“What do you mean?”
“Well, as dad pointed out, no one is going to come and repossess a house like this.”
“Like this? It’s a great house,” her brother protested immediately.
“No, it's not. It’s our home. And structure-wise, it’s fantastic. As far as I know, Mom and Dad did a good job keeping up with the routine maintenance. This house would sell for a lot, except that death roams the streets at night—as evidenced by the fact that there were four of us just a month and a half ago, and now there are two, Cage.”
She'd sucker punched him again. He knew she didn't mean to hit him hard. She was the only family he had left, so he wasn't going to say anything, even though he was having trouble breathing.
Besides, she was right. He was the one dutifully ignoring the fact that his father had not come home for three days. And he couldn't think of anyone else who had reappeared miraculously after that kind of time span.
“So we don't pay the house,” he asked. “Then what happens?”
“The bank comes after it.”
“That will ruin our credit.”
“No, it won’t.” Joule smiled at that one. “Though it will ruin Mom and Dad’s credit. You and I aren't invested. We aren’t listed on the title or the loans. We can let any credit card bills go, any car payments—no, wait, they might try to repossess those.” She paused and thought for a moment. “A car can be repossessed easily during the daylight hours and it can be transported for sale. So we need to make any payments on the cars. I don’t know if there are any to be made.”
Cage was struggling to keep up, but he tried. “So we need to pay the cars and the insurance on them.”
Joule added, “We need to gain access to the bank accounts. And we need to graduate so we can get to get our butts to Stanford in the fall.”
Cage sank back into the couch, his food forgotten as Joule’s words squirmed uncomfortably inside of him. They had three weeks until the end of school for the senior class. Then another week until their graduation ceremony. It occurred to him then that no one would be there for them. No parents. No grandparents. No one would come here to visit, and even if there wasn’t something wrong in Rowena Heights and the city at large, travel wasn’t as safe as it used to be. But Joule seemed to have it all mapped out.
“Do we leave as soon as we graduate?”
She shook her head. “Dad and I started the paperwork. Stanford's all set for both of us. Free ride and all,” she smiled, “but we don't have dorm rooms until the week before classes. So we should stay until then.”
“What if Dad comes back?” He hated that he had asked what if?
Joule stared at him. “If Dad comes back, all this is moot. All this goes out the window and we start from scratch. I would love nothing more than that, but it's been three days, Cage. Have you ever seen anyone come back after three days?” Her voice was rising as she went, but she was a steamroller and Cage was jumping out of the way. “And we know he went out to fight them.”
“But he was protected by that mail and hopefully the machete and sword. We've been out there,” he protested. “We fought them, and we lived.”
“Yes, Cage.” Joule’s tone was at odds with her words. “We did. Not him alone. Unless he's out marauding with some band of happy hunters, the chances that he survived are slim.” She emphasized the last word.
“We—all three of us together—barely made it through seven dogs. That all came at us at once. For a single fighter, I don’t think any number of hunters higher than two or maybe three is survivable. The odds are shitty. Which is exactly why we didn't want to go out again. We didn't like our odds at three to seven. And dad decided to take one against however-many-showed-up.”
She was so logical and he was so hurt. He couldn't stop the words that came out of his mouth. “You're so cold, Joule, calculating all this out. Dad might come back!”
She jumped up, nearly flipping the tray in front of her. “I'm cold? Mom saved us. Mom sacrificed herself so the hunters would be distracted and the rest of us could live. Dad went crazy. I don't think he meant to hurt us. But he did. That’s what cold is. He made his own decision without us, for no reason I can see, and now the rest of it doesn't matter.” She stopped suddenly, and he watched her through slightly blurry eyes as she sucked in a breath before continuing.
“Cage, my cold calculation is going to be what keeps you and me alive, because we're all that’s left of this family! And if we don't survive, no one does.”
45
Thursday, as Cage pulled the car up the driveway after school, Joule immediately spotted the package on the front porch.
They'd been to school every day this week—a record. Joule couldn't help but think that maybe it was because her father was gone and not in spite of it. She hated to think it, but the world was less work without having to talk Nate out of his crazy ideas each day.
Getting to the end of the school year now seemed achievable. For the twins, it was barely two weeks away, because the seniors finished early as all their grades had to be in and calculated well before graduation. The way things were going, Joule couldn't imagine any of their teachers stopping them from getting their diplomas.
The school had numbers to make, after all, and she and her brother had full-ride scholarships to Stanford. Any bean counter at the administration would see the Mazurs counted in the plus column—or they would—and failing to graduate them would only be the school officials shooting themselves in the foot.
Regardless of graduating, getting up every morning, going to class, and seeing her friends was comforting in its routine.
Now, she made her brother stop the car and let her out where she could run toward the front porch and pick up the package. Far bigger than it needed to be, it was almost lightweight enough to feel empty.
Cage came through the house and unlocked the front door, pulling it open for her. “What is it?”
“The trackers,” she said with a happy smile. She and Cage had a plan, a full plan—and that felt good, too. It sucked being on their own, but having things laid out felt better than anything had in a long while.
They would stay here and use their father's bank card to take out cash, as much as they could each day. They were slowly setting it aside into their own accounts for their future.
They had agreed that, if their father showed up before it was time to leave for college, they would happily reevaluate everything. But for now, the plan was to stay in Rowena Heights, graduate high school, and take care of the night hunters.
The first two were easy. Joule figured not moving was the easiest—it meant doing nothing. Graduation was something she’d almost actively have to spoil, and neither of them would do that.
The night hunters were the real problem.
“Taking care of them” meant either creating a scenario where humans were no longer night hunter prey or making the new species extinct.
The trackers were her first step toward that goal. Before she could successfully wipe them out, she had to know where they lived, what they ate, and how they reproduced.
The tech had been her idea originally, and she knew there were a lot of flaws in the plan. She and her brother had been raised to double check everything—to do a walk-through test before moving forward, to catch flaws before they happened.
So she wasn't surprised when Cage asked, “What if they chew them up?”
“Then we've wasted our money,” she replied. “But we will have learned something, even if it wasn’t what we meant to learn.”
Money was something they had, and time was something they didn’t. Joule wasn’t capable of sitting back and rocking her way through her grief. She fully understood her father’s desire for revenge on the creatures, but she had no need to personally hack each one to death. Her revenge would be cold.
Cage tossed her the next question. “How do we get them to eat the trackers? They won't even eat the moving bait anymore.”
It seemed the night hunters wer
e smarter than they'd given them credit for. The creatures had figured out the air machine was not providing real food and they’d quickly abandoned it.
Joule and Cage had continued to run the cameras through the night, and Joule watched the footage in the afternoons. Only yesterday had she confessed to Cage that she hoped to see her father walk across the yard one night. But it hadn't happened.
Her head knew Nate was gone. Her heart hadn’t been forced to believe it yet, and she’d chosen not to fully embrace the idea. So she watched the video from each night, foolishly hoping her father—clad in his mail and swinging his machete—would wander into the image.
Cage had looked at her when she confessed that. “I always find it interesting that when I wanted to hold on to hope, you were convinced it was gone. And now when I finally believe that he couldn't possibly have just been missing for all this time, and still come back, you're the one who's looking for him on the night cameras.”
Joule could only shrug. Cage was right. Grief was like that.
And without any solid evidence that their father was truly gone, it was hard to hold on and equally hard to let go.
Despite all his questions about the box and the trackers, her brother had fetched the scissors and now handed them to her, handles first. She excitedly cut open the box, aware of all the ways this experiment could go wrong, but desperately wanting to try anyway.
When she finally unpeeled one from the bubble wrap and pried it from the plastic packaging, she held it up. It was about the size of a large capsule.
“I could swallow it,” she commented.
“Hopefully, they don't crush it.”
With a breath in, she analyzed what she held. It was perfect—if she could get it inside one of the hunters at night, and then find it again during the day. “So. How do we get one to eat it?”
Her brother had no answer, so she dove in and started tossing ideas out. They were possibly crap, but as her dad had liked to say, “Crap often led to gold.” So she told Cage, “I think we can use what we learned and get the hunters to eat a piece of meat if we make it move. Probably only once, though. It seems, once they realize what we've done and that it isn't alive, they won't eat the bait again.”
“Well, we might get a second feeding, but likely not a third,” he corrected, obviously thinking back to the air machine.
“We need to make it move a different way. That method is used and they figured it out.”
“What about a full side of meat. Something big, from the butcher. Maybe even with bones in it?”
“You think we should just slice it open and push the tracker down in?” she asked.
Once he agreed, she popped her next question. “Do we want to put in one or two?”
After a little thought, Cage concluded, “I think we have to only do one. I mean, how good is the signal if he eats it? Are we going to be able to find it? How close do we have to get to read a signal out of that thing once it's inside a hunter’s body? All those problems make me think we shouldn’t burn two of them if we don’t know the answers first.”
He was right. So she opened her mouth as though she were going to swallow it. “Want to find out?”
Her brother’s hand flashed out and slapped the device out of her hand.
“Hey, douchewaffle! I was kidding.”
“Hard to tell,” he replied, as he bent over to pick up the tracker from where it had bounced along the floor.
The good news was that she’d invested in sturdy devices. There was no telling what the night hunters might do to them. Surely a tracker wouldn't survive a good chomping of their jaws, but it did need to be able to survive being thrown around, picked up, and gobbled down.
“I really thought you were going to swallow it and then we’d have to… reclaim it.”
“That’s shit-tastic.” She’d felt her face pulling into disgust as she thought about what her brother was suggesting to find the tracker once one of them had swallowed it. But the face she made must have amused him, because he laughed whole-heartedly.
It felt good to hear her brother laugh. It had been a long time, too long. Even though she was getting used to their new reality, so was he, and she tried to remember that.
“Let's test it—but not like that!” She pulled her hand back at his startled expression. “You hide it on the other side of the house and see if I can find it. Let's see how far away we can pick up a signal.”
He was following along. “If that works, then maybe we get that side of meat. We can stick it inside and see how much that masks the signal.” He was thinking his way through, the way they’d been taught, when he tilted his head. “We're not going to get this set up live tonight, are we?”
“No,” she replied. “Maybe tomorrow at the earliest. Too much testing first.” Though they’d been laughing, she didn’t hesitate to alter the mood. “We have to be very careful. We can’t afford to go up against the hunters without knowing how we stay safe first.”
They spent the next several hours testing the tracker as best they could inside the house. They hid it and found it. They tried masking it with a variety of materials and yet, gleefully, they still picked up the signal.
Joule had hidden it in the back of the closet inside her father's fireproof safe. Cage still found it, though the box clearly dampened the signal.
“At least it works,” she said. “Hopefully, if it's in the stomach of a night hunter, it'll still broadcast better than being in a safe.”
She looked outside, wanting to do further testing, but realizing that—even though it was still relatively bright—the day was waning. Having been caught outside once before, she found she was still wary of the late afternoon.
“Let's make dinner!” She aimed for casual, hoping the light tone would mask her own uneasiness. Or maybe it was PTSD. Hard to tell. She was still striving for normal whenever possible.
Luckily, her brother didn’t hear the tone riding softly under her request, or maybe he did and he was catering to her. They cooked together, making broiled chicken breasts and serving them with broccoli and baked potatoes.
And again, Joule noticed but didn't comment—dinner was another thing that was going a little easier now that so much of her day wasn't filled with talking her father down.
She missed him horribly, and she would gladly have continued talking him down. But she remembered her mother had once told her for every downside, there was an upside. And that sometimes you'll lose, and you'll lose big, and it will hurt and it will suck—but there will always be some little upside. And maybe you could enjoy that.
So Joule had made a pact with herself to enjoy an evening of TV and a nice dinner, even if her family was desperately smaller today.
She was doing a good job of it when the house phone rang.
Turning, Cage looked to her, but he was closer than she was. With a shrug, she asked, “Can you grab it?”
But she was speaking just as he did it. He almost had it to his ear when he froze.
When he looked up at her, his eyes were bleak. “It's the cell phone company.”
46
Cage wrote down the coordinates of the last known location of his father’s cell phone.
“Yes,” he said abruptly, also agreeing to receive a text of the same information.
“The next thing we have,” the woman said, not kindly, but not unkindly, either, “is the last time the phone was used. It was six days ago at four-thirty-seven p.m.”
As was now usual in any kind of business dealings, he and Joule often put the phones on speaker so they could both stay up to speed on their conversations. They were the only ones left, and they were team.
Joule’s eyes were wide, and he saw his sister was calculating back. A small nod told him that the time listed was in fact the last night that they had gone to bed and seen their father.
The news was as bad as they thought.
“It hasn't been used at all since then?” he asked.
“It hasn't pinged a satellite, s
o if it's been on,” the voice on the phone told him, “it hasn't been able to connect.”
In the end, there was nothing else he could ask. So he thanked the woman and got a number to reach her in case he had any other questions. But he didn’t think he would. Of all the things he wanted to know, none of them were things the information on his father’s phone would likely answer.
Hanging up, he looked to Joule, their dinner forgotten. It took a few moments to find a device to plug the given coordinates into, but in a moment, they saw what they hadn't really expected.
“It looks like we're standing on top of it.”
“Not quite,” Joule said, her head leaning in close to the small screen. “It should be that way.” She pointed up the stairs. “It's probably in his room, and we just didn't find it.”
Cage couldn’t disagree. Though they’d gone through his father’s room before, they hadn't been looking for the phone. They’d just assumed Nate had either taken it with him, or it wasn’t important. He didn’t know why they hadn’t found it though.
His sister gave a reason. “We always turn off the phones at night. No beeping. No ringing. No alerts. So if dad was heading out, the phone would just have been a nuisance. Another thing to carry that he couldn't use.”
Cage felt his lips pull together. He didn't like the sour taste in his mouth. “It wasn’t useless. If he’d gotten stuck, he could have called or texted us.”
But Joule was already shaking her head at him, as though to say, you know better. “If he was stuck, he wouldn't have had time to turn the phone on, let alone for it to find a cell tower and get a message out. And it would have been too noisy.”
“Texting is quiet.” He didn’t have to wait long for her to shoot that idea down, too.
“It’s light. So no. The phone would have just been an extra weight to carry in the end.”
Cage quit trying to justify why his father should have carried the phone he hadn't. And that was the end of the story.
The Hunted Page 19