Richard Kadrey - Dead Set

Zoe looked around the crowded hallway. The girls were all beautiful, all variations of the youthful version of her mother from the club. The cheerleaders, all smiles, texting each other madly, were more graceful than her mother. A cluster of girls in Dr. Who T-shirts and superhero and science-fiction backpacks seemed kinder, and some of them seemed more shy. Some of the girls were prettier, but not many. And none of them, not one, possessed the confidence her mother had had, that magic rock-star arrogance. The kind that didn’t push you away, but drew you to her.

And then there were the boys. Zoe couldn’t remember the last time boys had registered on her radar. Since the funeral, boys had all blurred together into a kind of vague cloud of maleness that was easier to ignore than individual boys. Now she was looking at them again and remembering their mystery and allure. Boys’ walks fascinated her, so full of their random and unfocused animal energy. Zim, the boy she’d hung out with at her old school, had shared her first kiss with, had mutually copped first feels with. . he had a great walk. Too bad he turned out to be such a jerk, Zoe thought, remembering him drunkenly hitting on Julie at a party.

Until now, Zoe had stayed mad at Zim, but even he seemed forgivable now-as young, stupid, lost, and overwhelmed by the world as Zoe herself. And there was his great hip-swinging walk. She remembered that he had always been much more handsome walking away than standing still.

Around her twelfth birthday, when she’d first become vaguely interested in the mystery of boys, Valentine starting give her advice, especially on which ones to talk to and which to avoid. His general rule was to look out for the ones having too good a time. Happy was all right, but too happy was a big biohazard warning. These were the boys who were usually the kings of their cliques-jock heroes, drama-club darlings, and the rest. Valentine said that they were the ones who listened and believed it when some idiot teacher on a nostalgia high would tell their class, “These are the best years of your life.” Knowing all that as she did, though, didn’t always help when the less discriminating part of her brain kept her gaze locked on the boys’ gliding arms, their strong legs and hips.

One of the shy girls, in glasses and a Wolverine T-shirt, dropped a book and a handsome boy in a basketball team jacket didn’t see. He started to trip. A little switch went off in Zoe’s brain and she saw her father falling down next to his car in a parking lot. The handsome boy caught himself, shot Wolverine girl a dirty look, and continued down the hall. Zoe felt a tightness in her chest, but it was over in a second. She turned back to her locker, closed it, and hurried away.

To continue our discussion from yesterday,” said Mr. Danvers, “who can remind us of the definition of a predator?”

Zoe was doodling on a piece of paper in her notebook. She couldn’t concentrate on much of anything, even a topic as cool as predators. She distractedly drew long, ragged sets of triangles. Gradually they linked up into long rows.

Teeth. There were dozens of sets of teeth leering up at her. She’d covered that whole page with them.

“Care to join us, Zoe?”

She looked up, suddenly embarrassed. The whole class was looking at her.

“Yes? Sorry.”

Mr. Danvers gave her a quick, reassuring smile. “Holly was kind enough to remind us of the definition of a predator. I wonder if you remember the name of the act predators carry out?”

Zoe glanced down again at the jagged teeth and shook her head. She was letting her mind drift off to the dark place again. Like before, when she wouldn’t talk for days at a time and her mother would be crying while on the phone to the doctors. It was stupid. She was happy now. There was no reason to let the darkness swallow her. I’m going to see Dad. I’m happy, Zoe told herself. I’m happy.

“Predation,” she said.

“Excellent,” Mr. Danvers said. “And what do most predators eat?”

“Other animals.”

“Making them?”

“Carnivores.”

“Give that girl a cigar,” said Mr. Danvers. A few kids in the class laughed. He turned and wrote CARNIVORE on the blackboard, then added a few more notes underneath.

Absynthe caught her eye and gave her a little wave. Zoe waved back. “How’s the boy?” mouthed Absynthe. Zoe glanced up at the board to make sure Mr. Danvers was still writing, then she mouthed to Absynthe, “I’ll tell you later.” Absynthe nodded and turned back to the front of the room.

“All predators have special skills and adaptations that help them hunt and catch their prey,” Mr. Danvers told the class. “Great white sharks are a good example. In their snout, they have an organ called the ampullae of Lorenzini.” He paused to write this on the board. Zoe copied the words, though she had a feeling that by tomorrow she’d have forgotten what they meant.

“This organ,” Mr. Danvers continued, “can detect the tiny electrical currents generated by all living things. Sharks also have an incredible sense of smell. Great whites can detect a drop of blood in the water from five kilometers away. Anyone know how many miles that is?”

A shaggy, blond boy in a plaid shirt a couple of sizes too big for him thrust up his hand, then blurted out, “Three point one one miles.”

Mr. Danvers nodded. “Thank you, Alex. I’d have settled for three, but you get extra brownie points for knowing about the point one one.”

Zoe tried to write down everything that Mr. Danvers said, trying to stay focused so she wouldn’t start drawing teeth again.

“Snakes are another advanced predatory species. They use highly developed organs in their tongue and mouth to literally taste the air. And they do it very accurately,” said Mr. Danvers. “Most snakes have lousy eyesight, but a lot of snakes, pit vipers, for instance, make up for this by seeing their prey another way. They have infrared-heat-sensors in pits on their face, between their nostrils and their eyes. They use these sensors to hunt prey at night.”

In Zoe’s mind’s eye a picture formed of Emmett in his dark store, lurking there all day, and maybe all night, happily dusting the record bins in total darkness. At first it was funny but then the image of him moving around the store in the dark, just another shadow, nothing more than a trick of the light, made her uneasy.

It’s just your mind playing tricks on you, she told herself. Trying to drag you back to the dark place. Emmett was odd, maybe even a full-on fruit bat, but he’d never done anything creepy or hurt her. In fact, he’d shown her a whole new world. Emmett was giving her back her father. How could that be a bad thing?

Mr. Danvers went to the shelves and took down the big jar of animal teeth. “Everyone come on up. I’m going to show you the kind of specialized teeth predators have.” He dumped the jar on the tabletop.

As Zoe followed the rest of the class to the front of the room, she heard a girl say, “Ew! Are those people’s?”

Mr. Danvers held up a couple of yellowed, flat-topped teeth. “They look like it, don’t they?” he asked. “They’re chimp molars. Very similar to ours.”

Zoe squeezed in and looked at the teeth Mr. Danvers was holding. They did look very human, if a little bit big. I really don’t want to lose my last baby teeth, she thought. And how would Emmett know the difference in that dark store? An idea formed in her mind while Mr. Danvers went on about sharks biting through steel cables and how some snake teeth were like needles and perfect for injecting poison, but she wasn’t listening anymore.

As class ended, Zoe busied herself at her desk, shuffling papers and stacking and restacking her books, waiting for the other students to file out of the room. Mr. Danvers sat at the lab table writing in a black spiral-bound notebook. Zoe walked to where he sat, rehearsing the question in her mind, trying to sound relaxed and spontaneous.