The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  But the bigger pets began to disappear, too. When her neighbors’ three pit bulls had vanished, the neighborhood realized that there was truly a problem: Something was stalking the night and eating the animals.

  They first thought it was a cougar—the marks on the local deer that they had found, or the pieces of them, were indicative of a slashing attack. But it wasn't a cougar, nor a bobcat. Not a coyote pack.

  No, it was the dogs.

  People had begun to see them at the edges of their property at night.

  One of the families had seen the pack. The dogs had tried to bust into the house overnight. The human occupants had spent the entire time frantically screaming. Two police officers had come. But there was nothing the police could accomplish. Both officers had died in the street, shooting at the dogs, trying to save the family.

  The next time the police came, they’d wisely stayed in their cruiser. But the windows—bulletproof windows—had not withstood the tenacity of the relentless dogs. With four officers down, the force sent a third car, but only after it had grown light the next day.

  Luckily, two of the family members had escaped to a tornado shelter and the dogs seemed to have lost track of them. They’d weathered the night through the screams and sirens. In the morning light, the dogs had disappeared.

  And, finally, someone could tell what was really happening.

  It seemed to only be happening in their local area. A group of “concerned neighbors” had formed, and Nate and Kaya had attended meetings twice before realizing the group couldn’t accomplish much at all. They wanted to talk more than act. They wanted to erect signs—as though vicious dogs would pay attention to their “we’re watching you” posts.

  Kaya had found another group that wanted to kill. This gathering was mostly younger, mostly male, and mostly idiots. Despite the police officers losing their lives to the dogs, these guys believed they could accomplish eradication, one dog at a time, despite having no information about what the dogs were or how to kill them. Kaya hadn’t even given them her name. That had been two months ago, and she couldn’t find any evidence of that group now. Maybe they were dead?

  The groups had not been having much effect, because over the past several months, reports showed the dogs’ range getting bigger. And why not? House pets were a feast, and the dogs were running unchecked. Though Kaya regretted it deeply now, she and Nate had decided not to move.

  Curie, Nebraska—the town where they’d been before here—had had its own problems. There were legitimate reasons why they’d left. However, those were small in comparison to what they faced now, with the dogs. Kaya wished she could go back, but Curie didn't exist anymore. Wildfires had rushed through and burned the plains after the harvest season, fueled by the dried stalks left in the fields. Everything had burned to the ground. Grain silos, filled with corn dust, had gone up almost like rockets. Then the floods had come. Most families had chosen not to rebuild.

  Lincoln was suffering massive fires every several months. In other parts of the country, flooding had taken the coastal towns and cities near the Mississippi. The big rivers’ dams had suffered to the point where they had broken, and several towns were now fully underwater.

  Kaya and Nate had thought the dogs were manageable, so they decided to stay where they were.

  Now, sitting with her back against the door, her heart broken, Kaya regretted that decision with everything she had. They might never find Joule.

  As she thought about what the dogs might do to her seventeen-year-old daughter, Kaya broke down into silent sobs, tears dripping down her face as she sat in a cold huddle and waited for a knock that did not come.

  3

  Cage sat with his back to the door. The bolt had been turned—both of them—but he was ready to leap up and throw the door open, if Joule should knock on the other side.

  His mind wandered. It was easier to think about how his parents were handling this than to handle it himself. His father, though emotional, had always been the more even-keel parent. Nate Mazur felt his emotions deeply, talked about them, and hugged his children often. He told his wife he loved her on a daily basis, and handled crises as though they were, in fact, crises.

  Cage’s mother, Kaya, was more extreme. Nate would be sitting at his door, crying and mourning the loss of his daughter, wanting to throw the door open and run into the night to find her, even if it meant his own death. Kaya was the parent who raged emotionally or found a way to freeze her blood and run things as they needed to be run—from a logical perspective. She’d turned fully logical tonight.

  Killing themselves wouldn’t save Joule, she said. “Besides, Joule is smart.” She’d stared them down, daring them to say otherwise. They didn’t. Kaya was holding it together on the belief that her teenage daughter would somehow be the first to defeat the dogs. Or that she had managed to see the storm coming and got under cover before it mattered. Cage held tightly to that same belief.

  Tonight, he was grateful that his mother had demanded the curtains be closed. It was the only reasonable response. Joule was alive. Or she was not. They could not save her. What they could do was save themselves, and Kaya had demanded it. If she had not said it, he would have. He was grateful he’d not been forced to grab his father and hold him back from running into the dark night. He couldn't lose two family members on the same day.

  However, Cage had something neither of them had: the firm belief that if something happened to his twin sister, he would know.

  He had shared a womb with her, and most everything else ever since. Had anyone at school asked who his best friend was, he would not have said Joule. But he knew in his heart, that was the answer. She was smart enough to keep up with him, and smarter still to run ahead and force him to keep up with her.

  They had moved houses and towns together, repeatedly. Just the two of them, the only children in this family. They followed their parents’ jobs. And they’d all come here when they realized that Curie wasn’t the Camelot it had been hailed as. They’d landed here in Rowena Heights.

  High school seniors now, he and Joule had been accepted to several colleges. Their most recent discussions had been: Did they want to go together? Or was it time to split up and go in different directions?

  Right now, with his back against the door, he would agree to anything his sister said.

  The family had talked about moving again, months ago when the dogs had begun showing up. They had all agreed: the dogs could be managed. The disasters in other parts of the country, maybe not. They’d taken their chances on closing the curtains and reading in the evenings. Their days were perfectly normal. In fact, they were so normal that the rest of the country wasn’t yet declaring the dogs an emergency.

  Besides, there were too many other, larger emergencies the country had to deal with: Tornado damage in the billions in the fly-over states. Fires. Massive rains destroying city systems, even if the town didn’t flood. Sink holes. Earthquakes. High winds. Blizzards… No, the dogs weren’t even on FEMA’s radar.

  Staying had seemed the best decision. They hadn't counted on the dogs getting bolder, or on the cloud cover allowing the dogs to come out early.

  Cage told himself his sister was the smartest person he knew. That was saying a lot. His parents were brilliant. Hence, all the moving around. In Curie, Nebraska, he'd met Nobel Prize-winning scientists. He’d hung out with a man who was so brilliant, he was murdered for his ideas. Yet, when it came down to it: Who was the smartest? Who was the fastest thinker? He would have said his sister.

  And he didn't have the feeling that he had lost her. So he dozed against the door off and on during the night.

  When the morning came, his mother began moving around. He could only assume the sound had woken him, though if he was asked, he couldn't say he had been asleep.

  Cage was still waiting for a knock at his door.

  Kaya was up and peeking outside. The clouds were still present, but the light was now bright enough that she made a decision to thr
ow the curtains wide and look down the street.

  Moving from his position—hoping it wasn't a mistake and that his sister wasn’t just on the other side, about to knock—Cage joined his mother. His back resting against the front door, Nate still slept with his head tilted down to his chin, his neck at an odd angle. They didn’t want to wake him if he’d finally found sleep. It had come hard for all of them, but maybe hardest for Nate. He'd been ravaged by the inability to go out and save his child.

  How long? Cage wondered. How long before they went out and looked for her? How much did they look before they decided it was a loss?

  He didn't know.

  He didn't want to know.

  So he stood next to his mother, peering down the empty street.

  When movement caught their eye at the same time, they jerked. Kaya’s hands flew to press at the glass of the large front window. But it was only the neighbor, pulling his car out of the driveway and heading off for work.

  The Pearsons didn't know that Joule had been out all night. They had likely closed their curtains early, all their family members intact, and spent the night as they usually did. Now, they were heading off for work, just as normal.

  But it was too much for the Mazurs. Kaya, still being quiet so as not to disturb Nate, motioned to Cage. In a whisper, she said, “I'm going out.”

  He shook his head at his mother. “Not by yourself. I'm coming with you.”

  “No.” She shook her head sadly, and he could tell she was pushing through the words. “If I find anything, I don't want you to see it.”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn't want you to see it, either. You're her mother. You carried us.”

  Silent tears rolled down Kaya’s face, indicating what she expected to find. But that was the only crack in her ice-blood armor. “If anything happens, wake Dad up.”

  “No!” Cage demanded in a fierce whisper. If there was ever a time to deny his mother, it was now. “We’ll wake Dad up now. Tell him to hold down the fort. But you and I are going out together.”

  4

  Joule clutched her phone, turning down the volume even as the screen came to life. She had to tell her family she was okay, but she couldn’t see beyond the roof. Though she was certain it was now light enough to turn on the phone, she still held her breath. It wouldn't do to have the phone bleep if any of the dogs remained in the house below her.

  It took an agonizingly long time for the phone to load, even though she knew it was as fast as it always was. Once it was up, she tapped out a note to her family and waited.

  Immediately, two messages came back, one from Cage and one from her dad.

  Her dad simply said, “Oh thank god baby.” He didn’t even use his standard full words and proper punctuation. Joule smiled at the screen, thinking just how worried her dad must have been.

  Cage replied with, “Where? Mom and I are out.”

  Tapping a message back to them, she explained which house she’d ducked into at the last moment. She’d been so close to home, but it hadn’t mattered.

  Though the day was far enough along that the dogs should be gone, Joule couldn’t make promises. She hadn’t expected them to be out as early as they were yesterday. So clearly, their understanding of the dogs’ behavior was off.

  The building had been dark when she’d come in, and she’d seen her way by the glow of streetlamps filtering through curtains that had remained opened since the family left. So it was entirely possible a dog or two was still in the house.

  No one knew where they went during the day. They appeared at the dark and disappeared at the light. If you saw them in the dark, you were done. No one saw them during the light. So no one knew where they stayed or how much they slept. Joule had only recently learned what they ate and how they hunted it.

  She heard the front door open and listened carefully, not quite willing to come out. Voices she knew and loved, voices that sounded like her own, hollered out as they tromped through the house. Joule figured the goal was the opposite of that at night: make as much noise as they possibly could, in the hopes of scaring away any remaining dogs.

  When she heard the footsteps get close, she yelled, “I'm here! Up here!”

  Crawling over to the hole in the rough plank floor, she saw the strings. Both had pull knobs on them. One belonged up here, to help get out of the attic. The other was supposed to hang down, just overhead, in the hallway below. She called out as the attic door swung down, extending the staircase that more closely resembled an escape ladder.

  When she’d raced up here, she’d pulled the string up with her, so the dogs couldn't jump up and grab it. She was afraid if they did, the door would swing down for them—like it had for her, on well-oiled hinges—and would offer them an easy path up into her hiding place.

  She was halfway down the stairs on tentative feet, still hungry and nervous, when Cage shot up the remaining two steps, grabbed her, and leapt down. She was in too tight an embrace to protest. In a heartbeat, she felt her mother's arms around both of them. Only then did Joule let herself cry.

  She heard the synthetic sound her mother’s phone used to mimic an actual old-style shutter go off. She realized her mother had taken a picture of the three of them, or maybe just her, and was sending it to her father.

  “Where's Daddy?”

  “At the house. Guarding the door and waiting for you to come home.” Her mother rubbed her head as though to prove she was real, and for once, Joule didn’t mind the overly-parental gesture. “I tried to come out by myself, but Cage insisted.”

  Joule felt her arm snake around her brother and squeeze tighter just one last time before she stepped backward onto her own feet. “I’m hungry.”

  Her mother laughed, the sound golden in the dim light of the abandoned home. “Of course, you're hungry.” Kaya liked to joke about the kids eating more than they weighed.

  “I got a cool computer system,” Joule volunteered, “but I threw it away when I realized it was weighing me down.” For a moment she wondered if she would have been fast enough to make it all the way home if she hadn’t tried to run with her pockets full. It didn’t matter; she’d survived, and she would take that as a win.

  “Oh, what kind?” Kaya asked. They were all trying to make the meeting as normal as possible, and not the aftermath of the first time they thought they'd lost one of their own.

  Joule rambled her way through what she’d seen. Honestly, she couldn’t even think now about what she’d grabbed. “I don’t remember. Just that it seemed like a good idea at the time. But I also got—” pushing her hand down into the deep pocket of her jacket, she pulled out a wad of nylon. “These bungee cords and this webbing. I wasn’t the first one who’d looked through their abandoned things.”

  The three of them headed out the front door and down the steps. Only her mother thought to turn around and pull the door closed behind them.

  None of them commented on the deep gouges in the hardwood floor.

  The dirt rubbed on the wall.

  Or how high up the scratches had reached underneath the attic door.

  5

  Kaya was frustrated. She wanted to put her foot down and be a demanding parent, though it wasn't her usual style.

  Nate had taken the day off yesterday and so had she. Today, they had both gone in to work. No one at either office balked at missed days anymore. In fact, she’d had days when the place cleared out and no one questioned it. Everyone knew about the dogs, though no one talked much about it.

  However, since her excuse for missing the whole day before was that her daughter had gotten stuck outside, everyone wanted to be sure Joule was okay. Kaya had brought the kids to the office more than once, and everyone loved them. “She was smart enough to find a good shelter,” was all Kaya told them.

  It was too much to say how she herself had stayed up all night, her heart pounding. They didn’t ask that kind of thing. When one coworker hadn’t shown up for three days and wasn’t answering his phone, another had gone by his hous
e but hadn’t found anything. Kaya was hoping he’d gotten out but had no idea where “out” might be. She certainly hadn’t found it for her family.

  So when everyone said, “Oh! Thank God she’s safe,” Kaya didn't comment on the fact that Joule had seen the dogs. That she had run from them. That her daughter was the first person she knew who had actually escaped. She didn't want to bring that kind of attention to Joule.

  Kaya didn’t like the way yesterday had gone down, or that her family was still voting to stay in Rowena Heights. Kaya was certain they should get out. If the other night had shown them anything, it was that the dogs were painfully unsafe.

  “But other people don't have houses.” Cage had pointed out that the markets in other places were painfully high—to the point where they couldn’t afford an apartment—or painfully low, because most of the houses had been destroyed by winds, tornadoes, earthquakes and more.

  Nate, on her side originally, had been swayed by the kids. “He’s right. I don’t think we can talk about moving. Where is better? We both have jobs here.”

  “We can't go back to Curie,” Joule had argued. That shocked Kaya the most. Joule was the one who had seen the dogs. She was the one who had run from them, had closed the door and felt the weight of the dogs pounding on the other side. Yet her daughter still wasn't voting to move.

  “Curie is burned to the ground,” Cage said, joining his sister. “Lincoln isn’t far behind it. Or Omaha. I mean, they're breathing ash all the time.” He was right. The wildfires were taking out houses and making the air borderline-unlivable for those who still had homes.

  “We could go back to Charleston, but a lot of the houses are old. With the earthquakes, they're cracking down the middle. The construction crews can't keep up. I don’t want to escape the dogs and die because a house collapses on me.”

  Joule surprised her mother again. The argument was solid, valid. Instead of traumatizing her daughter for life, the brush with violent death had seemed to make her think she was immortal.