Feral (10 page)

You still know how to say all the right things
, she assured herself.
Just calm down, calm down . . .

“School-wide lockdown occurs at eight fifteen,” Sanders was saying. “If you're not inside the building at that time, you will be sent away. No excuses. And there will be no bribing of the guard, either. As a recent PH grad, I'm certain he knows all the tricks for getting in and out of the building—his knowledge of the Peculiar High premises is exactly why I asked for him specifically.”

“Lockdown?” Claire croaked, her pulse turning the insides of her ears into kick drums.

“That's a full fifteen minutes after the tardy bell rings,” Sanders justified. “Surely you can be here—”

“We're just from a bigger town,” her father said, immediately jumping in. “That's all. It's a bit of a surprise—”

“I assure you, we take education every bit as seriously in Peculiar as you did in Chicago, Dr. Cain. More so, I might wager.”

The ceiling tile directly above Sanders's head dripped. A water droplet hit the top of his head, and he flinched as it trailed around the top curve of his forehead, racing through a wiry eyebrow.

Sanders scowled as the drop hurried toward an eye, quickly removing his glasses.

A gasp rippled through Claire's throat as Sanders pawed at his brow. Sanders's eyes were grotesque—a thick, milky skin covered the colored portions of his eyes, while the whites had turned the awful dusty green of bread mold. The eyeballs bugged and bulged, as though ready to tip and fall out of their sockets. Patches of skin near his temples and lids and around his brows were marred by deep, silvery scars, discolored pink spots of flesh.

Claire looked down, clutching her hands in her lap, refusing to react to the repulsion crawling up her arms. Judging by the fact that Sanders didn't have a white cane leaning in any of his office corners, and by the fact that the papers on his desk were written in black seventy-two-point-font letters, Sanders wasn't completely blind. And offending her new principal on day one wasn't exactly how she wanted to start off.

Besides, she reminded herself, she wore her own fair share of scars.

“Here,” Sanders said, placing his hand on a large 9 x 12 envelope. “Inside, you will find the Peculiar High handbook, as well as information on the lockdown and uniforms.”

“Uniforms?” Claire asked.

“New students are usually somewhat reluctant about the uniforms,” Sanders conceded. “But I know that they really are grateful for them after a while. Saves everyone from having to figure out what they'll wear every day. You appreciate that, don't you, Ms. Cain?”

Without allowing her a chance to answer, Sanders continued, “We will provide you with a temporary uniform to wear until you purchase your own. I'm sure you'll feel much more comfortable looking like the rest of your classmates.”

“I—uh—I—” Claire stammered.

Peculiar was supposed to have been a quiet rural town. If this school was exactly like Chicago—if this wasn't going to be a sabbatical for her, as it was for her father, then why had she agreed to it?
This can't be happening
, she kept thinking, feeling the room turning like a carousel.

Feet scurried about in the tiny hallway that snaked beyond Sanders's door, and the woman from the front office returned cradling some black-and-white garments. “Here you go—until you get your own,” she said, as though she were doing Claire a favor. “I think these should just about fit.” She placed them in Claire's lap and left. Claire unfolded the articles: a white blouse, a black pleated skirt, kneesocks, and a black, much-worn cardigan with a school insignia on the pocket. Her stomach lurched.

This is no escape, no better, it's all the same—the guard, the uniform—just like my old school. The ice storm. The missing girl, who stayed for a story just like I did. And I'm in her house. . . .

“Only for today,” her father promised, leafing through the papers in the 9 x 12 envelope. “Says here uniforms can be picked up at Cicily's, a clothing and fabric store just off the town square. I'll pick up your own uniforms when I stop for lunch.”

Didn't her father see what was going on here?
Let's run
, she wanted to beg him.
Let's run, let's run . . .
But then again, she knew what happened to a person on the run.
They chase you and then they throw you to the ground and they rip you break you . . .

“Perhaps you'd like to go change,” Sanders said. “The ladies' room is just outside the office.”

Claire nodded absently and pushed herself out of her chair, sweat pooling inside her coat. She swayed on her feet.

“Are you all right?” her father asked her.

“Water,” Claire croaked.

“There's a fountain in the hallway—” Sanders said. And as Claire darted for the door, she heard him ask her father, “Will she be all right? I saw in her file—”

“Yes, well, we'd appreciate it if that incident remained in her file,” Dr. Cain said.

“Of course, of course,” Sanders agreed. “I will request that the information be kept private . . .”

Claire staggered into the hallway, dizzy with the heat of pure fear, finding herself face-to-face with a bulletin board advertising Winter Formal! in glittering type.

She pushed herself away, toward the bathroom. She burst through the door, heading straight for a frosted-glass window on the far side of the room. She pushed it open, welcoming the cold January air that seeped in.

But as she looked out, she saw a number of feral cats sitting along the back edge of the parking lot, as if in wait.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

S
erena had spent the entirety of the ice storm in the woods behind the high school, underneath the crushing weight of the fallen limb, hoping for something to change.

A few things did—noises began to echo inside her head in a muffled, tinny way. And the woods she observed through the spaces in between the branches her killer had draped across her face began to seem a little blurry—as though her eyes were made of a scuffed-up glass.

Time was odd, without the old markers. She didn't get hungry or tired. She didn't need sleep. The branches took up so much of the sky above her that she was not quite sure how many times the sun had risen and fallen. But whole days
had
passed; she knew that much.

She wondered when she would finally stop feeling the cold and the heaviness of the branch. She was not
gone
—not as she'd expected to be. She had not floated out of her body like a helium balloon whose string had slipped out of a child's hand. She had not drifted straight up to the heaven that waited on the other side of the clouds.

Serena was dead; she kept telling herself so. But
dead
wasn't a title she could accept, not if she was still here, still inside her body.
Dead
—she had hoped it would start to be a relief, at some point. After all, everything now was outside her control. There should be peace in that.

But there wasn't.

She wanted someone to find her. Not in the same way that she had wished to be found in the last moments of her life—not in a frantic, desperate way. But she was protective of her body—it still felt as though it belonged to her. Even though it didn't work anymore, it was
hers
, and she was still afraid of what could happen out here, in the woods.

Peace
—
what a joke
, Serena thought.

She wished for certain things, as she lay in the woods: first, to talk to Becca one last time. Then she wished for grief. Because here, at the end, it would mean that someone had cared.

As time had pulsed on, though, some of Serena's wishes changed colors—they faded and slowly began to evaporate, without Serena having to decide to let them go.

Each time one of her earthly wishes (to taste her mother's chocolate mayonnaise cake once more, to finish that last story for journalism) faded away, she felt herself spread slowly outward. She felt both inside her body and bigger than her body. She saw out her eyes and down on the world, too. She still experienced the world through her body—she still felt the sting of ice, the crush of the limb—but at the same time, she could watch the world from afar. It was as though she were somehow able to see twice—once through her eyes and once perched from above, far enough away to see the entirety of the school grounds. It was
more
than odd—it didn't make sense. (But what about her death
did
make sense, so far?)

Earlier that morning, as her classmates had returned to school, she'd watched them pull their cars into the lot and stream through the doors. She'd watched Becca knot a yellow hair ribbon on the flagpole before she stepped inside the building.

The ribbon pleased Serena. Becca missed her. Missing someone—that was grief, wasn't it?

Though Serena's awareness was swelling, spilling outward, she was not exactly all-knowing. She could not see inside the school. So when the bell rang, she was left only with the woods, the ice. The parking lot . . . and the cats.

The ferals arrived after the eight-fifteen lockdown went into effect, after even Rhine slipped inside. A pack of twenty or so slowly began to emerge, to creep closer, edging through the lot, toward the back of the school.

Serena knew that hunting must have been hard the past few days for the wild creatures that had begun to overpopulate the town. Rodents had surely taken shelter under floors of barns and in old logs during the storm, hidden from the ravenous ferals.

Black cats, yellow cats, gray cats now edged cautiously toward the Dumpster at the back of the school, as though hoping for some pizza crusts or half-eaten hamburgers, maybe a ham and cheese on white missing only three bites. The hungry homeless cats jumped to the lip of the Dumpster, one after another. They dipped their heads toward the interior of the trash bin, all but empty because it was now Friday, and the students hadn't been at school to toss out their leftovers since Monday.

Serena easily zeroed in on a familiar animal—the calico cat she'd been feeding for months, on the back porch of her old house. Sweet Pea—that's what she'd called her, every single time she'd brought a can of tuna or Fancy Feast, trying to convince the old cat to come close, to let her scratch her head.

Sweet Pea crouched low and moved toward a group of ice-covered bushes at the back of the school, trying not to be seen by the ferals who lined the edge of the Dumpster. She disappeared for a moment in the brown bushes, and emerged with a young bunny, a poor thing maybe even making its first outing since the storm. She scooped the mutilated creature in her jaws, letting its juices fill her mouth and trail down her neck in a bright shade of pink. Lifeless long ears and back legs flopped from the old cat's jaws as she twisted her head this way and that, looking for a place to eat her kill in peace.

But she stopped short when she noticed a pair of pointed ears rounding the edge of the Dumpster. And another. Whiskers. Paws. Tails pointed skyward. All of them closing in on her.

Hunger buzzed from the pack of feral cats, making it clear that they all were willing to fight for the rabbit. Especially since the calico was old and not in the best shape.

Sweet Pea tightened her jaw and darted away from the school, through the small empty field that led straight into the woods.

The ferals followed as she raced in between piles of fallen limbs, her feet bouncing up with each step, making it appear that the ice was cold enough to burn the pads on her paws.

Sweet Pea stopped abruptly and opened her mouth, letting the slaughtered bunny fall to the snow. She stuck her nose into the air, letting it twitch back and forth.

She smelled something far better than that bunny. She staggered forward, a delectable new scent dragging her like a rope.

Serena could smell it, too, suddenly—the overpowering scent of fresh meat.

Sweet Pea followed the scent, her mouth squirming with anticipation. Serena could read her mind, the wild creature she'd come to know on the back porch of her old house.
What had just died out here in the field?
Sweet Pea seemed to be asking herself. An animal—far bigger than her rabbit. A soft, fleshy creature, judging by the smell. A possum? A coyote?

Twigs snapped. Ice crunched. Sweet Pea glanced behind her. The hungry ferals were still coming—following the same scent.

The cat raced forward a bit, attempting to lengthen her lead. Not too much, though—she didn't want to lose that mouthwatering scent.

Poor thing
, Serena thought. Without those cans of cat food, that tuna, her empty stomach probably felt as shrunken as a deflated balloon.

But then, the cat stuck her head beneath a fallen limb and found it: the source of the smell.

It was a human.

It was
Serena
.

The shade from the trees—all those limbs, those hundreds of gnarled, intertwined branches—had protected the ground from the sun. The crush of trees in the woods had just begun to warm enough to form a watery skin—but the ice hadn't yet melted enough to drip. The thaw here was still new.

Serena's body had been preserved by the ice, but now it was thawing. And sending out invitations for a feast.

Don't do it
, Serena quietly pleaded, staring at Sweet Pea through eyes like shiny stones.
Please, Sweet Pea, don't do it. Don't you recognize me?

The ferals—two calicos, several black and gray cats, and a large yellow cat—salivated as they moved in. The sandpapery surfaces of their tongues dripped.

Oh, Sweet Pea
, Serena thought.
Please don't let them. Please.
Her body had been damaged enough by those brutal last moments right before her death, by being dragged into the woods and being hit by the fallen tree. She didn't want the cats to do this to her body, too. She was terrified that if they completely destroyed her body while she was still somehow tethered to it, they would also destroy her spirit—that strange, still thinking, still feeling
thing
that had not yet completely slipped away.