The Hunt

"Dear Mr. Gerrard," the email began, pleasantly enough. "With great pleasure we now inform you of your selection as the next target in our hunt. We do not wish to unduly alarm you, but the hunt will begin in approximately one hour from the time stamp in this email. Please prepare yourself accordingly." The eclair in Henry Gerrard's mouth hung limply, a bit of cream dangling from the exposed end, threatening to drop onto the plain manila office folder he held in his hand. The letter concluded, "Have a lovely day!" signed "The Hunters." Gerrard's eyes flicked to the time stamp in the message(Sent: 08:00 EST), and then to the clock in the lower right hand of his desktop (08:45 EST), and then swallowed the bit of half-chewed eclair waiting expectantly on the back of his tongue.

"Must be junkmail," he said, and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. The office was busily humming away, without anyone paying any heed to Gerrard in his cubicle, as it did every day and as it had done for years. Without spending another minute thinking about it, Henry deleted the email, and returned his attention to the urgent work at hand. The day wound down without event, until 15:35 EST, when a sniper round shattered the window behind his head and embedded itself neatly into his monitor, which turned black instantly and began to smoke.

Henry plunged straight under his cubicle desk, but found the space already occupied by two of his colleagues: fat Mendelsen and lugubrious Jaspers, both sweating in their white dress shirts with their ties undone at the neck. "Go away!" hissed Mendelsen, and Jaspers nodded, silently, but with hateful worry. "This is my desk!" said Henry, but the two other men only looked over their shoulders, and dripped sweat down their faces. "Get lost!" said Mendelsen, "You'll give us away!"

Furious, Henry peeked around the corner of his cubicle. The connecting hall was empty, and led across the room to the elevator. He scurried along desperately until a foot came down from one of the adjoining cubicles, blocking his way. "Out! Get it out! I have to go!" cried Henry, but the foot was soon joined by a face: the floor supervisor Gibbons, who was bald. Gibbons looked down at him and said, "Where are you going so early, Mr. Gerrard? One wonders what it is we pay you for." Meanwhile, another sniper round penetrated the floor by Gerrard's leg, leaving a neat hole and a small cloud of dust. Henry cried out in terror, but Gibbons did not seem to notice, "If it were not for your lovely wife, I don't think we'd keep you on here, really." Another sniper round landed in Gibbons' chest and red began to spread out over his shirt. "Oh," he said, looking down.

Henry got up and made a dash for the elevator. Three men were standing there, pressing the button. They waved to Gerrard when he came up, breathless. "Did you hear, Gerrard, about the proposed merger with AcuFuck?" asked a man called Bunting. "That'll really shake things up in manufacturing, don't you think?" "Yes, most certainly!" answered a second man, Stevens, while a sniper round found the elevator door, "I'd say they'd finally have to start taking R&D seriously around here!" Another man, Kimmling, was just about to speak when another bullet penetrated his head and caused quite a mess to cover a nearby water cooler. The other two men looked down at their colleague for a moment, then back up at Gerrard, "How's the wife these days, anyway? I heard she's been pretty regular at the Greasy Tonic, am I wrong?" and he laughed while Henry bit his hands and hunched low and cringed at each additional bullet and shattered pane of glass. When the elevator doors finally opened, men in tactical assault gear and carrying automatic weapons burst out of the stairwell, firing indiscriminately.

Henry leaped into the elevator and closed the doors. A voice above him said, "Quickly, climb up this!" and a rope ladder tumbled inside from the shaft above, through a tiny panel in the ceiling. "How do I know you're not one of them?" gasped Henry. "Quick! Hurry up! I feel a terrible lightness coming on. I will hold for as long as I can, though, but only because the image of your stunning wife has conquered my mind, and gives me bountiful strength!" Resignedly, Henry climbed up the rope ladder, which did not start atop the elevator itself, but extended all the way up through the elevator shaft to a tiny speck of light at the apex of the building.

"Why am I being hunted?" Henry said to the man in the bronze satin vest who pulled him up when he reached the top of the ladder. "There are food and refreshments in the pavilion, sir," the man said, pointing to a navy blue tent situated at the far corner of the office building roof. Dozens of men and women were gathering there, socializing and drinking expensive cocktails. "Are you the man who yelled at me while I was inside the elevator shaft?" "Refreshments are free for all guests, courtesy of the hunters," the man replied, pulling up the rope ladder. Henry shrugged and made his way to the party.

It was only after his sixth martini that Henry suspected the woman in the ruched velvet gown was not being as sincere as her makeup suggested. "Really, you are a man of unmistakeable finesse. How could your talents have been squandered under the oppressive yolk of middle-American bureaucracy?" she asked, sipping a Tokaji and twirling a cocktail umbrella in between her pinky and ring fingers. "Not five minutes ago, Madame Duchennes, you told me that it was the spirit of the middle-class that would reinvigorate the faltering American zeitgeist, by being crushed between the impossibility of their dreams and the indefatigability of their greed." "Yes, and spurned by their own dialectic to take action, to surmount their pathetic faltering decadence, the Bourgeoisie have subjected men like yourself to the most excruciating of humiliations: to pursue an unattainable vision of happiness whilst remaining pinned to a desk!" She laughed buoyantly, and some wine dribbled down her chin from her lower gums, "It is sweeter than wine."

He was about to respond when a woman of unmistakeable beauty descended from the curtained room at the back of the pavilion, elevated on a sort of dais; she was wearing a diaphanous gown of paisley silk, and was smoking a long thin cigarillo. All the men and women at the front of the room reached towards her and sighed as she walked past them. They reached out with trembling fingers and stroked the edges of her dress. Without giving them the slightest attention, she walked straight up to Henry and kissed him wildly on the lips. "Husband," she said, smiling with beatitude. "Evelyn, my wife. I never thought I would see you again, and you are more beautiful than ever I remembered," said Henry.

"Yes, well, when you decided to become the Abject, I was given no choice but to become the Ultimate. You understand? When my love for you died, it took the form of an enormous cultural wind. Look around you? Have I not enthralled all the wealth of this nation?" She gestured at the audience, who were all drooling into their drinks, their eyes fixed on her. "Yes, the death of love has always been the most powerful tonic. But I only became the Abject because your eyes darkened and took on the texture of rotting fruit, your skin withered and began to smell of human filth, and your kindness turned to cruelty." "It was always thus so, my dear," she said, a hint of sadness in her eyes, and stabbed Henry with a knife she had concealed in her gown. He expelled his last breath and collapsed. "My love, the hunt is over. You have found everything you have ever been looking for."