Free The Killing Game by J. A. Kerley Page A

that time he was living and working in Mobile, but he’d kept the farm, leasing it to tenant farmers and hunting in the two-hundred-acre woods. Whenever they went out together, the old man was always blabbing about how much he enjoyed hunting, loved the woods, loved the streams.
    Over there, son, is where my father bagged a fourteen-point buck. How I loved to walk these woods with him, Gregory, and I wish I could have just one of those days back
…
    A tear rolling down the old man’s cheek, weird.
    Gregory was fascinated by the word
Love
. The morons used it as if it meant so much, but also to mean very little. People said they loved other people. Some said they loved their automobiles. Others used the exact same word about canaries, or cats or dogs. People loved Mexican food. Or their shoes. Or a paint color. It was another trait of the morons that they had no solid meaning for a word they used like water.
    Gregory had been to funerals where the word seemed to dominate …
yayaya loved his children, yayayaya, a lover of humanity yayayaya we will miss his love yayayaya
… and all the morons who had
loved
the piece of dead stuff laying in the box would cry and howl and moan and act like death had happened to them. The person was gone: find someone else to do what they did for you.
    But no, it was
Love, death, pain, love death pain
… which was really pretty interesting when you thought about it.
    Despite its liquid character,
Love
somehow had a big influence on the idiots, and Gregory knew whatever the word meant to the morons, it must have been something like what he applied to the bow. Probably even more: people said they would die for love, but there was no way Gregory would fucking
die
for the bow. It was, after all, just wood and metal and plastic. If it was him or the bow, the bow would be out the window justlikethat.
    Gregory stopped thinking about Love – an un- understandable concept – and picked up his bow. He and his new gift had been inseparable for weeks, the boy caring less for hunting with his stepfather – and listening to all those stories – than waiting for the old man to go on some errand so Gregory could hide in the woods and shoot at everything that came into view: birds, rabbits, groundhogs, dogs…
    Gregory had come close to being in trouble once when he shot a neighbor’s dog, but claimed he’d thought the yellow Lab was a coyote.
    “
Yellow Labs don’t look nothing like a coyote,
” the neighbor had said. “
That boy’s lyin’ through his teeth.
”
    “
You hold it right there,
” Gregory’s stepfather said. “
Anyone can make a mistake.
”
    “
My dog got shot twice, once in the hindquarters and once in the head. I think that boy crippled him for fun and killed him when he got bored.
”
    “
You hold your tongue, now—
”
    “
That dead-face kid may be some kind of mental wizard but that don’t make him right in the head, everyone in the county knows it too. You owe me five hundred bucks for the dog or I’m bringin’ the sheriff in.
”
    Gregory’s father had said nothing, but the bow disappeared. Gregory regained it two weeks later by telling his stepfather how much he loved hunting,
especially with you and could we do it some more real soon? Please, Daddy?
    He grinned at the memory. Call the limpy old fucker
Daddy
and Gregory could get anything he wanted, kind of like pulling Ema’s strings.
    Kayla Ballard shook her strawberry-blonde hair over her shoulders and patted her face with a bandana, the air in the university’s greenhouse dense with humidity. She studied rows of five-inch-tall cotton plants in individual planters, making notes on their size and health. Each plant was graded on eight points and turned into statistical models.
    “You getting all this, Kayla?” fellow student Harold Barkley asked.
    “My 4-H project was more involved,” Kayla answered, hefting a heavy tray of plants like it was a shoebox. “This is simple.”
    Barkley shook his head as he