by Cole, Olivia
Panther in the Hive
Olivia Cole
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Fletchero Publishing
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Fletchero Publishing.
Jacket Design by Anna Green
Formatting by Polgarus Studio
www.polgarusstudio.com
For Omaun, Hope, and Natasha. My shining muses.
Chapter 1
In the silent, shiny world of prepackaged snacks and frozen entrees, the fruit is rotting.
Not all of it: the apples survive, the pears still defiant. But the avocados are caving in on themselves, the peaches developing sinking brown craters like eyes. Above, a solitary fly cruises the wasteland of abandon, enjoying the heat only rotting things can emit. The other side of Jewel-Osco is clean and silent: the deserted aisles are vast stretches of empty fluorescence, Chef Boyardee and Jemima beaming out at no one, motionless on the shelves, dust gathering on their tops. Digital advertisements flash and jerk next to the unmanned cash registers: a pearly smile here, a diagonal slash of a catch line there. No lines at the checkout, no one sampling crackers and cheese from plastic trays, no one thumbing through the tabloids and envying the abs on the cover. Silence. And among it all stands Tasha—just Tasha—knife in hand, Prada backpack over her shoulder, dead body at her feet. It’s the fourth day.
The dead guy had been a Jewel employee, the only one left in the store, patrolling the aisles like a mindless attack dog. Taking a deep breath, Tasha leans down to poke the wound in his neck with the knife—just to be sure. The flesh makes a sound, sticky and moist like tape ripped from wet paint. But Tasha doesn’t vomit, not this time. This is partially because she has stabbed enough necks this week to empty her stomach of bile, and partially because when she withdraws the blade, the Chip is skewered on its point. Her nausea is distracted by relief—he’s not getting back up. Nothing else would have killed him, she’s learned. Get the Chip, or say goodbye.
Focusing on the guy’s face, she realizes she recognizes him from the meat counter before the Change—his name had been Rodney, or Ronald. Robert? His nametag had fallen off at some point, his identity under a shelf someplace collecting dust. Tasha remembers catching him staring at her boobs more times than she has fingers to count, before all this happened. She wishes she had cut him then; when it would’ve actually made an impression.
Satisfied the R-named butcher is dead, she stands from where she’d been crouching and wipes the knife’s blade on her jeans, leaving a messy red stripe. She’s done this before, hating to ruin the designer denim but preferring to stain her jeans rather than walk around with the knife dripping a trail of bloody breadcrumbs. The Minkers—psychos like the butcher here—would follow like sharks. Tasha re-shoulders the Prada backpack; special edition green canvas, leather straps, lots of little pockets. She bought it before the Change, and though it’s probably not being used the way Miuccia intended, Tasha can’t bear to leave it in her closet. It’s too cute to wither away in the dark, even if the world has gone crazy.
Backpack on, she glances around. She had thought she would have time to leisurely poke around the store and gather a few supplies, but the butcher had popped up out of the shopping carts like a hellish jack-in-the-box and now taking her time is no longer an option. She has to hurry in case the commotion attracted the attention of any other Minkers in the area. It’s one thing to stab a lone butcher’s neck but another thing entirely to be confronted with a whole pack of them, drawn by the sound of their kin’s call and whining like manic Chihuahuas. With this thought in mind, Tasha quickly gathers a bag of apples—Organic, she gloats, remembering the days when she had to pay $8.50 per pound—a few cans of beans, and a couple boxes of crackers. Cheese won’t keep, she thinks mournfully, eyeing the still-refrigerated shelves of dairy products with longing, and skips that aisle for the one that contains boxes of granola and protein bars.
The long row of multi-colored boxes of fiber and energy bars stretches out before her and she feels the way Eve must have felt in the Garden—all those snacks to choose from. Tasha already grabbed the apples, so nothing is really forbidden at this point. She enters the aisle and breathes in the smell of unspoiled edibles.
“Preservatives,” she says out loud. “Praise you.”
She puts the first box back—too much sugar—and settles on Nature Valley. Her dad used to eat these. The green wrapper seems environmentally friendly, but that’s unlikely. Regardless, the granola bars go into the Prada backpack with the apples and beans, and Tasha heads for the back door.
Sticking her head around the corner of an Employees Only doorjamb, FBI-style, Tasha pauses, listening and watching. She hears nothing, and there’s nothing to see, so she continues through the doorway. The actual door has been torn off its swinging hinges and hangs crazily askew, blocking part of the little corridor. She notices the blood smearing one side of the small round window and tries not to wonder who it belonged to. It could be anyone’s. Her friend Scout used to work here; it might be hers. Tasha figures it’s probably better not to think about it—it doesn’t matter much now anyway.
Exiting the grocery, Tasha finds herself outside in the tiny parking lot, used only for bicycles and masses of electric scooters. Before she ventures out into the open she swivels her head around, an owlish prowler. She had decided the second day—after a risky encounter with a Minker wearing a Walgreens nametag—never to leave a building the same way she came in. This is a good plan, and Tasha is pleased with herself, feeling very SWAT-like for coming up with it and, more impressively, sticking to it. She couldn’t stick to anything before the Change, but she guesses that when mutilation and cannibalism are on the line, people become a little more adhesive.
At the corner of the building she peeps again before skittering like a crab to the brick wall that borders the lot, above which the L used to crawl. She doesn’t like open territory, and she thinks about this with less smugness than she does her fancy plot for entering and exiting buildings. Open territory is no joke: indoors, faced with single predators, she is still human. Outside, alone in the vastness of the ruined city, she becomes an antelope. No, that gives her predators too much credit—they’re not lions. They’re more like noisy, rabid dogs—clumsy in the underbrush with messy tactics. Which makes Tasha what? A raccoon? An opossum? Great.
Berwyn Avenue is deserted like everything else. Under the L, the tiny closet-sized tailor shop—one of the last one-story establishments in Chicago—is dark and broken, its main window shattered. Tasha steps around the crushed glass that litters the sidewalk, forbidding her eyes from wandering into the shop. Above her the L is stopped on the tracks, its doors open. She can see only one body from the ground, the upper half of a balding man in a cheap suit. Gravity has brought the tails of the jacket down by his ears, exposing the pale pink oxford underneath. He’s been hanging over the edge of the tracks since the morning of the Change. Tasha hasn’t gone up on the tracks to poke around, so who knows what else is strewn across the transparent alloy or who is curled on the floor of the train. Poor bastards: most of them were probably on their way to work when the Change happened. She wonders how many were Chipped, how many without Chips were killed. The balding man is one, for sure. She’ll have to tell Dinah about the train and its unfortunate inhabitants.
Dinah is the woman in the apartment next door, whose face Tasha hasn’t seen sinc
e before the Change. Before, they’d passed each other in the hallway every few weeks, arms full of groceries and smiles half-strained, Tasha awkwardly trying to avoid looking at the black eye that blossomed on Dinah’s face every week or so. Tasha still doesn’t know the boyfriend’s name; only that he worked in the financial district and made Dinah quit her job at the youth center. Dinah’s boyfriend was the kind of man Tasha’s mother had referred to as quicksand: the surface looked normal, but he would suck you down if you got near him. He’d installed three deadbolts on the jamb when they moved in, for which there are three separate keys. The keys are still on a lanyard around his neck, Dinah has told Tasha; inside the bathroom where she’d locked him on the morning of the Change. He’s still there, keys and all, and so Dinah remains in the apartment, a prisoner.
Continuing down Berwyn, Tasha notices the small dogwoods planted along the sidewalk, their blossoms oblivious to the disaster that has happened right around them: it’s May and they’re blooming cheerfully, smudged watercolor pools lining the silent street.
“Rude,” she says, more about the blossoms than at them, and picks one off a branch as she passes under its branches. She carries it for awhile before letting it fall.
The doorman is dead, as he was when she left an hour before. Tasha stares at him as she heads to the stairway. She hasn’t been able to stomach moving him since the Change four days ago, and she clutches the sleeve of her hoodie over her nose and mouth as she passes through the lobby for the stairs. He’s slumped in his swivel chair, his forehead on the surface of the desk. The gaping hole in the side of his neck was courtesy of Tasha herself on the morning of the Change. He was her first.
Upstairs, Tasha closes the apartment door quietly behind her, not quite ready to begin a conversation with Dinah. She puts down the backpack with the groceries so she can move what had been her grandmother’s wardrobe in front of the door. It’s noisy and blows her cover.
“Tasha? Tasha, is that you? Are you ok?”
The walls are like paper—a quality she has lamented before and after the Change—and she has no trouble hearing Dinah. The voice drifts in from the bedroom and Tasha goes toward it.
“Yes,” she says, not loudly, entering the bedroom still carrying her knife. “It’s me. I’m fine. Just putting the dresser back in front of the door.”
She pauses.
“Is He…still…you know?” Tasha asks hesitantly, knowing the answer.
“I think so,” Dinah says. “But He’s…quiet.”
No name. Only He. Him. It would sound reverent if it weren’t so unnerving.
“We’ll be quiet too,” says Tasha. “Hold on, let me go put my groceries away.”
She goes back to the front door where she’d left her bags, thinking of Him. Dinah had been attacked on the morning of the Change, woken out of her sleep by her boyfriend’s barking. He’d turned and lunged straight for her throat, she’d said. She’d gotten him into the bathroom by accident, she told Tasha, while trying to lock herself in.
“I’m used to hiding in there,” she’d told Tasha, and this was the first time she’d mentioned it. “But He wasn’t drunk this time. Just…you know…crazy.”
And in the bathroom He’d stayed. Dinah doesn’t have much furniture, she’s said, but she did move a table in front of the door. However, Tasha has learned this isn’t really necessary. The day before, Tasha saw the guy who used to do her laundry bumping into the door of his shop on Kenmore. Over and over, an endless loop. As she passed, knife raised, he’d stopped and gazed in her direction with empty, animal eyes. As soon as she had gone, he was back to his bumping, a dinghy on the rocks with no one at the helm. They’re no good with doors, but this doesn’t keep Tasha from barring her fortress.
After putting away her groceries, she returns to the bedroom. Sitting on the bed, she settles against the wall, cradling a can of beans in her lap. Next to her is a stuffed tiger, a pilly, tattered leftover from her childhood. She raises the can of beans to the tiger in a silent toast.
Sighing deeply, she closes her eyes.
“I’m back,” she says to the air, and hears Dinah shift against the wall behind her.
“What time do you think it is?”
Tasha looks out the window, trying to get a glimpse of the dipping sun from between the newly built skyscrapers outside. Who am I kidding, she thinks. I wasn’t a freaking Girl Scout.
“No idea. Night. Almost night. Six. Seven.”
“I’m going to eat soon,” says Dinah.
Tasha nods, looking at the can of beans she’d carried in the room.
“It’s May,” Dinah says. “I hardly remember April.”
“I do,” says Tasha, looking at her fingernails, their pink polish chipped from various violence over the past four days. “What a month.”
They do this—just saying words. Eventually they’ll talk about Him, and other hims, and hers, and countless other faces and names that don’t matter anymore. Maybe eventually they’ll talk about Tasha’s parents. It’s only day four—who knows what day five will bring. For now they settle into silence, eating their canned foods and straining their ears for shuffling feet, thinking their own private, miserable thoughts.
Tasha reaches for the can opener she now keeps on her nightstand. She sinks its single metal fang into the lid of the beans. She can hear Dinah rustling, reaching for what will pass as dinner.
“Got food?”
“Yes,” Dinah says, and her voice sounds hollow.
Tasha know she’s probably surveyed the contents of her kitchen at this point, wondering how long she can last before she either starves or gets the courage to kill her Minker boyfriend and take the keys to her freedom. Tasha sighs again before she begins to eat. She thinks about her parents and is glad that they are dead.
Chapter 2
Tasha wakes with the can of beans in her lap, leftover bean juice spilled overnight creating a small stain on the sheet. The linens already haven’t been washed in weeks: she had been too busy before the Change, and now the electricity is out. She doesn’t want to hand-wash them and let them air dry: it seems medieval, and she imagines herself wearing an apron and a bonnet, hands raw with scrubbing. She’s grateful, at least, that the water still works to shower with, and pulls herself into a sitting position from where she had slumped over sometime in the night. She stretches, arching her back like a Halloween cat, and thinks of all the dead people beyond her window. The time for waking up and not remembering all that has happened is past.
She listens for Dinah and hears nothing. Over the past several days she has learned to take this as a sign that Dinah is still sleeping, but at first she had knocked on the wall as loudly as she dared just to ensure that her neighbor wasn’t dead. Logic tells her that if the boyfriend had escaped in the middle of the night and attacked, the din would have woken Tasha up. But this world defies logic. Ever since the Change, anything has been possible; the worst things are possible.
On the day of the Change, she had huddled in this very spot after moving furniture in front of the doors for the first time. She hadn’t moved, sitting on the bed like a wide-eyed gargoyle trembling between life and statue, sometimes hearing the distant screams of neighbors and pedestrians. In the months before, she’d heard cries like that—muggings, domestic disputes, the cops shooting various perps. The morning of the Change, it had all sounded like business as usual until she’d obliviously gone outside and seen firsthand what Chicago had become. Once she’d returned to her apartment, she’d stayed there all day and through the night, staring at the dresser, transfixed, every shadow a new hallucination.
Tasha rises, yawning, and goes into the kitchen, not wanting to wake Dinah yet. She looks around at her scrubbed cabinets and floors. On the counter, arranged from tallest to shortest, are silver canisters that contain wheat flour, white flour, brown sugar, white sugar, yeast, in that order, unused the entire time she’s lived here. Next to them stands her Macrowave, the all-in-one nuke, toaster, and oven. In the d
rawers are neatly arranged silverware and appliances, paisley china that her mother had given Tasha when she left for college three and a half years ago. Then there is the sink, deep and clean and metal, with a knife lying in the bottom of it, the little bit of water around it only slightly red with the blood of yesterday’s Minker.
Tasha washes the knife and lets the cold water run over her wrists. Wusthof, the handle reads. It’s a good knife. She bought the whole set online for her twenty-first birthday a few months before, a set of nine with a polished wooden block, along with a steel and a pair of shears. Her father had owned a set just like it; sold after her parent’s deaths.
“I thought I’d be using you on meat,” she says to the knife, drying it with a Miracle Cloth. “Not the butcher.”
Tasha lies on the rug sipping from a bottle of Evian. The rug was a gift from her mother and is made of t-shirt scraps; just the sort of thing her mother would have bought, never wanting to waste anything.
Without Dinah to talk to, the minutes stretch and twist. Tasha wishes that in the days before all this she had possessed even one clock that wasn’t digital. All of her clocks—like everyone else’s—are on various electronic devices, and now time has no master. It could be going backward on its own accord and Tasha wouldn’t know. She stares at the massive digital screen mounted on the wall, a thin square hanging there like a silent black mirror. Before the Change she had hooked it to her Glass and it had served as her clock, her weather forecast, her internet, her reading, her everything. Now both the screen and the Glass sit like a pair of paperweights. When Tasha sits in the middle of the couch with a little light coming through the blinds, she can see her own head floating in the screen, right in the center like a macabre dinner-table centerpiece. Staring at the blackness now reminds her of the night before the Change, when the screen had still been illuminated, its mindless noise washing over her in waves of disembodied breasts, explosions and—of course—Cybranu.
