by Bill Broun
Frustrated—that was a funny word for it.
“Inspector, I hear you. All is well.”
But nothing was “well,” Astrid thought. Indeed, she might at that moment half enjoy some errant tiger burning bright, in the park’s forest of the night, springing upon her, thrashing her withdrawal apart like a dirty pangolin. For if being near the zoo had initially eased the horrors inside her, new anxieties now seemed to be unhatching, and fast. And she felt sure of a terrible fact: she was going to end up drinking Flōt that night. Her life of sobriety was ending. FA could fuck itself. She’d had enough of being strong.
Just one orb, Astrid tried to tell herself, ruefully. She knew that even a mouthful of Flōt would restart her addiction in all its ugly fury. A drink of Flōt would be the beginning of the end of her life. She couldn’t escape that reality.
From across the zoo’s fence, at a distance, the two women suddenly heard a pair of African wild asses, among the most endangered animals on earth, bray heinously.
“Is that so?” Astrid pretended to answer, with a clownish voice. “Well. Good luck to you, then!”
Atwell laughed.
Astrid asked, “And are you OK, Constable?”
Atwell seemed not to hear, and now she was looking above the zoo, toward the mackerel-striped sky. She said, abstractedly, “I feel terrible about locking that man out. Physically.” She was grinning eerily. “Crikey. I’m feverish. My head hurts. Oh, I don’t feel well, I really don’t, guv.” She shook her head, looking away from Astrid. She said, “I just want to do a good job, yeah?”
“I understand,” said Astrid.
“Do you?” Atwell glanced at her and good-naturedly scoffed. “Maybe ‘a good job’ seems like a piddling ambition, but it’s not to me, yeah? You know, my mother and father, from Guyana, they think law enforcement is, you know, povvy.* But I love it—I just do. They say they didn’t come to England so their children could work as coppers. Ha! Big ambitions, everyone had—before the reclassifications. They thought I should be a barrister. They still think I may yet, yeah?”
“Why not?”
“You know why. England’s going backward. Oliver Cromwell’s jumbie must be crying. Fucking King Hen—”
“Don’t, Jasmine,” she whispered. “Don’t say it. Not here. It’s good to fear the Watch. They’re everywhere.”
“Sorry, guv,” she whispered. “You’re so fucking right. Ma’am.”
“For once.”
Atwell said, “Should we call Mr. Beauchamp?” She looked a little more awake now, and tense. She began picking expertly at a cuticle with her fingernail.
“Yes,” Astrid said. “Sadly.” She didn’t want to wake the zoo director, but she recognized the necessity of getting specialists on scene. “I suppose we can’t just shout, ‘Come along, Trixie!’ and just pick up a jackal like a lost cocker spaniel.”
It was Atwell who used the police glider’s old-but-secure comm-port for a few minutes to contact Beauchamp. Astrid could hear Beauchamp’s needly voice, whining in the background, taking up far too much of Atwell’s time. But she was glad she hadn’t had to deal with him. Atwell kept blinking during the call, as if trying to stay ready for the moment when the mountain that was Beauchamp’s grandiosity collapsed on her head.
“All set?” Astrid asked Atwell when the call ended. “Did he say anything useful?”
“Yes, guv. He said a lot. He said we needed to ‘get a perimeter.’ I asked about the jackals and he begged us, please, to leave them alone. He doesn’t think there’s much we can do about them anyway, since we lack proper training, for now, right? But I want to find that man.”
“Yes, the night keeper, Dawkins. Yes, we must. And anyone else in trouble. Have we heard anything from the Watch? Did Beauchamp say anything about them?”
“No, ma’am.”
“So typical. The Watch do things their way, and so does Beauchamp. No bleedin’ coordination—ever. Anyway, we should get moving.”
“That makes sense, Inspector,” said Atwell. She hesitated for a second. “Inspector, I feel the chills and I’m knackered and woozy.”
“You want to leave off?”
“Oh, no, no, no. I’m just . . . not myself, OK? I’m very sorry if I seem . . . odd. I’ve been hearing such terrible noises. And this zoo—I don’t know how to put it. Something about it just gives me gippy tummy to the core. I feel somehow extra soul-tired, just being near this bleeding place, guv. Like I’m part of something awful being born, and it’s not just the lost jackals. It’s more. It’s worse.”
“I feel it, too,” said Astrid. “It’s like something bigger than the biggest animal, fighting . . . for its life.”
“Yes. I think. Or we’re mad.”
“Could very well be.”
Astrid put her palm over Atwell’s forehead. It was damp and febrile and oh so vulnerable, like a sick child’s. She did look a little bluish somehow, and slightly awestruck, Astrid saw. Her eyes appeared poorly focused. They were greenish-brown eyes of a huge size she sometimes associated with people of Scottish ancestry. Her black, penciled-up eyebrows angled slightly into peaks, giving her a puckish expression that Astrid normally found winsome.
“Yes, you’re warm. Jeez. Very warm.”
“Right,” Atwell said. “But I can work, I tell you. ‘I be iree,’* as they say.”
Astrid said, “It’s also fine if you’re not fine, too. If you need to go home . . .”
“I’ll be OK, yeah?” Atwell chuckled a little, in the throaty, sniffly way someone does when she’s just been weeping. “That was funny, how you talked back to that animal. Right funny, that. Right.” She took a breath. “Shall we find this man now?” She started to get out of the car.
When she cracked the pandaglider’s door open, Astrid could smell her more completely. Atwell didn’t wear any kind of perfume—regulation discouraged strong fragrances—but for reasons she could not guess, Atwell possessed an agreeable scent, aromatic but bright, like almonds and watercress crushed along with something strong and rough, a tropical grass—vetiver?—that she could not name.
“Can I . . . ask you something . . . Inspector?” Atwell nodded once and squinted slightly, as if uttering a credo. She wore a serious expression. “God, I feel odd. I . . . I don’t want to show you any sort of eye-pass.* But you—I heard that you’re in what they call recovery—from Flōt? Is it true?”
The question was very rarely asked in Astrid’s experience; it shocked her. “It is, for now.”
“And I’ve heard that . . . you know, Flōtism?” Astrid could hear miles and miles of Guyana in Atwell’s accent. “It’s wicked impossible to kill off, yeah? What with two withdrawals and all. And you end up trapped in the devil’s own torture chambers, and you’re pure anta banta if you go chronic. There’s no way out then. And almost everyone dies. That’s what I hear. You become a prisoner, for life, and everyone looks at you and troubles you and gives you the minute of your doom on a paper dog-horn, and then you’re dead.” Atwell cleared her throat and gazed directly at Astrid. She even leaned in a bit. “You tell me: Is that the truth?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think.”
“OK. But ma’am, here’s my perspective, right? See, I think you can make it. And that’s what I wanted to say. I think you’re different. I just do, and I know it’s kind of weird . . . but I felt I needed to tell you that. I don’t know much about recovery, like I said. But still.”
“Thanks, Atwell. Thank you, Jasmine. There’s some paracetamol back at the nick, by the way. For your fever.”
“Good. All right,” she said. She opened the door of the pandaglider and jumped out. “I’m glad you’re here, guv.” She slammed the door shut with surprising strength. “To work!” she said.
Astrid felt a wobbly sense of normalcy returning. She said, turning toward the zoo, “So, what do you think’s happening in there?”
Just as she spoke, an elephant trumpeted distantly. It was so loud Astrid could feel it in her chest.
“Unbelievable,” said Astrid. “I wonder whether things are worse in there than they seem.”
“I’ve been thinking that for the last hour, ma’am. We don’t really have situational awareness here. I wish we could talk to those frightcopters.”
“Don’t even think it! You know the Watch. They don’t share info. They try to dismantle you. God, but listen. Why does the zoo sound so much worse than it looks?”
Although a few of the security light arrays in the interior of the zoo still raged, after several minutes they had begun to shut down. It was an almost comically worthless energy-saving aspect of the system of motion detectors. Why, after all, would a detector at the zoo ever be triggered in the middle of the night unless a dire occasion had arisen, in which case there could not possibly be a valid reason for such a light, once triggered, to turn off again. Perhaps the zoo’s own security team, run by David Beauchamp, was primarily concerned with theft and vandalism deterrence. (A few of the animals, such as okapi, were reportedly worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, though precisely what a burglar would do in England with a two-hundred-pound extinct-in-the-wild forest ungulate from Central Africa seemed hard to fathom.)
Atwell bit her lower lip; she seemed to consider Astrid’s question grave. She said, “I just don’t know. Whatever’s in there—this jumbie or whatever it is—it’s still there.”
“Jumbie?” She giggled. “What’s that then? Oliver Cromwell’s got one, too?”
“Oh, sorry. I mean, ‘evil spirit’—or ghost. Guyanese, ma’am. You know—creole.”
“Mmm,” said Astrid. “Island lore?”
“Ha! Guyana’s no island. That’s Britain.” Atwell grinned. “And this zoo, this island of almost-extinct pets in cages. Either a very intelligent animal has broken loose, and let the jackals out, or a very foolish person has broken in. How long for Beauchamp, you suppose?”
“Who knows?” said Astrid. “Oh, how I loathe that man. Sorry to say that, but he really gets on my knob.”
In the firearm training sessions Astrid had helped lead for the zoo team, Beauchamp had rushed her along and acted as if the constabulary’s onetime involvement with the zoo practically contaminated his staff. Beauchamp seemed to have neither particular respect for, nor desire to be addled with, schooling in safety or crisis management.
One of Astrid’s few friends in the zoo reported that he occupied his important job unhappily, with the impatient but apparently plausible hope that he might obtain some administrative position on the ZSL board, which would have carried with it a title of nobility. He scorned the ZSL’s own public relations team and craved WikiNous attention, so much so that the ZSL’s spokespeople steered visiting reporters away from him. Once, during a grim morning training session on the topic of what would happen if an animal needed to be shot, Astrid had tried to lighten things up. She pointed to an anteater in the Moonlight World exhibit, and made a wisecrack about the dangers an escaping “bull aardvark” could pose. Many of the zoo staff members laughed.
“That’s a Bolivian anteater,” Beauchamp had said, seething from the back, wagging his finger. “It’s an important distinction. And it’s a female specimen. And her name is Dinah.” With that, Beauchamp peered into the glass and said with a straight face, “Right, Dinah?”
He was what Astrid considered an animal fanatic. She adored animals—but she wasn’t a nut. Still, Atwell’s point was procedurally correct, she knew. The man knew his specimens.
“I’ve heard he’s difficult,” said Atwell.
“Yes,” said Astrid. “The zoo’s his babs to take care of. But he’s not going to be right chuffed about tonight.”
“I’ve heard he takes the animals very seriously and all.”
There were two torches in the boot of the pandaglider, along with muscle-slowing batons and extra sets of invisible handcuffs (they weren’t actually invisible, but used magnetic force to impel hands or feet together).
Astrid rummaged through them while Atwell used the comm to make sure Beauchamp and his small team were en route. For a moment, Astrid set the cuffs to reverse polarity and “floated” one cuff piece a few inches above her hand, amusing herself. She kept the torches and batons, and put back the cuffs—what was she going to do, lock up the jackals?
When Atwell came around to the back, she said, “I actually spoke to him. He’s coming. He sounded, erm, whipped up. He said we need to move quickly.”
“He’s whipped up all right, I’m sure.”
“He wants to seal off the zoo. He was beside himself, actually, guv. I told him about the man who claimed to be the watchman and he scarcely seemed to hear me. He wanted to know if we’d established a perimeter. He said it was ‘dead urgent.’ He was rather definite about that. I quote, ‘It’s the last line of defense against tragedy.’”
Astrid gritted her teeth. Had things really progressed into such a grand arena as that—tragedy? Wasn’t this more a mishap?
A few new scattered animal noises began coming from the zoo. This time, they sounded like monkeys or apes shrieking hellishly. It unnerved Astrid badly.
“Jesus fuck,” she said. “OK, let’s do our best to find out what’s going on. We sure as hell can’t establish a perimeter with two officers, can we? We’ll do what we can.”
She handed a torch and a baton to Atwell, and Atwell reminded her about the terribly distressed man who claimed to be the night watchman, whose mother was somehow still in the zoo—they wouldn’t forget about him, would they? She assured her they would look for them, but she thought it a waste of time. The real danger lay in Beauchamp’s appearing. He was such a fool. Then Astrid realized something.
“Oh Jesus, Atwell. We’re in for it tonight. I tell you, mark my words. I’d forgot something—you know Beauchamp’s going to have us at his disposal? That’s the reg. Crown property and whatnot.”
“Maybe it won’t be so bad, ma’am,” said Atwell. “Least it’s not the Watch as gaffer.”
“True.”
Atwell flipped the torch on and it shone up into her face. It gave her a sinister look with a moonglow brow and icy-looking cheeks.
They decided to walk down toward the place where the jackals had been. Astrid felt charged. Here she was in the midst of interesting police work. It was rare for Parkies. But there was something more and more frightening about the night, too, a sense of things flying out in broken pieces she could neither catch nor fix without getting hurt. The feeling back at the FA meeting, and Atwell’s jumbie, and the terrifying sounds in the zoo—there was something baleful afoot.
“You know,” said Astrid. “I think we’d better freq Omotoso. But I can’t imagine the old man’s going to be happy.”
Astrid waited as Atwell glanced down to prepare a new orange-freq.
“It’s done,” she said. “Omotoso knows a thing or two now.”
finding the head of satan
THEY WOULD FIRST CIRCUMNAVIGATE THE ZOO, Astrid decided, and inspect the fence. Meanwhile, they would also keep on the lookout for the alleged watchman—and, perhaps, of all people, his poor mother.
The two officers—one an addict in extremis, the other an unwell rookie—stayed on the Broad Walk, which, in the constricting darkness, hardly lived up to its name. The beams from their torches waved back and forth over the edges of the pink pavement like the antennae of a giant, blind beetle, and the night seemed to have grown unusually murky; Astrid thought this was due to some trick of the torches on her digitalized retinas, or perhaps because of the security lamps jumping on and off and on inside the zoo, to their right, as they patrolled forward. They passed a small tea kiosk, little more than a whitewashed hut built around a big gas-operated kettle. Beside it was a folding chair, apparently forgotten after closing. The chair had been knocked onto its side.
Atwell seemed rapt by the strange, melted-looking granite of the contemporary statues in the large children’s field to their left. They were all elephants. “See that, Inspector?” she said. “They sort of come to
life in the night. They’re like hearts, folded up on themselves and all gone gray. I don’t know if I see elephants, per se. But I see loads of feeling. It’s nice, ma’am, yeah?”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “I suppose you’re right.”
In truth, Astrid didn’t see indrawn hearts—she saw insufficiency, the grayness of indecision, an ingrownness of old dreams. This art didn’t move her. They walked on.
But there was that comet somewhere, Astrid thought, the one all over the WikiNous. Something brighter and more cutting than this world—now that would speak to her. The “most widely observed comet in human history” visible and she was stuck chasing wild dogs down. Urga-Rampos—it would really be something to see.
Ironically, the comet was actually more luminous in southern Britain at that time than almost anywhere else on Earth, but it was blocked, in north London, by a very southern English formation of stratus clouds. The cloud cover was beginning to push off.
Astrid thought about Atwell’s apparently heartfelt conviction that she could do what almost no one else had—withstand second withdrawal. It was touching, but wasn’t it misplaced? Oh, she hoped not. Could she beat Death? She was so close, after all, wasn’t she? Or was she? For if she could drink just one orb of Flōt—and no more—and walk sober thereafter—and never again after that. If, if, if. Just one orb. One and only one and never again on this debased Earth.
“Inspector!” Atwell was scurrying ahead of her. She had her torch trained on a red and black shape. “There’s something wrong up there.” She pointed toward a shadowy misplacement.
“Wait, Jasmine. Wait!” But she kept bustling along, well in front now.
Now she shined her torch over the thing. It was a small, chawed-out head of some kind. Atwell reeled backward.
“Jesus!” she said, her hand over her mouth. “I’m going to be sick.”
Astrid caught up and shined her light down. “My god,” she said.
Her first flare of thought was that she was looking down at the lean, masticated head of Satan. Smudged with dark, bloody fingerprints, to Astrid the ribbed horns appeared to have been curled not by eons of genetic adaptation, but by murderous demons. There was a sense, too, that the appalling object had come to meet her. It was out of the zoo, ready to swallow her with its skinny skull and one wet ear. For a moment, she even thought she heard a faint voice calling her, but she put that down to withdrawal.
