Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  One of the Minkers pulls away from the pack and Tasha risks a glance over her shoulder to glimpse his distance, remembering in a flash the people she’d witnessed from her apartment window, the person and their child, being chased and eventually dragged down. With his speed increased, and hers decreased, they are about twenty meters apart. All Tasha can think of is trains and her algebra teacher. She’s worried about the rest of the pack—there are more now. The white ones’ faces have reddened; she can’t tell if it’s from exertion, or sunburn from lurking around on the beach. She sees their mob racing along the sand after her and thinks momentarily of Nina Simone and poplar trees.

  Tasha sneaks another glance at her closest pursuer, who has closed to a ten-meter distance and maintained it. He’s blonde and bulky and she wonders at his ability to race along so easily. On his feet are sanitation boots worn by chefs in high-end restaurants. His stringy hair has fallen into his eyes, swinging back and forth as he lumbers along. Tasha assesses her game plan, little by little cutting across the sand, about to circle around the empty soccer stadium. The chef is gaining.

  Tasha lets him gain another yard; he’s almost upon her. Timing will be everything—she can hear his moaning, increasing in intensity as he nears his prey. Tasha skids to a stop, whirling around, her arm out like a thorned branch. He slams into the point of the knife, too slow-witted to stop in time, and the flesh of his throat swallows the blade. Tasha yanks the knife free and glances at the rest of the pack, about forty meters back, still on the sand. She draws back the blade and slices across the side of the neck, severing veins and sending sparks flying as she destroys the Chip. He collapses and twitches, but she is jogging again before he is still. The work was quick but the pack has gained; Tasha feels panic rattling her teeth. Her thighs begin to rebel as fear and exhaustion spread through her bones. She thinks of the guy in the Asics running down Broadway. She is him now, the knife cutting the air more slowly as she pumps her arms, struggling for momentum. An Asian woman lopes a little ahead of the rest, barking. Every step Tasha takes has already been taken by someone in the city, someone likely dead. The ground vibrates with the volume of the pack’s numbers.

  An arm nearly clotheslines Tasha, so quickly does it snap out in front of her. She almost falls on her back with the strength of her recoil, but the arm becomes two arms, two black arms snatching her upright and dragging her into the doorway they appeared from. The door is concealed by the pattern of its material, made to blend in with the rest of the wall, an employee entrance for soccer events. Tasha struggles, her assailant attempting to pin her arms. She slashes out in the dim illumination splashed from the doorway. The door closes, the rectangle of faint light gone, and she is in the dark, spinning, slashing with the knife.

  Chapter 14

  Light. Another door has been opened, a door that meets the sun, and the room is flooded with vision. Tasha is lashing out left and right with the Wusthof but with the room now illuminated, she sees that she is not being attacked; no one is trying to come near her. She stops her frantic windmilling and lets her eyes adjust to seeing.

  There are seven people in the little space—no, eight, there’s a woman leaning against a wall—watching her. Some look frightened. Some look angry. One or two just look. One of the men who is just looking is tall and dark, a year or two older than Tasha, and bleeding from his left arm. He is holding what looks like a jersey to the wound.

  “Are you finished?” he asks her, half-smiling now.

  Tasha looks at them all. They’re unChipped. They are brown and black—one white man—and dressed in jerseys like the one the tall man is now tying around his forearm. She realizes slowly, stupidly, that they are the soccer players she has seen running the field, footballers.

  “I thought you were a Minker.”

  “What?”

  Tasha points at her neck.

  “A Minker. Chipped. One of them.”

  “Oh. No, we’re not.”

  They all stare at one another until the leaning woman pushes off the wall and says,

  “What the fuck were you doing on the beach?”

  Tasha immediately dislikes her. She is small and toffee-colored, eyebrows arching over round eyes, a wide mouth pursed into a slanted bow. Her body is tight and wiry; her Adidas cleats are orange and match her jersey. Tasha wishes she could see the name on the back. The woman’s venom puts Tasha on her guard.

  “Sunbathing,” Tasha replies.

  The woman doesn’t respond, just looks at Tasha. The tall man smiles a little more and says,

  “Almost got sunburned, ladygirl.”

  Tasha looks at his arm.

  “Did I do that?”

  “Yeah, but it was an accident. I shouldn’t have grabbed you without warning you, but those…people were right behind you.”

  “Is the cut bad?”

  “No.”

  They all stare at each other some more. The other players don’t seem eager to talk. Some are staring at the floor; some are staring out the door that’s letting in the light.

  “Where does that door go? Is it safe?” Tasha asks the tall man, who is the only one who seems receptive to conversation.

  He nods.

  “It leads out into the stadium’s field. They can’t get in; we blocked the main entrances on the first day. There were a few who,” he paused, “changed that were already in the stadium with us. But I…we took care of them.”

  He turns his head slightly, looking at no one, but those behind him stare at the ground or fidget. Tasha walks through the open door and realizes why.

  The field stretches below her, three flight of stairs down. The stadium had been built into the hill, and she had been snatched indoors on the hillside. From where she stands now, the field is a green basin in a shallow stadium-crater below. And across the healthy expanse of artificial grass are bodies, orange-shirted forms dotted across the turf in what eerily resembles a ghost match. There’s the striker, lying on his right hip, one arm over his head. Close to him is the right forward, on her back. She could be stretching. They could all be sleeping. There are a few prone forms that are out of position, their jerseys bright and still.

  The tall man has followed her outside.

  “We were practicing for a match.”

  “Did you kill them all?” she asks.

  “Not all of them were sick,” he says. “Some of the ones that were sick had attacked and killed some of the other guys before we even understood what was going on. We didn’t know who had lost their minds and who hadn’t. One of us, Derek, wasn’t sick and he was helping a woman who was being attacked. One of our other guys,” he jerks his head behind him, referring to one of their remaining eight, “thought Derek was one of the crazy ones. So Derek died too. It was crazy. Is.”

  They are silent for a minute. Tasha’s heart beats slowly in her ears. Every step she takes has been weighed upon by grief for Dinah, and she had barely known the woman. Here in this stadium, these people have lost friends. Close friends. She doesn’t know what to say, so she sticks to logistics.

  “And you’re sure you have everything locked up?”

  The man shrugs.

  “We’ve been here for days now. None of them have gotten in. We’ve heard them at the two gates we chained up, but the only other entrances are employee entrances like the one you found. They’re not too smart; they just knock up against things. Once they focus on something though, like a door, sometimes they stick around.”

  Tasha nods.

  “How many of them are there?” he asks quietly.

  How many. Tasha swallows and half looks at him.

  Silence.

  He asks again. “How many?”

  “Everyone.”

  He balls a fist and presses it against his forehead.

  “We tried to get out, we tried to go home.” He’s talking to himself now, and she lets him. “We took Lakeshore and as soon as we got to Montrose there was a big group of them, at least twenty-five. We were ten when we wen
t out. We had to turn back, and now we’re eight.”

  Quiet between them. Tasha can hear the distant sounds of the lake.

  “Are they contagious?”

  The question surprises her. For all her mental comparison of the Minkers to zombies, it had not occurred to her that their condition might be something she could catch. Like a reel of film, her brain flips through every horror film she’s ever seen: square human teeth tearing at human flesh, the flesh animating; walking dead swarming the streets, rising from their graves. She thinks of Brian, her doorman, the morning of the Change, and the Driver she encountered in Uptown. Their incisors had been so near her, their saliva dripping, fluids waiting to be mixed to transform her into a Prada-wearing flesh-eater. She thinks dully of Dinah. After her death, there had been only one barking voice in that apartment. One pair of shambling feet. No more.

  “No,” she says, sobering. Even if she hadn’t known Dinah, other logic prevails. The girl in the yellow dress flutters through her mind like a ghost butterfly. She had been chewed to bits by her very Chipped boyfriend. Tasha had seen her die. All the bodies she had passed, piled at the top of the subway steps, sprawled out on the streets. Even the paused soccer game on the field right in front of them. No, it’s not contagious. The tall man is speaking from fear planted by a decade or two of horror flicks.

  “No,” she says again. He nods as if he knew this, as if he had been embarrassed to ask in the first place. It’s a question that shouldn’t exist.

  “What have you been eating?” he asks. “We have hot dogs from the concession stand. They’re cold, but they’re food.”

  At this moment one of the other players emerges from the door. They had all stayed inside when Tasha and the tall man ventured out. Tasha gets the feeling no one wants to see the field, and realizes they’d had to kill their own teammates just days ago, had witnessed their goalie gnawing on the throat of their left forward. She figures she wouldn’t want to see the field either. The man sidles outside and, as she predicted, works very hard at keeping his gaze on Tasha and the tall man, struggling not to look over their shoulders at the formation of the fallen.

  “We need to talk about this,” he says. “People want to know where she came from.”

  Tasha and the tall man exchange a look and follow the other guy inside, where the remnants of the team are clustered together. They break apart when Tasha and the other two enter the room, which Tasha realizes is a storage room, with boxes of equipment and supplies. A few are open—first aid stuff. She tries to be subtle as she looks around for others wearing bandages, wondering who was injured in their scuffles with the Minkers. She doesn’t want to think about what human teeth tearing her skin would feel like. She imagines it would require a lot of effort on the biter’s part.

  “What do you know about all this?” Someone is asking her a question. She turns from her thoughts and sees that it is the one white man. His jersey says #16.

  “Not much more than you,” she replies.

  “You knew it was in the neck.”

  “So did you, if you killed any of them.”

  “You knew it was the implant.”

  “I learned from experience.”

  “You’ve killed them?”

  At this question Tasha notices the unpleasant woman she had first spoken to change her facial expression. Tasha has either irritated her or surprised her. She answers carefully,

  “A few.”

  They all look at her and at her knife, which she’s still grasping. She knows they are probably now noticing the red streaks on her jeans, which have faded and dried into rusty stripes. They are taking her in: her immaculate mascara and her Prada backpack, her breasts, her lip-gloss. She feels the way she felt walking to work downtown, eyes moving over her body, assessing, measuring. It irks her. Of course she’s killed them—she’s still alive.

  “How many?” The other woman can’t help herself; the question bursts out and she looks surly with herself for asking.

  Tasha ticks off the faces in her list. Her doorman, the butcher, the Driver, Chip, the chef. She almost counts the boy on Day 1, but he got up, of course.

  “A few. Four or five.”

  “You did them all at once?”

  Tasha laughs at the question in spite of herself. It would have meant something entirely different before the Change.

  “No. One at a time, like a good girl.”

  The woman pauses, her eyebrow raised, then laughs loudly before stopping abruptly. #16 reenters the conversation.

  “Why do they change?”

  “You know why.”

  He is silent. Then,

  “How do you know?

  Tasha sighs, reluctant to repeat what Leona has told her. It sounds so very stupid, with so little to go on. They don’t need to know it all, she decides.

  “My sister knew something was going to happen. Because of the Chips, the implants. She said it was something bad. This is what she meant.”

  “Where’s your sister?” one asks. “Here?”

  “She lives in the Nation.”

  At this #16 mutters something and a few of the players shake their heads.

  “What is she,” he asks, “some kind of revolutionary?”

  “She’s a mom. And a farmer. She studied law when the States were United.”

  “Why did she leave?”

  “Look, what’s with all the fucking questions, okay?” She’s impatient now, and tired. “She sent me the letter before all this happened…and then it happened. She doesn’t know why, I don’t know why.”

  “Where were you going?” the woman in orange asks. Her voice is soft and Tasha doesn’t snap at her.

  “Downtown. I have family there.”

  A lie. Why?

  “Your family’s probably dead.”

  It’s the tall man that says it. He is staring out the door that leads to the field, his fist on his forehead.

  “They might be okay, Ishmael,” one of the other players offers. “Your mom is tough, and your brothers are there to help her.”

  Ishmael gives him a quick, cold look and goes on staring out the door. Everyone is silent for a moment until he says,

  “You won’t make it all the way there. They show up out of nowhere. We don’t even know how they surprised us when we were going down Lakeshore. They just show up.”

  “I’ve been outside a few times. I went and got food from Jewel. I went to the Post.” She feels like she’s trying to prove something and she doesn’t know what, or why. “Sometimes you can hear them barking and you can stay away. You just have to be quiet and pay attention.”

  “Barking?”

  Tasha feels uncomfortable. She will not imitate the sound.

  “You know…that sound they make. It sounds like…like dogs barking.”

  They stare at her. She gets annoyed.

  “Look, I’ll be fine. I packed some food, I’m sneaky. I’m kinda fast. I mean, I am fast. It’s not that far. If I travel during the day, I can see them coming.”

  “They can see you too,” the woman says.

  “Yeah.”

  “What about at night? What will you do at night?”

  “Sleep in soccer stadiums.”

  Tasha can see the woman wants to smile but stops herself this time.

  Tasha looks at the tall man named Ishmael, who is fussing with one of the packs of first aid materials. He’s replacing the jersey wrapped around his arm with an actual bandage. #16 goes over to help him, holds the sterile strip ready while Ishmael pours a capsule of hydrogen peroxide over the wound. Tasha can see that he had been right; the cut isn’t too bad. He must have been quick: she had made a serious attempt at severing any limbs in a two-foot radius. The others are watching the process too, and she wonders what they’re thinking, wonders if they’re thinking about war like she is. The Adidas logos on all their sleeves could be military badges. Her shoes are Nike, but her hoodie is Adidas. Maybe that makes her an ally. Or an enemy.

  The wound bandag
ed, Ishmael walks to the corner and comes back with a plastic bag, which, as he comes closer, Tasha sees is filled with hot dogs in buns. She can’t help but laugh as he offers her one. He’s smiling too.

  She accepts a hot dog.

  “What, no ketchup?” she jokes.

  “Sorry, princess.” The woman said it, and Tasha looks at her to see if any malice was intended, but the woman is eating a hot dog and Tasha can’t tell. Tasha takes off her backpack for the first time and sits against the door she had been brought in through. She can feel the smallest breeze whisper across her lower back, trickling in through the small crack between the door and the floor. The sensation is almost like breath. She imagines the Minkers from the beach crowding around the doorway, sniffing. She shifts her body to the wall beside the door, dragging her backpack with her.

  “How did you guys know I was out there anyway?” she asks between bites.

  A short man with a beard—his jersey says #34—shifts the food in his mouth to one cheek and points upward.

  “I was in one of the box seats in the stadium and looked out the window and saw you as you got from the sand to the grass and headed this way. I told Ish to get downstairs quick and see if he could give you a signal, call you or something. I didn’t think you’d get over here so fast. I for sure thought that one out front was going to get you.”

  Tasha chews and shrugs, then, finishing her hot dog, uses the clean side of the wrapper to wipe dirt off her Nikes. She can feel them watching her and is self-conscious. She decides to busy her hands and digs in her backpack for a can of peaches, along with the can opener. A minute later she is eating a slice of fruit.

  “Can I get a peach?” #34 grins. “It’s been nothing but hot dogs and Gatorade for like a week now.”

  Tasha passes the can, which he leans forward to accept. By the time she gets it back it has been passed to all the other players, who one by one have joined what has become a lopsided circle. Tasha wonders how well they’ve been washing their hands and considers not eating the few peaches left in the can, but her still-hungry stomach wins the debate, and she munches them, trying not to think about germs.