Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  Holding the letter, she stares at her hand and the light beige band on her finger where her ring had been. She sighs. Fucking Cara. To think she’d been heading to the Apiary on the morning of the Change—to get that job back. Temporary insanity, she thinks. The day after she’d been fired she had gone job hunting, heading downtown to see who was hiring. She’d been on the platform waiting for the Purple line, clicking through her Glass for job listings. The Pink Lynx was always hiring, but she hadn’t been sure she was ready to greet customers topless just yet. She’d adjusted her coat against the wind, the platform silent except for the chorus of competing voices emanating from various advertising screens. She remembers staring at the moving images, their glossy, persuasive spokesmodels; reminders of things she didn’t have. Not just the products themselves but the means to acquire them: a job, money, parents. A guy had passed Tasha on the platform and she’d noted the tattoo he had gotten to embellish the site of his Chip: the ink around the small square was frilly and elaborate, a paisley marker of his status. Tasha’s mother had loved paisley, but she would rather have died than get a tattoo. Tasha’s father would tease his wife about her vehement resistance against tattoos—“The Vice President has one on her shoulder!” he would say, “and she still looks professional! Beautiful, even!” But Tasha’s mother would just sniff, “The Vice President was not a ballerina.”

  Before she moved to Kentucky—the roots of Tasha’s father’s family tree—and opened a kennel, Tasha’s mother had danced her way from Chicago to New York, where she had never intended to stay for any great length of time. Her parents would sit in the kitchen together while telling these stories, old songs by CeeLo jangling out from the dock on the counter, the two of them humming along and wondering how they ended up cooking gumbo in Louisville. “Funny what a man can make you do…” she would muse. Tasha remembers the look in her mother’s eyes as she said this, sitting at the kitchen table with her chin in her hands, watching her husband slice vegetables. There was more than leaving for Kentucky in this statement, but she never said what else.

  What she did say was that she had traveled from her hometown with her dance company to New York, where they were to perform thirty-two shows in Manhattan. Tasha’s father had wandered into the empty theater with a Canon XZ9000 in front of his face, photographing the vaulted ceiling of the theater built well over a century ago in 1924. He was so taken with the mahogany pillars he almost missed the twelve mahogany women on stage rehearsing for that night’s performance.

  Tasha’s mother was a vision, he always said: he never understood the likening of ballerinas to swans until that moment. He said she was smiling—he loved to tell this part, stopping what he was doing at the kitchen counter to turn to his audience and gesture—and had just finished a series of pirouettes, finishing in arabesque. She continued smiling as she held her final pose, her leg raised effortlessly as her eyes fell upon him. The serene smile remained—but only for a moment. It was quickly replaced with a scowl, followed by some yelling as she chased him out of the theater, telling him that no show was free, and if he wanted to watch girls dance he could either go to a skin club or come back to the theater that night and pay admission like everyone else.

  He did come back that night, carrying an armful of sunflowers from the market on the corner where he’d waited all afternoon. He couldn’t afford roses. He watched the performance and at the end tried to clap around his lapful of flowers. He waited in the reception room with the rest of those who hung around to express their admiration.

  At this part of the story, Tasha’s mother would resume narration. Entering the reception room with the other ballerinas, she was at first overwhelmed by the crush of people: the chattering, the cameras flashing, the clouds of red and white roses being offered to her. But something caught her attention: a spray of yellow at the back of the room, behind the crowd. She looked; saw the young man in his white dress shirt, his camera bag still on his shoulder, his wavy hair combed back from his face, his outrageous bouquet of sunflowers. She knew they were for her.

  They saw each other almost every day during the thirty-two performances. At the end of the five-month tour, the dance company traveled back to Chicago, and Tasha’s mother stayed in New York. They were married ten months later, sunflowers on the tables at the reception.

  On the platform that day, Tasha had allowed her body to be swayed by the rushing air of the arriving Purple line. She’d resisted the urge to touch her empty finger where her mother’s ring had nestled every day until Tasha’s firing. Tasha was beyond the habit of crying in public—enough time cushioned her from the cremations to give her control over her grief. She boarded the train like a ghost, squeezing between other silent bodies.

  Tasha is still looking at her hands, remembering. They are neither her father’s nor her mother’s hands: long fingers, not slender, not blocky, oval nail beds, square palms. The wrists are small and bony—those are her mother’s. Her father’s arms, long and leanly muscled. She sees her parents in everything, and every part of her belongs to them. From the time Tasha was walking, her mother staked out her body parts, divvying them up between surnames: Lockett legs, Amaru kneecaps, Lockett hips, Amaru backside. There were some parts that were no man’s land: her eyes, her collarbones. “They’re just mine,” Tasha would say, but her mother would shake her head and cite books she’d read while pregnant: between every piece, between every bone and freckle, a line could be drawn, crossing some genetic bridge, connected to some biological tree root. “The only thing that is yours is your birthmark,” her mother would say, pressing the brown blotch above Tasha’s eye like a button.

  Tasha presses the birthmark now, still staring out the window, but she can’t make her hands cool enough to trick the flesh into thinking the touch her mother’s. The constant, deafening sound of thunder is almost peaceful compared to the noise in her head. She rests her head against the wall, closing her eyes.

  Something slams against the other side of the wall and she screams involuntarily. The walls are so thin that it had felt like a vibration through her skull, a blow. All she can hear is the sky’s roar, her room glowing and shadowing in two-second flickering intervals. Then, in the smallest silence between thunder—a scream. From next door.

  “Dinah!” She shrieks it, knowing, and the sound ricochets up her throat like it’s on fire. She doesn’t wait. She tears across the room, flinging the bedroom door open and battering the dresser that she’d slid back in front of the front door to escape. She bruises her finger on the lock, fumbling and fumbling. Then the door is open and she’s scrambling down the hallway, darkened by the storm. There could be Minkers roaming, but she doesn’t care. She finds Dinah’s doors and attacks it with her fists, screaming like a banshee on a cliff.

  “Dinah Dinah Dinah Dinah!”

  Deeper inside the building, farther from the storm, she can still hear the thunder, but the screams filter through it. She hears her name in the screams, Dinah’s voice. She hears the horrible, soulless sound of a bark. Vomit is in her throat.

  “Dinah!” she yells, indifferent to the raggedness of her voice, “Dinah! Let me in!”

  She’s pounding the door with both fists, kicking it with her bare feet, wailing. She can hear her friend’s cries, she can hear the crashing of dishes and shelves and tables. She hears silverware clatter to the floor. She hears glass break. She hears the brutal coughing snarls of Dale.

  “Dinah!” she screams. “Dinah, kill him! KILL HIM!”

  Her knuckle splits on the door and in the dimness of the hallway she can see her blood on the gray metal that’s the same color as the sky.

  Something slams against the door inside and Tasha beats harder and harder, her blood a pattern of paisley before her. She’s sobbing, her throat a mushroom, clogging.

  “Dinah!” It’s all she has; it’s the last of her voice. “Dinah please…”

  Then it’s quiet. The screams have died.

  She hears nothing but the storm.

&n
bsp; Chapter 12

  Tasha is packing the Prada backpack.

  She considers the size of the pack and eyes the assortment of things laid out on her kitchen table that she had deemed important enough to bring along. She has arranged three boxes of granola bars, several bottles of Evian, a can of peaches and a can of pears, the can opener, a fork, lip balm, and her bag of make-up. On her feet are her Nikes; in her hand is the Wusthof. She has also decided to bring a smaller knife from the wooden block—a knife used for paring under normal circumstances—and the nail file she had used to kill Brian the doorman. Last, she has laid out her ID badge from the Apiary. In the picture is a face that has begun to look strange: her hair is styled and her make-up pristine. She touches the face on the badge before zipping it into a side pocket.

  She’s leaving.

  She begins packing the other items into the Prada backpack, putting the bottled water at the bottom; the granola bars next, then the can opener. She has filled up most of the space inside and is down to holding a can of pears in one hand and the bag of make-up in the other. She eyes them. Inside the little purple-and-white striped pouch are her mascara and cream-to-powder shimmering foundation, as well as a tube of light-infused lip-gloss. She had applied all three earlier in the morning, smoothing the foundation on like war paint, coloring her lips carefully. The mascara she always applies last: the act of opening her eyes wide and swiping on the black paste is the chameleon’s flesh turning to wood as he freezes on the branch.

  Tasha makes her choice and returns the can of pears to the cupboard, stuffing the make-up bag into the backpack. In the outside pocket she has folded in two or three of Leona’s letters, including the latest one. She looks around her apartment.

  It had started empty, except for the pillow-top bench that her mother had sent with her when she moved out. Now it’s full of things. Tasha goes into the bedroom and sits on the bench. It creaks slightly with her weight. It was her grandmother’s and needs new varnish and some reupholstering. Tasha has never been one for antiques, but this is the bench her mother had sat on in front of the vanity mirror in the house Tasha grew up in, Tasha watching from the bed.

  Tasha pictures her mother’s fine toffee skin, the sable powder brush coated in faintly sparkling dust making its way over her cheekbones and nose and down to her throat. Her mouth would open slightly as she used the curler on her lashes, each eye opening and blinking twice after its treatment. Last would come the mascara, the wand dipping into the tube brown and coming out black, making its way toward her widened eyes. After each coat, she would look at Tasha through the reflection of the mirror and smile, and Tasha would smile back. She rubs her palm across its stained surface, stroked smooth by a couple generations of her family’s asses.

  She has the sudden urge to take it with her, a notion she dismisses as ridiculous as soon as it forms. There are other things she had wanted to take when she first began arranging items to pack: her flat iron, her atom video player, her H-Airless laser-razor. These are all things she would have packed on an ordinary trip, all of them useless now. She’d have felt safer taking them along. She also wanted to bring her favorite green satin Jimmy Choos. She had even tried forcing them into the pack on top of the granola bars, artfully storing bottled water in the shoes themselves, until in the end it became evident that the stilettos would have to be left behind. She’s embarrassed by how much it pains her.

  She takes a last look at the backpack’s contents before buckling it shut. Its green canvas offsets the top she has chosen for the journey, a purple chiffon blouse that falls just over the waistband of her skinny jeans. The Nikes stick out like two size-seven railroad spikes; Tasha makes a face at them.

  Tasha carries the rejected Jimmy Choos into the closet, which is almost as large as the bedroom itself and the reason she had chosen the apartment. Inside, she stands among the pants and blouses billowing from padded hangers in a jungle of silk and tweed. She stands among it all and breathes in, taking in the faint scent of laundry detergent and also cedar, which she has stashed throughout the space to keep the moths from munching. There is also a lingering smell of nutmeg, which surprises her. That is Leona’s scent, and her sister has never set foot in her apartment. She wishes she could stay here forever. This is a safe place. Outside, everyone is dead. After yesterday, after Dinah, she had scorned the cradle of the bathtub and curled up here in the closet, surrounded by these smells. Now, Tasha trails her fingertips along the lines of garments in the dim light, trying to identify each fabric as her skin comes in contact with it. She succeeds for the most part: twill, cotton, satin, rayon, cotton, silk, cotton. Her careful system of color-coding layers the room in sections of red and violet, strips of yellow and navy blue, a blinding arrangement of white. Separate from the rest of the blue hangs the dejected corpse of her Apiary uniform. She avoids its artificial sheen as she sweeps her gaze over the rest of her wardrobe in a final parting grief.

  She looks down at her purple chiffon top and at the Nikes jutting from the legs of her jeans. She can almost hear Gina saying, “Hello, clashy.”

  She pulls the purple top over her head, cursing as it catches on her earrings. She untangles the gold hoops from the fabric and gently hangs the shirt on its hanger in the purple section, caressing it lovingly before letting it go. She takes a step sideways to the black section and pulls down a cotton tank top, puts it on. She also brings down a vintage Adidas hoodie from the purple section. Gina would abhor the combination of Nike and Adidas, but Tasha needs something to layer if the temperature drops unexpectedly (which it often does), and she likes the hoodie. She looks at herself in the full-length mirror—jeans, black tank top, plain hoops, half-curly hair—and sighs. So much has changed.

  She closes her bedroom door behind her without looking back; the rows of designer heels inhabiting the closet floor would beckon to her like children being left behind if she did. Tasha imagines her shoe collection in an infomercial for abandoned accessories, with sad faces drawn on, starving pot bellies and puppy-dog eyes.

  The backpack is on her back, the knife in her hand, the hoodie over her shoulder. Almost out the door, she remembers her Guess aviators and gets them from the coffee table. She places them carefully into the back pocket of the backpack and steps into the hall.

  She walks the few paces to Dinah’s apartment. All morning she has gathered her belongings, said goodbye to others, trying not to think of her friend. Guilt settles heavily into her stomach. It quiets her. It burns her out. She has not even begun the walk South and already she feels tired. But she has to go. There is nothing here now.

  The guilt is an onion of tears. She hadn’t been able to save Dinah yesterday, but Dinah would not have needed saving yesterday if Tasha had saved her before. All those months of echoing slaps, Dale drunk and roaring every Friday, Tasha curling her pillow around her head, disconnecting the woman she would pass in the hallway from the cries she’d hear through the wall. Tasha had never even known her name before the Change. But Dinah had always been Dinah, and now Dinah is dead.

  Now that the storm has passed, the window at the end of the hall illuminates more of the corridor. She stares at her blood drying on Dinah’s door in patterns like roses. She wishes she had real roses to place at the entrance, but these blooms will have to do. What else can she give? Her keys are in her hand, and she has an idea. She holds one like a blade and uses it to scratch an epitaph into the metal.

  It’s time. Returning to her own apartment, she uses the same key to turn the deadbolt, locking in all her precious things, and locking out the world. Behind her, scratched into Dinah’s door, are her words, scrawling and ragged:

  Here lies Dinah. Day 8. Everyone’s to blame.

  Chapter 13

  Tasha exits the building on the side, as she had entered from the front. Outside, the weather has changed again, and she’s glad to be wearing a tank top and not the sticky chiffon. The heat makes her back damp after only a few steps; the sweat that is disguised by the black cotton w
ould have been obvious in the purple blouse. She adjusts the straps of the Prada backpack so it rides a little higher; she doesn’t like the feeling of it bumping against her ass, and if she needs to run it will interfere with her stride. Across the street is the mega McDonald’s, its lights still on, its windows empty.

  Tasha has to pass it to get to Lakeshore, but she finds herself striding across Foster toward its doorway. Thinking of the Post, she prepares herself for a locked door, reminding herself about the alarm. But it’s open and she enters its wide doorway, sinking into the air conditioning like a grateful fish into a pond. She doesn’t know why McDonalds is linked to the city generators—she’s sure Leona would have some theory of obesity and corruption—but at the moment she doesn’t care.

  She moves cautiously into the seating area, knife ready, but the restaurant is deserted. A few tables have remnants of breakfast burritos and enormous cinnamon rolls, an overturned cup of orange juice there by the window. Tasha can see a hand on the ground toward the back, its arm obscured by the elevator leading up to the multiple other floors—McMexico, McThailand, depending on what country of origin you wanted your pre-made, pre-wrapped meal inspired by. Tasha decides she’d rather not to focus on the hand and instead moves to the front by the counters.

  Here there is evidence of more activity: a pile of cash strewn about on the floor with some blood staining a few of the bills. A tooth. A Barbie doll. Tasha picks up the doll. There’s blood on it too, around its hip, which she avoids, holding it by the neck. The Barbie has flaming red hair and wears a green Lycra jumpsuit, the back cut into a thong, exposing the doll’s shiny plastic ass. Tasha sets the doll back down beside the tooth, propping it into a sitting position.

  She decides to go behind the counter, where she steps over a dead employee, not looking at her face. The dead girl is by the fry machine—still powered on and roiling hotly—her neck apparently broken. The floor around her shines with grease. Tasha wonders if her death came from falling or something less immediate. She does not investigate.