Bite Risk, page 3
Hale and his team are just as useless on Confinement nights, of course, but with a better excuse. And by common consent, none of us kids will tell on any other, no matter what. But our unwritten code means nothing to Ingrid. When she eventually Turns, it won’t make much of a difference. She’s already a full-time monster.
I shrug in what I hope is a careless way, feigning interest in the pigeons on the lamppost. There are now some on the rooftops near us, where they’ve gathered to watch the show. They’re cooing and grunting weirdly, mirroring my rising panic. My throat feels like it’s closing up. There’s a buzzing at the edge of my hearing, like a mosquito has got into my head.
‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’ My voice is shakier than I would like. ‘And I never killed Hinky. I bet it was you.’
I regret saying it immediately. Hinky spent most of his time curled up in Ingrid’s room at Juniper. She used to buy little sprats to feed him as treats, out of her allowance.
‘Oh, you are a piece of work,’ she says, her voice low and dangerous. She raises the tranq again and moves her thumb directly over the safety. One tiny slide and it’ll be armed.
‘Ingrid, no.’ Elena sounds panicky now.
Ingrid aims the tranq slowly between me and Elena as though choosing her prey. Fee and Loretta stand frozen, eyes wide. Even they’re unnerved by her behaviour tonight.
My throat is dry, my heart skittering in my chest. Next to me, Elena shifts her weight, like she’s preparing to make a lunge for the tranq. I want to stop her, but my arms are jelly. I try to speak but all that comes out is a strangled squeak. An instinctive cry for help. The buzzing in my head is now deafening.
People say there are no such things as miracles, but sometimes there’s no other explanation.
Right then, something incredible happens.
Pigeons start crashing into Ingrid’s face.
CHAPTER FOUR
She doesn’t see the first one coming. It slams into her temple out of nowhere, sideways like it’s been shot from a cannon. She’s almost thrown off her feet. Her head snaps round and the feathered body drops to the ground. Slowly, her hand rises to touch the place it hit. Blinking, she regards the dead bird at her feet.
‘What the—’
Then the rest of them come. Birds drop from the sky like hailstones, smashing into the ground, bouncing off her head and then her arms when she raises them to protect herself. There’s a sickening, slopping drumbeat of soft, fragile bodies hitting concrete at speed. Fee and Loretta are a few metres away, and it takes them a moment to react to what they’re seeing. Then a pigeon smacks into the ground right in front of Fee, sending a splatter of gore up her tanned legs and white dress, and that finally releases them from their stupor. They scream, grabbing at each other, trying to run in different directions before finally fleeing, crouched over, around the corner.
I can’t move. A sick bubble rises in my throat. My hands reach out instinctively to try to catch some of the birds, but it’s ridiculous, hopeless.
There’s a powerful tug on my shirt – Elena – and I’m dragged under my next-door neighbour’s porch.
The pigeon hail is mainly concentrated where Ingrid is standing, though a few stray birds are swooping wildly up and down the street. The feathery tornado seems to be expanding – there’s a rush of air on my cheek, a lump whizzes past and the window behind us shatters as the bird hits it. A droplet of blood lands by the corner of my eye. We duck, making our bodies as small as possible, using a hedge as cover.
I can barely see Ingrid now for the flying bodies, the torrent is so thick. She’s in a defensive crouch under the lamppost and they’re piling up around her.
It feels endless, but it can only be seconds, maybe half a minute since it started. All at once, it’s over.
The sky is empty again. Silence. Then, a thin, reedy noise escapes Ingrid, like air from a leaky balloon. I launch myself forward involuntarily, and Elena tightens her grip on my arm. When I glance back her eyes are glassy with horror.
‘Where are you going?’ she asks.
I shake Elena off and walk unsteadily to Ingrid, stepping around the mess, while trying not to see it. Some of the birds are moving, most aren’t. Ingrid’s whole body is shaking. Her head jerks up when I gently touch her back, and the whining sound she’s making cuts off. Her face is covered in blood and gunk and feathers, unspeakable juices dripping from her hair. ‘Are… are you okay?’ I ask.
For a moment she regards me with confusion, as if she doesn’t know who I am. Then her mouth twists into a grimace. ‘Get. Away. From. Me.’
‘Let’s get you home—’
Both her fists shove forcefully into my stomach, and I stagger, stumbling over the small bodies. ‘I hate you,’ she hisses, repeating it over and over hysterically while I walk numbly backwards. Finally, she seems to run out of breath and her anger subsides back into whining.
‘Leave her,’ Elena says quietly, arriving at my side. ‘She’ll go home eventually. Wanna come over to mine?’ I can tell she wants to pick over what just happened, but I can’t face it right now. I need my bed.
‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’
I watch as my friend reluctantly goes inside her house. Ingrid’s still in the middle of the street. The sound of her wailing is oddly quiet as I open my own door. And when I shut it behind me, I don’t hear it at all.
* * *
I barely register the dawn alert buzzing on my wrist a few hours later and enjoy a blissful extra ten minutes dozing until my phone pings with a text. My fingers fumble across the bedside table, push the phone over the edge and finally retrieve it from the threadbare carpet. The text is from Elena.
YOU OK? WHAT WAS THAT?
Last night’s apocalyptic weirdness returns to my brain and jolts me awake.
When I open the curtains and lean out of the window, there they are. I didn’t dream it. Bird bodies lie strewn in my garden and in the street. A ginger cat is sitting serenely in the middle of it all, washing itself like it’s just had breakfast. It probably has. My stomach turns over. I’m not going out there until the street cleaners have been.
I struggle to make sense of my thoughts – gears won’t click into place. Did I do it, somehow? I wished for rescue, sure. I thought Ingrid was going to kill me. Did I make the pigeons attack? Do I have some kind of… power?
The idea doesn’t feel like wish fulfilment, it feels like a nightmare. Those poor creatures.
And Ingrid. A surge of sympathy for her is immediately quelled by remembering her absolute hatred of me. I knew it before, but last night I truly felt the strength of it – a furious dark loathing.
We’ll never be president of each other’s fan clubs, that’s for sure.
As I go to close the window, I notice something metallic hanging off the tree branch just outside. At first, I think it’s a Frisbee – a disc, only about the size of my hand when I spread my fingers – but then I see it’s caught on the branch by wires sticking out of it.
Seems like pigeons weren’t the only things falling from the sky last night.
I reach it easily, unhooking it to bring it inside. It’s a drone – the propellers have mostly broken off, but there’s still half of one, bent, coming from the top. They never normally crash – they have sensors to avoid it.
Another memory from last night: that buzzing. I thought it was in my head but actually, I wonder if it was this.
This one is different from the other drones. There’s nowhere to hold cargo, and on the bottom of it is black mesh that reminds me of the speaker on a music player. I look it over for a while, baffled, and then Harold rings.
‘Forgot to give your mum’s cake tin back last night. Does she need it in the next few days? I can drop it round.’
‘Nah, it’s fine. She’s got loads.’ I’m still considering the drone in my hands.
‘What’s wrong?’
I laugh. He can always tell. I fill him in on last night, and then describe what I’ve just found. ‘I guess I should report it, right?’
‘Sounds intriguing. No hurry to do that, I reckon. Isn’t this Pedro’s area of expertise?’
It’s not a bad idea. I tell him I need to go and let Mum out, then hang up, before chucking the drone on my bed. I’ll take it to Pedro later.
* * *
Mum looks even more tired than usual when I let her out of her cage this morning. Dark circles under her eyes. Bloodstains at the corners of her mouth, which she missed with her hanky. She’s got a long cleaning shift to do later, too.
Most people get their Caretakers to leave a key within arm’s reach just outside the bars, so they can let themselves out at dawn, but Mum won’t hear of it. She insisted we save up to splash out on one of those heavy-duty cages with an electronic keypad on the outside of the door, because she saw a load of online ads about how much stronger and safer they are. We had to get a backup battery for it, too, so it won’t fail when our power goes out. It doesn’t even have a remote I can leave for her. I’ve got to punch in the number on the door, old-school style.
So when I come down, she’s already been awake for a while, sitting on her blanket fully dressed, hands in her lap and reading a book like she’s in the dentist’s waiting room. She always leaves her clothes and something to read within reach, just outside the bars in a neat pile, so she doesn’t trample them or rip them during the night.
As I jab the buttons, I try to persuade her again to buy a remote for the door. It would be so much more convenient. For her, I mean. It’s not just because I want to stay in bed longer.
Okay, it is a bit that.
‘It’s not like you could accidentally key in the passcode. Massive furry mitts, no opposable thumbs.’ I hold mine up and do a little thumb dance to demonstrate. ‘Everyone else lets themselves out.’
But she’s not having it. ‘Do you think I care what everyone else does?’ she asks, lips pursed as she steps through the door. ‘No such thing as too careful, Ansel.’ She’s the only person who calls me by my full first name. Literally everyone else calls me Sel, including at school. When she’s angry it’s ‘Ansel Archer’.
Mum can’t bear the thought she might hurt someone as a Ripper – waking up to find her claws and teeth have taken someone’s life.
I circle my finger around my lips to indicate she’s got a few stains left on hers. ‘Missed a bit. You look rough, Mum.’
She dabs around the corners of her mouth and gives me a sour glance, eyeing my wild hair. ‘What’s your excuse? Those opposable thumbs can’t hold a comb?’
Despite her exhaustion, her tone is light and teasing, full of relief that nothing happened. She can’t remember anything about the nights she Turns – no one does – and it’s only when she wakes safe in her cage that she can be sure everything’s okay. She once told me it’s like a huge, heavy blanket falls on her and presses her to the ground. Next thing she knows, she wakes up to the smell of blood, a sticky mouth, bad breath and aching fingers.
We don’t discuss the lunging and growling, or the howling. On the stroke of midnight they all howl. Up and down the street, across the whole town. No matter how many times you hear it, it’s eerie. I recorded Mum doing it once because I thought she’d be curious, but she dismissed it as ‘caterwauling’ and made me delete it.
‘What’s that?’ Her sharp eyes have caught the scratch on my hand. Her voice is suddenly tight. I cross my arms, tucking the offending mark out of sight.
‘Nothing, the knife slipped when I was cutting up the beef.’
Her anxious gaze searches my face. ‘Really?’
I snort and roll my eyes. ‘What else is it gonna be? If you’d got a bite out of me, don’t you think it’d be a lot worse than that? Have you seen your fangs? Oh, right, course not. Well, I’ll take a photo next time to show you.’
‘You will not.’
That puts an end to the questions.
* * *
Upstairs, we sit at the kitchen table to eat our freshly baked cinnamon whirls. Mum prepared them yesterday so I could pop them in the oven first thing today. She loves messing about with dough and pastry, even the fiddly stuff like croissants and doughnuts. She says it’s an art. Mum’s at her happiest when she’s icing a sponge or drizzling a sugary glaze over buns.
Crisp flakes of pastry fall from my lips as we listen to the radio news. I learn, mostly to my relief but also somewhat to my disappointment, that I am not, in fact, a pigeon-whisperer.
The dozens of birds that suddenly started acting weird didn’t come in response to my call, after all.
The radio says there was an unusual weather event last night affecting Tremorglade, Hastaville and Yojay – the valley towns. Some kind of storm high up, a weird atmospheric pressure thing that messed with the birds’ internal navigation instincts. We don’t normally get that stuff. It’s a northern thing. I hope it doesn’t mean we’ll get more of their nightmarish weather.
‘Well, how about that!’ Mum exclaims. ‘Did you notice anything like that last night?’
‘Yeah, a bit,’ I say noncommittally. I don’t want to get into exactly what happened because then she’ll want to check Ingrid’s okay, and Ingrid will tell her I was at Shady Oaks last night. Mum likes Harold, and helps me keep an eye on him, although she’s not wild about the fact that he keeps trying to give us money. I haven’t mentioned how much he hates Sequest either – she’s always fundraising for them, since they took such good care of her. And if she knew Elena and I spent Confinements at Shady Oaks, she’d decide he’s a bad influence. She wants me close to home those nights, following protocol, in case she needs shooting.
It’s overkill if you ask me. The system works without us having to babysit the whole time. Escapes just don’t happen anymore. The last one was years ago when Mrs Harris’s rusty cage lock broke. She cleared out the tropical fish tank with a couple of gulps, ate the family dog and gouged three slits right through the living room door before her daughter tranq’d her through the window. Now they have a titanium Impregnacage with a timer lock and CCTV.
No one in Tremorglade has ever got further than that, not since the Disruption.
Okay, so I got a little sloppy last night reaching through the bars. But the important stuff – the locking in… I would never take chances with that. Our cage is totally secure. Then there’s the tripwire across the porch, which can spring the graphene net down instantly. And if that misses her, there’s the explosives perimeter. A special little mix we call stun pops, just enough to stop her in her tracks and give her a nasty headache, but nowhere near enough to kill her in full Ripper mode. It’s a tried and tested formula around the world. Everything’s marked in neon, so humans can’t miss it. Luckily Rippers don’t pay attention to signs.
Even if she did make it beyond the perimeter, there are always dozens of kids up and down the road with a fully loaded tranq and an itchy trigger finger who’d be happy to deal with an escaped parent, no matter whose it is.
There’s no point trying to persuade Mum to stop worrying, though. I’ll just enjoy my tiny bit of freedom.
What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her, I think to myself.
Like my pigeon-whispering powers, it’s another of my assumptions that turns out to be wrong.
CHAPTER FIVE MAY – CONFINEMENT NIGHT
Next Confinement, Elena says she’s busy, so I ride to Harold’s on my own, feeling miffed. It’s not like she hangs out with anyone else much – only Pedro, and he’s not an option tonight, being of the fang-and-claw persuasion. She won’t tell me what she’s up to. What if she’s bored of me and just wants to spend the evening playing Happy Trappers, or on FIN, chatting with her online pen pal Trix in Rheitzland? I don’t begrudge her friendship with Trix – I chat with my FIN friend Chad all the time online and miss him when we haven’t messaged for a while. But Confinements are special. She can talk to Trix any time.
I don’t understand her, lately. She’s got ants in her pants. Even if her dad doesn’t manage to get a job outside Tremorglade, she wants ‘a change of scenery’. She’s been trying to persuade me to go hiking with her over to Hastaville. Hiking! Like she’s not aware of the big red warning signs at the edge of the forest specifically telling you not to do it. Like she’s entirely forgotten what happened to Remi Colletto and his family three years ago.
Remi was sixteen. Good at sports, an outdoorsy type. His whole family were adventurous. Anyway, they got it into their heads to go camping, never mind the warnings. What could go wrong? Obviously, from here, there’s only one direction to go, so they set off down the road through the forest, a nice safe waxing moon due over their heads all week, of course. Six of them, from Grandpa Colletto all the way down to little Wren, still in babygros.
None of them ever made it home. They were killed and eaten by a starving bear that had been roaming the outskirts of Yojay, where they’d apparently set up for the night. Locals found their bloody clothes, little pieces of them the bear missed still inside. Tragic, the newsreaders called it.
Harold reckons it was Sequest, of course.
Me, I’m not so sure it was a bear that ate them, either, but I have a different theory. The folks in Yojay have a reputation, if you know what I mean. They get hungry.
The thing is, the forest is safe – close to Tremorglade. Sure, there are wild creatures, foxes, deer and even wolves, but they’re timid, they don’t like coming close to town. They leave us be, and we do the same. That’s less true the further away you go.
Elena’s got to be joking about the hiking. She’d better be.
I fret about it all evening while playing cards with Harold, and fare even worse than usual.
