Unnaturals #2

by Devon Hughes

  His city: Lion’s Head.

  He felt almost as he had the first time he’d stepped into the Dome, with his senses going haywire. The sun was so bright, like a white-hot metal coin shining overhead. The heat was so extreme, like a great big tongue licking his fur. The smells were so varied, from garbage, to smoke, to diesel.

  It was almost too much, and Castor was dizzy. He had to remind himself this wasn’t like the ring. This was home. Here, he had nothing to fear.

  “Um, Castor?” Jazlyn said. “We should probably get going.”

  He followed her gaze upward. The dark glass towers rose up all around them, and on their sides flashed hundreds of images. Castor had grown up watching these images change—he had even learned to read from staring at the jumbles of text. Castor remembered seeing advertisements and news stories. It was where he’d first seen Laringo’s face, where he’d first heard about the Unnaturals reality show.

  Back then, he hadn’t had any idea how real reality could be.

  Now, instead of all sorts of different images streaming onto the windows, there were just four: one of Samken, one of Jazlyn, one of Enza, and one of him. He recognized the images right away as the publicity posters Mega Media had used to promote this season’s Unnaturals teams. Each image took up a full side of a building—in the picture of him, Castor’s wings seemed to be touching the sun. The text read: “Fugitives. Extremely dangerous. Contact the mayor’s office with any information.”

  “We need to figure out which way the Greenplains are,” Enza said.

  Jazlyn disagreed. “First we need to find someplace safe.”

  Castor had not planned to go home. He had told himself he couldn’t go back there. But now that it was so close, he felt its pull. Besides, it was the best option.

  “I know a place.”

  Castor was surprised at how natural it felt to run in these streets again. He barely felt the weight of his wings. His talons were dull enough that they barely scraped on the pavement. He felt like a dog again.

  Or at least he thought that he felt like a dog, until he rounded the last corner. At the end of the alley, the pack of dogs froze. Even from a block away, he recognized his old family—the bulldogs, Pittie Paula, Alpha. But they didn’t seem to recognize him. They were standing defensively. Their shoulders were squared off, their tails pointing out straight behind them. As he got closer, he could see the fur on their backs standing up. He noticed the flash of teeth.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Samken. “Castor, why are they looking at us like that? Like we’re Laringo or something.”

  The dogs were uncertain, anxious. More than that, they were scared. Castor could smell their fear.

  He had grown up with these dogs. He had slept in a messy pile with them in the shade every afternoon. He had hunted rats with them in the darkness. He had fought alongside them in territory battles. Yet they did not know him.

  “It’s me,” Castor called out.

  Some of the dogs started to shift their weight a little. Their ears perked up, and some of their tails started to wag tentatively. “Castor?”

  “This is Enza. And Jazlyn. And Samken.” Castor looked back at his team. “And this is . . . my pack.”

  “My pack,” Alpha corrected. The boxer stepped forward and puffed out his chest.

  Castor bristled. He had been beaten and almost broken at the NuFormz center. His whole life had been a set of rules. But despite all that the humans had done to him there, Castor had commanded a certain amount of respect. It had been a long time since he’d hung his head. A long time since he’d begged for anything. From anyone.

  But they didn’t have many other options right now.

  Castor lowered himself into a crouch, the fur of his belly brushing along the dusty ground. He crawled toward Alpha. He could feel his teammates’ eyes on him, the questions they were holding back. Was this who Castor had been before? Is this who he would become once again?

  “Alpha, we beg your mercy,” Castor said through gritted teeth.

  Alpha looked down at him for a beat too long, until it seemed like he really might turn them away. But Castor could feel the excitement of the other dogs, too. It would be bad for morale if their long-lost brother was exiled. They would think Alpha was afraid. They would lose respect for him. Alpha knew this, too, of course. Finally, he pushed his lower jaw forward. “Fine,” he huffed. “I, Alpha, grant you conditional asylum.”

  “Conditional?” Enza cut in, narrowing her golden eyes. The grizzly stood on her hind legs, rising to her full, towering height. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I decide,” Alpha said, not backing down. “Here, I decide everything.”

  The mutants advanced down the alley. Castor couldn’t believe he was back in his old den. There was the gutter he had played in, the familiar crack in the concrete where the sun had baked it. The bulldogs, and the hounds, and the lab mixes. Home.

  “Where’s Runt?” Castor asked. He didn’t see his little brother anywhere. “Is he out hunting?”

  The other dogs glanced at each other, uneasy.

  “What is it?” Castor asked.

  “He . . . Runt went after you,” Brenda, one of the bulldog triplets, answered. “Just a few days ago. He kept going on about you having to fight some scorpion-cat thing. He was really worried about it. Said he was going to go save you.”

  “Always was a dumb mutt,” Alpha said, and it took every bit of self-control Castor had to keep from lunging for his throat.

  21

  KOZMO WAS SURPRISED AT HOW COMFORTABLE SHE FELT IN the tunnels. She loved their darkness and their solitude. She loved how the walls hugged close around her; they were like the den she’d wished she had all those days in the room. Maybe this was what the dog had meant by home.

  The tunnels were teeming with life. In the walls, she found efficient colonies of termites, building tiny cities out of rotting wood. In the ground, she found worms, making their journeys through the mud. There were rats, too, and she saw the flash of their red eyes hidden between the tracks. And there were things that looked like her—or at least the part of her with wings—hanging upside down from the curved beams. When she got near them, though, they took flight, squeaking as they flapped away.

  Kozmo had never minded being alone. The other mutants seemed closer to machines than animals, so she had never craved their company. But out here, where the world was so different but the other beings were something that felt familiar—more like her—she felt, for the first time, lonely.

  She wanted . . . what had the dog called them?

  Friends.

  “Kozmo,” she whispered shyly to herself, repeating the name Runt had given her. “My friends call me Kozmo.”

  It took days before she picked up on any echoing signals from the dog and the lizard. Then, one night, when Kozmo was digging for worms in the soft clay earth of the tunnel, she heard something that sounded like more than the shhhh shhhh of wormy bodies sliding through the dirt. Kozmo’s ears twitched as she focused on isolating the direction, and when she let out a screech, she detected a warm, sleeping body off a turn in the railroad tracks.

  She crept along the track, slinking low, with her wings pulled in tight and tail straight out behind her.

  When she came upon them, Kozmo almost let out a squeaky giggle. Runt was sprawled, belly up, and his paws were twitching as if he was dreaming. Every few breaths he let out a little yip, as if he were giving chase. The lizard lay curled up beside him with its chin tucked into the dog’s neck—they seemed more like two pups than a cold-blooded amphibian and a warm-blooded mammal.

  As excited as she was to finally find them, Kozmo decided to hang back at a safe distance and study them for a while. During the day, whenever she wasn’t sleeping, Kozmo tracked the pair by hiding in narrow crevices in the ceiling and crawling in the ditches between train tracks. At night, she would use echoes to locate them and catch up to them in darkness.

  Runt seemed harmless enough, and
she knew he hadn’t received the shot yet, but she knew little about the lizard. She knew it smelled tropical and had some blue goo on its scales, which made her wonder if it had harmed the human girl in the room. But Kozmo also knew it had saved her.

  Why isn’t that enough?

  Kozmo told herself that she wanted to understand these creatures better on her own terms—it definitely had nothing to do with worrying that they would reject her.

  Runt chattered on endlessly, and at top volume. Kozmo could be trailing them by a quarter mile, and she could still learn about his home (Trash mountains! So smelly and delicious!), and his pack (Alpha hates me but lil Esmerelda loves me but the wee weenies try to fight us all!), and his brother (Castor the eagle-dog, Underdog, shepherd dog, winner, can you help me find him, please!).

  The lizard, on the other paw, seemed to be always changing. On the first day, it stepped gingerly as it walked, lifting up its feet with each muddy step and placing them with great effort one in front of the other. Kozmo wondered if it had been in a cage for so long that it had forgotten how to walk. At night, it lay strangely on its side, its tail curled up around it, shivering. Its skin was a bright, glowing green—a sharp contrast to the earthy walls around it—and it was sure to be a target for any predator they encountered.

  The lizard was an excellent mimic, though, and by the third night, things had changed. The lizard was scuttling up the walls, and its body had turned a muddy gray to match its surroundings. It wriggled under Runt while he slept, absorbing the heat from the dog’s heavy pelt.

  It didn’t speak much at first, so Runt called it Flicker after its flicking tongue and tail. But one day Kozmo heard excited barking and she heard the lizard making sounds, too—high, soft, rhythmic sounds—and though Kozmo could understand their talk of adventure and escape, the accent scared her a little bit.

  Besides, they called each other best friend, and Kozmo realized she didn’t know much about how a friend should act. So far, it looked like a friend was someone to laugh with, and imagine adventures with, and curl up against when you were cold, which seemed nice.

  But, Kozmo wondered, can you have more than one friend?

  And would someone want to be your friend if you had almost attacked them in a pen one time to prove to people that you were tough and not different from anyone else in the Room?

  Or is that to be expected?

  Kozmo decided she had better hang back a bit longer, you know, just to be sure.

  22

  CASTOR WAS SURPRISED BY HOW LITTLE HAD CHANGED IN the alley. The streets looked exactly the same, smelled the same. It was hard to believe that while he was in that lab, his body becoming a whole new creature, and then later when each day was life or death in the Dome, everything had just continued as usual for the pack. They still worried about the same territory scuffles. They still made fun of Chauncy Chow and his pack of wee weenies. They still bickered over the fattest rats and the shadiest spot to sleep. They still deferred to Alpha’s pointless bullying.

  From the moment he’d been taken away, Castor had longed to return to this place, this normalcy. He was surprised to find that now, normal felt strange.

  When he left, Castor had known his place in the pack. He was not an alpha, not an omega, but somewhere in between. He was a reliable scavenger and a better hunter. The old dogs liked him because he listened to their stories, the young pups appreciated that he’d never snitch to Alpha, and everyone knew he could be counted on to defend the territory.

  Now, his place was uncertain, and none of the pack knew how to treat him. Some tried to pretend that he was the same old shepherd dog he’d always been.

  “Castor, wanna go for a hunt?” Esmerelda, one of the hound pups, asked him, baring her teeth fiercely.

  “Castor, come join the pile,” Winky, a friend of Runt’s, offered, making room for him on the outer edges of the sleeping spot, a space that would’ve been far below his station before.

  He couldn’t go striding through the streets of Lion’s Head in search of raccoons anymore, though—not with his face plastered on every Sky Tower. And he couldn’t seem to get comfortable in the pile, either, since every time a dog shifted, his wings got squashed and his feathers bent.

  There were other dogs who treated him like a freak. They wanted all the grisly details of NuFormz, or they thought he had special powers, or they acted like his wings were some kind of gift to the pack.

  “What is it?” he asked BipBip, one of the bulldog triplets he’d noticed sniffing around.

  “It’s just . . . You smell kind of like chicken.” Bip eyed Castor’s feathers longingly, and a string of drool spilled out of the side of his jowls. He licked his chops. “Can I just have a little lick?”

  “No, you cannot lick my wings!” Castor barked. “Scram!”

  Then there were the dogs who didn’t seem excited about his return at all, including Alpha. They were even less welcoming of Castor’s new friends. They said Samken was too big, and Enza was too hostile. And if Jazlyn hadn’t been so quick, they would’ve considered her food. There was also the fact that they actually couldn’t fit here. Samken could barely turn around in the alley. When the rains came and the whole pack crowded under a sheet of plastic, Castor stood outside, shielding the other mutants with his wings.

  Alpha complained that it was a burden on the pack to shelter fugitives, so to pull their weight, Castor and his teammates ventured farther and farther into the trash mountains. The dump was crawling with Crusher Slushers, machines that churned garbage—and everything else—into sludge, but they had few options.

  There wasn’t any shelter big enough for Samken, and the octo-elephant was the only one capable of destroying a Crusher Slusher thanks to his tanklike body, so he stood guard. The long nights took their toll, though, and most days, Samken shuffled around wearily, dazed and depressed.

  “Why are we here?” Enza asked Castor after a week. “When are we going to the Greenplains?”

  “Soon,” Castor promised. “Really soon.”

  But as strained as things were with the pack, Castor still wasn’t ready to leave. He wanted to go to the Greenplains more than anything, he told himself. He just needed a little more time to recuperate. To settle in. To remember what home felt like.

  23

  ONE AFTERNOON, CASTOR WAS ON THE OUTER EDGE OF the territory, digging for edible trash, when he heard a rustling behind him.

  “Jazz, check this out,” he said. “I found a book all about biology, just like in your old classroom!”

  But when Castor turned around, it wasn’t Jazlyn behind him. He recognized the beagle with the nicked ear right away, and the mean-mugged Dalmatian. It was the pack he and Runt had fought the day he was taken. It made no sense that they were on this side of town. Normally, a northside pack couldn’t get a few feet into the southeast territory before some dog sounded the alarm.

  So where was his pack?

  “A little mouse told us you were back in town. We’ve been waiting for you a long time. Time to settle the score.”

  The dogs surrounded him. He’d fought these dogs before, but back then, there had been eight, maybe ten of them. Now there had to be thirty—the entire pack. Castor was not just outnumbered. He was dead meat.

  And, pushed up against a mound of garbage, he was cornered.

  The only advantage Castor had was flight. He pushed off the ground and snapped open his wings. He pumped the muscles hard, gaining air with every downstroke.

  Boy, it felt good to fly. He dove and soared to stretch his wings. He did some barrel rolls and loops for old times’ sake, remembering his training with his mentor, Pookie.

  “You are not only dog anymore,” Pookie had told him once. “You are bird and dog, one and the same.”

  Castor never thought he’d grow to like being a mutant, and he certainly didn’t miss his matches in the Dome, but he did miss this part—the wind whipping through his tail feathers, the precision of a hairpin turn, the escape when you were out
of reach of everything else. With all the running and hiding and cowering, this was the first time he’d felt a true sense of freedom since he’d left the chains behind.

  The wind was whipping so fast in his ears that Castor didn’t even hear the sound of the propeller at first. He only noticed the flying machine when a blue light—some kind of laser—flashed into his eyes. He’d been spotted!

  Castor needed to warn his friends, but the machine trailed him closely. It looked like a fat bumblebee, with oval wings and a buzzing propeller. But instead of a bee’s fuzzy body, a heavy metal sphere cage hung between the wings. The two halves of the cage locked together like jaws, and they opened and closed, opened and closed, snapping at the air and hoping to catch something good.

  Like an eagle-dog.

  It was right on his tail, its metal jaws going chomp chomp, chomp chomp. It was too quick in the air—if Castor wanted to lose it, he had to swoop low.

  The problem was, he had been away for so long that he didn’t know the newest trails of the trash mountains, and though he was trying to confuse the machine’s signals, Castor himself ended up turned around, and when he turned a corner, the enemy dog pack was there waiting for him.

  In a last ditch effort to send the flying machine off course and confuse the dogs, Castor stopped, dropped, and rolled into a pile of garbage to his left. The buzzing just got louder, though, and the propeller chopped through the trash, seeking out its target. As paper and food scraps fluttered around him, Castor glimpsed Enza leaping at the machine, swiping with her big bear claws.

  The metal bee wasn’t even dented, and as Enza continued to attack, the cage wrenched open and closed on a tight spring, swallowing up the huge saber-toothed grizzly like a Venus flytrap.

  Samken was charging toward it now.