Feral Page 3

  Claire jerked herself awake, her skin coated with slimy, panicked sweat. That wasn’t really what the girl cop told her, that night: you’re dead. The rest of the dream—she’d actually been having the same nightmare for months—was always brutally accurate, in horrifying, blinding clarity. But Claire never dreamed that the cop said what she really had, last April: “You’ll be okay. Hang on, hang on. Stay with me.” Instead, she always snapped awake after hearing the cop tell her the same thing Claire herself had thought, drenched in pain and blood. It’s too late for you. You’re dead.

  She’d said it to herself as she’d hung in the sky, above her broken, bleeding body. Wasn’t that what people always said happened during near-death experiences? They hung in the air, staring down at themselves. Claire had stared at herself, too, looking more like a pile of ground beef than Claire Cain, and she’d sighed at the blood—all that blood—and she’d waited for the sense of peace everyone also swore they felt. But there was no peace—not then, and not now, really.

  It had been nine months since the beating. Her bones had healed. Every time she took a shower, she swore her skin looked like a patchwork quilt, pink scars crisscrossing through her creamy skin in every direction. But no one had to know about the scars, not if Claire didn’t want them to. So she wouldn’t be wearing many camisoles or sundresses. What did that matter, in the grand scheme of things?

  The beating was behind her. Yes, it had been terrifying—yes, it had hurt. Yes, she had nearly died. But it was over. The truth was out: a gang had recruited a kid in a private school—a new student, who didn’t fit in—to sell their drugs to his fellow students, those kids whose pockets were perpetually heavy with their weekly allowance. And Claire had ratted, to save her wrongly accused friend. And she’d paid a price.

  It was over, as far as Claire was concerned. The boys who had hurt her had been arrested. Here in January—the beginning of a brand-new year—she was walking beautifully. She had excelled in her physical therapy, just as she had excelled at any course she’d ever taken. She moved now without so much as a hitch in her step. She was still Claire Cain, still destined for great things.

  The dream, though, had not yet gotten the hint. The dream had not yet learned that the beating was behind her. It had taunted her relentlessly, especially the past week, as she and her father had given away their houseplants and had their mail forwarded and their cable subscription suspended.

  Now, on their way to their new home, the damp winter chill seeped into the interior of her dad’s ’72 Gremlin (the same car he’d been driving since his grad school days), making Claire’s bones throb. She brought her feet up into her seat, almost as if she thought hugging her legs could make the ache go away.

  “You all right?” Dr. Cain (it was all anyone had ever called Claire’s dad—Dr. Cain—always with a stiff nod of respect, if not always intimacy) asked. He placed his hand on her forehead, as though checking for a fever, without lifting his eyes from the road.

  “Just the weird weather,” Claire said, shuddering, hoping that it was enough to excuse the clammy skin she was sure her father’d found beneath his fingertips. She hadn’t told him about the recurring dream. Not once in the past nine months. It was just a dream, after all. What damage could a dream do to anyone who wasn’t a character in a Nightmare on Elm Street installment?

  The afternoon was growing late enough—and the skies stormy enough—that Claire’s father flipped on the headlights. In the stream of light that flowed out from the front of the car, a green highway sign popped into view: Welcome to Peculiar—Where the “odds” are with you.

  She snorted a quiet chuckle as they passed the city limits sign, the side of her fist stinging against the cold, dewy glass of the passenger window. She pressed her face against the path she’d just cleared in the window’s steam, only to find herself staring, in the twilight, at a kind of gnarled rural landscape. Leafless winter trees. Twisting, narrow farm roads. Empty grazing fields. Miles of barbed wire. A lonely, enormous, ancient building looming on a distant hill.

  Already, Peculiar looked nothing like Chicago. No skyscrapers, no university libraries, no alleys. Instead—cows. Grain silos.

  She smiled until her phone buzzed. Freeing it from her pocket, Claire found another text from Rachelle. A simple Good luck that made Claire’s stomach drop, like her father had just driven too fast over a dip in the road.

  At times, it had seemed Rachelle had been the one in the beating. Because she was different. She’d spoken in a quiet voice around Claire. She’d moved daintily through Claire’s bedroom during her visits, like a ballerina on pointe. She didn’t jab her elbow into Claire’s ribs, teasing her. Not anymore. For nine months, she’d treated Claire like a tangled-up mass of black electrical cords, all knotted in a way that would make anyone who saw it wonder if it could ever get straightened out again.

  But there was nothing to straighten out.

  Claire shook her head, replied, Thanks, just to get Rachelle off her back, and tossed her cell in the glove compartment. She still missed Rachelle—the old Rachelle. She’d hated the way this new girl had shown up in her house to eye Claire as though she were still in need of a rescue.

  Claire sighed, grateful she had agreed to spend her father’s sabbatical semester in Peculiar, Missouri. It would be a sabbatical for her, too. Time away from Rachelle’s overly polite, quiet visits. A chance to get a full, deep breath.

  Her father checked the temperature gauge he’d installed in the Gremlin, and cleared his throat at the same time he pushed his glasses into his face.

  “What is it?” Claire asked, frowning against his nervous tic.

  “Temp’s dropping awfully fast,” Dr. Cain said. “And that rain’s not letting up anytime soon—see those clouds?” He pointed at the tall puffs. “Cumulonimbus. Lots of rain in those.”

  “We’re here, though,” Claire said, pointing over her shoulder. “We made it. We’re safe now. Don’t tell me you missed the sign. That thing was priceless. ‘Where the “odds”—’”

  “We might be in for trouble tonight,” her dad interrupted, leaning into the steering wheel and tilting his head toward the sky.

  “What kind of trouble?” she asked, fear instantly spilling in waves down her arms. She’d had enough of trouble.

  “Dad?” she prodded. “What kind of—” She grabbed the door handle, and clenched the muscles in her stomach to stay upright as Dr. Cain shot the Gremlin off the snaking road and veered into the gravel parking lot of a gas station, a slice of civilization in the overgrown brush that was attempting to pass as a town.

  Claire squinted through the rain-drenched windshield, wondering how her dad could have actually seen the store from the road. Instead of glowing neon signs, the tiny wooden building was dotted with old-fashioned enameled signs for Nehi soda and Oxydol soap flakes and Burma-Shave, each marred with giant chips and dark brown rust spots.

  Dr. Cain steered beneath the tin roof that sheltered the gas pumps. He cut the Gremlin’s engine beside a relic with a glass Mobiloil globe for a head.

  “You really think that thing could still work?” Claire teased, pointing at the rusty old pump. “You really think this place could actually still be open?”

  She leaned forward to look around her father, through his driver-side window, at the empty parking lot. A sign whose skin had grown completely orange with rust hung crookedly across the top of the rustic building: ’Bout Out General Store.

  “A general store?” she asked playfully. “Like in the Old West? They have saloons here, too?” She laughed.

  Her father turned to her with a smile branching out beneath his beard. Laughter spilled from his lips, too, like a bass line from a radio. He looked so goofy, with his open mouth and his eyes swollen to the size of shooter marbles behind the strong lenses of his glasses that Claire’s laughter intensified. She held her stomach again—this time to feel the vibrations. God—laughter. Like the face of a long-lost friend.

  On the opposite side
of the lot, a pickup truck missing its tailgate—and its passenger door—and its front bumper—rumbled across the gravel. Mud-tinted water droplets hit the air as the front tire splashed through a puddle. Brakes squealed; the bed actually slipped forward on the truck’s frame, bumping into the cab as the driver finally managed a crooked stop just barely within reach of another gas pump’s hose.

  The door of the pickup let loose a vulture’s squawk as a white-haired man in a plaid shirt and a padded vest stepped out. The face he turned toward the Cains’ Gremlin was covered in skin as yellowed and brittled by time as the pages of a Civil War–era diary.

  He frowned at them, grabbed the closest nozzle, and shoved it into his gas tank.

  “Looks like it works,” her dad said.

  “I stand corrected,” Claire replied quietly, her smile slowly disappearing.

  Dr. Cain pointed skyward. “Perfect conditions for this to turn into quite the ice storm,” he explained.

  Claire’s face flushed; her mouth drooped. The attack had happened during an ice storm, too. Suddenly, the rain against the tin roof above them sounded like hundreds of fingers drumming impatiently against a table. Just like Claire had drummed her fingers on the university library table while she’d waited for Rachelle.

  She cringed, her ears filling with the awful, gleeful laughter that had erupted in the Chicago alley.

  “Claire?” Dr. Cain asked, leaning forward. “You got peaked all of a sudden. I just realized—if this turns out to be an ice storm, it will be the first one since—”

  She waved her hand, swallowed hard, shook her head. She offered a weak smile. “Peculiar,” she said, “where the odds are with me,” and winked, wanting her father to laugh again. Wanting to be that father and daughter they’d been just a moment ago, no baggage, no history.

  But her father’s eyes were concerned.

  “You think it’s going to get icy, huh?” she pressed.

  Turning his face back toward the windshield, he said, “It looks like it’s already starting to freeze to the trees—overpasses are probably a mess, too. You fill us up; I’m going to stock up on supplies.”

  “Supplies?”

  “Just some canned goods. Hopefully, a place like this’ll have a few kerosene lamps—”

  “Wait,” she said, a frown smashing her eyebrows together. “How bad do you really think this is going to be?”

  “It’ll be fine. Just taking some precautions,” he said lightly, as he threw his door open.

  Claire nodded and hoisted herself from the passenger seat, watching as her father raised his corduroy coat collar over his ears, shoved his hands in his pockets, and raced through the rain toward the front of the general store.

  “Precautions,” she grumbled, shutting the door to the Gremlin. She had the sinking feeling that her father knew more than he was actually letting on.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  TWO

  Claire slipped the nozzle into the Gremlin’s gas tank just as a white Honda whipped into the lot, careening past the old pickup truck and steering straight toward the entrance of the general store. The passenger door popped while the car was still moving.

  “Wait, Becca,” the driver barked, hitting the brakes too roughly. The car skidded. The gravel offered some traction, though—a way for the tires to find a grip now that ice was beginning to firmly encase the entirety of Peculiar. The car came to a stop less than five feet from the Gremlin.

  A girl in a long blond ponytail, a tight long-sleeved T-shirt, and yoga pants far too thin for the weather emerged from the passenger side while a boy pulled himself out from behind the wheel.

  “Wait,” the boy called again insistently. He took a step from his car, leaving the engine running and the driver door open.

  Catching sight of Claire, he paused. The pause turned into an outright stare, as the boy began to absorb Claire in the same way she’d been taking in the surroundings of Peculiar just a moment ago.

  Claire straightened her shoulders beneath his gaze—not a particularly easy task under the weight of her naval trench coat, which stretched all the way down to her ankles and was made of a treated, weatherproof wool so heavy that the coat had a tendency to make her shoulders ache. Claire had often told her father it was a bit like wearing a house with gold buttons.

  She listened to the gas pour into the Gremlin’s tank as she eyed the boy standing before her—surely, come tomorrow morning, a new classmate. For now, a stranger. A beautiful stranger, with the chiseled face of a TV star and blond hair gelled perfectly from a side part over the top of his head. He wore jeans so dark and crisp they almost seemed dressy, along with a dark turtleneck underneath a black wool coat—nothing at all like the puffy ski coats or the jackets emblazoned with team logos the boys wore back in Chicago.

  The rustle of paper in the wind made Claire turn her eyes toward the still-running Honda. The inside of the car was a mess—the dash littered with what appeared to be school papers and fast-food wrappers skittering about in the winter breeze, the floorboards covered with soda cans and wadded clumps of who knew what. An old sneaker was wedged beneath the driver seat. The car had the appearance of having been messy for so long that the clutter seemed like it was part of the car—like it had grown wild right out of the upholstery.

  The girl in the yoga pants realized what had caught the boy’s attention, and eyed Claire with curiosity, too.

  Claire quickly noticed that this girl—Becca—was the kind of beautiful that could inspire both lust and jealousy that bordered on hatred. And she carried herself with an assurance that warned she wielded her beauty like a sharpened sculptor’s tool.

  Cocky, Claire thought, zeroing in on the way the girl held herself.

  She felt silly, suddenly, inside the secondhand coat and the mailman shoes—literally, big black mailman shoes, with extra insole supports for her damaged feet—that she’d purchased online. She’d told herself back in Chicago that the shoes and the coat looked funky. She had doubts now, as the girl’s beautiful face narrowed into a frown.

  The old man at the other gas pump let out a rough, chest-rattling cough, making them all quit their staring contest. The boy dipped back into the Honda to kill the engine, and Becca pointed at the front window of the general store.

  “Look, Owen. Chas is inside,” Becca announced.

  “Serena and Chas broke up,” Owen said, slamming the driver door shut. His tone was weary—tired, it seemed, of having to reiterate a well-known fact. “Why would he have any idea where she is?”

  “Don’t do that,” Becca pleaded, as her cocky exterior melted. “Please don’t,” she said again, suddenly a girl sick of being pushed aside. “Don’t act like I’m being a nag. Not about this.”

  The air around the two grew heavy. The kind of heavy that found couples who’d been together too long, who had too much history and too many disappointments between them to ever be happy with each other again.

  Becca raised her hands and made a pushing motion, as though she felt the heaviness, too, and wanted to knock it aside. “Look,” she said, “I can see him inside. And we’re already here. Come on. Let’s—” But she swallowed the last of her sentence as her sneaker slid across a particularly thick patch of ice and she started to fall.

  Owen lunged forward to catch her, his fingers gripping her ribs like the laces on a football.

  Becca righted herself and pried his hands free, wearing a look on her face that Claire interpreted as surprise—surprise at being caught, maybe even surprise that Owen was actually there to catch her.

  “He’s inside,” Becca repeated. “I see him. I’m asking him where Serena is. He’ll know. Trust me. Breakups lead to makeups.”

  Owen sighed, shook his head, and followed her up the front steps of ’Bout Out.

  Claire blinked into the bitter wind, watching the screen door swallow the two of th
em.

  Behind Claire, wind attacked a metal trash can. The sound of it crashing against the ground made her jump, swivel with her arms up, ready to defend herself.

  Empty, the can rolled in the wind.

  “Stupid,” she muttered to herself. “Get a grip, Cain.”

  She shoved her hands deep into her pockets, as her dirty-blond, wavy hair clung to the large lapels. She tucked her chin down, trying to use the coat to hide her cheeks from the vicious slap of wind. She closed her eyes, listening to the gusts torture loose pieces in the corrugated tin roof above the gas pumps and hiss through the nearby naked trees. In between the hisses, she heard a soft, pleading meow.

  Claire opened her eyes. The meow hit her ears again, begging for attention. She turned as a sweet yellow tabby emerged from behind the pump, curling his tail into a question mark.

  Her heart ached at the sight of the lonely cat out in the cold. “Hey, sweets,” Claire cooed, squatting so that her coat made a deep blue puddle on the gravel around her.

  “Ain’t no house cat,” the man at the side of the truck called out to her.

  Claire bristled. “If you know he’s a stray,” she mumbled, “then maybe you should take him home.”

  She extended her fingers toward the tabby, cooing for him to come closer, the stretch pulling against her scarred skin and making her back ache.

  “That ain’t no kitty that curls up with you at night and starts kneadin’ your stomach like dough,” he went on, his voice saturated with a Midwest twang. In between the twang, Claire detected the singsong notes of warning: You’ll be sorry . . .

  “Come here,” Claire called sweetly as the wind picked up, sending a cold mist flying across her lips. She wiggled her fingers as she tried desperately to ignore the man. “Come here, babe.”

  “That ain’t no cute little thing that licks dribbled drops a’ cream off the kitchen floor,” the man shouted, loud enough this time for his voice to bounce against the tin roof.