The Hunt (The Hunt 1)

With horror, I see the cover start to rise. She hasn’t been able to apply the locks yet. The steel door rises high enough for them to wrap their fingers around the bottom -

– when a galleon of bodies pummels into them, knocking them off. Naked bodies everywhere, elbows jockeying for position, arms striking randomly in the air. The cover falls back down. And this time, even with a dozen hands grabbing for the edges, the cover stays down. She’s applied the locks.

Run! a voice in my head shouts. It’s my own voice, barking at me. Run! But my feet are cemented to the ground, my eyes glued to the monitors. I need to be sure she’s fine.

She’s fine, my voice tells me again. She’s locked in, there’s no way they can break in. Everyone knows this.

Or will, and very soon. Will know there’s no way to get to the virgin female heper.

And they will remember, very soon, something else: the virgin male heper still in the Control Centre. And that the male, unlike the female, is very accessible.

Run, Gene! And this time the voice is not my own, but Ashley June’s. Run! Now’s your chance to get out!

This is why she cut her palm. This is why she lured them all the way down to the Introduction. To give me the slimmest of windows through which to escape to the outside.

Run, Gene!

I run.

For the moment, the corridors are eerily quiet. Even the stairwell harbours only a faint murmuring, a backwater of hisses. I need to go down four flights, towards them, to get to the ground floor and then out.

I place my foot down on the first step . . . and it’s as if I’ve inadvertently triggered a button. Instantly, a roar shrieks up the stairwell, a bellow of anger, frustration, realisation, lust. And then a grab bag of sounds: nails, teeth, hissing, clawing, bounding up the walls and stairs. Towards me.

So soon, and they’re coming.

I leap down to the next landing – towards them – and the impact sends a reverberation shooting up my legs and along my spine. Ashley June made it look easy. I grab for the railing with my left hand and – imitating her – swing my body around, leaping for the next landing, my body still rattling.

From below, the bellow of shrieks intensifies. It’s my fear, oozing off me in waves, they smell. I fling my body down another landing, just one more to go, even as they race up towards me. The impact is a sucker punch to my intestines. I collapse to my legs, cradling my midsection, doubled over in pain. My vision goes yellow, red, black.

I get up, gritting my teeth against the pain, and heave my body to the landing on the ground floor. I glance down the well just before I land: long-nailed hands on the railing, a flurry of bodies flashing by on the stairs, eyes glowing in the dark. Black oil gushing up at me, unleashed.

I burst through the doors on my left, get my legs working under me. Turn right, right, left, then I’ll be in the foyer. Twenty seconds away.

They are five, ten seconds away.

With my legs filling with lactic acid, I push for the exit, ignoring the mathematical certainty of my own demise. That is the exact phrase as it enters my turbulent head: the mathematical certainty of my own demise.

I turn right, knowing I have at most only two seconds of life left.

Race down the corridor, my form all but forgotten, just a rag doll pulled along by fear, arms flailing out.

Five seconds later, as I turn down the last corridor into the foyer, I’m still alive. I’m almost blinking in surprise.

They must have shot past the ground-floor landing, thinking I was still up in the Control Centre. I’m safe, I’m going to make—

An explosive bang. They’ve burst through the doors on the ground floor, are already racing down the corridors towards me, fast and furious and desirous, panic now driving them, the panic that they might lose me to the sun outside. A dark sea, an incoming tide of black acid.

My feet sink into the cool Turkish-knotted royal carpet in the foyer. I turn to my left. There. The double-panelled front doors, thinly rimmed by the daylight outside. Twenty yards to freedom. I take off for them, every last ounce of energy long gone, somehow finding speed.

The deranged voices behind, the scrabble of nails on marble, skittering and slipping.

Ten yards away. My arms stretch forward, reaching for the door handle.

Something grabs my ankle.

It is warm and moist and sticky. But with enough solidity and strength to keep its hold on me, to bring me to the ground.

I crash with a thud, air pushed out like a bagpipe squashed.

It’s Phys Ed, the spongy stickiness of what remains of him, anyway, holding my ankle, pulling himself towards me. Yellow pus runs down his pizza face. His mouth, partially toothless now (I see his fallen teeth scattered on his chest and the carpet), opens to hiss, but what comes out instead is a blubbering, sloppy mess of sounds.

I kick at him with my foot, but his grip around my ankle tightens. “Gah!” I shout. “Gah!” I strike out with my other foot, missing his hand but finding his face instead. My foot sinks in through the gooey stickiness – for one stomach-churning moment, I feel his eyeball pressed against the sole of my foot – before finding bone. What used to be bone. The head not so much explodes as peels off his neck.

No time to dwell. I’m on my feet, hand on the handle, pushing through the front doors. The brightness is blinding, but I don’t stop. Not with the cries of anger and frustration baying right behind me. I run with squinting eyes, barely seeing, my feet slapping at the sand beneath me, intent only on creating more distance, more distance between me and the doors; and I don’t stop, even when I know I’m far enough, but keep pounding the ground, and I’m shouting, “Gah! Gah! Gah!” not sure if this is because of anger or victory or defeat or love or fear. But I just keep shouting it over and over until I’m no longer shouting it but sobbing it, no longer running but face down in the sand, bent over with fatigue, my hands clenching and unclenching sand, sand in my fist, sand in my nostrils, sand in my mouth, throat, and the only sounds are my ragged breath and raspy sobs, my tears dripping down into the sand, bathed in the wonderful, painful, blinding light of day.

I am emptied of energy, thought, emotion, as I pick myself up and walk to the Dome. My bones are still jangling from the pounding they took on the stairwell. I examine my ankles: no swelling and, more important, no cuts or scratches on my left ankle where I was grabbed. It is quiet, not even the sound of wind blowing. I make a wide arc around the library; I’m not overly worried that any other hunter will charge out, especially with the SunCloak gone, but I’m not taking any chances. I think I hear a hissing, wet and slushy, coming from inside. But that recedes as I draw closer to the Dome.

And in the heper village, all is quiet.

“Hey!” Silence. “Hey!”

I walk into a mud hut. Empty, as expected. And the second mud hut is just as empty. Dust motes float in a beam of sunlight.

And everywhere I go, it’s the same. Empty. Not a heper in sight. Not in the vegetable patch, not under the apple trees, not on their training ground, not in any of the mud huts.

They’re gone. From what I can gather, they left in a hurry. Their breakfast sits half-eaten in the mess hall, slices of bread nibbled at, glasses half-full with milk. I scan the plains, looking for a moving dot or a cloud of dust. But they’re nowhere to be seen.

The pond offers the reprieve I seek: water. And space and sunlight and silence. I take a long drink, then lie down next to the pond, dangling my right arm and leg into the cool water. In about four hours, the walls of the Dome will rise up, emptied of its former occupants. A new occupant will have taken their place – no, not an occupant, a prisoner. For that is what it is going to feel to me, alone within its glass walls. A prisoner as surely as Ashley June is a prisoner within the walls of the pit, down in the dark recesses of the earth.

How long can she last down there? The old male heper, they’d said, had stored enough food and water to last a month. But how long, alone in the darkness and cold, b

efore you lost all hope? How long before your mind snapped under the constant scratching and tapping and pounding of the door above?

And why had she done it?

I know the answer, it’s obvious, but I don’t understand it.

She did it for me. She knew, as soon as she saw the SunCloaked man burst into the main building, that I’d be dead within minutes. She did the only thing that would save me.

I run my left hand along the gravel, letting the sharpness pierce my palm. I bite my lower lip, unable to shake a feeling that I’m missing something crucially important. An indelible sense that I’m loafing when I should be hustling. I should be doing something – but what? I slap at the pond in frustration, letting water splash onto my body, my face.

I sit up. What am I missing? I replay in my mind the last images of Ashley June in reverse order: jumping into the pit, rushing into the Introduction, flying down the stairs, in the kitchen writing a letter, throwing it into the oven—

I jolt up.

That wasn’t an oven.

It was the Umbilical.

I leap to my feet and run over to it. Even yards away, I see a blinking green light, right above the slot, a steady pulsing. I’m there in seconds. I grab the slot, pull it open.

There. In the corner, a small folded piece of paper.

It crinkles lightly in my fingers as I unfold it. A short letter, written hurriedly, if not frantically.

Gene,