Cured (10 page)

“How long does it take to work?” I ask, watching the child writhe beneath Jonah.

“It works in stages,” Fo says. “After a couple of days, he will stop attacking things as long as he's well fed. But it takes weeks for a beast to regain humanity.”

That's way too long. “We're not going to just hang out here and wait for him to be cured, and hope that the raiders don't find us, right?” I ask.

“We'll take him with us,” Jonah says.

“You've got to be kidding me! What are we going to feed him to keep him from attacking us?”

“I'll cut my rations in half,” Jonah says. He looks at me with his good eye. “You're pretty small. Do you have any spare clothes I can put on him?”

My face starts to burn, and I try not to start laughing at the insanity that my life has become. “Yeah, Jonah, actually I do. I brought a spare pair of boys' tighty-whities.”

Bowen gapes at me, as if I'm the naked kid being pinned to the sidewalk by Frankenstein's twin. “Seriously?” he asks.

“Seriously. It's all part of pretending to be a boy. If I bend over and my shirt comes up and someone sees my underwear, what would they think if it was pink with lace trim?”

Bowen grins. “That you're a pretty twisted little boy.” He laughs at his own joke, and I fight the urge to smack him.

Jonah pulls the sweatshirt over his head, and I forget to be embarrassed. His bare arms, up to the sleeves of his short-sleeved T-shirt, look like gold-and-white marble. Or cobweb-covered oak. There are teeth marks on his hand with fresh blood dripping from them. “What happened to you, Jonah?” I blurt.

Jonah looks at his hand. “The child bit me.”

“No, I mean the scars.” From the corner of my eye I see Fo cringe.

Jonah either doesn't hear me or chooses not to answer. He carefully forces the sweatshirt over the boy's head in spite of the way he's thrashing. Jonah maneuvers the hoodie down around the child-beast's torso, then ties the sleeves in a tight knot, straitjacket-style.

“I found him in the basement of a house a couple of miles from here, gnawing tin cans of beef stew open,” Jonah says. Fo takes his hand and gently dabs the blood from his skin with the hem of her shirt. “We could go back to that house and spend a few days there while the kid adjusts. I think there's some food left.”

The thought of beef stew perks me up a little bit.

“And I left my pack there,” Jonah adds, looking at Bowen. For the first time I notice Jonah doesn't have his backpack on. I almost thought the thing was glued to him.

Jonah secures the beast under one arm and holds his hand out to Bowen. With a firm yank, Bowen pulls Jonah to his feet. “We'll get our stuff out of the van and you can show us the way.”

I stand on what used to be a beautiful hardwood floor in an abandoned mansion, with giant windows that reach up two stories high, framing a view of the Rocky Mountains. The sun is being pinched between two peaks, and the smoke has thickened, turning the western sky a hazy pinkish-orange that has bled into the entire world as far as I can see.

We are somewhere around Westminster, a northern suburb of Denver. The house we're squatting in sits on the outskirts of a massive brown golf course encircling a mucky pond. White golf carts are rusting on the dead course, as if the golfers just up and left in the middle of their game. Or maybe they were attacked by beasts. Or raiders.

I spent the afternoon knee-deep in the pond, refilling my water bottle. Even filtered the water is slightly green. My hands
still smell like moss. Fo and Bowen are scavenging the neighboring mansions for food, and I am alone with Jonah and the beast. At the sound of a muffled whimper, I turn.

Jonah sits on a weathered, cracked leather sofa beside a dark fireplace, cradling the sleeping body of the boy-beast. Muscles line Jonah's marbled arms, tensing and straining as the young beast thrashes and kicks in his sleep. He is so different from the Jonah I went to school with. He's a lot bigger, for one. Taller. Filled out. Not at all the thin, awkward Jonah whose greatest ambitions in elementary school were to make the girls laugh and to build
Star Wars
models out of thousands of tiny Lego pieces. He looks like a monster now.

Jonah's good eye meets mine, the eerie pink glow of sunset glinting off it, and he stares at me. After an uncomfortable minute he asks, “What?”

“What happened to you?” I ask, forcing myself not to recoil from his stare.

He holds up a scarred hand and inspects it. “You mean the scars?”

I nod, then say, “Yes,” when I realize he isn't looking at me.

“They're worse on the inside,” he whispers, closing his eyes and leaning his head against the sofa.

“It happened when he was a beast.” I jump and turn around to find Bowen and Fo walking through the front door. “He's a Level Ten. He turned, and lived outside the wall for four years. He's still got all the physical leftovers of being a beast—like brute strength and the ability to heal at a rapid rate—but he has the mind of a human again,” Bowen says.

“Why is he so scarred?” I ask in a quieter voice, as if Jonah isn't sitting in the same room. Fo's lips thin and she won't look at me.

“The people inside the wall used to watch beasts fight—pit fights—for entertainment, and Fiona was matched against Jonah—a sibling grudge match to really get the crowd excited. To get her out, I put a grenade on the pit's glass seal, and when it exploded, the glass cut Jonah to shreds as he shielded Fo from the blast. If you feel his skin, you can still feel some of the glass shards stuck in it.”

I look at Jonah and shudder.

“It's a miracle he's alive,” Bowen adds. “He nearly died to save his sister.”

“Death would have been too easy,” Jonah whispers. Fo hugs her arms over her chest and goes to her brother. She sits down on the sofa beside him and leans her head on his shoulder.

Bowen walks to the kitchen and sets his loaded backpack on a dusty marble countertop. I walk to the counter, eager to see what he's found. Surely the mansions in this neighborhood have good food left in them. Rich people probably ate well. And they probably had lots of canned food stored in case of emergencies.

But when Bowen unzips his backpack, I frown. It is filled to the top with flat, rectangular tins.

“Where's the beef stew?” I ask.

“The beast-boy ruined it all,” he says.

“What is that stuff?”

Bowen grins and tosses a can to me.

I study it and grimace. “
Canned oysters
? People put
oysters
into
cans
?”

“Apparently. And crab. And lobster. And something called kippers.” Bowen dumps his pack out, and by the light of the fading sunset I study the cans. All seafood, except one can of something called palm hearts.

“No wonder no other scavengers took this stuff,” I grumble. “Do you think we will be able to get the beast to eat it when he wakes up?” My stomach rumbles, reminding me that I'm starving for something other than calorie tablets, and Bowen—mischievous grin plastered to his face—hands me a tin.

“Why don't you tell us how it tastes, Flapjack?”

I take the oysters and use the key on top to roll back the cover. The smell of the ocean overwhelms me, and not in a good way. The oysters are glossy, slick-looking brown lumps about the size of my thumb. Bowen watches, amused, as I stick my fingers into the oysters and pull one out, and then shove it into my mouth before I decide to chicken out.

It tastes … way better than I thought it would, like smoky, salty, tender fish. A little on the strong side—okay, a lot on the strong side—but a lot better than calorie tablets. I reach in for another oyster and Bowen laughs.

“If you can eat it, I think the beast will eat it,” he says.

I devour the oysters in a matter of seconds, sucking the fishy residue from my fingertips and savoring the feeling of something filling the concave space beneath my ribs.

I go back to the window and watch the smoky horizon change from red to dark purple. “So, do you want me to take first watch again?” I ask Bowen. He's sitting on the sofa beside Fo, eating something fishy-smelling from a can.

“We need two people to keep watch at a time. I'll take the front yard, you take the back.”

I nod, pat the gun at my belt, zip my tackle vest, and walk out the double doors that lead to a huge wooden back deck. The night is just dark enough that I can't quite see anything except the fading outline of the mountains. Holding the handrail, I walk down the deck steps, into the formerly landscaped backyard of the mansion and look around for a place to keep watch. At the edge of the yard is a hedge of dead bushes beside a vinyl picket fence. I head for the bushes and crawl into them so that I am hidden. Wrapping my arms around my shins, I rest my chin on my knees and watch the dark golf course.

The sky turns black and only the brightest stars shine through the haze. My butt seems to mold to the ground, sinking into it, and my eyelids grow deceptively soft. I imagine the buzz of mosquitoes and the chirp of crickets filling the quiet night, the sound of wind in aspen leaves, of an airplane droning across the sky. Car engines. Dogs barking. A stick cracks.

I lift my head and hold my breath. I was
not
imagining the snap of wood beneath a foot, yet I heard it. I think.

Slowly, I move my head from side to side. The golf course is dark. The house is dark. Everything is silent. Careful not to make a noise, I lower my chin back down onto my knees and listen. My heart goes from speeding to normal, and my breathing slows. I begin to wonder if I dozed off and dreamed the sound.

And then someone sighs, the gentle exhale of breath that can only be heard from close range. It came from the direction of the golf course.

My blood curdles in my veins and I start to sweat. Sitting perfectly still, I start moving my eyes around, searching for the source of the sigh.

I glimpse something from the corner of my eye—a human-shaped shadow standing in the darkness on
my
side of the fence—and grapple for my gun. In one practiced move I slide it from my belt and put my finger on the trigger. My sweaty hand starts trembling so badly, the gun falls and bounces off my shoe. The ground rustles when the gun hits it, and the shadow drops out of sight.

Completely panicked, I fall to my hands and knees and run my hands over the ground, searching for my gun, but don't find it. I stand and pull the knife from my belt and unzip the bottom pocket of my tackle vest, removing a small flashlight. My fingers
feel for the spot on the knife that releases the blade and it swings open. With the flashlight in one hand and the knife in the other, I spring to my feet and turn the light on, pointing it at the prowler. The shadow—a lone person—turns toward my light and starts running straight at me.

Full frontal attack. I have trained for this, trained to fight, fight, fight, and I am ready for his body to crash into mine, to use his own momentum to throw him off balance, to use both knife and flashlight as weapons. In half a heartbeat he's diving at me, hand wrapping around the top of the flashlight as if that is the only thing he's after, and everything turns dark.

Warm flesh contacts mine, and I lash out with my knife. He struggles against me, but I'm faster. I have learned speed over strength in a world ruled by physical prowess. With one practiced move, I whip him over onto his stomach and wrench his arms behind his back. The flashlight clatters out of his hand, the beam lighting up the bushes like bright, hopeful encouragement.

“The light!” my attacker gasps, struggling. I wrench his arms more tightly against his back, making his shoulder blades strain, making him whimper. “The light! Turn it off!” he says again, then adds a beseeching, pain-filled, “Please.”

I glance between him and the light.

“You have just broadcast your location to a whole group of raiders. If you want a chance to run before they get here, let go of me and turn off the light!” he growls.

I am torn. If I let go, he might attack me. It's the perfect story to make me release him. He grunts and thrashes and manages to throw me off of him, and then dives for the light and
smashes it into the ground. It goes dark as the glass shatters. And then he turns his back to me, falls to his knees, and puts his hands behind his back. For a moment, I stare at him, too stunned to react. Then I tackle him back to the ground, pinning his arms, but not quite as tightly as before. He lies perfectly still beneath me.

“What are you doing out here?” I ask, my quivering voice belying my rigid tone.

“I was getting water from the golf course pond.” He says it like it should be obvious.

“What do you
want
?” I clarify.

“I can tell you what I didn't want,” the stranger says, deep voice muffled by the ground. “I didn't want you to practically cut my arm off. Your bite is a lot worse than your bark. Here I am, trying to help you, and you cut the crap out of me! Every beast and carnivore within a mile is going to be coming over here to get a taste.”