Page 64 of Hunter

Hunter kept his expression blank. He would not talk about the things he and Kathryn had done. That was private. A memory he would lock away in his heart for the rest of his short life.

He climbed into the car and set the duffel bag on the seat beside him. The driver started the engine, and they rode to the training center. But leaving the house didn’t help. The pain rode with him.

It wouldn’t go away. He had invested too much of himself in the feeling of being connected with her. In the talks, the sharing, the touching and kissing, and all the little things.

The song she had been singing while she worked in the kitchen began to run through his mind. He liked the song. It had words that talked about life.

He had thought that he and Kathryn might have a little more time together before he fulfilled his purpose.

He had been wrong. But he knew his duty, and he hoped now that they would deploy him soon. He could go off and assassinate General Kassan, the dictator of Gravan. Kassan was evil. Colonel Emerson had explained many times that the man was destroying the lives of everyone in his country. Killing him would be a good deed. But nobody could get close enough to kill the general and escape. So, the clone Swinton had made was going off on what Colonel Emerson called a kamikaze mission. Like the Japanese airplane pilots in World War II who dive-bombed American ships and sacrificed their lives for the glory of the empire. He would be killed, too. But that was good, because then the pain would stop.

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Kathryn fought against waking, fought against the need to face reality. But once awareness returned, it was impossible to slip back into the blessed oblivion of sleep. The images from the night before came back like demons sent to carry her off to hell.

With a small sound of protest, she tried to push them out of her mind. But the pictures were too vivid. She covered her eyes with her hands, but it didn’t help. Over the course of her career, she had seen shocking things, like the miserable conditions that could prevail in a state mental hospital or refugee detention camps. But nothing had prepared her for the laboratory in Building 22. For as long as she lived, she would never forget that place.

Who had given the approval for the research here, she wondered? Did the President know Dr. Swinton was growing men in tanks? Or had permission come from some madman in the Pentagon?

She shuddered, then thought of Hunter. Oh God, Hunter. He’d been worried when he’d heard the siren and come out to meet her. Then he’d seen the horror on her face, and she’d been too upset to talk to him coherently.

Much of the scene between them was now a blur. But she could remember some of the things. His words. Her totally inadequate responses.

Leaping out of bed, she rushed to his bedroom. It was empty, with the bed neatly made. A drawer was slightly open. He never left anything out of place, she thought, as she crossed the room and looked inside. The drawer was empty. His clothes were gone. So was the duffel bag from the closet floor.

With a feeling of dread, she pelted down the hall. The front of the house was also deserted.

He had left. Run from her.

Eyes stinging, she sank into a chair, thinking about what she’d done to him. For the first time in his life, someone—she—had reached out to him on a human level. At first, he’d been wary. But she’d worked hard to reach him, and finally he’d let himself trust the warmth and sharing growing between them. Last night, she had shattered that trust, destroyed the private world she and Hunter had built.

She felt her heart being ripped from her chest as his words came back to her. He had said that he would remember the things that had happened between them, but that they—how had he put it—would no longer have anything to do with him.

Oh God. Oh God. What had she done?

He seemed so strong in many ways. Yet he didn’t know what to expect from himself, she realized, as she remembered the way he kept checking his reactions with her—checking to see if he was normal. And he certainly didn’t know what to expect from her.

Trying to block out the look on his face, she covered her face with her hands, her body rocking back and forth. But she couldn’t hold back the tears welling up inside her. They leaked from between her fingers and ran down her cheeks as her shoulders began to shake.

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Beckton called Emerson. Thirty minutes later, they had a staff meeting in the little office off the training area. Emerson, Beckton, Swinton, Anderson, and Kolb.

While the five of them argued, Hunter was sent off to clean his spotless automatic weapon. But he could hear the loud discussion. Kolb wanted him to move back into the cottage. Beckton and Winslow had always thought it was a stupid idea. Emerson said that he had changed. His request to leave the guest quarters proved that he had changed.

They called him in, asked him questions, made him show them what Kathryn Kelley had taught him. They watched to see if he could eat a sandwich neatly. They made him pretend he was sitting in an airport waiting area, then asked what he would do if someone accidentally bumped against him.

He said, “Excuse me.”

They asked him to talk about other things. He remembered to use the contractions. They asked why he wanted to change the living arrangements. He told them he wanted to concentrate on his assignment.

He was pretty sure that he did everything right. He showed them he had learned a lot of important socialization skills. Really, he had known many of the things already. He simply hadn’t thought of them as important—because nobody had made them important before Kathryn. Now he demonstrated that he could pass for human. He hoped he had convinced them he was ready for his assignment.

They let him put his clothing back in his quarters. He unpacked everything and softly touched the green fur of the alligator before shoving it into the back of a drawer. If anyone asked, he would say it was a souvenir.

That night he would sleep in the narrow bed where he had slept since he had left Swinton’s laboratory. Except for the two nights he had lived with Kathryn in the guest cottage. Only two nights. It seemed like longer. His whole life. The meaningful part of his life. He clamped his teeth together, trying to hold back any sound as he put his shaving cream and toothbrush onto the shelf over the sink. But he couldn’t hold back the feeling of emptiness inside.

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