“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.
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 fin
ds 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.