The Hunters of Jundagai

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Cy Yancey dreamt of being a big game hunter adventuring in Africa. Little did he know that stepping into an alleyway outside his rifle club would lead him to the most important hunt in his life, a hunt that would take Cy much farther than Africa, a hunt through the worlds of the Dimensions, seeking, of all things, Earth! For Yancey, in trying to grab a cab, ends up hitching a ride with Porteurs Zelda and Jorine - escapees from the power of the mysterious Contessa. Fleeing with them, Yancey is bounced from one Dimension to another until he arrives on Jundagai, planet of the Hunters. On Jundagai lies the answer to Yancey's dreams. The Hunt reigns supreme, though often one is not sure what the quarry is. But Jundagai holds still a greater attraction. Jundagai, Yancey's prison, holds the key to home. Yancey has only to find the right lock before death finds him.

Release date: July 12, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

Because he worked in a boring and body-destroying office all day, Yancey liked to go down to the club in the evenings and keep himself in shape with wrestling and karate and his eye keen with target shooting. He was good enough to be on the target and the judo teams and sometimes the fixtures clashed. Neither team wanted to drop him.

“Look, Cy,” said Maxi Feldstein patiently, spreading his hands in the club lobby where lower Manhattan, through the glass doors, showed its stark black and white winter contrasts. “You can shoot over at the Y and then get back here in time. I’ll hold back your event—”

“That’ll mean a cab.”

“So all right! The club can afford it. You’ll be tangling with Tiger O’Malley.”

“I owe him,” said Yancey reflectively.

Feldstein beamed. “That’s more like it, Cy!”

“Okay, then, Maxi. Count me in.”

Timothy—a self-styled Tiger—O’Malley needed to be upended, and Yancey felt a warm, uncivilized glow at the prospect.

The team did well over at the Y, and Yancey notched up a personally satisfying score. The image of Tiger O’Malley lured him on, steadying his eye and brain as he looked through the sights. His rifle spat from a rock steady rest.

He even beat out Rocky, the team’s champion fast draw expert, who was just as good with a target rifle, and that made Yancey feel brisk about the upcoming fracas with O’Malley.

Rocky kept a .423 Mauser in his room over in Brooklyn, and one day, so they’d idly gabbed together, they’d make it to Africa for some real man-size target shooting …

“Give O’Malley an extra thump for me, Cy,” shouted Rocky as Yancey dived for a cab rolling up at the curb, his old Winchester Model 72, in its canvas duffle, tucked under his arm. The cab took off with a squeal of tires carrying the fare who’d entered from the opposite side.

“Blast!” yelped Yancey outraged. He stared about but, as always at times like this, he could see no other cruising cab. He put his head down into the bitter night wind and started off at a fast walk along the sidewalk. It wasn’t all that far, especially for one in his condition, and the thought of O’Malley kept him warm.

He crossed the street and headed down an alley that would bring him out onto the next block and save going all the way around. He kept alert for signs of muggers, confident in his ability to cripple anybody who tried to molest him, hand-to-hand or with a sap. The loaded rifle under his arm would prove an unexpected argument to a clever guy with a gun, at that …

He did not expect what he saw.

He didn’t believe it, not at first.

What he did see was a young girl in some crazy stripper’s outfit abruptly topple from a doorway and go screaming and yelling across the wind-eroded alley.

A long, thin, glittery chain swirled from a collar about her neck.

Yancey gaped. Then the man at the end of the chain stepped into view. He wore a thick coat of furs, almost like a woman’s, and a metal hat with a crest. His face, dark and shadowed, caught a vagrant gleam of light in each eye socket, and the eyes glittered in that light in a way that made Yancey stiffen and grip his rifle.

The man shouted something unintelligible to Yancey, his voice thick and hoarse, and he struck the girl across the face. The only word Yancey picked up was “steechla!” and then he jumped forward, yelling, knowing he was a hell-fired idiot for embroiling himself in something which had nothing to do with him but completely unable to stop himself.

The sight of the girl’s white face, anguished and suffering, did something extraordinary to Yancey there in that night-choked alleyway.

The man pressed a stud on the bracelet on his wrist and the girl writhed, her back arching, her breasts thrusting, her mouth opening to scream.

Again the fur-clad man shouted—and again the only word Yancey picked up was something that sounded like “Jundagai.” And again—“steechla.” If that wasn’t a term of foul-mouthed contempt, Yancey hadn’t spat out a few in his time. He lunged forward.

Then, then— Oh no, Yancey yelled mindlessly to himself, this was madness!

For the girl, the man—disappeared.

He looked about foolishly. They’d disappeared, vanished, gone without a trace. He knew what he’d seen, all right. Yet he looked into a dark doorway, crossed the alley to peer into the opposite opening. They couldn’t have made it, not without him seeing them move—and they hadn’t moved! One minute they’d been standing struggling there; the next, they weren’t.

People just didn’t vanish off the face of the Earth, did they?

The wind gusted cold and clammy. Yancey pulled the collar of his coat higher. There was no point in hanging about here. And Tiger O’Malley waited. But—but. …

There was no point in calling the police. By the time they got here he wouldn’t believe the story himself. Proof, man, where’s ya proof?

He searched about the alley a bit, desultorily, half-heartedly. The girl might have dropped a bit of that stupid costume—all draperies and knickknacks and beads—but he did not expect to find anything and he did not disappoint this realistic expectation.

Looking down the alley, ready to leave, he heard a sudden footstep and swung about so violently he slipped and nearly lost his rifle.

Doing a panicky little juggling act to stop from toppling over and at the same time to hold onto the rifle, and in a reflexive movement to hold it so that it would serve as a weapon he could call on instantly, Yancey managed to regain his equilibrium. The man coming toward him had a hand in his pocket, and his face looked ugly and impatient and not ready to suffer fools lightly.

“Did you see anyone here just now, please?” asked the newcomer pleasantly. Yancey guessed that was his natural way of talking and the worry of something new had stamped that hard look over his face. He wore stylish, rimless spectacles, and his trim athletic figure dressed in an English overcoat moved with a supple ease eloquent of a man who hadn’t yet broken training.

“Yes—no!” Yancey said, and then felt more of a fool.

The man’s smile was really most pleasant. He said, “I see. So they whipped in here and whipped out again. Where, I wonder, where?”

The last, clearly, was a remark aimed at himself.

A fresh idea hit Yancey now. He swallowed. “If I told you I saw a man and a girl, oddballs, both of them, suddenly appear here and then—vanish—you’d think I was some kind of nut. …”

“Far from it. It’s no good your telling anyone else, of course. No one would believe you.”

“But you do?”

“Surely. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be talking to you now, would I?”

Yancey gripped his canvas-wrapped rifle, feeling the irrationality, the sheer screwball nuttiness of all this, washing over him like the suds in a machine scourer.

“It’s all that damn quarter-inch,” he grumbled.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing.”

Yancey stood five feet eleven and three-quarter inches.

In the few months before his twenty-first birthday he’d measured himself at least thirty times a day, running up the stairs of his parents’ house back in Red Bank and climbing on the chipped scales to straighten up against the rule. Everyone knew you stopped growing when you were twenty-one, and for Yancey the magic of that extra quarter-inch meant something he could not explain: as though it would open magic casements onto a different sphere of imagination, as though it would in some way complete and transform him. He didn’t bother to measure his height these days.

The newcomer stood back from Yancey and then began to look about the alley. He held his head a trifle to one side, and he reminded Yancey of a pointing dog.

“I’m Prestin,” he said suddenly. “Would you please, Mister—?”

“Yancey,” said Yancey. He wouldn’t tell this guy, he wouldn’t tell anyone that his name wasn’t Cyrus, as everyone calling him Cy thought. Why his mother and father had called him Claud was part and parcel of why he’d never grown that damn quarter-inch.

“Mr. Yancey, can you tell me exactly where they disappeared, please?”

The insanity of all these goings-on gripped Yancey now. O’Malley could wait to be thrown headlong to the mat. This seemed to promise more excitement.

“Over here, I think,” said Yancey doubtfully. “I was a trifle—bemused.”

Prestin laughed gently. That driven sense of urgency still emanated from him powerfully, but under absolute control. He moved across to the point where Yancey had indicated and at once his face tightened up.

“Yes, Mr. Yancey. It was here. Thank you, you have been most helpful.”

Prestin vanished.

“Oh, no!” yelped Yancey. He put his hands to his eyes. When he dragged them away, Prestin was still missing.

Either he was going to have to pay a quick visit to a head shrinker, or else the universe was imploding—something highly weird was taking place around here.

Up the alley came the sound of metal chinking against metal, footsteps, and a girl’s voice, light and quick.

“I think Bob went this way; he’s very good but he’s still not too hot on sensing ’em out.”

“Not like you, Sarah, you—” And then the words garbled into another language outside Yancey’s comprehension.

He turned around to face them with a deep and fallible resignation.

Three people advanced toward him. Yancey just stood there and let it all happen.

The girl first—young, extraordinarily quick and lovely, with smooth honey-colored hair and soft, shy, innocent face—that must be Sarah.

The men—one short, about an inch taller than Sarah, but incredibly wide and tough—barbarically tough—with a tanned devil’s face and twinkling, merry eyes, a walking bundle of dynamite, who wore some kind of armor beneath a heavy cloak of ruby red and hefted a long sword he looked capable of splitting enemies lengthways with. The other—quarter-inch short Cy Yancey had to tilt his head to look up at the giant, whose immense frame, clad in metal armor creaked the leather straps, and who lifted an ax so large Yancey mentally winced at the thought of that edge and weight biting through mere mortal tissue and bones.

They spoke to each other in what was obviously a coarse, rude, joyous way, the strange words flying between them like custard tarts in a silent film.

“Fezius! Offa!” reprimanded Sarah. “We’re supposed to be following Bob not—”

The short man—you could not call him a little man—gabbled something in her ear which made her slap him on the shoulder and giggle. Yancey out of his open-mouthed astonishment noticed they all had a kind of jeweled band in their hair; and then the girl was saying politely to him something about a fancy dress ball.

“Oh, sure, sure,” he said, standing stock still. He knew his legs wouldn’t carry him. Where had these three come from?

“If you want to know if I’ve seen anybody here,” he said, “the answer is yes. First of all there w. . .