The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  “People let me down,” he said. “They always let me down. But you . . .” He scooted closer. “I’ve got to know. Are we still Corey and Tucker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He reached for his backpack and withdrew his pocketknife. His face was pink with concentration, his mouth taut. He flipped open a long, sleek blade, then tested the point on the bulb of his thumb.

  “Do you want to see the Wildlands?” he asked.

  The knife glinted in the sunlight. I kept my gaze fixed on it.

  “I think so,” I whispered. Sudden tears stung my eyes, hot and filmy. I blinked them away; I did not want Tucker to see this evidence of weakness.

  “Are you with me?” he said, turning the blade in his fingers.

  I met his gaze at last. He leaned forward keenly, staring into my face, though he did not appear to notice that I was crying.

  “Do you want to see the Wildlands?” he repeated earnestly.

  “I do,” I said.

  His hand snaked out, grabbing mine. I flinched as he unfolded my fingers, smoothing my palm flat.

  “Blood oath,” he said. “Blood brothers.”

  I saw the flow of red before I felt the bite of the incision. Tucker sliced a line across my palm. The gash bisected the creases in my flesh like a highway on a road map. I watched in disbelief as the blood bloomed in beads.

  Then Tucker handed the knife to me. There was red smeared along the blade—the juice of my body, as dark as paint. I felt my breath catch in my throat, and I swayed for a moment in the wind, light-headed.

  This was a test.

  I took hold of Tucker’s hand and dove the blade into skin. I carved a bright line from his thumb to his pinkie. Blood puddled in his palm. Coils of crimson trickled down his wrist, outlining the structure of his tendons.

  “You and me,” he said.

  He pressed our palms together, slick and painful, commingling our blood.

  AS THE DAY PASSED, TUCKER did not put on his green jumpsuit and leave me. Instead, he lingered while the sun climbed the sky. I spent the hours lying down, my hand wrapped in gauze, my head pounding. Tucker packed up our gear—there wasn’t much to collect—and told me we’d be heading out once it got dark. He was restless, bobbing in and out through the door of the tomb. His hand was bandaged like mine; we bore matching wounds. He muttered to himself. He got out pen and paper and sat for a while drawing diagrams. I did not know why he had not left me alone as usual. I pondered this question as I napped. Eventually it dawned on me that most people did not work on Sundays. I had been outside the rhythms of human civilization for long enough that I had forgotten about weekends.

  After a while, Tucker began to lecture me. His voice rang through the air as I drowsed and gazed at the ocean. The mist had burned away, the horizon as sharp as the blade of Tucker’s pocketknife. He talked and talked. Forest fires. Invasive species. Algae fields. Maybe he didn’t realize that I wasn’t listening. Maybe he hoped that some of his insights might filter into my mind regardless. Maybe he wasn’t aware of me at all, speaking his thoughts aloud simply because he could no longer keep them contained inside his person. The destruction of the rain forest. The food chain. Earth Overshoot Day. The wind touched my cheek. The sun wrapped itself in clouds. I dozed and woke, dozed and woke, my brother’s voice interspersed with daydream and sensation.

  Then there was darkness around me. I was inside the tomb again. I wondered if Tucker had carried me—or maybe I had floated inside on the breeze. The cool pressure of the flagstone floor was soothing. The open door was a rectangle of muted light and greenery. I ran a hand through my hair—the hand Tucker had not cut. My locks were short enough to stay out of my face but long enough to catch in tangles around my fingers. I wondered what I looked like now. I had not seen a mirror in weeks.

  I blinked. There was a chill in the air. The light had changed once more, the marble floor splattered with helixes of ochre and purple. Time kept passing without my consent. Whenever I shut my eyes, another hour would drift away from me.

  “Remember when I told you about apex predators?” Tucker said.

  I realized he was sitting next to me, his leg touching mine. I wondered how long he had been there—how long he had been talking to me while I slept. He was rocking back and forth, his knee jostling mine with each revolution.

  “In the wild, polar bears walk for miles every day,” he said. “Their territory ranges over entire arctic plateaus. Tigers are the same. They live alone. They travel constantly. Wolf packs cross whole mountain ranges on the hunt.”

  I flexed my fingers, feeling the gauze tighten across my sore palm.

  “Most of them live in zoos now,” Tucker said. “You take an apex predator and you put it behind bars. Do you know what happens?”

  “No,” I mumbled.

  “Polar bears have been known to wear deep grooves in the floor of their cages from walking the same path over and over. Tigers sometimes pace until they faint from heatstroke.” His hands closed into fists, one on each knee. “They can’t accept that they’re trapped. They can’t stop. They can’t rest. The idea of captivity is outside their comprehension.”

  A breeze orbited the tomb, bearing the smell of the ocean. Gulls cried in the distance. I must have slept again, my brother’s voice whirling around me. Add up all the people on earth and the animals we’ve domesticated. The seagulls were closer now, singing in a shrill, violent chorus. Add up all the mammals in the wild. Tucker’s voice grew deeper, more guttural. Ten thousand years ago, human beings and the beasts of the field made up just .01 percent of all mammalian life. I sat up, thought better of it, and lay down again. My head was as leaden and unwieldy as a bowling ball. Now people and domestic animals are twenty times more numerous than all the other mammals on the planet combined.

  Then another voice spoke, hesitant and breathy. Humans are remaking the world in our own image. A sweet soprano chimed in. Certain species are everywhere: apple trees, cows, chickens, rice, dogs. But the plants we don’t eat, the animals we don’t like—they’re vanishing right before our eyes. A gruff tenor spoke next, echoing as though calling out from far away. Some people say that man is the animal who laughs. I disagree. Man is the animal who tells stories. A fading, wraithlike wail finished the monologue. We have to remember them. We have to tell the story.

  It was the corpses. I was sure of this now. Perhaps Tucker had not said a word in hours; perhaps he was rocking in silence as the voices of the dead rang around us both. The din became unbearable, too many disparate tones overlapping, louder and louder, each one crying to be heard over the others.

  Then Tucker was poking me with his forefinger.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  41

  The pavement was frosty pale, a moonlit river that flowed around the dark shapes of the animal houses. The rhino, a truck-sized silhouette, shuffled moodily around its cage. A wolf howled from the other side of the grounds, its call hanging in the air like woodsmoke. From the gloom behind me came the grumble of a bear. The koala exhibit was illuminated from within by the faint glow of an exit sign, a blood-red eye shimmering in the empty rooms.

  It was midnight, and we stood on the grounds of the Pacific Zoo.

  “Here we go,” Tucker said.

  This was the secret of the green jumpsuit. My brother had taken a job with the maintenance crew at one of the most famous zoos in the Southwest. He had mopped the paths, swept the animal houses, scoured the urinals, taken possession of a swipe card and a bundle of keys, and received his pay under the table in cash. I was amazed by his cunning. To me, the Pacific Zoo was nothing short of a magical realm. I had heard about the place all my life. My father had been there as a child, and his stories had percolated down to me secondhand through Darlene and Jane.

  As a janitor, Tucker was able to familiarize himself with the grounds. He learned where the cameras were, how each p
addock was protected, when the security guards went about their rounds. He mapped the layout until he could walk it in the dark. He knew the location of every back door. He had even discovered a few glitches in the system—a loose latch here, a broken surveillance camera there—loopholes that only a maintenance man would ever come upon.

  “It wasn’t hard to get hired,” he whispered. “There’s quite a bit of turnover in the janitorial staff. New faces every month or so.”

  When I looked confused, he explained, “We handle a lot of manure. The kangaroos are the worst. That stuff is toxic.”

  All the symptoms of my illness were gone. My head was not aching, my sore tooth and the palm of my hand no longer reflecting the rhythm of my pulse in jabs of pain. The adrenaline had short-circuited my fever. I felt more alert than I had ever been.

  “Are we really doing this?” I said.

  “Hell yeah. Tucker and Corey.”

  He handed me a balaclava. I tugged it on, though I needed my brother’s help to get the eye and mouth holes lined up correctly. The fabric was scratchy around my ears. Tucker donned one too, smiling at me, his face distorted by the arrangement of black cloth, a flash of teeth, a glint of eyes, not quite human anymore.

  “There are three night watchmen on the grounds,” he said.

  He explained that there would be two young guys and Abe. The old man would almost certainly be sleeping in his plush chair in the administrative building now. After midnight, Abe ceased to take his guard duty seriously, assuming that any potential vandals would, like himself, be too sleepy for activity. The two youngsters, on the other hand, would be keeping a sharp eye out.

  Tucker and I headed toward the panda exhibit. A streak of silver by the southern wall might have been the neck of a giraffe or the trail of an airplane dusted against the sky. The trees were alive with sound, surging in the wind. Entry into the panda habitat—an open area behind a high fence, a sprawling void filled with snuffling—required a swipe card and a key. Tucker had both. I stood cloistered beneath the arch of the back door, scratching at my ski mask and watching him work. It took him a while to find the right key, fumbling through a clattering ring in the darkness. I was vibrating with excitement. I had never been more of a boy than I was then.

  The gate opened with a brassy clunk. The shape of the pandas was impossible to parse at this distance. Their black fur melted into the background, while the white stood out in mysterious configurations—two, perhaps three, animals slumbering in a heap, now stirring, beginning to roll to their feet. I had the impression of disembodied movement, a patchwork of pallid fabric like clothes hanging from a line, suddenly imbued with agency, rippling and floating toward me.

  “Come on,” Tucker said.

  We made tracks toward the primates, where our job would be both easier and more complex. The monkeys had been trying to escape all their lives and would be quick to grasp an opportunity, but even the little tamarins and lemurs could be dangerous if surprised—let alone the gorillas and chimps, faster and stronger than my brother and me, capable of crushing our skulls with their bare hands.

  Tucker used the janitor’s entrance and jogged down a narrow corridor. The exhibits for the monkeys were lovely and large, hung with netting, rope swings, and all manner of toys—an approximation of the rain forest, designed to charm the visitors but unable to fool the animals. The back doors, hidden from the public, were far less scenic. A row of steel squares with plastic handles. For a moment, I was reminded of the portals in the mausoleum.

  Tucker fiddled with his bunch of keys. As he undid each lock, I opened the door and we darted to the next enclosure. In our wake, hairy figures flung themselves into the open air as though launched on springs, screaming with joy and alarm. The smallest monkeys moved with the illusion of flight, their tiny limbs splayed. The capuchins were larger and calmer, hooting genially, licking the pavement, and pausing to sniff the air. A few territorial squabbles broke out, resolved in seconds by a baring of teeth.

  The primates were not all grouped in one cage but spread over a series of exhibits, some outdoors, some enclosed, some spacious, some cramped, some reeking of urine and rotting fruit, some carpeted by a plush layer of straw. Tucker and I released the gibbons, who leapt clumsily toward the trees. Their arms were long enough to drag on the ground, so they bounced sideways while holding their hands aloft like waders unwilling to commit their upper bodies to contact with icy water. They mounted into the branches, and at once their figures made sense: stubby torsos swinging away beneath deft, slender arms. One gibbon—a youngster with ivory fur—paused high in a nearby pine to gaze down at us. It gripped a branch with one hand and looped its tail around another. With its free arm it made an indeterminate gesture, probably scratching its maw, though I imagined that it might be waving goodbye.

  Nobody but Tucker and Corey could have managed this. It was all true—it was really happening.

  We did not move systematically down the pathways, since that would have made our progress easier to track and exposed us to too many security cameras. Instead, we crisscrossed the zoo through side routes and back alleys, following a pattern discernible only to Tucker. The crocodile. The moose. The tarantula. The anteater. The capybara. We walked for what felt like miles, mounting hills, ducking through buildings, sliding down corridors as narrow as burrows. I was disoriented, bewildered, and ecstatic. I no longer felt the oppressive grip of the balaclava on my head; I was used to it now, remembering it only when I looked at my brother and saw his face similarly obscured.

  We liberated the kangaroos, who grasped the concept of escape at once but took some time to finish the business of fleeing; a dozen of them bounded through the gate and back again like relay runners with no apparent leader. Tucker and I released the lonely orangutan: an inky haystack, a shy posture, a boiled walnut for a face. There were more kinds of deer and antelope than I knew existed—one timid and trembling, another as hefty as a boulder, a third half drowned inside a waterfall of unkempt fur. Some wore spiraling corkscrews on their heads, while others sported short, brutal shivs for antlers. There was a buck crowned by a lattice the size of a shrub, carrying stars in the lacunae between the prongs. We freed them all.

  Next on the list were the zebras. Tucker led me behind a maintenance building, sliding along the wall to avoid the glow of a streetlamp and a camera perched on a nearby eave. The zebras were more skittish than the deer. Their instincts went back to the African savannah, after all, where darkness was a time for being hunted, when lions and hyenas were on the prowl. The zebras pranced and pirouetted. Their bodies were a cacophony of white strips and negative space, many animals blurred into a single, chaotic mass. I could not begin to count them. They clattered onto the path in a unified herd and bolted toward the trees, giving vent to their upside-down fire alarm of a call.

  After this, things grew more intense and intricate. Tucker whispered that we did not have much time left. We would have to move faster and faster as we went. We opened the gate for the tiger, undoing the bolt and pushing the door ajar. The big cat was sleeping on a faraway rock, a spill of tufted belly, its tail lashing in dreams. Tucker drew me away, whispering that the animal would awaken soon enough, roused by the unaccustomed flurry of sounds, the musk of frightened deer, the whinny of the zebras, the suggestion of prey on the move. The tiger would check the door to its cage—it always checked the door—and one swipe of its paw would set it loose.

  On our way toward the polar bear exhibit, I glanced down a slope and saw a lamp shining in the administrative building. Tucker pushed his ski mask up to his hairline for a better look, then ran a hand fretfully around his chin.

  “Damn,” he muttered.

  A gazelle cantered down the pathway, snorting and tossing its head. A pack of shadows slid between the trees—either hyenas or kangaroos, I could not be certain. Tucker turned away, motioning for me to follow him.

  The polar bears were asleep on a slab of stone, milky fur shimmering in the darkne
ss. There were three animals—a brother and sister, Tucker informed me, along with an orphaned female who had joined their makeshift family as a young adult. Their cage contained a deep pool, the water pervaded by a soft blue glow that seemed to emanate from the concrete flooring. Tucker unsealed the electronic door, which opened with a ripe, metallic clunk. All three bears woke at once. This sound, according to Tucker, was usually associated with breakfast. I watched them lumbering to their feet, sniffing the air. One was substantially larger than the other two, as massive and pale as a cumulous cloud, his fur marbled with dirt and damp. He took the lead, stalking curiously toward us while the females fell into step behind him.

  “You know what a group of polar bears is called in the wild?” Tucker hissed in my ear.

  I shook my head.

  “Every species has its own name,” he said. “A herd of cows. A colony of bats. A murder of crows. For polar bears, it’s a celebration.” Tucker smiled behind his ski mask. “They meet up so rarely. They live such lonely lives. When there’s more than one together, you’ve got a celebration.”

  We cut through an alley and climbed over a wooden fence, my brother giving me a boost. Together we approached the gorilla exhibit. We would have to work like lightning here. The animals had a vast outdoor arena in which to luxuriate. There were fake trees and fake rocks, as well as a man-made waterfall. I noted that the gorillas were at rest, lounging on branches, in corners. The big silverback examined his feet. One of the females held a baby in her arms, while another buried herself systematically in straw. I stepped closer to the viewing window.

  At once, the silverback was galvanized into motion. His monstrous arm shot out and slammed against a boulder to launch his bulk upward to a higher perch. He rocketed around the cage, booming a territorial shout, flinging himself from branch to branch. The other gorillas seemed unfazed. One of the females gummed a stalk of grass. The baby made an attempt to escape its mother’s arms, receiving a slap for its trouble. The silverback landed noisily in the straw and began whacking at the tire swing.