The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  A quick glance around told her no other dogs had joined the fray.

  Cage, already at her back on her right, pushed at her side a bit. Then the whole little party of three rotated as a unit, leaving her father facing the original dogs and Cage, with Joule, facing the newcomers.

  “Got this one,” her brother said, and she breathed a little sigh of relief.

  The second dog got close and Cage swiped his sword into the air, hoping to stop it. He’d aimed for the neck, knowing that it likely wouldn't kill. Her mother had made those cuts on the dogs in the house and had still had to get underneath and cut a different artery before they died.

  They had discussed this already—what their best defenses and offenses were, what Kaya had found in her books and when she fought, what information she’d left behind for them. So Joule knew Cage’s cuts right now were intended to wound and that was it.

  But a wounded dog was more controllable, and Joule also anticipated what he would do next. He used the sword against the cuts in the neck, the pain probably making the dog faster to comply, to move out of the way of where the sword pressed. It kept the mouth, and those teeth, away from him and let him get the dagger underneath the dog and go for a femoral artery.

  But Joule couldn’t watch her brother’s moves. She was already dealing with the dog coming at her now, full on.

  She pulled her second stiletto from its sheath, the bow still up and over her shoulder, across her chest. She’d practiced fighting with the bow in place, with one stiletto and, like this, with two. She’d practiced while having Cage bump her unexpectedly, and she’d practiced with everything except actual dogs coming at her.

  But when she faced this one, she was ready with two weapons in her hands. So far, she hadn’t been bitten, hadn’t put the mail to the test. If she was lucky, she could keep it that way.

  Joule was prepared—if she lost her stilettos, she had more sharp, pointy things on her back than she had hands. She had tried using the arrows as weapons in and of themselves, but they didn't offer a good grip. They didn't let her grasp and shove and pull back without her hand sliding along the shaft, but they were backup, if she needed it.

  Joule was ready to cut and stab and smack the creature coming at her, because it was ready to tear her limb from limb. Since cutting the carotid arteries wouldn't make him bleed out the way a human would, Joule bent her knees and leaned forward to put her weight into heftier cuts.

  Turning her shoulders sideways, she aimed to make herself a smaller target. The hardest part was waiting for the animal to get close. The stilettos were not a long-range weapon, and her arms were not the longest either.

  Three.

  Two.

  She held herself calm, waiting for the right moment as the dog came closer and closer. One.

  As he lifted up to come at her face, she jabbed the stilettos into each side of his neck, letting them cross somewhere in between their entry points. It was not an easy flick of her wrists. This was much harder work than that.

  The veterinary texts had shown them—and her experience was agreeing—that the dogs had incredibly thick, muscular necks. Human necks were weak and spindly in comparison. Thus, on the dogs, slicing was harder. But she put her shoulders into it and wrenched the blades back and forth scissoring beyond where she’d pierced him. Then she watched as the dog—just like the frog in her bio lab—piece by piece, stopped moving. The mouth whimpered once, and then blood gurgled toward her.

  Using her foot, Joule shoved him back. It worked and the dog, no longer fighting her, went flying further away then. She was stronger than she’d thought.

  But as she pulled the foot back, she saw and felt as a pair of jaws clamped around her ankle.

  31

  Cage, noting the two dogs in front of him were dead, and knowing that one behind him was as well, now rotated to his left again. He was trying to face the still living dog or dogs.

  Joule still had a live dog she was fighting off. The growls were unmistakable—it was still healthy enough to put up a good effort. As he came around, his mouth fell open at the sight of the creature clamped on his sister's ankle. He also saw his father coming from the other side.

  Nate's eyes were full of light and anger. And something else, maybe glee. He seemed to be enjoying the killing. All week, he’d enjoyed getting ready for the fight.

  Cage had seen it as a task he could not get out of. In fact, he would have much preferred to stay home in the dark—the far safer place to be—but his father insisted on coming out, insisted that knowing they could fight and how to do so efficiently was a necessary part of their forward movement. Now, here was Joule, the dog clamped around her ankle. The jaws were firmly on the mail, though whether it was working, he couldn’t tell. She shoved with her foot, but the dog didn’t come loose.

  “Are you okay?” Cage asked, getting in her face and enunciating each word. His father hadn’t asked; he was just assessing how to get at the dog.

  “Yes,” she answered calmly, eyes still on the dog as she shoved at it again.

  But it was Nate who, after a moment of contemplation, put an arm across Joule’s chest as though to hold her back. Cage grabbed her then, lifting her off the ground, giving her an advantage so that her leg was at the same height as the dog’s mouth. The dog was trying to use his strength to pull on her, and though Cage wanted to fight, his sister’s foot was more important.

  With no warning, Nate leaned over the dog. Using the machete, he laid a harsh cut into the middle of its back. Despite his apparent effort, the cut was not deep, but it must have been enough. Maybe the processes on the vertebrae had led the knife through the V down between the bones, severing the spinal cord, Cage thought. Because, as he watched, the back half of the dog went limp.

  Joule shook her foot again, but the jaws did not want to let go.

  “Careful,” Nate said, once again holding his arm out the way Cage remembered his father doing if they had to stop suddenly while he was in the front seat of the car. It probably worked just about as well here. Maybe it was only intended to be a gesture; Nate certainly hadn’t spared a look at his daughter.

  Still, Joule leaned back, Cage’s arm clamped around her as he lifted her. In his other hand, the sword was ready to fight. Her hands still clenched the stilettos, but it was hard to reach down by her ankle with any force.

  The dog should have let go. Logic said there were far more blades than the dog could withstand. But for all Cage was willing to credit them with intelligence and cunning, this dog wasn’t figuring out that it was time to let go and run.

  It was Nate again who chopped at the dog. Without warning, he brought the machete down in another hard arc. He was clearly trying not to get too close to the head. But the swing had made Cage nervous, incredibly nervous, for a split second as it swung down too close to Joule's foot.

  However, this time, the dog let go.

  The three Mazurs staggered back as Cage saw the last of the dogs fall. A quick spin revealed that no more were coming, and that his father would have missed it if they were. He was too busy lording over the last dog as it twitched on the ground in front of him. Cage looked away, finishing his turn to the sight of his sister putting weight on the ankle and testing it.

  “Does it work? Are you okay?” he asked. Even as the words came out of his mouth, he realized it probably wasn't anything she could answer yet. Certainly not until tomorrow, not until the ankle did or didn't swell up.

  “I think it's good.” She shook it, the chain mail rattling ever so slightly with the movement.

  Nate had wanted something silent. The pants they had on were made of chain mail stripes alternating with carbon fiber cloth. The carbon fiber didn't protect against punctures as well as the mail, but it could not be torn outright and lessened the weight of the pants by half. The maker had believed there was enough chain mail in strategic locations that a bite would not go through.

  He'd made these on the other side of the country and mailed them. He’d done
it while asking questions about needs, but not exactly what it was for. Perhaps he was getting many strange orders these days.

  Cage thought the mail did well, protecting against bites, but he’d withhold judgment until he got a good look at Joule’s ankle. He wanted to see how it protected against the pressure of the bite or the rubbing of the mail against the skin as the dog held on and shook his head. His sister had become their unintentional test case.

  Joule put weight on the ankle again, lifting it and stepping down gingerly while Cage and Nate looked around, watching for more dogs, any late entries into their fight.

  None appeared.

  The only dogs he could see were the seven dead, now in a circle around them, at varying distances from where he stood. But all were too close for Cage’s comfort.

  It was Joule who asked, “What do we do now?”

  Cage looked to his father for that answer. He saw that Nate had not heard his sister, but was still looking at the dogs with a triumphant grin and a gleam in his eye. That bothered Cage more than the fact that they had been out at night—and more than the issue that they had fought off seven dogs without backup.

  That his father saw this as a victory was the worst thing he’d seen tonight. A quick glance between him and his sister told Cage they were on the same page. Their next job would be to hold Nate back from thinking this was anything they should repeat.

  Joule asked again, this time louder, “What do we do?”

  “Do you think anyone saw us?” Nate asked in reply, too casually looking up at the windows on the houses down the street. Almost half the places were abandoned, but that meant more than half still had people in them. People who might have looked out. But Joule shook her head.

  “I doubt it.” Her gaze bounced between them. “We heard the noises in the night before and I would never have cracked the curtains to look. Not as long as it's dark.” She looked up at the sky. “I don't think anyone was watching. The problem is we can't leave dead dogs in a circle in the middle of the street. That will draw suspicion. And the last thing you want is to advertise that we just did this.” Her voice grew angrier as she spoke, and Cage felt the weight of her words in his chest.

  She was right. What they had done was monumentally stupid. It was possible they had done something no one else had done. Or, possibly, it was something crews all over the area were doing as they spoke. But none of that mattered. The last thing they wanted was to get a reputation as a vigilante crew.

  Cage hoped their job was done here. We fought them. We proved we can do it. And now we go back to other methods. But he didn't say that. Nate wouldn’t hear it and Cage couldn’t afford to miscalculate, or they would wind up out here every night.

  Looking to his father, he said, “We have to dispose of the bodies. We have to at least get them out of the street. It will be bad enough, because several are bleeding heavily, and we're going to leave streaks. Hopefully, it will look enough like what we've seen before that no one will think twice.”

  His father still stood looking at the dogs, not acknowledging that his children were speaking. Dagger and machete in hand, he turned in a circle, surveying all that he had done.

  “Dad! We have to at least drag the bodies off the street,” Cage said with more force this time.

  Nate only nodded absently, and it was Cage who leaned over to grab the first dog. The skin was a little loose, though not as loose as he would have expected. Again, he reminded himself, they needed a new name: These weren't dogs. They were something different.

  He began to drag the bleeding body off the road toward a little copse of trees, where he hoped no one would look. It was hard work, pulling in that bent over position, the weight of the animal in his hands and the weight of the chain mail making him even more tired. The work was much slower than he wanted.

  As they reached together for the last carcass, Cage offered a half smile to his sister. Joule was walking fine, he was glad to note.

  But Nate came up to them as she strode back from shoving a dead dog into the overgrown front landscaping of a nearby abandoned house. He reached down, strength and energy renewed with their unwarranted victory. “I’ve got this.”

  Both kids nodded at him, not knowing what else to do.

  Cage leaned toward Joule and though he knew his father couldn’t hear him, he whispered the words anyway. “Sun's coming up. We have to get home.”

  32

  By the time Joule woke, the day was almost gone. The three of them had dragged their exhausted butts inside just as the sun had peeked above the trees, just as they’d finally been relatively certain the dogs would not walk in behind them. The creatures should be heading wherever they went during the day—something the Mazurs still hadn’t been able to figure out.

  Joule had been dragging, and she could see that Cage had, too. But Nate walked on disturbingly light feet. When they’d gotten inside the house, they still hadn't spoken, just taken turns running through the shower, pulling on pajamas, and climbing under their covers.

  This is a shitty setup, Joule thought as she lay down. They should not be sleeping during the day. That should be saved for the night, when there wasn't much else they could do. Given the way the house was built, there wasn’t a safe space to read or have any light at night except in the hallway—and it wasn’t set up for anything like that.

  An older house, theirs was designed to let in the light. Most of the interior was accessible by curtains. That meant, once it got dark, they couldn't be in the game room; they couldn't be in the living room or have a light on in their bedrooms. Even the kitchen and the downstairs had too many windows to keep them safe.

  She’d thought more than once about covering them completely. Joule wasn't a fan of artificial light, but having a place she could go and something she could do at night was looking more and more appealing. The problem of having to go downstairs to get there was something she only now considered as she truly entertained the thought and noticed the previously unforeseen problems.

  Being downstairs meant any light leaking out was on a level the dogs could directly access by coming through the windows. It meant that, if the dogs did come through the windows, she would have to run through the main house to get upstairs. Not safe. Bad ideas all around, she thought as she fell asleep.

  So far, the hallway and the dimmed halogen flashlight still seemed to be her best bet. But sleeping during the day was a waste of usable time.

  She woke, refreshed but starving, and found Cage must have had similar ideas. His head was in the refrigerator and his hand was reaching in and out, piling items on the counter.

  “Are you making dinner?” she asked, noting just how late she’d slept. From the looks of him, he hadn’t been up much longer than she had.

  He mumbled something about being the only one who was going to do it. Joule turned then to look at the table, at her father, who sat there scribbling on paper, piles of other pages around him.

  Looking back to her brother, she watched as Cage took a moment to pull his head out of the fridge, look at her, and shrug his shoulders. But it wasn't a casual shrug or dismissive shrug. It was a worried one—a heavily worried one—and the shrug only meant that he had no idea what to do about it.

  Letting Cage plan the meal, she walked over and looked at what her father was drawing. There was no need to ask, once she saw the sketches. Nate glanced up with a grin on his face that she didn’t like at all.

  “It will work better if we redesign the pants so that we have slightly more mail. Or, alternately, more, thinner stripes. With thinner pieces of mail versus carbon fiber, we can keep the weight low, but also keep the dogs inability to bite through very high.” He spoke quickly, a cadence that would have been indicative of drug use of some kind if she didn't know what her family had just been through—and what her father had just lost.

  It had been several weeks now, and it was time. A quick glance to Cage, eyebrows up, and a quick nod back from her brother, and it was decided between them.


  Reaching around the table, Joule picked up the sketches her father had been making for the new armor. She gathered them, stacking them neatly as though to respect them more than she did. Then she set them in front of her father and said, “No. No, Dad, we can't do this. We're not going out again.”

  Nate looked up at her, confused by her declaration. “It's almost dark. We can go out again tonight.”

  “No,” she replied again, her voice firm. “We're not going out again tonight. We just woke up. It's going to be hard enough for Cage and me to get our butts to school tomorrow morning, given that we just woke up now.”

  Her father’s eyes darted around the room and ended up looking at the floor, even as he shook his head at her. “I don't think you need to go to school anymore.”

  Joule froze. If there was one thing her parents had always supported it was their children’s education. Nate and Kaya were both highly educated, both holding their own doctorates. Her mother had two advanced degrees. Her grandparents were immigrants on both sides, and they had come here to escape hard situations but also for opportunity and education for their children. That sentiment was something her parents had both carried on from their own parents, and she and Cage had always known they could be anything they wanted—but they’d be educated.

  Her father's words now were mind-blowing, and she saw that Cage had paused in his activity and was turning to lean against the fridge, watching from a slight distance.

  “No,” Joule said again, wishing she had something to bang on the table to make her point and holding herself back from letting that show in her voice. “Cage and I have to go back to school. We're going to finish. We're very, very close to graduation. We have honors, even with the missed days. We're going to graduate with four-point-oh GPAs, Dad. So we're going to school tomorrow. None of us are going out tonight.”