At the Hands of a Stranger. Lee Butcher
his equipment after sundown and long before sunrise. At these times it was too late or too early for anyone to be at the park. It was another carefully thought-out tactical maneuver, and he enjoyed his clever deceit.
The van was dented and rusty, muddy, filled with empty food cans, rotten fruit peelings and cores, and cargo bags filled with camping gear. The back door was held on with bungee cords, because the hinges were broken. It attracted as much attention as Hilton did. The camper was careful to move the van to a new spot every day and park in the space that was in an out-of-the-way spot, to lessen the chances of the van being noticed by others walking to the Blood Mountain hiking area.
Although Hilton had been homeless for the past decade, he still needed money to eat and buy incidentals. Any kind of work, of course, was beneath his status as a perpetual soldier and professional criminal, and he wouldn’t be caught dead in some of the cheap, inadequate hiking gear that others wore. He wore the best microfiber clothing that was available, and that was one of the reasons people noticed him. Anyone seeing him today, he knew, would remember the bright yellow jacket, with the black stripes and patches on the elbows, and the black backpack that he carried, and they would wonder how such a dirty, strange, unkempt man could afford such expensive clothing. It was seldom that anyone asked about the clothing; but if they did, Hilton told them that he had a marketing arrangement with the manufacturers. Or he would freak them out with a glare and say, “Because I’m Microfiber Man.” He never revealed how he really got the clothing. The hiking clothes and gear were the best money could buy, and the clothing drew attention to him, but that was the risk he had to take for being a professional.
Hilton also had an edge over others because of his intelligence and awareness that life was filled with nothing but meaningless activity. Among all men, he knew that life was a shifting, meaningless charade to keep people so busy that they wouldn’t have to think about the inevitability of their impending deaths. Hilton was terrified of his own death, and his earliest memory was of looking at his hand when he was a four-year-old boy and realizing that one day it would be nothing but a skeleton.
The two hikers who chatted with Emerson started to go their separate way from her. She sat on the ground at the intersection of the Byron Herbert Reece Trail and the Appalachian Trail in order to rest and eat some trail mix. She gave her dog a drink of water and some treats. Hilton saw the departing couple glance at him as he went to the same path the girl had chosen. Ordinarily, he would have abandoned the mission because, when he went out to kill, he didn’t want anyone to remember having seen him in the area. He would be screwed. However, he was desperate, so he ignored the warnings that told him to abandon the mission and just go for a hike with his dog and have fun. Hilton told himself he should be patient and wait for more suitable prey, but he needed food and money. He had to kill someone.
Hilton believed he had found prey the day before yesterday on Blood Mountain when he spotted a young woman hiking toward the summit. He passed a group of hikers about thirty yards behind her. Hilton closed the gap between them and started up a conversation with her about the dog trotting beside her. They rounded a bend, and the people behind them were out of sight. This could be his chance.
“Are you hiking alone?” he had asked.
“No. That group behind me is my family.”
Hilton had grunted in anger, got off the trail, and walked into the woods and stayed there until it was dark enough to sneak back to his van in the parking lot and make camp. He had come up empty. So here he was again today, still hunting.
Blood Mountain was one of the best places Hilton knew to hunt because it was one of the most popular daytime hikes in Georgia. There were a lot of potential targets. People came to the roughly 24,000-acre Dawson Forest Wildlife Management Area to hike, watch birds, hunt, fish, camp, ride horses, or canoe on the scenic Amicalola and Etowah Rivers. It was only about sixty miles from the Atlanta urban area. Conversely, Blood Mountain’s popularity was also bad news for Hilton because it increased the danger of being seen. Even the most efficient professional couldn’t anticipate every Tom, Dick, and Harry who might pop out of the woods onto the trail.
He took the same trail that Emerson did and noticed with satisfaction that her dog was a female. It was unleashed, as was his male dog. As he followed the woman, they encountered a few hikers coming back down the mountain. Hilton realized that he should have hidden in a blind off the trail and waited for someone to come along. It was too late for that now, so he lagged several feet behind the woman and began to talk about her dog. The dog’s name was Ella, the girl said, but didn’t offer her own name. That was a mistake in his opinion, because he believed that if she feared abduction, she should do everything she could to make herself seem more human. She ought to try and make him like her, personalize her, to be more than an object, so she might elicit feelings of sympathy from her abductor.
But she was not a professional like him. After a while the girl told him she wanted to hike alone and he dropped back, but he kept talking to her. He asked her what kind of music she liked as he tagged along, going deeper into the woods. She took a branch off the main trail and walked onto a path wide enough for only one person at a time. The killer continued tailing her and continued to talk; he was garrulous or stone-cold silent by nature, and it didn’t matter to him if she answered or not.
He dropped back farther and she was soon out of sight as she headed toward the summit. There were no other trails she could take to get back. He knew he would meet her once more when she came back down. She would be tired from the hike and he would be relatively fresh. Not that he needed to be. He could whip almost anybody’s ass because he was one hell of a stud, but he was glad he had found a petite woman. A man would be more likely to put up a fight, and then you never knew what might happen. He wanted it to be nice and easy.
Hilton got off the narrow trail and hid in the deep woods, where he could still see her, but he would be out of her line of vision when she returned. About an hour later, Emerson and her dog came into view. Now that she was on the way back to the parking lot, the woman seemed to feel more at ease. Emerson walked happily along, half jogging, and talking to her dog. Hilton burst out of the woods with his bayonet drawn and blocked her way.
“Give me your credit cards and PIN number,” he snarled, “and I won’t hurt you.”
Hilton approached her, threatening with the bayonet, hurrying, because he thought that Emerson would try to run. Instead, she faced him in a defensive stance and started to fight. She wrested the bayonet from his hand and it tumbled down a ravine into a pile of leaves.
The bayonet had sliced her palm and the webbing between her thumb and forefinger and blood flowed. In spite of this, Emerson continued to face Hilton in a defensive position. He was afraid he had picked the wrong target. This woman was not weak. Having lost the bayonet, Hilton pulled out his favorite weapon, the collapsible baton, and snapped it out to full length. He was an expert with the baton and was proud of how well he could use it. He had beaten men much larger than himself senseless. He swung at her, but the woman dodged and the baton missed. Her hand slammed into his face and the baton flew out of his grasp and fell down the ravine with the bayonet. Hilton could not believe how fast she was and how well she could fight.
She’s kicking my ass! he thought in disbelief. This woman is kicking my ass.
“I’ve got a gun!” he yelled. “Stop fighting or I’ll shoot.”
The woman screamed and continued to fight, kicking and flailing. He slammed a fist to the side of her head and she hit him back. They were grappling when they slipped and went tumbling down a steep ravine on the opposite side of the trail, where the bayonet and baton had tumbled. Hilton hoped she wouldn’t break away and run, because he knew most women could run faster than he. The woman fought so hard and long that Hilton almost gave up. He had another large knife in a sheath strapped to his leg, but he couldn’t get to it. The woman feinted, and then hit him from the other side. When he grabbed her around the body and pinned her arms, she became limp and he thought he was in control. And then he found himself being thrown into the air and landing hard on the ground.
After he got to his feet, he managed to hit her in the face several times with his right fist. It felt like he had broken several of his fingers. But the woman kept fighting,