Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  Tasha walks down the center of the Cat House, looking left and right at the captive beasts. They look at her too, and with great interest. Two lions stand and move closer to the bars, crouching as she walks past. Their eyes are savage, staring planets. Tasha waves at them. The lioness twitches an ear. Tasha thinks of her sister.

  Like the other inmates of the Cat House, she seeks a corner where she can curl up, lick her wounds. At the other end of the hall she sees the emergency exit sign, a door that doesn’t open from the outside. That’s where she needs to be, somewhere hidden and dark.

  The exit sign casts a faint greenish glow over her hands, and she tucks them into the pouch on the front of the hoodie. She sits, bringing her knees to her chest, and watches a jaguar whose chin rests on its paws, watching her. Together they wait out the storm.

  Chapter 17

  Tasha wakes slowly, the light growing brighter and clearer a little at a time, as if she’s rising to the surface of a deep pool. When her eyes are fully open, she focuses on the jaguar behind its bars several feet away and jumps. She’d had strange dreams. In one she was looking in a mirror, and a girl in yellow had stared back before beating her fist against the glass over and over until her hand broke through and grabbed Tasha by the throat. Tasha was paralyzed as the girl continued coming through the mirror, her dress transforming into a jersey as she stepped through the rest of the way. The girl had a black eye and a soft face. Then Tasha was wearing the jersey and looked into the mirror to see her face painted brightly like a horrifying china doll, her teeth falling into the sink as she grinned madly.

  Tasha shudders. Across from her, the jaguar licks its paws.

  “What’s new, pussycat?” she asks it. It blinks.

  Tasha looks about her, and realizes it’s early morning, maybe even dawn. She must have slept for 12 hours. Less. More. It’s hard to say: without a watch she has no idea—the marbled mammatus clouds (storm or not) have always made it difficult to see the position of the sun in Chicago. Her ass is asleep, as she’s spent the entire night propped up against the exit door, her blood flow confused by the angles. She stretches, and her back protests, but she stands and peers out the window of the door she made her bed. The storm had left many of the trees of the zoo looking as if they’d spent a long night out drinking: their branches hang crazily in various levels of destruction. One entire tree has fallen, partially blocking the door of what Tasha can make out as the Bird House.

  She raises her arms above her head, elongating her spine, and looks about her at the Cat House. The cats are languid, their tails twitch. Tasha’s stomach growls and she bends to pick up the Prada backpack. She digs inside and pulls out the can opener and a can of SpaghettiOs. She wishes she were able to warm it up, but she imagines that wouldn’t help the taste much anyway. She doesn’t have a spoon, she notes irritably, and sticks two fingers and a thumb into the can, trying to avoid the sharp edges of the lip, scooping out pinches of the room temperature red pasta. Her mother never let her have this stuff as a kid, but it’s not half bad.

  Eating her SpaghettiOs by the fingerful, she walks down the wide corridor of the Cat House, able now to see its many prisoners. The ocelot, the jaguar, and the lions she had seen, but there is a panther, a caracal, a tiger, a lynx—full-sized; not like the miniature cats at Fetch Fetchers—and several others that the gloom of the storm the night before had hidden from her. They all stretch out quietly in their various imitation-habitats, their eyes following Tasha intently, but not raising their heads. Tasha’s stomach gives a rumble; it has not yet gotten the message that the cheap, salty pasta is on its way. The lynx’s nose twitches.

  Tasha realizes suddenly that the animals are at various stages of starvation. She doesn’t know much about cats, as dogs had been her specialty, but she imagines that captive animals don’t go about storing fat the way their wild cousins do throughout the season. It has been nearly a week since they were fed, trapped behind the bars with no one to look after them. Their keeper, on the morning of the Change, had likely gone off to feed himself on the blood of Chipless Chicagoans, neglecting his captive charges. No wonder they’re so languid. Tasha observes their intense stares in a new light. She had seen animals like them stalk toddlers from their cages even when they were well fed. Tasha can only imagine how badly they want to eat her now.

  “Sorry, guys, I don’t think you’d like SpaghettiOs,” she says to them.

  But she feels foolish saying this. This isn’t the “Sorry, Spot” one tells one’s groveling Jack Russell from the dinner table. These animals are starving. Their fate will be found where they lie now unless Tasha decides to call it quits and climb into one of their cages, which would still only delay the inevitable. The cats would die, one by one. The lions, caged together, might kill one another, but the others would deflate, become still, each alone in their 20x20, fading. The thought makes Tasha almost unbearably sad. She’d heard college philosophers spouting their crap when she was in college—“every man dies alone.” What about women? What about cats? She hates to think of the lynx, the panther, starving in their prisons. She thinks sharply of Dinah, and herself too. She looks at the tiger, which stares back with blazing eyes. Its cage has small trees planted along the back wall, clouds painted on the bricks with an orange blazing sun. Pretty, Tasha thinks, but a placeholder. She thinks of her closet of shoes and clothes. Pretty, she thinks. Pretty cage. She looks back at the tiger. It would tear her to pieces if given only a fraction of a chance, but while it remains on the other side of the bars she feels no fear: only sympathy and a heavy sense of sameness.

  She finishes her food and licks her fingers, averting her eyes from the many fiery stares around her. Tasha goes to the door she came through the night before. Outside, the sky is as mottled as ever, but the light coming through in persistent dapples tells her that the storms have indeed passed. So what now?

  She considers the situation. She’s wearing her Adidas hoodie with nothing but her bra underneath. Her socks probably stink. After the fiasco of the corner store with Vette she had been unable to get the razor, toothbrush, and deodorant for which she was so desperate. She smacks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, tasting the staleness. She can’t believe she even dared to have a conversation with Ishmael yesterday at the top of the stadium. She can’t remember the last time she had gone a day without showering, without brushing her teeth. Even after the Change her water still worked, and for some reason she thought she would have been able to make it to the South Side in a few hours. Not two days. Never this long. She needs to get downtown.

  She charts her running path from her days of exercise before the Change. She’d jogged on Lakeshore from Foster to the Magnificent Miles (long pluralized to suit the waves of new shops) before, and she imagines she’s only a few miles from what used to be her home away from home, the dense streets of department stores and boutiques. Somewhere on the Miles she could get underwear, socks, a new shirt, maybe even a toothbrush. She isn’t sure what time it is, but it’s early: she could be on Michigan Avenue by noon.

  But first she has to pee.

  The Cat House, she has found, does not have a bathroom, and she is loath to pop a squat in the corner on the tile. She’d only peed on the ground once before, after a long night carousing with Gina and her friends, and even then it had been in a darkened alley with Gina and the others laughing and cursing, possibly peeing also, a few meters away. Peeing on polished tile in broad daylight beneath the judgmental eyes of a jaguar seems low. Even now.

  She peeps out the front door of the Cat House and across the tree-strewn grounds of the zoo, looking for Minkers. None in sight. She cracks the door—it is mercifully well oiled—and sticks her head around the edge, looking left and right. She hears nothing but the distant shuffling of elephants. The main office is only twenty or thirty meters away, next to a huge wooden likeness of a bear and her cubs. Birds land on the bears’ backs, looking around imperiously.

  Tasha runs. She tries to run softly, on th
e tips of her Nikes, and is proud of how quiet she’s being until she trips. After that she just jogs, every step jolting her whining bladder. She picks her way quickly across the concrete, hopping over branches and rubbish. The grounds were so orderly yesterday, she thinks—chaos descends suddenly, like a black-feathered bird.

  She sighs with deep relief to find the door to the office building unlocked, and she slips in, closing it quietly behind her. She locks it as a precaution, though she knows the Minkers aren’t handy with doors. Inside the office—which has windows on three sides—is a dead girl dressed all in khaki like a safari hunter, her Pocahontas braids bloodied. Tasha steps over her and peers around the office.

  The space is a bit like an announcer’s booth, with computers and microphones and blinking machines. Blinking. So there’s power. Is the zoo hooked up to the city’s grid too, or is it solar powered like the museums?

  She turns away from the microphones and walks through another Employees Only door, finding herself in what is labeled as the Control Room. One entire wall of the room is taken up with rows of flat, shining screens, each one showing different angles of the wide expanse of the zoo. From the Control Room she can see the giraffes extending their necks across their bars to nibble at neighboring trees, as well as the meerkats sitting on their mounds of mud, gazing skyward.

  But Tasha’s not interested in controls; she’s interested in a toilet. Luckily there’s a bathroom in the Control Room as well, where she pees gratefully. She tries to wash her hands, but the dispenser is out of soap, which shocks her. Next to a football stadium or a train station, a zoo seems like the dirtiest place in the world, a place most in need of soap. Only in a zoo is there a possibility of both zebra urine and your own urine being on your hands. Soap should exist. She supposes it’s because of the zebra urine that they go through soap so fast. Luckily she’s already eaten, especially since she had no spoon.

  She tries to avoid the mirror before leaving, but can’t, of course. It calls her like a topless siren sitting on a rock. And like a siren, it dashes her careful little ship on the crags with what it shows her. Hair wild, mascara smudged, foundation sweated off—

  A sudden, persistent beeping distracts her from her mutant reflection and she freezes. In another time she would have thought it was her Glass, but this world has departed from the one that had Glass devices in it. She moves quietly to the door of the bathroom and stands flat beside it. Any sound could be a dog whistle for the Minkers—before she goes back into the Control Room she has to be sure she isn’t tottering blindly into a massacre. She pulls the door open a millimeter, pressing her eye against the crack and trying not to think about germs as she scans the Control Room. Nothing. No swaggering shadows with bloody breath, no half-eaten zoo employees clinging to life. Tasha opens the door a little wider.

  She almost slams it again when she sees the flashing light, thinking only of the many illuminated necks of the past week. But it’s a light on the panel of monitors in the Control Room, a yellow bulb that beeps shrilly in rhythm with its flashes. She darts out into the room and over to the source of the beeping, eager to quiet it. It hasn’t drawn a predatory audience yet, but it could. She quickly scans the panels, looking for what she hopes is a simple “Shut the Hell Up” button, but instead her eye falls upon a box of text on a smaller screen below the flashing light. East Motion Sensor Trigger the small, blinking words read, and underneath it a touch-screen option: “Acknowledge.” Pretty simple after all. Tasha’s finger acknowledges the motion sensor trigger, and the flashing and beeping halt abruptly. Well, there’s that, she thinks, and moves back toward the front office. She has almost reached the doorway when something on one of the many shining security screens catches her eye. Movement.

  She crosses quickly back to the rows of monitors and stares numbly at the glaring screens. Minkers: at least a dozen of them wandering between the main office and the Cat House. Some dawdle by the Visitors’ Center, the first building she’d seen when she arrived at the zoo yesterday. Others drift loosely across the area like ants swarming a picnic. On some of the cameras Tasha can see their mouths moving. In another world, someone watching the screen might believe that they’re witnessing a pack of drunks who had come to hassle the flamingos. But Tasha knows without hearing them that the sound their mouths are making is nothing so human as drunken babble. They are short clipped syllables, more Schnauzer than Chicagoan. Her guts knotting, Tasha reaches for her knife.

  She doesn’t have it.

  Or the backpack. Everything important in her life at this moment is in the Cat House. She wants to vomit but doesn’t want to get it on her shoes and she has no time for regurgitated SpaghettiOs: the crowds of Minkers are moving through the zoo, closer to the office, closer to the Cat House, closer to her.

  She flies to the front of the office, staying low. She peers over the edge of the counter with all the microphones. She can’t see the Visitors’ Center from this angle, but she can easily see the Cat House and the crowd gathering outside it. She curses under her breath and curses, from a distance, the Prada backpack and all its precious contents.

  The pack of Minkers hasn’t shown any interest in the office building where she huddles yet, and for that she’s thankful, but their focus on the Cat House concerns her. Where did they come from? Did they follow her scent? Do they even use their noses in that way? She remembers reading about Harriet Tubman, her treks through creek-beds to throw off the hounds on her trail. The storm last night should have washed away her scent. But here they are. Maybe it was chance. She can tell by the khaki uniforms of some that they were zoo employees before the morning of the Change. Now they gather with three or four high school girls in the plaid skirts of prestigious St. Xavier’s. She can also see a few men in suits, a woman in a stylish navy-blue dress. Tasha struggles to catch a glimpse of the shoes. She’s always had trouble matching shoes to navy blue.

  Tasha looks around the office for something that might be used as a weapon if one of the barkers happens to wander over. She thinks she’s relatively safe in the office as long as her presence is undetected, but even if they don’t breach it…she’s stuck. Her food, her backpack, Leona’s letters, her can opener—all in the Cat House. Her knife. She can’t leave the zoo without the Wusthof.

  Nothing in the office looks like it would serve well as a tool of Chip-destruction. There is a stapler on the desk behind her, which would be amusing but wouldn’t actually work. What else? Paperclips. Those won’t do.

  Checking to make sure the door is still locked, Tasha crabwalks back to the Control Room with its dozens of illuminated screens. She looks frantically at them, trying to find the one that shows the building she’s in. She finds it in the third row, and breathes a miniature sigh of relief to see that the Minkers haven’t moved around behind the office, or multiplied their numbers. There are, however, still quite a few she will have to deal with. She counts thirteen.

  “Fuck,” she rasps.

  Another scan of the control room again shows nothing that might be used as a weapon. The illuminated screens hum lightly. She curses again and almost turns away when one screen catches her eye.

  “Cat House,” she says aloud.

  She steps closer and examines the screen marked Cat House. On it is a layout of the hall she slept in the night before, the digital rectangles running along the edges clearly marked “Ocelot,” “Jaguar,” “Caracal.” Tasha looks more closely at the screen and the menu at the bottom: “Change House,” “Temperature Control,” “Assistance,” “Emergency Menu.” She touches her finger to “Change House.”

  The screen now displays a layout of the entire zoo, various rectangles labeled with the different creatures: “Bird House,” “Reptile House,” and others. The elephants have a crib to themselves, she sees, with a yard attached. High rollers. When she presses the Elephant House rectangle, she’s shown the elephants themselves, viewed through the cameras installed in their building. The elephants lounge in the yard, except one who stands alo
ne inside, swinging his trunk back and forth. Agoraphobic, perhaps.

  She switches to the Primate House, which also shows her the inside of the building and its inhabitants. Some of them appear to be dead. On the Primate House screen, Tasha looks again at the menu at the bottom, and “Emergency Menu” catches her eye. This is an emergency, after all: there are carnivorous, sadistic former-people wandering the zoo grounds. Maybe the menu will tell her where to find a fire axe or something.

  Tasha presses her finger against Emergency Menu.

  The list that pops up has a number of options. One is Sprinkler System. Wrong kind of emergency. One is Seal, which Tasha assumes will lock all the doors to the Primate House. Another option says Release. This she presses. Another menu pops up: “Release 1-6,” “Release 7-12,” “Release 13-18.” Tasha presses the first option.

  Nothing happens. At least nothing loud or flashing or jarring or emergency-appropriate. But Tasha sees something on one of the other monitors. A flash of activity on one of the screens. What was it? Had the Minkers wandered over to admire the baboons, or had they begun to swarm the office? She checks the screens. She doesn’t have company. She exits the Emergency Menu, returning to the view inside the Primate House, and jumps.

  The monkeys are loose.

  Not all of them; only a few. They are creeping out onto the floor of the large hall like cautious cavemen, looking about them, picking at each other as they’re joined by their brothers. Tasha laughs, shocked. She’s freed the monkeys. And why not?

  Again she opens the emergency menu. This time she presses Release 7-12, then returns quickly to the camera view. More freed monkeys wander out of their tall prisons. She’s amazed by how easy it is, this emancipating. A simple touch of the screen and monkeys are out of their cages, loose in the halls of the House. Gorillas too. She sees them lumbering like sumo wrestlers out of their pens, supporting themselves on fists like hams. She opens the Emergency Menu once more and opens the final six cages with Release 13-18. On the camera she sees the caution first exhibited by the primates melting with their fantastic realization of freedom. They beckon to their shyer brethren, inviting them past the pens. The dead remain where they are, and if the living are starving, they forget their condition long enough to bask in liberty.