Undaunted

by Kat Falls

I glanced down at the uneven ground, where broken glass, garbage, and hundreds of spent shell casings were scattered in the dirt. Not exactly what I expected to find on the grounds of a summer camp, but okay.

  “There’s electricity?” I asked Happy.

  “A couple of solar generators,” he said. “But we don’t use ’em much, ’cept for music. Keeps us pumped.”

  But not pumped enough to pick up all the garbage. Rafe pulled me toward a large rustic building with a loading dock off the back, where a fresh deer carcass lay on a workbench, waiting to be butchered. Flies buzzed around the blood that pooled on the cement as dead doe eyes stared back at me. My stomach curled in on itself.

  “There’re fifty cabins, an infirmary, and a dining hall.” Happy hooked a thumb at the large building as we approached, its wood siding worn with what looked like a century’s worth of weather. “Plenty of room. You know, in case you want to stay.”

  “She doesn’t,” Rafe said sharply. “She’s human, remember? Why would she stay here, when she can go anywhere?”

  Happy’s expression turned sulky. “I was just saying.”

  “It was a nice offer,” I assured him before shooting Rafe a dirty look.

  “Yeah, real nice,” he mocked. “ ‘Come live with a bunch of freaks who were stupid enough to get themselves infected.’ ”

  Happy stopped short to glare at Rafe. “You’re infected.”

  “Yep. I’m just as stupid and freaky as the rest of you.”

  “Jerk,” Happy muttered, and stalked back the way we came, looking anything but happy.

  “If the Olympics ever add victim blaming as a sport,” I said, “you’ll get the gold.”

  “Gold’s not good for much around here. I’d rather get an Uzi,” he said, completely unrepentant.

  When a bloodcurdling yell rose from the other side of the dining hall, I jerked to a stop, heart racing.

  “Welcome to camp.” Rafe led me past a row of animal skins stretched on frames and up several rotting steps to the dining hall’s covered porch.

  Meat hung from porch beams in long strips, scenting the air with blood. One step closer and I realized the meat strips were actually skinned snakes. Pest control? Food? I couldn’t think of a single reason why I’d want to know. I pursed my lips and stepped around the splatters of blood, though they were hard to spot, considering the entire porch was coated in a mixture of sludge and dead leaves. I followed Rafe to the front of the porch, where he took a seat on top of a picnic table.

  The dining hall was one of many buildings that circled a giant field, where some sort of game was going on. One that involved running after, tackling, and then flinging a given player out of the giant circle that had been painted onto the grass. Male, female, big, small, didn’t matter. All the players were tossed with equal disregard. And everyone was coated in mud — players and spectators alike. Rafe had said that Echo was an all-manimal camp, but it hadn’t prepared me for seeing so many in one place. Some of them only had a few physical markers, while others were quite mutated. All of them looked dangerous — even the children, a few no more than toddlers, who were shouting encouragement from the circle’s perimeter.

  “It’s called Take the Teddy.” Rafe spoke loudly to be heard over the yelling and the music that blasted from a speaker a few yards away from us on the porch. Pre-exodus music, on some old format that didn’t require a computer.

  Rafe pointed to a black-furred man running for a telephone pole at the center of the enormous circle. He clutched a soggy object in one hand. He hurled it at the bucket sitting on top of the pole and missed. Clearly the bucket had been nailed into place because it didn’t so much as wobble when the man slammed into the pole with two players on his back. The teddy bear he’d thrown lay forgotten in the grass. A bunch of the other players carried the furred man to the edge of the circle and flung him into the crowd. Even though he took down several spectators, the crowd roared with laughter and threw out insults.

  “No one can touch the teddy until the runner is dealt with,” Rafe explained.

  Dealt with indeed. The furred man picked himself up and, to my surprise, pounced right back into the game.

  “And then a player can only grab the teddy if one of their team members helped fling the runner.”

  “How many people are on a team?” I asked as a player snatched up the toy and threw it to another player.

  “Three.”

  I did a quick count. “So there are ten teams out there.”

  “Probably less. Lots of randos join in the tossing just for the fun of it. Fling her!” he shouted along with the rest of the crowd.

  “I can barely hold myself back,” I muttered.

  A tall woman with spotted skin and fuzzy pointed ears leapt onto the porch, skipping the rotten wooden steps entirely. The sides of her head were shaved, and the mohawk of remaining hair was woven into a long French braid. The better to show off her ears? Her tattered T-shirt was only splattered with mud, not coated, indicating that she’d been at the back of the crowd.

  She grinned at Rafe. “You came for dinner! This is a first.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m looking for the human that came in earlier. A line guard.”

  The woman gestured toward a squat little building on the other side of the field, at the tip of the peninsula. “Infirmary,” she said, though her attention had moved to me.

  “Is he hurt?” I asked while wondering how I was going to cut through the game. Going around the spectators would be difficult since they were spread out as far as the lake on either side of the peninsula. And as much as I hated to admit it — even to myself — I didn’t want to squeeze through this crowd. My brain knew that I couldn’t breathe in the Ferae virus, but my nervous system didn’t want to take any chances.

  “No,” she told me. “He’s waiting for Aaron to wake up now that his fever’s broken.”

  My heart leapt. “Aaron is here?”

  “Came in at dawn,” she said, and sent Rafe a sidelong look.

  He snorted. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Of course not,” she said with a smirk. “We all know you’re just out for yourself.”

  “Glad that’s clear,” he replied.

  “Is Aaron okay?” I asked the woman.

  “He’s got a major adjustment ahead of him,” she said, studying me as if checking that my question was sincere. “But he’s young. He’ll do fine.” Her piercing dark eyes cataloged every detail of my appearance.

  I looked down at myself. I was cut, covered in dirt, and soaked in sweat. Six months ago, I would’ve taken myself to an emergency room to get decontaminated. Now I just longed for a shower.

  “Are you newly infected?” she asked, as if that would be no big deal.

  “No,” Rafe answered for me. “Pure human. She came with the guard. I’m trying to pair ’em up again.”

  His meaning was so clear that even the spotted woman caught on. She shot him a curious look. “So in addition to being a hunter and a hack, you’re hiring out as a yenta?”

  “Sure. Whatever that means,” he said distractedly as a cheer went up from the field. Rafe got to his feet, his gaze fixed on a giant man with uneven horns twisting up from his misshapen head. Infected with … goat maybe? He lumbered over to the dog pile of muddy, bloody players and began tossing them aside like he was digging into a Cracker Jack box to get to the prize.

  “Lane, this is Little One,” Rafe said with a wave of introduction to the woman, though he never took his eyes off the goat-man, who was still throwing players aside.

  When the man reached the player at the bottom of the pile, he hauled her to her feet, pointed at the bucket atop the pole, and hoisted up her arm. My mouth dropped open as I recognized Deepnita under all that mud. Cheers rang out around the field, though there were a few boos too. Before Deepnita had even lowered her arm, half the crowd peeled off and stampeded toward the dining hall. Toward us.

  “Guess I don’t need to ring the dinner bell,” Lit
tle One observed.

  I pulled up my feet and knelt on the picnic table as manimals infected with dozens of different Ferae strains swept up the porch stairs and plowed into the dining hall. The rotten floorboards should have collapsed under the abuse. I heard a shout from the field and glanced over just as Deepnita went down again, slammed back into the muck by a jubilant Neve. A shrieking Mahari piled on top of them.

  So. While I was being chased by a giant lizard-dude, they were playing Take the Teddy.

  My flash of resentment flamed out one second later as I recalled that Mahari had spent the past two weeks in an eerie basement lab — never mind that the three of them had spent years in a cage and had just lost Charmaine. They deserved every moment of happiness they could scrounge up.

  When the goat-man joined in the fun and hefted Mahari into the air, hands high on her waist, she turned into a yowling, spitting cat. He put her down and snatched his hands back, but not before she’d put bloody tracks down his forearms with her claws. His lips parted with surprise as he stared at his torn skin. My body tensed for the blow that was sure to come. My hands tingled as the moment stretched out, and then the guy threw back his head and … laughed. Mahari didn’t share his amusement and neatly knocked away his hand when he reached out to clap her on the back.

  Rafe made a noise of disgust. “Proving that ‘randy as a goat’ isn’t just a saying.”

  “Leave him alone,” Little One snapped. “He’s been miserable since Charity turned last summer.”

  “Be right back,” Rafe said, and leapt off the porch.

  “Where are you going?” I called after him.

  He glanced back, but his eyes were on Little One. “Feed her,” he said.

  “I don’t take orders anymore,” she replied without offense. “Not since I left Heartland.”

  He grinned, unrepentant. “You’ll feed her. She’s like you. Always trying to be nice.”

  “Jerk,” she huffed as he continued across the field without a backward glance.

  “You don’t have to feed me,” I said as I climbed off the picnic table. My legs trembled a little, but that was a good thing. My muscles were revving up, in case I needed to run for my life.

  “I’m going in to dinner anyway,” Little One said. “May as well bring you along.”

  “Because it’s convenient, not because he told you to,” I couldn’t help but tease.

  She smiled, revealing a line of sharp little teeth. “Of course.”

  “Who makes sure there’s enough food for everyone?”

  She shrugged. “The only meal we plan is dinner, but no one goes hungry. There are plenty of fish in the lake, and the kids love to fish. They go out every morning and grill lunch over the fire drums that we keep burning. Also, the woods are full of game — pureblood animals and mongrels. Doesn’t matter to us if our meat is infected with Ferae before it hits the grill.”

  “But there’s no leader?”

  “Nope. We had enough of that back at Heartland. Boone has that place laced up tight — we were so worried about slacking off that we never had time to question the things he told us.”

  Not anymore …

  She glanced at the goat-man in the field, who was still grinning at an unimpressed Mahari. “What does Rafe want with Glenfiddich?”

  “I don’t know.” Maybe to pass on the info that lizard-dude had killed Boone. “Is … Glenfiddich,” I stumbled over his name, “from the Heartland Compound?”

  When she nodded, I asked, “Isn’t that a kind of whiskey?”

  One of my dad’s clients had given him a bottle on top of the exorbitant finder’s fee. Little had I known at the time that my dad had earned every penny acquiring a Magritte titled Time Transfixed from the Art Institute of Chicago.

  “When a person arrives at Echo, we tell them to pick a new name to go along with their new identity as a manimal. We encourage them to name themselves after something worth living for. We need those daily reminders — especially in the beginning.”

  “What does Little One remind you of?”

  “Lost children,” she said softly. “The little ones who’ve been chased out of their compounds and need to be found before it’s too late.”

  “Oh,” I said as my heart swelled inside my chest. “That is worth living for.”

  She smiled her sharp-toothed smile. “I think so.”

  “So not everyone is from Heartland?”

  “A lot of us are.” She beckoned me toward the entrance to the dining hall. “But not all. When someone gets banished from their compound, they tend to come looking for Camp Echo. The hacks spread the word about us and how we’ll take in anyone who wants to join — though not all of them can handle camp life.”

  She pulled open the screen door and waved me in as if proving a point.

  I was apparently one of those who wouldn’t be able to handle it. The level of noise alone set my teeth on edge. But on top of that, half the people stayed on their feet as they ate — though there were plenty of empty seats at the round tables — the better to dodge the flying food. Someone shouted for a drumstick, and five were hurtled at him from all directions. Not in an aggressive way. Evidently, throwing food was just another way to pass it. Not surprisingly, the wood plank floors were carpeted in bones and garbage. My boots squelched with every step.

  Too few wall torches fought to light the dark interior. Inhuman faces peered out from the shadows. Some flashed eerie, distinctly nonhuman smiles. A man infected with baboon caught me staring and snapped his fangs at me. “The better to eat you with, my pretty.” His guffaws echoed off the dining hall’s wood-paneled walls.

  “Vengeance,” Little One shouted over the din, “save us two seats.”

  Someone thought vengeance was worth living for? I wondered with a shiver.

  Little One held out a metal plate and pointed to the side of the room where the boisterous manimals were gathered. “Chow counter. Load up your plate.”

  “Where’s the end of the line?” I asked.

  She barked out a laugh. “Line? What’re you — civilized? Get over there, shove your way in, and take your share. Better yet, take more than your share.”

  “Uh, okay, thanks.” Thanks to the orphans, I’d gotten used to being jostled, but still, a crowd of manimals represented my own personal gauntlet.

  Little One gave me a friendly shove toward the service window that opened onto the kitchen. I shot her a dirty look over my shoulder, but she just laughed again. I slipped through a break in the milling bodies to find a wide counter laden with hot food, which included a platter of roasted snakes. Unasked question answered! Other options included fried catfish with whiskers and barely seared steaks. I remembered my dad’s warning: Even if you’re desperate for food, never eat red meat in the Feral Zone — it might have come from an infected mammal. Since I didn’t eat meat of any kind, I rounded the group to get to the far end of the counter, where I found a selection of eggs and roasted vegetables. I piled my tray with two potatoes, one hard-boiled egg, and a lump of green stuff, which might have been boiled spinach or maybe grass.

  I joined Little One at a big round table.

  Her steak overflowed the edges of the plate onto the food-crusted table. She pulled out the chair next to hers, and I slid onto it gratefully.

  She looked at my plate and said, “Ah, yes. Sometimes I forget we have gardens, for the veggie lovers among us.”

  The kid in the next seat leaned toward me and inhaled deeply. “She’s human,” he announced with disgust.

  Every person at our table, other tables, and milling nearby turned to stare at me.

  “What’s she doing here?” hissed a man with mottled orange skin on the other side of Little One. His black fedora hid much of his face because it sat so low on his head. He had no ears to keep his hat in place, only holes where his ears had once been.

  “She’s with Rafe,” Little One said in a voice loud enough to be heard by all. Her clipped tone implied that was the only answer they were g
oing to get, and to my shock, that seemed to be all they needed.

  Most of the manimals turned back to their dinner plates, but then I noticed their gazes intermittently flashing my way. They were still watching me, but doing it on the sly now, which spiked my anxiety. Or maybe my nerves were snapping because the bumpy orange-skinned man clenched and unclenched his fists as if fighting for control.

  “Oh,” Little One said with mock curiosity. “You don’t think we owe him, Vengeance?”

  Snatching up his plate, Vengeance got to his feet. “We do. But that doesn’t mean I have to sit here and lose my appetite.” With a last glare at me, he strode off. Several of the others at our table rose and followed him. On his way out, the kid sent me a perfect imitation of Vengeance’s glare.

  As long as no one bit me, I wasn’t going to take their hostility personally. After all, humans had banished them from their homes, and then there was the Titan wall, which had turned the West into one big gated community. Besides, my anxiety was losing ground to my curiosity; I wanted to hear more about Rafe and what the camp owed him. But before I could ask Little One, a hunched man in a hooded raincoat shuffled over to our table.

  “Is Rafe here?” he rasped.

  “He’s in camp,” Little One told the elderly man. “But not in the dining hall. You got a problem with him, Cohiba?” she asked.

  He swung his head back and forth as if his neck was unable to twist. As he returned to his own table, I had to hold in a gasp. He had long spines poking through the back of his raincoat.

  “Cohiba?” I asked softly.

  “It’s some kind of fancy cigar.”

  I nodded. It hit me then that he was the oldest person I’d seen in camp so far. The oldest by decades. “Most of the people here are really young. How come?”

  “Ferae is a hard disease, physically and mentally,” Little One explained. “Hard to watch your body change every day. Hard to know that someday you’ll lose your mind. A lot of the older people can’t handle it and opt for a fast way out. Others can’t get past the grief of leaving family behind — husbands, wives, children, and all their friends. They know they can’t go back; they’d just get driven off again, so they give up. Stop eating, stop taking care of themselves. They opt for a slow way out. Those of us who are left, we know we’re going to go feral someday — probably sooner than later — so we cram as much life as we can into the time we have left.”