Rachel Vincent - Menagerie

This couldn’t be happening.

On my right, a door squealed open on rusty hinges. Startled, I turned to find a sheriff’s deputy heading down the center aisle toward me. He carried a tall stool under one arm and a bundle of familiar material beneath the other.

The sight of my clothes in his hand triggered fresh tears as I scooted along the wall at my back. When I hit the far corner, I stopped, cradled by solid brick on two sides. I tucked my legs up to my chest again and crossed my ankles to cover my most private parts. I was as shielded and defended as I could get, yet I’d never felt more exposed or vulnerable.

“Hi.” The deputy set his stool down in the aisle, out of reach from my cell.

I rested my chin on my left knee and let my hair fall forward like a curtain, hoping all he could see were my shins, hair, and eyes.

“Do you remember me?”

He did look a little familiar, but no name came to mind.

“I’m Deputy Wayne Atherton. You were a couple of years behind me in school.”

Wayne. Yes. We’d had a history class together my sophomore year.

“Where am I? Are you in charge?”

“This is the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. You’ve been taken into custody as a cryptid living under false pretenses. And as far as you’re concerned, yes, I’m in charge.”

“Did—” My voice cracked, so I cleared my throat and started over, my face flaming. “Did you take my clothes off?”

“No, that was a couple of guys from the SWAT team the sheriff called in to assist with your transport. Dr. Almaguer said he would only examine you while you were still unconscious. To check for species-identifying features.”

Dr. Almaguer . My teeth began to chatter and I set my chin on my knees to make it stop. They’d called in a small-animal veterinarian to examine me—the very man who’d once put my dad’s farm dog to sleep.

The deputy propped one foot on the lowest stool rung and set my clothes on his lap. “He didn’t find anything, Delilah.”

Because there was nothing to find. How else could I not have known?

“Are you going to give my clothes back?”

“That’s up to you,” he said.

I closed my eyes. He was going to interrogate me in the nude. Because he could.

“What are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Make this easy on yourself, Delilah. Just tell us what you are, and you can have your clothes back.” The deputy shifted on his stool and my underwear slid from the pile of clothes and landed on the floor. He didn’t notice, but my focus snagged on that bit of fabric. I would have told him anything I knew for a single scrap of my own clothing. But there was nothing to say.

“I told you, I don’t know what I am. Please give me my clothes.” My cheeks were burning, but my teeth still chattered. “I’m freezing.”

“Yeah, the sheriff runs warm, so he keeps the air turned down low. Especially in the summer.” Atherton shifted on the stool again, and his tone softened. “Delilah, I can’t help you until you help me. I got orders. So why don’t you tell me what you are, and I’ll not only give you your clothes back, I’ll get you some water. Or something to eat. Are you hungry? Your friends said you didn’t eat much dinner.”

“Are they here?” Shelley’s scream still echoed in my aching head. Brandon’s look of horror was imprinted on my retinas. “Can I see them?”

Deputy Atherton started to shake his head, and I buried my face in the crook between my knees, sniffing back fresh tears. “Please,” I said into my lap. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I have no idea what happened. Please just give me my clothes and let me see my friends.”

Atherton sighed. “Ms. Wells had to be sedated. Her boyfriend took her home.”

My throat felt thick, my tongue clumsy. “Is she okay?”

“She’s terrified. She’s not the only one. The news is out, and people don’t feel safe, knowing you were born and raised here. Knowing you went to school with their children and spent the night at their houses—and they didn’t have a clue. People are starting to remember the reaping, Delilah.”

Oh, fuck .

Terror pooled in my stomach like acid, eating at me from the inside. “They don’t think I’m a surrogate, do they?” I peered at him over my knees. My hands started shaking again. “Because I swear I’m not.”

“How can you know that, if you don’t know what you are? You look human, and you lived among us for years. Just like the surrogates. What are we supposed to think?”

Panic slowed my brain, yet sped up my words. “This is totally different. I wasn’t hiding or lying in wait, planning something. I didn’t know I wasn’t human. I still can’t believe what happened. You have to tell them that. Tell the sheriff I’m not one of them.”

“How do I know that’s true?”

Terror scattered my thoughts into a maelstrom of disjointed theories. Think, Delilah! “There were hundreds of thousands of surrogates, but there’s only one of me.”

The deputy shrugged. “So far. For all we know, you could be the first in a whole new wave.”

“No, that’s not what I am!” My arms tightened around my shins, drawing my knees tighter against my chest. “I don’t have any siblings.”

“Having grown, healthy siblings would work in your favor. Being an only child does not.”

“Okay... But I’m an adult!” Surely they’d figured that much out when they’d taken my clothes off. “The surrogates were six-year-olds.”

“Yes, but even cryptids age. The surrogates are now thirty-five years old. Wherever they are.”

But no one knew where they were, and that was the problem. As soon as they’d been discovered, Uncle Sam had rounded them up like rabid dogs, and no one knew whether they’d been shot, or studied, or cryogenically frozen for later. And that was fine, because the surrogates truly were dangerous. They were the fucking devil’s spawn.

If the government thought I was one of them, I would disappear, too.

“I’m not a surrogate.” I pushed hair from my face with one hand and sat up as straight as I dared without clothes on. “I didn’t steal any babies. I’ve never hurt a soul in my life before tonight, and I don’t know how that happened . Think about it. If I’d known what I was, why would I go to the menagerie? Please, Deputy. You have to believe me. I’m not conspiring against humanity.”

Atherton exhaled slowly. Then he stood, still watching me, and shook out my blouse. “I believe you.” He stuck my shirt between two of the bars and dropped it on the floor. “But I’m not the one you have to convince.” Next came my jeans, bra, and underwear, each dropped just inside my cell. “Get dressed.”

I glanced at my clothes, then back up at him. “Are you going to watch?”

He blinked, obviously startled by the thought. “Of course not.” When he walked down the aisle away from my cell, I realized that Atherton wasn’t the enemy. He was just doing his job.

Unfortunately, his job was to extract information I didn’t have, in order to help the sheriff—

Help the sheriff what?

End life as I knew it?

I lunged for my clothes, then dragged the whole pile back into my corner, where I shimmied into my underwear as fast as I could. I turned my back on the bars to put my bra on, in case he turned around, and had just stepped into my jeans when the brutal reality of my new situation hit me over the head like that carny’s mallet, swinging straight for my soul.

I’ll never go home again .

My legs buckled beneath me and my knees slammed into the concrete. My jaw snapped shut with the impact, but I hardly felt it. I was a cryptid living under false pretenses, and no one would care that I hadn’t known. Most probably wouldn’t even believe that.