The Trap (The Hunt 3)

She thinks of the dome. Her prison. Her home. By now, with dusk coming to a close, the dome has risen out of the desert ground. She imagines what it must look like now, with onyx dusk rays beaming off its glassy, globular surface. She thinks of the pond inside the dome, its surface flat and still as a mirror, of the mud huts that sit empty and uninhabited, as they will for centuries and millennia to come—

And in that last second of existence, she closes her eyes. She feels so terribly, terribly alone.

Forty-five

I RUN INTO the elevator lobby. Slam up against the glass door. Peer down the atrium. At first, I can’t quite comprehend what I’m seeing. The elevator, stripped of walls and roof and reduced to a platform, is rising toward me, about twenty floors below. White-pale blobs swirling on the platform. And for just a millisecond, there is a part in the bodies and I catch a glimpse of Sissy. Her face oddly placid.

The gun fires in my hand before I’m even aware of aiming or pulling the trigger. The bullet punctures a hole into the soft, pale mass, a meter from Sissy. The bodies ripple like a flag in the wind; one body keels over and falls off the platform, down into the atrium, splattering when it hits the marble floor of the lobby. But the other bodies seem unaffected as ever.

I pull the trigger again. Click. The chamber is empty.

The elevator, still ascending, is now about fifteen floors below. Too far below to leap—from this height, I’ll likely bounce right off the platform and down the atrium to my death. But there’s no time to spare. I bend my knees, leap out. Wind gushes through my clothes; my lungs ram up my throat. I plummet, arms pirouetting, toward the ascending platform.

Forty-six

SISSY

THE DUSKERS CAVE in on Sissy. They hiss loudly, their rank breath whistling between their exposed teeth and fangs.

So dark under them, so cold.

Everything happens so quickly, afterward she will barely be able to recall what happened.

A gunshot. Then a falling blur. The shape of something smacking into the duskers from above. A sickening splat. Someone crashing to the floor. With such force, it causes the whole platform to gong and hum.

The duskers domino into one another, plummet down the atrium. Leaving only one dusker on the platform, dizzy and concussed, temporarily out of commission.

Whoever just crashed down is now bouncing toward the edge, about to fall off.

Afterward, she will not know what possessed her to reach out. But still curled on the elevator floor, she snaps out her arm at the hazy shape skidding away.

Fingers wrap around her wrist. The shape falls over the edge, still gripping her.

And now she is being pulled across the platform. To avoid sliding any farther, she hooks her feet around the ankles of the disoriented—but quickly reviving—dusker.

Her face is pulled over the precipice, and she stares down the vertigo-inducing drop of the atrium. Fallen duskers lie far below, splattered on the lobby floor. Glass shards scattered everywhere.

And Gene, his face directly below hers, his sweaty hand clasped in hers. Slipping out.

The dusker shakes its head, hissing. Its eyes turn to Sissy.

Sissy and Gene stare at each other desperately. “Help me,” they both utter at the same time.

Forty-seven

HELP ME,” I whisper through clenched teeth.

“Gene,” Sissy says. Her eyes do the rest of the speaking. They are pleading with me. Because she can’t hold me much longer.

A dark shape looms above her. It’s a dusker.

“Sissy!” I shout. “Let go of me. ”

Still she holds on. Its shadow falls over her.

I let go of her hand. In that same moment, she flips over to face the dusker.

For a moment, I’m suspended in air, touching nothing but the emptiness of a vacuum. I begin to fall. With a shout, I grasp for something—anything—and my hand catches a thick outcropping at the bottom of the elevator floor. I scrabble for purchase until my hands meet the metal framework of the elevator and I’m able to pull my whole body up and over onto the elevator floor. Gravity presses down on me as the elevator continues to rise.

Sissy is holding the dusker by the cuff of its neck. She’s the weaker creature, but not now, not after what the dusker’s been through. Its skin and joints and muscles and bones have softened under the burn of sun rays, and it is now more soft putty than hard bone and muscles. Digging into some hidden reserve of energy, Sissy slams its head into the wall that’s still rushing down past us. And she holds it there, the skull that’s been softened by the sun into the consistency of an unshelled boiled egg. And even though the dusker fights back, flailing its arms and trying to kick, Sissy doesn’t ease up one bit. She holds its head pressed against the passing wall, and like cheese being grated, its head is shredded into oblivion.

The elevator reaches the top floor.

Ping.