The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  I was roused from my reverie by a clatter behind me. Whirling around, I expected to find a security guard there, maybe brandishing a gun. But Tucker and I were alone on the dark path. After a moment, I realized that the sound had come from above. There was an animal on the roof of a nearby building. I saw it framed in the moonlight—a mountain goat with a curlicue of antlers, its cloven hooves echoing as it moved away.

  “Stand by the door,” Tucker said. “Get ready to run.”

  The bolt dropped—the silverback glared—and we were gone.

  Down the hill, the reptile exhibit was aglow. A human figure flashed past one of the windows. The guards must have discovered the alligator and the anaconda wandering loose. The lamps were burning in the petting zoo as well. Tucker and I finished the next few enclosures in record time. He unhooked the elephant’s cage, pausing just long enough to observe a gray trunk twining through the gap in the door and fishing for the handle. I liberated the rhinos and watched them lumbering into the open, their heads lowered truculently. The ostriches fled into an alley on stiff, wiry legs, kicking up a wake of dust. I unfastened the latch of the aviary, and a vulture landed with a thump a few feet away. Its wings jerked spasmodically, its bald head gleaming. Shrieking raucously, it hobbled through the open gate and glanced around. One by one, the eagles descended too. Their telescopic vision had no doubt captured every aspect of my approach, complete with the flash of the key and the tumble of sawdust carried through the doorway on the breeze.

  The hippo. The donkey. The fennec fox. Human voices were yelling now all over the grounds. On top of the hill, a building shone like a bonfire. The zebras were dealing with their fright by running continually. A wolf howled somewhere, answered by a chorus on the other side of the zoo. The pack had evidently been separated in the chaos and were trying to locate one another.

  Despite our best efforts, there were a few animals who did not want to leave their pens. Tucker had warned me this might happen—just like the animals back on our farm, before the tornado took them away. It was not our fault, he said. We could only do so much. We tried to free the penguins, but they refused to vacate their pool; they merely squawked and splashed, preening their feathers. The camels, too, seemed uninterested in what Tucker and I had to offer. They only eyed us balefully and spat. Eventually we let them be. If they felt like making a break for it, they would do it on their own schedule.

  Other animals were just too slow. The tortoises stood like ice sculptures, their glassy shells glinting in the moonlight. Tucker tried to usher them toward the open air, but they would move only in response to his touch, stepping mechanically forward with each nudge and stopping when he stopped. I was half convinced they were not alive at all. The sloth was similarly afflicted by a largo tempo. We unlocked its cage, and I watched it turn its head millimeter by millimeter and blink like an automaton in a museum display. It would never make it out in time.

  The giraffes surprised me. When Tucker and I approached them, they appeared to be asleep on their feet, three adults and two juveniles, their pronged heads in shadow, their necks overlapping like a thicket of tree trunks growing haphazardly toward the moon. Their enclosure contained a few feeders as tall as the animals—baskets on poles covered by thatched umbrellas. Tucker let me open the gate. The hinges squealed painfully as I dragged the massive thing ajar. Someone had forgotten to oil it. At the groan of metal on metal, the giraffes awoke.

  All five of them began to run. They jogged a few laps around their pen, perhaps stretching their legs, perhaps surveilling the scene. There was something of the marionette in their movements, rocking and dipping as though tugged by unseen wires. They were as fast as horses, but their cantering was much more alarming. Each footfall shook the ground. The juveniles were the first to pass through the gate, the adults right behind. As soon as they stepped outside their cage, they seemed to undergo a transformation. They became real before my very eyes. They were the same size and shape as they had been a second ago, but they had density now—odor, breath, heat. I backed away, thudding against Tucker, my mouth agape.

  Finally we found the lions. The pride lay in the grass, the females sprawled in a pile, the male visible only as a beige cushion of mane behind a boulder. Tucker unbarred the gate and we ran for our lives. We did the same for the bobcat, the cheetah, and the little serval. Tucker had told me beforehand that we should never bolt away from predators like this. The sight of prey dashing into the distance could, in and of itself, trigger the hunting instinct. But in the extremity of this moment, we were not capable of reasoned thought anymore. Our own fundamental instincts took over, and we ran frantically, desperately, holding hands, his bandaged palm pressed against mine.

  An alarm sounded overhead. The remaining buildings blazed into life. Someone had evidently decided to turn on all the lights. A sun bear froze in the process of crossing the patio as though electrocuted with shock. A golden eagle soared above our heads, circling the café. We dashed through an alley, heading for the exit. My balaclava was askew, one eye blocked by fabric, but I did not stop to fix it. I followed my brother’s lithe figure as he turned a corner and plunged down a hill. The only thing between us and a clean getaway was the flamingo pond.

  Tucker paused, clearly tempted. The birds were unperturbed by the tumult around them. Most stood on one leg in the water with their heads beneath their wings. In sleep, they were not recognizably avian—not recognizably anything. They looked like the stems and tufts of some aquatic alien forest.

  My brother charged. In an explosion of spray, he ran among their pearlescent forms. Reeds collected around his calves, slowing him, nearly sending him face-first into the pool, but he regained his balance and whooped, flinging his arms over his head. The flamingoes took flight. They collided with one another, flaring their webbed feet and rising in a cloud, blotting out the moon with their feathers.

  Tucker clambered out of the pool, damp and shuddering. He led me to a side door, and then we were in the street, surrounded by the thunder of wings.

  42

  Tucker had parked on a side lane hours earlier. He chose the place for its solitude and easy access to the highway. As we hurried down the sidewalk, my brother’s wet pant legs slapped with each step.

  In the glow of a streetlamp, I saw a dark orb marring the sleek frame of our silver sedan. It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at. Then the cat lifted its head. Its eyes were luminescent pinpricks, emerald bright. Its tail swung, stroking the license plate. At my side, Tucker grunted in shock.

  There was a leopard on the hood of our car.

  The animal released a guttural snarl. I saw the flare of its pointed teeth. The message was clear: it had claimed the vehicle as its own. Ours was the only car on the street to have been recently driven—the only one whose engine would provide heat. My brother maneuvered me behind him, his body shielding mine from view as we backed away. The leopard nestled down again, though its tail kept twitching. It tracked every movement of our retreat with its eerie, reflective eyes.

  “Shit,” Tucker whispered.

  We slid together into an alley. A hollow between two dumpsters provided some cover. In the distance, a siren sounded—then another. A whole choir began to sing. It would not be long before the place was swarming with police.

  “Fuck,” Tucker said, smiting himself on the forehead. “Everything we need is in that glove compartment. All our cash. The gun. Everything.”

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  A squad car raced down an adjacent street, its lights splashing the alley with intermittent flares of red and white. Tucker pushed me deeper behind the dumpster. The vehicle sped toward the zoo, its siren now sounding a minor key.

  “A rock and a hard place,” Tucker said.

  “What?”

  “We’ll have to keep moving,” he said. “Stay out of sight. Got it?”

  We put our balaclavas back on. We crept along the wall, sticking to the shadows. Tucker stu
mbled over a pothole and cursed. A burro brayed plaintively on the other side of a building. Another police car went haring by, a storm of alarm bells and lights, gone in seconds. I thought I heard the faraway clatter of giraffe hooves. At the time, I did not fully understand how much danger we were in. I was halfway in the realm of stories—Tucker and Corey on one of their adventures—and halfway in a dream of illness and thrill. Nothing seemed entirely real to me. Any minute now, Tucker might shake my arm to wake me up. I might find myself back in the mausoleum, or even at home in No. 43, roused by Darlene’s voice.

  Tucker, however, had no illusions about our circumstances. His state of mind was obvious—shoulders rigid, breath quick. He had planned for us to be miles away by this point. Gone before the police descended and the animals traveled too far from their cages. We might as well have set off a bomb, releasing not radiation but kangaroos and mountain goats and polar bears. More than a hundred animals were loose in the city with us, spreading steadily outward from the epicenter of the zoo.

  “Keep moving,” Tucker muttered. “It’s the only way.”

  I followed him unquestioningly, just as Corey had always done. We hurried down a block lined with restaurants and shops. An awning fluttered overhead, and Tucker froze, glancing up in alarm. I could not get my bearings. The night sky was at once dark and bright, a haze of cloud coated with an iridescent sheen, catching and holding the leftover light from the city. Streetlamps shone in cheerful rows, offering no guidance. Sirens sounded all around us, some climbing the scale as they moved in our direction, some descending note by note as they traveled away. A coyote yipped—a familiar voice from quiet nights in Mercy. It was a strange thing to hear in this urban landscape.

  A car turned the corner, its headlights sweeping toward us. Tucker shoved me behind a row of newspaper stands and crouched down beside me. As the vehicle passed—a taxi, not a cop car—I glimpsed something moving on the roof across the street. I thought it was a squirrel, but when I looked closer I realized it was a monkey scrambling along beneath a ribbon of tail.

  Tucker got to his feet and beckoned for me to follow him. We ran.

  An eagle screamed overhead. It was a chilly, windswept sound, the sort of fierce battle cry that was meant to echo off mountainsides. I saw a khaki-colored shape wheeling thirty feet above us. The eagle’s wingspan was longer than I was tall. Its talons were spread. Tucker grabbed my bandaged hand and yanked me onward. We jogged past a row of garbage cans, an apartment building, and a gas station. We cut through a playground into another alley.

  “Look,” I said, pointing.

  A crocodile was strolling toward us at a genial waddle. The pavement in the alley was slanted on both sides toward a runnel in the center, marked every so often by grated metal drains. The animal seemed to be following the gutter in the concrete as though hoping the path would lead to water. Beefy legs. Little eyes. Ten feet long. I heard the gush of its breath, the scrape of its claws. It stank of rotten meat. Tucker squeezed my hand so tightly that I felt my bones pull against their sockets.

  The crocodile lumbered past us without appearing to register our presence. Apparently its night vision was not acute. I watched it shuffle into the pool of light beneath a streetlamp. The glow caught each tooth in turn, dozens of blades lodged in a hacksaw of jawbone. The animal’s tail swung as a counterpoint to the sway of its belly. It dragged its bulk over the curb and into the road. I half expected it to look both ways, but of course it did not recognize the limits and thresholds of the human world. It crossed the street without haste or concern and slipped into the shadows on the other side.

  “Jesus,” Tucker said.

  Up a hill. Through a parking lot. Past a convenience store. My head began to ache again. My hands trembled with adrenaline aftershocks, and my injured palm prickled. New sounds rang through the air: a parrot squawking, the yowl of a fox, the unsettling laughter of a pack of hyenas. I was not sure why the animals were vocalizing—maybe keeping in touch with their own kind, maybe communicating a warning to other species, maybe trying to overpower the chorus of police sirens. I had never experienced a night so wild and full of perilous music. My nerves jangled in concert. My brother led me down a quiet lane studded with palm trees, but before we had taken more than a few steps, there was a blast of breath—a rhino snorting at the sight of us—and a massive shadow shifted in the gloom. We hurried back the other way.

  Tucker was lost. I realized this after a while. There was no method to his madness; he was not leading me back to the car, not leading me anywhere. We passed a mailbox with a dent in the side, and a few minutes later we passed it again. My brother tugged off his ski mask and wiped the sweat from his forehead. His nostrils flared, a sure sign of tension. He mumbled to himself, staring up at the street signs in consternation.

  My head was thudding dully. Tucker darted into an alley, then backtracked, drumming his fingers on his chin. He threw his balaclava on the ground and stomped on it. He made a frame with his hands and pivoted in a circle as though attempting to locate true north.

  Finally, he tipped his head back and laughed.

  “Screw it,” he said.

  I hovered numbly beside him. The ache in my temple was overpowering.

  “Man plans,” Tucker said. “God laughs.”

  He picked me up and swung me onto his back. I gripped his neck in relief, laying my cheek against the muscular plane of his shoulders. He set off at a brisk trot. I closed my eyes, bouncing against his ribs, and when I opened them again we were in a wide, murky park. A canopy of trees crisscrossed the sky, black and whispering, the leaves surging apart every now and then to offer a glimpse of cloud.

  “Higher ground,” Tucker said.

  He hoisted me up onto a knobby branch. I leaned gratefully back against the trunk, my legs slung on either side of the limb, the wind circling my bare shins. Tucker perched beside me. We could see the street—a restaurant, a gas station, and a movie theater with its marquee darkened for the night—but nobody on the sidewalk would have been able to see us.

  I don’t know how long we sat there. I was so tired that my arms hung limp; I could not even find the wherewithal to lift my hands into a more comfortable pose in my lap. But I did not sleep. First a trio of chimpanzees came into view. The streetlamps bronzed their bodies, turning their fur into straw. Hay bales on the move. A fire hydrant seemed to unnerve them. All three apes shrieked at the sight of it, and they spun away from one another, giving the unknown object a wide berth, pivoting on their knuckles. Their long arms were stiff, their hind legs two-stepping.

  Then came the zebras. I heard their hoofbeats before I saw them. They burst into being beneath the fluorescent glare of the gas station parking lot, perhaps fifteen animals in all. One of them was bleeding, a splash of crimson against a lattice of interlocking black and white. Their haunches surged, their manes sticking up like the bristles of a broom. They all wore the same expression—ears erect, eyes rolling, teeth bared. One of them gave vent to a ululation, and the cry was answered by the rest. They were not running flat out; they seemed to have settled into a steady jog, as though they had come to understand that this was a marathon, not a sprint.

  A cop car appeared, whizzing down the middle of the street, ignoring the double yellow line completely. Its lights blazed like a firework display, but the siren was off. I wondered if a command had gone out over the police frequency. Maybe sirens had proved counterproductive, scaring and stimulating the animals.

  The zebras checked at the sight of the squad car, and it checked at the sight of them, skidding to a halt. I wondered what the officer intended to do. He could hardly arrest the animals. The herd huddled defensively beneath the traffic light. There was a momentary stalemate. The zebras stamped their hooves and tossed their heads. The car gunned its engine but did not budge.

  Then, to my surprise, the vehicle reversed. It swerved a little as the driver attempted to steer backward, tires whining against the pavement.

&nb
sp; The zebras gave chase. With a drumroll of hoofbeats, they charged. From what I could tell, the inclination struck them all simultaneously. They hurtled after the police car, skinny legs flying, tails whipping. I wondered if they were chasing away a threat—the way they might gang up on a lone cheetah in the savannah, overwhelming a superior predator by sheer force of numbers—or whether they had decided to follow a perceived ally through an unknown, bewildering situation. The police car led the herd down the hill, reversing frantically out of view.

  For a moment, everything was quiet. The clamor of sirens had stilled. The animals were no longer calling out with the same frequency as before. Perhaps they had buckled down to the complicated business of escaping. At my side, Tucker was staring across the city with an expression of almost indecent pride. He had shaken off any signs of fear, now basking in the glow of his achievement. I had never seen a human face so suffused with satisfaction.

  In the silence, there was motion. Animals everywhere. An enormous bird of prey flitted across the amber wash of clouds. A skyscraper obstructed my view to the west, gilded by the matrix of a fire escape. Something was there—too bulky to be human, its belly rotund, its arms plush with curtains of fur. An orangutan. It was climbing up the outer scaffold, swinging from hand to hand.

  A sound caught my ear. A chuckle. Malicious. Nearly human. I glanced up and down the block. There was an elementary school on the far corner. Several ragged black shapes were moving through the playground, gliding beneath the slide and nosing at the swings. Even after the darkness had swallowed them up, I could still hear their voices—the mad merriment of hyenas on the hunt.

  The sky began to brighten. Each time I blinked, the clouds along the eastern horizon took on a greater intensity, no longer merely reflecting the city lights but marinating in the fiery glow of incipient sunrise. Tucker checked his watch. He ran a hand down his throat and fidgeted with his collar.