“Chimpacabra bite.”
The way he said it, he could have been talking about hot sauce, and yet my nerves jerked taut. “Chimpacabras aren’t real!” The scoff came out tinged with horror, which ruined its effect.
Ignoring me, Rafe ducked to peer into the hole. A chimpacabra hole. I wanted to laugh, but my memory was too busy fact-checking my father’s stories against what lay below. A chimpacabra larder, which he’d described as being like a mole’s larder, only instead of paralyzing earthworms and bugs with venomous saliva like moles did, chimpacabras stocked up on bigger prey.
“At least toss me a light,” Rafe called over his shoulder.
Returning to his knapsack, I dug out the flashlight. By the time I got back to the crevice and chucked it to him, I knew I couldn’t leave him down there — not if chimpacabras were real. “All right. I’ll get you out of there.” I picked up the rope. “But I want your word that you’ll take me to Moline.”
He strolled into the shaft of sunshine to gaze up at me. “Cross my heart.”
Looking down at him with his tangled hair and gleaming eyes, mistrust bubbled up inside me again. Before I totally lost my nerve, I dropped one end of the rope into the hole. He caught it midair with cobra-strike speed.
“Now what?” My voice came out raspy. “Should I wrap my end around a tree for leverage or —” My question became a scream as the ground under me crumbled and fell away.
11
Every part of me rang with pain until I tried to take a breath and turned it into a siren’s wail. I rolled onto my back. How many bones had I broken — all of them? In two places each?
“Might want to move it,” said a nonchalant voice. “I bet the chimpacabra felt that. It’ll probably be here soon to see what dropped in for dinner.”
That unglued my eyelids. I blinked into the sunlight pouring in from high above. I’d more than tripled the size of the gap. Sitting up sent pain shooting through my limbs, and a groan escaped me. Well, at least I could breathe again, which meant no punctured or collapsed lungs. Rafe stood nearby, re-coiling the rope, stone-faced. From this angle, he seemed bigger than I remembered. Was he angry that I hadn’t gotten him out?
“You’d be feeling worse,” he said, slinging the rope over his shoulder, “if you hadn’t dropped right into its nest.”
I scrambled to my feet to see that yes, I’d landed on some sort of horror-movie prop pile. Furs of all sorts lay clumped together, surrounded by branches, but they weren’t the problem. It was the dung and claws and animal faces still attached to the pelts that had me fumbling through my pockets for my bottle of hand sanitizer. I oversqueezed and ended up with a mound of gel in my palm, which I rubbed up my arms and onto my neck and face, but even then I didn’t feel clean.
“You missed a spot.” Rafe said, gesturing to my ear.
He could snicker himself to death for all I cared. I pocketed the bottle without offering him any. “I can’t believe chimpacabras are real.” Anna was going to have a heart attack when I told her. “What about weevlings, are they real?”
“Too real, like most mongrels.”
“Mongrel as in a dog?”
He shook his head and I groaned, seeing the gleam in his eyes. He liked scaring me. So what? Let him. I was going to find out about everything that I might have to face out there. “Okay, I give. What’s a mongrel?”
“An animal-animal hybrid. Like a wolf juiced with cobra DNA. Or a hyboar.”
“Hyena-boar,” I said, remembering them only too well from the stories. Nasty, carnivorous creatures with razor-sharp tusks.
“How’d you know that?” Rafe looked disappointed.
Guess I’d deprived him of giving a good, gruesome description of them. “Are there a lot of mongrels in the Feral Zone?”
“Yep. And right when you think you’ve seen every combination possible, they mate and you get offspring mash-ups with three species in them. It’s disgusting.” He headed for the tunnel, but then paused by the mouth. “Just so we’re clear, the deal’s off.”
I hurried after him. “Do you know where that tunnel goes?”
“Nope.” He unholstered a serrated knife and pointed to the wide swath of sunshine. “You wait there.”
“What?!”
“When I get out, I’ll drop the rope and pull you up.”
“No way. I’m going with you.”
“You’ll be fine in here where it’s bright. In the tunnel, you’ll just flip out and bring the chimpa running — and then probably try to stop me from killing it.”
“A chimpacabra is not the same thing as a sick person.” The words snapped out of me too hot. I felt exposed, like I’d leaned over too far and given him a good look down my shirt. In a calmer voice, I said, “I was going to do the decent thing and get you out of here.”
“Some would say you took advantage of the situation, bargaining with me.”
Prickly heat crept up my neck. “I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have —”
His laugh cut me off. “Silky, the smartest thing you did up there was cut a deal. But the odds are still better for both of us if you wait here.”
My insides ached, and not from my fall. “Please, let me come with you. I’ll do whatever you say.”
“Whatever I say?” he scoffed, but then he waved me over. “Fine, but keep up. When the tunnels branch off, I’m not yelling back to tell you which one I took.”
I nodded. As he ducked to enter the hole, I glanced over my shoulder to see if my messenger bag had fallen in too, but I didn’t see it. “Hey,” I whispered, already breaking my resolution not to be an annoying silky, whatever that was. “Can I carry the flashlight?”
“No. You won’t put it to good use. Down here, it’s a weapon.”
“Because chimpacabras have really sensitive eyes.”
He paused to look back at me, surprised, and then just pushed up the cropped leg of his pants, took a knife from an ankle sheath, and handed it to me. The blade wasn’t even metal, but fiberglass. Doubting its effectiveness, I touched the point.
“Sharp enough?” he asked blandly.
Blood welled from the prick. I clamped my mouth shut, curled my fingers into a fist, and joined him in the tunnel. The dank, dark smell of the earth enveloped me.
“If you see a gob of slime on the wall, don’t touch it,” he said and started forward.
Good thing he told me, because, of course, touching slime would be my natural inclination. Why not warn me not to eat it?
If he was impressed by how well I kept up, he didn’t let on. I had two things going for me: I was a runner, and I didn’t need to crouch nearly as much as he did to keep from scraping the tunnel’s ceiling. What I had going against me was that everything my father had ever said about chimpacabras was now replaying in my mind. Part mole, part chimpanzee, all nasty — especially the nugget that my dad had thrown in about them crawling out of their warrens at night to steal human babies from cribs. When I was older, I figured that my father had swiped that detail from a little-known fact about chimpanzees: They really did eat human babies if given the opportunity.
At least the tunnel finally seemed to be sloping upward — because I could not get out of this nightmare fast enough. We spilled into a chamber like the one we’d just come from. But then the flashlight revealed walls that were pocked with more tunnels. This wasn’t another larder; it was a hub. Rafe paused before each opening and inhaled deeply — probably checking for fresh air. After making a full circle, he shrugged.
“What if none of them lead to the surface?” I whispered.