It was in the still hours of the night, when the darkness of the world had fully wrapped its suffocating embrace around the streets, that I received the call. My hand trembled for the briefest of moments as I lifted the receiver, the sound of the dial tone still humming in my ear. The voice that followed was deep, calm, and far too familiar—an eerie rasp that chilled my very bones.
“Are you still in the business?” the voice asked. There was an unsettling familiarity to it, as if it had crawled from the deepest recesses of my past, forgotten and buried, yet never truly gone.
I had hunted this one before. The name—Derrick Palmer—was etched into my mind as if burned there by the fires of my obsession. He was a predator, a killer, like me. His crimes were brutal, methodical, an artist’s work of twisted masterpieces. But his arrogance had been his undoing. I had nearly caught him once—so close. But like a shadow in the night, he had slipped from my grasp, vanishing into the abyss of his own darkness.
Now, years later, he was contacting me.
“Yes,” I replied, my voice steady despite the rush of adrenaline pulsing through my veins. “I’m still in the business.”
“Good. I need someone for a job,” Palmer continued. “Junk removal. It’s a simple task. You think you can handle it?”
The irony of it struck me immediately. He was asking me, a killer, to remove his junk, a task beneath him—or perhaps beneath me as well. But my interest was piqued, as it always was when faced with a challenge. And more than that, the thought of being in his presence again, of seeing if he recognized me, was a temptation I could not resist.
“I’ll be there,” I said before hanging up. My heart beat faster now, as though the thrill of the hunt was already upon me, even before I had arrived at the scene.
The place was a decrepit old house, situated on the edge of town, far from prying eyes. The street was shrouded in fog, and the pale moonlight barely cut through the mist that clung to the ground like a mourning shroud. As I entered the house, the stale air pressed in around me. The interior was barely lit by the flicker of a single, dying bulb hanging from the ceiling. The shadows seemed to pulse, alive with a thousand whispered secrets.
Palmer was there, waiting in the dimness, his eyes glinting in the shadows. He didn’t look like the man I remembered. Age had begun to claim him—lines etched into his once-pristine features, his hair thinning, his posture slightly bent. But his eyes… those eyes were the same, cold, calculating. The eyes of a predator.
I paused at the threshold of the room, my body tensing, my mind calculating. Would he recognize me? Would he remember the chase, the attempted murder on his life, my escaped victim? And if so, would he make the first move? Would he attack—or would he wait for me to make my move?
I stepped inside, my boots making a soft, deliberate sound on the creaky floorboards. The air grew colder, heavier. The room, filled with discarded furniture and forgotten relics, seemed to close in around us. There was something almost intimate in the silence that hung between us, a space between two predators, each knowing the other’s nature, yet unsure whether to strike.
“You’ve changed,” Palmer said, his voice a whisper that cut through the tension like a knife. “You used to be more… composed. More precise.”
I said nothing. I didn’t need to. I could see the flicker of recognition in his eyes, and I could feel the primal energy crackling between us. He knew who I was. He knew the game we played. But whether he would make a move now, in this moment, remained to be seen.
The silence stretched on. I could feel my breath in my throat, shallow and controlled. He was watching me, studying me, just as I was watching him. Would he strike? Would he attempt to outsmart me once again? Or would he simply wait, like a snake in the grass, waiting for me to make the first mistake?
I reached for the pile of junk in front of me, pretending to examine it, but my senses were sharp, my every nerve alert to the movements of the man across from me. There was a shift in the air, a subtle change that I recognized. Palmer’s hand moved slowly, his fingers brushing the edge of something heavy—a tool, maybe, or a weapon.
My own hand slipped to the concealed blade I carried with me, the weight of it comforting in my palm. A smile tugged at the corner of my lips as I sensed the game beginning, the tension building between us like a taut string, ready to snap.
Then it happened.
With a speed that startled even me, Palmer lunged. But it wasn’t toward me—not directly. He dove for the pile of junk, for something hidden within it, something I had not anticipated. The flash of steel caught the light for a split second, and in that moment, time seemed to stretch on forever.
I moved before he could fully raise the weapon, my own blade flashing through the air. We collided with a sickening thud, two predators fighting for supremacy. The world seemed to close in around us, the noise of our struggle drowned out by the pounding of my heart.
In that fleeting moment, I realized the truth: we were the same. There was no difference between him and me, no line separating predator from prey. I had been hunting him for years, but perhaps, in the end, we had been hunting each other all along.
And then there was a flash of pain. The world spun. I could feel the warmth of my own blood on my skin, and Palmer’s figure blurred in front of me as everything went black.
The room was still now, the silence oppressive, broken only by the soft drip of blood pooling on the floor. Whether it was mine or his, I couldn’t say. The truth of it remained, as always, elusive.
Had I won? Had Palmer triumphed?
The question lingered in the dark, unanswered.
And in the end, perhaps it didn’t matter. The game had ended, but the story was far from finished.
