Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

When Dinah returns to the window, she’s wearing a different shirt.

  “Better?” asks Tasha.

  Dinah nods, looking off into the dimming sky.

  “You okay?”

  “I mean, the bite…it hurt. I can’t believe I was so weak. He still has the keys,” she says, and Tasha can hear the quaver in her voice. Tasha wishes she could put on the comforting voice that Dinah slips on so easily and so well. That cap doesn’t fit Tasha as flatteringly. It slides down over her eyes; all she sees is how silly she is, how inept. It’s been a long time since she had a friend, she realizes. Gina had been…something else.

  “But that’s not the worst part,” says Dinah, and now she is crying and Tasha is mystified and beginning to panic.

  “What? What is, then? What?”

  “We broke the lock,” Dinah sobs, and Tasha can barely understand her. “We broke the knob when we fought. When I realized I couldn’t kill him, and after he bit me, I was trying to just get out of the bathroom without dying. And he had hold of me. And we slammed up against the door and the knob went right into my hip and he was dragging me toward him and I twisted and…and the knob broke off. It broke right off. And I managed to kick him hard enough to push him back. And I got out. And I had my back against the door and he was bumping up against it.” Her voice is grating. Tasha sees two tears drop from her face and go spinning down into space, where they would eventually join the corpses on the sidewalk. Tasha is in shock.

  “I moved the table in front of the door, but it’s small” Dinah finishes, her chest shuddering as she catches her breath. “He’s in there. But without the knob, the door doesn’t close all the way. Whenever I pass the door he can see me through the crack. I’ve been in the corner by the window, trying to be quiet.”

  Tasha lets these words sink into her skin. It’s like rubbing in tar and she feels sick. Her stomach feels ornery, as if she might vomit again. She thinks of the girl in the yellow dress, who she had fully intended to tell Dinah all about, a witness to her horror. But she can’t now. The girl and her Ronnie are too much like Dinah and her Dale: biting boyfriends, girls locked in boxes, bloodied. Instead she sighs. It’s too much. It’s all just too much.

  “We’ll figure something out, Dinah,” she says, trying to sound strong since she can’t muster sensitive. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.”

  “That’s why I was hoping you’d get the letter,” says Dinah, sniffling. She has another t-shirt in her hands and is wiping her face with it, tears and snot. “Some news. Some plan. Some cure.”

  She wants a pill, Tasha thinks. A pill she can feed Dale in a hunk of meat—whose meat? —that would transform him back into the man he had been a week ago. A man she’d still have to hide from, Tasha thinks angrily. A cure. An answer. It’s ridiculous. She’d seen a policeman—an officer of the law—with blood around his lips go howling down Broadway after a man in a green shirt. This is life now. Isn’t it?

  But instead of saying these things, Tasha pulls the letter from where she’d folded it into her pocket. She stares at her name on the envelope, written in Leona’s hand: Natasha Lockett. That was her. The contents of this letter were for her, from Leona. She wishes she had a bloodhound’s nose, so she could hold the paper to her face and inhale the scent of her sister, her niece. Even Morris.

  “Read it,” says Dinah softly. “Read it to me before it gets dark.”

  Chapter 11

  Tasha read it. It took all of thirty seconds.

  “Is that all?” Dinah had cried, the tears coming. “Is that all?”

  That had been last night. It’s morning now and Tasha is awake, waiting for Dinah to come back to the window. She feels like a platonic Romeo in the garden waiting for Juliet to get a clue and hear the pebbles being thrown harder and harder against her windowpane. Except there are no pebbles being thrown—that might disturb Dale.

  After Tasha had read the letter Dinah had wept and then dried up almost immediately, saying they needed to “sleep on it.” Tasha had interpreted this as Dinah needing to be alone, which Tasha had granted willingly enough. But now it’s morning, and Tasha is restless. It’s the eighth day. The letter—small as it is—needs to be discussed. Tasha wants to rap on the wall, but with the door to the bathroom broken, she doesn’t want to risk riling up Dale. Luckily Tasha had discovered, in her anxious solitude of the night before, that her Glass still had a bit of battery life left, so she sits by the window and clicks through the only thing she had ever stored on it: Cosmo. It’s last month’s issue—the last issue ever, she realizes. Why is this the only thing she has on the Glass? It feels suddenly very stupid.

  The woman on the front is Ramona Melón, a newish star, debuting in Bright Lights, a poignant tale of the first woman to win such-and-such Pumapod race. Tasha wonders if Melón actually rode the airborne motorcycle for the film, or if she had a stunt double. Tasha examines the woman’s face: completely symmetrical, the nose straight and slightly upturned, a nose popular in recent years for whatever reason. Tasha liked the actress’s previous nose better; it had a little bump in the bridge that gave it some character. The nose before that had been more hawk-like, taken on for a role Melón described as “intense,” playing a warrior nun. The actress had sported as many noses as she had roles, which was only slightly unusual: sometimes Hollywoodies had kept one for a sequel, or for personal reasons. Tasha’s eyes wander down the front of the woman’s shirt. Melón. Those had remained unchanged, no matter the role. Tasha vaguely feels as though she’s looking at an artifact in a museum.

  Tasha opens the Cosmo app. Her mother had claimed that they hadn’t changed a single word of an issue since the magazine was printed on paper; they only changed the Hollywood interview, she said. Tasha hasn’t seen a paper issue since she was eight or nine so she couldn’t really agree or disagree, but she figures her mother was probably right. Tasha raises an eyebrow at the feature article, “201 Ways to Turn Him On.” Two hundred and one seems steep—she suspects a few of the tips were cleverly duplicated, something like “#74 Lick his left nipple. #75 Lick his right nipple.” She rolls her eyes as she skims the list, clicking through impatiently. It’s the typical hungry-vagina fodder, written in the same cotton-candy verbiage: “To really wow your guy pal, wait until he’s almost there”—this is written in italics, an editorial nudge-wink—“and then put him in your mouth for a mind-blowing climax.” Tasha is always annoyed by the use of “him” in place of “penis.” What if she didn’t know any better? What if she thought “him” meant him? All of him? She imagines herself an anaconda of a woman, her jaw unhinged, swallowing her lover like a reptilian black widow. She skips to the article that interviewed Ramona Melón. The first question they’d asked Ramona was about Bright Lights. The second was about Cybranu.

  Cosmo: What do you think of Cybranu?

  Ramona: Oh, I think it’s a fantastic organization, a really great organization. They really care about people. It’s people-centric.

  Cosmo: Do you have an implant?

  Ramona: Oh, several!

  Tasha rolls her eyes.

  Cosmo: [laughing] What about a Cybranu health implant?

  Ramona: Of course! [Ramona swings her long, luxurious hair and shows us her neck]

  Cosmo: Did it hurt?

  Ramona: Oh my god, not at all. They were so nice and gentle. And now I don’t have to worry about anything! I can stay at my ideal weight—one hundred and two—and eat whatever I want, and I never get sick or anything.

  Cosmo: Would you recommend the Cybranu health implant to your fans?

  Ramona: Oh my god, of course! I would say my fans have to get it. They owe it to themselves. I just wouldn’t feel safe in this country without it.

  Tasha switches back to the cover of the issue, holding the screen closer to her face to examine the beaming, laughing video portrait of Melón. Tasha can see it now: the faint outline of the Chip nestled just under the styled tendrils of glossy hair. Cosmo hadn’t bothered to airbrush it out, no: they’d lef
t its vague shape there below her ear to be casually noticed, taken in as part of the whole that was Ramona Melón. Tasha stares at the image, the curly pink font—100 Ways, Perfect, Abs, Love, Must Have—and fights the stupid feeling of jealousy. Jealous of what? Ramona Melón is somewhere in Hollywood—relocated to Nevada, big white letters and all, after the secession—chewing on the intestines of her costars. What’s to be jealous of?

  She wonders what Dinah will say about the prominent placement of Melón’s Chip on the cover of Cosmo. Tasha thinks she knows. Cybranu had certainly done a good job of shoving it down everyone’s throats. MINK couldn’t have been blameless either, she thinks suddenly. Partners. She pictures a bunch of fat cats somewhere before the Change, shaking pudgy hands and congratulating themselves.

  She shifts her shoulder on the windowpane and looks out at the sky. The clouds are gathering like grey wolves around a carcass. She’s glad she’s indoors, looking at the circling patterns of the approaching gale. The superstorms have been part of her life for as long as she can remember, but they’re just as scary every time. She hopes lightning will strike a Minker or two.

  She puts down her dying Glass for Leona’s letter, which she’s read eight times this morning.

  Tasha, it reads.

  I told you. Trouble’s coming. Not just Chicago. Everywhere. Get to South Side ASAP. It’s in the neck. Dr. Rio can help. Find him. Come to LA.

  Love, Leona

  And that was all. It’s written on a torn piece of paper, as if Leona had snatched the nearest piece of anything and made it her pad.

  “Trouble’s coming,” Tasha whispers, and feels a lump in her throat. No shit, Leona.

  The letter is postmarked two weeks before the Change, which disturbs Tasha the most. It must have arrived just before everything went to hell. Tasha might have gotten it on time if she hadn’t been moping around about Gina and losing her job at the Apiary.

  She strokes the paper, fingers the stains along the border. Leona is alive, or was when she wrote this letter. Tasha wonders for how long.

  She jumps as Dinah’s head appears out of the window next door. She’s combing her hair with her fingers, yawning.

  “Hey,” she says, squinting at Tasha through puffy eyes. She must have cried more after they said goodnight. “How long have you been up?”

  “Couple hours,” says Tasha. “The light woke me up.” She nods at the strobe-like light coming from the storm clouds.

  Dinah looks.

  “Oh crap,” she yawns. “Glad we’re inside. How long do you think?”

  “Any minute,” says Tasha. “It’s been working itself up all morning. Might have to close the windows for awhile.”

  “Yeah, probably. But before we do,” says Dinah. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yes?”

  “About the letter.”

  Tasha reaches down to the floor where she has set an open can of pears. Plucking one out, she nibbles it while watching the clouds. She wonders if Dinah will start crying again.

  “Yeah?”

  ‘Well, what does she mean? I mean, I get the ‘get to the South Side’ part, even if I don’t know why there. And the neck part. Obviously.” She sniffs. “But who is Dr. Rio? Do you know somebody named Dr. Rio?”

  “No,” Tasha says wearily. “Never heard of her. Or him. Leona never mentioned anyone by that name in any of her other letters.”

  Dinah bites her lip, looking at her hands.

  “Not much help, is it?”

  “No.”

  They sit in silence for a moment, the wind whipping their hair around as the storm crawls steadily closer.

  “Well,” says Dinah, “at least we know what the South Side means. That part is easy.”

  Tasha nods, but it’s actually almost as mysterious as the mention of this Dr. Rio person. Tasha doesn’t know shit about the South Side, and has only been one time since she’s lived in Chicago. She worries about going there. Before the Change, the way they told it on webnews, the whole area had been all but quarantined. She wonders if Leona knows shit about it either and if so, why in the blue hell she’s telling Tasha to go there. From Tasha’s one visit, she remembers it looking much like any other neighborhood, just not as tall as the North Side in terms of architecture. The webnews anchorpeople, however, had one story after another of stabbings, dog attacks, and other ghastly occurrences. She tells Dinah this, who scoffs.

  “Psh, that’s a bunch of crap. I work—worked—at a youth center on 85th. There are bad areas, sure. But not everywhere. They make it seem like everything past Roosevelt is walnuts.”

  Tasha considers this. She should know better, really: she remembers there being a stabbing near her own apartment one night around the time she moved in, but when she heard about the incident online they reported it as having occurred on 79th Street. At the time she thought it had been a teleprompter mistake, a coincidence. There are no coincidences, she can hear her sister saying.

  She remembers her sharp criticism of Gina for believing what was said about the Nation on the news and feels a little guilty. She has seen the kind of people who continue south when she gets off the train downtown: they are sullen and glowering, or chatty and exuberant. They talk loudly on earphones or stare at other passengers. They do the same things as every other passenger, but somehow it is different because they do it. Webnews has told her this, she thinks. She’s always felt a bit sour toward anchors anyway: their reporting accents, their clipped syllables, the way they still seem to smile when telling the camera about a noxious gas outbreak in which forty toddlers were asphyxiated. They’re being neutral, she argues with herself. But nothing about their stories regarding the South Side is neutral, she knows. She remembers a professor in college—a man in his eighties who had spent twenty-eight years in prison before being released when uncontaminated DNA evidence exonerated him—lecturing about the importance of monitoring one’s law enforcement with as much scrutiny as law enforcement scrutinizes you. Why do you think they continue to pass laws making it illegal to record police officers, he had asked. They pretend the South Side is no-man’s land. They like it that way. They broadcast it as a warzone, and all force becomes necessary. Do you live past 25th Street, young man? Yes? Then you are living in a police state.

  “They really screw the South Side neighborhoods too,” says Dinah, watching the storm. Thunder has begun to growl, the sound of a bruise. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve heard. The city privatized the trash collection, right? You remember. And they just drew a red line around where they would and wouldn’t serve. It was crap. Anything south of the Museum of Science and Industry was cut out. Can you believe that? What are people supposed to do? Where are they supposed to put their trash? Bury it? Burn it? Then they’d arrest them for unlawful fires.” She sucks her teeth. “I don’t remember what happened though. I think the South Side aldermen or whoever sued the city. They stopped broadcasting after the first riot.”

  Tasha thinks of the riot and clutches her mental purse. Who she’s protecting it from, she’s not sure. The protestors? The police? A cop had stared down her shirt once while riding the L. Or is she clutching the purse against the mysterious South Siders, the people who stayed on the train past Chinatown, who were never asked for their stories while mass webnews broadcasts did all the talking? Their eyes are doors within her left swinging open. To close the doors—or to pass through them—requires approach, nearness. Tasha has kept her distance.

  She eats another pear.

  “Well, that makes me feel a little better,” says Tasha, “since Leona thinks the South Side is the safest place to be. For whatever reason.”

  “We’re about as far from there as we could get besides Evanston or the suburbs. It’d be a hell of a walk. I wish she had said more in her letter,” she adds.

  Tasha hears the bitterness in Dinah’s voice and doesn’t blame her for it. She wishes the same thing. The letter had been maddeningly short and pointlessly cryptic. Really, Leona, Tasha thinks, you cou
ldn’t have spent five minutes telling me who Dr. Rio is? What he knows? What you know?

  “Either way,” says Dinah, “we could make it. You know. If we went.”

  Tasha hears the “we” but ignores it for now. She doesn’t want to ask how Dinah plans to get out of her apartment in order to create this “we.” It’s another subject surrounded by caution tape. Tasha doesn’t have an answer either, but she tells herself they will find one. Maybe after the storm she can go break into the offices of their apartment building and see if they have back-up keys on site. One time Tasha had locked herself out of her unit and the building manager had made her call a locksmith, claiming not to have spare keys, but ransacking their desks is worth a shot. The offices are next door, so she’ll need to wait for the storm to pass, but once it does, she’ll go. She feels a tiny buoy of hope blip inside her. She won’t say anything to Dinah just yet—no sense in letting her down. But maybe this could be their solution.

  The first drops of rain are beginning to fall, and the first jagged yellow crayon of lightning scrawls across the sky. A moment later is a godly crackle, and Tasha sees a splash of orange in the distance, the fuzzy mist of distant fire.

  “Whoa,” Dinah says, craning her neck, “it must have hit something. Haven’t seen that happen in a long time.”

  Tasha responds, but thunder drowns out her voice.

  “It’s starting,” she yells to Dinah, “close your window. We’ll talk more when it’s over.”

  Dinah nods and her head disappears inside. Tasha hears her window slam shut and then she follows suit. The thunder won’t rest for awhile. Like most superstorms, it will be one crack and rumble after another. Watching shows or having a conversation had been pointless during a storm before the Change. She watches the roiling clouds and rain for a moment, but staring out at the churning gray of the sky is like being a sailor staring into the guts of the Bermuda Triangle. She settles down on the bed to read Leona’s letter again. Letter. It’s just a blurb, really. She wishes she knew Morse code. She could tap messages to Dinah, ask her more about the South Side.