They Are the Hunters

by Faith Gardner

Inside the SUV, it’s hot as an oven. Inside the trunk, it’s even hotter. The sweaty girl locked up in there, curled tightly in the fetal position, is screaming—but no one can hear her.

The seats are laid flat. There’s a bodily fug in the air that wafts out the second she opens the trunk—metallic and sweaty and something else. It makes her stomach turn. She doesn’t want to think about her son screwing Olivia West in the back of the family car, but obviously he did.

Her stomach would really turn if she knew what they actually got up to in that car.

Sometimes, at times like these where he isn’t taking the situation seriously, she has the urge to hit him. Not hard. Just a little bomp on the chin.

It still stinks underneath the fake lavender—coppery, dirty—and she tries very hard not to wonder if she’s smelling her son’s semen.

Ewww gag lol .

“That’s … strange.” “Why?” She forces herself to loosen it again. “To be meeting with a sixteen-year-old girl? One who’s our child’s best friend and who’s apparently banging our other child?”

“Ange, don’t forget who we are and what we’re capable of.” With her hand on the door, she glances back at him, keeping her breath steady. “What do you mean?” “You know what I mean.” There’s a sacred code of silence, one that they long ago agreed to never break. To think he’s breaking it now—to think he’s referring to it after all these years—steals the breath from her, makes her feel like the world is tipping to its side.

Okay this sounds sus. Just what exactly are they capable of? Seems the parents got some shady secrets of their own.

But only liars say appearances don’t matter.

“Chlamydia,” she says. Carson looks up at her as if she just hurled a rock at his head. “Come again?” “Did you know,” she says, in a quieter tone, “that you can catch chlamydia from birds?”

I didn't know that until I read this book. I had to google it just to make sure though lol.

She unnerves him. Most people don’t, but there’s something about Janis that gives Carson a little shiver and he can’t tell if it’s the kind of shiver he likes or the kind he doesn’t. Often, they feel the same.

“That’s all right,” he said with a nod. “I’ll tell my boss you said no comment.” “Thank you,” she said, starting to shut the door. He put his foot in the way to stop her. “Now that I’ve done my journalistic duty—can I take you out to lunch?” Angela let out a snort.

“So why’d you assault your pops, anyway?” he asked. She paused so long he thought he lost her for good. “Because he’s a fucking monster.”

She has a shapely figure Carson notices against his will. Yes, Ezra probably has a lot of fun with her. Carson clears his throat and asks his thoughts to please center themselves on the task at hand and to remain professional.

Duudee why'd you even go there?

“I was surprised to see you sent an email at—what—seven this morning? I’d have figured you’d be sleeping in.” After having sex with my son in the backseat of our car all night, he doesn’t add.

Lmao

Carson selects his words carefully, wanting to be as honest as possible, but also aware that an uncharacteristic anxiety is building in him, a gripping pressure in his chest.

Did Carson help his wife kill her own A-hole dad back in the day?

He puts a hand on her shoulder, which is bare and soft and gives him a sweet shiver, then pulls it away like he touched a hot stove.

if you want to win Miss Riverwood, you can’t go up there looking like you stepped out of a Tim Burton movie.” “Why not?” Eliza says, unable to help herself from arguing. It’s like a magnetic pull with her mother sometimes. “Aren’t I supposed to be my authentic self?” That’s what the Miss Riverwood contest urges its contestants: “Show us your authentic self!” “Your authentic self has lovely, golden-brown hair,” Angela reminds her.

She’s too weird to be normal and too normal to be weird.

“He’s acting fuckin’ weird, man,” Izzy says. “Have you noticed that?” “Yeah, I have,” Eliza says. “For the last sixteen years.”

LOLOL

Izzy has never called Eliza “bitch” affectionately before. Apparently an achievement in their newfound friendship has been unlocked.

I saw his face in the mirror on the wall. He looked serious as shit when he did it.

“Eh, come on—we both know Ezra’s too much of a wuss to kill anyone.”

“Compartmentalization”—a fancy word she learned from a self-help book on PTSD she found on a curb one day. She can take something awful that happened, the memory, and will herself to never think of it again. Pretend it never was.

Sleep: the one place she can’t control where her mind goes.

So clueless. So unobservant. Boys are blind.

He smells his sleeve again. Why does he keep doing that? It’s a tic she never noticed before.

But there’s a softness in Angela as she speaks that Olivia’s not used to. She’s heard her doctor voice and her mom voice. This, here, is a new voice.

For the first time, Ezra considers that he might not be the real psychopath—and the thought makes his stomach pitch.

“What happened? He just … drove into the water?” “Someone cut his brakes.” Olivia’s jaw drops.

She’s an adolescent psychiatrist. She’s well aware that, in the end, they’ll find a place to have sex if that’s what they’re determined to do.

All week she’s been nauseated,

Maybe the late period means she's pregnant

“Want me to kill her?” She shoots him a look. “Carson.” “I’m kidding. Sort of.”

Nah but seriously, has he killed for her?

Passion is a flame that inevitably dies. But loyalty burns forever. And secrets can sew two hearts together.

The irony that a human being that heartless was a cardiologist is not lost on Carson. The world is a better place without Walter Atkins in it. Human beings are complex, indeed, but sometimes it’s just simple math. Subtract one person and the world’s a better place.

She’s pregnant, she’s gay? Oh, he hopes she’s gay. Please be gay and not pregnant.

LOL

“What if I don’t think she … should … stay with us?” Eliza shifts her gaze from her bunny slippers and finally makes eye contact.

“Look, if her dad went missing, she’s probably got something to do with it.”

Her father appeared to be a wealthy, respectable doctor, but underneath that costume, he was nothing but a sadistic brute whose entire family lived in constant fear of him.

“Are you sorry you did it?” Carson asked her when she told him the story. Angela turned to him. He saw a distant fire in her tiger eyes, a danger that made him never want to look away from her again. “The only thing I’m sorry about,” she said, “is that I didn’t hit him hard enough to kill him.”

Sure, she doesn’t mind hurting people, but she doesn’t want to hurt people. There’s a big difference between having the stomach for horrors and having the lust for it.

“You don’t hear it?” “Hear what, Ezra?” “The screaming,” he says, his eyes wide. Finally, he’s looking at her, really looking at her. And he’s terrified. Seeing this in him strikes a note of terror in Olivia, too. What the hell is going on? “Screaming?” she whispers. “Yeah, I hear it. On and off, on and off. Coming from the …”

The tale-tell head

And then, the most shocking thought of all: is she the darkness? Is she the darkness that has descended upon the Hunter household?

She tried to get Olivia kicked out of her house not because she thinks Olivia’s such a bad person. It’s more that it makes life awkward.

Then Eliza’s eyes meet Olivia’s. It happens in one split second. And in that second, it’s like the whole world disappears and it’s just the two of them: Eliza. Olivia. Each at opposite ends. With a sick twist of her stomach, Eliza understands exactly what happened tonight. Because Olivia flashes a smug half-smile and a queenly wave—so quickly that no one else catches it.

Imagine going through it all again, at this age. How could she? It’s exhausting and eternal and imperfect, raising children.

I have a feeling she's gonna have to go through it again if my prediction comes true and she's pregnant

But hon, Olivia’s not out to get you. Listen to how that sounds. She’s not some mastermind collecting venomous spiders and letting them loose in your room.” Angela offers a gentle smile, a little poke. “Come on.” “That’s what she wants you to think,” Eliza whispers.

He reaches a hand deeper and feels something large and solid—a roast, probably, one they’d bought and forgotten—and

Time’s not a straight line, but a path full of switchback turns. There’s a comfort to it.

Here’s the secret they never tell you about getting everything you want: once you get it, you live in fear you’re going to lose it.

“Holy macaroni! Look at these living dolls up here, am I right? Is that creepy to say? Is that not PC?

Um a little creepy, yes lol

thing that everyone is surrounding, the thing they’re all there to gape at together, suspended in horror. A raven hops on the ground in the middle of the walking path with a rotting human hand hanging from its black beak.