Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  I will be.

  Can I still live with you when I’m a grown-up?

  Hell, no, Paul whispered as he passed behind the sofa, breath warm against her ear, but she said, Of course.

  Because I want to be around you always, Lincoln said then, and his small hand was on her arm, in the crease where bicep met forearm.

  He won’t want that, of course. But it is a nice thought.

  “Mommy, let me tell you something,” he says now, and the Predator—the zombie—seems to be digging in the dirt for something. “Not all zombies are bad.”

  “No?”

  “No. There are some zombies called policeman zombies, and their job is to catch bad zombies and put them in a big hole. That is what zombies use for jails.”

  “Shhhh,” she says, belatedly. “A little quieter.”

  He keeps going, and she nods as she, for the thousandth—millionth—time, scans the trees and the darkness around them. Lincoln is surely maneuvering his figures more by feel than by sight, although there is a sliver of a moon and a light from the patio behind them puts out a faint glow. She can see the curves of her son’s head and the silhouettes of the trees and the rooftops of the buildings. Everything around her has a shape, barely. But she would have to walk carefully if she were trying to climb out of their enclosure—she cannot make out the holes or loose rocks that might be under every footstep.

  What would the pathways of the zoo be like? Are the strings of light still glowing? Are there more light poles, beaconing the way? If there are lights, of course, she would have to avoid them. If she were going anywhere.

  If they were going anywhere.

  It is not supposed to be like this. She has read about enough shootings—she feels confident she knows how they work. The shooter comes in and sprays everything with bullets and people fall to the ground, dead or wounded or pretending, and it is hellish, but it is also over within minutes, and then the police come and either the shooter kills himself or the police kill him. It is a terrible pattern. But it is a pattern. There is a predictability to it, and this has always struck her as the most terrible part. The killings are common enough to have a set sequence of rolling ticker headlines and then grim snapshots of the shooters and smiling vacation snapshots of the victims and Facebook quotations and connect-the-dots for how-they-got-the-guns and released statements from the victims’ families. She wants the predictability now. She wants the pattern.

  This—this nothingness and silence—dead bodies still out there on the concrete, an hour later, this does not happen.

  She needs to reevaluate. Should they wait here? Hide no matter how long it takes? It is not the only option.

  She knows there are boundaries around the perimeter of the zoo—“perimeter,” that’s a military kind of word—but she can’t bring up a picture of what the outer walls look like. Surely she has seen them in all the hours she’s spent here—surely she has walked within inches of them. What are they made of—chain link? Brick? How high are they, and is there barbed wire?

  She thinks that if she were sitting here alone, she would be making a plan involving those outer walls.

  Paul hates flying. He always wants to hold her hand as they are taking off. He tries to estimate the number of planes taking off from their particular airport, and then he multiplies that number by how many airports there are in the entire country, and he makes up the figures and puts them together and computes some imaginary odds of the plane crashing. The math comforts him.

  She wonders about the square footage of the zoo. She and Lincoln are occupying about three square feet of it now. And if the zoo is one square mile and a mile is 5,200 feet, something like that—do you square that number? Over 25,000 square feet, maybe, and if she carried Lincoln out of here, they would be occupying only a couple of square feet at a time, so the chances are one in 12,000 that the gunmen would be in the same space.

  She knows her math cannot be anything close to right.

  “I used to have two feet,” says Lincoln, in what she thinks is a zombie voice. “No one needs two, though. You only need one.”

  Something is moving through the leaves and pine straw. She has a moment of panic—so many moments of panic, all strung together. But this time the fear fades quickly. Whatever it is, the thing is small. A bird or a lizard, maybe.

  When she was small, she loved the nighttime. It was so wide open, and her mother’s house was so cramped, all the dark corners full of things she did not want to think about. But the darkness outside was different. She would go out on the small square of concrete that served as a patio, feet bare, and she would sit on the splintery lawn chair—her mother had never bothered replacing the cushion when it molded—and she would try to pick out the sounds. Frogs and crickets and sometimes a dog barking, and the sound of passing cars and the chains on the swing set clinking in the wind, and she was amazed, always, by the noises, once she bothered to notice them.

  It is the same here. There is that same layer upon layer of sound. Only now it does not fill her with any sense of wonder. It leaves her struggling to breathe.

  She hears the baby crying again.

  6:28 p.m.

  The wind has picked up, and there is a new sound—something like marbles falling on the kitchen floor. An oak tree nearby, Joan guesses. Acorns bouncing off concrete. They sound, for a moment, like many small feet running.

  There is something hard under her hip, and she pulls out a rock nearly as big as her fist, which she thinks might be a chunk of concrete. She tosses it a few inches away with a jerk of her wrist just as her phone flashes inside her purse.

  You there? Paul is asking.

  She wants her husband here next to her. Badly. She does not really want that, of course—she would never want him to be in danger—but she thinks of the hard curves of his body pressed tight against her after they turn off the lights, molded S-shaped to each other, thighs to thighs and belly to back, her belly button against his spine.

  She does not want to have to answer him. She does not want to put anything into words.

  She is given a reprieve: a news alert flashes on her screen. She feels a flush of anticipation, relieved that finally the phone has come up with actual answers. Something has happened—the police are coming. The shooters are dead. And even as the possibilities churn, she is pulling out the phone and reading the words, and then she is reading them again, over and over, because they do not make sense.

  Dozens killed in flash flooding in Texas, the phone reads.

  It is inconceivable to her that people are dying somewhere other than here. It is inconceivable that there is any place other than here. She is still staring at the words even as she swipes the news alert away. She glances at Lincoln, who is sitting, only sitting, the Predator clutched limply in his hand.

  She needs to answer Paul.

  Waiting, she types, wondering if I should do something different.

  There is no pause for thought before his words materialize—no uncertainty at all in their straight lines.

  STAY THERE.

  She wonders if he thinks the capital letters will persuade her.

  You know that—she starts, but then her fingers stop and she watches them, arched in the light, and she thinks the pose is like a hula dancer’s, and she is sharply aware that she is admiring her own fingers.

  One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

  She listens.

  Something has made her stop. She knows that there is something for a short while before she knows that the something was a sound.

  Then she hears it again. It is a sound that she’s made herself on these winding concrete paths—the slide of a shoe on loose bits of gravel. A scrape and a scuff. Possibly a whisper. It is coming from the path behind the chain-link fence, from the vast shadowy area behind their enclosure.

  She turns the phone off quickly and pulls Lincoln to her
. She feels like she has always been reaching for him, grabbing him up, tightening her arms, nervous of his distance—not too far not too loud not too fast—except for the times, of course, when he is grabbing at her, pulling her to him, nervous of her distance.

  Mama, up pease, he used to say, back when he had not mastered his “l’s.”

  Up pease. Up pease. Up pease.

  She scans the darkness—it is total now—and she can see nothing past their pen. She knows the bamboo is out there and the train tracks and the concrete pathways, and she hopes maybe the woman with the baby is out there again or someone else looking for a hiding place, and this time, she tells God, this time she will call to them and help them and share her hiding place, if only that is what the noise is.

  She cannot see. But she can hear.

  Whispers now, unmistakable. Men’s whispers, like a radio station barely coming through.

  They have not barricaded themselves in a room.

  “Quiet,” she says to Lincoln, even though he is not making any sound. “Bad men.”

  “Wh—?” he starts, but she shushes him, and he listens to her, and she says a quick prayer of thanks and even as she says it, she wonders, again, if God is punishing her for thinking her child is more important than the other woman’s child. She would do it again in a heartbeat, cannot really regret it even with the guilt weighing on her like wet wool, and she wonders, sometimes, about her ideas of God.

  They are coming closer, she thinks, almost surely on the asphalt path that parallels the train track. She can hear footsteps, just a slide and crackle every now and then.

  The shadows are uniform, unmoving.

  She does not think that she and Lincoln are visible. She pictures the light attached to the eaves overhanging the deck, and she knows the edge of the pen is illuminated, but the rocky area where they are hiding seems almost black to her. She wiggles her fingers and can only barely make out the movement.

  The phone, though. If they saw the light of the phone.

  “Here,” says a voice, quietly, closer than she would have expected, and it is the most terrifying word she has ever heard.

  “There?” says the other voice.

  “No. Over there.”

  She still cannot see them. But it sounds like they are within a few feet of the fence—maybe twenty feet away? Thirty? Close enough that she can make out every word they are saying, although she has to strain to hear. They are standing still, she thinks, waiting.

  Have they seen her? Are they looking at her right now, aiming?

  A moth skims across her cheek, wings heavy. A branch creaks overhead. Her hair blows into her mouth, and she does not spit it out.

  “I don’t see anything,” says one of them.

  “Shhh.”

  She looks down toward the phone she has stuck under her thigh, even though she cannot see it in the dark. She is certain that they saw the light from the screen, and she is equally certain that they will keep looking until they find it. It is entirely her fault. She understood the risk, and she did not weigh it heavily enough.

  The price of her mistake is far too high.

  “Mommy,” says Lincoln right in her ear, and she does not know whether he is as loud as she thinks he is.

  Sometimes they make air kisses at each other’s ears, as loud as they can. Lincoln says, I’ll make a mwah in your ear, and he smacks his lips right at the shell of her ear, and there is the sweet, painful percussion of his kiss, and his soft breath, just like now, the damp warmth of his exhale, how it pours out of him and soaks into her skin even as it drifts into the air, gone.

  “Disappear,” she whispers, so softly that she does not know if he can hear her, but he must because he drops his head to her shoulder.

  She has somehow risen to her knees, she realizes, one foot already braced against the ground, ready to spring up and run. She wants to run. But she can’t see, and she does not know, even if she could see, where she would go. They would hear her moving. She would have to climb over the railing, carrying him wrapped around her, and the railing is well lit.

  She has to stay still.

  She is not sure she can manage it. She is not sure she can make herself let them come to her.

  “You sure?” says a voice.

  She assumes they are the same two men who walked through the primate house, but she is not positive. She can no longer distinguish between their voices. They are both hushed.

  “Someone is here,” says another voice.

  “Hiding, huh?”

  The other voice does not answer. For a while there is only wind and leaves and something far away hooting. She does not move other than to run a hand over Lincoln’s head, over and over.

  There is a jingling sound, a movement at the fence. Maybe a shoe or an arm propped on the chain links or maybe someone losing his footing. She thinks she can make out the shapes of heads and shoulders, as flat and featureless as paper dolls in the dark.

  “You were lost but now you’re found,” one says in a singsong voice, although he is not quite singing. He is chanting, off-key, voice rising and dipping. “You were run wild / thrown out, exiled, / but now you’re mine.”

  He keeps going. Louder. She imagines he is smiling, and she half expects him to start clapping out a rhythm.

  “You led the way but you knew I’d follow / Your neck was bare / but dip your head / I’ve got your collar.”

  Now the voice is carrying enough that she can hear it just fine. She thinks it is the quiet one from earlier. His voice is the thinner, higher-pitched one. For someone who claimed to be such an expert on hunting, he doesn’t seem to be concerned about being stealthy anymore.

  Or maybe he is simply that confident.

  “I’ve got your collar,” he echoes again, and he is running his hand—or, no, something metal—along the fence, making an almost musical sound.

  She tries to calm her breathing—she can hear herself almost panting. Shivers coming up from her lungs.

  “I had one squab tell me that all she wanted was peace,” says one of them in that fake drawl they were doing earlier, and at least the chanting has stopped. They are talking loudly enough now that she knows they are not overly oblivious or overly confident—or at least they are not only those things. They want whoever is out here to hear them.

  The grating noise of the fence still. Steady and metallic. An acorn falls with a quiet crack.

  “And what did you do?” says the other.

  “What did I do, honey pie?” The drawl. “I gave her lots of pieces. Her arms and legs and a finger or two.”

  Both of them laugh, and there is something about the comfortable, agreed-upon kind of laughter—an old joke—that makes her realize: they are quoting some show.

  She doesn’t recognize the words, but she is sure that she’s right. She had an old boyfriend who could repeat paragraphs of dialogue from Jaws, and back when her brother still lived with her—she can barely remember it, a time when she was not alone with her mother—he worked Star Wars lines into normal conversation, and it sounded just like this. Her boyfriend and her brother would ramble on in different languages, words thrown together, all sorts of meaning in them that she was missing—she could hear the same giddy, worshipful current in their voices that she can hear from these chanting men.

  So eleven hundred men went into the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest.

  These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

  The fence is rattling like the men are grabbing hold and rocking it. There is no chance they can budge it, of course—the only point of it must be to make noise.

  They have moved across the pathway, closer to the bamboo. She can make out the movement, a change of pattern in the dark. They shake that fence, too.

  “I spy with my little eye,” one calls out.

  B
ut they do not see anything. She knows that now. They are playing games. Hoping to flush out their prey, like her father would use his Labrador to flush out doves back when her father was still around, and the doves would fly up and he would shoot and the dog would bring one back and if it was not dead her father would pinch off its head and toss it to the ground because he said it was less painful for the dove that way but, still, there would be blood dripping from the neck hole and a little beaked head lying in the grass. He took her hunting only once that she can remember.

  “What do you spy?” says one man in his normal voice.

  “Something dark,” says the other.

  They laugh again. She wonders if they have been drinking.

  Lincoln makes a sound against her neck that sounds like Muddles when you step on his paw.

  The fear in her cools and hardens as the men laugh, and she is thrilled to realize that she is furious. These stupid men are waving guns and singing nursery rhymes at her. Making her son whimper in her arms. She remembers being in a haunted house back during college, and there was a large man in front of her—way over six feet tall, with a football player’s build—so close to her that she kept running into his back when he would stop suddenly. She had a date with her, but the large man made a better shield. And in the middle of a strobe light a masked zombie jumped out with a bladeless chainsaw not three inches from her face, eye to eye, and it made her scream embarrassingly loud, and he must have scared the large man, too, because the guy—in a flash of white light—punched the zombie in his face, and then instead of a zombie there was a teenager on the ground, pulling his mask off, blood running out of his mouth, moaning, and she did not feel sorry for that teenager at all and in fact was very pleased with the football player.

  They are teenagers, she thinks, these men with guns. They are not men or, at most, barely men. And they are idiots. She will not have her son killed by stupid, stupid teenagers singing songs.

  If they want to play pretend, she has watched movies herself, and, really, that is what this feels like anyway. And if she is only a character, it is easier to act. She lets loose of Lincoln with one arm—her other hand still in his tangled curls—and feels in the weeds for the concrete lump she set aside earlier. Almost immediately her fingers close around it. Sharp-edged and substantial, it fits nicely in her hand, as comfortable as a baseball. She tucks it against her thigh and splays her fingers along the ground again, sweeping circles in the dirt. Another rock, bigger than the first one: her hand cannot close around it entirely.