“Log.” Cage pointed off into the woods. “We need something heavy enough to activate the trap.”
He and his father spent the next fifteen minutes rolling the massive, rotting piece of wood over and making faces at the worms that turned up underneath it. Next they got their fingers under the edges, which took a little more effort than he’d expected. It took a few minutes to work out a grip that would allow them to chuck it into the middle of the trap.
“Three, Two,” he and his father swung it back and forth with each count and let the log fly. “One!”
It landed a little further than center, but it worked. With a sudden jolt, the net swung sharply upward, the log caught firmly inside. Leaves that they had used to camouflage it fluttered down around them.
Nate looked at Cage with crossed arms. “Well, it works.”
“And that log wasn't as heavy as a dog.” It wasn’t really the answer Cage had been looking for. If it was broken, they could fix it and hope for a better answer tomorrow. But if it wasn’t broken… what could they change?
They went ahead and reset it. Cage offered a shrug and an, “I mean, it's already here. And I think it would take the four of us to move it.” They needed a better location, clearly.
It took the next twenty-five minutes to haul the counterweight up, lower the trap back into place, and anchor the four corners of the net until the pulley lines could be hidden again. Getting the log out of it had been the hardest part.
Chucking the log to the side of the trail with a heave and a sigh that he wasn’t as strong as he’d thought, his dad said, “Do you think they're too smart to go in?”
“I hope not.” Cage’s brain ran away with ideas, and his mouth followed. “I’m tempted to get out here at night. Just come out with a full arsenal—guns, smoke bombs, grenades, everything. Even night vision goggles.”
Suddenly, Cage changed his mind. “Not night vision goggles.” He noticed his father was about to protest coming out hunting at night with any kind of goggles that would restrict peripheral vision. That was a recipe for disaster. “No, we need a night vision camera. We need to know where they're going and how many and all that.”
Nate tossed his head back and laughed. Not the reaction Cage had expected.
“You're absolutely right,” his father said. “You want to know how I know? Because your mother ordered one last night.”
19
Kaya watched the footage of her backyard displayed in grainy shades of grey and green.
Though it was interesting to see what was happening in her yard overnight, mostly it was boring work and not at all what she was supposed to be doing to earn money. But the fact of the matter was, no one was going to fire her, and she intended to do this work—the work that mattered most.
It had now been several weeks since the night Joule had spent outside. That night had changed everything for her family, but to Kaya, it felt that time was dragging. The deadline for the kids to decide what college they wanted to attend was looming closer. Though they had decided to go together—much to her relief and their father’s—they still hadn't decided where.
She and Nate had also put off deciding if they would follow the kids. Normally, she would never follow her child to college, but there was no normal anymore. She was edging closer and closer to survival mode, as was everyone else. It had become a very real possibility that they might move close to her children’s school and at least attempt to keep the family unit somewhat together.
Right now, she couldn’t make that decision. She wanted Cage and Joule to decide where they wanted to go on their own. She would make her decisions later. All she could do today was learn what the dogs were doing at night.
If she could figure that out, maybe she could protect her family. At least, that’s what she wanted to believe. She had ideas. An electrified fence might be a great plan, but it was a lot of work and a lot of money. If it didn't keep the dogs out of their yard at night, then it wasn't worth it. A tall fence might work, but not if they could jump or climb it. There were too many options, and the Mazurs couldn’t enact any of them until they knew more of what they were up against.
She forwarded through several hours of nothing happening, but then paused as—in rapid fast forward—the screen lit up with shapes. Backtracking for a bit, she tried hard not to guess what was happening before she could really watch what was on the screen.
As it finally played in regular speed, Kaya saw a pack of coyotes had come through close to the back of the house around two a.m. She wondered: Had they always come that close and she hadn’t known it, or did they just do so now? Was it a tactic? The coyotes might think they'd be safer from the dogs if they were closer to humans.
She waited with bated breath, but nothing happened to the coyotes. There was no sound with her system, so she watched in silence as mouths opened and the coyotes presumably yipped or bayed. They did seem to communicate well and eventually the mid-sized pack had given a little jog and disappeared into the woods.
With the yard empty again, Kaya fast forwarded until she saw another, smaller shape. It turned out to be two possums, one with lumps that looked like babies clinging to her back. For a moment, Kay smiled at the cute animals—but then, from nowhere, three dogs descended on the two possums and ripped them to shreds.
With a gasp she couldn’t hold in, Kaya leapt back into her seat. She was grateful no one was around to see her visceral reaction. Even though the dogs couldn't get to her, even though the event was already over and they were simply on a screen, the attack was stunning and disturbing.
It was like Wild Kingdom in her own backyard—the worst of Wild Kingdom.
She swallowed hard, and then forced herself to rewind and watch the footage again. This time as she watched, she checked to see how close the dogs came to the house—almost as close as the coyotes. That was the scary part. She and her children were sleeping behind walls probably less than fifteen to twenty feet away from where the dogs had come.
Previously, Kaya and Nate had slept downstairs and the kids upstairs. But when the dogs had come, they’d moved their bedroom upstairs, trading out with her office in an effort to have just a few more seconds to get away, if it ever came to that. There was a tin roof over the first-story patio below their new bedroom window. She and Nate had quietly reinforced it one day while the kids were at school.
That was the plan: Get the kids out of their rooms and then bolt through the parents’ bedroom and out onto the roof, if necessary.
While Kaya watched the video again, the dogs made short work of the possums. Forcing herself, she went back through it a third time. This time, she didn't pay attention to the possums at all. Only to the dogs.
The green and black shades made it hard to glean much detail, but she could see that her kids’ description had been quite accurate. The twins had nailed the thick legs, barrel chest, and wide face. Even in this grainy image, the heavy jaws were as scary as Cage and Joule had suggested. That was about all she could say. The clarity wasn’t great and she couldn’t see color or anything else she wanted. But what she could see was disturbing enough.
One more time, the last time, she told herself and started it again.
This round, she watched for how the dogs attacked. Kaya noticed they surrounded the possums first and then dove all at once. She was surprised they didn't conk their thick heads, but the attack was eerily well-coordinated.
So far, she was counting the night vision camera as incredibly informative. It was well worth the time she and Joule had spent installing it. Unfortunately, all of the information had been negative. It seemed the dogs were bigger than she’d originally thought. Kaya was hoping the kids had overestimated their size but, if anything, they had underestimated it.
She’d known they worked in packs, but now she knew they worked almost as though they had a hive mind—all striking with a precision that concerned her.
When she had gone through the entire previous night, and thankfully not found any other in
stances of the dogs in the range of the camera, she turned back to her other research. Her pet project, as she was calling it.
Kaya Mazur was now the proud owner of three veterinary texts, and she was focusing her research on canine physiology. What she’d learned so far were all things that wouldn't help, but that might stop her from trying something in the first place.
Dogs carried their heads forward, as all canines did, and thus had thick necks and tended to be hard to strangle. Check that off the list of possible counter-attack methods, she thought.
They had massive immune systems. In fact, most veterinary surgeries were done in open air, not even in a sterile operating room. Thus, they were hard to kill by infecting them with something. Open wounds didn't carry much of a threat to canines. In fact, it seemed dogs were made for them. They licked the wound and didn’t suffer much unless it was horribly deep. Even then, they sometimes survived.
She had few options left. Up until now, they had avoided considering poison, not wanting to poison the entire local animal population. Not knowing how the dogs had come about in the first place made Kaya even more wary of setting out chemicals.
Maybe these dogs had developed as a reaction to somebody trying to poison feral dogs. She didn't know. But as she flipped the pages, she learned more.
20
Joule sat behind her school desk during last period, basically doing nothing. It was their third consecutive day with no AP Chemistry teacher.
Mrs. Wintston simply had not shown up at the end of last week. In the ensuing days, the school must have called her house, tried to find her, and come up shy.
The class had been assigned to a substitute, but it was difficult to find a anyone who could not only teach Advanced Placement Chemistry, but could also come into another teacher’s course and pick up exactly where the other teacher had left off. In fact, it was difficult enough that it hadn't happened.
Joule pulled a deck of cards out of her backpack and was playing solitaire to burn the time. The sub had suggested they study for their next test. Several of the more dedicated students had taken the suggestion and were nose deep in review. Others had ignored it.
Joule knew it didn’t really apply to her. She understood Mrs. Winston easily, and the test material came with little effort—the way it did when the teaching style was a good match. Despite getting almost kicked out of physics, Joule and Cage had never actually blown up the lab.
She would have pulled out her laptop and looked up information on the dogs or could have tried to do research on traps, that kind of thing. But the last name “Mazur” had not afforded her a seat at the back of the room. All it had done was place her one seat behind her brother.
That meant anyone who was sitting behind her would be able to see her screen. Anyone who got up and walked around the room would know what she was looking up, and then it would become a thing. She didn't want to tell them what she and her family were trying to do. Everyone had their own theories about the dogs, and Joule was in no hurry to share hers.
The kids who’d thought they were invincible were now mostly missing. They’d learned ... one way or another. Some of the others didn't even want to acknowledge that the dogs existed. They simply said they went to bed early and had no idea what people were complaining about. Joule didn’t have either problem.
She was laying down an ace as Cage ended whatever conversation he was having and turned around to whisper to her. “I think we need new traps.”
She shook her head. “Not here,” she hissed, although she agreed with his assessment. It had been three days since Cage and their dad had checked the net trap and shown that it worked. It simply wasn’t catching any dogs.
The twins had gone to the store for bait, and she was beginning to think the clerks had to have noticed they were buying far too many chickens—so much so that the online coupon generator was sending them discounts specifically on cheap, whole, raw chickens and boxes of very dark chocolate bars. As of yet, none of the traps had sprung closed—not with a dog caught in them—although the chickens continually went missing.
They had jimmied the latch on the bear trap in an attempt to make it much more sensitive. An online video showed them how to file the notch down, putting the whole system on a hair trigger rather than the safer, ten-pound trigger. Though they had again found it sprung closed and the chicken missing, there had been no dog inside.
They discovered no random dead dogs on their trips through the woods, despite seeing evidence that the dogs passed through there regularly. She’d hoped if the traps didn’t get them, they might have choked on chicken bones or been poisoned by the chocolate. Joule was beginning to think the dogs weren't even eating the chickens, and maybe her family was just feeding the other wildlife and fattening it up for the dogs.
“When we get home, we’ll talk.” She put her brother off because there was far more she wanted to discuss than was acceptable in this classroom, and she went back to flipping cards, though her brain stayed focused on making plans.
For far too long, they had been failing at trapping a dog.
The sheer scope of their failure was becoming concerning. Joule was beginning to think the dogs weren't just hive minded, but actually rather intelligent. She had talked her mother into letting her watch some of the footage, even though Kaya had told her it was violent.
Joule didn't like it, but she was smart enough to know that if they were going to trap a dog, violence was going to be involved.
When she finally got bored playing cards by herself, she and her friend Sarah started up a game of Gin. The substitute didn't really seem to care that what they were doing had absolutely nothing to do with chemistry. Basically, the woman was a warm body in the seat.
Leaning toward Sarah, Joule played a card. “What number teacher is Mrs. Winston?”
Sarah didn't need further clarification, which is probably why they were friends. “Fifteen.”
The Chem teacher was the fifteenth to go missing since the dogs had first appeared. Joule sat with that thought for a moment until Sarah nudged her that her turn had come again. The school was reasonably large. They could lose fifteen teachers, and it was likely none of the students would have known all fifteen of them. But it was still a big number.
“Far more students than that,” Sarah added, out of the blue.
That was probably the case. They should be losing more students than teachers in a purely mathematical sense. But, she thought, how many more? She asked Sarah.
“More than the right ratio.” Sarah played another card, though her words indicated she had been thinking along exactly the same line.
Joule began to wonder. “Is it because we’re smaller? Are we just easier prey?”
Stopping her motion of throwing down cards and rapidly snaring points, Sarah looked around the room surreptitiously. Then she played another card, flipping over everything in her hand to show Joule just how soundly she had lost. Her words didn’t match the game. “Honestly, as a group, we're stupider.”
Despite having told Cage that she didn't want to talk about it, she and Sarah were now having the conversation. But Sarah wasn't coming home with her, and she couldn't simply put her off until later. Besides, it was Sarah who offered up that perhaps they should just hang one of their less-well-liked classmates out as bait.
“We might be able to solve this whole problem.” Sarah had shrugged as she shuffled the deck again.
Joule had taken that thought home with her that afternoon. She and Cage had arrived at the house just a handful of minutes after the last bell. They took turns driving an old hybrid their parents had recently bought for them. Kaya had liked that it was heavy; Nate had liked that it didn't cost much for gas. Neither of their parents said anything about the dogs. But Joule liked that she was no longer on the bus—or as she was now referring to it: The Moveable Feast.
The family afternoon had worn on as it usually did, checking traps—and of course, finding them empty, making dinner, doing homework. Closi
ng the curtains and clipping them tightly down the middle so no light got in or out. Then going to bed early.
Joule hadn't had a chance to tell her brother what she thought. It wasn't quite Sarah's “sacrifice a classmate” idea, not straight up. But that had gotten her thinking, and Joule smiled to herself. She did have a few fellow students she wished she could use for bait.
She had decided she would bring up her new idea in the morning over breakfast. But just as she was beginning to fall asleep, sirens went off all around the room.
21
Cage came awake to the hideous noise, initially thinking it was some kind of alert from his cell phone—but his cell phone was off. It was off for exactly this reason.
No one needed an alert on a kidnapped child in the middle of the night. Not when he wasn't even outside to help spot the relevant silver sedan, anyway. All sound would do was draw the dogs to the house.
Distant family members might have heart attacks, it was true. Someone might need the Mazur family in the middle of the night, but they would not be coming, because their phones would be off.
So Cage sat up, still not fully alert, and reached out beside the bed, grabbing for the phone. He held it up to his squinting eyes, only to see in the dark gloom that it was, in fact, off. He dared not press a button to check, but the sirens still wailed and it wasn’t his phone.
His sister stuck her head the room with her own phone in her hands. “It's coming from outside,” she told him. “I think it's a tornado warning.”
The sound of his parents rustling on the other side of the hall had him looking to his sister in her night shirt and him and his shorts. “We'd better get dressed.”
The Hunted Page 8
