Zombies vs. Unicorns (25 page)

She leaves me on the porch, blinking back tears. I want to run inside and climb into her lap and have her sing me lullabies
or hymns or whatever it takes to drown out Flower’s cries of fear and hunger. The unicorn has been calling to me since the second I got out of Yves’s car.

What if I just left it there? It won’t be able to survive alone much longer. If Flower dies, I won’t be able to hear it cry, won’t feel its pain. I won’t be caring for a demon, like Mom says. No matter how innocent the baby unicorn looks, I know what lurks within. It was foolish of me to obey Venom yesterday, foolish of me to defy my parents and everything I knew was right.

Maybe after it’s dead I can go and bury it. Or drag it into the woods. Or …

Except how could I save it from drowning, from the quick death the wrangler offered—only to subject it to a day and night of terror and hunger and loneliness? What right do I have to torture it so?

Ignoring the garage and my backpack filled with groceries, I head to my bedroom. I do my homework, I surf the Internet, and I pray to God to deafen me to the baby unicorn that screams inside my head.

I resist it for two hours, and then I find myself on my way to the garage, backpack in hand. All my life I have learned that my God is a God of love, and that above all He wishes me to be compassionate. And then He places in my path a monster. If this is a test, then surely I am failing.

Inside the garage the unicorn is standing and pushing its face against the lid of the laundry basket. It has made a mess inside again. I sigh and empty out the basket. While I get its
formula ready, the unicorn takes a few tottering steps on the concrete floor, unsteady on its matchstick legs, then wipes out and starts crying. I do my best to ignore it while I blend the formula according to directions, then add a few handfuls of raw hamburger and set the blender to puree. The resulting mixture looks and smells like something you’d see on a reality television show, and I wonder if this will be any more palatable to the unicorn. Baby birds eat regurgitated bits of bugs or other meat from their mothers, though. Maybe unicorns work the same way.

Flower seems to like it, sucking from the bottle like a pro and pawing at me for more. After eating, it settles down pretty quickly into the cardboard box nest I’ve made for it. It drifts off to sleep as I’m rinsing out the blender, but when I cross the garage to return Mom’s gardening tools to the laundry basket, the unicorn wakes up and starts crying at me.

I swallow until I can speak. “Stop.”

Bleat, bleat. Bleeeeeaaaaaaaaaat.

“Stop, please!” Why couldn’t I kill it? Why couldn’t I let it die? I clap my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes shut.

Bleeeeaaaaaat. I hear Flower throwing itself against the sides of the box.

“No!” I say sharply. “Stop it. Settle down.”

And, amazingly, the unicorn listens.

By the end of the following week, I’ve fallen into a routine. My life circles around Flower—when to feed the unicorn, when to clean out his box, when to sneak out of the house, how
quickly I need to run home from school to take care of the little monster. In the middle of the night, I can tell when he stirs from his sleep, when he needs me. Oh, yes, it’s a boy. I made that little discovery the other day when I got a good look at his backside.

Flower thrives on the burger-formula solution and begins growing by leaps and bounds. Wooly white hair sprouts all over his body, and I worry less about whether or not he will be too cold at night. I’ve taken to sneaking out of the house to walk the unicorn around the backyard, hoping to tire him out enough that he won’t go wandering around the garage the next day. Luckily, he seems to be a nocturnal creature, happy to snooze the day away. I’m not so lucky, and I walk around school half in a daze, doze off in class, and suffer long, concerned looks from Yves at his place at the other end of the lunch table. He hasn’t spoken to me since the goat milk incident.

If I weren’t so tired, I’d wonder about that, and also about the damage this behavior is doing to my eternal soul. Every night I pray to God to send me strength, but it’s never been enough to kill Flower, nor even to leave him alone long enough to let him die. Apparently my parents had nothing to worry about. Even if they had let me go with those people, I’d never have been able to bring myself to hunt unicorns.

Saturday afternoon our crowd has a picnic at the newly reopened park. All around, families are walking the trails, playing Frisbee in the fields, or barbecuing in the pavilions.

“I think it’s premature,” says Katey, unpacking sandwiches
and bags of potato chips from a cooler. “They caught one unicorn. Doesn’t mean there aren’t more.”

“If you’re so scared, why did you come?” asks Marissa, pulling out a six-pack of sodas. Today she’s in a pair of shorts cut almost to the crotch.

Katey gives Marissa a smile that is more like a growl. “Noah will protect me. Won’t you, sweetie?”

Noah is standing next to Marissa, but moves really quickly. Yves is sitting on the picnic table, and Summer is on the bench, propped up against his knee. Aidan is stealing carrots from the plate where I’m setting out vegetables. He grins at me, his mouth a row of baby carrots laid end to end.

“Hey,” he says through the veggies, “did you see the corpse they put on the news yet?”

I have not. My parents deemed it unnecessarily macabre, and not only forbade me from watching the news, but also hid the metro section of the newspaper the following day. Aidan has brought the video, downloaded from YouTube, on his cell phone. We cluster around to watch. The audio is terrible, and the first minute is all the mayor shaking hands with the wildlife control people, none of whom, I note with interest, look like they could be unicorn hunters. To start with, there’s not a single girl in the bunch.

There’s a ticker running across the bottom of the screen that explains what neighborhood watch group found the corpse. Apparently the wildlife control folks aren’t the ones who killed the unicorn after all. Then the video cuts to another scene, where photographers and people with cameras cluster around
a small table in the police station. The camera zooms in on the corpse.

It’s Venom.

I reel back from the group, a gasp lodged in my throat. How I recognize the remains of Flower’s mother on a two-inch screen, I don’t know. But it’s her. The unicorn from the carnival. The one that bowed before me and begged me to save her child.
Dead
.

When? How? Did the wrangler kill her when I escaped with the baby? Venom wasn’t looking too good that night, was having trouble standing after the wrangler ripped Flower out of her. Did she somehow injure herself then?

But what I know for certain is it’s not the unicorn that killed Rebecca and John. It’s not even the same kind. That one was big, and dark, with a horn that curved instead of twisted.

And then I realize something else. If the unicorn they “caught” was Venom, it means the one terrorizing these woods is still out there. Which means that all my friends, all these people in the park—they’re in terrible danger.

Even more because they are here with me.

I turn and sprint away as my friends start calling my name. I run into the parking lot, breathing hard and wondering how I can get the city to close the parks down again. I hear feet pounding behind me, then feel a hand on my arm.

“Wen!” It’s Yves, and Summer and Aidan are right behind him. They each stop a few feet away, giving me space, but not enough. I back up again.

“Get away,” I tell Yves. “Don’t come near me.” I breathe the
air, tasting it for any trace of unicorn. We’re safe, so far.

“It’s okay, Wen,” he says.

“What’s wrong?” asks Aidan.

“It’s the unicorn,” Summer explains. “Those kids it killed—they were her cousins.”

I rip my arm out of Yves’s grip and glare at him so hard he stumbles backward.
“You told her?”

“Wen,” says Aidan, coming forward. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. Man, I’m such a moron. I—”

“That’s not it. That unicorn, in the video. That’s the one from the fair. They have the wrong one. The one that killed Rebec—it’s still out there.” I’m crying now, words choking me, breath stinging my throat.

“What do you mean?” Yves says.

Oh, no. This burning, this clarity, this smell of rot and forest fire. I know it. It’s coming.

“Get away!” I scream at him. “Get away from me right now!”

And then I start to run.

They say on the news that no one died in the attack. Yves calls from the hospital, reporting that the unicorn knocked Aidan down and broke his arm, then ran right by them.

Of course. It was trying to get to me.

I huddle under an old afghan on the couch while Mom makes me hot chocolate and smoothes my hair. I can hear the helicopters overhead, watch as their searchlights scour the woods behind our house. The parks and forests have been closed again, and the whole town is on lockdown. I wonder if the unicorn
is waiting out there for me, or if it has enough sense to go back into hiding.

“You did the right thing,” Mom says. “Running away from a populated area. It was stupid to reopen the parks, to think there was only one of them out there… .”

I sip my hot chocolate and don’t correct her. After all, it’s true that there
was
more than one unicorn in our town. And even if they do kill this one, there’s still Flower, tucked away safe and sound in the garage.

Sometime late that night they report that the unicorn has been eliminated, but that the wilderness shutdown remains in full effect, for public safety. Yeah, right. They couldn’t have gotten hunters over here from Italy so fast. My parents, now seated on either side of me, praise God for his protection and mercy, but I just sob into their hugs and reassurances and promises that they can keep me safe. My parents are so much older and wiser than I am. How can they be so wrong about this? How can any of us be safe when I’m raising the instrument of our destruction in our own garage? How can we guard ourselves against unicorns when I’m spending half my nights feeding one from a bottle?

I excuse myself, claiming I need some alone time. This is, miraculously, not a lie. Then I head to the garage.

In my father’s toolbox is a small hand axe. I’m doing this for the right reasons. The wrangler was correct all along. Maybe she was in the same situation I’m in. Tricked into caring for a unicorn that became increasingly dangerous, that created little monsters of its own. Maybe she was right to try to drown
Venom’s offspring, to let Venom die—or even kill the unicorn herself at last. Maybe the wrangler possessed the grace that I could not muster on my own.

I approach Flower’s box. I can tell he’s happy I’ve come, but something’s wrong. There’s a hole chewed in the side of the box. The box is empty.

“Flower?” I say, spinning. He’s still in the garage, hiding. He thinks this is a game. Flower’s joy is palpable. He’s so proud of himself. Clever beast, escaping. Freedom. Showing off for me when I come home. Each emotion is clearer than the last, and I realize that every moment I spend with the unicorn is giving it more access to my mind, to my soul.

I tighten my grip on the handle of the axe. I
must
cast it out. “Come here, Flower.”

The unicorn usually obeys my every command, but he’s hesitant now. Perhaps he’s even smarter than I thought. Perhaps since I can read his thoughts, he can read mine and knows I mean him harm. I try to project my usual tenderness.

“Flower,” I coax, following my senses through the garage, behind the saw table, under the disused weight bench, over to the old camping equipment. There are holes in the bag where we keep our cooking supplies, and utensils are strewn all over the floor. “Come here, baby.”

I hear rustling from the darkness. Flower is unsure of my motives, confused by my tone.

“Flower,” I try again, my voice wavering over more sobs. How do soldiers do it? How do the real unicorn hunters? The trained ones? “Don’t you get it? I have to! I
have
to …”

The unicorn steps out of the shadows, his blue eyes trained on me. His mouth is open, panting slightly, so that he almost looks like he’s smiling. I can see brand-new white teeth breaking through the gums. Teeth that helped him chew through the cardboard. Teeth he might use on my parents, or my friends.

I have to
, I cry to the unicorn inside my head. Flower’s matchstick legs wobble a few steps closer, and he watches me, eyes full of trust. This is the creature I’ve held and fed every night and every morning.

The flower in the center of his forehead is red now, glistening, enflamed and engorged like a massive, starburst-shaped boil. The horn is coming. The horn, and the poison, and all of the danger that marks this monster’s—this demon’s—entire species. I can’t let him survive. I can’t.

This is the animal I caressed until he fell asleep, who I crooned to while he cried, who I dreamed of every night, who I’ve run through the yard by moonlight, who I rushed home to day after day. I watched him be born; I held him in my arms, still wet from his mother; and I crushed him to my chest so he wouldn’t freeze. I’ve hidden him and protected him and given up everything to keep him safe.

Flower bends his forelegs and lowers his head to the floor. He bows before me, just like his mother, and stretches out his neck as if for sacrifice. I could do it now; it would be so easy.

I drop the axe and fall to my knees.

Under cover of twilight I take Flower out to the woods. The deadly woods. The forbidden woods. With an old rubber-coated
bicycle chain for a collar and a leash made from steel cable that Dad uses to tie his boat to his truck, I secure the unicorn to a tree, then create a makeshift shelter in the brush right next to it. From a few feet away you can hardly tell there’s anything unnatural there. And at least he’s out of our yard. No one will go into the woods—not after this new attack.

Flower is quiet while I work, and still, as if he knows how close he came to death. He trots obediently into the shelter and settles down on a pile of leaves. I leave the unicorn a package of ground turkey for dinner. Now that his teeth are in, I don’t even need to bother with the blender anymore, but I figure that the food should still be soft. Baby food, for a predator.