The Hunter And The Hunted

“You can smell fear in the dark—just like blood. And tonight, I wasn’t sure which one would give us away first.”

The unexpected sound of a woman's voice slicing through the darkness snapped me out of the creeping edges of exhaustion.

“I mean you no harm,” she called, her tone strikingly calm, unnervingly measured—a deliberate contrast to the oppressive silence that had preceded it. The words floated through the night like an echo from a dream, surreal and wholly out of place.

My head jerked upright, a jolt of adrenaline purging the fog from my mind in an instant. The dry wind had been whispering steadily across the Drop Zone, playing with the corners of the tarps, filling the silence with its indifferent breath. Kain's soft, pain-laced whimpers had been a lullaby of sorts, their rhythm familiar enough to numb my vigilance. But now, the calm had ruptured.

With fumbling fingers, I unearthed the phone from its shallow grave. The cold plastic bit into my skin, a stark reminder that comfort was a luxury we couldn’t afford. The screen lit up—weak but piercing in the black—and I swept the light across the uneven contours of our space, searching for the voice’s owner.

The shadows flinched and twisted beneath the light, exaggerated and looming. My heart thudded so hard I could feel it behind my eyes. Then, it caught her.

A figure, emerging from the darkness like something conjured. She stepped forward slowly, deliberately—no hesitation, no attempt to hide. And that was what terrified me most.

I gasped, an involuntary sound that tore from my throat like a reflex. My whole body clenched, breath caught halfway between a scream and silence. She stood there, young but not fragile, a bow gripped in one hand, a bloodied arrow dangling from the other. It glistened—fresh. The thick crimson trail that streaked down its shaft caught the phone's light before vanishing into the dust at her feet.

“Shit,” Kain rasped behind me. The sound was dry and guttural, the exhalation of someone who had already given too much to the night. His voice held pain, yes—but also something else. Recognition, maybe. Or fear.

My body was poised to run, to protect, to fight, but my mind staggered under the weight of questions. Who was she? What had she killed? What had she followed?

The memory of Borneo surged to the surface without warning—vivid, unbidden. Jungle heat clinging to my skin. The weight of a satellite phone in one hand, a scalpel in the other. The flash of movement in the brush. A scream, just like Kain’s tonight. Human cruelty had once shocked me. Now I braced for it.

She had blood on her arrow, and calm in her voice. A hunter—or a liar. Or both.

And I couldn’t tell which I needed her to be.

As I squatted there, facing this armed stranger in the midst of an unfamiliar landscape, the horrors I had witnessed in Borneo uncoiled from the recesses of my memory like a serpent, fangs bared and breath hot against the nape of my neck. They slithered up alongside the present moment, entwining themselves with the dread already creeping beneath my skin. My body gave a violent shudder—not of cold, but of recognition. A deep, cellular understanding that the kind of violence once confined to foreign jungles could just as easily take root in desert dust.

This world, too, was built on blood.

The arrow in her hand shimmered red in the faint light, a crude needle still threaded with death. My throat tightened. I had seen men gutted in the brush with machetes sharp as truth, had stitched up wounds that pulsed with stories too horrific for words. But this was something different. This was new. This was here. The brutality I had filed away in the cabinets of memory was now walking towards me, quiet and real and not in the past at all.

A raw truth clenched at my gut: life, at its most basic, was an unrelenting negotiation with violence. But still, I resisted. I always had. I refused to believe that survival demanded the abandonment of our better selves. Darwin’s brutal logic—the fittest endure—echoed in my mind like a verdict. But I was tired of verdicts. I wanted to believe we were more than animals with tools and fear.

And so I looked at her, this young woman poised like a question between attack and mercy, her bow still drawn, her presence like a flint spark above dry tinder. Her face was unreadable, but not cruel. Her posture firm, but not bloodthirsty. I clung to the hope—no, the need—to believe that her bloodied arrow had been loosed in defence, not domination. That somewhere beneath the weapon and the tension and the horror of this night, she still held within her the capacity for compassion.

That she wasn’t just a hunter.

Her voice came suddenly, slicing through the heavy quiet like the snap of a trap springing shut. A command, sharp and deliberate: a demand to follow. No explanation. No comfort. Just a direction.

My hand shot to Paul’s arm, gripping it tightly, as if anchoring us both against the unknown. The adrenaline in my blood ignited my voice before reason could temper it.

“Step back!” I shouted.

The sound fractured the silence, echoed off the boxes and vanished into the dark. My fingers pressed deeper into Paul’s sleeve, part shield, part warning. The urge to protect surged through me, irrational and absolute. Not just to protect him—but to protect some line, some final boundary between our humanity and whatever force had just stepped out of the dark with a weapon in her hand and blood on her fingers.

The woman’s sudden change in demeanour—dropping the arrow, raising her hands in a practised gesture of surrender—should have brought relief. It didn’t. It merely shifted the nature of the threat. Now, instead of anticipating an attack, I was caught in the limbo of second-guessing. Was this disarmament real, or calculated? Her eyes, narrowed against the wind and shadow, scanned the horizon with a tension that didn’t leave her limbs, even in their raised position.

“Keep yer fuckin' voices doon,” she hissed. The urgency in her tone was not desperation but warning, precise and controlled. The kind of warning given by someone who had seen things—survived things. “It's nae safe. We hae tae gang. Noo.”

Her words struck like flint on dry tinder, igniting a new layer of panic in my chest. The darkness beyond our little box-formed haven suddenly thickened, as if something monstrous might slither forth if we lingered too long. But even as the weight of her warning pressed down on me, my mind bristled with distrust. Go where? Why now? Why us?

Paul turned toward me, his face half-lit by the phone’s pale glow. His eyes searched mine, trying to mine answers I didn’t have. “Where are we going?” he asked, and the question felt both innocent and impossible.

“Tae yer camp,” the woman replied.

Her answer was as simple as it was devastating. It landed like a stone in the pit of my stomach. Our camp. Our fire. Our people. The idea of her—this armed, bloodstained stranger—moving freely among them sent ice coursing through me. The camp was our last illusion of control. And now even that felt vulnerable.

Paul leaned in closer, his whisper barely a thread. “I don't think we should trust her.”

Neither did I. My instincts thrashed against themselves, torn between every cautionary tale my life had taught me and the raw need to act. Kain whimpered behind us, a cracked sound of pain and helplessness, and it sliced through my indecision like a knife. We couldn’t stay here. That was clear. But following her might just hasten our end.

Lois growled low, the sound almost imperceptible—but it carried weight. It was ancient, primal, a warning gifted by evolution itself. Her hackles weren’t raised, but her body had shifted imperceptibly forward, tail still but poised, as if waiting for one wrong move to pounce. I placed a hand on her back, feeling the tremble in her muscle—an echo of the storm gathering within me.

Fear and necessity wrapped around each other like serpents, hissing truths I didn’t want to hear. This woman might be a threat. Or she might be the only one who knew the threat.

And still—we were already bleeding.

The growl that shattered the fragile silence wasn’t Lois. This sound was deeper—richer with intent—like something pulled from the belly of the Earth. It didn’t echo; it settled, as though the darkness itself had birthed it. The hairs along my forearms stood on end, my breath catching halfway to a scream.

The phone’s light trembled in my hand as I swept it wildly across the surrounding dunes, but the void swallowed its glow. There was nothing—no shape, no shimmer—just an expanse of shadow so thick it almost felt sentient.

My mind seized on the one thing that still made sense: the woman.

Her arrow, once discarded, was back in her hand. Blood still curled along its shaft in serpentine streaks, catching the thin light like a signature left by violence. But her eyes—they were scanning the darkness too, not us. Her stance had shifted, not toward aggression but defence. And the realisation clicked into place with jarring clarity: she didn’t injure Kain. If she had wanted to hurt us, we’d already be dead.

The thought didn’t calm me, but it redirected my fear.

“There's something else out there,” I whispered to Paul, the words scraping out of my throat like a prayer and a warning all at once. I angled the beam toward the direction Lois had fixed on—her posture now frozen, every muscle tight as a drawn bow. But the light found only more black, as if the night itself had thickened.

“Shit!” the word burst from both Paul and me in unison, the synchronicity underscoring our shared dread.

The woman moved closer. Her silhouette emerged like a shadow born from our own fear, arrow lowered but ready. The nearness of her body should have grounded me, offered reassurance that she wasn’t running away from the threat, but instead she was placing herself between us and it. Yet I couldn’t help the instinct to recoil.

“My name is Charity. Don’t be afraid; ye can trust me,” she said, and her voice, though low, cut cleanly through the static of our rising panic. No tremor. No doubt. Her hand closed around Paul’s arm—not as a question, but a directive. Not softness, but urgency. “We maun gang.”

Trust. A small, brittle word.

And still, against all logic, something in me wanted to believe her.

Lois’s growls deepened, vibrating low and savage in her throat—a sound so foreign it might as well have come from another animal entirely. Her body was coiled like a spring, every hair along her spine standing rigid, her eyes locked on something unseen in the dark. I’d never seen her like this. The loving, loyal companion was gone; in her place was something ancient, primal—a sentinel called forth by danger we couldn’t yet name.

The sound twisted in my gut like a warning bell.

“Come on,” Paul urged, his voice breaking through the haze of fear. His hand closed around my arm, grounding me, but not calming me. I wasn’t sure anything could. His words echoed my own earlier logic, the rationale I had tried—and failed—to cling to. “If this woman wanted to kill us, she would have done it already.”

“Or feed us to some creature,” I whispered without thinking, the phrase slicing through the air before I could stop it. The bitterness in my voice shocked me. It was the kind of paranoia I would have ridiculed in someone else. But tonight—after everything—we were all teetering on the edge.

Glenda!

My own name cracked across my consciousness like a whip. This wasn’t me. I had faced machetes and gunfire in Borneo. I had kept men alive with nothing more than gauze and a prayer. What was I doing, letting fear dictate my thoughts?

“Dinnae waste ony mair time. We need tae move,” Charity’s voice pulled me back again—sharp, unwavering, and imbued with just enough command to override hesitation. She wasn’t panicked. She wasn’t begging. She was moving. Acting. Leading.

Paul and I moved to lift Kain. His weight was deadened by pain, his head sagging against Paul’s shoulder as we steadied him. I felt the burn in my arms and back immediately, but it was a welcome pain—proof I was still doing something useful, something real.

“Gie me yer licht,” Charity said, and I froze.

The request was small, spoken plainly, but its weight landed heavily in my hands. The phone—the only sliver of light we had—was my lifeline. My guide. My control. And now she was asking me to surrender it.

She stood still, her arm extended, waiting.

It was absurd how difficult it felt. But something in the way she looked at me—not pleading, not forceful, just ready—shifted something in me. She hadn’t flinched when the growl came. Hadn’t backed away when we accused or doubted her. She had moved toward the danger.

And right now, I didn’t know what else to do.

I placed the phone in her hand.

It clicked into her grip with a soft plastic tap, and in that instant, the roles shifted. I was no longer the one guiding us through the night. I had handed over that control. Not out of weakness, but out of necessity. Out of hope.

Hope that this stranger wasn’t just another shadow in the dark.

“Bide close,” Charity instructed, her voice low and firm, cutting through the darkness like a taut wire. “And keep up.” There was no room for debate in her tone—only command, and the brittle promise of safety if we obeyed.

I nodded, the motion reflexive, but her words struck a chord deep within me. They weren’t just instructions—they were an echo. The same phrase I’d spoken countless times before, in a different war, to children too small to understand the peril of stepping in the wrong place. “Stay close. Step where I step.” The memory surged up, unbidden but vivid: the humid air of the jungle, the acrid scent of earth disturbed by explosives, the eyes of children wide with trust, their small hands clinging to mine as we passed through killing fields dotted with hidden mines.

Then—the boom.

Even in memory, the detonation was instant and overwhelming. My body flinched now, as it had then, every nerve misfiring in imagined anticipation. The sharp scent of blood and clay returned like a ghost on the wind. I squeezed my eyes shut for a half-second, bracing against a past that refused to be buried. It was a phantom pain, but the terror it brought was real. The kind that lingers in muscle memory.

I forced myself to look away from the memory, anchoring my eyes on Charity’s silhouette. Her bow was slung across her back now, but the tension in her shoulders spoke volumes—this was not a woman unfamiliar with violence. Yet she walked with the assurance of someone who knew the route, who knew how far to push her fear before it became paralysis. I followed that confidence. I clung to it.

Paul and I moved in rhythm, lifting and guiding Kain between us. He groaned quietly now and then—a sound I tried not to dwell on. His weight had shifted subtly. Too much. He was slipping closer to unconsciousness, and I could feel it in every slackened muscle.

Step. Breathe. Focus. Step.

The wind, once so savage and unpredictable, was finally dying. Each gust grew less fierce, the storm loosening its grip on the night. Without the constant sting of grit in our eyes, we moved with more certainty, the worst of the confusion beginning to lift.

And then, like a lighthouse after a long, churning sea, the camp came into view.

Tiny flames shimmered ahead—fire-sticks. Their glow was dim but steady, outlining the boundary of our fragile haven. My breath caught in my throat, not with fear this time, but with the sharp, almost painful relief of recognition. We were close. Almost there.

The firelight danced on the sand like sentries waiting for us, small guardians warding off the black. Each flicker felt like a promise: you’re home. You’re alive. Keep moving.

I didn’t believe in miracles. But tonight, even a flicker of light felt like grace.