The Prey (25 page)

Hope glances back at Cat. He's already loading the next arrow on the bowstring.

By now everyone is scrambling for weapons and ammunition. As Hope presses another rock into the slingshot's pocket, she sees a wolf clamp its snarling teeth around Red's ankle. She sends the rock flying, and
it bounces off the animal's side. The wolf, which has a diamond-shaped splotch of white fur on its muzzle, continues to gnaw away at Red.

“Get it off!” Red cries, twisting and squirming under the wolf's hot clutch.

The Sisters and LTs pelt Diamond Wolf with everything they have. Rocks, pebbles, stones—all bite into the animal's thick fur. Even Argos fastens his teeth to the wolf's hind leg and clamps down. With a blood-dripping snarl, the wolf releases his grip on Red and snaps at Argos, taking a small chunk out of the dog's side. Argos cries and falls backward. Diamond Wolf finally retreats down the rocky slope.

“You all right?” Twitch asks.

“Give me a bow,” Red answers, ignoring the blood oozing from his ankle. The Sisters are firing darts from crossbows and the LTs are zipping arrows. The growling wolves tumble to the ground with such wild shrieks that it raises the hair on Hope's arms. The wolves' numbers are suddenly reduced from two dozen to half that many. The rest have either fled or lie dead and bleeding.

“That's it!” Red yells. “Keep 'em coming!”

Hope and all the others are feeling confident—invincible, even—and she is smiling as she reaches for the next pebble. But as she tries to pull her hand away, she feels a strong yank on her wrist, tugging at her arm. The wolf is back.

She shakes her arm to fling it off, the way you would a fly, but its grip is far too strong. In one swift move he pushes her on her back and rips at her arm as though trying to snap it free. As though it were a chicken leg. The splotch of white becomes a smoky blur as its head twists from side to side.

The others begin pelting the wolf, but nothing fazes him, not even a dart from Diana, which catches him in a rear leg, its shaft jutting out from bone. No longer content with her wrist, he dives for her neck instead. She lifts her hands and tries to pummel him away, but the wolf is too strong and soon his mouth is pressed against the silky flesh of her neck. She feels his searing, sour breath, reeking of dead rodents.

Hope looks away, and her gaze falls on Book. The rocks from his slingshot have no effect on the wolf. But at his feet is Hope's spear. “Pick it up!” she screams, but he doesn't hear her. He continues to pelt the wolf with one rock after another.

As the wolf's jaws widen and he leans in to press his sharp canines into Hope's jugular, a spear soars through the air and impales the wolf right in the back, sending him sprawling to the rocky soil. When he drops his head to the ground, life leaves him, and his yellow-gold eyes remain fixed on the person who threw it. Hope turns to see.

Cat. He holds his warrior's pose, the spear having
just left his outstretched hand. It was her own spear—thrown by Cat—that saved her life.

Helen rushes to her side. “You okay, Hope?”

Hope nods dumbly and Helen helps her sit up. As she does, Hope suddenly realizes there is silence. The wolves are gone, either dead or vanished. Everyone is breathing heavily, lungs expanding, trying to draw oxygen from the thin air.

“I'm fine,” she says, although her wrist is a squishy, gnarled combination of meat and muscle. She nearly faints just looking at it.

“Let's get you cleaned up,” Helen says.

While she begins tending to Hope's wound with rags and water, Cat faces Dozer.

“What the hell, Dozer? You fell asleep on
watch
?”

Dozer puffs out his chest. “Don't blame me. I tried waking Book, but he wouldn't take over. I can't stay awake all friggin' night.”

Everyone turns to Book. His eyes open wide in surprise. “What? You didn't try to wake me.”

Dozer doesn't back down. “Sure I did. But you said you were too tired.”

“What're you talking about?”

“Don't act all surprised, Book
Worm
. Unless you're saying I'm a liar.”

“I wasn't saying that. . . .”

“Then what
are
you saying?”

No one knows who to believe, and the Sisters glance back and forth between them.

A startled yell interrupts everything.

“Where's June Bug?” Flush asks, his voice hysterical. He's on his feet, eyes probing the ground.

Sure enough, the stretcher is empty. No June Bug. They all stand, weapons raised, pointing them in every possible direction.

It's Twitch who spots him, his keen eyesight cutting through the dark.

“There!” The others follow his gaze down the slope. A good hundred yards away they see the pack dragging June Bug . . . or what's left of him. They nip and tear at his body, ripping bits of flesh as though breaking off chunks from a loaf of bread.

“Let's get him!” Flush shouts. He's taken his first steps down the steep ridge when Cat stops him.

“No.”

Flush wheels around. “What do you mean, no?”

“It's a trap.”

They look at Cat as if he's crazy.

“They set us up,” he explains. “This whole thing. They knew they couldn't overpower us, but they got what they wanted: the weakest of the tribe.”

Twitch scowls. “No way wolves are that smart.”

“They are now,” Cat says, and an icy chill runs down Hope's spine. “These wolves did exactly what they set
out to do, and they'll get more of us if we're not careful.”

Hope's eyes return down the mountain to June Bug: a still, small dot on the barren slope. One of the wolves seems to sense her stare. He tears a large piece from June Bug's body, tosses it in the air, and catches it expertly with his sharp incisors. He swallows it almost instantly.

“We gotta bury him,” Flush says weakly.

“We gotta get away,” Cat says.

“We can't just let him be eaten by wolves.”

As Flush takes a step, Cat draws back an arrow, the bowstring taut and quivering. “You walk away from here and you'll get this arrow in your back.”

Flush turns. Even in faint moonlight, the fear on his face is unmistakable. “You wouldn't do it.”

“Try me.”

No one says a word. It's just Flush and Cat staring each other down, until Flush drops his gaze and returns to his pack, stuffing his belongings back inside.

Cat removes the arrow from the bow and puts it in his quiver. He walks over to a dead wolf, jams his foot against the corpse's muzzle, and pulls the arrow free. Entrails hang from the arrow's tip. He wipes the intestines on his pants leg, slips the arrow back into his quiver, then moves on to the next wolf.

Meanwhile, Four Fingers washes out Argos's wound, and Helen wraps Hope's wrist in strips of cloth.

As they make their way back along the trail, all are silent. It's impossible not to think of June Bug. For him to die in such a way is absolutely horrible. But Hope sees what others aren't willing to understand: if it hadn't been for Cat, there would have been even more injuries, more deaths. Cat came to her rescue. There's no question that he just saved her life.

T
HE DEATH OF
J
UNE
Bug hit us hard. Among us Less Thans, he had always been something of a leader—precisely because he didn't act like one. Now that he was gone, I realized how much I'd miss him.

We marched eighteen hours straight, through the night and all the next day. Although I wanted to talk with Hope—wanted to see if she was okay—it seemed like she found reasons to steer clear of me. Maybe I was just paranoid, but if she was avoiding me, well, who could blame her?

All I had to do was pick up the spear—it was right there at my feet! Instead, I had been fighting my own demons, the ghoulish images dancing before my eyes. All I could do was fire a few harmless rocks with my
slingshot. No wonder she couldn't take her eyes off Cat.

Despite what Dozer claimed, he hadn't tried to wake me. It was a lie. But what was the point of trying to convince the others? They could believe what they wanted.

When we finally stopped, we killed some squirrels and rabbits; then we cut them into thin strips and hung them up to dry. When they were shriveled and free of moisture, we wrapped them in torn-out pages from my final book—
A Tale of Two Cities
. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” echoed in my head.

As we worked, I eased over to Hope. “I'm sorry about your wrist,” I said.

She grunted something like “Thanks.”

“You okay?”

“I'll live,” she said.

“I guess my slingshot was no match for that wolf.”

“No, I guess not.”

We stuffed the dried meat in our packs.

“Thank God for Cat.”

“I'll say,” she agreed, a little too quickly. And then she found a reason to move away.

Whatever it was that I felt at that moment—jealousy? hurt?—I could barely acknowledge it. I wished it had been me who'd taken down that wolf—who'd had the
sense to pick up Hope's spear and launch it through the wild beast.

Of course, even as I tried to convince myself of that, I knew better. I'd lost her, plain and simple. I might've spoken to her in the barn, might even have been the one who helped her escape the tunnel, but it was Cat who came through when the danger was greatest.

We stumbled down the mountain until we reached the edge of the Flats—a landscape more barren than anything I had ever seen. Pure, white, unblemished desert. Although there was a certain beauty to it, I knew from a glance it was as inhospitable a place as one could ever imagine. Endless miles of nothingness. A white floor under a blue sky. In the far distance, barely visible to the naked eye, was the jagged outline of
another
mountain range. We had had water up at the mountain. And shelter. Down here, all bets were off.

We rested in the mountain's shadow, knowing it was the last time we'd escape the sun for several days. Once we started out on the Flats, there'd be no shade. No trees.

No water.

“Why's it white?” Flush asked.

Unlike the desert back at Camp Liberty—brown sand dotted with small clumps of green—this was snowy white. A painter's canvas.

“It's not sand,” Twitch answered. “It's alkali.” He was rubbing a pinch of it between his fingers. “This was once a big lake. Then it dried up, leaving an enormous salt flat.”

“Recently?”

“If you count a million years ago as recent, yeah.”

We studied the terrain—a mosaic of cracked earth. Hard to imagine we'd be walking across a former lake bed.

The sky began to darken. Still we waited. Although we didn't think the Brown Shirts had followed us down the mountain, there was no point announcing our presence by emerging onto a barren desert. Better to wait for complete darkness.

Though the wolf attack had forced us to work together, there was still a wariness there, and little interaction between the groups. Less Thans vs. Sisters.

When the sky turned to velvet, Cat said, “Okay. Final sips.”

Everyone removed canteens and measured out their small allotments. Then we shuffled forward. Our feet stirred up a noxious, low-hanging cloud of powdery dust, and we covered the bottom halves of our faces with bandannas.

If the dehydration didn't kill us, the nuclear fallout would.

I cast my gaze behind me. That's when I saw them.
Wolf eyes. Dozens of them. Gleaming like yellow jewels in the mountainside.

I wondered which was worse: wolves trailing us across the desert . . . or wolves stopping at its edge, wise enough to go no farther. As if they knew something we didn't.

T
HE SUN IS BLAZING
and unrelenting. Heat shoots up the soles of their boots as they drag themselves across the cracked tiles of the desert floor. Their skin darkens. Lips split and bleed.

They sleep briefly in the afternoon, resting in the meager shade of their hoodies, then walk into the evening and all during the night. For hours on end no one breathes a word.

In the morning, strips of lavender glow in the east, revealing vague silhouettes of mountains. They appear no closer than before. Hope's heart sinks. It's no longer a question of when they reach those distant foothills, but
if
.

Her feet drag across the white sand and any thoughts
of Cat and Book are pushed to the back corners of her mind. Survival is what she thinks about now. Putting one foot in front of the other. Ignoring the shooting pain in her arm where the wolf played tug-of-war with her wrist.

She hears a muffled sound and turns to see Twitch crumpling to the ground.

Book kneels by his friend's side. “You okay?” he asks.

Twitch doesn't answer. His eyes roll back.

Hope unscrews the top of her canteen and pours a tablespoon of warm water into the lid. “Here. Drink this.”

She holds the lid to Twitch's lips and lets its contents slide down his throat. The water has to be nearly boiling, and yet it looks utterly refreshing.

“How much do we have left?” Book asks.

Everyone offers up canteens that are almost empty.

Helen's chin begins to quiver. “Are we going to be all right?”

For obvious reasons, no one answers her.

“So what do we do?” Red asks. His pale skin is burned to a crisp, his nose peeling like the skin of a snake.

“We keep going,” Book says.

“With no water?”

“We can't stay here. We'll die for sure.” There is no panic in his voice, just calm, grim determination.

“But my shoes have disintegrated,” Flush says. Hope can see the blood oozing from his blisters.

“That's why we gotta keep moving. We need water.”

“Ya think?” Dozer asks.

Twitch is sitting up, sipping another swallow of water, his back resting against Book's knee. For the first time, his eyes seem to focus.