Winston’s brain boiled from the fever inside his pressure-cooker skull.  

He had sweat through his clothes for two straight days. He’d sweat through his hoodies and even his comforter. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. It was infuriating to be constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown and not have the strength to do anything about it.

Steadying himself against the window pain, he stared into the park across from his apartment. The October cold coming through the glass felt good on his face, but he couldn’t enjoy it. Something was out there. It was looking back at him, he could feel it, this “hunter.” The full moon teased at it in glimpses through the branches. His eyes darted from shadow-to-shadow, tracking autumn leaves as they shook loose in the wind. His breath fogged the window.

“Winston!”

He flinched and spun around, heart pounding and he started shivering. His eyelids felt full of grit. When his eyes refocused, it was just his roommate, Clarence, standing by the door with his coat on. Winston rubbed his face and ran his fingers through his hair. “What?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

Clarence started to laugh but caught himself and spoke slowly, “I’m… going… to find… something… to eat. Do you want me to grab something for you, too?”

Blood rushed to Winston’s face, making his cheeks feel on fire. His stomach twisted and squelched, making him clench his fist. A draft leaked through the windowsill, sending a chill down his sweaty back. He pushed his thumb against his temple to make the pounding stop, and breathed a single word: “No.”

“Dude, maybe they,” Clarence started to say then shook his head. “Your folks are only, like, fifteen minutes away.” Between the constant headaches and locking himself in his room for days at a time, Winston looked like he’d lost twenty pounds since the accident. Not to mention the hair he was losing. And now he was turning down food.

Clarence pulled his cap over his ears. “Well, if you change your mind, about food or your folks, I have my phone on me.”

Winston locked his bloodshot eyes on him. “I’m fine,” he said with feigned absolute certainty.

“What happened to you, man?” asked Clarence.

The words explaining what happened to him were on the tip of Winston’s tongue, only to fall silent. He took a couple of feeble steps towards the door before a headrush nearly brought him to his knees. He leaned against a chair. “I said, I’m fine.”

“Sure you are,” said Clarence, shutting the door behind him.

Winston wanted to talk to him about it. He really did. The urge to get it off his chest struck him nearly every day, sometimes every hour. But Clarence wouldn’t understand. How could he? Nobody could understand.

Back at the window, Winston winced as his surgically repaired shoulder protested against him gripping the frame with both hands. He watched Clarence walk out into the street below, pulling up his collar to block the wind. The hair on the back of Winston’s neck prickled. Expecting the shadows to stretch across the pavement from the park to snatch up his friend, he frantically looked from tree-to-tree.

But it didn’t happen, and Clarence kept walking as if nothing were wrong. How Winston envied his blissful ignorance.

Without another person there, the apartment was too still, oppressive, and silent, just like the trail he took through the Olympic Mountains. He remembered how a shroud of fog fell over the trees and brought an eerie quiet to the forest. It was Heaven until that peace was shattered by the feeling of being stalked. Like a hunter was waiting for him to step off the trail from the shadows.

It was a feeling that followed him all the way to the hospital in Seattle, and then home to Greensburg, Iowa.

He pressed his forehead against the glass as he breathed in the cold through his nose and held it. The smell of dust filled his senses. He exhaled through his mouth, fogging the window, and took a step back.

Steadying himself, he breathed slowly and deeply. “I am at home,” he said out loud. “This is my sanctuary.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Accidents happen all the time in the mountains.” He took in a shaky breath and opened his eyes. “The mind plays tricks,” he said to himself, though anyone passing by outside would have thought he was trying to convince a third party. “Just some weird PTSD thing.”

Winston looked around the room. Nothing was out of the ordinary, yet it was all wrong. His heart pounded against the wall of his chest. The furniture hadn’t been moved in two years. The sparse wall art was the same as when they moved in. Even the unpaid bills sitting on the coffee table hadn’t been moved in weeks.

The crack of gun fire flashed through his head. “Stop,” he yelled, rubbing and scratching at the pink, dimpled skin, where staples still held his shoulder together, and he let out a nervous laugh. “I slipped and fell down a ravine,” he laughed, desperate to believe his own story. His cheeks tightened and he bit his lip. Saliva filled his mouth and his eyes misted over. Swallowing, he gasped. “This is ridiculous.” He wiped his blushing face. “It was a normal hiking accident.”

Slapping his cheeks, he grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. News, sports, sitcoms, there was nothing on. Nothing of interest. Nothing to distract him from the barrage of memories he’d been trying to suppress. He held his breath. The TV had one job. He needed distraction. Clicking through the channels faster, pressing the buttons harder, he chewed at the inside of his cheek. Why have a TV if it can’t serve the one function it’s specifically designed for? Winston clicked frantically until finally turning off the TV.

He paced around the room. Sweat matted his hair to his skin. The apartment felt like a filthy cage; the lock was his own fear. He spit at the idea of being afraid of anything. Turning up the stereo, “Moon Baby” by Godsmack drowned out all ambient noise. I am not worked up, he thought. His panting reflection in the black TV screen said otherwise. I am in complete control.

He threw the remote and it exploded against the wall.

“God damn it!” he yelled at the shattered plastic strewn about the floor. He knelt down to pick up the pieces and dug his fingernails into the coffee table. His throat burned as if he’d swallowed acid and he flipped the coffee table across the room, smashing the lamp. Pain surged from his shoulder, flowing out through his veins.

Hyperventilating, Winston scrambled to his feet. Fire consumed him, he was sure of it, but there were no flames. Chest and shoulders rising and falling erratically, he choked and gasped. “No,” he managed between sobs. “No!” He slammed the back of his head into the wall, leaving a dent, and tried to recite a broken version of a prayer he’d learned as a child. “Please! Not one of them!” Tears and spittle dripped from his chin. “I promise,” he sobbed, but couldn’t finished the sentence as his jaw popped out of place on one side and his tongue swelled.

Winston dropped to his knees and pressed his head to the dingy carpet. The rank smell of stale beer, blood and rotted take-out flooded in. He sat up as if in a trance. Stoic. Numb, even as his teeth cracked and shifted in his mouth. He thought about how he’d never see his family again. He didn’t even have a picture of them in the apartment.

His reflection, a face he didn’t recognize, grinned back at him from the TV screen. It was like looking into the face of the “hunter” that had stalked and tried to kill him. He doubled over and let out a howling moan.

A sliver of moonlight shown through the window like a sparkling spotlight. Bathing him in clarity, it soothed and focused him. He accepted that the hunter had been as real as the pain that wracked his body now, and gave in to it.

A key turned in the door.

 

Clarence stepped into the darkened apartment, dinner in hand. “Hey, bro, I grabbed you a little something in case you’re hungry!” he tried to say over the stereo. Smacking his shin on the overturned coffee table. “What the hell?”

“Leave!” Winston growled from the darkness.

Moonlight gave just enough light for Clarence to see Winston’s hunched silhouette, shivering against the wall. “Listen,” said Clarence gently. “Let me call your folks. I’m sure they’ll know-”

“No!” barked Winston.

Clarence reached for the light switch. “They said there could be… complications.”

Winston held his face in his hands. “Get away!”

Clarence flipped the switch and recoiled with a gasp.

Winston looked up at his roommate with blue eyes and furless face. “They didn’t get all the silver out,” he sobbed, pulling at his newly exposed skin.

“You’re… you’re…,” Clarence babbled. “A human!” he cried in terror, and scrambled out the door so quickly that he tripped over the trick-or-treater he’d brought for Winston to eat.

Winston shook his fist at the moon and tried to exorcise his pain with a howl, but it only came out as a pathetic, human scream.