Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  She faced the mirror again, arms akimbo, putting on a haughty little slouch. She looked sharp, she knew, about as sharp as she ever got. Her high cheekbones, her brunette sleekness, her nearly black-brown eyes—they all gave her a mink-like appearance, hard and gorgeous, washed for years by the fast icy rivers of Mount Bitch.

  It’s still good, this, she thought. In the kit, Flōter or not, she was It. She felt safe from relapse, at least for a while.

  “You need more uniforms,” she said to the mirror. She already owned two dozen identical shirts, but she could never have too many. “And fuck what anyone else says,” she whispered.

  Lastly, she went back to her dresser and pulled out the top drawer. Her neuralzinger rested on a neat stack of black silk panties. In Texas, she’d had a single triangular rhinestone jewelered onto the stock, just on one side. It gleamed with icy sadism. She flipped open the chamber. Loaded with living gangliatoxic nets—the most dangerous rounds allowed by nonfirearm specialists in Britain. She slipped the gun into her trouser pocket.

  jackals in the headlamps

  WHEN ASTRID SCUTTLED BACK TO THE TAXIGLIDER, the path-manager said, through the video panel on a bulletproof clear divider, “No charge, free ride, all the way.” The path-manager was smiling, craning his head around at Astrid, then looking back at something on his monitors, moving his long fingers over holo-controls with a flurrying grace. He seemed nervous, with something that went beyond even the stress of his Indigent job. Astrid hadn’t looked at him very closely before but now took him in. He wore a navy down puffy vest over an old wool jumper with ragged cuffs. His eyes were almond-shaped and close together, and he had thick eyebrows and bushy hair.

  “I need to go fast,” said Astrid.

  She wanted to make small talk with the path-manager, but she thought this would make the man more tense. He faded from the video screen. Unlike some officers, Parkies possessed no policing powers outside the parks, but Indigents always saw the law as an extension of the hated Red Watch. Astrid wished she could explain this, perhaps put the man at ease. But she felt uneasy. As a woman officer, she’d had her share of being called a “plonk” or worse by colleagues, and a little part of her didn’t mind feeling the man’s deference.

  “It’s a quiet night,” said Astrid.

  The path-manager faded back on-screen and said, “Yes.” He looked at Astrid more closely, but not impertinently. “Too little business, I think, so far, if you notice,” said the path-manager. “It’s OK to me if it is not too quiet.”

  Astrid said, “Good luck.” She cleared her throat. “With your fares and all.” The cab was speeding somewhat, and Astrid grabbed the safety handle above the window. It was flimsy, cool, nuplastic—a toy door knocker without a door.

  She tried to roll down the window, but it only came down a few inches—broken.

  The cabcab was barreling forward now, bucking Astrid from side to side. It somehow careened around a rough-looking Indigent pushing a cart in the street.

  “Oh!” Astrid said.

  “Sorry!” said the path-manager, blinking back on the screen.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  The driver’s recklessness seemed part of a larger wildness in her life.

  The cabcab shook and its bosonic color-charge engines shrieked as the glider encountered a bit of LST, or low-speed turbulence, a mysterious phenomenon that occurred with gliders in parts of the old City.

  “Right,” Astrid said. “I’m in no absolutely life-or-death rush.” It was her subtlest way of saying “slow down.”

  AT GREAT PORTLAND STREET STATION, Astrid asked the path-manager to turn right and get onto Regent Park’s Outer Circle road. She saw at least two solarcopters quietly warbling in the sky above the zoo area, their spotlights roving irritably. One was indeed a Red Watch frightcopter. Its rotors were made of living black feather-like blades that gave off a distinctive hornet whir. (They retracted in overlapping layers on the ground, where the rarely seen frightcopters could reputedly be driven as easily as gliders.) Its two powerful neural-cannons, spiking off its nose, could turn—and had turned—a crowd of people’s brains to gray soup in a matter of seconds. The other solarcopter was a small autonewsmedia drone. She also saw the towering white dish of an autonewsmedia glider truck Atwell had mentioned. She hadn’t quite believed it could all be possible.

  “Dagenham,”* she said.

  At that moment, two things happened: first, Astrid felt a mild, unexpected easing of second withdrawal. Simply being close to the zoo had done something. Her muscles and tendons were weirdly freer of tightness. She could think again. Even the taloned craves ripping in her gut had softened a bit.

  The other thing was that she understood that lives, possibly even her own, were in peril. She wasn’t sure how or why. Am I going to top meself? she wondered. No—I won’t do that. That the Watch and autonews might arrive at an incident in advance of the police wasn’t in itself all that unusual in 2052, such was the feral alacrity of the WikiNous rumor mill. Unfortunately, because of this, it also wasn’t uncommon for ride-along autonewsmedia producers and camera operators—often not the sharpest blades on the fan—to get injured and worse at incidents along with gawking rubberneckers. Autonews solarcopter drones regularly scanned for photo-anomalies from the skies of London, and they darted instantly to the scene of anything unusual. And if the Watch were on hand, well, anything could happen. The Watch always neuralpiked first and asked questions later.

  “Make us go faster, but careful,” she said. “Please.”

  They drove north for a minute or two until they came upon, to the left, lavish Chester Gate. It was a Victorian shambles of ornate wrought iron painted glossy black and metallic gold. The gate itself was open, as usual, and they drove into the park a few meters, into the two-lane thoroughfare called Chester Road, paved with the characteristic pink asphalt of the park’s interior byways.

  “Right here,” said Astrid.

  “Yes,” said the path-manager. “We’re off the operating grid now, ma’am. You may notice.”

  “I know. It’s OK, right?”

  “It is no problem for you, ma’am.”

  Immediately, on the right, appeared the locked gate to the Broad Walk, through which one could access all the interior of the northern part of the park. Virtually all the gates and locks of Regent’s Park were little more than psychological deterrence, meant not just to keep vagrants and kids out at night, but also to suggest forcefully that something of worth stood beyond reach. The truth was, except for the zoo itself, and the park’s Inner Circle, Regent’s was a perfect sieve.

  Chester Road led to the Inner Circle, which in turn held the rose gardens and the furtive nests of mute swans and Egyptian geese. The Inner Circle was all locked down tight for the night, per usual procedure. It was the Broad Walk Astrid needed to open. Unless in hot pursuit, PC Atwell would have followed procedure and locked it after herself. How the autonews got in was anyone’s guess, but it didn’t surprise Astrid.

  Atwell was supposed to be parked a quarter mile or so up the path, beside the zoo.

  Astrid said, “We’re going in there, but I need to unlock it.”

  She jumped out of the cabcab. The loose turbine-cover noise was much louder outside the glider—it sounded like a bean tin steadily rapped with a spoon. She also heard animals—loads of them—bawling, braying, whooping, and yinnying, and all clearly very upset.

  As soon as Astrid approached the gate, she could see something was very wrong in the zoo, too. Looking north from where she stood, the lights from inside the zoo raged. She heard more animals screaming. She could barely fathom it. It was as though a missile had hit Noah’s Ark.

  “Oh god,” she said.

  Her hands shook as she yanked out her master key and rolled the black fence back. She felt wound up tight, buzzing, like a coil of plutonium. It wasn’t exhilaration, but more a sparkling disquiet, both radiant and distressing. ’Bout time we have a bit of action, she thought. No, don’t w
ish for it, that’s naff. Stay professional.

  The gate was indeed locked, as it turned out. Atwell’s good, Astrid thought. Most veteran men on the constabulary just let a detail like that go these days. And that’s precisely why they’re still Parkies.

  Astrid sprinted back to the cabcab and explained to the path-manager, breathing hard in the backseat, that they needed to proceed up the Broad Walk as fast as safely possible.

  “We possibly have an intruder in the zoo,” Astrid said. “Someone could get hurt in there, feasibly.” There was the faintest sense of a deeper conscientiousness creeping into her mind. “You see, I’ve been off duty, and was called here by my colleague. But it’s all a bit odd, really.”

  The path-manager gave a high, slightly wheezy giggle. “I didn’t know there was a zoo here,” said the path-manager. “Very, very hard to see, if you notice. You hear me before? I said there’s no glider path. I drive on my own, OK?”

  It was rare and often illegal for a cabcab to be switched to manual controls.

  “I know,” said Astrid, trying to stay polite. “Please. Go. You can drive without the glider path, right? Your eyes will adjust. This would be a great benefit to the police.”

  “I’m not good in dark,” said the path-manager. “I try.”

  “Yes,” said Astrid. “Now.”

  The path-manager said, “These animals, they maybe want to play around with you.”

  “Mmm. Maybe.” Astrid chuckled in a rather fake way.

  The cab’s path-manager looked straight ahead. He had begun to slouch into the path-manager’s side door a bit, like he was preparing for a long night, but he’d sat up straight. Up to now he had been working his holo-controls, obviously taking care of other riders on other routes, but he dropped that now.

  The path-manager was speeding, the headlamps gathering great, moving bowls of green park scenery as the glider shot along. The pale patches on plane trees along the Broad Walk shone white, despite the darkness of the park, and became an oscillating flash in Astrid’s periphery. She felt disorientated and dizzy. She hunched forward on the seat, looking out for the signs of Atwell’s Paladin pandaglider.

  “Sorry, friend, please, slow down, please,” said Astrid. She spoke in a stern tone she had not used before. The path-manager slammed on the brakes. Astrid bucked forward. The path-manager gave one of his funny laughs again.

  She said, “Thanks.”

  As they were sitting there, the glider’s small color-charge engines ticking with heat, Astrid spotted the taillamps of the Paladin, just a hundred meters or so in front of them on the walk. If the path-manager hadn’t stopped when he had, they might have rear-ended Atwell.

  “Just a little farther,” said Astrid. “Please, slowly.” The cabcab started gliding forward, and the path-manager banged the brakes again.

  “What the devil’s wrong?” said Astrid.

  “Wawi!” the path-manager said. “Wawi!”

  Astrid looked out, saw the creatures, and nearly hit the ceiling of the cabcab. There were five of them, right in front of the Citroën. They just stood there, stock-still apart from the flicking of the great triangles of tawny fur that was their ears. Their snouts weren’t as pointy as those of the foxes she’d see sometimes at night on her back garden wall in Haggerston, and they stood taller, yet they looked similar. The main difference was an unnervingly adorable, sloe-eyed expression on all their faces that was pure jackal.

  “Wawi!”

  “What’s wawi?” asked Astrid. “What do you mean?”

  The headlamps had made the jackals’ eyes glow a hellish phosphorous yellow-white.

  The path-manager seemed not to hear her and honked the horn several times. The peculiar animals backed off a bit, tails curled under. These wawi would fade back, stop for a moment, then mince forward again, each dog following a sort of ragged orbit around the area in front of the vehicle. Astrid watched, speechless. The pack structure seemed to disperse and re-form in a shaggy cadence, contracting, expanding, contracting, expanding, breathing out England’s air through equatorial lungs.

  “I don’t know about wawi,” said the path-manager. “Don’t know English word.” He sounded irritated. Astrid had got him into something over his head.

  “Please, keep driving,” said Astrid. She could see Atwell’s dim form poised in her glider. Atwell wasn’t visibly reacting to the horn or the headlamps, and this by itself alarmed Astrid.

  She said to the path-manager, “Don’t stop here, if you don’t mind, sir. Pull up a bit, please.”

  The path-manager, sounding far away, said, “I don’t like wawi. They are trouble. That’s problem.” The path-manager eased the cab forward slowly, and the animals roved around it for a moment or two, then passed into the night, busy muscles pulling along their dog skeletons like restless little hate-cages on paws.

  Astrid got out of the cab. She felt very nervous again. She unlocked two fresh £50 Optimatrix holograms for the path-manager, twice the fare—but it didn’t seem much to her, considering. The man frowned upon seeing the floaty red holograms. He pinched them up from Astrid’s hand and muttered a few words in a language Astrid didn’t recognize, much less understand. For a moment, he sniffed at Astrid’s hand (the old counterfeit holograms left a distinctive tomato-leaf scent on the skin), and said, “I like OptiCredits—the holograms cost two pounds in fees, ma’am.” The path-manager pushed the swirling red holograms into his OptiCredit reader. “But I take.” His window popped shut.

  He motored away in reverse, the broken-fan sound audible even after the cabcab’s headlamps vanished into the city.

  oliver cromwell’s got a jumbie, too

  WHEN ASTRID GOT TO PC ATWELL, THE YOUNGER constable hesitated a bit before switching off the pandaglider’s imagiglass windows. This peeved Astrid, a little more than it ought.

  “Come on, Atwell. We haven’t all bloody night, have we?”

  Astrid knew she was being cruel and highhanded, especially since she’d so delayed responding to the initial orange-freq, but there was a prowling anger in her again after the brief respite in the cab. Cigarette smoke and the scent of crushed almonds poured from the pandaglider. Atwell wore a dazed expression that suggested to Astrid she’d had a tough time waiting alone. A sheen of perspiration covered her forehead. Atwell didn’t say anything, and she wouldn’t look at Astrid. She merely held her arms crossed, rubbing them as if cold.

  “Didn’t you see us? Behind you? Smoking, Atwell?”

  “I know,” said Atwell. “I just, I—”

  “I saw your little jackal dogs,” Astrid interjected. “You called them in?”

  “Yes, ma’am. At least half a dozen different units, on their way.” The younger constable leaned forward in her seat for a moment, took a deep, fretful breath.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry, Atwell. I am sorry. I’m . . . well, I’ve been. Things aren’t good. You all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She found herself feeling worried about Atwell, and about her own apparent incapacity to help. She wondered whether one of the new viruses might have Atwell.

  “You’d said there were some people about, too, right?” asked Astrid. “They’re always the most difficult animals, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, some autoreporters—I’ve left them alone, ma’am.” Atwell was finally looking up at her. There remained an odd languor in how she moved, with liquidy arms and a heavy-necked torpor, and she coughed a few times.

  “Are you ill?”

  “Maybe,” said Atwell.

  She wondered whether Atwell herself might be Flōting, though she didn’t have quite the right signs of that.

  Atwell said, “Two souls—inside the autonewsmedia glider-truck.”

  “Good. They’re safe in there.” Astrid stood on tiptoes for a moment and peered across the glider’s roof. Powerful limbs of plane trees, festooned with bunches of white blossoms, bowered the area where she and the constable spoke. Distant city lights twinkled through the branches. “I wo
uld have thought you’ve done just about all you can. All right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I do hope. And there was that strange man I mentioned.” She hacked in a wheezy cough again; she was careful to turn away and cover her mouth. “But I—I had to decide on my own what to do—and I decided not to give chase.”

  “Never,” said Astrid. “That wouldn’t have been too clever, I would’ve thought.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Astrid asked, “What did this . . . this funny chap . . . what did he look like?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark, ma’am. Like a crazy man. A long face. He had ginger hair sticking up all over, like his head was going in twenty different directions at once.”

  “These rough-sleepers,” said Astrid, “and I don’t say this in judgment, but they can be quite, well, tricky, god bless ’em. Trust me—this man’s OK, as much as any Indigent can be these days. And the jackals—the fact is, they seem, PC Atwell, . . . they’re small. We’ll sort this.”

  Atwell, taking a breath, looked as if she wanted to interrupt Astrid, whose patronizing tone had made things awkward.

  “The man,” said Atwell, “he was quite distressed. Really, ma’am, I don’t think he was sleeping rough. Like I said before, he says his mother’s in—”

  “Yes, his mother. I heard you the first time.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  There was a hesitation, and then Atwell looked straight at Astrid. “Guv . . . it’s not my place to say, but we all admire you, guv. What’s the matter? What’s got you? You seem . . . frustrated. We’re on the same team, yeah? And I really like you. What’s wrong?”

  Astrid began working her mouth, slowly. Her lips were quivering a bit, but no words came out. After a few more seconds, she said, in a husky whisper: “I can’t say.” She couldn’t very well list the litany of second withdrawal’s horrors to the officer she supervised.