Inhuman

10

The bridge ended at a blockade of stacked sandbags, sheet metal, and scaffolding. I slipped through a narrow opening and stepped into a windswept meadow. A few rusting tanks jutted above the waist-high prairie grass. I paused, listening for the sound of boots crossing the bridge, but heard only the breeze in the surrounding trees, many of which were showing fall color.

On the eastern horizon, pink and purple gave way to orange. I took out my father’s map and traced my finger along Route 92, which ran parallel to the river all the way to Moline. If I stuck to the road, I should run right into the compound. Easy … provided I could find the road. According to the weather-beaten sign in front of the blockade, I was at Twenty-Fourth Street, which fed onto Route 92, but I didn’t see anything that qualified as a street. I took another step into the misty meadow and realized that the meadow was the street. The prairie grass had broken the asphalt into a huge jigsaw puzzle with wildflowers providing sprinkles of color.

I set out along the shattered road, scanning the trees to my right — the woods of my father’s bedtime stories. With most of humanity hiding beyond the wall, Mother Nature had reclaimed this area with a vengeance. I decided to jog. At the crest of a hill, I came to the turn off for Route 92, although the sign bore other words as well, added in spray paint. “All who bear the mark of the beast will drink the wine of God’s wrath.”

What a comforting thought to share with infected people. Although, really, was this graffiti any less brutal than building a giant wall? I paused to look back at the monolith that overwhelmed the entire landscape. Then, with a bounce, I jogged onto Route 92.

The two-lane highway wasn’t nearly as overgrown as the smaller street, and it was easy enough to follow the islands of asphalt within the waist-high scrub. I quickened my pace, wondering how many of my father’s stories were true. The piranha-bats? He had to have made those up, right? I glanced at the sky, grateful that the night was retreating, and pushed on. My breathing was steady. I could keep up this pace all the way to Moline, no problem. But could I find the old quarantine compound? And what if my dad wasn’t there?

I mentally mashed the question to pulp. I could only handle one worry at a time. Right now, all I had to do was follow the broken asphalt and ignore the eerie fluttering of leaves. I’d never been so alone in my life. I couldn’t even see Arsenal Island anymore because the highway had veered inland. At least I could still hear the rush of the river over my pounding feet. And a thumping off to my right … I stumbled to a stop.

What went thump in the woods? Lots of things. Branches and … those thumps hadn’t sounded like falling branches. A roar cut through my thoughts, and my legs almost gave way. That didn’t sound like any forest animal I knew — or wanted to know. It sounded like a jungle cat. Spinning toward the woods along the riverbank, I looked for a place to hide.

“Easy there, whiskers!” a male voice commanded. A voice that held no trace of panic.

My curiosity got the better of me. I slipped through the dew-soaked bushes toward the voice as quietly as I could, getting my arms as damp as my pants and shoes. On the other side of a half-fallen tree, something rustled. I put my fingertips on the moss-covered trunk to steady myself and rolled onto my toes. A young man in a white thermal shirt was crouching in the ferns. His light brown hair fell around his face, hiding his expression, but whatever he was doing, he was wholly absorbed in it. Stretching to stand en pointe, I tried to see what lay at his feet. A dirty green knapsack! My eyes swept back to the guy with skin as tan as his pants and sun-streaked hair and I gasped. It was the jerk who’d locked me in the supply closet. Rafe.

I froze, certain that if I so much as released a breath he’d turn and see me, but I didn’t back away either. What was he up to? His knapsack was fastened to a pack frame now, with a shotgun bungee-corded to the back. He bypassed the gun and rose with a crowbar in hand, and I knew I wasn’t going to like what came next.

Rafe rounded a large bush, and the roar of an enraged beast split the air. I heaved myself over the fallen tree to peer around the bush, only to be brought up short by the sight before me. What I’d thought was a forest was really just an overgrown median strip. Beyond it, another endless stretch of broken asphalt. Rafe stood at the edge of the road, and beside him, hanging upside down from the crossbar of a highway sign, was a …

Tiger!

He’d trapped a tiger! The animal thrashed under the highway sign, its head several feet above the asphalt, ankles ensnared, its vivid orange-and-black stripes writhing. The tiger slashed at Rafe, who was circling it with calm precision. For all the emotion he displayed he could have been calculating a tricky jump across a stream.

Blood soaked the tiger’s fur where the snare was cutting into its flesh. If left dangling much longer, the animal would lose the use of its hind legs … legs that were encased in black nylon pants. That wasn’t possible. I crept closer — close enough to see that the tiger was indeed wearing pants. When Rafe lifted the crowbar and took a practice swing at the creature’s head, my stomach turned inside out.

“I’m not wasting a bullet on you,” he snarled.

“Don’t!” I rushed from my hiding place. Either Rafe didn’t hear me or didn’t care. He slammed the crowbar into the tiger-man’s skull, wreaking a scream that was followed by a roar of torment.

Sprinting, I closed the distance, not stopping until I was at Rafe’s back. My first glimpse of a feral up close took away my breath. Okay, so he had fur and a tail — he was still human. A terrified, injured, thrashing human. When Rafe lifted the bar again, I darted forward. “Stop!” But I was too late. The crowbar cracked into the tiger-man’s head again and his arms dropped and hung limply. I grabbed Rafe’s wrist and tried to drag him back. “You’re killing him!”

He shook off my grip. “Get out of here.”

“But that’s a person!”

“That’s a grupped-up man-eater.”

I looked past him at the limp tiger-man. Fine orange fur striped with black covered his chest and arms. His face, though upside down, seemed tigery too. My nerves jerked taut. He wasn’t unconscious like I’d thought — he was watching me through slitted eyes. “How do you know he’s a man-eater?” I asked.

“He’s infected with tiger,” Rafe said as if that were proof enough. Lifting the crowbar, he prepared to swing again. “Adios, cat chow.”

“But what if you’re wrong?” I darted between him and the upside-down man. “What if he hasn’t done anything?”

“There will be one less feral in the world, which is fine with me.”

“You’re the feral!” I shoved him so hard that he stumbled back, tripped over a chunk of asphalt, and hit the ground. “You can’t murder someone because he’s sick. Sick people have rights. They have families who love them and aren’t ready to lose them just because you’re scared of a virus.”

Rafe didn’t answer. In fact, he didn’t move at all.

I bolted forward, dropping to my knees, and touched his face. He was out cold! But he’d landed on a patch of prairie grass.

I slipped my hand under his neck to feel the ground, and went numb. A jagged rock jutted out of the dirt right under Rafe’s head. “Oh no, no, no, no …” What had I done? I rolled him onto his side and touched his hair. “I’m sorry.” At least there was no blood.

What was happening to me? He was the second boy I’d knocked out today.

Something squeaked and I twisted to see the tiger-man swinging back and forth in the air, turning his body into a pendulum, even though the movement had to be making the wire cut deeper into his ankles. He was reaching for the steel post on the right, claws extended from his fingertips.

He was going to escape from the snare!

Just because I didn’t want Rafe murdering him in cold blood didn’t mean I wanted to be here when the tiger-man got loose. Would he come after Rafe for trying to kill him? I shook Rafe’s shoulder. “Wake up,” I whispered in his ear. “We’ve got to get out of here.” I slapped his gorgeous face, too softly at first, and then harder. That’s for cutting my arm, I thought. He moaned but didn’t wake. I lifted his limp arm and dragged him across the gravel and weeds to the bush at the edge of the median strip.

I stepped back to catch my breath and saw the tiger-man swing toward the steel post again and snag it this time. He then pulled himself up the pole, hand over hand, until he could reach the crossbar. Hooking his knees over the bar like a trapeze artist, he swung himself up to sit on it. Without his body weight pulling the snare tight, he was able to loosen the wire and slip it over his feet.

Was that my cue to run? No. I couldn’t just leave Rafe lying here, not when it was my fault that he was unconscious. I hurried back to the road for the crowbar, but then hesitated to pick it up. Would the tiger-man see me as a threat and feel compelled to attack? My mind ran in circles, which meant I froze — exactly what my self-defense instructor had said never to do. Great. Now I had her voice in my head, telling me to get out of my head, and I still wasn’t moving.

The tiger-man flipped backward off the highway sign’s crossbar and landed on his feet. Right — cat.

Despite being upright, he seemed unsteady. Blood streamed from his wide, flat nose into the black scruff that framed his face like a beard. He had the slightest deformation of his upper lip, like the split lip of a cat. All I could do was gape as he pulled a handkerchief from a pocket of his pants and wiped the blood from his face. His bare feet made no sound as he padded through the weeds toward me, staring with auburn eyes as if unable to believe I was real. The feeling was mutual, though my disbelief made me shiver. He seemed more curious than menacing … which didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill me. My cat, Gulliver, would bat a cricket around for twenty minutes before making his final pounce. Cats liked to play with their food.

Whatever the tiger-man was planning, I couldn’t tear my eyes from him. He was a fairy-tale creature come to life. Rings glinted on his fingers and diamonds sparkled in his ears. He was heavily muscled, with pale orange skin and luxuriant fur covering his chest and arms. The pictures I’d seen in Dr. Solis’s office had made it seem like the Ferae virus deformed its victims, but this man’s appearance was more alluring than horrifying.

“Your kindness astounds me.”

He could talk! My stomach flipped over in excitement, but then the truth hit me. I was standing face-to-face with an infected person. People woke up screaming just from dreaming about this. I edged back and brought in a slow breath. “Are you, um, okay?”

“I will be, because of you.”

His voice was low and rumbling and his pronunciation odd, maybe because of the curving split in his upper lip. Or maybe because his ivory fangs — top and bottom — were so long and thick they didn’t fit neatly into his mouth. Still, I was conversing with a tiger-man. When had I taken a hard left out of reality and into a bedtime story?

The man cleared his throat. “I am Chorda,” he said formally. “And I can’t thank you enough.”

He seemed to have forgotten about Rafe, which was a good thing. I was also relieved that he didn’t extend his hand, because chances were I couldn’t have gotten myself to shake it. “I’m Lane.”

Chorda’s gaze lingered on my face and then skimmed down me. “You’re not from here,” he said, as if trying to work out the puzzle that was me. “No one here is so … human.”

Rafe had said he was 100 percent human. So were the little girl at the gate and the wounded man, so there were humans living in the Feral Zone. “You mean humane?”

“Yes, humane.” His coppery eyes glowed as if he’d just come across a beautiful stone. “No one here has such a humane heart.”

“I’m from the West.”

He chuffed in surprise. “Someone pushed you out of a plane? I don’t believe it.”

A laugh rose in my throat, but I stifled it. “No, I’m not a criminal.” Well, at least I hadn’t been until I snuck across the quarantine line.

“Then what are you doing here, Lane, risking your humanity?”

That sounded so much worse than just risking my health.

Suddenly Chorda’s eyes narrowed and his lips pulled back. He was looking past me. I turned to see Rafe striding out from behind the bush with the shotgun in his hand.

When I turned back, Chorda was streaking across the road, heading for the trees beyond, faster than I’d ever seen anybody move. Rafe took aim, cursed, and then sprinted after him. I decided I had better not be there when he returned. He being the human.

I ran back to the median strip, dashed through the overgrown brush, breaking spiderwebs with my face, and snatched up my messenger bag. When branches crashed to my right, I choked back my scream and sprinted onto the other side of the highway.

Farther up the road, Rafe pushed through the trees, carrying the pack and still gripping the gun. Spotting me, he dropped his pack and rushed toward me. I took off for the river. My only hope was to swim back to Arsenal Island.

With my heart hammering in my ears, I didn’t hear the water until I was right on top of it. I skittered to a stop at the edge of the bluff — too high for diving and too sheer to climb down. I thought Rafe must be right behind me by now, but when I whipped around, I didn’t see him anywhere. He wasn’t in the clearing in either direction. I scanned the tree line along the median strip — nothing. The sky was empty and blue with the start of the day. Where could he have gone?

I took a tentative step back toward the weed-choked road. He must have been lying in wait somewhere, belly to the ground like a snake. I slipped the bag from my shoulder and drew out my dad’s machete. Now I was a match for him. So long as I discounted things like height, weight, slabs of muscle, and killing experience. I stepped onto the broken asphalt. The last of the fog had burned away but the landscape still had a desolate feel.

“This is what I get for trying to keep you from becoming meat,” a voice said. My heart jerked. His voice seemed to rise from the ground itself. “Man, my head hurts!”

I crept forward, watching the thigh-high scrub for movement.

“You might want to watch your step.”

I froze in place. Just ahead of me, half-hidden within a thatch of weeds, was a hole. Not a round manhole, but a long jagged gap where the asphalt had recently caved in. Probably under Rafe’s weight, since pebbles were still spilling in. With my feet planted so firmly they could have grown roots, I leaned forward and spotted him in the darkness below. His eyes had the shine of a wild animal cornered in its den … a situation in which only an idiot extended her hand.

“Sure took you long enough to come over for a look.” I heard the faint disdain in his tone, as if I was stupid for being cautious. Well, I wasn’t nervous now. Not with him stuck twenty feet underground. Even an Olympic high jumper wouldn’t be able to pull himself out. I tested the ground and then knelt for a better look. Rafe was standing in the middle of some sort of underground cavern. The only light came from the crevice that he’d fallen through, but as far as I could tell, the walls were dirt — impossible to scale. Releasing my breath, I sat back on my heels.

“I could use a little help here,” he said without bothering to hide his irritation.

I got to my feet. “You can rot down there. Call it karma.”

“You think you’re scared now? Of me? Wait till that thing comes back.”

I peered back into the crevice. “He’s not a thing!”

“What do you call a beast that tears out people’s hearts?”

My mouth dropped open. “Hearts?”

“He probably eats them, but who knows? Maybe he’s got a collection going.”

His words had me scanning the tree line and breathing so hard, I couldn’t hear anything else. No. I couldn’t let this scam artist get to me. I gritted my teeth until the muscles in my jaw crackled. If the tiger-man — Chorda — had wanted to hurt me, he could have. Instead, he’d thanked me politely and introduced himself. The only feral thing around here was down in that hole.

“The rogue just got started in Moline,” Rafe went on, “which is why no one will be using this road anytime soon. Except you. And you sure caught its attention. You should know that once a feral has your scent, it can track you anywhere.”

“Will you please be quiet?”

His smile was a flash of white in the darkness below. “That was the most polite ‘shut up’ I’ve ever heard.”

I was tempted to kick dirt down on him. “I’m glad the tiger-man got himself free. You were going to murder him.”

“I was going to put him down. You can’t murder an animal. Now how ’bout you get me out of here?”

I stalked away from the fissure.

“Oh, that’s good. You’ll help a slobbering beast but not another human. Hypocrite!” he shouted after me.

Hypocrite I could live with. But helping him out of that hole would make me a fool. I didn’t get far, though, before I tripped over something and went sprawling face-first into the scrub. It was his stupid knapsack. He’d probably left it there on purpose to trip me up. His shotgun lay a few feet away. Good to know it wasn’t with him.

Getting to my knees, I shoved my machete into my messenger bag. Let’s see who you really are, thief. The pack frame was loaded with a rolled army blanket and the weatherproof knapsack, which I unzipped without a single pang of guilt. The medicine that he’d stolen from the infirmary sat on top of the jumble along with vacuum-packed food pouches bearing the line patrol logo. The nonedibles included a crank flashlight, a water bottle, balled-up shirts, and a bunch of weapons. Okay, technically the ax wasn’t a weapon, but after what I’d just witnessed, it counted.

I sat back, thirsty and uncomfortably damp in my dew-soaked pants. After sniffing the water bottle, I risked a sip. It was time to start walking again. I had to get to Moline and find my father. It was okay to leave the thief in the pit. He was dangerous. And I had a cut to prove it.

“Get me out of here and I’ll take you to Moline like you wanted,” Rafe called up, making me spill water on my shirt. “There’s a rope in my bag.”

He was trying out a new tone. Friendlier. Just how stupid did he think I was? Still, I shoved aside his clothes and silver food pouches until I found a long, coiled rope made of some kind of high-tech fiber. Lightweight and strong. Great. Now there’d be no telling myself later that I couldn’t have helped him even if I’d wanted to.

Rope in hand, I returned to the gap. Rafe sat on the dirt floor below, eating blackberries off a branch. Where had that come from?

He glanced up. “We both knew you weren’t going to leave me down here.”

He made it sound as if being a Good Samaritan was a flaw. I dropped the rope by my feet, which at least got him to stand up again. “Why do you have so many weapons?”

“I’m a hunter.”

“Killing sick people, that’s your job?” I asked acidly. “Who pays for that?”

“Any town with a feral problem. Right now, it’s Moline.”

“A feral problem?”

“All ferals are dangerous. Unless you’re looking to get bitten, you steer clear of them and mostly they’ll steer clear of you. But sometimes a feral goes rogue, the way bears and mountain lions do. Meaning, it starts hunting humans.”

“Why?” I glanced over my shoulder at the woods.

“It could be old or hurt and we’re easy prey. Or maybe it’s got a grudge against people. Or sometimes, a feral just gets a taste for human meat.”

His eyes glinted in the shadows. He’d savored that last part — a taste for human meat — like a storyteller warming to his task. At ten, I would have shrieked at that line, pulled my blanket over my head, and then begged my dad to say it again. Now, I just stretched and cracked my spine. “So, how will the good people of Moline pay you?”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Does anyone ever?”

His eyes narrowed. “Fine. It’s your heart.” He tossed aside the blackberry branch. “The mayor of Moline is offering one hundred meals to the hunter who bags the feral. Cooked fresh or in bulk. I get that squared away and I’m good for the whole winter.”

“And you just kill these rogue ferals in cold blood? You don’t even try to relocate them?”

His brows shot up, his expression incredulous. “Even I won’t sell a lie that stupid, not even to save my own skin.” He headed for an opening in the wall that I hadn’t noticed. It looked like a tunnel carved into the dirt. If there was a way out, why had he waited until now to use it?

I knelt to see him step over something lying on the cavern floor and then caught a gleam of open eyes. “Is that an animal?”

“Lynx,” he said without looking back. “Paralyzed. Want to relocate it?”

“Did it get hurt when it fell?”

He paused by the tunnel opening, which came up to his shoulder. “It didn’t drop in with me. It was already here, like them.” He gestured toward the far wall.

I had to lean in farther, precariously so, to see the pile of fur. More animals — raccoons, rabbits, and even a wolf — some twitching, some still as death, but all with open eyes. “What’s wrong with them?”

“Chimpacabra bite.”

The way he said it, he could have been talking about hot sauce, and yet my nerves jerked taut. “Chimpacabras aren’t real!” The scoff came out tinged with horror, which ruined its effect.

Ignoring me, Rafe ducked to peer into the hole. A chimpacabra hole. I wanted to laugh, but my memory was too busy fact-checking my father’s stories against what lay below. A chimpacabra larder, which he’d described as being like a mole’s larder, only instead of paralyzing earthworms and bugs with venomous saliva like moles did, chimpacabras stocked up on bigger prey.

“At least toss me a light,” Rafe called over his shoulder.

Returning to his knapsack, I dug out the flashlight. By the time I got back to the crevice and chucked it to him, I knew I couldn’t leave him down there — not if chimpacabras were real. “All right. I’ll get you out of there.” I picked up the rope. “But I want your word that you’ll take me to Moline.”

He strolled into the shaft of sunshine to gaze up at me. “Cross my heart.”

Looking down at him with his tangled hair and gleaming eyes, mistrust bubbled up inside me again. Before I totally lost my nerve, I dropped one end of the rope into the hole. He caught it midair with cobra-strike speed.

“Now what?” My voice came out raspy. “Should I wrap my end around a tree for leverage or —” My question became a scream as the ground under me crumbled and fell away.