Chapter 1
Three
Present Day
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to the tiny creature writhing in my hand.
I shoved the crawler through one of the gaps in my muzzle, using my fingers to push it all the way into my mouth. It wriggled on my lips, its wispy legs brushing against my skin like strands of hair.
I bit down hard and chewed fast.
I didn’t want it to suffer. It was only trying to survive, like me. It just wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time.
It didn’t taste like much of anything, not this time. My throat was so dry it took three attempts to swallow to get it all down, but it did nothing to fill me. Instead, guilt settled heavily in the pit of my stomach while hunger curled around it.
I told myself I wouldn’t eat them anymore, but I was just so hungry.
I wiped away my tears, then cleared my throat.
“Are you crying, Three?”
My heart raced as I sat there and didn’t move. Didn’t answer.
“He ain’t gonna answer you, Two. I dunno why you keep tryin’,” Twelve shouted from down the row.
“I just ain’t ever seen him cry before, mind your own damn business, Twelve.”
“Fuck you.” Twelve’s deep voice echoed in the large space, the angry tone of it pounding into my skull over and over again.
Two muttered something under his breath, and then it was quiet again.
I wished our cells weren’t bars on three sides, that solid wall was there instead to separate us all.
Then maybe they wouldn’t keep trying to talk to me.
I wouldn’t have to listen to them argue and cry and scream.
This part of the prison was just one long room with twelve cages on either side and three in the back and there was no escaping the other hounds.
It was better than the single cage they kept us in years ago, though.
My stomach gurgled, breaking the silence.
It had been three days since they last fed us.
Two days since Five corrupted.
One day since Seven killed himself.
I wondered where he’d gone. If it was better than here. If he’d even gone anywhere at all. Maybe he’d just…disappeared.
He didn’t exist anymore. Anywhere. He was nothing.
Part of me was jealous that he didn’t have to suffer with the rest of us any longer. I wanted to be gone from here, to never have to smell Hunter’s sour breath or hear Hayes’s cruel laugh as he beat one of us to a bloody pulp.
Part of me thought he was lucky.
I wanted to know how he’d done it.
If Hunter and Hayes were never coming back, then I would do the same.
Then there was the other part…
The other part had a vicious will to escape this wretched place, even if I was only free for a day, an hour, a minute.
I wanted to be free.
I didn’t want to die in here like the rest of them. Like Seven.
I didn’t belong here.
I wanted to feel the sun on my face.
I wanted to die in the light.
Every day, this awful, crushing feeling bled deeper into bones that felt like dust. Oozed into a soul that hung like shredded ribbons of rotten flesh.
Every day, it became just a little heavier.
Squeezed just a little tighter, an invisible hand around my neck.
It was impossible to ignore, but to acknowledge it meant surrender.
It meant becoming nothing.
I didn’t want to be nothing. The thought of nothingness terrified me, and as much as I wanted to leave this world, this life, this cell, I didn’t want to become nothing in pursuit of something.
I didn’t know what I was good for. I didn’t know why I was clinging so hard to a life that was never mine to begin with.
I could hardly remember where I was before this. All that had stuck in my memories were vague flashes of being strapped down, being kept in a dark, tiny room, being injected with things I had no knowledge of. Confusion and fear and anger were what I remembered.
It was my blood they’d wanted. Being a carrier of the virus meant I was less than human, just something to be tested and used, studied and dissected.
I didn’t care about the virus or what it had done to the world. I didn’t care that my blood might be the path to a cure.
When the brothers found me and brought me here, I thought maybe things would be better.
That was when I realized things could never get better, only worse.
At first, I wished I could return to the place I was before. At least they’d fed me there. But I slowly became accustomed to the brothers and their ways. I got used to hunting the very monster I was doomed to become.
They called us all bloodhounds, kept us locked in these cages, chained to the walls. They only took us out when they needed us. All we were good for was helping them find the Corrupted. Helping them hunt those flesh-crazed monsters that haunted the earth.
I got used to doing their bidding. Got used to being too cold or too hot or too hungry.
Too tired.
Whenever I sank into all that exhaustion and despair, when I let those tendrils of surrender curl around me, all the stories I’d ever heard of the world crashed through my mind in a stampede of hope.
You can’t go yet. There’s still so much to see. To learn. You know there is.
You can’t go yet.
I didn’t know whose voice it was that whispered in my mind. It was low, calm, reassuring. Soft.
I didn’t know what love was or what it felt like—had only heard stories—but I imagined that it would sound like that voice. How it slipped beneath my skin and wrapped me in its warm embrace.
Maybe it was a memory. Maybe I’d known love once. Before…
Before.
So I needed to escape.
It didn’t matter that the world outside these walls was a crumbling, putrid wasteland. It didn’t matter that I could possibly end up in an even worse situation. All that mattered was that one day, one hour, one minute, one second of freedom.
But the brothers were strangely absent these past few days. Even before they left, they’d been acting different. They’d even forgotten to attach our chains to the wall.
Mine, at least. I’d seen some of the others who hadn’t been chained to the wall either.
Maybe the brothers had finally gotten themselves killed. Maybe they’d gotten bored with us and gone somewhere else, leaving us to rot in here alone.
Maybe Seven had the right idea then.
I’d been licking up the smallest bits of water that slid down from a crack in the ceiling since my muzzle was short enough for me to reach with my tongue, but it wasn’t anywhere near sufficient, and a painful dryness had cracked my lips and made it feel like tiny pieces of glass were stuck inside my throat.
The smell in here was becoming unbearable, but there was no escaping it. Feces and urine and a rotting body that would’ve been cleared out by now, had Hunter and Hayes been here.
And then there was Five, snarling in his cage and beginning to rot from the inside.
“Where are they?” Two whispered. “They’ve never left us alone this long. What if they died? And we’re just stuck in here? I’m so fucking thirsty.”
I was thirsty, too. Thirsty and hungry with no way to change that.
My vision had become a little fuzzy and my thoughts were moving slower. Sometimes I’d wake up and not realize I wasn’t dreaming anymore.
I could be dreaming right now. I wasn’t sure.
Was this what dying was?
A sizable part of me wanted to give in to this feeling, to let it envelop me in its hazy oblivion and take me away.
Maybe then I’d know something good. Maybe I’d wake up in a better place. A different world.
Would Seven be there?
But I didn’t deserve to be free, did I? There was a reason I’d been kept in a cage for years. There was a reason I was the only hound here wearing a muzzle.
And still, I couldn’t help dreaming of being out there. My dreams were a patchwork of stories and conversations I’d heard over the years; things I’d never seen or done before. Things I didn’t understand but wanted to.
I wanted to know what the rest of the world looked like. I wanted to know if there really was a great body of water that was as endless as it was deep. I wanted to see it for myself.
“Three,” Two hissed.
A chain rattled to my right.
“Three. Stop ignoring me, I know you can hear me.” Metal on metal rang out sharply between us. He’d thrown his chain at the bars that divided our cells.
“Mm.” My throat was so dry that forming words felt like they might tear into me.
“Why were you—”
I startled when the heavy metal door at the end of the corridor banged open and Hunter strode in, immediately turning to the first cell on his left. There was a few days’ growth of hair on his face, and…
Blood.
He was covered in blood.
“Everybody stand up!” Metal clinked as he unlocked the cage.
Hayes came through the door a moment later, dragging a long set of chains behind him. He, too, was covered in blood.
“Stand up!” Hunter shouted.
My heart raced.
They were back. They hadn’t abandoned us, they were here, and now would they finally feed us?
I shuffled closer to the bars at the front of my cell, trying to peer down the long corridor.
Was Hunter unlocking Four’s cell? Why? What were those chains for?
I gripped the bars and stood on shaky legs.
“He said stand the fuck up, Twenty!” Hayes shouted, stalking right past me and pointing his rifle toward the end of the corridor.
Toward the three cells where Twenty, Twelve, and Eight were kept.
I watched in horror as he fired without hesitation. A shock of fear rippled through my body, and one of the hounds started crying.
Was I dreaming?
Twelve ran to the bars of his cell, baring his teeth at Hayes, his bloodshot eyes brimming with hatred. “You killed him! What the fuck—”
Hayes fired off another round. I was staring right at Twelve when his head blew open. My limbs seized up, and then Hayes shot Eight in the next cell over when he didn’t stand up, either.
Every crack of the rifle, every hound falling in a lifeless heap seemed less and less real.
I didn’t know what was happening, why they were acting like this, why they were killing us like this when they never had before, but—