Inhuman by Kat Falls

the page. An address in Chicago and “Arabella Spurling, age 6. Brown hair, blue eyes. Any photo in good condition.”
    Arabella Spurling. She must have been Director Spurling’s daughter. I actually felt a little bad for her for a moment, until I remembered that she was the reason my dad was on the run in the Feral Zone.
    Everson let the letter drop to the floor. “What kind of person sends a clueless girl into the most dangerous situation possible for a photo?” There was as much venom in his voice as in a bucket of chimpacabra spit.
    I knew it was a rhetorical question, but I thought about it anyway. What kind of person did such a thing? A desperate one. I wondered if her memories of her daughter had begun to fade. I could still remember what my mother had looked like, because I had file upon file of digital video of our family. I could still see her face and hear her voice any time I wanted to. Except for right now, of course.
    What I couldn’t do was feel her arms around me or her kiss at the edge of my hairline. I could still remember how she smelled — like honey, somehow — but there might be a day when I couldn’t conjure that up. If that ever happened, I could imagine feeling quite desperate.
    I picked up Spurling’s letter. Wait. What had Everson just called me?
    “I am not clueless,” I said, sitting up straighter against the door. “In fact, my dad has been telling me about the Feral Zone for years.”
    “But he never mentioned the grupped ferals who live there?”
    “He did. He just didn’t call them grupped ferals.” They were the were-beasts, mongrels, and manimals from his bedtime stories. Only now I knew that they weren’t fiction. Dad had been describing his day at the office, which happened to be in a forbidden quarantine zone. “And yes, okay, he may have sugarcoated things a bit. But it doesn’t matter because no one forced me to come here. And even after being attacked by an infected guy and seeing a man bleeding to death in a wagon because he’d been mauled and finding those horrible photos of mutated body parts, I’m still glad I —”
    I couldn’t breathe.
    I put my head down and tried to take in air, but my lungs grew stiffer by the second. And then the gasping started and I heard myself suffocating.
    Everson held something up to my face, commanding, “Inhale.”
    A prickly scent blasted up my nose and into my brain where it switched on strings of fairy lights at the back of my eyeballs. Choking, I shoved his hand away. “What was —” Then I saw the dark-blue inhaler in his palm and my bones melted.
    “It’s Lull,” he explained. “I didn’t press long enough to put you out. It’ll just calm you down.” He tucked the inhaler into the front pocket of my pants. “If you’re still anxious, take another hit.”
    Another hit? I fell back against the door.
    “Okaaay … ,” Everson said, surprised.
    The air around me turned into gelatin as I dripped down the wall.
    “Actually,” he said. “Let’s keep it at one.”
    Sure. Whatever. The door lolled against my back. My cheek dipped onto my shoulder. I tried to straighten up, but had lost my sense of up. Much easier to let gravity do the figuring so I let it pull me down. My head landed on something that wasn’t the floor. Not too soft, not too hard. “Just right,” I murmured.
    “Oh crap,” said a voice, warm on my ear. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d be so sensitive.”
    “S’okay.” Rolling to my side, I snuggled down for the night. My fingers curled into the sheet and pulled it to my chin. “I like the scary ones,” I assured him. And I did. I also liked it when he stayed until I fell asleep. I reached up and cupped his cheek, firm and warm. “You need to shave,” I murmured, tracing a finger down his sideburn, and then wondered why that would make my father gasp.

I couldn’t place what was wrong with the scream. The note. The pitch. Something was off. The person screamed again, which