The Academy: Book 2 (2 page)

             
Asa’s heart was hammering, and he no longer felt as cold. Instinctively, he let out a loud, piercing cry into the forest, and closed his eyes. Because of a mutation, he was able to produce a scream pitched much higher than humans were capable of hearing. Asa guessed that he and bats alone were capable of hearing the noise he could create: As Teddy had informed him, the geneticists who invented his mutation probably were inspired by bats’ ability to use high pitched noises to locate things in the dark caves that they inhabited. With closed eyes, Asa’s ears picked up the echo of the cry he had just released, and a detailed image of his surroundings came to him. Using his echolocation, he could detect things in a 360 degree angle all at once, in roughly a fifty yard diameter. In his mind, he saw an owl asleep in a tree above, a squirrel digging a hole for nuts, and every crack and crevice of every tree in the vicinity. There was no indication of whom or what might have roped this creature up and slit its throat.

             
Asa stood up and brushed his pants. He did a quick circle, gazing into the forest around him, but saw nothing.

             
Asa looked at the ape again. Aside from the cuts on its head and neck, the animal had sustained no further injuries. The beautiful white hair was untouched, and so were the meaty muscles.

             
Whoever did this didn’t do it for food or fur. And they must have done it recently, because the birds haven’t had time to pick at it.

             
Asa glanced below the animal, his breath fogging in front of him in the cold air. A puddle of sticky blood painted the snow and dirt, some of it was on Asa’s shoes.

             
And the blood hasn’t had time to freeze yet.

             
Asa leaned against a tree, puzzling over what could have killed this animal.
It could have been another second semester student. Maybe they were just trying to practice hunting. Or maybe some other animal did it… I mean, this monkey is wearing clothes; setting a trap couldn’t be beyond its capabilities. Maybe a monkey enemy of his was retaliating for something done in the past.

             
Curious, Asa picked up his spear and moved deeper into the forest. He remembered how last semester Hubert Boistly had warned the Fishies to stay away from the mutated animals. He kept walking anyways, but tried to stay quiet.

             
He periodically threw his echoing cries into the air to monitor his surroundings, but it was Asa’s eyes that saw the next corpse. As Asa moved closer, he saw that this animal, like the last, was a white furred monkey that had been hung up by its ankles. The throat was slit, too, with blood puddling beneath like a shadow. But, instead of jean shorts and a t-shirt, this one was wearing what looked like a very old, and very dirty wedding dress. Gravity was pulling the skirt up to the monkey’s hairy shoulders. Though the eyes were gouged out and the face was mutilated, Asa could see that the animal had been wearing makeup, including eyeliner, eye shadow, dramatic pink blush, and red lipstick.

             
Asa scanned his surroundings, looking for footprints in the snow or dirt. He found none, but it had been lightly snowing an hour ago, and so they could have been covered up. This kill, like the last one, looked fresh.

             
Asa walked wide of the blood on the floor and moved deeper into the forest. The trees were dense above, and Asa was using the mountains behind him to judge his distance from his dwelling.
Probably an hour away from base,
he thought. He wondered what Teddy was doing up in their dwelling, all alone.
Hopefully he’s sleeping. He looks terrible.

Asa looked at the rope the white monkey was swinging from and wondered if she had been killed and hung up, or if she had stepped into a trap.
And if she had stepped into a trap, what are the chances that I will notice a small circle of rope on the floor and not step into it?

Asa remained still for a moment, not wanting to take another step until he had sorted out what was going on.
Someone or something has killed two monkeys and I have found them hanging from trees. Odds are, it’s just another student. It could be Stridor: I could see him hunting like this; the guy is crazy.

Asa considered this for a moment. It made sense. These animals were right next to a mountainside where a group of mutated students lived, and there hadn’t been school for the past two weeks. People were getting bored. And these weren’t ordinary people; they had all seen terrible, violent acts. Not only that, they had also
committed
terrible, violent acts. It should be expected that some of them have odd, uncouth hobbies.
So there is nothing to be afraid of. The mystery is solved. No reason to be scared.

Asa was breathing a little easier, and he could feel himself growing less alert when the next thought snuck into his mind:
But what if it’s not another student?

Asa looked around the woods. Again, he noticed how incredibly quiet it was, without a single crow in the sky or trees. For as long as Asa could remember, the animals had been Asa’s protectors. Now, they seemed to be disappearing.

Asa attempted to reason with himself:
If it’s not a student, it could be the hobby of one of the Multipliers that lives on the Academy. I need to get out of here. They want me dead. Conway confirmed that last year, as if all the assassination attempts weren’t enough. And…and…what was that!?

Asa’s ears pricked and his body tensed. All was quiet. He could hear the blood whooshing through veins in his skull, pumped onward by his panicking heart.

Yes, panic. I feel like I’m panicking. Just breathe.

Asa let out an echolocation cry. There was nothing there.

You’re okay. It’s in your head
.

Asa’s heart wasn’t calming down, though. It continued to pump faster and faster despite Asa’s attempts to sooth himself.
All of the sudden, he felt like he wanted to cry. The feeling came out of nowhere. He was sick of always being scared, of always being on the run. He felt crazy, insane, unstable.

A wave of anger overcame him at the mountains and institution behind him. They had hurt him so much, and all in the pursuit of Robert King obtaining more money.

First, the businessman had used Asa’s dad’s technology to create the most deadly virus in human history, the Wolf Flu. As Asa stood there, scared, the virus was killing even more, and there was no end in sight. The virus had taken Asa’s mother before her time, stealing dozens of good years so that Robert King could be wealthier.

Alfatrex, Robert King’s company, was selling a Wolf Flu vaccine, which was mildly effective, for a ridiculous price. He was thought to be the richest person ever.

The second thing that Robert King had done was to use the humanitarian organization that Asa’s father had established as a sort of military camp. The Academy kidnapped fifteen year olds from all over the country, every six months, and put them through brutal mutations and exercises. Many of them died, and at the end of two years the ones left standing were brainwashed, disturbed, and unnaturally strong individuals who worked to keep the secrets of the Wolf Flu from the general public.

And in the process, it’s made me mentally unstable.

“I’m fine,” Asa whispered to himself.

He was jerked from his thoughts as he heard something again: a clear
‘snap!’
broke the silence. Asa gripped his spear harder, and let out another echolocation cry. This one showed something.

             
When Asa opened his eyes, they immediately locked onto the source that he had detected with his echo. He crouched lower behind the bush and watched the man through the snowy tangle of branches and leaves, too scared to breath.

Chapter 2

Four Strangers in the Woods

              Asa had never seen this person before; he didn’t look like he belonged to the Academy. He wasn’t wearing either the white or black tight suit that the graduates and students wore.
A civilian hunter?
The man was dirty, with a washed-out brown long sleeve shirt, and camouflaged pants on. Both of these were stained with blood. A knife handle stuck out of a sheath on the man’s hip. There were leaves and sticks in the black mess of hair atop his head and tangled within his thick beard.

             
The man was muttering something that Asa couldn’t hear, and walking with his head down, lost in thought. Asa’s heart was thudding as he watched him pass. Asa stayed put until the muttering person was lost in the layers of forest. Even at a distance, the mutterings and footsteps of the man could be heard in the quiet.

             
Asa took another look up through the trees. In all his walks into the woods, he had never been out this far before. The passing stranger, the blood, and the dead primates had left Asa with a nauseating fear…but also with mounting curiosity. The stranger that had walked by Asa didn’t seem to belong to the Academy, as Asa had guessed. Just as the footsteps became too quiet to hear, Asa stood and began to follow in the snow.

             
The man wasn’t moving quickly, and at a light jog Asa had the man within sight after one minute. The man veered slightly right at a place in the forest that looked completely ordinary to Asa. Asa followed, the spear still clutched in his hand.

             
Even while moving, Asa was shivering in the cold air; when the wind blew, he had to catch his breath. He turned the heat on his suit up more and wondered how the man was able to stand the temperatures in such little clothing. They continued on, walking through beams of light that penetrated the canopy above. Asa saw nothing in the man’s walk that suggested he knew he was being followed.

             
Finally, the dirty man came to a campfire in a clearing. There were three camouflage tents set up, and the smell of meat drifted to Asa’s nose from a pot on the fire.

             
There was a woman sitting on a log near the fire. Coils of rope were laid at her feet, and she was snaking them through her hands, making knots occasionally. It looked like the same kind of rope that the monkeys had been tied up with. Asa saw her head turn to look at the man he had been following. Asa ducked behind a thick tree, scared she would see him.

             
“Eyyy! Joney!” She cried. “What kept you so long, you weren’t peakin’ up at the kiddos on the Mount, I don’t suppose?”

             
“Shut up!” Joney said. They both had accents that Asa didn’t recognize, but they sounded closer to Australian than anything else. “That was once, Edna, you hear me? Once, I was peakin’ in on ‘em and you won’t let it go. Michael has let it go! Why won’t you?”

             
“I’m only teasin’, my friend. Here, sit. The stew is almost ready.”

             
Joney obeyed and for a long while they were quiet. Asa kept his back against the tree trunk, and occasionally sent out echolocation calls to make sure that they had not quietly gotten up from their log in an attempt to sneak up on their eavesdropper. He had thought that finding the source of the dead monkeys would help to answer some of his questions, but he was now more confused than ever.
What are these people doing here? Do they have any idea who the “kiddos on the Mount” are?
Asa decided that he would watch for a time, and then, if these were indeed human hunters, he would warn them of the danger that they were in;
If the Academy finds them, they’re dead; if they run into a Rock Dragon, they’re dead
. For now though, he needed to observe for longer.