Prey by Stefan Petrucha Read Free Book Online Page A

the water. She didn’t even trust the world not to open up and swallow her whole, like a giant, merciful lizard.

4
    Heavy and sticky, the fear lingered like a wet, suffocating blanket, through the day, into the night. Scant moments of sleep were filled with dreams of feeding crickets with human heads to the Rhett’s Pets chameleon, and pinky mice that looked like human babies to the milk snake.
    Chelsea even woke up afraid.
    Over the years, she’d been taught tricks to free herself of the more lasting terrors, to breathe slowly, to try to think of something else long enough for the bad image to “get bored” and go away, anything to lower the continual stream of adrenaline coursing through her body.
    It was evidence of the existence of free will, of mindover matter, that she could, if she tried, make it work. She’d done it before, the first time when she was twelve. After passing a cemetery, she’d been frightened for hours that she’d become like a ghost, invisible forever, unable to touch or be touched unless she counted each and every telephone pole in the city. The dread rose like an ocean tide inside her, drowning her, but finally she was so heartsick of being afraid that she managed not to count at all. The feeling passed in about fifteen minutes, the average time it takes a human body to shed its rush of adrenaline.
    But invisible ghosts—that was a girlish fantasy. She’d gotten pretty good with the really silly things. The damp, dead rats in a bag, bred to be food, were real. The feel of the mighty jaws snapping against the metal claw as if it was her arm, was real. And monitor lizards, sometimes, really did eat people, like that guy Eve told her about, who died and his monitors fed on the corpse. She Googled the details and learned that even the victim’s father wasn’t surprised by the fate of his son. He really hadn’t been at all careful with his pets.
    That should have been comforting, but it wasn’t.
    Dogs and cats had been known to do the same, but they didn’t scare her the same way. Why? A big barking dog could make Chelsea jump, but it neverset off her OCD. It was their eyes, she decided. They were different. Their faces shone with emotion. They were mammals, after all. They had limbic systems, feelings. Koko, as much as he looked like a Muppet, was more a machine, eyes dead, no matter what Eve Mandisa said about his sophistication.
    He had crocodile eyes that shed crocodile tears.
    Chelsea spent the day at school trying to think of anything but her new babysitting job. She had two midterms, Spanish and math, and her traumatic encounter with Koko had the unexpected side benefit of making the tests seem easy in comparison. She had something called a 504 in place in case she needed extra time to finish a test, but this time, she didn’t have to use it. Mr. Abbaté grinned and patted her on the shoulder when she handed in the trig test with ten minutes to spare.
    After that, she pretended to be tired, giving her an excuse to avoid Derek and her friends. She really just didn’t want to tell them about Koko, so she wouldn’t have to conjure the images she worked so hard to bury. She even took the afternoon off from the pet store, a little mental-health afternoon that she deserved anyway, so she could wander through the center of town, look in the bookstore windows,and try to shed the last of her fright.
    It wasn’t a great December day for a walk. It was colder than yesterday and a strong wind yanked the few clinging leaves from the bone-fingered trees. The grass on the commons, stiff but not quite frozen, crunched beneath her feet. The only thing that looked warm were the billowing clouds in the big, blue sky, and they were too far away to afford any comfort. But she walked anyway and, after a while, felt normal—comfortable in her skin. The world felt normal. Winter was coming, yes—but that was normal.
    She also finally