Bite Risk, page 8
Frantically searching around for Elena’s tranq, I curse myself for not bringing mine upstairs. If I go to get it now, she’ll be dead by the time I come back.
The headphones are lying right by the cage door. Without thinking, I reach in and pick them up. They’re flimsy and almost certainly useless in this situation, but they’re all we’ve got. A stab of despairing, stubborn anger twists in my gut. If Pedro’s going to eat us, he’s going to have to do it wearing these.
Just as I step into the cage there’s a horrible yowl of triumph as he throws Elena off, upwards and to the side. Her body clangs sickeningly against iron and drops to the floor, unmoving.
Everything seems to slow down. I see it all in minute detail. The silvery, stiff fur standing up along Pedro’s spine, the curve of his neck as he reaches for Elena.
I leap for him at the same moment he goes for her, coming at him from behind. I get a close-up view of his jaws closing on her shoulder, the teeth sinking through her T-shirt, blood instantly welling up. She screams in pain and terror. I land on his neck with my elbow glancing off his muzzle as he swivels round briefly. With all the strength I have left, I shove the headphones down over his ears.
He stops moving.
I lie half on, half off him, panting.
For one glorious moment, I think it’s worked.
Then he throws me off with a quick, irritated shake, and I land on my back just outside the cage. He turns to finish off Elena.
Bracing for the sound of bones crunching I start to drag myself up ready to fling myself on him again, but then realize he hasn’t gone for the kill. He’s just… waiting. A drop of saliva lands on the floor next to Elena’s head. Pedro’s sides heave up and down, but otherwise he’s still.
Then, very slowly, his haunches go back, and he lies down carefully, almost gently, next to Elena.
He doesn’t pass out. But he doesn’t get up, either.
The red stain on Elena’s T-shirt creeps slowly outwards. She hasn’t moved.
‘Elena,’ I whisper.
Her head rises, just a fraction, and I breathe again. She’s watching him. After a few seconds, grimacing, she inches her leg sideways. Then she slides her bottom away, eyes on him the whole time. He watches her too, tongue lolling, alert but quiet.
She reaches the edge of the cage and, moving painfully slowly, neither of us daring to speak, I help her trembling body out into the room. The moment she’s over the threshold, I kick the door shut and, shaking, latch it. After a few attempts, the key turns in the padlock.
Neither of us can speak. We can’t take our eyes off Pedro.
While he looks entirely Ripper, his demeanour reminds me of Gunther, the greengrocer’s elderly mastiff, who lies flopped on the wooden floor of the shop all day, watching the world go by.
We stay like that for what seems like hours. Elena’s wound is painful but isn’t bleeding anymore – looks like I stopped him before he got more than a nibble. Pedro sniffs and laps a little at the smear of blood Elena’s left behind in the cage. Then he heaves a big, contented sigh, puts his chin down on his paws, and goes to sleep.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN JUNE – 30 DAYS TO NEXT CONFINEMENT
Pedro’s video shows everything. And I mean everything. Mum is not going to be happy when she sees it, but when it gets to the end she’ll understand. This is proper evidence, and it raises questions that Sequest won’t be able to dodge. Also – and this is just a nice side benefit – it totally makes me look like a hero. And Elena, obviously.
Today’s a school inset day, happily for those of us who have more important stuff to do. First thing this morning Elena was in the Wellness Centre, getting stitches in her shoulder from Nurse Pete. She told him she’d been bitten by a stray dog. Somehow, she managed to keep the events of last night to herself while she was there, and by the time she arrives at the café where Pedro and I are waiting for her, she’s desperate to tell the world.
I know Harold said to keep quiet about our investigations. But the time has come to start making a noise. This could change everything.
Our first stop is Tremorglade’s community website – Tremorgossip. Usually it’s just local news and notices, and people complaining about potholes, but Pedro uploads our explosive video, along with evidence from his infrasound app, plus a report that we spent all morning writing, about exactly what we did and why.
While Pedro emails the same thing to the two biggest national papers, the National Times and the Sentinel, Elena and I are tasked with handing a printout of our report to the Wellness Centre, for them to pass up the chain to Sequest. They think they can ignore us, but we are going to get right in their faces, show them that we know what they’re up to, and demand they tell us why.
Pedro said he felt fantastic when he woke up this morning. He doesn’t remember any of last night, of course – no change there. He slept a little, according to Elena, who sent me home after I started falling asleep in her lap. At midnight he woke and howled his heart out along with the other Rippers. She couldn’t bring herself to try going in the cage again, but she reckons she could have. The aggression we all thought was a major part of being a Ripper just wasn’t there. The conclusion couldn’t be clearer: the infrasound’s making them angry, or scared, or both. But why on earth would anyone do that on purpose?
* * *
There’s no one at the Wellness Centre reception when we arrive so we sit on the squeaky chairs to wait. My phone beeps. It’s Chad.
Chad: Hey, Ansel! How u doing? Seen the trailer for Plague Terror 2 is dropping next month? Cannot WAIT.
Sel: Hey yeah I heard! Bit busy rn. Speak later.
I smile to myself. When I tell him about this it’s going to blow his mind. Even more than the Plague Terror 2 trailer.
Doctor Travis’s heels click as she strides to the reception desk, totally ignoring us, and starts filling in a form. Elena and I glance at each other, trying to work up the courage to interrupt, when Doctor Travis says, ‘What?’ without looking up, in a tone that suggests we’d better have something seriously wrong with us.
‘Doctor Travis,’ Elena says politely but firmly, walking up to the desk and slapping our report down on it. ‘We would like you to send this to Sequest HQ in Hastaville, please. We’ve been conducting an experiment and have made some remarkable discoveries.’
‘Mmm hmm.’ She doesn’t raise her eyes from the form.
‘We’ve managed to calm down a Ripper,’ I blurt out. ‘Completely.’
That gets her attention.
‘You calmed a Turned, did you?’ She can’t resist a dig at my terminology.
Elena nods. ‘My brother.’
‘Would this have anything to do with the stitches that my colleague gave you this morning. Your… dog bite?’
Elena hesitates. ‘No. Completely separate incident.’
‘Really. And you did this how?’ Scepticism pushes her eyebrows a surprisingly long way up her forehead.
‘By putting noise-cancelling headphones on him. It was… tricky.’
There’s a short silence. The eyebrows return to their usual position. A sigh. ‘Right.’
‘No, we did,’ Elena insists, jabbing at the paper. ‘You should read it. It explains why we think it works, too. But you do have to send it to Sequest after. Our video will be on the news soon enough. Do you want to see it now?’
Doctor Travis goes back to filling in her form, biro scraping softly across the page. ‘I don’t have time to watch Righteous Rippers videos, thank you. Put your letter on there.’ She indicates with the pen to a towering pile in a tray next to her.
‘It’s not for Righteous Rippers, it’s important,’ I tell her. ‘Honestly.’
Her mouth tightens into an impatient line and she looks me in the eye. ‘More important than ordering Mr Bates’s heart medicine? Mrs Juror’s antibiotics? More important than requesting tests to establish whether someone has diabetes?’
I hesitate. ‘Y-yes?’
She snatches the paper and dumps it in the tray herself. ‘Can’t wait to read it. Now, unless you have a broken limb or are bleeding to death, I suggest you leave.’
* * *
‘Do you think she’ll send it to Sequest?’ I fret, as we walk away from the Wellness Centre.
‘I think so. But even if she doesn’t, they’ll have to respond eventually, because of pressure from the media.’
As we turn onto the next road, I spot something out of the corner of my eye. I nudge Elena, and she follows my gaze.
‘Ugh. Ingrid.’
‘I swear she just came out of the Wellness Centre,’ I say.
‘I didn’t see her in there.’
‘Neither did I. But the waiting room goes all the way round the corner. She might have been there the whole time.’
‘Don’t worry about it. Who cares?’
‘I guess. I just don’t get why she’s stalking me.’
Elena snorts. ‘Haven’t seen her with Fee and Loretta lately. Maybe she thinks you’ll be her new friend.’
We walk faster, and by the time we reach home we’ve lost her.
Harold’s excited when I phone to fill him in on what happened. But there’s a horrified silence when I tell him that we’ve given our reports to the press and the Wellness Centre. I hear the panic in his voice. ‘Oh, Sel, this is not being careful. Can you take it all back? We’re not ready yet. There are still so many unanswered questions. It might have been a fluke. And if it’s those wretched drones making Rippers aggressive in Tremorglade, why are they aggressive everywhere else in the world too?’
I hadn’t thought of that. A tiny crack of doubt opens in my mind. But the effect of the headphones on Pedro was undeniable, and everyone will see it. ‘Well… maybe Rippers are just generally worse in other places, like everything else is.’
There’s silence down the line.
‘Or maybe Sequest are doing it in loads of places. It could be we’ve uncovered an international scandal! It’s fine,’ I reassure him. ‘We know what we’re doing.’
I’m on a high, we all are.
It doesn’t last long.
* * *
The following day, we check Tremorgossip, looking forward to all the juicy comments on our post, but instead of the homepage, we’re greeted with an error message. With spectacular timing, the whole website’s screwed.
Pedro checks the emails he sent to the newspapers and finds them safely in his sent box. But then he makes an odd, confused noise. We gather round, peering over his shoulder at his phone screen.
‘I don’t understand. It can’t be.’ His forehead is creased in bewilderment. ‘I sent them a link to the video – it was uploaded to the sharing site I normally use. But now there’s nothing at the link.’
‘Upload it again,’ I suggest. ‘Use somewhere different?’
‘I just did. Or at least, I tried. I picked another video-sharing site, but when I clicked the button to upload, the website downloaded some kind of malware onto my phone. The video’s gone. Everything’s wiped…’ He trails off, gesturing hopelessly at the technology in front of him.
I’m starting to get a bad feeling about the whole thing, when there’s a knock on their front door.
Pedro goes to answer it and when he comes back into the room, he’s followed by Sergeant Hale, carrying a cardboard box. Elena and I stop breathing. Is he going to arrest us?
‘Hey, kids, what ya doin’?’
We’re all frozen to the spot. He gives us a quizzical look and then shrugs. ‘Well, okay. Here’s your stuff back, Pedro. See? Told you it wouldn’t be long.’
When Pedro doesn’t hold out his hands to take the box, but just stands there warily, Hale puts it on the chest of drawers. ‘Everything’s in there, including your phone.’
‘So, Sequest aren’t… you’re not here to arrest us?’
Hale laughs. ‘No further action at this time. Why would I arrest you now? You learned your lesson, right?’ He grins.
As he leaves, he gives us a friendly wink that turns my blood to ice.
Are they… playing with us?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN JULY – CONFINEMENT NIGHT
Confinement rolls around again and nothing’s changed. There’s been nothing in the newspapers, no word from the Wellness Centre about our report. Tremorgossip is still screwed. The parts Pedro ordered to make more noise-cancelling headphones don’t arrive, even though he bought them the day after last Confinement. There’s a shipping delay. The entire universe is refusing to co-operate. Pedro spent a whole day changing all his passwords, and wiping and resetting his returned phone, taking it to pieces, just to make sure nothing has been done to it.
The paranoia has got to me too. I’ve started to feel like my school friends are acting distant somehow. I tried to tell a couple of them about what we found, but they were weirdly uninterested. Not avoiding me, exactly, but just… wary. Like I might infect them with something. I feel like I’m being whispered about in the corridors, and not in a good way.
Harold’s advised us to spend the rest of the month acting as normal as possible. We’re not acknowledging defeat, but we are seriously spooked.
We don’t feel like going to the Howler party today, but Harold persuades us, saying it’ll cheer us up. There’s nothing else to do, and we should probably act like everything’s fine.
At first, the Howler party seems like it’s going to be the same as every other one.
The sun has come out, and the cobblestones steam as the early rain lifts away. The air smells clean and fresh, until the barbecue is lit and then the scent of slowly charring corn-on-the-cob and sausages drifts on the breeze. There’s rain forecast for the evening, but right now it’s a perfect summer’s day.
The town square is the furthest point from the forest, not far from our street. The ground starts to rise steeply here up to the mountains. Tremorglade sinks gently away in front of us, then the trees cover the distance up to the horizon. Birds are circling lazily above, early scavengers for dropped chips and breadcrumbs. I follow their looping paths and hope none of them will be splatting tonight.
We all feel robbed when Confinement is on a weekend, or in the school holidays, like now. When it’s not, we get the afternoon off school so we can prepare for dusk and go to the Howler party. The parties aren’t compulsory, of course – we’re not living in a dictatorship – but we’re encouraged to go. Helps the bonds of community, and all that. Also there’s always plenty of free food, so we rarely miss it.
Harold is sitting on a wooden fold-up chair next to one of the trestle tables, manning the drinks stall: tea, coffee and his homemade punch. Elena and I keep our usual vigil next to the crisps and popcorn, munching our way through them while Mayor Warren makes his standard speech about the precious nature of Confinement responsibility, and what a privilege it is for the children to be entrusted with it. I mean, whatever.
Elena crunches anxiously on her popcorn, not saying much. Apparently, her dad had another job rejection today. Lucas never comes to the Howler parties anyway, which is probably just as well. I scan the crowd for Pedro but can’t see him, though some of his friends are here, chatting and laughing in their usual group.
Mum’s already gone home, even though it’s only early afternoon. As always, she came with me and stayed for one drink, made small talk with as few people as she could as quickly as she could without seeming rude, and then left, pleading tiredness. She loves Tremorglade, loves our community, loves that everyone else wants to enjoy themselves before folks get hairy, but she can’t bring herself to party.
Mayor Warren wanders around from group to group, stroking his moustache nervously like he’s afraid it might fly off and leave his smile naked. I wonder if he knows about our video, if he’s the one who made sure it didn’t upload. The council is responsible for the town’s internet, for the upkeep of cables and so on. A word from him could get someone hacked, I reckon.
But it’s not him we need to worry about today.
‘Heads up,’ Elena mutters into her drink, peeking over the rim. ‘Incoming.’
Sergeant Hale is swaggering over to us, chewing gum, thumbs stuck in his belt. He nods at us casually as he comes to stand next to us, and there’s an awkward silence.
Someone uploaded a video of him onto Righteous Rippers after the last Confinement and it’s made its way around the kids of Tremorglade. We all know it was Justin, who Caretakes him since he has no children, but Hale has no clue and is desperate to find out who did it. I’m guessing he doesn’t want to mention it in case we haven’t seen it. I don’t think there’s any of us that haven’t watched it about a hundred times. It won Ripper of the Month. It’ll have been seen millions of times across the world by now. Chad says it’s really put Tremorglade on the map.
The video begins with a shout of ‘Call the cops!’ and an explosion of drumbeats that then settle into an intense, addictive rhythm. The visuals open on Ripper Hale in his cage, twisting and apparently spotting the camera. He’s wearing his police hat, incredibly – someone’s timed it beautifully, must have thrown it on him through the bars just before rolling the camera. It falls off almost immediately, but you have to hand it to the director, that is pure skill. It gets even better, though.
The video has been edited to add his school assembly speech over the top as a rap, so it looks like he’s giving it as a Ripper. It’s beautifully done. Be calm, methodical and responsible he says as his claws swipe viciously through the bars just out of reach of the lens, blood smeared on his bared teeth, ramming the cage door with his head, yellow eyes rolling back in their sockets. Some of you aren’t taking this serious- serious- seriously he raps, and then there’s an instrumental break, during which he lifts a leg and pees up the wall.
