by Dan Wells
“At least some snares,” she decided, and set a few simple rope traps near the top of the subway entrance. There were prints around the mouth of it, and she figured some of the local elands and rabbits were using it as a watering hole. She climbed back up to her observatory, set a few more snares for birds, and got back to work. Two nights later she had goose for dinner, roasted over a smokeless survival stove and turned on a spit made of old wire hangers. It was the best she’d eaten in weeks.
Five days and three water trips later she found her first big break—a gleam of light in a window, a tiny speck dancing redly for just a second, and then it was gone. Was it a signal? Had she only imagined it? She sat up straighter, watching the spot intently through her binoculars. A minute went by. Five minutes. Just as she was about to give up, she saw it again: a movement, a fire, and a closing door. Someone was letting out smoke; maybe their cook fire had gotten out of hand. She scrambled to identify the building before night fell too completely, and saw the dancing flame three more times in the next half hour. When the moon rose she looked for smoke, but there was nothing; they had dispersed it, or the wind had, too effectively to be seen.
Kira stood up, still staring toward the building now invisible in the darkness. It was one of the many she’d identified as a likely target—its roof was covered with solar panels, ringing a central antenna so large she thought it must have been an actual radio station. If someone had gotten that old equipment running again, they’d have a more powerful radio than either of the two she’d seen blown up.
“Do I go now, or wait for morning?” Staring into the darkness, she realized she still wasn’t sure what her plan was—knowing where the bad guys were hiding wouldn’t do her any good if she triggered a bomb as soon as she stepped inside. She could try to catch one of them, maybe in a larger version of her rabbit snares, and ask questions, or she could try to slip in when the bomb wasn’t armed—which, she supposed, was only when the mysterious bombers themselves were inside. That didn’t sound safe at all.
“The best thing to do,” she whispered, crouching lower in the window, “is exactly what I’m doing now—watch and wait and hope I can learn something useful.” She sighed. “It’s gotten me this far.”
But the question remained: Should she go tonight or wait for morning? A journey through the city would be more dangerous in the dark, but her targets had proven to be incredibly cautious—if they knew a flash of light and a trail of smoke had given away their position, they might move to a new location, leaving another booby trap in their wake, and Kira would lose them. Had the fire been an accident? Would it make them nervous enough to run? Kira had no way of knowing, and the uncertainty made her nervous in turn. This was one situation where the slow, cautious approach was too risky—she’d already lost five days; better to go now, she decided, than to take the chance of losing her only good lead. She packed her things, checked her rifle, and began the long descent through the pitch-dark bowels of the stairwell.
Feral cats prowled the lower levels, searching for food with bright, nocturnal eyes. Kira heard them moving in the shadows, waiting and watching and pouncing; the hiss of predators and the struggling of prey.
Kira scanned the street carefully before leaving the building, then moved softly from car to car, keeping to cover as much as possible. The building with the campfire was about three miles north, uncomfortably close to the giant forest of Central Park. Wild animals lived throughout the city, but the park was home to most of the big ones. Kira traveled as quickly as she dared, keeping her flashlight off and using the moon to see. The pale light made shadows deeper and more ominous; it also made the ground look smoother than it really was, and Kira stumbled on the rough terrain anytime she tried to move too fast. She skirted the west side of the park, watching for animals, but there were none out in the open. This was bad news: If there were deer out, it would at least give the predators something better to hunt than her. Feral house cats were hardly the most dangerous predators in the city.
A shadow shifted in her peripheral vision, and Kira whirled around to look. Nothing. She paused to listen . . . yes . . . there it was. A deep thrum, almost too low to hear. Something very big was breathing nearby, not just breathing but purring, almost growling. Something very good at hiding.
Kira was being hunted.
Before her was a large plaza, the concrete cracked and buckled and dotted with tufts of tall, dark weeds; the center statue stood solemn and unmoving. Cars circled the edge, their tires long ago turned flat and deflated. Kira backed slowly against a wall, cutting off the predator’s lines of attack, holding her breath to listen. The deep breathing was there, a bass rumble of giant lungs filling and exhaling. She couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
There are panthers in the city, she thought. I’ve seen them during the day—panthers and lions and once, I swear, I saw a tiger. Refugees from a zoo or a circus, well fed by the herds of wild deer and horses that roam Central Park. There are even elephants—I heard them last year. Do they feed on those, too?
Focus, she told herself. They’re going to feed on you if you don’t find a way out of this. Lions or panthers or worse.
Panthers. A terrifying thought occurred to her: Panthers are supposed to hunt at night, but I’ve only ever seen them in the day. Do they hunt in both now, or is this thing in the darkness something worse—something so dangerous the panthers had to change their habits to avoid it? Am I being hunted by a nocturnal panther, or are the panthers hiding, scared in their dens, to escape the creature that’s hunting me? Memories of the ParaGen brochure leapt unbidden to her mind—dragons and intelligent dogs, engineered lions and who only knew what else they’d done. They’d designed the Partials as the ultimate soldiers—had they designed an ultimate predator as well?
Kira stole a glance back down the street where she’d come, shaking her head at the long string of derelict cars and delivery vans; this creature could be hiding behind any one of them, waiting for her to pass by. It was the same with the plaza in front of her. Her best bet lay across the street, in the lobby of what might once have been a shopping mall: fallen mannequins, faded posters of bodies and faces, rack upon rack of ragged clothes. The beast could be in there, too—for all she knew the cluttered hallways could be its den—but there were doors as well, human-size and closed, and if she could get inside one and close it again behind her, she would be safe. Safe until it went away, safe until morning if it took that long. She heard the same rumbling growl, closer now than ever, and set her jaw fiercely.
“It’s now or never.” She leapt to her feet, charging across the broken street to the mall beyond, dodging around the corner of a car as a rush of air tore past behind her. She imagined giant claws swiping inches from her back, and struggled to regain her footing as she raced in through the shattered glass facade of the building. Debris clattered in her wake, far more than she could ever dislodge by herself, but she didn’t dare look back; she raised her gun over her shoulder, firing wildly behind her, turning again as she reached a cracking pillar. The interior of the mall was bigger than she’d expected, glistening metal stairways climbing up and down in pairs, a vast courtyard yawning wide in the center of the floor below her. It was too dark to see the bottom or the top; too dark to see much of anything. The door she’d been aiming for was on the other side; she turned to the right, skirting the pit, and brought her gun back in front of her, switching on the light. The thing seemed to be scrabbling on the slick floor; Kira found the first door she could and sprinted straight toward it.
The light beam jerked wildly as she ran, up and down, back and forth, shining back from the tiled floor and the metal stairs and the mirrored plates across the walls. In a flash of reflected light the wall before her showed her own image, a massive black shape bearing down from behind, and then the beam jerked again and the scene was gone, a strobing nightmare of light and darkness and fear. She fixed her eyes on the doorway, running like she’d never run before, and moments before she got th
ere she lowered her rifle, sighted on the doorknob, and fired a semiautomatic burst. The lock blew clear, the door fell open, and Kira dove through without a pause, slamming her hand against the left wall to help propel her toward the right and another open door. She grabbed at this one as she passed, slamming it closed behind her, and leaned against it just as something hit it from the other side, cracking it loudly; still, though, it held, and Kira braced herself tightly against it as the thing came back for another hit.
She looked around wildly, aiming the rifle awkwardly with one hand to shine its light on the room, and saw a large wood desk. Claws scraped across the other side of the door—it was pawing at the barrier now, not smashing it, and she took the risk, jumping over the desk and heaving against it, pushing it back to block the door. The scratching turned to thumping; the door shook, and suddenly Kira was deafened by a massive roar. She lost her footing, dropped her rifle, and threw herself against the desk again, slamming it up against the door just as the thing on the other side slammed it again, shaking the room. The desk held. Kira fell back, reaching for the rifle’s light, and brought it up to illuminate the top half of the door, riven with cracks and splintered away from the frame. Something moved beyond it, nearly as tall as the ceiling; the light reflected against a huge amber eye, narrowing to a slit as the light blinded it. Kira reeled at the sheer size of it, scooting away almost involuntarily. A massive paw clawed at the gap in the door, giant claws gleaming silver in the halogen beam, and Kira fired a burst from her rifle, clipping it in the toe. The creature roared again, but this time Kira roared back, cornered and furious. She climbed on the desk, sighted straight through the broken doorway, and fired at the wall of fur and muscle before her. It howled in rage and pain, thrashing wildly at the door, and Kira ejected the spent clip, slapped in another one, and fired again. The creature turned and fled, disappearing into the darkness.
Kira stood frozen in the doorway, her knuckles white as bone as they clutched the rifle. A second became a minute; a minute became two. The monster didn’t return. The adrenaline rush wore off and Kira began to shake, subtly at first and then harder, faster, shaking uncontrollably. She climbed down from the desk, nearly falling to the floor, and collapsed in the corner, sobbing.
The dawn light didn’t reach through the maze of walls and doorways, but Kira could hear the sounds of morning: birds singing to greet the sun, bees buzzing through the flowers in the asphalt, and yes, even the distant trumpet of an elephant. Kira stood up slowly, peering through the cracked doorway. Her light was still on, though the batteries were failing; the room beyond was covered in sprays and smears of blood, but the creature itself was gone. She pulled back the desk, carefully opening the door; it was lighter out here, and she saw a beam of sunlight on the cluttered floor of the mall. Red-brown footprints led out to the street and into the plaza, but Kira didn’t bother following them. She took a drink from her canteen, sloshing the cold water on her face. It had been stupid to go out at night, she knew, and she promised herself she would never do it again.
She shook her head, working out the kinks in her back and arms and fingers. The men she was chasing were probably too far away to have heard the gunfire last night, but if she was unlucky with the echoes, who was to say what could have happened? It didn’t change her plan—she had already been in a rush to find their building, and it was only more urgent now. She pulled her map from her backpack, locating herself and her quarry and planning out the best route to take. With a sigh and another sip of water, she set off through the city.
Kira traveled cautiously, wary now not only of Partial patrols but of giant hairy claw monsters; she saw movement in every shadow, and had to force herself to stay calm and levelheaded. When she arrived at the right neighborhood, it took her a few hours to positively identify the building with the antenna, though most of that was her fear of being seen. She ended up climbing another building’s staircase to get a bird’s-eye view, and from there spotted the antenna easily. The buildings here were shorter, only three or four stories for most of them. Knowing what she was looking for, it was easy to spot some of the more subtle clues that the building was inhabited—many of the windows were boarded over, especially on the third floor, and faint tracks in the built-up dirt showed that someone had recently used the front steps.
This was the tricky part. She didn’t dare to move in until she knew who lived there, where they were, and whether the bombs were set to explode. The most likely scenario, at least to her, was that this was some kind of outpost for a faction of Partials—and not a faction friendly to Dr. Morgan, since their last meeting at the other outpost had gone so destructively. That didn’t automatically mean that these Partials were friendly to humans, though, and Kira didn’t want to walk into a trap. She would watch, and wait, and see what happened.
Nothing happened.
Kira watched the building all day and night, holed up in the apartment across the street. She ate cold cans of beans and huddled under a moth-eaten blanket to avoid starting a fire. Nobody went in and nobody went out, and when night fell there were no fires in the windows, no smoke rising up through a crack in the boards. Nothing happened the second day either, and Kira was beginning to get nervous—they must have left before she got there, or slipped out a back way. She crept down to the street and did a quick perimeter check, searching for other entrances and exits, but nothing looked used, either generally or recently. If they’d left at all, they’d done it through the front door. She settled back in to watch it.
That night, someone came out.
Kira leaned forward, careful to stay out of the moonlight in the window. The man was large, easily seven feet tall, with the heft and girth to match. He probably outweighed Kira by two hundred pounds. His skin was dark, but probably no darker than her own; it was hard to tell in the faint light of a cloudy moon. He opened the front door cautiously, lifted a small cart through the door and down the stairs, and carefully locked the door behind him. The cart was full of jugs, and Kira guessed he was off to retrieve water. He wore a heavy pack full of something she couldn’t identify, and she couldn’t see his weapon. Safer to assume the worst, then, she thought, as there could easily be a high-caliber handgun or submachine gun hidden in the folds of his loose-fitting trench coat.
Kira grabbed her things quietly, packing in the dark, and stole down the stairs to follow him. He was already at the corner when she reached the street, and she waited until he rounded it before slipping out after him, stepping as lightly as she could through the rubble in the street. She peered around the corner and saw him walking slowly, pulling the cart behind him. He moved strangely, almost like a waddle, and Kira wondered if it was just his bulk or some other factor. He reached the end of the block and stepped into the street without pausing, as if completely unconcerned that he would be seen or, worse, eaten. How had he survived this long without running into that nocturnal monster? He disappeared around a low wall, and Kira crept after him.
He stood at the mouth of a subway tunnel, filling his plastic jugs with a long-tubed pump similar to her own. He huffed as he worked, as if the exertion was too much for him, but the rest of his mannerisms spoke of long familiarity and expertise. He’d done this often enough to be very good at it.
Was he a Partial? Kira stayed motionless in the shadows observing him, trying to . . . not to listen, not to smell, but to feel him, in the way that she’d been able to feel Samm. The link. It was more emotional than informational; if she linked with this man at all, it would be through feeling the things he felt. She examined her emotions closely: She was curious; she was tired; she was sure of her purpose. Did any of that come from him? What would he be feeling? He was muttering to himself, not angrily but simply talking, the way she had started talking to herself. She couldn’t hear the words.
The more she watched him, methodically filling the jugs, the more she realized that his size suggested he was human. The Partials had been engineered not just as soldiers but as specific soldiers: the in
fantry were all young men, the generals were all older men, and Samm had said that their doctors were women and their pilots were petite girls designed to fit easily into small vehicles and tight cockpits. The military contractors had saved billions of dollars building undersized jets. Obviously there were exceptions—Kira had no idea what role Heron was intended to fill, the tall, leggy supermodel who’d captured her for Dr. Morgan—but did one of the templates include this man? He was huge, especially now that she saw him from ground level. Some kind of super-soldier among super-soldiers? A heavy-weapons specialist, maybe, or a close-combat expert? Samm hadn’t mentioned anyone like that, but there had been a lot of things he’d never mentioned. Kira concentrated as hard as she could, willing herself to detect this giant through whatever version of the link she possessed, but she felt nothing.
Aside from his size was the simple fact that he was winded. He’d walked only a couple of blocks, and yet he was huffing like he’d just run a marathon. That didn’t make sense for a physically perfect super-soldier, but it was perfect for an overweight human.
He was illuminated fairly well, thanks to a large moon and a cloudless sky, and Kira quietly pulled out her binoculars to look at him more closely. She was barely thirty yards away, crouched behind a rusting car, but she wanted to confirm his weaponry at the very least. There was nothing on his legs or hips, no holsters or knives, and there seemed to be nothing in the cart but plastic jugs. He finished filling a jug and lifted it, turning toward her as he placed it in the cart, and for just a moment his coat fell open and she saw his chest and sides: He had no weapons in there either, no shoulder holsters or bandoliers or anything. Kira frowned. No one would travel in the wilderness unarmed, so his weapon must be concealed, but why conceal it if you thought you were alone—
In a flash Kira realized that she had walked into a trap: This man, big and slow and unarmed, had been sent outside as bait, while the others circled around to cut off her escape. She dropped to the ground, lowering her profile in case anyone tried to shoot her right there, and looked around wildly for the attackers. The city was too dark; there could be snipers in a hundred different windows and doorways and shadows around her, but she couldn’t see deep enough into any of them. Her only hope was to run, just like with the monster in the plaza. The building behind had some kind of storefront, maybe an old pizza place; there would be a back room at the very least, probably a basement, and if she was lucky a stairwell that accessed the rest of the building. She could slip in, find another exit, and slip out before they had a chance to close their trap.
