For hours.
My headache was back, and when I shut my eyes all these images danced on the backs of my eyelids.
At one point a whitecoat came in and dumped another “experiment” into the crate next to mine. I glanced over, curious, then quickly turned away, my heart aching. It looked enough like a kid to make me feel sick, but more like a horrible fungus. Huge pebbly growths covered most of its body. It had few fingers and only one toe, stuck onto the end of a foot like a pod. Senseless blue eyes looked out at me, blinked.
Sometime in the next half hour, I realized the “experiment” was no longer breathing. It had died, right next to me.
Horror-struck, I looked across at Angel. She was crying. She knew.
Finally, much later, the door to the lab opened. A crowd came in, and I heard human voices and Eraserlike croons and laughs. They wheeled a big flatbed cart to our aisle.
“I count only four,” a man said in a prissy, concerned voice.
“Two bought it,” Ari said, sounding triumphant. “Back in Colorado. This is what’s left.” He kicked my cage, making the bars rattle. “Hi, Max. Miss me?”
“Is the Director quite sure about this?” a woman asked. “It seems a shame—there’s so much more we can learn from them.”
“Yes,” said a third whitecoat. “It’s just too risky. Given how uncooperative the little one has been.”
I caught Angel’s eye and gave her a thumbs-up, proud of her resistance. She sent a weak grin back at me.
Then her cage was grabbed roughly and swung onto the cart like luggage. She winced as her bruised cheek hit the side, and fury flamed in me again.
In the next second, Ari grabbed my crate and swung me up next to her on the cart, letting me drop with a crash that made me bite my lip hard. Like I needed another head wound. He grinned through the bars, letting me see his long yellow fangs. “Strong, like bull,” he bragged.
“Your dad must be so proud,” I said snidely, and he angered instantly, punching my cage so hard I almost toppled over.
“Easy,” murmured a whitecoat, earning herself a murderous snarl from Ari.
Then two more Erasers loaded Nudge and Fang on next to us. With Ari trailing behind, looking angry, they pushed us through wide double doors. The hall outside was painfully bright and overlaid with the smells of floor cleaner and office machines.
Clutching the bars of my crate, I peered out, trying to recognize a doorway, an office—anything that would tell me what section of the School we were in. The Erasers poked their fingers through our bars, trying to scratch us, taunting, literally rattling our cages. I wondered how much strength it would take to grab an Eraser finger and snap it.
We took a sharp left turn and got pushed through more double swinging doors, and then we were outside. I inhaled eagerly, but even outdoors at the School the air was tainted and foul.
Squinting, I shifted from side to side in my cage, looking for landmarks. Behind us was the lab building. Ahead of us, maybe a hundred yards away, was a low redbrick building. We were in the yard in back of the School.
The yard I used to look out at, in the dead of night, from our lab window.
The yard where Erasers were trained to bring down prey and tear it limb from limb.
Which was probably why they were laughing.
64
The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective.
Like right now. My choices were to either give in and let them kill all of us or fight back with everything I had.
I chose the second one, ’cause I’m just funny that way.
In the split second I had to ponder what form my “fighting to the death” would take, a shadow blotted out the sun.
“Got your running shoes on, piggy?” Ari asked, pushing his hairy fingers through the bars of my cage and wiggling them. “Feeling like a little exercise? Wanna race? Wanna play food fight? You’re the food!”
I grinned evilly. Then I leaned over and chomped hard on Ari’s fingers. He sucked in a deep breath, then yelled in awful pain. I gathered my strength and bit down harder, until I actually felt my teeth break his skin, tasted his horrible blood. But you know what? I didn’t care. Seeing Ari hurt was worth it.
After the car wreck, biting anything hurt majorly, but I shut out the pain and put every ounce of my fury into my aching jaws. Ari was shaking my cage, slamming it with his other hand, and my head was getting snapped around like a paddleball.