Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

Stockton’s son, Peter, was asleep in one of the cots, his back to them. He’d celebrated his high-school graduation by killing a black rhinoceros only the day before. Peter had brought along his best friend from boarding school, Christian Swift, but Christian didn’t kill anything except time, sketching the animals.

Christian followed the man Fallows out of the tent. The killer crossed the ground in slow, careful steps, always planting his feet just so, like a pallbearer lugging one corner of an invisible coffin. He laughed and smiled easily, but he had attentive, chilly eyes, the color of lead. Those eyes made Christian think, randomly, of the moons around Saturn, airless places where the seas were acid.

The way Fallows killed, it was as if he himself were the weapon and the gun was only incidental.

Christian had overheard Fallows saying to Mr. Stockton that after he got his lion, he might give up hunting, that there was nothing left to go after. Stockton had laughed and said, “What about hunting a man?” Fallows had looked at him with those chilly, distant eyes and said, “Hunted them and been hunted by them and have the wounds to prove it.”

Parallel to “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell

For the moment he was alone with the lion in the profound stillness between life and death, a separate and solemn kingdom.

The boys sat together on the love seat, Peter in a tailored Armani suit, Christian in a blue blazer. Christian didn’t come from money, had made it to private school on his wits. Stockton was proud of his son for looking past the other boy’s secondhand wardrobe and for quietly accepting Christian’s broke, shy, strictly religious foster parents.

a trip through the little door was probably worth any number of overweight, intellectually lazy sons.

Nothing reassured a man about an investment like knowing that richer and more powerful men had gone first.

“I feel like a fly on the edge of a drain,” Christian said. He spoke with what sounded like a thickened tongue, sounded like a teenager who’s found himself drunk for the first time in his life.