He stepped into the room, climbed over the rubble, and bent down to the first body. He had to pull part of an old curtain off it to make certain it was one of the Cats. It was an older boy, his eyes open and staring, his face contorted in pain and horror. There was a huge swollen purplish mark on his neck with a dark center, as if he had been stung. Hawk had never seen a wound like it. He studied the body for other damage and didn’t find any. With Panther following, he moved on.
They found a dozen dead boys and girls of varying ages, some of them bearing the same purplish mark and others simply crushed. One was decapitated and another missing both arms and one leg. The level of violence was shattering; the Cats had been caught unawares and unable to defend themselves. It looked as if they had tried to flee, but there had been no escape.
Despite his revulsion and Panther’s whispered insistence that they get out of there, he pressed on. In the very back room, they found Tiger and Persia.
Tiger had apparently been trying to protect her, his body half flung across hers where she lay sprawled on a mattress that was pushed up against the back wall. The short-barreled flechette lay on the floor to one side, bloodstained and bent. Hawk picked it up. Both barrels had been fired.
Tiger’s head was almost torn loose from his body, and his neck bore the same strange purplish mark they had seen on the bodies of the other Cats. He had fought hard to protect his little sister, but in the end it had not been enough. Hawk stared down at him, unable to find the words to express what he was feeling. He could hear Panther mumbling from across the room, the words dark and angry.
He glanced at Persia. She bore the same sting mark, but her face was peaceful. Perhaps she had died quickly and without knowing what was happening to her. Sadness emptied him out. She was only eleven years old. No one should die at eleven. He knew it happened every day, that it had happened every day for as long as he had been alive and much longer before that. But knowing it didn’t make witnessing it any less horrific. He wished he had come earlier to his meeting with Tiger. He wished he could have done something to prevent this.
He looked around at the wreckage of the rooms and the scattering of bodies. What in the world had done this?
Then he caught sight of Persia’s right leg. It had been severed cleanly at the ankle, and the foot was missing. On the other foot, clearly visible against the white surface of the bloodstained mattress, was a pink tennis shoe with silver laces.
He remembered that on his way here he had seen its mate not two blocks from their underground home, and he felt his heart stop.
Owl!
Shouting frantically for Panther, he raced from the room.
Chapter TWENTY-TWO
OWL SAT QUIETLY in one corner of the common room, poring over another of the medical books she had been researching since Hawk and the others had left, her eyes scanning quickly from page to page. It was the fourth book she had opened, but she still didn’t know anything more about the Weatherman’s form of plague than when she had started. There just wasn’t enough written about the plagues; so many of them had developed in the aftermath of the chemical attacks and poisonings that there hadn’t been time to write anything down, let alone find the means to publish it. She was relying on texts that were out of date twenty years ago, but it was all she had—that and her personal experience, which wasn’t much better given the rapid evolution of sicknesses all over the world.
She rubbed her eyes to ease the ache of her weariness. She wished sometimes that she could walk, that she wasn’t confined to this wheelchair. She wasn’t being selfish, although she had her share of those moments, too. She was simply frustrated at being unable to just get up and see what could be done instead of having to rely on others. She wanted to go down to the waterfront and have a look at River’s grandfather, but Hawk would never allow it. He might agree to bring the old man to their underground home, but only if she was able to give him some assurance that doing so would not endanger the family. It was bad enough that River was already exposed to whatever her grandfather had contracted. Hawk would never risk exposing the other children, as well.
She wasn’t even sure, thinking on it, that he would allow River back. It seemed inconceivable that he would not, but Hawk could be intractable about certain things, and this might prove to be one.
Across the room, where he lay curled up in his favorite spot, Cheney stirred awake suddenly and lurched to his feet with a low growl. It was the second time he had done so in the last few minutes and the fourth or fifth since Hawk had left, and she knew right away what was happening. The big dog was reacting to the noises in the wall they had both been hearing for the last two hours.
Sparrow appeared in the bedroom doorway, her young face dark and intense.