Feral (2 page)

A new terror grabbed hold of Serena.
The woods
, she thought, the words like venom in her skull.
He's going to dump me in the woods.

Overgrown thickets dotted the entirety of Peculiar, Missouri. Undeveloped, unpaved patches, filled with underbrush, stood out behind the town's only gas station and to the side of the Peculiar cemetery; they lined the highways leading into and out of the city limits. Bigger wooded patches separated individual homes; rather than city-style neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs and swimming pools, Peculiar was filled instead with white two-story farmhouses, separated by the acres that had been passed down among generations. While some residents continued to use sections of their land as grazing fields, most had let old farmland grow wild and unruly.

The small patch of woods just behind Peculiar High offered the students a haven in which to disappear between classes to smoke. A shortcut, when students were afraid of being beaten by the morning's first tardy bell. The patch behind the school was a hangout, an escape, a secret-special place for everyone at Peculiar High. Except for Serena.

Just looking at a dense patch of trees had drawn goose bumps across her skin, ever since she'd gotten lost, barely four years old, in the woods behind her house. She'd spent a cold, lonely night there, her tiny body surrounded by the yellow eyes of the wild creatures she swore peered out at her from the underbrush. She'd thought, then, that she was going to die. That no one would ever find her.

Fortunately, rescue had come, shortly after daybreak the next morning. But in the years following, Serena had never quite been able to quit feeling like beasts with untamed hunger and claws and fangs were peering out from between the branches, just waiting for her to return. To get close enough to grab.

At the beginning of eighth grade, Becca, Serena's brand-shiny-new best friend, lost her bird dog, Jasper. Poor heartbroken Becca had called Jasper's name as the days bled into weeks, then months, her desperate tones clanging like an unanswered dinner bell against the sky. Early the next spring, Becca's older brother, Rhine, returned from a hike, Jasper's collar dangling from his fingers. A skull, Serena remembered. He'd found the skull in the woods behind their own farmhouse. Jasper'd been killed by some wild Missouri creature—a bobcat, maybe. A wolf. Killed and dismembered by the very creatures Serena had sworn she'd seen peering out at her, when she was four, from in between the overgrown branches. And carried off in pieces by other animals.

Now, Serena predicted, her killer would drag her through the small patch of trees behind the school, across the dirt road, and into the thick, wild woods behind the closest farmhouse. He would dump her there, in a patch of land that had been allowed to grow wild for nearly two generations, and let nature take its course.

“Come on,” her killer grumbled, tugging on her limbs like an impatient dog owner with a leash.

The menacing trees arced dangerously, heavy with ice. The same brutal rain that pierced her eyes froze the instant it touched the leafless winter branches, completely encasing the oaks and the maples, turning them into Popsicles.

Unable to turn away, to shut her eyes, Serena stared at the limbs that loomed above her, slicing shiny black patterns through the late afternoon sky—until the limbs began to crack.

She listened, horrified, as the cracks grew louder, closer together; a branch sheathed in a thick skin of ice snapped, rattling like a tambourine as it tumbled. It struck another limb on its way down, instantly breaking it free, too. Her killer dropped her leg and arm, and darted out of the way, just as one of the limbs crashed and collapsed against Serena's chest, smashing her into the ice-coated ground.

The ice pellets had hurt. Breaking her nose had hurt. But that had been nothing—a mere paper cut—compared to the pain that exploded through her body now. The force with which the limb struck cracked her ribs, nearly split her heart in two, and turned drops of congealed blood into glass-sharp shards that ricocheted through her veins.

“Not here,” her killer moaned. “Too close to the shortcut. Someone could still find you here.”

He tried to push the limb off Serena, his sneakers slipping out from underneath him, his knees thunking against the earth. He whimpered, frantic, his eyes as wide as moons.

He grabbed Serena's hand and pulled hard enough to actually dislocate her shoulder, wrench it out of its socket. Had her muscle tissue and skin not still been attached, her arm would have flown off, like a plastic Barbie doll arm. She felt herself wailing inside against the pain—the kind of hurt that would have sent her straight into shock, if her heart had still been beating. He tried again, a look of sheer desperation smeared across his face. But Serena was going nowhere. She was trapped. And the rain was falling harder. The world was getting slicker.

When her killer angrily threw her hand down, it landed bent at the elbow in a gruesome angle, her palm facing up. The ballpoint letters she'd doodled above her life line in journalism class earlier that morning proclaimed, “CHEATING.”

He growled and kicked her side. “Dumb bitch,” he howled, clearly cursing her for being stuck, being dead, being leftovers that were too big to get tossed down a garbage disposal, chewed up, and swallowed by the drain.

A few smaller branches jingled, scraping against the ground as her killer tossed them across her legs. He bent down and turned her face so that it wasn't staring straight up, right at him, but to the side. It was an odd gesture, Serena caught herself thinking—it almost showed a slice of humanity, of guilt, of remorse. He dragged another fallen limb toward her, tossing it over her head and smashing her cheek into the sharp ice.

The siren edged out from the distance again, growing louder, ever closer.

He bolted up and ran away, his footsteps growing distant. He fell twice—two thuds, one heavier than the other. Serena imagined the lighter thud was his knee striking the ground, the heavier whack his hip. She ached to run away, too. But she could only lie beneath the limb, listening to the click of freezing rain dance on bark. Listening to the trees crack, threatening to snap beneath the growing weight of ice.

The worst part was that her eyes were still open. And there were still too many spaces between the branches that her killer had laid across her head. She'd see the next horrible thing that would come for her.

Her ears perked against the sharp, rhythmic clatter of freezing rain hitting the trees as she waited for it—a growl, a sniff, the crunch of footsteps. Here she was, as she'd long feared, in the woods, with all those wild animals, all those yellow eyes, all that danger.

She couldn't rid herself of the feeling that more hurt was still to come.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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T
he university library table feels clammy under Claire's forearms as she waits, staring at the stacks of journals she's pulled from the shelves. She drums her fingers in time to the evening rain that taps gently against the window behind her. It's been raining for so long that everything—even the interior of the library—feels sort of limp and damp. Everything except for Claire's growing annoyance. That feels hard and dry and hot, like a driveway in August.

“Where
are
you?” she asks aloud, frowning at her phone. She's been asking it for twenty minutes, long enough for the pouring rain to ease to barely a trickle. Now, when she asks, her voice almost pleads.

The world feels funny, lopsided without Rachelle—Claire's sidekick, as her father is always calling her. The two girls are so close, their edges have blurred; it's nearly impossible to tell anymore where one leaves and the other picks up.

When Claire's phone finally vibrates, she lurches to get a look at the screen.
Grnded
Rachelle's texted.

Claire shakes her head. It's the senior—the one Rachelle has been sneaking around to see because her dad isn't wild about him.

Claire texts back,
Do I need 2 save u again?

And she smiles, waiting for the response. Thinking of the way she had, in fact, just saved Rachelle from the freshman who had transferred to their school at the start of the second semester. He was a scrawny thing who bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked and wore a uniform two sizes too big—attempts, Claire suspected, to seem taller and more muscular than he really was.

Claire and Rachelle actually tried to be nice to him, the first day he'd shoved his winter coat into the locker next to Rachelle's—they'd introduced themselves, but he'd rolled his eyes. “Losers,” he'd muttered before pushing past them, into the hallway traffic.

They would have ignored him after that, but he started watching Rachelle spin her lock every day between classes. Memorizing the stops.

“Go ahead and watch,” Rachelle began to tell him. “It's not like I have anything to steal. You have a burning desire to get your hands on my civics textbook?”

He always tried to pretend it wasn't true, that he wasn't watching her at all. His peach-fuzz mustache wiggled nervously across his top lip as he passed a pencil box from his backpack to the top shelf of his locker and back again, like he was never quite sure of the best place to put it.

“Really?” Rachelle finally asked one day. “A pencil box? With comic-book-looking lightning bolts? What is this, the second grade?”

He flinched, his cheeks turning horrible shades of mortified.

Claire and Rachelle were not usually that type of girl—as pretty as they both were, they could have wielded their looks as weapons. But they weren't teasers, not bullies; they weren't into high school torture.

Still, though, the boy had been rude, and they felt justified, somehow, in tormenting him a little. The day Rachelle succeeded in turning his face red, she and Claire walked down the hall, arms linked at the elbows, in a flurry of laughter.

But on a snowy day late in February, the drug dogs came, parading the hallways, sniffing locker doors while everybody was in class. Slobbering over the faint but distinct aroma of a secret that a student was trying to hide.

When they barked, a lock was snipped free, and the cops found it: a pencil box covered in lightning bolts. Filled with white crystal meth. Packaged into neat little plastic jewelry bags. Maybe twenty of them. Intent to distribute. Only, they found it in Rachelle's locker.

Claire immediately swooped in to the rescue, as fearless as a superhero in a satin cape. Told their principal exactly what happened.

The boy disappeared as an investigation was launched. His desk sat empty in every one of his classes.

That might have been enough for anyone else, but not Claire Cain, high school winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award—already, for an article she wrote her freshman year. She was destined for great things, every one of her teachers swore, and now, in her sophomore year, the journalism instructor eagerly approved when Claire wanted to write a piece on the incident with Rachelle—which appeared in the school's weekly paper and online. The story was picked up, too, by local news stations. Claire was on TV. And Rachelle was vindicated. Claire put a stop to any gossip surrounding Rachelle; it was her superpower. Awe trailed behind her in the hallways, because stopping gossip was a power all her classmates wished they had.

Claire and Rachelle went to the movies to celebrate their victory. They bought the extra-large tub of popcorn, and Claire whispered to Rachelle about her freshman “boyfriend,” because they were that kind of close—Claire could tease Rachelle about anything, even something as serious as being framed for selling drugs, and know that Rachelle would never take it the wrong way.

Remembering it all, Claire keeps staring at her phone, until the response finally comes:
Next time.

She laughs, because it's true. She'd rescue Rachelle anytime.

She decides to go ahead and photocopy the scholarly articles she's already found in the general science journals that she knows so well, thanks to her father, the professor. She hugs the journals to her chest as she skips downstairs. She hogs the best copier on the first floor, not that the librarian minds. She is Claire Cain, after all, daughter of Dr. Cain, who received the Romer Prize back when he was still a predoctoral student; he is destined, everyone swears, for the Romer-Simpson Medal, the highest award given by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. They are alike that way, both of them racking up awards; they are both the academic type, and when Claire wins her Pulitzer, she just might thank the libraries at the University of Chicago.

Claire chuckles at her silly fantasy as she shrugs on her coat and hoists her backpack onto her shoulder. Waves good-bye to the library assistant, a worn-thin college girl who smiles and waves back. Now that she's snagged a few sources, she and Rachelle can brainstorm ideas for their paper later. The assignment isn't due for two weeks, anyway.