Feral (13 page)

“Not on your life,” Claire snapped, and turned her face forward again, pretending to feel tougher and faster than Becca . . . and two male athletes . . . and a car.

Blood turned into a white-water rapid against her eardrums.
Not on your life? Buzz off?
Who talked like that? Surely they all knew exactly how rattled she felt.

The granola crunch of a second pair of feet made her look behind her shoulder; a black uniform, like a giant puddle of spilled ink against the white backdrop of the snow, started to trail after her, too.

“Hey,” Rhine called. “Hey, you! What's going on? What's wrong?”

Claire tried to jog, but her backpack held the clothes she'd worn earlier that morning and just about every single book known to man, now that she would be expected to get caught up with the rest of the students in her classes. And with every step, the straps pulled against her shoulders, making her feel like a bicycle whose rider kept slamming the brakes.

And still, the car followed. Rhine followed. Why couldn't they just leave her alone?

Simply asking herself the question made the smell of a wet alley explode in her nose. Laughter—it clanged against her ears like a bully's taunt. Voices—big talk. Egging each other on.

Desperate, Claire reached down and grabbed a handful of snow. She quickly packed it into a ball and heaved it at the front of the Honda. It splattered across the windshield; brakes squealed. The car slid a little on a patch of black ice; a front tire edged up over the curb, toward Claire's sidewalk.

“Hey!” Owen shouted. His door squeaked open.

Claire bolted from the sidewalk. She raced straight into a thick patch of the fog that had continued to linger around the fringes of Peculiar High.

Breath like the rub of sandpaper inside her ears, Claire glanced up ahead, toward a patch of woods—the kind of thicket that she'd seen lining the highways coming into Peculiar and separating just about every house in town and cradling the general store.

“Don't!” Owen called, racing after her. “Hey! Don't go in there! You'll get lost!”

But
lost
was the goal—at least, losing
them
was the goal. So Claire just kept running, her feet crunching through the snow as she thanked every lucky star in every sky she'd ever lived beneath that her clunky shoes had such good soles.

“Stop!” Becca called.

She tried to increase her pace, fighting the depths of the snow and the weight of her bag pulling her back. Her legs hurt, her joints hurt. Running on the bones she'd broken was like being hit with mallets.

A whole herd of shoes crunched in the snow behind her. Just as a herd had slammed against the pavement, in Chicago, the streets not yet slick enough that they couldn't get traction.

As she neared the fringes of the trees, Claire glanced over her shoulder to see four black silhouettes, stark against the white snow, wisps of fog dancing about the outlines of their bodies. Becca's and Rhine's unbuttoned black winter coats caught the wind and flapped like the wings of vultures.

“Don't!” Owen shouted.

Claire opened her arms as she entered the lines of trees, as though to hug the dense patch, grateful for the safety it promised.
This will be different
, she told herself; she would be hidden here, not like in that empty parking lot with nothing to duck behind, no concealment, just pavement—that rough, ragged pavement that ate the skin on her knees.

But the woods were a regular briar patch, filled with thick sections of ice that had only barely begun to melt. Broken tree limbs lay in a haphazard, random pattern on the ground. A few limbs that had only partially snapped still clung to trunks, hanging by little more than splintered threads of bark.

And the ice—piles of it lay undisturbed. Mountains of ice clumps—fragments that had broken off limbs as they'd tumbled to the ground.

And the piles were precarious, Claire learned as soon as she planted her foot into a mound. The outer crust cracked, broke, and gave way. Claire's foot sank; the ice swallowed her up to her shin. The cold chewed on her leg through her sock.

She groaned, trying to free herself. That damned crunching of footsteps in the snow was getting louder. Closer.

“Stop!” Owen shouted.

“Claire,” Becca screamed. “Come on. Where're you going? Come back.”

A frantic shriek filled the air as Claire freed her foot from the ice and began to run again, pumping her arms, sprinting. This time, she avoided shiny piles of ice, aiming for the inches of matte snow instead.

She was winning. Skittering on ahead of the herd behind her. Lengthening the gap between herself and those who were chasing her. She swore that the humming of a few gas-powered generators still running in the storm's aftermath and the buzz of chain saws were growing louder. She was making it—getting closer to other buildings, other homes. Civilization.
She was going to break free this time.

The voices behind her turned into distant barking. Claire felt a smile break across her face. And still, she kept pressing forward, occasionally making a misstep and sinking deep into piles of ice, but always wrenching herself free and pressing on, frantic. The fingers of fallen limbs reached for her, grabbing, tugging at her hair, clawing at her thighs. But they couldn't stop her.

No one could. Claire was going to do it. She was going to win.

Yes, yes, yes
, she thought, her coat flying out behind her in the brutal wind, exposing her legs to the cold.

Claire pressed faster, using every drop of strength, until a shattered limb tripped her, and she went flying, landing on her knees. She screamed, her voice shredding the sky, as glass-like shards of ice sliced her cold skin as easily as a knife could slice a block of cheese.

Scrambling to free herself, Claire turned to see exactly how badly her feet were tangled in the fallen limb. But the shattered branch that had just tripped her was a strange shade of blue—purple—gray.

Claire twisted in the snow, turning herself onto one hip. Panting like a marathon runner, her eyes zeroed in on what appeared to be a cluster of five tiny, twig-sized branches, all attached to one larger limb. But the bark looked leathery, not really like wood at all.

She dragged herself closer. She squinted at the branches—which, now that she was close up, didn't look so much like branches, either. She reached out, touched the thick trunk of the limb to understand what it was. Touched it again. Lowered her face. Gasped. Jerked herself backward.

My God
, she was staring at a human hand. Palm up. Fingers—those tiny branches were
fingers
—the tips painted red. No—not painted. Missing. The red meat beneath the skin was now exposed on each finger. The palm had been branded, “CHEATING.”

“What the—?” Claire breathed.

Claire leaned down for a better view, lying flat against the ice-covered field, her thick wool coat protecting her chest from the inches of snow. As she looked beneath the fallen tree limb, a glassy blue eye stared back at her. A brunette curl. More blue skin. Cheeks raw with scrapes that had been filled with ice. A jagged black hole along the tip of the nose. A mouth open at a grotesque angle; a clump of mud, marred by brown blades of dead grass, spilling out from behind front teeth.

She threw herself backward as the whole picture came into focus—a girl. A dead girl lay pinned beneath the heavy, fallen limb. Her legs, her arms, all filled with pink pits.

Bite marks.

“No—
no
,” Claire screamed, as she attempted to get away from the limb and the dead body, tripping on the hem of her coat in the process. She stumbled back to the earth, falling on her backpack. The blood on her sliced knees poured warm from her body, but instantly chilled in the winter air, making her cuts sting against the January wind.

An angry hiss pried Claire's eyes upward, away from the waxy, blue fingers.

A cat edged forward from his perch on top of the limb that pinned the body; a pair of yellow eyes with black stripes narrowed at Claire; pink fangs flashed. Nearby, another yellow set of eyes popped from the shadows, as a tail curled up onto a black curved back. More fangs. More eyes. More angry, fat tails.

Ferals. Black and gray and yellow. Their mouths all stained a frightening shade of pink.

Claire's mind spun as the hungry ferals hissed territorially. They lowered their chests toward the ice, elbows hugging their ribs. They crouched, inching toward Claire. They snarled, because her appearance had made them scatter, made them pull themselves from the glorious feast that had been taking place for hours.

Two hissing ferals beneath the limb danced, in the crowded space, like a couple of fencers. Fighting beside the girl's battered face. While they threatened each other, a third feral—this one the color of wet newspaper, with some sort of giant, fleshy tumor on its left shoulder—crept up on the arm trailing out from the limb, opened his mouth, and sank his teeth into the exposed flesh on the heel of Serena's hand. Gnawing on the flesh—moving into the center of her palm. Chewing up the ballpoint word: “CHEATING.”

Claire tried to scream again but found no sound.

She gagged. They were fighting over her. Eating her.
It's too late for you
, she heard ringing in her ears.
You're dead.

“Please come back,” Becca screamed, as footsteps crunched still closer. “We live on the same road—it doesn't make sense for us to leave you here.”

Claire felt the bile rising in the back of her throat as the cats continued to gnaw. A gang. Another wild gang. Devouring her.

“Come on,” Becca called. “I'm sorry if Chas said something boneheaded. I'm sorry if I was weird at lunch. I'm just worried. Please. Get in the . . .” Becca's voice trailed, only to be replaced by a gasp, then a grunt of disgust as she watched Claire gag violently, her vomit burning the back of her throat before spilling onto the snow. The grunt became a wailing squeal as Becca saw first the hand, then the uniform skirt poking through tree branches, then the rest of her friend's remains.

“No—no, please, no,” she begged, dropping to the ground, not caring that her knee fell into Claire's vomit. “Serena?”

“Ah, hell,” Rhine moaned, catching up with his sister.

“Serena?” Becca cried again as she started to crawl beneath the limb. Owen wrapped his arms around her waist, hauled her backward even as her legs and arms moved wildly, like a kid trying to learn how to swim.

Claire's stomach crawled into her mouth again as Rhine started squawking into his cell.

She lifted her head, weakly, only to find herself staring into the face of the mangy old calico from her woodpile.

The cat tilted her head and eyed Claire curiously.

Rhine stomped his feet and threw his arms about, attempting to shoo all the ferals away. Most of the cats scattered, racing off. But the calico stayed at Claire's head, braver than the rest of the wild things whose claws clacked against the still-icy ground cover.

“Yeaaaa!” Rhine shouted, waving his arms to scare the last of the body eaters away.

“Go away,” Claire begged the calico, while the hot, bitter remnants of her vomit clung to the insides of her mouth.

As the cat stared, Claire's world flashed, switching between two scenes: first the night sky, the Chicago parking lot, the April ice storm, the chase—then the afternoon sky, the empty high school parking lot, the ice crunching beneath her feet, the woods, another chase. The school uniforms, the guard—his dark clothing making him look like a police officer. The way she'd been stuck to that sky, in Chicago, staring down at her own pulverized body. And this body before her, filled with pink marks, bite marks, all that slashed flesh. She had looked just like that, she thought, staring at the strange girl's body. So torn up, so shredded, destroyed. When that girl cop saw her, that was what she found.

Her worlds alternated, back and forth, first like the flipping on and off of a light switch: Chicago, Peculiar, Chicago, Peculiar—then faster, faster, like the images in a flip book. Her mind was folding in on itself, one thought bleeding into the next with no boundaries. Chicago, Peculiar, Chicago, Peculiar—she was looking down on her body, that pile of ground beef. Chicago, Peculiar—she was the girl beneath the limb. She was staring at herself.
Claire
had been ravaged by those ferals. Chicago—the chase, the gang, the untamed rage. Peculiar—the ferals. Eating her body. Eating—hungry—screaming—tearing—flesh—ripping—cold—pleading—laughing.

It's too late for you. You're dead
, she heard staring into her own lifeless face as her two worlds blurred together into the same wild smear.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

T
he air swirled with screams. Pleading tones, cries that begged the scene not to be real. Phone—someone was on the phone. It was ringing. Claire could tell. “Hello?” she heard. It was Rhine's voice. “Hello?”

When did Rhine start working for 911?
Claire wondered.

“Hello?” he asked again.

“Hello,” Claire murmured. But it was too late. She was dead. It took him too long to answer the phone.

“Missing girl,” she heard Rhine say. Had that much time gone by? Had Claire been lying here in this parking lot so long that someone had actually reported her missing? “Woods,” Rhine said. “High school.”

“No,” Claire moaned. He had it wrong. All wrong. No one would ever find her now, not if he was telling them to look at the high school instead of the parking lot by the apartments.

A girl's voice screamed, wailed. “No, no, no,” she cried out, as another voice begged, “Becca. Becca, don't. Becca, calm down.”

Becca?
Serena thought.
When did Becca come to Chicago?