The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  Above the rooftops, I saw a giraffe’s head bobbing along. Its body was hidden behind the buildings. The rock and sway of its gawky gait made no sense when only its face was visible—horns dipping, chin rising, ears swiveling. The giraffe stopped to gather a mouthful of maple leaves, then loped behind an apartment complex.

  I waited for it to reappear on the other side of the building, but it did not. Instead, I saw a lamp come on in an upper window. The sky was growing lighter by the second. The city was waking up.

  There was a scuffle on the sidewalk below. A bighorn sheep emerged from an alley, its coat disheveled. Its hooves made a delicate patter. The animal was the size of a motorcycle, burdened by an arabesque of giant horns.

  Then a door opened farther along the street. Twenty feet from the bighorn sheep, a man stepped outside, blurry in the gloom. He strode to one of the parked cars and set his briefcase on top, fumbling with his keys.

  The animal reacted swiftly, leaping away. Its whole aspect changed as it gathered momentum, no longer an earthbound boulder of flesh but an airy thing, catching against the wind like a kite. As I watched, it executed a flawless sequence of gymnastic maneuvers. It sprang onto a mailbox, ricocheted off the top of a parked van, and soared onto the roof of a nearby building. The animal mounted thirty feet into the sky in less than a second. Then it paused, listening, framed against the clouds, its coil of antlers pivoting.

  The man had not noticed a thing. He opened the car door and flung his briefcase inside. I heard his radio begin to play, and he drove off.

  “Stay here,” Tucker said.

  “What?”

  I turned and saw him climbing down from the tree. He landed in the grass and dusted off his thighs. Looking up at me, he put a finger to his lips.

  “I think I’ve figured out where we are,” he said. “I’ll go get the car.”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t leave me alone.”

  “You’ll be safer here,” he said.

  I twisted off the branch and began to descend too. I scraped my injured palm on the bark as I slid awkwardly to the ground. The cut reopened, blood seeping into the gauze.

  “We stay together,” I said firmly. “Tucker and Corey.”

  He gazed down at me for a long moment, taking in my determined expression and the stain spreading over my bandaged hand.

  “My blood, your blood,” he said.

  The landscape was temporarily deserted. No animals. No police cars. No early-morning commuters. Tucker and I crossed the road. The air smelled of baked goods, mixed with the heady suggestion of the ocean, a salty tang that pervaded everything here. The eastern sky was almost too bright to look at. The row of streetlamps all along the block flickered once, twice, and went out for the day.

  “This way,” Tucker said.

  We turned down an alley. Somewhere far off, an elephant called out, a throbbing note like the blast of a tuba. The walls were a meshwork of shadows. We picked our way through stray garbage and potholes. I realized that my palm was bleeding heavily enough to drip. I paused, investigating the soaked gauze and wiping the trickle onto my shirt, as Tucker walked on ahead.

  That was the instant it happened. I could not imagine how something that size had been concealed from our view. For a moment, I did not believe what I was seeing.

  A polar bear stepped out from behind a dumpster. The animal gazed at Tucker and me without expression. Its presence seemed like an optical illusion, a refraction of the darkness, a pale stain on a film negative.

  People say that in moments of great stress, time seems to slow down. For me, each second became crystalline and exquisite, as hard and complex as gemstone. I had time to watch the animal consider the fact of our presence, tilting its head ever so slightly. I had time to notice that its fur stank of fish and clay. I had time to realize that the lid of the dumpster was askew. Perhaps the creature had been looking for scraps. I had time to remember that polar bears could smell blood, like the cut on my hand and the smear on my clothes, from a mile away.

  Tucker took half a step backward, then seemed to think better of it. Retreat was not an option here. The animal was nearly as fast as a car. Its body was topographical, the shoulders an alpine peak, the torso a snowy slope, the hindquarters a rugged cliff face. I was having trouble gauging how far away it was. Maybe twenty feet. Maybe thirty. The polar bear was massive enough to throw off my sense of spatial orientation.

  A growl perfumed the dark alley. I saw a flash of tongue. The beast stood with a slightly pigeon-toed stance. Its fur was matted in texture but pristine in hue. It did not move. There was something almost holy in the polar bear’s stillness. No need to hurry. The world would wait until it was ready. I had never before been in the presence of any living thing that was absolutely without fear.

  Tucker acted first, lunging toward me. I felt his hands tighten beneath my armpits as he hefted me into the air. He threw me with all his strength—the ground lurched away—something struck my temple. A rough metallic surface slammed against my side. Everything was dark. I thought I had been knocked unconscious, but then I saw a scrap of sky overhead. Tucker had flung me into the dumpster.

  Panting, I took stock of my surroundings. The interior was half-filled with garbage bags that pooled and pressed around my limbs, gripping me like quicksand. My ribs ached each time I inhaled. There was a chink in the seam of the dumpster. I leaned toward it, unable to extricate myself from the slippery morass of the garbage bags, but able to peer through the hole into the alley.

  A gleam of white. A flicker of motion. Tucker’s shoulders. I saw my brother framed in the middle of the alley, facing the bear.

  The attack happened so fast that I almost couldn’t follow it. There was no preliminary crouch, no baring of teeth, no warning signal of any kind, no communion between animals, no celebration. The bear transformed from an immovable object into an irresistible force. It bore down on my brother, its paws landing without sound. There was something effortless, even graceful, in its stride. You could perceive the perfect architecture of its muscles beneath the sway and bounce of its bulk and the flutter of its untidy coat.

  I waited for Tucker to run. Surely he would try to save himself. I opened my mouth to yell, but no sound came out; I seemed to be paralyzed the way I sometimes was in nightmares. There was a tearing noise, a damp sigh, something sluicing, another growl from the bear. Tucker did not say a word. My view was blocked by white. The beast was facing away from me now, its fur smudged with blood.

  Then I saw Tucker again. I could tell from his stance that he was badly wounded, clutching his side, his lips drawn back in pain. He and the bear began to circle one another, my brother staggering, the animal prowling contentedly. Tucker slid along the wall of the alley, both hands pressed against his gut. Blood fountained over his fingers. There was a ripe gash in his thigh, too, the denim shredded. The polar bear ambled in silence, taking its time. An apex predator in its element.

  My brother looked at me. I swear he saw me—my little face pressed to the gap in the side of the dumpster.

  The polar bear reared up on its hind legs. If possible, it became even larger than before, its head scraping the clouds. Claws spread. Back arched. A cairn of marble and ice.

  This is my last memory of Tucker. This night, this alley. There was no worry or sorrow in his face. His eyes were wide in a kind of rapturous wonder. The bear let out a roar that was loud enough to bruise my eardrums. Tucker threw his arms open, maybe mimicking the animal’s posture, maybe asking for an embrace. The bear obligingly folded its body around him, swaddling him in a blanket of snow.

  I heard the wet grind of bones breaking. Tucker’s hand was still visible—his bandaged hand—the fingers splayed. A shudder ran through his flesh as the bear compressed his spine into fragments. His arm went limp.

  My vision blurred, and I wiped my eyes. The polar bear nuzzled its mouth into my brother’s clavicle. Its jaws clamped down with an audible crunch. It stayed like
that for a moment, head low. Then, with a snarl, it shook Tucker’s inert body side to side like a dog with a chew toy. Lashes of crimson spattered the brick wall. My brother seemed weightless in the animal’s jaws. All his wonderful breadth—wide back, long torso, strong hands—was nothing compared to the mass of the bear. His limbs flopped strangely, smearing the white fur with blood. The beast lifted one paw high, its claws bejeweled by clots of flesh. I saw the curve of its shoulder and the glittering expanse of teeth. There was no longer any suggestion of softness in its face. Its belly was a patchwork of red, its eyes as pitiless as lumps of coal, its forehead marked with war paint.

  The animal reared up onto its hind legs again, dropping Tucker to the ground with a damp thud. My brother did not fall like a living thing. He was no longer the right shape, the right consistency. His bones were pliant, his leg torn, his throat worried open, brimming like a geyser. He was a tumble of flesh, an afterthought. He was prey. The polar bear opened its bloodstained maw and bellowed in triumph.

  And just like that, Tucker was gone.

  SEPTEMBER

  43

  Darlene stood outside the morgue with her arms folded across her chest. Despite gathering her courage to open the door for the past twenty minutes, she could not make herself go in. The air was a noxious stew of formaldehyde and bleach. A man hovered at her side—horn-rimmed glasses, a solemn mien, calm eyes. If he was impatient with her, he did not let it show. He stared down at the clipboard in his hands as though it contained all the riddles of the universe, as though he had nowhere better to be than this cramped, poorly lit hallway.

  “All right,” Darlene said.

  The coroner pushed the door open.

  There were four metal tables in the morgue. Each gleamed silver beneath its own private spotlight. The floor was tiled, sloping toward a grate in the middle of the room. Darlene averted her eyes, willing herself not to consider the purpose and contents of that drain. Medical instruments lay beside a pristine steel sink. The morgue was located in the basement and had only one window, stuck high on the wall, showing a tousle of evergreen bushes.

  There was a fifth table in the corner. Darlene had not noticed it at first, perhaps because it was the only one draped with a sheet. The coroner walked over and patted the white cloth. The air was cold; there was a draft pouring in from a vent overhead. Darlene tucked her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket. She wished Roy were with her. She closed her eyes, imagining him—his honest face, the generous cushion of his lower lip, the starburst wrinkles around his eyes.

  “This way,” the coroner said.

  She moved across the tile as though she were on wheels, gliding rather than walking. The shape beneath the sheet was odd. It did not seem to have the right arrangement of peaks and valleys. With some distant part of her brain, Darlene wondered whether Tucker was playing an elaborate prank on her. Perhaps the coroner would throw off the cloth to reveal a manikin or a crash test dummy. Perhaps Tucker would leap out of the closet, laughing at the expression on her face. He always loved pranks when they were kids.

  “Are you ready?” the coroner said.

  “Yes. No.”

  Slowly he lifted the sheet. There: a thatch of brown hair. A smooth slope of forehead. Her brother’s nose and chin.

  “Oh,” she breathed.

  Half of his face was gone. She could see exactly where the animal’s claws had landed—brutal gouges scored across one cheek. Tucker’s left eye was missing, the ragged orifice caky with dried blood. A chunk of his upper lip had been torn away, leaving a gap in the flesh that showed a few teeth. His ear had been gnawed off as well. Darlene saw a shimmer of skull beneath the mottled overlay of tissue.

  The coroner was discreet, doing his best to reveal only Tucker’s face. But Darlene caught a glimpse of what lay farther down. Her brother’s chest was a trench of marbled crimson, his left shoulder chewed down to the bone. She realized that one of his legs was gone, too. That was why the sheet did not sit evenly across his lower body; there was an intact limb on only one side of the table.

  “Is this Tucker McCloud?” the coroner asked.

  “Yes. That’s my brother.”

  Swiftly, he covered the corpse with fabric again. He made a note on his clipboard and signed the bottom of the page. He murmured that he would give her some time alone. Then, after a moment’s thought, he took her elbow and guided her to a chair. Once she was safely seated, he slipped outside.

  Darlene breathed amid a cloud of formaldehyde. She tried to remember the facts she had been told. It seemed vital that she stick to the facts. Tucker had been dead approximately thirty-six hours. His body was found in an alley by a woman on her way to work. He had been mauled by an animal—some large predator, species currently unknown. Dead by the time the paramedics arrived. Already gone for a couple hours by then, slipping into rigor mortis.

  Roy had warned her that she might experience some aftereffects of trauma. He printed out a list of PTSD symptoms, told her about support groups for people like herself, but Darlene did not believe there were other people like herself. Her circumstances were too specific, her brother unique. She was not experiencing any of the emotions she was supposed to.

  Mostly she was furious. The rage that burned in her chest all summer had not yet abated. Tucker was dead, but Darlene was still mad at him. She was mad at him now for removing himself from the world, slipping beyond her reach. She would never have the chance to say what she needed to say, to win the argument once and for all, to list the thousands of injuries her brother had inflicted on her—and Cora—and the whole of human civilization.

  Darlene rose to her feet, hands jammed in her coat pockets. These would be her last moments with Tucker. She stepped closer to the shape on the table.

  She had seen dead bodies before. She remembered her mother at the wake, so many years ago: the sunken look of Mama’s skin and the peculiar, artificial odor of her hair. Then there was Daddy, vanished into the blue. Darlene had been cheated of the chance to see his body, and that was a lasting, painful thing. Perhaps it would have helped her understand that he was gone.

  She laid one hand over her brother’s heart, the other on his brow. Even through the cloth, she could feel the unnatural coolness of his flesh. The fabric was rough beneath her fingers. She did not remove the sheet; she did not need to see it all again. Tucker’s injuries were scored permanently into her psyche. He no longer looked like the person she remembered. The grotesque state of his body made his death a little easier to accept, offering a visual representation of his mental state. His exterior finally matched his mind: normal in places (sleek forehead, sharp chin, splash of freckles), and distorted in others (missing eye, ravaged cheek, torso reduced to a bloody canyon). The boy she loved for most of her life was gone. The man on the table was somebody else.

  At last, Darlene wiped her eyes and turned away.

  44

  Darlene took a cab from the hospital that contained Tucker to a second hospital, across town, that contained Cora. Her siblings were on opposite ends of this unfamiliar, sprawling city. It was evening, the sun hanging low in the sky. Tall buildings lined the streets, coating the pavement in shadows. The wind was ripe with the smell of saltwater. She had never felt a breeze so freighted with moisture; the air in Oklahoma was always bone-dry.

  Traffic was bad. The taxi driver made frequent use of his horn, shouting in a language Darlene did not recognize and gesturing with one hand out the window. Bicycles whizzed through the gridlock, as fragile and fleet as dragonflies. Now and then the matrix of streets would line up just so, and the setting sun would poke its fingers down a long avenue into the car. In the rush to get to her sister, Darlene had left her sunglasses back in Mercy.

  There was a commotion on the sidewalk. The pedestrians on the corner began shoving one another. A woman stumbled off the curb and into the street with a yell. A horn sounded. The cab driver slammed on his brakes, and Darlene cried out indignantly as the seat b
elt choked her.

  Then she saw it: a warthog charging through the crowd. It ran with its head lowered, a wrecking ball of hooves and tusks. Darlene glimpsed the black spray of its mohawk as people dived out of its path. Its eyes were wild, and there was froth around its mouth.

  She gasped in amazement. The warthog was bigger than she would have expected. Longer and broader than a human being. It barged against the knees of an elderly man, who toppled to the side. The beast did not appear to notice. It plunged into the intersection, giving vent to an unearthly squeal. Traffic came to a standstill as the animal darted this way and that. It threaded through the morass of cars, snorting, trying in vain to find a path to safety.

  Darlene leaned forward, staring through the window. The warthog’s jowls quivered with each footfall. Its belly was a gray hammock. There was something prehistoric about its appearance—the snout elongated, the neck as wide as a telephone pole, the tusks doubled and tarnished and curled. Strange knobs of flesh bulged beneath its eyes. Darlene heard a tinkle of glass breaking as the animal collided with a station wagon, knocking the side mirror clean off. The warthog let out one last screech, then swung to the east and picked up speed.

  The cab driver turned around in his seat, pointing a finger in Darlene’s face. His cheeks were red with fury. For an instant, she thought he was accusing her of something, but he was merely ranting, spittle flying with each word.

  “You see?” he cried in a heavy accent. “You heard about this business at the zoo? You see what we have come to?”

  “I heard,” she said.

  “It’s madness. Who would do such a thing? What kind of person?”

  “A lone wolf,” Darlene said faintly.

  This was the expression the newscasters kept using. The police had released a carefully worded statement earlier that day, confirming that the perpetrator responsible for this heinous act of eco-terror had died in the assault. No names or specifics given. No mention of Cora. All that would come later.