Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  She does not know. Which way? What next? What is she even looking for? Her feet keep their rhythm, and she curls her toes more tightly, and she wishes this way were not uphill.

  She cannot do this for much longer.

  Hide. They have to hide.

  That must be the first thing, and then they can call the police or Paul or both. She thinks she should call the police—just to let them know that she and Lincoln are trapped in here? Surely they need to know who is still inside the zoo? She shifts him from her right hip to her left and readjusts her hold on him.

  “Mommy!” he says, still wanting some kind of answer. Always wanting an answer.

  Finally they have crested the hill, and the walls of perfectly wildly landscaped plants are past them, and she is staring at the African elephant exhibit, all sandy hills and grassland and flowing creek, and they must either turn left or right. Right would take them to the giraffes and lions and tigers; left would curve around to the rhinos and wild dogs and monkeys.

  “Mommy!”

  She kisses his head and turns left.

  “I hit my tooth on your shoulder,” he says.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  She is glad now that she did not go to the woods and the familiar narrow paths of the dinosaur pit, because even with all the tall trees around, they would not have found much to hide behind, and the few good spots—the log cabin and the butterfly house, maybe—would have been far too obvious. Of course, there would have been room to run and maneuver if they’d been spotted, but how much can she really maneuver with Lincoln attached to her? No, they do not need space to run. If someone spots them, running will get them nowhere.

  This strikes her as an important thought. Proof that her brain is pushing through the panic.

  Yes. They will get nowhere running. They need to hide so well that they cannot be seen, not even if someone walks right past them. She needs a rabbit hole. A bunker. A secret passage.

  He has stopped saying her name. Something of her fear must have communicated itself to him, and she is glad as long as it is the right amount of fear—enough to turn him docile but not terrified. She can’t really know, but she will find out once they are safe.

  The elephant exhibit stretches out forever, and as she skirts the railings of it, she hears music playing, and at first it is unintelligible, only a note here and there, but soon she can make out the Ghostbusters theme song. The music is cheerful and far too loud by the time she passes the Coke machines that Lincoln often pretends are the Bat computer.

  The Joker is up to his old tricks! To the Batmobile! Mommy, do you think there’s a Bat carwash, because the Batmobile gets dirty but it’s a convertible, so could they wash it? Her ankle turns slightly, but she does not slow down. There is an actual elephant, sleepy-looking, surprisingly close to the railing on their right, and she is glad for the substantial shape of it. She half sees the gentle ticktock of its trunk, registers the rhythm of it, but she is turning in the other direction, to her left, scanning the broad building only a few yards away. The Savannah Snack Bar. They’ve eaten raisins under its giant thatched roof, ceiling fan blowing on them in the summer air, but they have never sat inside the actual restaurant. She likes to stay outside, watch the elephants, pretend they are in Africa—she will take him there someday, she’s always thought—she likes to think of all the places she will show him. Did you really ride an elephant in Thailand, Mommy? Yes, that was before you were born. She eyes the bathrooms as she passes them, slowing, but she thinks of doors being kicked in and speeds up again. The restaurant itself, now that might be safer—surely the doors have locks, and there would be more rooms inside, offices and storerooms with better locks, hiding places and closets, maybe chairs or tables or heavy boxes you could pile against a door. The thought is quick and tempting, and she darts under the shade of the thatched roof and shoves on the glass doors, but they don’t budge, and everything is dark inside.

  OPEN, says the sign.

  WITCH’S BREW SLUSHY, says another sign, purple and pink. SPOOK-A-LICIOUS!

  Joan spins and begins running again, and Lincoln’s arms are tight around her neck, which helps take a little of his weight off her arms, but she is spent and off-balance, and she nearly runs into a concrete column.

  There is a speaker above her head, she notices. The music is blaring from it. An invisible man / Sleeping in your bed / Who you gonna call? / Ghostbusters.

  She backs away from the pavilion, away from the speakers, back into the dimming sunlight. The elephant and its graceful trunk are gone and how can anything that big disappear and she whispers It’s okay into Lincoln’s ear, over and over, and she speeds up again even though she is aimless. This is nothing like the steady rhythm of her regular runs around neighborhood streets. She is ill-prepared. She thinks of her big brother, back during his army training, when he was obsessed with something called rucking: strapping a thirty-pound bag to himself and running many miles with it. She hardly knew him by that time, because he had moved to Ohio with her father, had escaped long before she did, and she only saw him for two weeks in the summers and sometimes holidays. He was a grown man visiting her, and he slid his rucksack on her—that was, what, seven years before she ran her first marathon—and she tried to impress him but her back was wet with sweat and she was panting after two blocks. She is panting now, biceps burning, Lincoln’s weight listing her to the side, and she’d be so much better off if she’d been rucking all these years.

  How long has she been running? Three minutes? Four? No time. Forever.

  Behind the eighties synthesizers in the music, she can still hear the sirens. Louder now.

  She is nearly at the rhino exhibit. She sees two teenagers, a boy and a girl, running toward her, running as if they know something is wrong, not as if they are only trying to make it to the gate by closing time. She thought she wanted to see people, but now she finds she does not. People only complicate things. They slow down when they see her—the boy grabs at his sunglasses, which are falling from his face—and they both talk at once, asking something, but Joan only steps around them, turning sideways as she moves.

  The girl’s skirt is orange with a fringe of black lace, so short and tight it barely covers her underwear and what kind of mother does this girl have at home and maybe actually a very good mother who has taught her she is beautiful even in a skirt like a sausage casing.

  “Don’t go toward the exit,” Joan says, barely slowing. “A man is shooting people.”

  “Shooting?” says the girl.

  The boy lets loose more words, too many of them, lost in the air.

  “He’ll kill you if he sees you,” Joan calls over her shoulder, but she is long past them. “Go hide somewhere until the police come.”

  She does not look back. The only thing that matters is Lincoln. He cannot wind up bleeding on concrete.

  It’s good that the restaurant was locked. That would have been stupid. She and Lincoln might have been well hidden there, but the man would check the buildings, wouldn’t he? Indoor places would be his first targets. Kicking in doors and smashing windows and knocking things down—it must satisfy him, breaking things—and there is not much to shatter in the open air, not like furniture and doors and bones, so solid.

  She can hear her breathing and her footsteps, as soft as she can make them, but she can also hear the wind and the background noise of traffic not so far away and the leaves trembling on branches—all the background noise that she never bothers to hear. She needs this background noise, because Lincoln will never be perfectly quiet. He is a good boy, but he cannot be expected to stay completely silent, and what if a single whisper slaughters them?

  Out in the open.

  But hidden. Someplace no one would look.

  She glances behind her at the open space of elephant habitat, which has plenty of rocks and entire walls of boulders, but there is a steep drop—not
jumpable—down to ground level. And there are elephants, and the whole idea is moronic, but there is a spark there—something—the shooters would not check exhibits, surely?

  She has thought this in no more than ten footsteps, so quickly and so slowly—if she turned around, she would likely still see the teenagers—and all this thinking is getting her nowhere. The lion roars, from a distance, and it is not a shocking sound, because they feed the animals right before closing, and the lion is always vocal, anticipating. It roars again, comforting almost. She is surrounded by wild things in boxes. She feels a thrum of solidarity.

  A monkey chatters, high-pitched and aggressive, and she wonders whether maybe the keepers never got to the evening feedings. Maybe they were interrupted.

  It comes to her then. The porcupine.

  The buildings should all be locked, but maybe not? Maybe that last set of keys never made it up this way?

  She prays as she has not in a very long time while she spins toward the primate building. She passes the African-themed playground on her left—drums and masks and seesaw and the statue of the dung beetle—and then she darts under the spider monkeys and their complicated ropes course, where they are lolling about, oblivious, swinging paw-to-tail, and then she is at the entrance to the Primate Zone, shoving the double doors, which give way immediately. She sprints deeper into the cool, dark halls of the building, passing lemurs with their black-and-white-striped tails, and then she is around a curve, everything shadowed, with tree trunks growing through the floor. As with most of the scenery here, she does not know whether the trees are real or manufactured, but when she puts out one hand to steady herself, the bark feels real.

  “A man was shooting people?” asks Lincoln against her collarbone.

  “Yes.”

  “Is he chasing us?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Then why are we running?”

  She can see natural light in the exhibits, sunlight trapped inside the glass, and she can’t help but notice that the animals have boulders and caves to hide in, caves that might even lead into unseen rooms if you could only get through the glass barriers. But she cannot pass through walls—the Invisible Woman? One of the X-Men?—so she keeps jogging through the halls, brushing against smooth glass and cinder block walls that are rough and tidy.

  There will be a point, she knows, when her muscles stop working. When her arms loosen and fall no matter how she fights them. For now, there is only a constant burn—pulsing—from her shoulders to her wrists, from her hips to her ankles.

  “Mommy?”

  “We’re nearly there,” she says, but the words come out barely formed.

  There are monkeys and more monkeys, all unconcerned.

  Then she sees a glass door, and she rams it with her shoulder and they are outside again, cool air blowing. They’re facing a weathered railing that comes up to her chest. Beyond it, there is a small fenced-in wilderness of pine trees and tall grass. She’s standing on the wooden planks of a deck—a patio between the exhibit halls. To her left is another glass door that would lead to baboons and orangutans and other glassed-in habitats and open hallways that are no good to her. Here the sign on the brick wall explains the habits of the porcupine, although there is no explanation for why a porcupine was put in the Primate Zone. Months ago a zookeeper with a notebook in her hand admitted—quietly, so Lincoln wouldn’t hear—that the porcupine had died. Joan and Lincoln have been checking periodically for a new specimen. She told him the truth, since it wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen dead birds and squirrels and squished roaches and why act like nothing ever dies, and he has been hoping for a baby porcupine. But the pen has stayed empty.

  She hopes it has stayed empty.

  She steps closer to the railing, scanning the low-growing trees and hollowed-out logs. The bare patches of dirt and gravel overwhelm the few tufts of wild grass. The whole thing is unkempt and neglected. The middle section of the pen is what she’s remembered—boulders three or four feet high. The wall of rock stretches maybe a dozen feet across, curving around so there is no clear view of whatever might be behind it. A chain-link fence half covered in vines seals in the space. The fence is easily fifteen feet tall, with the top panel angled steeply, prohibitively inward—did they really have any sort of trouble with climbing porcupines?—and pine trees tower along the edges.

  It is hidden back here, deep in the twists and turns of the primate house. It does not look fit for humans, and that is what strikes her as perfect about it.

  She lowers Lincoln onto the railing and gasps as she surrenders his weight. The railing will be easy enough to climb over, and there is a short ledge on the other side that’s nearly as long as her feet. She can get her footing there and then lift Lincoln, and even if something goes wrong, the drop to the ground is no more than a couple of feet, and he wouldn’t get hurt, but he might start crying and the noise would be—no, there is no danger of him falling. She can keep a hand on him the entire time.

  “This is what we’re going to do,” she says. “I’m going to sit you right here while I climb over—”

  He shakes his head and grabs tightly above her elbows.

  “Mommy, we can’t go in with the animals!”

  “There aren’t any, remember?” she says, trying to dislodge his fingers. “This is the porcupine’s home. And there’s no new porcupine yet.”

  “Fences are to keep the animals in and the people out,” he says.

  She has never been so sorry that he always follows the rules.

  “The rules are different today,” she says. “There are emergency rules now. The rules are that we hide and do not let the man with the gun find us.”

  Lincoln relaxes his hold, peers behind him, and clutches at her again.

  “I’ll fall,” he says. “It’s too high.”

  “Would I let you fall?”

  “No,” he says, pressing closer to her. “Mommy.”

  “I’ll have my hands around you. I’m just going to climb over now—”

  “Mommy,” he whimpers.

  “Shhhhh. I’ve got you.”

  She boosts herself and straddles the railing, keeping her hands on either side of his body so that her arms are still bracketing him. It is awkward, but she swings herself the rest of the way over, the balls of her feet fairly stable on the ledge.

  He has clasped a hand lightly on each of her wrists. She can hear him breathing, near tears. Because of a man shooting people or because of this complete break from the normal boundaries of things? She has no idea.

  “Mommy.”

  “I’ve got you,” Joan says, and she loops an arm around him, pulling him against her chest with the crook of her elbow. His heels thud against the iron mesh.

  “I’m going to lift you down,” she tells him, “and I want you to put your feet on this little step here and hold on to the metal part with your hands. Then I’m going to hop on the ground and scoop you up.”

  She lifts him even as she is still speaking, not giving him a chance to think more about it, because he does not usually get braver when he considers things, and she can have this over in two seconds. She holds tight to the railing with one hand and slides him back, bending her waist and holding herself far from the railing to make room for him, and there is one moment where he is in midair, anchored only by her arm and elbow, and she feels his panic, but then she has his feet on the same ledge she is standing on, his tennis shoes tucked between her own leather sandals. She wraps his fingers tightly around the mesh.

  “Hold tight,” she says.

  She pushes off, landing soft and easy in the dirt beneath them, the grass high enough to tickle her wrists. She pulls him down to her, turning him so that his arms wrap around her neck. His legs clasp her hips, and she is moving again, watching her footing as much as she can with him obscuring her view—she remembers how a pregnant belly made uneven ground
an unseen obstacle course—and finally they are behind the tall rocks she had found so tempting.

  She lowers herself, sinking down so that her back is against the rock—hard and cold—and her legs are splayed on the ground. He is still curled around her.

  5:42 p.m.

  Lincoln has not loosened his hold on her, so she pulls her phone from her purse with one hand and then holds it in front of her, just past the curve of his skull, her palm brushing his tangled curls, which are always matted in the back, like he has been rubbing syrup into his scalp. She swipes her thumb across the screen, and then she freezes, still not sure whether to call the police or Paul—the police are here already, surely, and maybe they would have questions for her. But it is Paul’s voice that she needs to hear.

  And then she sees a text from Paul already. She stares at his black-and-gray message, the squared-off bubble of it so familiar.

  You didn’t go to the zoo this afternoon, did you? let me know asap.

  He has no idea where they’ve gone, of course. She usually doesn’t know their destination until Lincoln declares his choice for the afternoon as she buckles him into his car seat. Paul can only be asking because he knows something.

  She types back, and she has a thought of calling him instead, but her thumbs have automatically begun responding. It is habit.

  Yes. At zoo. Do you know what’s happening? Hiding in porcupine exhibit right now.

  There is no way he will know where the porcupine exhibit is. He does not visit the zoo nearly as often as she does. She adds:

  In the Primate Zone.

  She pushes Send, then immediately begins a second message.

  Call police. Saw bodies at the entrance. Man with gun.

  Again she pushes Send—there’s something wrong with the order of her messages—they are jumbled up—but she cannot stop her thumbs from typing. She likes watching them move, likes seeing the letters string themselves together into sentences, likes the light of the screen, and as long as she is typing there is nothing but blue shapes filled with words, stacked one on top of the other.