Gods of Blood and Bone (Seeds of Chaos Book 1) Page 5

  “What does it mean?” I asked Chanelle.

  She shook her head, looking distracted. “I don’t know. It’s part of the Game. You get Seeds after the Trial’s over if you ‘perform’ well.”

  “How—” I started to ask, but a screaming voice cut me off.

  “People, it’s a trap! It’s a lie!” A boy stood at the edge of the forest, waving urgently at us. “If you stay there and enter the Trial, you’re all going to die. Please, believe me. I’ve done this before. It’s a death trap—” his voice cracked out, either from the stress of screaming, or the force of his memories.

  People inside the clearing murmured to each other, some unsure, some shaking their heads at him.

  Chanelle gripped my arm. “Don’t even think about it. Remember the penalty for not completing the quest? At least we have a chance of living if we can win the Trial. If we leave, we’re dead for sure.”

  The beautiful girl heard her words and cracked her neck back and forth. “He’s obviously a newbie.” She had an accent. Spanish? “Watch what happens to him.”

  “Please, believe me. At least out here we have chance. We can help each other survive,” he called.

  Across the clearing, a girl let out a whimper and raced toward him.

  He took her hand and squeezed it, then yelled to the rest of us again. “Run away before it’s too late. We can—”

  His voice cut off again as the fifteen-minute timer reached zero and winked out of existence in front of all our eyes.

  I drew a deep breath to calm myself. All this terror was really getting to me.

  Clutching the girl’s hand, he took a step backward toward the blackness of the forest.

  But then the tree above him moved, its whole form writhing. Something sprinkled down onto the two of them. At first I thought it was just fallen leaves, but the two started frantically brushing at their bare skin.

  Their movements grew more and more frenzied, and then the girl started to scream, and ran back toward us. He followed, stumbling. “No, no, no, please, no,” the words scratched out of him.

  As they got closer, I saw that whatever the tree had dropped onto them was sticking. I frowned and pushed forward through to the edge of the group of Players.

  The boy stumbled first, and then the girl. “I take it back. I’ll do the Trial! Please, forgive me!” she wailed, clawing her way forward.

  “Oh, damn,” I said aloud as I saw what was happening to them.

  The things that had fallen onto exposed areas were burying themselves within the skin, growing, pulling at the flesh. As I watched, a tendril sprouted from the boy’s cheek, and a leaf grew from it, so rapidly it was like watching one of those time-lapse videos of the life of a plant over weeks. From seed to thriving adult, they only took a few minutes.

  These were using the boy and girl as fuel. As the plants grew from them, unfolding beautifully, they sucked up the flesh beneath through their roots. The pair screamed, and kept screaming, wordless.

  The girl looked like a corpse, skin thin enough that her bones were almost visible through it. Her voice trickled away into silence. An eyeball burst as a tendril forced its way outward, then shriveled as it was sucked up. But she didn’t move, and her expression of terror didn’t change, because she was dead.

  I took an involuntary step backward, only able to watch as the two of them were consumed. The plants grew thicker and higher. The only sounds now were that of branches creaking and snapping, their leaves rustling as they reached for the sky, and the Players’ flesh and bones squelching and crumbling.

  Finally, two trees stood in the place where the pair had fallen. The bases of the trunks were a vague memory of the shapes of their tortured bodies, like surrealist sculptures. The trees were miniature versions of all the others in the forest, and still growing upward.

  I choked on nothing, my throat spasming involuntarily. I thought I might throw up. “They failed the quest,” I murmured under my breath, but the sound was loud enough to carry in the absolute silence of the clearing.

  “Oh, we’ve got a smart one here!” a mocking voice rang out from behind me. A man in a three-piece suit walked out of the trees. He was dressed immaculately, from his white, starched collar to his shiny black dress shoes. The only incongruous thing was the huge costume wolf head that he wore, which completely covered his own head.

  The cube hanging in mid-air rose higher and grew bright, causing those standing next to it to jump. It lit up most of the clearing, a spotlight shining down and forming a distinct circle of brightness. The newly grown additions to the forest stood just outside the light.

  He stopped and took out a gold pocket watch from his vest. “Seems like time’s up.” He looked us over. “And a few are missing?” He shook his huge wolf’s head back and forth. “Tch. Too bad. So sad.”

  I moved back to Chanelle, who’d been my savior. She shook her head at me before I had a chance to open my mouth. “It’s over. The Trial’s started now. Focus on that,” she said.

  I had a sudden realization. “Your sister…?” I murmured, clenching my trembling hands and trying hard not to think about what I’d just witnessed.

  She shook her head. “China’s not here. Maybe she entered a different Trial,” she said, but looked grim.

  I knew we were both thinking of those anonymous screams we’d heard from the forest. The image of a new tree growing in the darkness flashed in my mind, and I shuddered from deep in the pit of my stomach.

  The suited man moved farther into the circle of light. He bounced on his toes, and I could swear the wolf’s head smiled just a bit, its felt tongue falling out of the side of its mouth. “There are consequences. You were all warned. This isn’t just some child’s game…” he trailed off with a giggle to himself. “Well, except it is, tonight.”

  He clasped his hands formally behind his back, stood up even straighter, and announced, “This Trial will be a game of ‘What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?’ Has anyone played it before?” It seemed almost as if the costume head had moved a bit, the tongue adjusting itself to lie properly inside the mouth, instead of hanging lasciviously over the side.

  No one said anything.

  “Well, that’s fine. You’ll all get the hang of it quickly, I’m sure. I am Mr. Wolf, obviously.” He gestured to his head, and paused as if for laughter.

  There was none.

  He sighed, but continued. “I stand in the center of the playing field with my eyes closed. You all start around the edges, wherever you want. You will all ask me ‘What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?’ ” He called out the last part in a high-pitched, singsong voice. “And I will respond with, say…‘Three o’clock.’ You must all take three steps at that point, and then you ask me again. You may not take any more, or any less than the amount given. Repeat ad nauseam, until it’s ‘Dinner Time.’ ”

  The lips of his wolf head stretched back from the teeth in a strange parody of a smile.

  I swallowed. Rather than being ludicrous, it was terrifying. The teeth looked sharper and harder than stuffing-filled cloth possibly could, the eyes brighter, and the gums pinker. He snapped his fingers in the air.

  From the forest, dark shadows moved forward, slinking up to Mr. Wolf’s heels. They looked a bit like feral dogs, except that their eyes and ears were bigger than any dog I’d ever seen, and they had teeth that curved out of their mouths like saber-tooth tigers.

  “What the hell are those?” I whispered, afraid to draw attention to myself with noise.

  “The same monsters that attacked us in the forest,” Chanelle whispered back.

  “When ‘Dinner Time’ is called, my wolves will eat you,” he waved a pointed finger, encompassing our group, “who are dinner. If they can catch you before you get back past the safe line again, that is. If you can make it out of the light, you’ll be safe. So run fast, little bunnies.”

  The gorgeous girl with the Spanish accent cracked her knuckles. “How do we win this game?”

  He focused on her intently for
a few, incredibly long seconds.

  She didn’t seem fazed by the psychological pressure at all, as I knew I would have been. Instead, she took the time to crack her neck again and roll her shoulders backward in a circular motion.

  “The game is won either by surviving for twenty rounds, or if one of the prey is able to touch me before I call ‘Dinner Time.’ Everyone who makes it to the end will be rewarded with Seeds, according to their performance, as always.”

  “Got it.” She nodded. “But…I’m not the prey here. I’m the predator.” She licked her chops exaggeratedly and grinned.

  Mr. Wolf threw back his head and laughed. His eyes shone wetly when he looked at us again. “Let the Trial begin.”

  Chanelle gripped my hand and pulled me out of the circle.

  I stumbled, my legs feeling weak. Outside of the light’s edge, I couldn’t help but look at the fresh twin trees.

  She let out a sigh, gripped my face, and pulled, forcing me to bend over and look her straight in the eye. “Things are about to get dangerous, okay? You need to pull it together. Focus. From now on, concentrate on staying alive. Don’t think about what happened to those other people. There’s no room for that.”

  I stared into her big blue eyes and tried to stop trembling.

  She gripped my face tighter. “Do you want to live, newbie?”

  I swallowed and nodded. “Yes.”

  “Then stop thinking about those two. Forget them. The Trial and surviving it are the most important things in the world to you right now. Got it?”

  “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  She let go of my face and stepped back, turning to face the light. “Does there need to be a reason? That’s not important.”

  Mr. Wolf placed himself in the center of the circle, his hands covering his eyes. “Let the Trial begin. Loudly, now, and all of you together.”

  “What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?” we chorused.

  “Twelve o’clock, little bunnies!”

  We stepped forward twelve times, moving from the outside of the circle inward. This repeated with different “times,” until a few Players drew dangerously close to Mr. Wolf and his saber tooth dogs.

  It would be the next round, I knew. And it was.

  “Dinner Time!” he sang, uncovering his eyes as he turned around to look at the majority of us, who’d walked toward him from behind.

  His stuffed animal head was no longer stuffed. It was a grotesque, huge wolf’s head, alive atop his human body. His too-large eyes moved, taking in our positions relative to him, and the dogs sprang forward. His nostrils flared, and saliva swung from his hanging tongue, falling toward the tip of his polished shoe.

  Seeing it hit snapped me out of my trance, and I turned around to sprint back to the safe line. Someone screamed. I didn’t turn my head to look back, didn’t wonder about the safety of my fellow Players, and didn’t think about my own already aching legs. I just ran.

  Ahead of me, a guy stuck out his foot to trip another, and the second guy went down hard. I jumped over him, and kept running.

  I passed the line by quite a bit because of my momentum, and turned around to make sure I was safe. Others stampeded toward and past me, obscuring my view of Mr. Wolf for a moment. When the small field had cleared of terrified people, I saw him standing still in the middle of it.

  Two of the dog-things had caught someone, and one was the boy who’d been tripped. The monster’s jaw was clenched around his upper arm, long curving teeth piercing into the flesh. Blood mixed with saliva ran down, soaking the boy’s blue T-shirt. His face was white and contorted with pain and fear.

  Someone laughed beside me. It was the one who tripped him. Our eyes met, and he gave me a small shrug and a smile. “Less survivors mean more Seeds.”

  The fallen boy reached out a pleading hand to all of us watching safely from behind the line, and then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he started to convulse. He looked like he was having a seizure, and foam dripped down his chin. The other downed Player started to flail, too. The dog-monsters retreated back to Mr. Wolf’s side, and soon the bodies lay still.

  Not saber-tooth tiger teeth, then. More like cobra fangs. Poisonous.

  People screamed and cried on the edge of the light.

  But then the boy in the blue T-shirt twitched. Silence crashed down as we watched him.

  He moved bit by bit, jerky, like a battery-powered doll running on the last bit of its juice. He stood up, but his stance was strange, alien. Limp arms hung down past slightly bent knees, and his head lolled to the side. His eyes were vacant, and he turned his back on us to join Mr. Wolf in the center of the light.

  Mr. Wolf giggled. “Oh. Bitten Players become wolves. I may have forgotten to mention that.”

  Chapter 6

  What reinforcement we may gain from Hope. If not, what resolution from despair.

  — John Milton

  The next round, we all inched forward, moving our feet only enough to count as taking a step, and no more. When “Dinner Time” was called, the two bitten Players turned and chased after us, just like the monsters. The boy’s mouth was stretched in a wide grin, and slobber ran down his chin and neck.

  I turned after reaching safety and watched a thin guy run desperately from the strangely loping former Player. He…it reached out a hand and grazed the back of the guy’s shirt. Terrified, the guy took a dangerous chance, trying to feint away. He stopped abruptly and turned to run at a different angle, but he wasn’t counting on a dog-monster being there. The creature vaulted at him, and his neck was caught between its massive, wide-open jaws, his head disappearing inside the mouth.

  Blood gushed out between the teeth.

  My knees were shaking. I took deep breaths and looked away from the gruesome scene. I wanted to deny that this was real, just pretend it was all a horrible dream that I would wake from soon. But I couldn’t do that, because I knew the fear was the only thing keeping me going. Without the slight edge that it gave me, boosting my slow, ungainly movements with adrenaline, I would die here tonight.

  I knew that, and so I didn’t pretend that it wasn’t real. I looked away, swallowed, and tried to steady my shaking legs.

  Chanelle caught my eye, and gave me a silent nod of approval.

  We started forward again. The speed was glacial, each of us doing our best to move forward less than the others.

  I panted for breath, my muscles burning and trembling, and I felt so grateful to Bunny for enticing me to exercise. He must have known I would need the strength I was using now. He knew, I realized. He knew about this.

  Chanelle crept beside me on one side, the beautiful Spanish girl on the other.

  I felt incrementally safer between them, and found myself watching Chanelle’s white runners dragging through a puddle of dark blood half-soaked into the ground where the last Player had fallen. Her pretty white shoes were ruined.

  I realized my mind was trying to play tricks on me—to disconnect from the horror. I grabbed the pad of my left hand between my forefinger and thumb and pinched as hard as I could. Pain brought some clarity to my mind, and I focused on it, trying to get a grip.

  When “Dinner Time” was called, we all turned to run. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Spanish girl slip in that same puddle of blood covering the ground. But I didn’t stop. How could I stop?

  When I reached the safe line and looked back, she was pinned to the ground by the blue T-shirt “wolf.” He snarled down at her, drool dripping onto her cheek.

  The fingers of her left hand were wrapped around his neck, holding him off. She formed the other into a fist and slammed it into his ear. Once, twice, three times.

  He fell sideways off her, eyes unfocused for a second. He shook his head and rallied, but she’d already scrambled to her feet.

  She pulled back her right fist and slammed it down into the back of his head, propelling it with the force of her entire body.

  His face smashed flat into the ground. He twitched, and
she pulled back and punched once more. He didn’t move that time, but she kicked him in the side before racing back to the safe line, weaving to avoid the remaining monsters and bitten Players.

  I watched her in awe. What kind of strength was that?

  By the start of the next round, we were down to almost half of our original numbers, while Mr. Wolf’s had grown again.

  Everyone’s tension inched toward the breaking point as we got closer and closer to Mr. Wolf. A girl tried to bolt back to the safety line early, but vines burst from the earth, tripped her, and held her down. She screamed and struggled, but was trapped. When Mr. Wolf sang out “Dinner Time!” all the attackers ignored her, leaving the easy pickings for last.

  Only a few seconds from the safety line, a turned Player lunged for a boy running close to Chanelle. The boy swerved and spun to avoid it, smashing his elbow hard into her temple.

  She went down.

  I stumbled the last few meters across the line and looked back, gasping.

  She knelt on her hands and knees, blood dripping down the side of her head. Beside her, the boy who’d elbowed her was being bitten.

  “Run!” I screamed at her.

  She crept forward a few inches and tried to stand, but couldn’t get her feet solidly under her, and fell forward again.

  The turned Player released its catch and turned to her.

  I took a step into the light, but she snarled at me, “Get back!” Her voice was slurred, groggy.

  It grabbed her head between two hands and bit into the curve where her neck met her shoulder. It ripped its head back viciously, and a bite-sized chunk of flesh went with it.

  She flopped awkwardly in its grip, like a fish stranded on the shore, and let out a choked scream.

  “No!” I shouted.

  “My sister…China. Find her. Thirteen hundred Brine Street. Tell her…to live!” She squeezed the words out, rapid-fire.

  It bit into her neck again, this time digging its teeth in and shaking its head like a dog with a toy.

  She ignored it, keeping her eyes locked on mine.

  I nodded, and her eyes rolled back into her head, and she started to thrash around.