by Jon McGoran
“The Levline.”
He cocked his head to one side. “Why?”
“I can’t tell you.”
He snorted and shook his head, then looked over his shoulder to make sure Mom wasn’t in earshot. “Aren’t you in enough trouble? If this is more of that crazy chimera crap, you need to let it go. Seriously. Before you get yourself in even deeper trouble than you’re already in.”
Then he turned and walked away.
I stood there, shaking with anger and frustration, with fear and with anguish.
I peeked through the kitchen door to make sure neither Kevin nor my mom was nearby. Then I picked up the phone, got the number for the coffee shop, and placed the call.
Jerry answered, “Higher Ground.”
“Jerry, it’s Jimi, Rex’s friend.”
“What’s up?”
“Listen, there’s something terrible going on in Pitman.”
In the next ten seconds, I told him what I knew, and what I suspected, and what I planned. Then I hung up and grabbed Kevin’s car keys. I took his money, too.
The car had only been parked on the charger pad for half an hour, but I just needed to get to the Levline station. I’d taken enough lessons to know how to do it, but I was flustered and frantic and I forgot to disengage the charger the first two tries.
By the time I was barreling down the driveway in reverse, Kevin was outside pointing at me and laughing in disbelief. By the time I swerved out into the street, my mom was running down the driveway after me, screaming, “Jimi! No!”
I was so freaked out, I couldn’t remember how to set the autodrive, so I kept it under manual control until I thought it was safe to pull over four blocks later, take a deep breath, and figure it out.
I called up Perkins Park Station on the nav console and said “Yes” when the display showed the name and the map. The car surged underneath me. It was a strange sensation, sitting in the driver’s seat with autodrive on. As a passenger, it didn’t make much difference whether it was my mom driving or autodrive, other than the vague awareness in the back of my mind that I was much less likely to die with autodrive. Sitting in the driver’s seat, though, it felt weird.
The station was a couple miles away, and I was just a few blocks away from it when the hazard lights started blinking extra fast. I flicked the switch on and off, but it had no effect. I was just starting to suspect something was up when the car drifted to the side of the road and the motor shut off.
The lights inside the car started flashing, too, and a computer voice said, “This vehicle has been reported stolen. Please remain by this vehicle until police arrive. Failure to do so may result in additional criminal charges. Thank you for your cooperation.”
At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what the last bit was. I was already running down the street by that point, grateful that my mom had only sprung for the bronze theft deterrent package. If she had silver or gold, I would have been autodriving back home, locked inside the car.
I was halfway up the block when the police lights appeared behind me. I ran up a driveway and covered the rest of the distance to the station cutting through backyards and jumping over fences. I was a lot better at it than I would have been a week earlier. I smiled, thinking Rex would be proud. Then my throat cinched tight as I thought about what could happen to him if I didn’t warn him in time.
When I got to the station, I ran up the metal steps to the platform and waited. I couldn’t see the police cars, but the flashing red and blue lights were reflecting in the trees.
Then I heard the familiar shush of the Levline. The train appeared around the bend and slowed to a stop right in front of me.
SEVENTY-FIVE
The zurbs were a blur as the Lev train sliced across the landscape, but sitting in my seat, I felt like I wasn’t moving at all. And that was driving me nuts.
The train was half-full. I wasn’t covered with mud, and I wasn’t traveling with chimeras, but people were still staring at me, still keeping their distance. Maybe they could read something on my face.
As I thought about what I was going to tell the others, the terrible reality of it played through my brain. I tried to come up with another explanation, one that wasn’t so . . . evil.
But I couldn’t. Haven wasn’t a refuge, protecting chimeras from the world outside until they could be moved to some mythical out-of-state paradise. It wasn’t protecting my friends from the H4H nut-jobs in Pitman and beyond. It was the Pitman Exotic Game Preserve, a murderous fraud, lining them up for the slaughter.
And Game Day wasn’t some quaint family fun day. It was a hunt, and my friends and the other chimeras—many of them spliced with creatures that were exotic or even extinct—were the prey. It would be mass murder.
There had been a lot about Jasper and his whole Haven setup that hadn’t seemed right from the start—the fence, the secrecy, the vibe. But as I sat on that train, more pieces came together in my mind. Pitman was a screwed-up little town with a lot of past and not much future. And that past was based on two things: coal and hunting. When the easy-to-find coal ran out, they’d started liquefying it to get the last little bits, pumping more and more chemicals into the ground. The climate had wiped out most of whatever animals there were to hunt, and the chemicals from the coal wells took care of the rest. The hunters stopped coming when the game died out.
It horrified me to even think it, but having exhausted the natural resources they once had, the people in Pitman found a new one; and now, thanks to the Genetic Heritage Act, it was even legal. The posters in town said GAME DAY IS BACK. Now that chimeras were no longer legally people, as far as the H4Hers and the people in Pitman were concerned, they were animals. Animals to be hunted.
Unless I could stop it.
SEVENTY-SIX
It was just after five o’clock when I got off the train with the throng of commuters at Carston Station. They quickly dispersed through the parking lot, and as I stood alone on the platform, watching the train pull away, I realized I was no closer to a real plan of action than I had been when I’d grabbed Kevin’s car keys and took off. I supposed I was going to try to sneak into Haven, tell everyone what was going on, and get back out again, hoping that Jerry and his friends at Earth for Everyone could somehow help keep us all from being killed.
As impossible as it seemed, I knew that maybe the hardest part would be convincing Del to leave. His zeal for Haven had been creepy even when I thought the place was legit. Knowing what was really going on made it infinitely creepier.
And what I was going to tell him was so bizarre, so horrifying, I couldn’t see him just taking my word for it. But I had to try.
A tiny, spiteful part of me might have found some satisfaction that this thing he was abandoning me for was so different from what he’d thought it was. But apart from the horror of what was actually going on, I knew what this would do to him, and I felt pity for him. He’d been acting like a jerk, but at least he’d seemed happy in his new world, happier than I’d seen him in a long time. It was going to tear him apart to find out it was all a lie. And it was going to hurt me to tell him.
Minutes ticked by while I tried to figure out my next step. The posters said Game Day wasn’t supposed to start until tomorrow, so conceivably, I could start hiking. But I felt like I needed to get there as soon as possible if I was going to save my friends.
As I stood there, a car drove up to the parking kiosk at the bottom of the steps. The driver got out, tapped some buttons on the keypad, and swiped his card. The machine spit out his parking voucher, and he got back in and drove off to find a parking spot. He’d left the car door open and the motor running the whole time.
At the far end of the parking lot, another car entered and drove toward the kiosk. I watched for a moment, letting it get closer. Then I started down the steps, timing my stride so I was walking past the kiosk just as the car pulled up. The guy who got out was in his late forties. He stared at me with a sleazy smile as he crossed over to the kiosk. I g
lared at him until he looked away, embarrassed.
Then I got in his car and drove away.
I could hear him yelling behind me, but I didn’t look back, trying not to think of the mounting pile of serious trouble I was getting myself into. My mother probably wouldn’t press charges against me for stealing her car, but I doubted this guy would be as forgiving.
I zigged and zagged until I spotted the exit, and I was turning toward it when the owner of the car jumped out in front of me. He wasn’t smiling anymore. I swerved around him, terrified I was going to hit one of the parked cars. He punched the back of the car, hard. The sound made me jump, and almost made me lose control of the car. As I skidded through the exit and onto the road, he flung himself at the back of the car, but missed. I looked back and saw him on his knees in the middle of the road, yelling at me.
For the first couple of miles, I drove with the window down and my elbow outside it, in case he had a better security plan than my mom did. But apparently, he didn’t. His next car probably would.
There were a lot of other cars on the road at first, and I squeezed the wheel tightly, terrified I was going to hit one. But when the traffic died away, I felt nervous and conspicuous. If anyone was coming after me, they’d have no problem finding me.
I knew I was heading in the right general direction, but that was about it. I was hoping to get as close as I could by car, then go the rest of the way on foot. But I had only the vaguest idea where close was. Within a couple miles, I could feel the road deteriorating under my tires.
I was starting to panic that I was lost. A police car passed me going the other direction, slowing as it disappeared around a curve. I couldn’t see what town it was from.
I kept an eye on the rearview, waiting for the cop to reappear behind me. But as the road straightened, I spotted the covered bridge off to my right up ahead, and I exhaled.
It spanned a small creek with gentle, rocky banks. I didn’t want to damage the guy’s car any more than I already had, but I also didn’t want to get caught before I got to Haven. Besides, the banks of the creek weren’t much bumpier than the road itself. I drove slowly onto the shoulder, then down the gentle incline toward the stream. When I was confident the car was no longer visible from the road, I got out and started running.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
I reached the top of the first hill just in time to see the sun setting. I paused for a brief second, feeling its warmth on my skin. I knew it was the last I would see of the sun that day, and it crossed my mind that I might never see it again.
Haven was big, but I didn’t know how big. I knew it covered much of the far side of the hill in front of me, but I had no idea how much of this side it included as well.
A quadcopter buzzed past overhead, and I ducked under a bush. It didn’t seem like it was searching, just going from one place to another, but I tried to stick to the more densely wooded areas, just in case.
A stream ran through the valley between the two hills. I paused when I reached it, then started up the other side. A few more quadcopters went by, but I ignored them and they ignored me. Two-thirds of the way up the hill, I came to the barbed fence.
It seemed even more sinister now. I gave it some distance, maybe forty yards, and followed it as quietly as I could. After a quarter mile, I heard footsteps and I froze, squinting through the trees at the fence, at the trees on the other side of it.
Then I saw them: two guards with shock rifles. They looked like hunters, and something like vertigo passed through me as I was reminded of what I was trying to prevent.
The guards were moving in the opposite direction, so a few minutes after they passed me, I continued on. Half a mile later, I saw the dirt road cutting through the woods in front of me. It was getting dark for real now, but following it with my eyes, I could just see the gate. I moved closer to the fence and followed it until I found what I was looking for: the trees Rex and I had crossed over that morning.
The one on the outside was easier to climb. I jumped up to grab the lowest branch and swung myself up, ascending until I was higher than the razor wire on top of the fence. Then I stepped from one branch to the other, and climbed down the trunk on the other side.
I felt slightly protected by the gathering darkness, but increasingly afraid I might stumble across a guard. I circled through the woods, staying clear of the lawn as I made my way to the overlook where Del had taken me that afternoon, hoping to get there before the banquet, hoping the banquet would be later than the simple dinner the night before. By the time I got there, it was getting seriously dark. Down the trail, I could see people making their way across the lawn toward the lodge, and I worried I was too late.
“Better hurry,” a voice said behind me. “They already rang the bell.”
I turned to see the small girl with huge lemur eyes, blinking at me in the darkness.
She tilted her head. “Oh. I thought you left.”
I felt a strong compulsion to warn her, tell her to run away. Instead I smiled. “Not yet. Do you know if Rex is still here?”
She smiled back. “The big cute guy? Sure he is. Why?”
“I have to show him something up here before I leave. Can you ask him to come meet me here?” I smiled even more, trying to keep it light.
“Um . . . I guess,” she said. She walked down the path, looking back at me over her shoulder.
I moved into the trees on the side of the trail, but I realized immediately that I couldn’t rely on some stranger to tell Rex to come and find me in the dark. I was about to step out onto the trail and go find him, when I noticed a dull red glow on the leaves and branches around me. Then I realized it was the reflection from the bright red dot blazing on my chest.
A voice in the darkness said, “Move a muscle and I’ll shoot.”
SEVENTY-EIGHT
For a second I considered jumping off the outcrop, into the woods below. But before I could figure out how badly I would shatter my legs, a second red dot appeared on my midsection. Another figure appeared on the trail in front of me and said, “Hands in the air.”
I raised my hands. “I didn’t do anything,” I said.
The figure on the trail came up to me, his gun on me the whole time. “You’re under arrest for trespassing,” he said as he moved behind me.
They whispered back and forth for a second. Then one of them said, “Walk,” poking me in the back with his weapon. I turned around and looked down at it, surprised to see it was a shock rifle.
“Don’t get any ideas,” he said. “You get hit with one of these, you’ll be begging for a bullet.”
As I started walking, the other guard muttered something about how ridiculous it was that they only had stun guns. For a moment, I thought maybe I had it all wrong, they didn’t want to hurt anybody. Then the other guard replied, “Rich bastards are paying good money to hunt. The last thing Jasper wants is mugs like us shooting the game for free.”
My blood ran cold.
The lawn was dark and empty. As the guards marched me around the edge of the trees, toward the back of the lodge, another passenger quadcopter approached, a halo of lights slowly turning as it descended over the landing area, which was now crowded with copters.
As we walked down the slope toward the rear of the lodge, a service entrance in the lower level came into view. When we reached it, one of the guards stayed outside as the other one opened the heavy door and walked me down a long, brightly lit, tile-and-concrete corridor. We passed doors marked UTILITY, CATERING, LAUNDRY, BOILER, and several that weren’t marked at all. Finally, we stopped at a heavy door marked SECURITY.
The guard reached around me to swipe his card through a reader and pull the door open, then we entered a similar corridor with doors spaced along the left-hand side. The door we had just come through began to close slowly behind us.
The first door on the left was open, revealing a small room with a heavy, gray-haired man sitting in front of a dozen small security screens. He looked up at me, then nod
ded to the guy behind me. Then he went back to watching his screens.
Just past that, another door opened onto a small room with a bench on either side. The guard shoved me inside it. It was the first time I got a good look at him. He looked stupid and slow, more like a thug than a cop, even a dirty cop. “Wait here,” he said with a glare.
Then he took three steps farther down the hallway and I heard his voice, muffled, saying, “Hey, you got any cuffs? I forgot mine.”
Another voice said, “Jesus, Frank, you need to get a proper belt.”
In the background I heard a sound—creak, creak, creak. I peeked my head out the door. To my left I could see the back of the guard, leaning his head and shoulders into the next room. To my right, past the room with the video screens, was the door we had just come through, still slowly closing.
Once it clicked shut, once the guard came back with handcuffs, I’d be stuck.
I made a dash for it. I don’t think the guy in the video room even looked up, but he’d see me on the cameras soon enough.
I got to the door just as it was about to close, got my fingers into the tiny gap just in time for the door to crush them. But I gritted my teeth against the pain and I put my shoulder against the door. It swung open, slowly, and I skidded out into the corridor.
I knew I had only seconds as I looked over the labeled doors. The closest one said CATERING. I didn’t have time to be picky, so I opened it just enough to slip inside, then pulled it shut behind me.
As soon as it clicked, I turned and ran down a dingy passageway. The walls and floor were unpainted concrete. A row of bare bulbs ran down the ceiling. Cases of produce and big cans of cooking oil and tomatoes were stacked against the wall. I hurried down the passageway toward another one that ran perpendicular to it. As I approached the turn, a small man rounded the corner, struggling with a large trash bag. I slipped around him at the last second, and he turned to look at me. His eyes were kind and wise and sad, and he said something, but I couldn’t understand. I kept running until I came to a set of steps leading up to a wooden door.