The Prey Read online

  Epap’s head flies around, raw disdain swimming in his eyes. “Oh, really, figured that one out yourself, did you?”

  “Listen! They might still be out there—”

  “Not anymore, they aren’t,” Epap says. “Don’t you know anything about them? I’m surprised how little you know considering you’ve lived in their midst your whole life. Hello, the sun burns them up. And hello, the sun is shining down now.”

  “It’s not enough sun. The hunters, they’re clever, they improvise, they have technology, they have determination. You underestimate them at your own peril.”

  “The only thing out there is food,” Epap yells back. “There’s wildlife running everywhere, it’s like a petting zoo out there. Must have seen at least three prairie dogs already. Now, just leave the decision making to Sissy and me.”

  “Epap,” Sissy says. She shakes her head. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s too risky.”

  A wounded expression crosses his face. “But Sissy, I don’t understand. You just agreed to go hunting for food.” His eyes are equal parts confused and incredulous. “You know how hungry we are. Think of poor Ben.”

  “Of course. But let’s be levelheaded about this, okay?”

  “No, Sissy, you just agreed with me. That we should dock and go hunting.”

  “I’m trying to be careful—”

  “Is it because of him?” Epap says, jabbing a finger at me. “Just because he said we shouldn’t dock, and suddenly you’re agreeing with him?”

  “Stop.”

  “Because of him?”

  “Epap! I’m not saying we stay off the land for good. But let’s wait for the skies to clear. For the sun to really scorch the land. If we have to wait until tomorrow, then we wait. An extra day of hunger isn’t going to kill us. But rashly and prematurely going on land just might.”

  Epap turns his back to her, anger fuming off his narrow shoulders. “Why’re you so quick to get on his good side? I can’t believe you’re siding with him!”

  “I’m not siding with anyone. I’m siding with reason. With what’s best for all of us.”

  “What’s best for you! You want him to think well of you, that’s why you’re siding with him!”

  “Okay, I’m done arguing,” she says and walks away.

  Epap glares at her back. He’s still got anger to burn. “See what you’ve done?” he says to me. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you? You think you’re such a tough guy. Oh, look at me, I survived for years living in their midst. Oh, look at my swagger. You know, you’re just ridiculous to me.”

  Don’t be baited, walk away, I tell myself.

  “Did you want to be one of them?” Epap says in a low voice. “Were you ashamed of who you are?”

  I stop in my tracks.

  “Because I’ve seen the way you look at us. I’ve seen the smugness on your face,” he says, his lips twisting into a snarl. “You look down on us. It pains you to have to associate with us. Deep down, you look up to them, don’t you? Deep down, you probably want to be one of them.”

  “Epap, drop it,” Sissy says. She’s turned around again, watching us carefully.

  “You have no idea,” I say to Epap, my voice tight.

  “Come again?” he says, a silly grin on his face.

  “You have no idea what they are. If you did, you’d never have said something so stupid.”

  “I have no idea? Really? I mean, really? I have no idea?” He glares at me with naked derision. “You’re the one who has no idea. But then again, why would you? You’ve rubbed shoulders with them, been buddies with them all your life. You’ve never seen them rip your parents to shreds. You’ve never seen them tear the limbs off your sister or brother right in front of you. You don’t know them the way we do.”

  “I know them better than you think,” I say. My voice is low and even-keeled, but bunched, ready to be unleashed at a split second’s notice. “Trust me on that one. I mean, what do you really know of them? They’ve been little more than your doting nannies, feeding you, clothing you, baking you birthday cakes—”

  Epap comes at me, his finger pointing like a talon. “Why you—”

  Sissy pulls his arm down. “Enough, Epap!”

  “There you go again,” he cries. “Why are you always so quick to side with him? Enough Epap, stop Epap. What is he to you? Why do you … oh, forget it!” He tears his arm away from her. “You want to go hungry together, go ahead. But if we get sick, if we starve, it’s on you, don’t you forget that.”

  “Quit with the melodrama, Epap.” Her chest heaves up and down.

  He casts his eyes away, doesn’t say anything. Then suddenly leaps at me, his momentum catching me and sending our bodies crashing hard against the deck. The wooden boards drum hollow on our impact.

  A curious, deep thump rumbles beneath me. As if I’ve jarred something loose under the boat.

  Epap is cursing and swinging on top of me, and it’s all I can do to deflect his blows. Then Sissy is prying him off me, her face a furious red.

  “We’ve got enough to deal with!” she shouts. “We need to focus on fighting them, not each other!”

  Epap spins around, stares at the riverbank. He runs a hand through his hair, his breathing ragged. But I’m not paying attention to him. All my focus is on the deck under me. I knock on it. The same hollow thump reverberates back. I knock the deck a yard away, and a thump of a different timbre sounds back.

  “What is it?” David asks. Now they’re all turning to look at me.

  I thump the deck with all my might. And I hear it again, the sound of dislodgment. Of something secreted under the boat, hidden from unwanted eyes. A lump suddenly forms in my throat as I realize something.

  “Gene?” Sissy says. “What’s going on?”

  I look at her with dazed eyes.

  “Gene?”

  “I think something is under this boat,” I say. And now everyone’s staring at me. “It’s been under our noses this whole time.”

  Ben studies the deck, confused. “Where? I don’t see anything.”

  “The only place a hunter wouldn’t think—wouldn’t dare—look,” I say. “Underwater.”

  * * *

  Diving into the river is like cracking through the face of a mirror. And as welcoming; it’s all shards of cold that slash and cut my bare skin. My lungs contract to the size of marbles. I surface, gasping for air. The current is a beast. Although a rope is looped around my chest in the off chance—not so off, I now realize—that I might get swept away, it offers little comfort. I immediately grab the side of the boat. I allow myself a few seconds to get used to the cold, then duck under.

  For grip, I wedge my fingers between the wooden planks of the deck. My legs go flying with the current, pulling me parallel with the boat. I’m like a flag flailing in high wind. Sunlight pours between the planks, thin slats of light cutting downward in the murky waters. It’s eerily quiet down here, just a deep mournful humming broken up by the occasional swishing sound. My eyes dart around, trying to find something, anything, out of the ordinary.

  There. A boxed compartment, jutting from the boat’s dead center. Carefully, I allow my body to drift toward it until I’m wrapping my arms around it, thankful for the support. A metal latch, rusted over, hangs on the underside. It doesn’t give on my initial pull. I yank it and the whole underside swings open.

  A large slab of stone tumbles out, hitting me on the back of the head. The pain is numbing and disorienting. I make a quick, blind grab for the tablet as it slides down my body. But I’m too late. The tablet slides down my legs, bounces off my left shin, and fades into the murky depths.

  Lungs bursting, I spin around until I’m crouched upside down, feet planted on the underside of the boat. It’s now or never. One chance to make a dive for the tablet before it descends past the point of retrieval. I kick off the bottom of the boat. My body missiles downward, into darkness, into the cold.

  A fraction of a second before the rope looped around me pulls t
aut, my fingertips touch stone. I grab it. Then I’m bounced up as if on a bungee cord, the force of it almost dislodging the tablet from my hands. I cradle the tablet against my bare chest, feel grooved lettering engraved into it.

  I surface out of the water in a spray of white, my body reduced to one gigantic mouth gasping for air. Epap and David see the tablet and pry it from my tired arms. They leave me in the water, clinging to the side, barely able to hang on.

  By the time I heave myself onboard, my body flopping wet and heavy, they’ve all huddled around the tablet. Heads pressed together and angled, they’re reading the words chiseled into stone:

  STAY ON THE RIVER.

  —The Scientist

  Their mouths are cracking open. A chorus of giggles and laughter leaks, then bays out. They are all smiles and astonishment and delirium.

  “I told you! I told you! I told you!” Ben is shouting, slapping everyone on the back. “He’d planned this all along!”

  Sissy is standing, hands clasped to her mouth, her eyebrows arched high, tears brimming in her eyes.

  “I knew he’d come through for us!” Jacob shouts. “The Promised Land! He’s leading us to the Promised Land. Of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine!”

  Sissy’s face breaks into a smile that almost feels like physical warmth. Her eyes close in relief. “How did you know the tablet was under us, Gene?” she asks.

  I pause before speaking. My father would often play treasure-hunt games when I was a toddler, leaving me clues around the house. I remember how flustered I’d become, unable to find the clues I knew were there. He’d force me to slow down, take deep breaths, survey the scene with equanimity. He’d say: You’re looking but not seeing. The answer is right under your nose. And almost inevitably, once I calmed down, I’d find the clue wedged between cracks in the floor, laid between the pages of a book I’d been holding the whole time, or placed in my very own pocket.

  But I don’t tell them any of this. “I was just lucky, I guess,” I answer. I start to shiver, the wind gusting blades of ice into my body. I’m only wearing underwear, having taken off my clothes before diving in.

  One of the hepers says something; a burst of communal laughter follows. Sissy rejoins them, clapping her hands. So much emotion gushing off of them.

  I walk into the cabin where I’ve left my clothes in a pile. I strip off my underwear, wring it with shivering hands and arms. I can still hear them guffawing, their eruptions of laughter hee-hawing back and forth. I don’t understand why they have to so demonstrably display what they’re feeling. Can’t they simply feel their emotions without needing to project them? Maybe captivity has stunted them, rendered them incapable of intuiting another’s emotions unless it’s spelled out for them in a vomit of colors.

  They start giggling now, talking about the Scientist this, the Scientist that. This is the confirmation they’ve been looking for. The sign that the Scientist never left them, or betrayed them, that he is in fact waiting for them at the end of this path. For them.

  And not for me.

  Me, he abandoned in a metropolis of monsters. To fend for myself. A boy who cried himself to sleep and wet himself in bed for months afterward. But for them he created an elaborate escape plan involving a journal (clearly meant for them to find), and a boat to lead them to the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine.

  I hear another giggle, then another, their laughter like taunting jabs. I am about to tell them to shut up when I realize they have, in fact, fallen into a silence that is as sudden as it is eerie. I glance through the cracks in the cabin wall. I can’t make out very much, just David and Jacob raising up the stone tablet. Quickly, I slip into my dry clothes and walk out of the cabin.

  They’ve stood the tablet up on its base and gathered behind it. Water is still dripping out of the grooved letters and down the face of the tablet, forming a puddle on the deck. I read the words again.

  STAY ON THE RIVER.

  —The Scientist

  But the Dome hepers are looking not at the front of the tablet but the back. Their eyes, seeing something I cannot, are wide with shock as they travel up the tablet, past the top rim, and fall on mine.

  “What?” I say.

  Slowly, they turn the tablet around for me to read.

  Four words. Four words that will become as indelibly etched in my mind as they are permanently chiseled into the stone tablet.

  DON’T LET GENE DIE.

  The first words in years from my father for me, about me. A whisper from the past, growing into a breeze, then gusting into a blaze. A skein of electricity jolts through my body and I feel the crackling of ice thawing in my marrow. And though it is a surge of light and hope and strength that flows through me, all I can do is collapse to my knees.

  Jacob and David are the first to reach me, and they’re picking me up. I feel their hands clapping me on my back, their voices loud but no longer jarring, their bodies pressing against me but somehow no longer intrusive. Their arms sling over my back as they hold me up, wonderment spreading across their faces. Smiles break out, and their eyes are warm with welcome. Sissy’s eyes clench shut as she presses her balled hands to her lips in excitement. When she opens her eyes to look at me, they are hot and tender.

  “I knew it,” she says. “It’s no accident that you’re here, Gene. You were always meant to be with us. To be a part of us.”

  I don’t say anything, only feel river water dripping down my body. A wind picks up and my body shivers. She wraps her arms around me and gives me a hug. I’m still wet but she doesn’t mind.

  “Don’t be a stranger anymore,” she whispers into my ear, so softly, the words can only be meant for me, and she pulls me in closer one last time before we separate. Her face and the front of her chest are damp as she throws the blanket Ben has just brought over across my shoulders. Sunshine pours down on the boat, on the river, on the land, on us.

  3

  WHEN I WAS in second grade, on the night I was almost eaten alive, I sat alone in the corner of the cafeteria. It was early for lunch, and the relative emptiness of the cafeteria would be a large reason for my survival that night. In commemoration of the Ruler’s Birthday, special synthetic steaks that were particularly bloody and flesh-textured were served up for lunch. Everyone ate with zest, teeth ripping into the steaks, blood oozing down chins and into dripping cups.

  I bit into the faux meat and felt the ooze of blood seep out like water from a sponge. It was hard to ignore the gamy texture. I had long overcome the gagging reflex that biting into bloody synthetic meats used to induce, but this new, commemorative meat was especially noxious. I breathed in deep, controlled inhales, careful not to let my nostrils flare. I closed my eyes in fake delight, and bit into the chunk of meat one more time.

  I felt a prick of pain in my upper gum that almost made me wince. I paused, my teeth still sunk into the meat. Blood collected in the cavity of my mouth. I let it flow out. Down my chin. Into the dripping cup. Took another bite. This time, the pain shot out in a bright flare, radiating around my skull. It took everything to stifle a cry. Teeth still sunk into meat, I kept my eyes closed, as in bliss, willing the gathering tears to dissipate from behind my eyelids.

  And it was from behind the black curtain of closed eyes that I first heard the eruption of hissing and neck-snapping. Building in volume, stemming from all four corners of the cafeteria. I waited a few more agonizing seconds until certain my eyes had dried before opening them.

  Students were twitching with excitement, saliva now mixing with the blood pouring down their chins. A few were attacking their steaks with renewed fervor, mistakenly believing that the tantalizing aroma stemmed from the meat in hand. Others, the older students, were lifting their noses into the air and sniffing. They were detecting something else altogether.

  I bit into the meat again, not fully comprehending what was going on. I was only in second grade, after all. I was only a young boy, a little runt. Again, a jolting stab of pain in my gums. Blood sopped o
ut, collecting in my mouth. But something was different about the blood.

  It was warm.

  I did not understand. I pushed the overflow of blood out of my mouth, felt the warmth even more keenly on the skin of my chin.

  And almost instantly, everyone in the cafeteria stopped eating. Hisses broke out, loud and inquisitive. A few students leapt up on their chairs, their necks snapping instinctively.

  I moved my tongue across the upper row of teeth. Starting from the back tooth, moving from tooth to tooth, over the rough crevices, over the pointed tip of the fake fangs I inserted every dusk. My tongue slid over my two front teeth, over the first, then—

  Where my other front tooth should have been, there was a gap.

  My tooth had fallen out.

  I stood up. Half the cafeteria was standing or crouching on their seats now. Even the kitchen staff, on the other end of the cafeteria, stopped working. Only the table of kindergarten students, mistakenly believing the aroma to be from the faux meat, kept on eating, eyes wild, jaws chomping.

  I grabbed my dripping cup. Pretended to drink from it, but behind the cover of the chalice, I pressed my lips together, forming a tight seal. I let the blood pour over my chin, down my neck, onto my clothes. To cover over the heper blood as much as possible.

  I put the cup down, walked slowly, casually out. When I felt a set of eyes fall on me, I bent over to do my laces, pretending I had all the time in the world and not a single concern. I walked out, one step at a time, sucking at the gap in my teeth, sucking my own blood down my throat, not wanting a single drop to escape my mouth, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing.

  I forced myself to walk down the hallway. I willed myself not to cry. I almost lost control over my bladder and that would surely have meant my demise. But I controlled it all. Seven years old, clenching my eyes, my bladder, my face. Refusing fear, refusing emotion to make the faintest dint on my face. My father had taught me well.

  My classroom was empty—everyone was at lunch—and after I closed the door behind me, I almost faltered. Almost gave in to the fear and the panic, almost let the tears and blood and urine come seeping out in a deluge of surrender and fear. But I gathered myself and lifted up my deskscreen. Still sucking and swallowing the blood, making sure that none of it dribbled outside my lips, I typed in my father’s e-mail address. My fingers shook as I pressed each key. It was a simple message, a message he’d taught me to use in times of emergency.