Feral (3 page)

She heads straight for the door.

And thinks nothing of the feet she hears on the tile, a student or a prof or a TA leaving right behind her. She even holds the door for him—the low “Thank you” says it's a man. She thinks nothing of the others, either, clustered around the base of the front steps, smoking.

Claire spends so much time at the university where her father teaches that it just seems natural for people to gather this way. College kids always linger around stairs and buildings, clustered, talking, laughing. Claire passes them, still feeling light about her texts with Rachelle:
Next time.
Rachelle loves her, needs her, as best friends do. Claire is needed. Knowing it makes the night air smell clean.

The group out in front of the library lets go of the stairs and follows. But even this doesn't seem odd. Not yet.

The night feels far too cold to belong to early spring; Claire's breath is visible—just as visible as the fog that's building, laying like a gauzy curtain over items no more than five feet away. Her knees are going pink beneath her uniform skirt. Her nose tingles.

The rain that had been dancing against the library windows is picking up again, but each drop feels sharp against her face. The rain is freezing. It's already early April, but winter seems to be insisting on one last good storm. The sidewalk beneath her is turning the kind of slippery that almost makes her feel as though the soles of her shoes have wheels.

Claire hates the unsteady sensation.

They laugh, the group behind her, as Claire walks down one street, rounds another corner. They shout big talk, egging each other on.

Claire's phone buzzes.
Dad stuck in lab,
her dad's assistant has texted.
Rain 2 freeze. Go home now. Take R with u.

Claire slips her phone back in her pocket. When her father has his grad assistants text her, it means he's completely unreachable. He's locked the door of his lab and won't be out again until he's ready to die of starvation.

He doesn't know that Rachelle never showed. He doesn't know Claire's alone.

Sure, she could go back to the library and call campus security, and she could have someone walk her, now that night is falling, to the science building. She could hang out with the grad assistant until her dad is ready to go home. But she suspects that by the time Dr. Cain finally pries himself out from his lab, the streets will be too slick for driving or walking. They'll be stuck trying to figure out a way to sleep on his office furniture.

Claire would rather sleep in her own bed.

She passes block after block. The group behind her trails by only about six feet. Their shouts are getting louder. The ground slicker. Cars are sliding. Claire needs to get home, because soon cars will start skating right off the road, careening onto sidewalks, where they can knock her flat. In fact, she figures she'd be smart to go ahead and get away from the main thoroughfares, all those slippery roads and cars with no traction, not on ice.

She turns down an alley—in Chicago, alleys are as common as trees, after all; they've never been the sinister shadow to her that they might have been had she grown up in another city. Passing by an empty garage, though, the laughter behind her starts to have a different ring to it. Sharper. A little mean.

“Schoolgirl!” she hears one of them say, and the skin tightens on the back of her neck. Hairs turn into porcupine needles. She's still in her uniform. They're talking about her.

She eyes the pavement, where she can see their long shadows swagger beneath the streetlights. She can smell their cigarettes. And something else—something metallic—the vague smell of danger.

Her heart thumps hard enough that each beat makes her fingertips tingle.

Now she does want to turn around, run back to the library. But the alley is so narrow, she'll send herself straight into the arms of the group behind her if she pivots on her heel. The only thing she can do is walk straight ahead, searching for an escape to open up in front of her.

Her eyes bounce about, between nearby streetlights and distant tree limbs that are all beginning to sparkle in the moonlight that peeks through the clouds, now that the ice is growing thicker. Icicles are beginning to form, dangling like stalactites from the edges of buildings. Freezing fog is accompanying the drizzle; when it lands, it sticks to all the cold surfaces. Before it settles, though, it creeps along the sidewalks like a cat on the hunt.

It seems as though the entirety of Chicago has rushed inside, all of them shaking their heads in disbelief. “An ice storm in April,” they're all saying, as they thunk saucepans onto stoves, boiling milk for hot cocoa. “Who'd have ever thought?”

Claire speeds up, flexing the thighs that feel tight beneath the wintry chill. The footsteps behind her thunder in a way that makes Claire believe not only that the boys are trailing her, but that they know she's now aware of being followed.

They can smell her fear.

She keeps eyeing the shadows that the streetlights draw long and lean at her side, noting that one of the figures behind her bobs up and down, obviously walking on the balls of his feet. A skinny kid, she can tell from the tiny shadows his arms make beneath the hiked-up sleeves of a coat. Skinnier than the rest. But wearing enormous clothes.

“You like ratting us out?” one of them shouts. “You like ruining everything?”

At this point, she starts to run.

So do they.

Claire screams, her arms pumping. But they're so fast. She looks over her shoulder once, and she sees them, black faceless silhouettes surrounded by the fog. They run, and she can only think to dart straight into the arms of a parking lot, behind an apartment building.

The lot is vacant, even though there are lights on in a few apartments. They will catch her, she thinks, if she doesn't get out of this alley. Her only available option is a parking lot, behind an apartment building.

Claire runs across the cracked pavement, because even though the cars aren't parked here tonight, the edge of the apartment building is so close. She will race around the side of the building and be on a street with lights and the apartment building's front entrance and she will run inside and the boys will not hurt her, not there, not when she screams in the lobby, making the worker at the front desk reach immediately for the phone: 911.

But when she gets there, to the far edge that she expects to sprint around, finding her escape, there is no out. The brick building butts up against the next, without so much as an inch between.

Claire pants, staring at her dead end. Still determined to save herself, she pulls her phone from her pocket and she dials 911.

Before it connects, she can hear the feet behind her grow louder, closer. She knows that everyone inside the apartment building has closed their windows against the storm, and with their TVs on or their phones pressed against their heads or their earbuds in, they will never hear her, no matter how loud she screams.

The phone finally begins to ring. But the feet are so close. There will not be time to tell the operator where she is.

Claire tries, in that moment, to steel herself against what is about to come.

She is frozen; she is caught. She stares at the seam between the two buildings, barricaded. She does nothing, just stands, and as seconds pulse, she knows there is no preparing herself for what they are about to do to her. There is no predicting it. She can guess, but her mind doesn't work like theirs do; her imagination cannot come up with ways to hurt another human being.

“911, what is the nature of your emergency?” the operator finally asks.

“Please, God,” Claire whispers. “Don't let me die.”

The boys are here. They surround her; they kick her to the ground.

Claire's phone flies from her hand, strikes the brick wall, shatters.

Shouts explode as her parka is shredded, the downy lining hitting the air like the insides of a feather pillow.

She fights back, but there are so many hands, all of them punching and scratching and tearing her clothes. She claws against the pavement, trying to hoist herself onto her knees, trying to crawl. But they hit her, knocking her down. Her skin splits open. It doesn't even feel as though she's being cut—she feels as though their hands and their nails and their anger, it's all tearing her, like she's an old bedsheet being torn into rags. They rip an inch-thick section of hair straight out of her scalp. They shred her shirt, until it hangs in tatters. Until she's in nothing more than her bra.

One of them picks up a metal trash can. He dumps it, scattering slimy, foul-smelling refuse across her body. He slams the can against the back of her head, turning her skull into a gong. They laugh, take turns picking it up and throwing it on her over and over. The force of every blow turns so hard, so vicious, she doesn't even know what they're hitting her with anymore. She only knows that it can't be their fists. And all the way through it, they're shouting with glee, enjoying it.

She presses her palm against the pavement, tries once more to pull herself forward. Even now, she's trying to crawl away. But they strike her arm—the pain is so agonizing, she's not sure if they hit her with something blunt—some sort of club—or something sharp, like an ax. She screams as their laughter and their cheers explode again.

The same pain hits her legs. They're crushing her, snapping her bones. She swears she can hear them break.

The fingers of her right hand crunch when the boys begin to take turns stomping on them. Smashing them beneath their boots like cockroaches.

Hands reach under her skirt. Fingers curl under the waistband of her underwear. And she knows. Beaten and broken and dizzy from so much pain and the loss of so much blood, she knows what's coming. There's no stopping it.

The siren sounds like another cheer, at first. She's still whimpering soft pleas to stop when the police jump from the car. And then, in that moment before the truly horrendous can happen, the hands disappear from under her skirt. Feet stomp about her—the gang and the police both. She listens to shouts and other bodies being thrown to the ground and cuffs rattling.

The girl cop is the one who comes to Claire's side. She has blond hair in a ponytail, Claire notices—it's yellow like sweet corn. But she's got kind of a thick body—like there are lots of hours at the gym under her uniform. She's got that look of a woman who knows how to kick any guy who wants to rough her up to the curb. There's a soft roundness about her face when she looks at Claire. She's worried.

The girl cop tries to push Claire's hair from her clammy face. But her long hair is tangled in the blood on her chest and her arms. Her hair is smashed into her bleeding sores, and when the girl cop tries to push her hair away, she winds up tugging the strands from her wounds, and it's like being sliced into all over again. Claire wails as the girl cop picks up her hand, and as other voices shout about calling the paramedics.

The scream startles the girl cop, and she reaches up to grab hold of a small gold charm hanging from her own neck. She slips it off her head, puts the necklace in Claire's hand. “It's St. Jude,” she whispers. The patron saint of the Chicago police force—and lost causes.

She frowns as she wraps her fingers around Claire's wrist. Searching for a pulse. She shakes her head; her charm has failed. “It's too late for you,” she tells Claire. “You're dead.”

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.