She was about to ask what the man had said when Cage finally came back downstairs, notes in hand.
“Were they okay?” she asked, noticing as she did that her heart had kicked up. Nothing in his hand was neat.
“It's a mess,” he sighed. “They knocked dad's computer off his desk. I think it's dead.”
“Mom’s?” She was almost on her feet, but there was nothing she could do but look. That didn’t change anything.
“It's okay.”
Joule and Cage had already checked on their own. Hers had slid from her backpack when it had fallen from the table, but it seemed alright. Cage’s was untouched. Well, we have three out of four, she thought. She probably couldn't ask for more than that.
Joule looked at Dr. Brett again—this time, with fight in her eyes. “We have to figure out how to kill them in groups. How to take out all of them. I'm not doing this zombie TV show shit where we kill them one at a time, and we’re still fighting the same stupid way seven years later.”
Despite the seriousness of her expression, Dr. Brett had laughed at that. “You're right,” he agreed. “We need something serious.”
“We have to get their numbers down low enough where they're no longer a threat to humans,” Cage added. “At the very least, we need to achieve a technical extinction.”
“Well, these are my lists of things to try.” The doctor pointed to the pages in Joule’s hands.
“The Warfarin sounds the best. We just have to deliver it carefully,” Joule said, bringing her brother up to speed on what they’d been discussing.
It was Cage who asked the most pertinent question then, one Joule hadn’t thought of. “How do we get Warfarin?”
Her head had turned to her brother, but it was Dr. Brett who said, “You can just buy rat poison, but some kinds are better than others. I’ll get you what I think will work best. Although I have to admit, your safety with the delivery system concerns me.”
“Well, it concerns us, too,” Cage replied with a smile. “Which is why we're working on exactly how to do it with us not in the equation.” His expression turned more serious. “We want the same things my father wanted, but we want to survive it. We've got college to get to in the fall. And we're all that's left.”
Joule listened more to the tone of her brother’s words than the words themselves. She’d heard it before, but the tone was becoming stronger each time he said it. And that made her feel stronger.
“We leave in just under four months for school,” she told Dr. Brett. “That's how long we have to get this done.”
The doctor nodded at her. “That makes sense. But… be aware, it's spring now. There may be juveniles out there that you haven't seen yet. And they'll probably start coming out in the summer months.”
“Well, shit,” she said. It was another thing she’d not even thought of.
“Maybe this will make you feel better.” He handed over a second envelope.
Joule opened it, scanning the pages and showing it to Cage before she asked her question. “There's an application to declare a new species of animal in here?”
It looked as though she simply filled in her information on the form and voila, Species declared! But that didn't make any sense.
Again, the doctor smiled. “It’s not that easy. This actually goes to a coalition of university biodiversity professors. They range from five different fields and seven different universities. The problem is that everybody and his brother thinks he’s the one who found some new species. My guess is they got tired of fielding useless information, so they created an application. If you fill it out and give them enough information, and if they agree, this will get you an answer on whether or not they think it's worth sending someone out to test your new animal.”
“Interesting,” Joule mused, and then asked, “Are you going to sign it?”
“Me? No.” The vet shook his head. “Not unless I have to cosign it because you're underage. This is yours.”
“Well, I don't want the hunters called Mazurs.”
“I'm pretty sure,” he said, “that the team will let you keep your name off the animal if you want. Lots of people find new snakes, but they don't want snakes named after them.”
Joule almost huffed. She'd be thrilled to have a snake named after her—but not these guys. “We don't have a lot of the things they want.”
She was looking at a list that included skin samples, blood samples, habitat information and more. “Maybe we can get it as we catch some more. Our samples are old. After we thaw them again, they won’t be good samples. The freezing is going to break the cell membranes.”
The doctor smiled again, as though he were surprised she’d paid attention in her biology classes. “Well, we'll send it and see what happens.”
He stood up, pushing his hands downward on the table top as though making a declaration. “We have a lot of cleaning up to do.” He pointed around the house. “We've got to get those windows boarded up before tonight, or you can't stay here.”
She would have argued, but she couldn’t. He was right.
Then, he turned and pointed toward the jagged glass of the window. “But the good news in all of this is that we have blood samples.”
52
Cage helped his sister close the attic door and crawled into his makeshift bed.
It was a sleeping bag with a comforter laid out over it. Both were on top of a twin-sized, inflatable mattress.
On the other side of the attic door, his sister was climbing into a similar setup. He'd brought up one pillow. She'd brought up three.
He'd brought up a sheet and a comforter. She brought a softer comforter, a smaller fleece blanket, and a pair of socks thicker than his finger. He wasn’t sure how she wasn’t going to boil in all that.
Cage had assured Dr. Brett before he left that they were going to sleep in the attic. He’d also had to explain that the hunters had not come into the house for no reason. It had been their own stupidity and lack of attention that had alerted the canines they were inside. It was a mistake they wouldn't make again, and one they would be ready for if they did.
In addition to pillows and inflatable mattresses, Cage had brought with him a store of weapons this time. Joule’s stilettos lay on the ground on either side of her. She’d considered stuffing them under her pillow, and it seemed like a great idea until they remembered the mattress was inflatable.
Cage had his short sword and his dagger and the gun. Everything in close reach, just in case.
The beds were on either side of the attic door. Their thinking was, if something managed to come up that way, it would have to choose to take on one or the other of them. Whoever wasn’t getting attacked could defend.
It was tough to admit that strategies like these were things he’d not thought about a year ago, when he crawled into bed and was most concerned with whether or not he could join an online game and still get enough sleep to wake up for school in the morning. Now he was worried about communication and long-term survival.
They’d brought up cell phones and mag lights, snacks and more. Not that they would use any of those overnight, but if they ended up trapped, they might be key to getting out or to surviving long enough until they could.
The attic was stuffier up here than he remembered. Of course, the previous night, nothing had been about comfort, only survival. They hadn't discussed whether they would remain sleeping up here for the duration—until they left for school. He knew it was only going to get hotter as the weather changed.
Cage had suggested they bring a fan up with them, but Joule quickly shut the idea down. “Noise. Can't do it.”
She was right. Even the low hum of a fan might be enough to alert the predators.
Dr. Brett had stayed to help Cage haul the multi-density fiberboard from the garage. As the two of them had picked out several pieces and carried them back toward the house, he’d said, “You've got a nice setup here with the wood ready.”
They’d propped up the boards close to
the window and Cage had shown the vet where they kept the tools. “My dad got ready. He knew the hunters could come and take the windows out at any time. He’d seen it happen to the neighbors. He figured it was better to invest and be ready to close up shop quick than to have to deal with something like a motel and an exposed home.”
“Smart man,” was all Dr. Brett had said, as he set about anchoring the piece in so that hopefully the dogs could not get through it. They discussed the best method for a little while, thinking about how to board the gaping hole up with the strongest results.
“I think we should do it more like for hurricanes,” the vet had offered. “Put the board on the outside, because the hunters are going to try to push in. If you tack up the board from the inside, they’ll push from the outside and need only bust out the nails. If you put it on the outside, they’ll have to actually get through the board itself. Good thing your dad bought the good stuff.”
They stood outside as the day warmed up, hammering and attaching the boards as best they could. Neither was a carpenter, Cage thought, and it showed. But it was a good enough job. Though a few of the neighbors walked by and waved, none of them seemed to find their project weird.
Joule had stayed inside, cleaning up, gathering splinters from broken wood, determining what could be kept and what needed to be tossed, and basically putting the place back to rights. They'd watch her haul trash bag after trash bag out to the bins.
“It's really good to have an extra set of hands on this,” Cage began, “but I'm curious. You could have been at work today. Why are you helping us?”
The vet didn't look at him, and the answer wasn't what Cage had expected. Not that he was sure what to expect. But it hadn't been this.
“My son was only a few years older than you,” he said. “When he was your age, he worked in the office with me a lot of the time. He really was very good with the animals. He knew more than maybe an average vet tech by the time he'd hit that age. He had plans to go to vet school. I thought I was going to pass the business on to him… and then he didn't come home one night.”
There was a pause and a breath. Then the vet put it in simple terms. “Though you guys clearly have this under as much control as any of us, you're not actually adults. Not yet. You’re kids with no parents and I'm a parent without my son. It works.” There was another deep pause and Cage let it ride.
“If it had been the other way around, and I was gone… If your dad was helping my son clean up after something like this, I would have been eternally grateful.”
Cage could only nod. It was a sad situation. But, as he thought about it, maybe it didn’t have to be. The vet was right. They didn't have any parents left. And though they felt okay on their own, like they could handle it, it was nice to have a backup set of hands, an adult, and some advice. The vet was helping them figure out what drugs they could use to poison the night hunters. He was going to get them a supply. He was boarding up the window of a home he didn’t live in.
Cage had been sure to thank the man as the two of them worked the late morning away in the growing heat.
At the end of the job, they'd collected blood from the window shards and wrapped it up for Dr. Brett to take with him. They’d filled out the paperwork and promised that they would get a skin sample as soon as they could.
But the priority was killing the hunters, and the blood sample they already had would probably suffice for DNA.
Dr. Brett had gotten copies of some of the pictures they had as well: the triplicate canines, the back feet, and most of the things he'd found that were different from other, known canine species.
Once again, the vet had had to leave in time to get home before his own house grew dark. Cage wondered if he was also going to try some of the tricks they had talked about, like getting a tracker and using meat as bait. Maybe he’d try following the packs of night hunters around his own home or find out where they were sleeping.
He was finding them enough rat poison for their needs and had promised to bring them a supply the next time he came, in a few days.
Cage and Joule had agreed that the tracker needed to be the first priority. If they tried both at once, they risked ruining the information from the tracking device. If they got a tracker into a hunter, but also poisoned that same hunter in the process, then he might not make it back wherever home was. That would ruin their information.
One experiment before the next, Cage reminded himself.
They could do what their father had done and angrily hack at the night hunters, killing them one at a time, but it wasn't going to solve the problem. So they had to work smart.
“Good night,” Joule said in the dim light of the attic as the late afternoon faded into night. It was far too early to go to bed, but there would be no more sitting up in the hallway, watching the night cameras on the laptops. They couldn't risk it. So Cage turned over, snuggling under his covers, and attempting to fall asleep.
He had a lot to think about. He had three more exams before the end of school, and he figured he could just show up on those days. He had to eradicate an entire colony of killers. He had to keep his name off a species of canines that Dr. Brett had already sent in the information for. And he had to survive the night.
But when he woke up in the morning, he checked the cameras and saw something.
53
Cage was scrolling through the feed from the night vision cameras. With both screens rolling at double time, his eyes were darting back and forth. He slowed down when he thought he caught activity, but he ended up watching the occasional deer, a handful of foxes. Several times, a pack of night hunters roamed the streets in front of the house. Since they did nothing but walk down the street or across the yard in search of something, Cage scrolled on.
Things that happened in the front yard were relatively clear. What happened down the street was too far away to know exactly what was going on. He’d stopped and watched a deer three times just to be sure that’s what it was.
When the night hunters had taken out the front window the other night, they had knocked out one of the cameras. It had survived, but he would need to remount it today. He and Joule would put it up aimed to catch activity in the backyard again. They had decided repositioning it would limit their span in the front, but catching what happened in the back would yield so much more than they lost.
He looked up at his sister. She was leaning over his shoulder now, watching the screen roll by in front of them. “Tomorrow we have to go take that Geography test.”
She only nodded in response, but pointed to the screen “Cage, is that a person? Go back, go back!”
The staccato of her voice jolted him to attention and focused his blurring eyes. It took three tries to catch the image, as the man—or woman, it was hard to tell—was further down the street. Whoever it was seemed tall and lumbered a bit.
“Is it Dad?” Joule whispered, but Cage couldn't tell. He looked more closely. Rewound. Tried to find anything he could definitively say was a yes or a no.
“Watch the walk,” she whispered again. No longer hovering over him, leaning in and actively fidgeting in his personal space, she’d gone stock still.
“That’s not the way Dad moves,” Cage countered. Nothing said it was his father.
She looked at him with worry mixed with hope. She'd never been the optimistic one before, but now she said, “Maybe he moves differently after being out for several weeks. Maybe it's the chain mail?”
“Do you really think that?”
“Of course not,” she replied, leaning back now. The sheen of hope vanished and was replaced with her usual practicality.
In general, the practicality was great—Joule was a straight shooter, always ready to dive in, but wanting to do it the best way possible. But this time, it was just an erasure of hope. “I can't imagine how Dad could have possibly survived this long. Or why he wouldn't have come to see us if he did. But on the off chance that that's our father, we have to figure it out.”
In the end, the person hadn't come close enough to the house for them to tell.
Cage had headed outside and re-aimed one of the cameras. He refocused the lens to get better shots down the street. But what Cage suspected was that one of the other neighbors had gotten pissed off enough or crazy enough to take up the call. He hoped he and Joule could get an answer in the next night or two.
They headed to the butcher's next, collecting several large sides of beef rib, one leg, and additional smaller chunks of meat and bone. While Cage was holding his breath and trying to think of a good answer for two teenagers buying a reasonable chunk of a cow, the butcher didn't ask any questions.
Cage had no idea if that was normal—if people just occasionally picked up huge hunks of meat for their own backyard barbecues—or if maybe the last six months had brought such weird orders in that the butchers had quit commenting.
After getting most of the meat wedged into the fridge as best they could, they used Nate’s phone. It was a treasure trove of information that—despite getting knocked off his dresser when the night hunters had come through the house—had survived the fall.
As Joule worked to string up the meat on a system that would make it move, Cage logged into his father's banking system.
“Moving large amounts of money will get us flagged,” he said as he pressed the appropriate buttons for a transfer, “but Dad’s account has access to mom’s accounts and mine and yours. So I'm going to move some about every third day or so. Not in a regular system, not in the same amounts. I don’t want to trigger anything. So you won’t be getting the same amount I do with each transfer.”
She’d paused and raised her eyebrows at him, as though he might be cheating her out of the money they were siphoning from their parents’ accounts.
“You can log in, too. Check my math. I’ll make sure they wind up even. But we've got to have access to the money. Sooner or later, they would shut him down for inactivity. Better we have it before then.”
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