Prey (4 page)

He rested his lower jaw on the back of one five-fingered claw. The way he just lay there, lazy, smiling, with that human-looking hand of his, he looked sort of like Kermit the Frog. Or perhaps a distant cousin.

Eve and Chelsea stood in the smaller section of the basement reserved for humans. There, recessed fluorescents glowed in a hung ceiling and light oak paneling covered the walls. It, unlike the rest of the house, was tasteful.

“See, he's not so bad, is he?”

Chelsea shook her head. It was like looking at one of her nature books, only close up. The OCD warnings had faded and she found herself pleased to be seeing this amazing thing.

“How big is he?” she asked, stepping closer to the Plexiglas.

“Five or six feet, last I measured. But that's mostly tail.” Eve rapped on the Plexiglas with a knuckle of
her right hand. “This was the most expensive part. Three inches thick, but he could have dug through drywall or even wood with those claws of his, and I'd have spent my entire life replacing walls.”

Chelsea looked again at the thick “hand” Koko rested his head on, this time noticing the sharp, thick claws. “He tries to get out?”

Eve shook her head. “Not really. He's pretty happy, but any intelligent creature gets a little antsy now and then. I couldn't risk him wandering off in the winter. He'd die in a few hours in the cold. And they're not stupid. Monitors are the most advanced lizards on earth. They can recognize individual faces. Koko even knows the sound of my voice, don't you Koko?”

As if in response, the big head flicked out a forked tongue. Chelsea was startled by the sudden movement. It proved Koko was really alive.

“Ready for the big event?” Eve asked. Not waiting for a response, she walked over to the circular opening and grabbed something long and metal leaning against the wall. Then she set the plastic bag on the floor and withdrew one of the rats. Shed of the wetness inside the bag, it looked less gross, as if it really were just sleeping. “I'll do the first, you do the next two, okay?”

Again, Chelsea wasn't given time to respond. The metal thing Eve had grabbed, about six feet long, she noticed, had some kind of mechanical claw. The bio teacher grabbed the dead rat with its business end, lifted it, slid the little window open, and pushed the long arm, rat dangling, toward the darling giant Kermit head.

SNAP!

Chelsea barely saw Koko move. One minute the rat was dangling in front of him, the next, it was gone, Koko was chewing on something, and Eve was withdrawing an empty metal claw. When Koko swallowed, apparently not bothering to chew much, a rat-sized lump appeared in his throat and shortly disappeared.

Chelsea was repulsed, terrified, and fascinated.

“Your turn.”

Chelsea turned to her teacher, not bothering to wonder exactly what sort of shock was on her face.
What are you, out of your freaking mind?
she wanted to say, but she didn't. Instead she made a little squeaky sound in the back of her throat.

Gently but quickly, like an impatient mother, Eve reached out and pulled her closer. “Come on, come on. Please. I couldn't find anyone else. Chelsea, if you can't do this, I'll have to cancel my whole vacation,
and I've never been picked up by a limo before. Please. It's not so bad. I swear. Just try.”

Chelsea let the woman guide her a few steps closer, let her put the metal thing in her hands. It was heavy. Heavier than a baseball bat or a rake. She noticed scratches at the end and a few dents. Teeth marks?

Eve held up the open bag. “You don't even have to touch them with your fingers. Just use the claw to pull one out.”

Trying not to shake, Chelsea maneuvered the claw end into the bag. It worked pretty easily. In seconds, she snagged one of the two remaining rats and hefted it. It dripped a little as it came free of the bag.

Chelsea thought she would puke, but Eve was thrilled. “That's it. That's great. Just put it into the window and reach it toward him. Koko will do the rest.”

Eve slid the window open and even pulled the claw closer to the hole, as if she were guiding the efforts of a child. The woman was so calm, so certain, Chelsea felt a little stupid as she stuck the claw deep in the habitat toward the big head.

“Talk to him. That way he'll recognize you when you come again.”

She cast her teacher another glance, then said, weakly, “Hey, K-Koko. Here you go, fella. Nice…”

THUNK!

The bite was so powerful it nearly knocked the metal pole out of her hands. It didn't feel like a living thing at all had touched the pole—more like it had been hit by a truck. Chelsea opened her eyes wide and, eager to get it over with, as if the claw were her arm, started quickly pulling it out as Koko chewed and swallowed.

Eve slowed her. “Not so fast. Don't want to drop it. If you do, there's a spare here, but sometimes I use it to clear out the crap if I don't want to go in. If you have to, you can use it to get the first pole back, but clean it with bleach before you feed him again. And don't lose both of them. I don't have a third. Come on now, one more and we're done.”

Chelsea made that involuntary whining noise again, but managed to fish out the last rat and stick the claw back in.

THUNK!

She was done. With a sense of accomplishment she carefully withdrew the claw again and laid it against the wall. Eve was beaming. “Great! Just great! You did it!”

Chelsea was feeling pretty good about things, but then Eve stepped closer to the clear wall. She laid her forehead against it, watched Koko chew and said,
“You know, if you think about it, it's not a bad way to go.”

Chelsea's face scrunched. OCD or not, that was a creepy thing to say. “What do you mean?”

“You're young, maybe you've never seen anyone die slowly from cancer,” Eve said. “I guess I think it would be like giving yourself over to a greater intelligence rather than something that just doesn't care.”

“My grandmother died from cancer.”

“Oh…I'm sorry.”

“It took three weeks, but I don't think we ever considered feeding her to a monitor lizard,” Chelsea said. Then she stepped away. She wasn't so much offended as freaked, but she used her indignation to mask that, a trick she'd done many times before. Only her parents and Dr. Gambinetti knew her well enough to call her on it.

Eve sounded abashed. “I am so sorry. I only meant that it was quick and seemed merciful.”

The explanation didn't help. Chelsea started backing toward the steps, but Eve stopped her.

“Just a few more things,” Eve said, sounding like a teacher again. “Then you can go.” She indicated a set of thermostats and dials on the wall. Next to them a printed sheet with instructions and phone numbers
had been posted. “The entire system is automated, so there shouldn't be any problems, but when you feed him, just check to make sure that the temperature and the humidity are at the right levels. He also needs all three lights on during the days in order to digest, and the UV light so he can produce vitamin D3. Maybe you can do a paper on that for your bio project! If anything goes wrong—anything—there are phone numbers here for you to call.”

She turned to Chelsea. “Okay?”

“Got it,” she answered, but she was already at the base of the stairs. As she started climbing, she could swear Koko lifted his head slightly to follow her movements, and flicked his long forked tongue.

Chelsea counted the twelve steps going up, grabbed her jacket from the kitchen table and headed for the front door. The rush of victory had faded, replaced with the image of her grandmother being eaten by Koko. The OCD was screaming:

It'll get you. It'll tear the flesh out of your legs. It'll rip open your chest.

None of which seemed terribly unreasonable. To keep it from happening, she looked at the staircase heading up from the front hallway and furiously counted the steps to the second floor. She stopped at
eight, turned to the door, twisted the handle and pulled. It was locked. The key was missing from the lock. She felt her heart begin to pound.

Eve came up behind her, a chain of keys dangling from her hand. “Another gift from the shut-in. All the doors work like that. I think she was terrified she might wander outside while sleepwalking or something, so she locked herself in every night. Here.”

Chelsea took the keys in her hand. They looked worn. The labels on them were old and difficult to read.

“This will be your set while I'm gone. I was going to have new ones made, but this is the set the former owner gave me. They work. Just don't force the wrong key into the lock, it might snap when you try to get it out.”

Chelsea nodded, and in an extreme act of self-control, slowly found the right key, inserted it in the lock and pulled open the door before ever so gently pulling the key back out. The cold air, so much colder than the basement or even the living room, sobered her, but not much.

“Sorry if I got a little nervous, there…Eve,” she said as she stepped onto the porch. “I'm working on it.”

Eve lingered at the door, leaning her head against its edge, regarding her carefully. “I know. I could see how difficult this was for you and I'm sorry if I said anything stupid, but it is terribly important that you come back every other day for the next two weeks. You will do that, won't you? Bring a friend with you if need be. And if for some reason you absolutely can't, call me. I'll have to fly back. It's my first vacation in ten years, but if that's the way it is, that's the way it is. Okay?”

Chelsea caught her breath, feeling terrible. “I'll do it,” she said. “I promise. Really. It wasn't so bad. And he looks kind of like Kermit.”

Eve smiled, but her eyes still scrutinized Chelsea. “He does, doesn't he? Good, then. I believe you. I'll see you in two weeks.”

She shut the door, but as Chelsea walked down the four steps and mounted her bicycle, she felt eyes on her. Eve's from the window? Or Koko's?

It'll rip you apart.

Just a lizard in a cage. Just a lizard in a cage. She repeated it over and over, then counted the number of times she said it. Her throat was so dry. She stopped at the end of the block and entered a small convenience store. There she stood counting the bottles of
Coke in the refrigerator until finally she started to feel a little better.

“Yeah?” a gruff voice said. She turned to see a fat fifty-something man behind the counter. He had hair stubs everywhere, not just on his face, but even on his neck. There was so much fat around his face, his eyes were like slits. Normally he would have set off her OCD, but it was already roaring, and he did at least look better than a lizard that could swallow a rat in one gulp. A little better anyway.

“Dasani, please,” Chelsea said.

“A dollar twenty-nine,” he said back. He had a watery voice that almost sounded like a gurgle. She pulled a crumpled five from her pocket and handed it over. He gave her the bottle, but before she could open it, he handed her the change, almost all of it in quarters.

“I'm out of singles.”

She stared at the coins.
11, 12, 13, 14
quarters. 1, 2 dimes. 1 penny.

The owner watched as she counted them again, and then again.

“What's the matter?” he said. “Don't you trust me?”

That was the problem. She didn't. She didn't trust
the man whose eyes vanished into the folds of his head skin. She didn't trust the change. She didn't trust the water. She didn't even trust the world not to open up and swallow her whole, like a giant, merciful lizard.

Heavy and sticky, the fear lingered like a wet, suffocating blanket, through the day, into the night. Scant moments of sleep were filled with dreams of feeding crickets with human heads to the Rhett's Pets chameleon, and pinky mice that looked like human babies to the milk snake.

Chelsea even woke up afraid.

Over the years, she'd been taught tricks to free herself of the more lasting terrors, to breathe slowly, to try to think of something else long enough for the bad image to “get bored” and go away, anything to lower the continual stream of adrenaline coursing through her body.

It was evidence of the existence of free will, of mind
over matter, that she could, if she tried, make it work. She'd done it before, the first time when she was twelve. After passing a cemetery, she'd been frightened for hours that she'd become like a ghost, invisible forever, unable to touch or be touched unless she counted each and every telephone pole in the city. The dread rose like an ocean tide inside her, drowning her, but finally she was so heartsick of being afraid that she managed not to count at all. The feeling passed in about fifteen minutes, the average time it takes a human body to shed its rush of adrenaline.

But invisible ghosts—that was a girlish fantasy. She'd gotten pretty good with the really silly things. The damp, dead rats in a bag, bred to be food, were real. The feel of the mighty jaws snapping against the metal claw as if it was her arm, was real. And monitor lizards, sometimes, really did eat people, like that guy Eve told her about, who died and his monitors fed on the corpse. She Googled the details and learned that even the victim's father wasn't surprised by the fate of his son. He really hadn't been at all careful with his pets.

That should have been comforting, but it wasn't.

Dogs and cats had been known to do the same, but they didn't scare her the same way. Why? A big barking dog could make Chelsea jump, but it never
set off her OCD. It was their eyes, she decided. They were different. Their faces shone with emotion. They were mammals, after all. They had limbic systems, feelings. Koko, as much as he looked like a Muppet, was more a machine, eyes dead, no matter what Eve Mandisa said about his sophistication.

He had crocodile eyes that shed crocodile tears.

Chelsea spent the day at school trying to think of anything but her new babysitting job. She had two midterms, Spanish and math, and her traumatic encounter with Koko had the unexpected side benefit of making the tests seem easy in comparison. She had something called a 504 in place in case she needed extra time to finish a test, but this time, she didn't have to use it. Mr. Abbaté grinned and patted her on the shoulder when she handed in the trig test with ten minutes to spare.

After that, she pretended to be tired, giving her an excuse to avoid Derek and her friends. She really just didn't want to tell them about Koko, so she wouldn't have to conjure the images she worked so hard to bury. She even took the afternoon off from the pet store, a little mental-health afternoon that she deserved anyway, so she could wander through the center of town, look in the bookstore windows,
and try to shed the last of her fright.

It wasn't a great December day for a walk. It was colder than yesterday and a strong wind yanked the few clinging leaves from the bone-fingered trees. The grass on the commons, stiff but not quite frozen, crunched beneath her feet. The only thing that looked warm were the billowing clouds in the big, blue sky, and they were too far away to afford any comfort. But she walked anyway and, after a while, felt normal—comfortable in her skin. The world felt normal. Winter was coming, yes—but that was normal.

She also finally realized that while Koko was real, her fear of him eating her was just as much a fantasy as becoming invisible. The imagination could do many wonderful things, but it could not ever predict the future.

By the time she returned home she felt stupid and embarrassed. Not because of the OCD—there was nothing she could do about that—but for not talking to her friends. If not Derek, who might make fun of her in his efforts to help, at least she could have spilled her reptilian guts to Lori and Delina.

In a massive effort to exorcise her demons, she typed out the whole story, full of all the details she could remember and posted it on her MySpace blog.

It was difficult, conjuring the giant face of Koko and the sight of him chewing, but in the end she succeeded. With a strong feeling of self-satisfaction, she posted the entry.

It was with even more pleasure that within twenty minutes, she watched the messages of support come rolling in, some from friends at school, some from her therapy group, others from people she knew only as silent voices online.

And so on. She leaned back in her chair and looked at the laptop screen, terribly pleased with herself. She felt like she'd survived some horrendous catastrophe, like Hurricane Katrina, instead of just making it through a training session for a part-time job. It was something she learned in therapy, small steps, small triumphs. She was feeling calm, not even thinking
about the day after tomorrow, when she'd have to go back there again.

So what was the antidote to fear? Knowledge. Since the computer was booted up and some more messages might come in, she decided to open another window in her browser and Google some more about the devils themselves, monitor lizards. She was surprised at the wealth of information and the huge number of lizard fanciers.

There were many species, from the dreaded Indonesian Komodo dragon, the ten-footers that ate everything from water buffalo to each other and were known to dig up fresh human graves for a snack, to the
Varanus brevicauda
, which only grew to about the size of a human finger, tail included. In between, there was the nile monitor, the crocodile monitor, the desert monitor, and the Australian lace monitor, which could grow as long as the Komodo, but wasn't as heavy.

But which was Koko?

Their heads tended to look the same, and now Chelsea was sorry she hadn't plied Eve Mandisa for more information. Monitor owners (who sometimes called them “companion animals” rather than pets, which Chelsea found a little creepy) all talked about
their habitats, but none seemed quite as nice or as big as Koko's. They mentioned the right temps, the dead rats for the larger lizards.

The most common “pet” monitors were the Savannah monitor and the Nile monitor, both of which could grow to be more than six feet. Maybe Koko was one of those, but his skin didn't quite match the olive brown of the Savannah or have the distinct yellow bands of the Nile. There was a larger water monitor that could grow to nine (!) feet and a rare Australian Papuan, the longest lizard in the world, rumored to be able to attain lengths of up to fifteen feet.

She felt a little tickle, asking her to count.
6, 9, 15.
She looked at her room and measured the distance. Six feet was as long as her bed. The image of a lizard in there, waiting for her, flashed in her head, but she beat it back. Nine feet was nearly the width of her ten-by-twelve room. But fifteen feet—something that long couldn't even fit in here. Unless it curled up and waited for her. The Komodos, she read, would hide in the brush, take a bite out of their prey—a big bite—and then wait for it to either bleed to death or succumb to the venom in its saliva before feeding. Scientists used to think Komodos had filthy mouths
full of bacteria that would infect their prey. It was only recently discovered that they actually did produce venom.

Chelsea looked at her leg and pictured a chunk of it missing down to the bone. Pictured it starting to rot while the lizard in her bed just waited, biding its time.

She snapped her head back to the screen.

The other thing a lot of the sites mentioned was how safe the monitors really were, how intelligent and interactive. The big water monitor was so popular because it was so docile. Koko could be a water monitor—a nice, docile water monitor. One of the sites echoed what Eve Mandisa said about dogs killing ten to fifteen people a year. Dogs: 15. Monitors: 1.

15, 1.

What was wrong with that picture? Something didn't square with Chelsea's mathematically diseased mind. Wouldn't the real danger depend on how many dogs or monitor lizards are around? A quick Google told her there were more than sixty million pet dogs in the United States. Her OCD seized on it and pushed it to an illogical extreme.

If there are sixty million dogs and only fifteen kill someone, the kill rate is 0.00000025 percent. But if only one person owns a monitor lizard and it kills him, that
makes the kill rate 100 percent!

Chelsea felt her heart rate rising. When her mother's voice at the door startled her, she felt like she would explode.

“It's amazing how far you've come.” Mom beamed. She stood smiling in the doorway and didn't even yell at her about all the dirty clothes scattered around the room. She just came in and starting picking them up herself. “I don't think I could feed anything dead rats.”

The word
rats
careened through the air, stuck to Chelsea's skin, and started gnawing. She had to look at her arms and legs to prove there was nothing there. She started counting the hairs on her arm, the goose bumps on her skin. This was bad. Words hadn't bothered her for about two years. She felt like she was slipping back to childhood. Slipping, hell—she was falling.

Why had her mother done that? The woman was forever finding just the wrong thing to say.

“Please!” Chelsea howled.

No. I am not going to let this beat me.

Her mother stood up straight, shocked, helpless with worry.

“It's just words. It's just feelings. The feelings will
pass,” her mother said, but she sounded more like she was trying to convince herself.

Summoning her will, Chelsea swallowed and calmed herself. “Yes, I know. You're right. Say it, if you want to.”

“If you can't do this, you don't have to go back there. It's
okay
if you're not ready.”

“No,” Chelsea said, sitting at her computer, typing away. “It's not okay. Ms. Mandisa would have to come home from her trip. And I want to be able to work with animals.”

Her mother walked up and kissed her on the forehead. “You can't do everything in a day, my darling.”

Chelsea was about to close her eyes when she thought she saw the blanket on her bed tremble. She wondered if the lizard in it had turned, but then she buried herself in her mother's arms. In about fifteen minutes, as her mother held her, the feelings finally passed. A few hours after that, her emotionally exhausted brain finally crashed, and Chelsea fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

 

With no immediate midterms to occupy her, Chelsea got through breakfast and lunch by pretending it wasn't her first day of lizard-sitting. When the sun
hung heavy in the sky and further delay would mean visiting Koko at night, she thought of asking her parents to go with her or asking Dr. Gambinetti to give her a shot of something to get her through. But ultimately, she decided, no, she'd somehow have to handle it. She would power her way through, just do it. Don't think about it at all, just go.

What might be always owes its deepest debt to what is.

She repeated it like a mantra, enjoying it more each time. Even the few OCD images that dogged her, bloody and dangerous, flitted by almost in the back of her mind. She was rested now and feeling better.

Resolute, she pulled her bicycle out and faced the wide streets. The cool air was bracing, demanding her attention, as was the bike and the road ahead. Block after block, she passed children playing in their yards. Then, entering the university proper, she swerved over and over to avoid the students that whizzed past her, driving their secondhand cars well above the speed limit.

On the other side of Bilsford University, many of the older houses, rented out to five or six students, looked like pig sties, with beer bottles lying on the porch, windows broken and signs for Hobson Night adorning the trees out front. It wasn't until the sounds
of the campus traffic faded in her ears that the houses were more well kept. Still, the good feeling lasted until she saw the small corner market, with its wrinkle-faced owner, that meant she'd reached the street where Eve Mandisa lived.

As Chelsea rode up, Tess Sullivan was on her porch, wearing an impossibly bright yellow jacket, cupping her hands to her mouth and calling, “Aristotle! Aristotle!”

Chelsea didn't blame the little horse-dog for wanting to flee from that fashion nightmare. It was probably roaming a golf course somewhere, looking for a small cowboy to ride it.

As the woman continued yelling, Chelsea kept her eyes dead ahead and full of purpose. The Volvo was still in the driveway, but Eve had mentioned she was being driven to the airport by a limo service.

She climbed the steps and fished the keys from the pocket of her jeans. Finding the right one on the second try, she pushed the door in. It was again warm in the living room, but not quite as warm as she'd remembered. Eve had probably lowered the heat to save money.

Chelsea stripped off her thick coat and, not bothering to hang it in the hall closet, laid it across the
couch. Then she did something she'd wanted to do the first time she was there. She pulled back the dark drapes and let bright sunlight exorcise the room. The darkness disappeared like a ghost. Even the huge couch and the elephantine lounge chair with its back to the hallway seemed cheerful. Chelsea actually smiled.

Now came the hard part. The kitchen. The refrigerator. She hesitated in the hallway, wavering, and again let herself count the steps up to the second floor.
10, 11, 12, 13.
That seemed unlucky. She strained forward and felt satisfied to see the fourteenth step. Maybe she should walk up, count again and make sure?