Inhuman (14 page)

Every part of me rang with pain until I tried to take a breath and turned it into a siren’s wail. I rolled onto my back. How many bones had I broken — all of them? In two places each?

“Might want to move it,” said a nonchalant voice. “I bet the chimpacabra felt that. It’ll probably be here soon to see what dropped in for dinner.”

That unglued my eyelids. I blinked into the sunlight pouring in from high above. I’d more than tripled the size of the gap. Sitting up sent pain shooting through my limbs, and a groan escaped me. Well, at least I could breathe again, which meant no punctured or collapsed lungs. Rafe stood nearby, re-coiling the rope, stone-faced. From this angle, he seemed bigger than I remembered. Was he angry that I hadn’t gotten him out?

“You’d be feeling worse,” he said, slinging the rope over his shoulder, “if you hadn’t dropped right into its nest.”

I scrambled to my feet to see that yes, I’d landed on some sort of horror-movie prop pile. Furs of all sorts lay clumped together, surrounded by branches, but they weren’t the problem. It was the dung and claws and animal faces still attached to the pelts that had me fumbling through my pockets for my bottle of hand sanitizer. I oversqueezed and ended up with a mound of gel in my palm, which I rubbed up my arms and onto my neck and face, but even then I didn’t feel clean.

“You missed a spot.” Rafe said, gesturing to my ear.

He could snicker himself to death for all I cared. I pocketed the bottle without offering him any. “I can’t believe chimpacabras are real.” Anna was going to have a heart attack when I told her. “What about weevlings, are they real?”

“Too real, like most mongrels.”

“
Mongrel
as in a dog?”

He shook his head and I groaned, seeing the gleam in his eyes. He liked scaring me. So what? Let him. I was going to find out about everything that I might have to face out there. “Okay, I give. What’s a mongrel?”

“An animal-animal hybrid. Like a wolf juiced with cobra DNA. Or a hyboar.”

“Hyena-boar,” I said, remembering them only too well from the stories. Nasty, carnivorous creatures with razor-sharp tusks.

“How’d you know that?” Rafe looked disappointed.

Guess I’d deprived him of giving a good, gruesome description of them. “Are there a lot of mongrels in the Feral Zone?”

“Yep. And right when you think you’ve seen every combination possible, they mate and you get offspring mash-ups with three species in them. It’s disgusting.” He headed for the tunnel, but then paused by the mouth. “Just so we’re clear, the deal’s off.”

I hurried after him. “Do you know where that tunnel goes?”

“Nope.” He unholstered a serrated knife and pointed to the wide swath of sunshine. “You wait there.”

“What?!”

“When I get out, I’ll drop the rope and pull you up.”

“No way. I’m going with you.”

“You’ll be fine in here where it’s bright. In the tunnel, you’ll just flip out and bring the chimpa running — and then probably try to stop me from killing it.”

“A chimpacabra is not the same thing as a sick
person
.” The words snapped out of me too hot. I felt exposed, like I’d leaned over too far and given him a good look down my shirt. In a calmer voice, I said, “I was going to do the decent thing and get you out of here.”

“Some would say you took advantage of the situation, bargaining with me.”

Prickly heat crept up my neck. “I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have —”

His laugh cut me off. “Silky, the smartest thing you did up there was cut a deal. But the odds are still better for both of us if you wait here.”

My insides ached, and not from my fall. “Please, let me come with you. I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Whatever I say?” he scoffed, but then he waved me over. “Fine, but keep up. When the tunnels branch off, I’m not yelling back to tell you which one I took.”

I nodded. As he ducked to enter the hole, I glanced over my shoulder to see if my messenger bag had fallen in too, but I didn’t see it. “Hey,” I whispered, already breaking my resolution not to be an annoying silky, whatever that was. “Can I carry the flashlight?”

“No. You won’t put it to good use. Down here, it’s a weapon.”

“Because chimpacabras have really sensitive eyes.”

He paused to look back at me, surprised, and then just pushed up the cropped leg of his pants, took a knife from an ankle sheath, and handed it to me. The blade wasn’t even metal, but fiberglass. Doubting its effectiveness, I touched the point.

“Sharp enough?” he asked blandly.

Blood welled from the prick. I clamped my mouth shut, curled my fingers into a fist, and joined him in the tunnel. The dank, dark smell of the earth enveloped me.

“If you see a gob of slime on the wall, don’t touch it,” he said and started forward.

Good thing he told me, because, of course, touching slime would be my natural inclination. Why not warn me not to eat it?

If he was impressed by how well I kept up, he didn’t let on. I had two things going for me: I was a runner, and I didn’t need to crouch nearly as much as he did to keep from scraping the tunnel’s ceiling. What I had going against me was that everything my father had ever said about chimpacabras was now replaying in my mind. Part mole, part chimpanzee, all nasty — especially the nugget that my dad had thrown in about them crawling out of their warrens at night to steal human babies from cribs. When I was older, I figured that my father had swiped that detail from a little-known fact about chimpanzees: They really did eat human babies if given the opportunity.

At least the tunnel finally seemed to be sloping upward — because I could not get out of this nightmare fast enough. We spilled into a chamber like the one we’d just come from. But then the flashlight revealed walls that were pocked with more tunnels. This wasn’t another larder; it was a hub. Rafe paused before each opening and inhaled deeply — probably checking for fresh air. After making a full circle, he shrugged.

“What if none of them lead to the surface?” I whispered.

“One does. Blackberry bushes don’t grow underground.”

I remembered the branch he’d been holding. “You’re saying the chimpacabra went outside and got the branch.”

“Not much gets past you, huh?”

Could he cut me a break? It wasn’t like I spent my free time exploring chimpacabra warrens. “Okay, Marco Polo, which tunnel is it?”

“Crapshoot.” He pushed the flashlight into my hands. “So, let’s split up.”

An icy finger traced down my spine. “Like you’ll come back for me if you find the way out.”

He tested his lighter, flicking it on and off several times. “I wouldn’t leave you down here.”

“Yes, you —”

“Whatever I say?”
he reminded me pointedly and then nodded toward a hole. “You take that one.”

I crossed my arms. No way was I crawling down a dark tunnel alone. He glanced over, took in my expression, and unslung the rope.

Stupid! Why couldn’t I just follow orders? I jerked up the fiberglass knife to ward him off.

His brows rose. “Is something wrong?”

“What are you doing?”

“Giving you peace of mind. Lift your arms.”

He didn’t seem mad, at least not enough to tie me up and toss me down a hole just to be rid of me. I lifted my arms a little. After sheathing his knife, he wound an end of the rope around my waist and tucked it in. “That’s it?” I asked.

“You want me to tie you up more?” He didn’t smirk but I sensed his amusement.

“I meant,” I whispered through gritted teeth, “what’s this going to do? You didn’t knot it.”

“We’re not mountain climbing.”

Maybe not, but I knotted my end anyway and pulled it extra tight. He rolled his eyes and tied the other end of the rope around his waist. “If either of us finds a way out, a tug will bring the other.”

“What if I run into the chimpacabra?”

“Tug, but it’ll probably attack before I get to you. The bad news, there’s no cure for chimpa venom. The good, it’s not strong enough to paralyze a human completely. So, if the thing’s about to bite, give it your leg. If it nips you any higher, your throat will freeze up and you’ll die of thirst.”

Okay, then, leg it was. Shivering, I wondered if the doctors in the West had a cure for chimpacabra spit. Sure, they did — considering that I was the only person in the West who’d even heard about chimpacabras and until now, I’d thought they were imaginary.

Rafe traded knives with me, taking the small one for himself. “On the bright side, you can’t catch Ferae from a chimpa.” He gestured to the hole.

I stalled. “Why can’t you catch Ferae from a chimpacabra?”

“ ’Cause they’re like tenth-generation hybrid. Mongrel parents pass on their messed-up DNA, but not the virus, and the offspring have a natural immunity. Lucky them, right? Now, in you go.”

Seeing no difference between the tunnels, I stepped into the one he’d indicated, and he entered the next over. Fifty feet of rope lay on the floor of the connecting room. We could each go twenty-five feet before the slack ran out. It hadn’t sounded like much when Rafe said it. But now that I was alone in a tunnel, surrounded by damp earth and facing only darkness, twenty-five feet was a lot farther in than I wanted to go — especially since this tunnel was much narrower than the one we’d been in before. And yet, I crept forward like a hunchback with both the flashlight and knife raised. Equally effective weapons, according to my father’s stories.

I slunk along the narrow dirt passage, wishing my dad were here now. He’d have never made me go alone. I’d bet Everson would have insisted we stick together as well. I felt a sudden welling of warmth for the tall line guard with the serious demeanor. He was exactly the kind of person you wanted by your side in this type of situation. Not that this situation was common enough to be a type.

My tunnel ended abruptly and I was in another scraped-out chamber. I flashed my light around to see bones littering the dirt floor. Even more disturbing — the dead coyote at my feet. And was that a felox next to it? I directed my beam on the shuddering red fur and remembered my father telling me about the half fox, half cat creatures. My heart broke for it, trapped here, waiting to be eaten alive. But there was nothing I could do if there was no cure for the venom.

A movement in the corner caught my eye and I directed the flashlight toward it. This creature was on its feet, its yellow-furred back to me. It stood as tall as a small child. Maybe, like a human, it was too big to be fully paralyzed by a chimpacabra’s bite. But in the split second that I considered it, the creature flicked around, a rabbit carcass cradled in its taloned hands. An icy wave of understanding crashed over me. It hadn’t been bitten by a chimpacabra….

It
was
a chimpacabra! Real. In the flesh. And hissing! When I lifted the light to see its face, I glimpsed a flash of maggot-white eyes, but then the creature threw back its head and howled with rage. My muscles melted, leaving me barely able to stand. Flinging aside the dead rabbit, the creature bolted for the far side of the cave. From there, it peered at me with an apish face as yellow as old parchment. I eased back into the tunnel while keeping my gaze pinned on the creature’s blood-smeared mouth. When it sprang forward, I whipped the flashlight into its eyes again. The creature let loose an ear-piercing screech and ricocheted back. With the flashlight aimed behind me, I ran.

Holding the knife between my teeth, I yanked the rope, but it came too easily; there was too much slack. It would take forever to get to a level of tension that Rafe would feel. I dropped it and took the knife in hand again as I ran. The chimpacabra scrabbled after me, just beyond the reach of the flashlight beam, and with every turn in the tunnel I heard it make up ground.

“Rafe!” I screamed. Dashing through the hub room, I darted down the tunnel he’d taken. Every time I swerved the flashlight too far to one side, the chimpacabra lunged forward only to fall back as I straightened the beam. Rafe’s tunnel was so much twistier. Navigating it without looking was next to impossible, but I didn’t dare take my eyes from the creature, which was one pounce away. I ran past the other end of the rope, lying in the dirt. It took me a moment to register what that meant.

Rafe had untied himself and abandoned me!

Another bend in the tunnel and daylight blasted me as I ran into a dirt wall. A dead end, the bottom of a hole. The only way out was up. Roots lined the shaft, looking tough and thick enough to cling to. The chimpacabra couldn’t come out of the tunnel after me because of the sunlight, but that didn’t stop it from reaching around the bend and making a swipe for me. I pressed into the earthen wall and sucked in my gut as the four-inch-long talons narrowly missed my stomach.

I jammed the knife through a belt loop, shoved the flashlight in my pants pocket, and began to climb. Digging my feet into the soil, I created toeholds. Grabbing root after root, I pulled myself up. But long before I reached the hole at the top, I ran out of roots.

“Help! Please, someone —” The rope around my waist jerked taut, cutting off my cry. I tightened my hold on the roots but the tug from below turned into a steady pull, and I started slipping inch by inch as the chimpacabra dragged me toward the darkness.