Misfits
Part One
The man was alone and terrified. He was leaving a trail of blood that Shiloh could smell, much less see in the moon light as it ran along the leaf litter floor of the woods. Worst of all, for him, he wasn’t even trying to run anymore. He was holding onto his side and grunting in pain. He was trying to hide in a stand of bushes and doing a piss poor job by any account. Running wouldn’t have saved him, but it might have added a few more tired minutes to his life.
This was a messy hunt. Mistakes were made and they belonged mostly to Shiloh. There were no excuses to be made and Wendy wouldn’t listen to them if they were offered anyway. This wasn’t the first hunt or even the twentieth and not nearly the most questionable. They both did their homework, just like they always did.
Thomas Mayhew is thirty-seven years old. Estranged from his wife and only child, a girl, now thirteen. They live in another state and for good reason. Thomas works in construction, which is to say he shows up and does all of the shit that no one else wants to do because his older brother owns the company and refuses to fire him out of some misplaced sense of familial loyalty. Thomas makes right around forty thousand a year and rents an apartment in an ugly, run down little complex in an out of the way part of town. He keeps to himself for the most part, watches baseball when it’s the season for it, keeps an old card collection that belonged to his old man that he doesn’t add to. That’s pretty much it, except for his penchant for preteen girls.
Father raised them by a code. Porn habits and responding to catfishing wasn’t enough. “A man may think a certain way and lead himself astray in so many ways, but you kids will never survive going around randomly killing perverts over their internet search histories.”
Father was wise, and concerned, always concerned. He taught them both who to go after and how, he raised them how he had been raised. “Predators in the wild take the old, and the very young, but they mostly take the sick, the lame. Predators cull the members from the herd that are a drain on it. In a way, we’re just predators, but for the human herd.”
No criminal factions, no connected officials or people who knew people. Loners and misfits only. Wendy put it a different way once while arguing with Father. “So, we don’t solve problems for anyone, we don’t go after the gangs and the pimps, we don’t free anyone, we just go after the fucking johns.”
She had a point, there was nothing heroic about the family way. A certain argument could be made about going after addicts for their addictions instead of going after the people supplying the drug. That is, until you considered the nature of this particular criminality. Pedophiles aren’t addicts. These are not misguided wretches or victims of trauma turning to a simple opiate in order to forget their daily maladies. These are child rapists.
Father had plenty of examples on hand as well, stories about old friends and family. Fellow predators, born or turned like they were who took it upon themselves to try and solve things, once and for all. The lesson to be learned was there was no such thing as once and for all. Manage to kill an entire gang, another gang comes along to take the trade. Take on a cartel or a mafia, only compounds the misery while producing no change in the long run.
Wendy came around eventually and so did Shiloh, with time, because here’s the thing about the hunger. The hunger is always there. The hunger never fucking stops. You hunt, you kill, you feed, the hunger is always waiting around the corner, letting you know that its time to start the cycle all over again. Life could become a very simple and very short affair if you let the hunger take over.
The hunger was reminding Shiloh of that as the slick blood trail ran over the leaves. The hunger reminded Shiloh that Thomas Mayhew was prey. His repeat visits to a shady hand job massage parlor on Jefferson Ave allowed Shiloh to ease into that sense of hunger until Wendy appeared through a thicket of brush, her hair a tangled yellow mess. “Where is he?”
Shiloh whispered, “Over there in those bushes. He just…stopped. I guess he thinks he’s hiding.”