Prey

by Stefan Petrucha

  “Aristotle probably felt the warmth down here and wanted to check it out. He climbed in, fell into the habitat and…thunk!” Derek said.

  “Oh God, oh God,” Chelsea said. “What am I going to do?”

  “For starters, call Ms. Mandisa and see what she says. I’ll find something to block that window closed so we don’t lose any neighborhood cats,” Derek said. He had a commanding, confident tone she’d never heard from him before.

  She wanted to say something nice, but instead only nodded and flipped open her phone. As she searched for Ms. Mandisa’s number in her contacts list, Derek found a piece of wood just the right size and managed to wedge the window shut.

  “That wire’s strong.” He grunted as he shoved it into place. Chelsea, meanwhile, found the number and pressed the call button. After a few moments, an answering machine picked up.

  “Ms. Mandisa, it’s Chelsea. Please call me right away. Something terrible has happened,” she said. Then she clicked the cell phone shut.

  Derek looked at her. “Way not to sound panicked,” he said.

  “At least she’ll know to take me seriously,” Chelsea answered. She managed to get to standing. In a weird, sick way, she was relieved. It was all someone else’s problem now. Ms. Mandisa would probably have to fly back and deal with her unhappy neighbor and maybe the police. She wiped her eyes and felt terrible for Aristotle, but remembered what Eve Mandisa had said about it being a merciful way to go. Somehow she didn’t think Aristotle’s owner would be comforted by the thought.

  But then she opened her eyes and noticed her boyfriend sticking his arm into the habitat, trying to retrieve the fallen claw. She wanted to scream, but the words stuck in her throat, finally coming out instead like a raspy gasp, “Derek, stop! What are you doing?”

  “Relax, it’ll take a second….”

  But before he could finish, something raced out of the nest, something very long and colored a dark clay gray. Chelsea’s mind flashed back to what she’d read about the way Komodo dragons hunt, hiding beneath the brush and lashing out when prey came by. Maybe Koko hadn’t been lazing under there at all. Maybe he’d been hunting.

  Derek saw it coming too and pulled his arm out, falling backward in the process. It was a photo finish as the big lizard, a blur of head, body, and legs, slammed into the Plexiglas wall, shaking the whole thing, then swerved and with a flurry of shredded plants, vanished again into the back of the habitat.

  Chelsea screamed again. She didn’t get much of a glimpse of Koko—he was visible only for seconds, but he seemed huge, way bigger than six feet. Derek was on his knee grabbing his hand.

  “Crap! Oh crap!” he said.

  Had Koko bitten his finger off? His hand? What if he came back again and smashed down the whole wall?

  Chelsea stumbled away and leaned against the banister, her back to the whole scene. All at once she realized that what she’d seen in her boyfriend wasn’t bravado at all. It was total, complete stupidity. Her boyfriend was a jackass. A moron.

  After saying, “Aggh!” and “Crap!” a few more times, he put his arm around her and gently pulled her back to standing.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay! I was just being stupid. I’m not gonna do that again! Boy, he’s big, huh?”

  He turned her whimpering form slowly around.

  He sucked the blood off and stuck his index finger out at her. “Look! Look! It’s not so bad!” Derek said. “He just nipped me.”

  But he was wrong again. The jagged wound was horrible. It ran half the way along the length of his finger. It looked like a little piece of the flesh had just been torn off. Derek looked at her face, then back at his finger. His brow furrowed. “Hey, you’re right. That is pretty bad. You got a handkerchief or something?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe upstairs? Can we go upstairs now?”

  Derek nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.”

  They mounted the first of the twelve steps, but before they walked up and passed the thirty-six slats of thin paneling, Chelsea glanced back at the cage. For a few horrifying seconds, she thought Koko wasn’t in the cage at all, but then she saw that familiar head, the curved nostrils, the black eyes, watching her from beneath some shrubs.

  Hunting her?

  Upstairs in the kitchen they found a dish cloth, which they wrapped around Derek’s finger. The first time, the blood soaked through, but by the third time they rewrapped it, the bleeding had seemed to slow. Chelsea wanted to pour some iodine she’d found on it, but Derek refused.

  “You kidding? That’ll hurt like hell!”

  “Derek, you’ve got to go to the hospital.”

  He shook his head. “I’m fine, really. Look, the bleeding’s stopped. How’s your OCD?” He was trying to change the subject.

  “It’s fine. You know how when everyone really is out to get you, it’s not paranoia? Same thing here,” she answered.

  He nodded. “Are you counting anything?”

  “There are six knobs on the gas stove. Four tablespoons and one soup spoon in the kitchen drainer…”

  “Okay, I get the picture. But look, the dog? That happened because it wandered someplace it wasn’t supposed to. My finger? That happened because I stuck it into a monitor lizard’s cage. No magic, right? Counting couldn’t have stopped it from happening, not counting didn’t make it happen, right?”

  “Right,” Chelsea said, but she knew she didn’t sound like she believed it.

  They put on their coats, opened the door, and stepped outside, into the cold. It was later than Chelsea had realized, and darkness was falling.

  Posters had been plastered on the columns that supported the roof on Tess Sullivan’s front porch, across the street. More hung on her front door. Sixteen in all.

  “Chelsea, you should tell her.”

  “I don’t want to. You tell her.”

  He looked for a second like he just might do it, but then he shook his head.

  “Okay, fine,” she said. “But what if she doesn’t believe me? What if she thinks I’m some stupid kid making a stupid joke?”

  He looked at her face, which was white with fear. “No one would think that of you,” he said.

  So she nodded and stepped off the curb just in time to see the woman’s car pull out and head down the street. She could have waved and stamped her feet, but she didn’t, and even if she had, Tess Sullivan might not have stopped.

  She looked at Derek. “You could call the number on the poster, but you can’t just leave a phone message for something like this,” he said.

  Now he was being sensitive? Now? She nodded. “Ms. Mandisa will probably call in a few hours and tell me what she wants to do. But if she doesn’t, I’ll come back and tell her. Will you come with me? Back up my story?”

  He cradled his hand as he nudged her hip. “Sure. I’ll pick you up after dinner.”

  6

  Night clouds shrouded the Bilsford sky with a clay-gray color as dark as a lizard’s skin. As it thickened into blackness, drawing even more heat away from the December air, it ultimately smothered the light from even the brightest stars. But mere dark couldn’t keep the town’s denizens inside, safe and warm, not on Hobson Night. As Derek and Chelsea drove through town after dinner, it seemed as if everyone under thirty was out having fun.

  Everyone except them.

  Groups large and small wandered the grassy commons, laughing drunkenly as they tromped the frosty grass. Banners and holiday lights hung from all the streetlamps. If you peered inside the garish fluorescent-lit windows of the supermarkets and convenience stores, you could see long lines of people with their IDs—both real and manufactured—already out as they bought cases and six-packs of beer.

  Hobson Street, three blocks of ramshackle off-campus student housing that lay just a quarter mile from Eve Mandisa’s, was the nexus for this dying-of-the-light debauch, but the party always spiraled out from there, sucking the whole town in. University classes had ended yesterday; the campus shutdown would occ
ur tomorrow, but this was a night when college students rewarded themselves for work well done, or drowned their sorrows over opportunities lost. It was rumored, and likely true, that Bilsford scheduled its high-school midterms during this week specifically to keep the younger kids in the town busy and out of trouble.

  Like that could ever work.

  Derek slowed for a crowd in the crosswalk. Among the people, Chelsea recognized six kids from her classes, singing, “We Will Rock You.”

  Derek caught her longing expression as she looked out the window. “Do you want to go later?” he asked hopefully. “Just for a few minutes? Just to drive down Hobson Street and look? We can drink seltzer.”

  Chelsea shook her head. “Bah. Humbug. No. Maybe. I don’t know. I think I just want to go home and go to sleep after this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She reared. “My lizard ate a dog! I’m feeling a little drained, Derek.”

  “Fine. Sorry. I thought the whole idea was to distract your inner reptile.”

  “That’s the idea, but not tonight. You should go. Really. I won’t mind.”

  Much.

  “Maybe. Maybe I should.”

  He sounded defiant and annoyed and she didn’t blame him. Who would want to be stuck with her on Hobson Night? Last year, when she was fifteen, she’d actually finished all her tests and her friends begged and begged her to sneak out and play. Her father even made a point about how the lock on the back door was broken and, hell, anyone could sneak out and join the party for an hour or two and no one would notice. But Chelsea stayed in her room, curled up under a book lamp, startled by every crashing bottle or good-natured scream.

  Tonight, though, Chelsea was on her way to tell a woman she didn’t particularly like that her dog had been eaten by a lizard she was sitting.

  My, how times had changed.

  She told her parents everything, but they didn’t seem to believe her until Derek displayed his as-yet-untreated wound. Though the bleeding had stopped completely, the width of the cut looked pink and pulpy and had acquired a strange shade of green on the edge of the frayed skin.

  Her mother nearly fainted. But her father, after whistling, just said, “I stuck my hand under a running lawn mower once to grab a ring. Stupidest thing I ever did. An inch in the wrong direction and I could have lost the whole hand.”

  Derek nodded solemnly, but Chelsea thought she saw them swap furtive glances of “manly” approval.

  Her mother instantly reached for the phone to call the police, to have the killer monster dragon arrested and/or shot, but Chelsea begged her not to, at least until Ms. Mandisa got back in touch.

  “It’s not Koko’s fault Aristotle got inside! He was just doing what a lizard does!” Chelsea said.

  Seeing her daughter defend the creature that terrified her made Chelsea’s mother think twice. She put the phone down, but kept her hand on the receiver for a few long seconds, for comfort’s sake, it seemed. Chelsea sometimes wondered if her mother had her own OCD, but had kept all the little fears and rituals locked away inside, all her life, telling no one.

  Dr. Gambinetti said that everyone had these terrifying stray thoughts, conjured by the reptile brain, and the disease was really just a question of degree. Her father actually said he had them too, but that he ignored them. Chelsea was never sure if he really did, or if he was just saying that to make her feel better. But her mother had never owned up to anything other than a concern for Chelsea that she insisted was born only out of love.

  And where was her bio teacher anyway? It’d been three hours and there was no return call from Eve Mandisa. Maybe she figured Chelsea had just freaked out over the rats, so she wasn’t in any rush to hear about it. Maybe Chelsea should have been more specific. In any case, when Chelsea announced her plan to go back with Derek and tell Ms. Sullivan what had happened, her mother was further tested.

  “You will not go anywhere near that house!” she screamed.

  But Chelsea’s father took his wife into the kitchen and the two parents treated Derek and Chelsea to a muffled but heated exchange. Words like “independence” and “best thing for her” and “she’s a little bigger and smarter than a dog” danced out into the living room.

  Finally, the Kaüers did what they always did when they came to loggerheads over how to handle their only daughter. They called Dr. Gambinetti at home. He, surprisingly, offered a compromise between the armed guard Helen wanted and the footloose methods Ben advocated. As it turned out, the doctor was going to be in the area and could meet Chelsea and Derek at Ms. Mandisa’s himself. It would be a good place, he said, to see exactly how his patient was doing.

  Chelsea figured he suggested it because it was his big opportunity to see her in the middle of a full-blown attack. Despite its sloppy appearance, the doctor’s office was controlled and safe. This was real life.

  The university campus was impossible to navigate because of the traffic, so they had to take the long way around. As they finally exited the center of town, with its lit buildings and equally lit denizens, into the less well lit neighborhoods, she felt her reptile brain wriggling its long, sharp tail in her head, ready to perform for her doctor.

  They pulled up in front of Tess Sullivan’s house, frozen leaves crackling beneath the tires. Tess’s car still wasn’t in the driveway, and the house was dark, its silhouette barely visible against the trees. Ms. Sullivan obviously wasn’t home. Maybe she’d given up on her beloved Aristotle and, like many of the older residents, decided to flee the neighborhood for Hobson Night.

  Derek shut off the engine and looked at his watch. “We’ve got half an hour before Restrooms gets here. What do you want to do?”

  Chelsea hadn’t noticed when it began, but a light snow was falling. It was supposed to get worse—dump up to six inches—as the evening went on, but right now it was just a feathery sprinkling, floating bits of sugar against black velvet. She watched the flakes land on the windshield and melt.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

  “Well, you know what I always like to do?”

  He slid his arm around her coat.

  Boys. Ready to roll at the drop of a hat. They were like—what was the word?—opportunistic feeders.

  She pretended not to know what he was talking about. “No. What?”

  He came forward and put his lips against hers. She did not resist, tingling with pleasure as he wriggled his arms under her coat. He took her mind off guard perfectly and she was thankful. For the first time in what seemed a million years, she actually felt herself relax. Her whole body seemed to exhale. Sure, a tightly wrapped, icy little something in the back of her mind was still beating away, but maybe if she gave in to this simple pleasure, even that could melt from the warmth.

  After all, it wasn’t the end of the world. Just a lizard doing what lizards do. Nature. Just like this. The circle of life.

  She let him put his tongue in her mouth, prod her teeth and pull her closer. It was so quiet, except for their quickening breath, that she thought she could hear the snowflakes landing. As the car windows fogged from the heat of their bodies, she heard more than that, though. She heard tree branches crack lightly in the wind. Distant laughs. Music from a car stereo.

  Then scraping.

  No, scratching. Like something crawling up beside the car, something that could tear through the door and grab them.

  She stayed in Derek’s arms, eyes closed, knowing it was just the OCD, but she counted anyway, hoping he couldn’t read her mind. She counted the flashes of darkness on the inside of her eyeballs, counted how many teeth Derek’s tongue touched. Counted her breaths, counted the seconds.

  Eventually, Derek noticed she wasn’t moving.

  He pulled away and looked at her. “Look, Chelsea, don’t force yourself or anything.”

  “I’m not!” she protested. He just looked at her and she felt like crying. “I’m sorry. I feel so stupid. I can’t even kiss you. I am so damn lame.”
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br />   He pulled farther back and looked out the window. “You’re not. You’re not lame. It’s been a big day. We’ll…we’ll try again after this is all sorted out.”

  She watched him, thinking how wonderful he was being. Too wonderful. In fact, he seemed way too calm about the whole thing. Didn’t he want her?

  “Derek, how can you just stop like that? Aren’t boys supposed to get all worked up?”

  “Oh, I am,” he said, laughing a little. “I just…I just want to make sure things are right between us.”

  She was about to grab and kiss him again, show him just how right things were between them, when a heavy tapping came at the window that made them both jump.

  The wide head and bespectacled eyes of Dr. Gambinetti hovered outside the window, surrounded by shadow and snow. He was narrowing his eyes, trying to see past the fog into the car’s interior.

  Derek opened the door as Chelsea buttoned her long coat.

  “Very sorry to interrupt,” Gambinetti said. “Are you the young man who calls me Restrooms?”

  Derek blanched. “Uh…Chelsea…”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Chelsea said, climbing out of the car. Why had she told Gambinetti about that? She was certain she’d lost Derek to Penny now.

  Gambinetti laughed. “You really should see the look on your face. It’s fine, Derek. I’ve been called much, much worse. And I’m glad to meet you.”

  Chelsea could see the doctor’s laugh was genuine. There was a faint smell of alcohol about him, too. Scotch? Even Dr. Gambinetti was getting in on Hobson Night.

  Maybe she should?

  “Chelsea,” he said, widening his grin. “You don’t seem all that rattled by these shocking goings-on.”

  “Actually,” she began. Deciding she didn’t want to go into the details of her aborted make-out session at all, let alone in front of Derek, she said, “Nothing.”

  Gambinetti nodded. “Have you spoken to the dog’s owner?”