Foodchain

by Jeff Jacobson

  Up on the catwalk, Red wouldn’t stop his high-pitched screaming. Sergio plucked the knife out of Red’s thigh and grabbed hold of Red’s bleeding nose with his other hand, pinching the nostrils shut with his huge thumb and forefinger. He held Red’s head very still and wiped the blade clean in the red hair. He cut off the other sock with his newly cleaned blade and sliced Red’s underwear in half at the hip.

  Giulio nodded at Frank’s boxers. Frank took a deep breath, slid his boxers down to his ankles, and kept watching the darkness under the cages.

  Red managed one more “—please—” before the zookeeper and Sergio lifted his naked, bleeding body and dropped him into the tank with a dull splash.

  Above and behind him, Frank heard quick, savage movement. A desperate, gurgled shriek. Brittle leather scraped over wet iron. Water, thick with algae, splashed over the rim, slid down the outside of the tank, and dripped onto the top of his head, trickling down the back of his neck. It felt warm, like a used bath.

  The zookeeper and Sergio turned to stare down at Frank. He tried to breathe slow, easy, and found that he couldn’t even take a breath. His exposed balls felt cold and shriveled in the night air. He curled his toes, felt the sand and grit underneath. It was time to make his move. He’d stalled long enough. He had to try something, anything. Trouble was, nothing was coming to him. Nothing was left inside. Nothing except the urge to simply bolt, to spring naked between the cages, to flee shrieking into the night.

  But the quiet gentlemen would catch him. And they’d make his death last for days. So he started up the stairs, legs feeling weak, like overcooked spaghetti, head down, hands cupped over his dick and balls. It was a funny time for modesty, but ingrained habits died hard. Giulio followed him up the stairs, snicking the knife away.

  The surface of the water seethed and boiled as if it was alive. Frank caught a flash of white, a belly maybe. Whatever it was, it wasn’t Red. A flat, tapered tail slapped the surface with eagerness. Something dark rolled several times and disappeared in the roiling water. Bubbles, silver in the yellow light, popped and fizzed. The zookeeper bent over and banged the cattle prod several times against the side of the tank.

  Shadows rose to the surface. They were large, maybe eight, ten feet long and nearly two feet across.

  Frank finally realized that the tank was full of alligators.

  Freezing terror scrabbled up his spine and sunk its fangs into the bottom of his brain. His knees quivered, threatened to collapse completely. He should have known. Should have known that the tank would be stuffed with some kind of goddamn squirming nightmare. He hated reptiles, alligators especially. Ever since he was a little kid in East Texas, playing on the sloping lawn that dropped abruptly into that black canal.

  Frank didn’t trust anything that didn’t generate its own body heat.

  A single word, “PLEASE” erupted in his throat like the silver bubbles in the tank and nearly popped in his mouth. But he choked it down. He’d be damned if he started begging now. For a moment, under the gassy, rotten smell of the water, he suddenly smelled his father, the sickly sweet smell of his shaving lotion.

  “Go ahead. Shoot me. Get it over with,” he said.

  The rubbery folds in the zookeeper’s face split into a smile. “Fine. Shoot him then.”

  Sergio shook his head. “We can’t. Mr. Castellari gave specific instructions.”

  “Just shoot me. C’mon, you spineless fucks. You fucking wop motherfucking cocksucking—Frank’s voice got high and tight, like an overstrung violin, and he screamed, “Shoot, you greasy motherfucking—”

  But instead Sergio and Giulio curled their thick fingers around the muscles above Frank’s elbows, and the sudden sense of being powerless, of being forced, slithered into his mind and squatted above the gleaming fangs of terror, enveloping his consciousness in a white, blurry haze of shock.

  And just as the two quiet gentlemen started to tilt Frank forward, forcing him to topple face first into the alligator tank, just as all the strength left his knees and he felt his own warm, humiliating piss run down the inside of his left leg, just as the zookeeper played his flashlight over the rolling black water, catching the awful black eyes of the alligators, the lion leapt.

  * * * * *

  Later, Frank could only guess that the lion had been driven into a frenzy by the smell of the blood and raw greyhound meat in the dust, maddeningly just out of reach, and had somehow forced its cage door open just enough to slip out. After gulping down the few pieces and licking up Red’s vomit, he must have followed the drops of nose blood and the pure, uncut scent of panic, obeying the oldest instinct of all, older than fear.

  Hunger.

  Frank sensed, rather than heard, the roar behind him, felt the impact of the lion hit the catwalk like a five hundred pound wrecking ball. The lion came down hard on Sergio, claws slicing through the tasteful suit like a plow breaking through the last frost of winter.

  Frank grabbed Giulio’s left wrist with both hands as he fell forward and pulled the heavy, quiet gentleman down. They toppled into the tank together, Frank fumbling for the car keys in Giulio’s suit pocket. Frank’s bare feet hit the slimy bottom and he instantly kicked out, driving his heels into Giulio’s chest, pushing himself back towards the catwalk. He heard nothing but a rush of bubbles and the thin, staccato beat of his own heart.

  The lion’s back feet, claws outstretched like lethal grappling hooks, caught the bottom rung of the railing. As the front legs bounced off the catwalk, the ungodly massive shoulders rolled with the impact. The back legs tensed, pulling the giant cat backwards. Sergio dropped to his knees, his eyes popping open as shock ratcheted into his soul.

  The zookeeper stumbled away, fumbling with the cattle prod, and fell backwards down the stairs.

  Sergio managed to get his .38 clear of the holster just as the lion’s front left paw swung through the air like a scythe and sent the quiet gentleman’s arm, fingers still clenched around the taped gun handle, sailing out over Frank and the alligator tank. The arm spun, spitting a fine mist of blood into a rainbow above the black water and yellow light. The hand muscles twitched and the gun flinched, firing a round into the night sky.

  The lion rolled his back hips over the railing with a fluidity that matched the surface of the water and stalked forward, inch-long splintered claws slipping into the gaps in the steel mesh.

  Sergio took one solid, confident step forward. In his mind, he raised the .38 and squeezed off three quick shots.

  The lion struck faster than a rattlesnake, clapping his great stretched paws on Sergio’s shoulders and crunching his skull between his jaws like a hammer under a walnut. The cat shook his head once, twice, and raggedly ripped Sergio’s head off.

  Down in the tank, Frank gathered his legs under his chest and shoved down as hard as he could manage, throwing himself onto the catwalk, just under the flicking tail. The steel mesh chewed into his chest like a cheese grater, but he thrust his elbows down, pulling himself out of the water.

  Sergio’s headless, one-armed body sank to its knees, as if he had finally given up completely, and toppled backwards, bounced down the stairs and landed heavily on top of the zookeeper, who was scrabbling away when the limp sack of bones and flesh slammed him into the dirt.

  Frank rolled under the bottom rung of the railing as two quick explosions shattered the water’s surface. Frank didn’t know if Giulio was shooting at him, the lion, or the alligators; he didn’t care. His bare feet hit the dust and he broke out into a flat-out run, ignoring the sharp edges of gravel, cuffed hands swinging, elbows flailing in the cool night air.

  The lion shivered, shaking his head, crunching those giant teeth together. The pieces of skull cracked into splintered fragments, dribbling blood over the black lips and tawny fur of his bottom jaw. Elegant drops clung to the long, thick whiskers like heavy dew on a spiderweb. The tufted tail flicked happily back and forth. The taste of blood had jump-started his other senses; smells suddenly gained new dimensions o
f texture. Every sound became crisp, clear. Even the quick snick-snick of the .38 being cocked.

  Frank ran. Behind him, gunfire popped. The lion roared.

  The shooting lasted for a long time and as the thunderous, almost numbing sound of gunfire continued to ring in Giulio and the zookeeper’s ears, neither heard the engine of the long black car start as Frank stomped on the gas, plowed through the front gate, and shot into the night.

  DAY TWO

  He hadn’t meant to kill the horse.

  No, that wasn’t right, Frank corrected himself as he steered the long, black car along the high desert highway. That’s not exactly being honest. He’d meant to kill the horse, all right, just not then, not that way. He braced his naked knees against the steering wheel and reached over with his cuffed hands to turn on the heat. Soothing, warm air exhaled softly over his white skin.

  The grooms called him, “El Caballo Susurrero.” The Horse Whisperer.

  After Frank and his mom moved away from East Texas, away from the ghost of his father, they settled in the industrial wasteland of suburban southwest Chicago. Mom told Frank that she was a waitress, but he found out later she was a stripper.

  Frank found work at Hawthorne, a nearby horse racetrack. For a long time, Frank worked alongside the little Mexican guys who found their way north riding in the backs of trucks. He cleaned stalls, shaking and sifting the shavings until nothing remained, not horseshit, no soiled hay, nothing except wood shavings. He tacked up the thoroughbreds, preparing the snorting, dancing racehorses for their morning run, and washed them after their workouts.

  He may have made a good jockey, but genetics betrayed him. Mom was damn near six feet and his father was at least 6’ 5”. But his father’s height was never impressive; he looked like a scarecrow that had seen too many hard winters.

  In the barns, Frank hung back, always helping, always watching. When he spoke, it was quiet, but people started to listen. And listen hard. By the end of that first season, he’d been driven up to Arlington to watch the horses there. His observations about the horses and his race predictions were eerily correct. The big money boys, the guys that watched the races from behind great walls of air-conditioned glass, took notice. It wasn’t hard to pull an eighteen-year old into the fold.

  They paid for college. Frank went to school at nights while working at the track during the day. Two years away from a veterinary degree he saw his Mom cough blood. She was washing dishes. He’d come down from his bedroom and saw her back hitch a little as she gripped the side of the sink. Little flecks of crimson suddenly appeared within the bubbles. She whipped at the water in the sink with a wooden spoon, as if stirring in some exotic herb into a frothy soup. Frank put a frozen burrito in the microwave and his mom asked him if he was going out that night and neither one of them mentioned it again.

  The next day Frank was bent over, wrapping the front left leg of a five-year old filly nearing the end of her career, trying to focus on the job but thinking of all those flecks of blood in the soap bubbles, when a groom tried to bring a notoriously twitchy colt under the lead line connected to the filly’s halter. Any other day, it probably would have worked, but the colt was spooked by the sound of a pitchfork being tossed into an empty wheelbarrow. It reared and kicked, and the next thing Frank knew, he was vomiting uncontrollably in a hospital bed. The doctors spoke in clipped, officious tones, throwing out terms like “brain damage” and “limited recovery” as if they were simple math equations.

  Once the pain went away and the vomiting stopped, Frank didn’t feel much different. Except for two things. He’d been kicked in the left side of the head, and the muscles on that side of his face didn’t work very well. They’d respond halfheartedly, like a tired, petulant ten year old being ordered to wash the dog. Other times, they’d constrict, as if they were trying to climb right off his face. Most of the time, though, they just hung there like heavy, wet curtains. The right side worked just fine.

  The second thing was, for some reason he never did understand, he couldn’t get his brain to decipher numeric representations. He could read a traditional watch with an hour and second hand, understood it on a core level, but a digital readout looked like a series of random LED slashes.

  The college board wanted to know how he would read textbooks, medicine bottles, syringes. Frank demonstrated that he could count just fine, as long as the numbers were written out as words, and he could mark on the measurements on a bottle or syringe, but they wouldn’t give a definite ruling. His employers told Frank not to worry, that the school had to make sure they couldn’t get sued, either way. Weeks dragged into months. Frank’s mom moved into the hospital and didn’t come out. Yet, there was still hope.

  Until the day Frank beat a man to death with a fistful of aluminum horseshoes.

  The defense successfully argued that the man had been treating a race horse with exceptional cruelty, and what with Frank’s past as a promising young veterinarian, dedicated to preserving these animals’ health and safety, combined with his recent devastating brain injury, he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions that tragic day. He had to visit a psychiatrist one day a week, and his career as a vet was over, but that was it. No jail. No hospital.

  Later, Frank wished he’d been locked away somewhere instead.

  The men who’d paid for his aborted education wanted to know how and when he was going to pay them back. The nature of Frank’s work changed. He decided which horses had potential, which horses could stand another round of injections, and which horses would make more money if they died from insurance claims. Once in a while he would hear the grooms whispering about him in halting, flurries of Spanish and English, as if it was safer to talk about a man like that in a deliberate blurring of language. A rumor started that if he visited a horse, held up his finger to his pursed mouth and said, “Shhhh,” that horse ended up dead.

  His mom never came out of the hospital. The men paid for her funeral.

  And so Frank became the guy you’d go to when you needed a horse dead. At least he killed the horses humanely, with drugs so they’d just slip away, just go to sleep. Not like that sonofabitch who’d slide lubricated wires into the horse’s asshole and then connect the wires to a car battery.

  * * * * *

  Frank kept the needle around sixty-five and shifted on the gray leather seat, rolling his head, easing the kinks in his neck. Long, black hair hung in his face; the left side of his mouth was pulled down by an unseen fishhook. He had to find some clothes. It didn’t matter what he told the cops, if he got pulled over, that was it. They’d take one look at his nakedness and the handcuffs, and he’d be spending the night in jail. Waiting, no doubt, for more quiet gentlemen to show up. Castellari had connections everywhere. Frank probably wouldn’t last more than a few hours in jail. They’d bail him out and drag him off to a garage in the middle of nowhere and go to work on his flesh.

  Clothing was the first priority. Well, that and the goddamn cuffs. He slowed the long black car to twenty miles an hour, scanning the side of the highway. Luckily, he hadn’t seen anyone way out here yet. He found a wide, level spot and pulled the car off the highway and steered it deep into the scrub brush.

  Two weeks ago, he’d gotten a call from Mr. Enzo Castellari. Ten minutes before the Breeder’s Cup at the Arlington Racetrack, Frank pretended to pat The Elizabeth Dane’s flank affectionately, but he was actually shooting fifteen ccs of his own special cocktail into her bloodstream. Mom had worked as a magician’s assistant in one of the riverboat casinos for a while, and she taught Frank a few tricks. Mostly sleight of hand. He used a latex bulb syringe, used for cleaning babies’ ears, a curved needle, and a length of surgical tubing that snaked up his sleeve.

  As the drugs slipped through the horse’s circulatory system, eventually hitting specific nerve endings in the brain, it was supposed to gradually stimulate her into a frenzy of strength and speed as she went charging out through the race, winning by several lengths. Then, while the insu
rance was quietly changed, significantly raising the coverage, the horse would slip into a coma and die in three or four days. The insurance companies were in on the scam as well, they had business insurance, and everybody just kept ripping everybody else off up and down the ladder.

  But a group of animal rights activists had stormed the racetrack, delaying the race for an hour. Once the race finally got started, Castellari’s horse burst out of the pack early in the race and seemed a sure bet, until blood burst from her nostrils and she collapsed in the soft dirt in tangle of long, impossibly thin legs and leather reins, flicking the tiny rider away. The other horses simply thundered around the body as the jockey, who knew that the horse had been poisoned, got caught on camera stomping at the dead horse.

  The Elizabeth Dane was supposed to slip away quietly, out of the spotlight. Instead, she died on national television. Frank knew Mr. Castellari wouldn’t give two shits about his excuses and so he ran, ran out into the parking lot, out of Chicago, out of the Midwest.

  * * * * *

  There was a pair of wraparound black sunglasses, half a roll of Tums, and a cassette tape of Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass in the glove compartment, but that was it. The car was clean, so clean he couldn’t even find dirt in the plush carpeting.

  Frank killed the engine and sat for a moment under an empty sky. Then he got out. He found two crisp black suits, neatly folded and pressed, still snug in their dry cleaning bags, in the back seat. Blinding white shirts too. He figured the suits might have been just in case the two quiet gentlemen got any blood on their clothing while feeding the animals. There were even two pairs of gleaming black shoes.