before dawn was like a liquid frozen to a solid, imprisoning within its translucent substance the thin slivers of starlight, the waxen shapes of frozen leaves, the brittle tracery of branches, the cubes and cones of inky shadows. Moving stealthily, Hendley had a sense of shattering this density, of stealing then along the irregular, jagged cracks of the fragmented night.
In the distance he heard the hunters' voices, strained by the intervening trees into the thin cries of children at play. Hendley, a red marker taped to the back of his uniform to identify him as the target, had been given a five-minute start. The gap had closed. The hunters could crash and blunder through the underbrush, careless of noise, while he must slink in silence.
"No weapons," one of them had told him, grinning. "You don't need to worry about that. We really have to catch you."
No weapons. But with a shudder Hendley remembered a scene in a newsview film, not understood at the time, in which a group of Freemen had swarmed upon a single fleeing figure. And he remembered a glimpse of that lone figure lying afterward on the grass, motionless, as if he were asleep. No weapons. Only hands and feet....
He had no idea how many of them there were. In the open near the edge of the woods they had been a numberless mass, a restless, eager horde of hunters, impatient for the pursuit to begin, fanning out to blanket a ridge with their white uniforms. He'd heard their excited mutter, like a single animal growl, as he plunged into the line of trees. He'd looked back once, and they had seemed to surge toward him, straining against an unseen leash.
He paused, trying to place his position. Fortunately he had spent an afternoon in the woods planning his aborted attempt to scale the outside wall. He knew roughly where he was and where the main paths were that would represent added danger.