Her eyes flicked next to Joule and the compound bow she wore slung over one shoulder. The cross strap on her chest indicated she was also wearing the accompanying quiver.
When she and Nate had first bought the kids bow and arrow sets, Kaya thought it was for fun. Cage had put his set down relatively soon. But Joule had stayed outside and practiced day in and day out. Now, she could hit a bullseye from a distance farther than the bow and arrow was supposed to range.
Three years ago, the bow and arrow had been a toy. Now Kaya was glad her daughter was wearing it. Guns didn't work—not easily. The bow and arrow probably wouldn't kill a dog, either. But it was broad daylight, and if anything happened, she could only hope it would slow the dogs down. She wasn’t keen on her kids carrying guns into the woods. Then again, she was no longer keen on any of her loved ones going into the woods—period.
Standing up, she hugged each of them tightly. She would have kissed them on their foreheads, but they had grown tall enough to kiss her on hers. So she didn't try. She wanted to wrap them in packing materials and keep them safe, but now that would mean keeping them from living life. She had to trust them on their own, the way she trusted Nate.
She was taking a gamble every time she let them out of her sight. But it was broad daylight, they were together, and there wasn’t much more she could ask. “Be safe.”
They weren't even snarky in response anymore. Cage looked her in the eye and said a clear, “Yes.”
Joule replied, “We're on it.”
So she watched her only children head out the front door, turn right across the lawn and head into the woods on the side of the property. Several years ago, she would have enjoyed watching her kids romp off to play in the woods. Today, it just filled her with trepidation.
She thought by now—her children were seventeen years old—that she wouldn't have taken the day off just because they were out of school. But she wasn't ready to let them go. They’d discussed colleges, but the colleges were having the same problems as everywhere else. Kaya had her fingers crossed the twins would still decide to go together.
It was difficult to get in the way of their education, because she could only hope things would get better. People would figure out what they needed to do and begin to patch the Earth, and when they did, her children's education would give them an edge. If they can just live through it.
With everyone out of the house, she logged out of her work program. Work could wait. Her job gave her too many hours, and she logged too many more trying to find solutions to everyday problems. Not today.
Kaya pulled up another screen and dove into other research.
She was a physicist. She sorted out weights and balances on pumps. She was working out the nature of the mechanics of windmills. Her husband—also a physicist—was in a different sub-field than she was, but they spoke the same language.
The dogs, though… they were not a problem of physics. Kaya had never before wished so strongly that she'd gone into biology.
She tapped on her keys and pulled up an image. Then she began the research she hadn't told anyone about.
9
Joule led the way into the woods with Cage just a few feet behind her. He'd tucked their brown bag lunch into the backpack before they crossed the small creek that marked the border between lawn and forest.
She had the bow and arrow in her hands now, no longer leaving it slung over her shoulder. Cage was keeping his hands free. It was what they agreed upon before they coming out. Though the brown bag had, in fact, contained peanut butter and honey sandwiches, a handful of carrots, gummy worms, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, another double-bagged Ziploc inside the backpack contained pieces of raw meat.
They had not told their mother that they had taken it. Yesterday afternoon, Cage had nicked a frozen chicken leg and shaved a thin piece of each of the four steaks in the freezer. Joule still hoped no one noticed either loss. They’d snuck the meat into the back of the fridge to thaw and no one had called them on it yet.
They’d walked a little way in silence before Cage spoke. “So, what a little internet search told me is that a coyote—a lone one—can have a ten-square-mile range. The number is much bigger for a full pack; they can cover up to sixty square miles.
“If we consider that range as an actual square, then we're looking at just over three miles distance on the side.” He paused before adding, “That’s not too far, and we could possibly find one. If it was a lone coyote.”
Joule shook her head. “The pack analogy makes more sense, and we don't know that they're like coyotes. But if they are, sixty square miles in a compact arrangement would come out to…” she thought for a moment. “About seven-point-seven miles on each side of the square.”
The woods didn't go that far back, and their parents would notice if they walked seven miles out and seven miles back. The sun would notice if they stayed out that long. The chances of getting caught out at dusk would be too high, and the ladders weren’t ready yet.
Joule wasn't even sure she wanted to get that far from home on foot. Where would she find a house that she knew for sure had solid attic access?
“Right?” Cage was still following the coyote analogy. “You’re assuming seven miles on the side of the square, if we started at a corner. I am assuming we're probably closer to the middle of the square. So only three and a half miles in any direction gets us to the edge of the territory.”
“Yeah, but we have to walk in the right direction. And what really decides what the center of the coyote territory is?” Joule asked these questions as she swung her bow from side to side. She did not pull back on the string, although she was tense and ready to. She did not trust the woods to stay silent during the day. Using her own voice, she talked over her fear. “Is the center where they hunt? Or maybe where they sleep?”
“That is something the internet was not quite so willing to give up,” Cage replied, and she trusted he was watching her back even as he talked. “But I would assume it’s where they sleep. That’s the point they have to return to each night. So—unless they just sleep wherever they find themselves when the daylight hits—then the epicenter should be where they sleep.”
“So what do you think about how they sleep?” she asked.
This was their plan: find the dogs and use their unconsciousness as an opportunity to learn everything they could. It was a ridiculous plan. Joule knew that they might walk ten miles today, and if they got lucky, stumble onto a dog. Or they might find a den and not even recognize what it was. If the dogs reacted, they might be toast. Or more likely, nothing would happen
She’d seen deer in the yard—back when there had been herds of deer roaming the area. More than once, she'd watched one walk into the woods from her yard. A deer on the lawn was obvious. By stepping into the woods, the front end of the deer would completely disappear. Joule could still see the white tail flick, but she could not find the head, even though it had to be at the other end of the tail. The deer would pass the edge of the bushes and, even in the winter, when she would think she could see through bare branches just fine. The deer knew how to simply disappear into the underbrush.
She could only imagine it was possible the dogs had a similar level of camouflage.
Cage was still answering her question. “I'm guessing they sleep with some kind of shelter. What do you think?”
“I think it is entirely plausible that they sleep directly on the ground. They just curl up, in groups or even a dog pile, and go to sleep.”
“Really?” Cage asked. “You think they do this and no one has seen them?”
“Exactly,” she said, shaking her head, still not looking at her brother, but scanning the underbrush that hadn’t quite started filling in its spring growth. “No one sees them because no one can see them. But I think they might be right there.”
When he offered her a carrot from the backpack, she took it. Then she continued with her theory. “No one has seen them in the daylight, Cage. So we really have no idea
what color or colors they are. My guess is that they're very well-camouflaged. We know that they're reasonably dark. And from what I saw the other night, it looks like they have rough fur in shades of brown—kind of like a brindle that a boxer might have had.”
Joule noticed she used the past tense regarding pet dogs. No one around here had them anymore. Stepping cautiously through the woods, she continued, still not turning and looking at her brother. “I would imagine they are here in the woods, asleep. It’s also plausible that they’re so well camouflaged that we wouldn't know we were on them until we stepped on one.”
Behind her, the crunch of leaves stilled for a moment, and she could imagine her brother looking all around them—checking out the ground, checking for changes in the patterns of leaves. Clearly, he'd been thinking the dogs would be more hidden. That they would have to go looking for them. That the two of them would spot a den and decide whether or not to look inside. Joule thought that very well might not be the case.
The dogs were vicious, but they also appeared to be hardy. Hardy animals could sleep on the ground. Hell, deer did it, and they were prey animals.
The two of them walked in silence after that, stepping softly through the woods, not speaking. Now, the only noises came when they broke twigs and stopped cold, freezing in place for a moment. They would stand back to back and watch for movement in the underbrush.
Joule had paid close attention to the path they had come in on, knowing they might need to get out quickly. She looked at trees now and thought about having to climb up them to escape. Would it work? Could she get up high enough? The trunks had few low hanging branches, but she thought with the right motivation she could get up there.
According to her watch, it was thirty minutes later when she paused. Turning to Cage, she said, “Look. Look at that.”
The bright red and true black didn't belong in the forest with her.
“It smells,” she commented as they got closer for a better look. It smelled bad.
As Cage approached the object, she held court with the bow and a single notched arrow as he leaned over and picked up a nearby stick to poke at it.
“Well,” he said, “that's asstastic.”
“What is it?”
He continued to poke at it for a moment, but at last he stood up and looked at her. His hands on his hips and quirk in his eyebrow, he said, “It’s a human foot.”
10
Leaning over, Cage looked at the foot again. Then, knowing his sister had his back and was watching the woods around him, he examined it a little more closely.
He pulled off the backpack and reached inside. Grabbing one of the plastic grocery store bags he'd stuffed in there, he made a grimace and immediately grabbed for another. His idea had been to use the bags to take things home to study. Now he considered using them like a latex glove.
Double-bagging his hand, he leaned over and picked up the shoe with the foot still inside. A bone protruded where the leg would have been. It went from looking like a perfectly normal shoe near the toe to looking skeletal about halfway up the tibia.
Joule turned, her gaze just shy of a real glare. “Don't pick that up.”
He turned, still holding the foot in his hand. “I'm double bagged, it's okay.”
“That's not what I'm worried about,” she replied. Arrow notched into the string, ready to pull back and let fly as she swung back and forth, Joule scanned the woods. “It's not that you might get sick from holding it or that it might squish in your hand. It's that the dogs ate somebody and dragged them out here. You are clearly holding their food.”
Cage looked down at the foot in his hand. Well, when she said it that way ... For a moment, he examined it a little closer, wondering if he could recognize the shoe, the size, anything that might explain who it had once belonged to. But he didn't.
Holding it out toward her, Cage asked her if she recognized any features of the foot or maybe the shoe itself.
“I don’t know,” his sister replied after a brief glance that clearly bothered her. “I don't think any of our friends has feet that big. I'm trying to think who in the neighborhood it might have been. Looks like a man’s shoe—maybe a big guy.”
That matched Cage’s initial assessment, though he could have added some of his teenaged friends had bigger feet than they were built for, but he left it at that. Joule was right, he didn't want to be holding dog food. So, with a toss, he chucked the foot into the distance.
The two of them, automatically in sync, stood there silently waiting to see if his move had roused any waiting dogs. After a few moments, when nothing stirred, he turned to talk to her. “Well, we know they don't have a good sense of smell. So, I'm not that worried about it.”
Joule nodded her agreement. That was something the Mazur family had figured out early on. If they closed the curtains, if they didn't flash any lights inside or make loud noises, the dogs didn't try to come in. Without visual or auditory alerts, they didn't seem to know they had prey inside the house. The family had decided that had to be true, because once the dogs did know a person was inside, almost nothing stopped them from eventually finding a weak point and bashing their way in. So they didn’t have the sense of smell of coyotes, wolves, or even a standard house pet.
Stepping carefully, they walked away from the severed foot. Cage had thrown it off to the side—not in their way going forward, and not something they would stumble on coming back. But they would both be keeping their eyes open for more body parts.
If the local systems had been working better, he would have insisted on bagging it and calling it in. The police or forensic center might have been able to identify which missing person it belonged to. Cage was no medical examiner, but he was pretty certain that the person who’d once been attached to the foot was now dead.
But each time the police had come to help, they’d tried to fight rather than hide, and they’d died. At one point, animal control had been called in, but they had fewer weapons and fared worse than the police did. The packs were relentless. It hadn’t taken long before the local law enforcement’s position was to advise everyone, including their officers, to stay inside at night. The police chief had even publicly said she wouldn’t send her officers into an area with poison gas, and she couldn’t in good faith send them out on complaints of dogs anymore.
“I'm assuming the foot means we're getting close to where they sleep, or at least where they stop and eat. They dragged it this far for a reason, and I can only hope we can find a den, or a sleeping pile of dogs, somewhere around here.”
“Do you think they’re really dogs?” Joule asked her brother.
Cage shrugged. “They look more like dogs than wolves. More like dogs than coyotes.”
But Joule had a good point. They looked like mongrels with thick jaws and wide heads. Their chests were barrel shaped and muscular. But, where many dogs had thinner legs, these dogs had thick appendages and long claws. And he’d seen the damage they could do. When he thought about it, people just called them “the dogs” or even “helldogs,” but no one had analyzed them. Not that he knew of.
No one who’d gotten a good enough look had lived to see what they looked like—except his sister. But from what Cage could tell, they were at least as different from dogs as they were from wolves or coyotes. Which messed up all of his math for their little sojourn today. With a heavy sigh, he asked Joule what she thought.
“I think they are dogs… something about the eyes, and the way they barked and…” she used her hand to mimic the snout in front of her face. “The way they snapped. It just made me think of dogs. At least, that's what I’m remembering from seeing them. But their heads are huge and they have claws, not regular dog nails.”
Joule also had to know that it was entirely plausible she’d been run down by a pack of angry boxers and simply inflated the memories to helldogs in her mind.
However, the damage Cage had seen them do—the aftermath from attacks his parents had tried to shield him from—said thes
e weren’t just dogs. The cuts and deep bite wounds weren’t anything he could imagine coming from even the wildest of feral canines.
They talked a little more, but in another fifteen minutes, she said, “We've been out for too long. We have to go back.”
He wouldn’t argue with her. She didn’t deserve that. A guy gained a lot of respect for his sister when he’d spent the whole night thinking she was likely dead, even though now it was clear she wasn’t. “We can turn around and head straight home. Or we can loop, and make the turn here. Take a different path back.”
Cage voted to loop so they didn't retrace steps. He wanted to cover as much territory as possible. When Joule had no issue with this, they took a sharp turn to the left.
They walked all new paths—headed in the right direction, Cage knew, because of the GPS he was carrying—but nothing appeared. They'd been out for hours, and they were finally coming back toward the house. Pulling the GPS out of his pocket again, he checked their trajectory. They were less than a mile from the house now and he started to feel some of the tension drain.
Though he’d not actually thought they would get caught outside at dusk, it was nice to know they’d made it with plenty of time to spare. It was nice to know they wouldn’t worry their mother. He’d thought about bringing a regular compass, but the GPS allowed him to mark the coordinates where they had made their turns. Of course, he’d marked where they’d found the foot.
Even close to home, they remembered not to get too lax. Joules stayed out in front, the bow still pulled taut. Though she'd left the house with the bow slung over her shoulder, it hadn’t left her hands the whole time they’d been walking. He suspected the casual look had been for their mom’s benefit.
Now, she held one hand out to him, her eyes still trained forward. “How about that sandwich?”
He handed over her half, thinking he’d been hungry for a while but wondering when she would ask. So the two of them walked the last leg of the little loop through the woods, munching on sandwiches, a little more comfortable now that they were so close and hadn't seen anything.
The Hunted Page 4