Prey (6 page)

“So where's the reptile house?”

Chelsea tugged half-heartedly at a thick drape. Maybe she could leave them open until Ms. Mandisa came back.

“Downstairs,” she said weakly. “The basement door is in the kitchen.”

As they walked down the hall she could see it was open, like she left it, the yellow glow visible against
the bottom half of the door. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was the only thing she had to do: head back down there. Maybe she could send Derek alone. No, that would be stupid. Selfish, just like Penny thought. Besides, then she'd just worry that Koko would get him.

She neared the door and stopped short. “Wait.”

“What?” Derek said. He knew her well enough to add, “Come on, let's just get it over with.”

Feeling like a child trying to avoid an injection at the doctor's office, begging for just a few more seconds, she switched tacks. “I'm supposed to feed him today. We have to feed him.”

It was a good idea, anyway. If they were going to poke around his nest with a mechanical arm, better Koko should have his tummy full.

“Great! So are the rats next to the brewskis?” Derek said. She'd told him the story, so he walked right over to the fridge, popped it open, and started ferreting around in it.

He emerged a few seconds later, a look of boyish delight plastered on his face. “Whoa!” he said, dangling one of the plastic bags in front of him. “Check it!” He shook the bag so the rats sloshed in their juices.

Chelsea turned away, feeling like she was going to
throw up. Gritting her teeth, she led him down the steps, counting the slats in the paneling. As they entered, she realized that, though the room still looked pleasant enough, since she'd thought about it so much and so often, it now held an eerie glow in her psyche, as if it were haunted.

Ignoring all the dials and instructions, Derek walked right up to the Plexiglas. “There it is, in the corner! Wow! It looks plastic,” Derek said, scrunching his face. “Are you sure it's even real?”

Koko had shifted back to lying on one claw, and Chelsea was pleased to see that the collar was nowhere in sight.

“Oh, he's real, all right.”

“Koko! Koko!” Derek said, rapping on the Plexiglas.

“Derek! Stop!” She pulled him back. Then a thought hit her. “So, do you want to feed him?”

Derek's face lit up, but then he looked at her suspiciously. “You want me to feed him just because you're too scared to, right?”

Chelsea nodded. “Right. Is that a problem?”

“No.” Derek grinned. “Just checking.”

She tried to talk him through it, but he was one step ahead of her all the way. He actually scooped the
rat out with his hands and stuck it in the claw, like it was a worm on a fishing pole. She felt her lunch slosh in her stomach as he did it.

“Now I just stick it at him?”

She nodded. She was going to tell him how lucky he was that he could just do that sort of thing, but then he made a weird mechanical humming noise as he pushed the claw through the small window in the Plexiglas.
“Gshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

THUNK!

Derek's eyes lit up. “Awesome! And you get
paid
for this?”

She took the claw from him. “You're right. I should be doing it.”

“No, no! It's okay, really. I'm here. Let me. You get to do it for the next ten days!”

She, of course, feeling stupid, relented, and he repeated the process twice. Each time Koko bit, Derek's eyes lit up. The last time, he chuckled out loud. He looked at the bag again and seemed disappointed it was empty. Trying to maintain some of her dignity, Chelsea at least grabbed the wet bag and tossed it in the trash.

“So, I'm not seeing any leash,” Derek said.

“I don't see it either,” Chelsea said, walking up to
the Plexiglas. “But he was in a different position.”

She watched Koko closely. He chewed a few times, as if savoring the last bite, then swallowed. When he was done, he leaned forward and brought his second claw back out under his chin.

And there, under his arm, she saw it again.

The angle was different, so she wasn't quite sure what it was, exactly, but the little bit of pink was obvious. Maybe it was a piece of a plant?

“There!” Chelsea said, pointing. “Right there! Under his claw.”

Derek was beside her in an instant, lining his head up with her pointing finger. “That? The little pink thing? That could be anything. It might even be a piece of rat.”

“Thanks for the picture, Derek. I'll keep it forever.”

“Sorry.”

“I saw more of it before. I just wish I could be sure….”

“No problem,” Derek said. He grabbed the claw again and pushed it through the window.

“Derek, don't poke him!”

“I'm not going to poke him, I'm just going to grab that little pink thing.
Gshhhhhhhh!
”

Koko raised his sleepy head as he saw the claw
coming. He eyed it warily, as if aware he'd had his three rats already and there were something unusual about this fourth intrusion into his domain.
Could lizards count?
Chelsea wondered.

Koko followed the end of the metal pole with his head all the way back to the window. Then he seemed to stare right at Derek's face.

Derek noticed. “
Gshhhh!
Easy, fellow. Nothing to see here. Move along.”

For now, the lizard did nothing, only watched, seemingly bemused as the claw edged closer and closer to the little pink flap—and finally snagged it.

“Got it!” Derek said, terribly pleased with himself. “I'm a regular ‘Crocodile Hunter'!”

He tugged gently, pulling it free from the straw and twigs that lay around and above it. Luckily, it wasn't actually under Koko. Luckily, the lizard seemed to find this all terribly interesting.

The pink thing swung forward, right in front of the lizard's bemused face, into the light, where it could clearly be seen. There was no question now: It was a dog collar, pink with silver studs, torn and frayed at one end, as if it had been chewed.

Chelsea screamed, long and loud, hurting her throat and filling the quiet space with a shrill, terrified
sound. Koko snapped at the metal arm, yanking it from Derek's hands. It fell onto the floor of the habitat, one end near Koko's mouth, the other just below the circular window. Then Koko pulled himself completely into the shadows of the nest, disappearing, except for the tip of his tail.

“Damn!” Derek said, working his index finger in his ear as if trying to dislodge Chelsea's scream.

“He ate Aristotle! Koko ate Aristotle!” Chelsea sobbed as she sank to her knees. Her OCD, oddly enough, was completely silent, as if basking in its success. No need to say, “I told you so.”

Derek tried to pull her back up to her feet. “Come on, L. C., come on. The good news, I guess, is, it's not your OCD playing tricks on you.”

“What's wrong with you? How can you be so calm? This really
is
terrible!”

Derek shrugged and hugged her. “Shh. Calm down. I guess I never liked small dogs much. I mean, I'm sorry, I guess, but it happens. For that matter, how
did
it happen?”

He gently pulled away from her, helped her back down to sitting on the floor, and looked around, scanning first the floor and then the ceiling. Finally, he pointed.

“There.”

Chelsea looked and wondered how she had missed it before. Wondered how it'd been missed ever. Above the Plexiglas wall, the wire mesh that ran to the ceiling straddled a basement window. It was open, not all the way, but enough. It was barred, too, like all the other windows, but the bars were far enough apart for a small, curious dog to squeeze through.

“Aristotle probably felt the warmth down here and wanted to check it out. He climbed in, fell into the habitat and…
thunk
!” Derek said.

“Oh God, oh God,” Chelsea said. “What am I going to do?”

“For starters, call Ms. Mandisa and see what she says. I'll find something to block that window closed so we don't lose any neighborhood cats,” Derek said. He had a commanding, confident tone she'd never heard from him before.

She wanted to say something nice, but instead only nodded and flipped open her phone. As she searched for Ms. Mandisa's number in her contacts list, Derek found a piece of wood just the right size and managed to wedge the window shut.

“That wire's strong.” He grunted as he shoved it into place. Chelsea, meanwhile, found the number
and pressed the call button. After a few moments, an answering machine picked up.

“Ms. Mandisa, it's Chelsea. Please call me right away. Something terrible has happened,” she said. Then she clicked the cell phone shut.

Derek looked at her. “Way not to sound panicked,” he said.

“At least she'll know to take me seriously,” Chelsea answered. She managed to get to standing. In a weird, sick way, she was relieved. It was all someone else's problem now. Ms. Mandisa would probably have to fly back and deal with her unhappy neighbor and maybe the police. She wiped her eyes and felt terrible for Aristotle, but remembered what Eve Mandisa had said about it being a merciful way to go. Somehow she didn't think Aristotle's owner would be comforted by the thought.

But then she opened her eyes and noticed her boyfriend sticking his arm into the habitat, trying to retrieve the fallen claw. She wanted to scream, but the words stuck in her throat, finally coming out instead like a raspy gasp, “Derek, stop! What are you doing?”

“Relax, it'll take a second….”

But before he could finish, something raced out of the nest, something very long and colored a dark clay
gray. Chelsea's mind flashed back to what she'd read about the way Komodo dragons hunt, hiding beneath the brush and lashing out when prey came by. Maybe Koko hadn't been lazing under there at all. Maybe he'd been hunting.

Derek saw it coming too and pulled his arm out, falling backward in the process. It was a photo finish as the big lizard, a blur of head, body, and legs, slammed into the Plexiglas wall, shaking the whole thing, then swerved and with a flurry of shredded plants, vanished again into the back of the habitat.

Chelsea screamed again. She didn't get much of a glimpse of Koko—he was visible only for seconds, but he seemed huge, way bigger than six feet. Derek was on his knee grabbing his hand.

“Crap! Oh crap!” he said.

Had Koko bitten his finger off? His hand? What if he came back again and smashed down the whole wall?

Chelsea stumbled away and leaned against the banister, her back to the whole scene. All at once she realized that what she'd seen in her boyfriend wasn't bravado at all. It was total, complete stupidity. Her boyfriend was a jackass. A moron.

After saying, “Aggh!” and “Crap!” a few more
times, he put his arm around her and gently pulled her back to standing.

“It's okay, it's okay! I was just being stupid. I'm not gonna do that again! Boy, he's
big,
huh?”

He turned her whimpering form slowly around.

He sucked the blood off and stuck his index finger out at her. “Look! Look! It's not so bad!” Derek said. “He just nipped me.”

But he was wrong again. The jagged wound was horrible. It ran half the way along the length of his finger. It looked like a little piece of the flesh had just been torn off. Derek looked at her face, then back at his finger. His brow furrowed. “Hey, you're right. That
is
pretty bad. You got a handkerchief or something?”

She shook her head. “Maybe upstairs? Can we go upstairs now?”

Derek nodded. “Yeah, I think that's a good idea.”

They mounted the first of the twelve steps, but before they walked up and passed the thirty-six slats of thin paneling, Chelsea glanced back at the cage. For a few horrifying seconds, she thought Koko wasn't in the cage at all, but then she saw that familiar head, the curved nostrils, the black eyes, watching her from beneath some shrubs.

Hunting her?

Upstairs in the kitchen they found a dish cloth, which they wrapped around Derek's finger. The first time, the blood soaked through, but by the third time they rewrapped it, the bleeding had seemed to slow. Chelsea wanted to pour some iodine she'd found on it, but Derek refused.

“You kidding? That'll hurt like hell!”

“Derek, you've got to go to the hospital.”

He shook his head. “I'm fine, really. Look, the bleeding's stopped. How's your OCD?” He was trying to change the subject.

“It's fine. You know how when everyone really is out to get you, it's not paranoia? Same thing here,” she answered.

He nodded. “Are you counting anything?”

“There are six knobs on the gas stove. Four tablespoons and one soup spoon in the kitchen drainer…”

“Okay, I get the picture. But look, the dog? That happened because it wandered someplace it wasn't supposed to. My finger? That happened because I stuck it into a monitor lizard's cage. No magic, right? Counting couldn't have stopped it from happening, not counting didn't make it happen, right?”

“Right,” Chelsea said, but she knew she didn't sound like she believed it.

They put on their coats, opened the door, and stepped outside, into the cold. It was later than Chelsea had realized, and darkness was falling.

Posters had been plastered on the columns that supported the roof on Tess Sullivan's front porch, across the street. More hung on her front door. Sixteen in all.

“Chelsea, you should tell her.”

“I don't want to. You tell her.”

He looked for a second like he just might do it, but then he shook his head.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “But what if she doesn't believe me? What if she thinks I'm some stupid kid making a stupid joke?”

He looked at her face, which was white with fear. “No one would think that of you,” he said.