The Trap (The Hunt Trilogy)

by Fukuda, Andrew

“Over there,” Sissy says, head lifting. Her voice flat and hoarse, emotion ripped out. She walks to a tank on the far side of the suite, her paws silent on the marble floor. The heper inside the tank is drifting submerged in the fluid. Eyes closed, arms drifting upward as if surrendering, its hair waving back and forth languorously. The heper boy. David. The only sign that it’s still alive is the oxygen mask placed over its mouth. It looks so different from how I remember it. Sapped now, its youthful aura gone, replaced by a sadness and agony that permeate off it.

  I hear a click of metal. Sissy has pulled the dart gun off her back, jacked back the trigger. She points the gun at me, her eyes fixed warily on the drool splattering down my bare chest.

  “We re-turn now,” she says. “You first.”

  “No, wait.” The words sloshing in my mouth, drowning in my saliva.

  Her head snaps. “No. Now.” Her words coming out lispy, mired in wet bands of saliva in her mouth. “I dart you. Then I’ll turn the gun around, dart myself.”

  The floor starts to tremble, the walls shake. I gaze outside quickly. They’re almost upon us, the millions from the metropolis.

  “Wait,” I say, lifting my arms. “Just wait.”

  The dart gun trembles. Because she’s feeling it, too. The conflict. The equivocation.

  “I’m going to shoot you now,” she says. “Don’t move.”

  “Wait.”

  She stares into my eyes, past the drab, unreadable expression of my face. And in my eyes she sees something I’m trying to hide, and it is the very thing she’s trying to deny.

  We don’t want to be re-turned. We don’t want to be squeezed into the confines of heper nature again.

  Hands trembling, the smallest flash of fear breaking through the plane of her face, she raises the dart gun, points it at my neck. “Never forget who you are,” she says, and starts pulling the trigger.

  A flash of movement. From behind her. A mere blur, a flash of white, whorls of flaming red.

  Ashley June, a bullet of ferocity and velocity, smacks into Sissy’s side. Sissy goes flying, the dart gun skittering across the floor. Ashley June pounces, her body looping right across the suite, landing on the dart gun. She spins around, the gun pointing at Sissy.

  55

  ASHLEY JUNE IS a pyre of savage beauty. The dusk sun has descended into her hair, and the stars become imprisoned in her eyes. I’m seeing her not through the scope of a sniper rifle or the tinted glass of the Panic Room. Nor, most of all, through heper eyes. But in the flesh, in dusker flesh, with dusker eyes. And it is as if I’m seeing her for the first time. And when her gaze falls on me, my lungs grow hot because I have forgotten to breathe.

  “You,” she says. A huskiness scraping her monotone voice. Her face shines with the alabaster white glow of a corona. “You did it. You turned. I knew you would.” Her tongue licks out. “It feels perfect, doesn’t it?”

  “What have you done?” Sissy says. “What have you unleashed here?”

  Ashley June’s face flicks back to Sissy. “I did what anyone would have done in my position. What you would have done.” She turns to me again. “I used my knowledge to my advantage. I stole in here, hunted down as many hepers as I could. It was easy. They were all in the basement, like food served up on a platter. Then all the Palace staffers wanted in on it, started hunting down the remaining hepers. It was an all-out binge. Better than advertised.”

  A pained wistfulness flares in her eyes. “It was supposed to be just me and you, Gene. To celebrate your turning. How awesome would that have been. All that heper blood and flesh and bone you missed out on…” She stares outside, at the approaching masses of people. “And now look, you’re just like those latecomers. Not a heper left. Except one.”

  My eyes swing to the tanks, to David floating, eyes still closed.

  “Not that one,” she says.

  “Then who—”

  “Her,” she says, keeping the muzzle pointed at Sissy. “Once we re-turn her.”

  “Stop. You don’t understand,” Sissy says. “We can help you. We can re-turn—”

  “Sorry, but we’ve already had this conversation.”

  “You don’t get it,” Sissy continues. “We’ll dart ourselves with this Origin serum and—”

  “—it’ll turn us back to heper?” Ashley June finishes. “Do you really want that? Be honest now: do you really want that?” Ashley June scratches her wrist. “Because by now you’ve realized how much more comfortable you feel. Everything simply flows better, doesn’t it? Feet and hands gliding and sliding in synch instead of crashing about like uncoordinated appendages.”

  Sissy steps toward Ashley June. “Give me the dart gun.”

  But Ashley June only shakes her head, raises the gun. “Everything that has fallen apart is coming back together. Everything is being restored. Everything is going to be perfect. Except there’s one last thing to do.” The temperature in the room suddenly plummets.

  Ashley June, keeping the muzzle pointed at Sissy, places the stock of the gun firmly against her shoulder.

  Sissy falls into a crouch, lips pulled back, fangs jutting out.

  Ashley June hisses, her finger tightening around the trigger.

  Sissy kicks out with her legs, bounds toward Ashley June. Closing the distance by half, Sissy leaps at Ashley June. Fangs bared, claws unsheathed.

  Ashley June pulls the trigger. A twang, no louder than a rubber band stretched and released, so innocuous, I think the dart gun has misfired.

  Sissy spins sideways in the air, then falls to the ground, arms and legs splaying about. She stands up on her legs and blinks, quickly, rapidly. A dart is jutting out the base of her neck, right in the tender dip between collarbones. She pulls it out, throws it against the wall. “Nothing’s happening,” she says, scratching her wrist. “It didn’t work. You—” And then she is suddenly collapsing to the floor. Reduced to a quivering heap of flesh.

  I start to move toward Sissy.

  “Don’t,” Ashley June says. She cocks the dart gun. Fires again at Sissy, hits her in the thigh.

  “What are you doing?” I say in a loud voice.

  “Giving her what she wants. She wanted to become a heper again, didn’t she? So I’m just helping her.”

  With the two Origin darts injected into her, Sissy is re-turning rapidly. Her head snaps back. Her hands smack against the ground in quick, jerky pats. An anguished groan escapes her mouth.

  “Why are you doing this?” I shout.

  Ashley June turns to me. Her eyes, a shattering softness in them. “Because I know everything. The whole truth. And it’s not what you think. It’s not what you think at all.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free. Sometimes it haunts you. Sometimes you wish you never found out.”

  A horrific yell issues from Sissy. Her back severely bent, concaving her stiffening body. I start moving toward her. And that’s when I smell it. A whiff of the decadently delicious. The fragrance of heper, blooming and ripening by the second.

  “Shissy!” I say. Her designation odd on my tongue, slushing out, snared in saliva. I turn to Ashley June. “She’s re-turning.” My jaw starts vibrating uncontrollably.

  Ashley June wipes drool from her lips. “That’s the idea.”

  Heper fragrance is flowing out of the pores of Sissy’s skin, an irresistible velvet seduction. She moans in pain, but all I can think of is the flow of her bloodstream, swishing and pulsating so very near.

  I fight my impulses. Take two steps away from her, every centimeter a tug against the grain of my craving. To lick her, to taste her.

  To eat and drink it.

  I smash my hand against the window. It cracks, first in a single line, then, as I pound it again and again, into an expanding web.

  “Don’t fight it,” Ashley June says. “You will understand later when I explain. But she has to die.” She lifts the dart gun at Sissy, readying to fire off the last dart.


  “Stop!” I shout. The odor, so much thicker, so much more luxurious, now. I curl my claws into the marble floor, trying to hold myself in place.

  “Better that she dies,” Ashley June says. “Better for us. For everyone. You will come to understand. Go on,” she says to me, flicking her chin in Sissy’s direction. “You get first dibs, poor baby.” Tilting her head, she howls with pleasure. And her voice is joined by another, a harmonizing howl that takes me a second to realize is coming from my own mouth. Ashley June shudders; I shudder.

  A heper. Right in front of us. Virginal and tasty and irresistible.

  “Don’t fight it,” Ashley June says. “Don’t resist it.”

  My tongue, red and thick, laps out. I can almost lick up the odor in the air, it is so thick and tantalizing. The flesh of the heper quivers suggestively, and I am about to leap at it, on the soft, wondrous flesh, on the lava of blood that is mine with the slightest prick of my fangs. The desire so pure, so overwhelming, even the succumbing to it will be an exquisite pleasure in itself.

  “Gene!” Its face is twisted in an effluence of emotion. Fear humming off it, sweat dripping off its chin, a tornado of ungainly excitements tiding off its body.

  I hunch my body down, preparing to pounce. I can almost feel the warm melt of supple flesh on my lips, its blood gushing into my mouth, its body squirming under my paws.

  “Gene.” It’s spoken again. Its voice is calmer, though still tinged with fear. But there’s a different look in its eyes. Not fear. Not panic. Something different. It holds me in place, glues my hands and feet to the ground. “Gene,” it says again, and this time all fear is erased from its voice and its eyes are filled with strength and softness both.

  I stop, head cocking to the side. And then I see. A brief moment of clarity of a different kind. Of a watermark imprinted on my mind, my heart.

  It’s Sissy.

  And then I am remembering; then I am reseeing her. Who she is, what she means to me.

  There’s only one way out of this.

  I pull the strap of the shotgun over my head, touch its long, cold length. And press the muzzle against the bottom of my chin.

  “No!” shouts Ashley June. “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t, I can’t,” I say, and even now my saliva is running down my chin and sliding down the long shaft of the gun.

  “Don’t!” Ashley June says, her hands white against the cold steel of the dart gun.

  “Then shoot me!” I shout to Ashley June. “Shoot me with the Origin dart.”

  “No—”

  “Do it!” I shout. “Do it or I shoot myself.”

  “You don’t understand. She has to die!”

  “No! It’s you who don’t understand. Both Sissy and I have to live. We’re the Origin. We’re the cure!”

  Ashley June lowers the dart gun. “You and this heper girl—you’re not the cure. You’re the contagion. What your father discovered wasn’t ‘the cure.’ It was a virus.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Everything starts to shake around us. The masses have arrived, and they haven’t slowed down, not even as they reach the outer fortress walls. They buffet against the walls, over and over, until the walls, unable to withstand their collective might, collapse. Pale bodies race across the grounds, blanketing the Palace in a sheet of membranous white.

  Sissy. Her heper flesh shuddering, ripples of fat and muscles moving irresistibly up and down her body. Only a few more seconds before I will have lost complete control.

  “Shoot me!” I yell. “Shoot me with the dart!”

  “No!”

  Muzzle still pressed into my chin, I start pulling the trigger.

  “Gene!”

  I don’t know what causes me to look up. The urgency in Ashley June’s voice or the oddity of hearing her speak my designation. But when our eyes meet, a strange resignation settles upon her. As if she’s just realized something. Slowly, and very deliberately, she places the dart gun on the floor.

  Then her legs crouch, and her back arches as she prepares to launch herself at Sissy. Everything about Ashley June’s body is tense, like a drawn bow. Her eyes, though, as she gazes at me. Softer than I’ve ever seen them, with a strange quality, almost a sadness, blazing in them.

  “Look to the moon,” she says. “The truth is in the moon.”

  And then she springs toward Sissy, a blur of action, her eyes rolling back, her clawed paws slashing forward.

  I see them both as in a photograph, this moment frozen. Ashley June silhouetted against the window, her hair flaming behind her, descending on Sissy; and Sissy trying to rise, pushing off the floor with her sweaty arms.

  I pull the trigger and the shotgun explodes.

  56

  THE BLAST CATCHES Ashley June with enough force to send her flying into the window. The glass craters under the impact of her body, bulges out like a cracked eyeball, but does not break.

  “Don’t,” I say.

  But she does. Ashley June picks herself up, her legs buckling. Her body riddled with holes, her eyes clenched in excruciating pain, she’s blinded by the flash. She had not known to shut her eyes against the blast as I had. She sniffs the air, her nostrils flaring. Trying to locate Sissy.

  “Don’t.”

  Ashley June keeps moving. Right toward Sissy.

  I fire another round. A warning shot, into the window. It blasts a huge hole, one body length in diameter, right next to Ashley June. Wind gusts through. Whistling, it blows through Ashley June’s hair, and the strands seem to reach out to me like bloodstained, pleading arms.

  “Don’t.”

  She crouches down to leap at Sissy.

  I shoot again.

  The blast pummels Ashley June almost right out of the hole in the window. She is only able to stop from falling outside by spreading her arms and catching herself on the ragged rim. Her eyeballs have disintegrated; viscous white liquid leaks out from the corners of her shut eyelids. Like tears.

  “Please,” I say.

  She leaps, once more, and I pull the trigger for the last time.

  The blast swallows up my hellish scream.

  She’s flung outside into the open sky. For a long moment, she hangs suspended in the great wide emptiness of the night. She looks so alone. And then she falls. Shards of glass sparkle around her, twinkling, blinking, then are no more.

  57

  I PUT MY mind on lockdown. Refuse to think, to acknowledge the horror of what I have done. There is only what must be done next, and quickly, before the heper odors, still thickening, overcome me. The dart gun.

  I scuttle across the floor to where Ashley June laid it down. My neck is cracking, head flickering from side to side, drool seemingly pouring out from my pores now. Desire revolting against my will, beginning to get the upper hand. With trembling hands, I turn the dart gun around until the muzzle is pressed against my leg. I pull the trigger. A sharp sting on my thigh.

  Ice flames sweep over me.

  I don’t even remember collapsing to the ground. When I come to, Sissy is leaning over me, cradling my head in her lap. Five seconds might have passed, or five hours—it feels like both, it feels like neither.

  “Gene,” Sissy says, “it’s okay now. You’re okay now.” She strokes my sweat-dampened hair away from my forehead. Everything is dark. Everything is night again.

  I turn over and cough, heave out a stream of chunky putrid yellow. I’m vanquished, strength obliterated. My legs, thin and stilt-like, sticking out of a body that already feels clumsy and distended. Gravity, so heavy on me.

  The suite is shaking. The whole obelisk seems to be canting. They’re in. They’re in the obelisk, racing around the spiral staircase.

  “We have to hurry, Gene.”

  I nod, and she helps me up to my feet. I avoid looking outside, at the masses pouring into the Palace, at the gaping hole in the window through which Ashley June had been shot.

  “Sissy,” I say hoarsely, and her name on my tongue
again feels as natural as it is comforting. “The enclave. We use it to escape. It’s programmed to head to the train.”

  She nods.

  Screams wail up the spiral staircase inside the obelisk. Harsh, grating, predatory.

  “Hurry,” I say. I stumble over to the enclave, fish out the tablet. The controls are self-explanatory, thankfully user-friendly. Just get in, press GO.

  But Sissy is staggering to the other end of the suite, her legs wobbly and uncertain.

  “Sissy!”

  The screams from the staircase intensify. They smell us.

  Sissy runs back, cocking the shotgun.

  “Forget shooting them! There’s too many. Just get in!”

  But she’s only remembering what I have forgotten. She aims high at one of the tanks, fires away. The glass shatters, a partial break, but the thick liquid gushing out widens the break further, until the whole tank collapses in a spill of glass and green liquid.

  David slides out, his body runny as the tank liquid.

  Sissy grabs him before he hits the ground. But he slips out of her arms, slick as oil, and I’m already there, catching him before he hits the floor. I flinch back in horror at the touch of his skin. It’s ice-cold, flaccid, folds of wet skin layered on top of each other.

  Sissy is pulling off the oxygen mask. David’s congealed skin around his mouth is pried off with the mask, a soggy, stringy pulp offering no resistance.

  “David,” Sissy says, her voice somewhere between a gasp and a cry.

  I grab her arm. “Let’s go, Sissy.”

  But she doesn’t. Not even as screams—hundreds of them—reverberate up the obelisk. She’s hunched over David, pounding his chest.

  Then, in the midst of the cacophony of screams, comes the most beautiful, miraculous of sounds. A cough.

  From David.

  Thick, soupy phlegm rises halfway out of his mouth before falling back in.

  “David!” Sissy yells, then turns him over to his side, starts thumping his back. “Cough it out, David!” She flings her eyes up at me in panic. “He’s choking on his own vomit.”

  The mob of duskers less than twenty seconds from bursting into the suite.