Night of the Animals (41 page)

“What's he to you? He's a stranger. He's nothing. He's a part of your second withdrawal from Flōt. Your unnecessary withdrawal. Your unnecessary ‘struggle' with your human container.”

“But he's not. Leave me alone. You don't care about me. Cuthbert—he's no stranger. I've even an idea that he might be my granddaddy. He shouldn't be a stranger. Not to anyone in England.”

“But you don't realize,” said Applewhite, beaming smugly, holding one of the glasses toward Astrid, “that this saint is merely
second withdrawal?
Don't you see? There is no
Saint
Cuthbert. He's just another city drunk.”

Astrid pulled her hair down again and shook it out.

“I don't care,” she said. “For all I know, we're all just the ghosts of one another's deepest needs. But there is this helpless old Indigent who says he has come to save Britain's animals, and he may be crazy, but tonight, this first of May, in the reign of King Henry the Ninth, in 2052, in London, England, he is Saint Cuthbert.”

“But you . . . what about you? What are you to him?”

“I am . . . I am the Christ of Otters.”

Applewhite grimaced sadly. “Oh, child,” he said, chuckling. “You've been, well, between withdrawals for so long—and that's such a scary thing, I know!—that you're easily taken in. And that's OK. We'll help you. I really, really, really, really think you're at the Evolutionary Level Above Human. You're as
unanimal
as they get. And you're
so special
. That's why you're not being forced . . . like the others . . . see? We know you well, Astrid. I'm sorry, but I have to say this: you're completely ready to shed your container. You
are
ready to ascend to our home in the comet. Drink, friend, drink.”

Lifting a filled shot glass in his wrinkled pink hand, Applewhite drank one of them, wincing slightly.

Astrid said, “I will not, cunt.”

“Then you've wrecked your
self,
Astrid,” he said, gasping a bit. “You can stay in your world of giant vaginas and shit. You
will
die tonight. If the Death doesn't get you, my Neuters will.”

There was a kind of popping sound, and a flash of red lights, and Applewhite, mysteriously, was gone.

ASTRID ALL AT ONCE FELT VERY DIZZY AND
clumsy, and she fell again to her knees, right beside the banquet table of Flōt and champagnes and Stilton and foie gras, still naked from the waist down. And her heart seemed to be struggling to beat, as the gorilla's was. Had the cultists somehow slipped her the fatal ingredients, too? she wondered. She did not have time to speculate—she soon found that the redoubtable Mason was by her side again.

“Can I help you up?” he asked, his lip quivering a bit.

“No,” she said. “Yes.”

And when with his arm he pulled her to her feet, for a moment her legs straddled his thigh, and a shudder of pleasure hit her, and she nearly pushed Mason back to the floor so that she could take him inside her.

He seemed to scramble for a few moments, as if twisting and weaseling away from her.

“Fuck,” she said. “For some reason . . . I'm really hot for you. I'm sorry. It's . . .”

He pulled her to her feet, and she spun around. She looked all around herself.

“It's OK,” he said. “I just—I'm kind of slow, you know? And you're so . . . you're beautiful. But there's something going on with you.”

“He's . . . left?” asked Astrid.

“Who?”

“The creepy cult man, holding the shot glasses.”

“Um, sure,” Mason said, in a way Astrid read as
sure, whatever you say
.

Astrid leaned hard against Mason, trying to calm herself, to still her body—but a big part of her remained like an unsocketed eye, looking everywhere helplessly, unable to move, stuck upon Mason. She wondered if this helpless nakedness, this abject dependency on the animal warmth of another, was somehow a sign that she had indeed cleared the last hurdle of the second withdrawal, and that a new life could unfold from here. She hated the feeling of need. She longed to be the otter queen again, with legs as big and hard as the trunks of oak trees and a mind as big as the sky.

“You saw him?” asked Astrid.

Mason just smiled at her and said, “We need to get you some trousers.” In his own buttoned-down and overly competent way, he felt oddly liberated, too. The
loop d'loopers
in matching white had taken the night into realms beyond the diplomatic service. Questions swarmed his mind: Was America also under attack? Had he been drugged? Was he somehow mentally ill? Was he alive? He didn't see a way that the events of the night would
not
leave his outlook forever altered. But delusions or not, drugs or not, live or dead—he, for one, wasn't going to let an obviously suffering woman walk around half-naked in the chancery without getting her some clothes.

He opened Suleiman's giant bag and dug out a pair of ancient, tattered
Phineas and Ferb
pajama bottoms. They must have been half a century old. Astrid jumped into them gladly.

“Now,” said Mason. “I want to see about the animals.”

“Come with me,” Astrid said to Suleiman and Mason. “Let's try to move them into the center of the square. We need to move away from here.”

At that moment, not far beyond the trees west of Grosvenor, and growing closer and closer, there arose again the chilling noise Astrid had heard earlier, like a phalanx of holy dragons, puffing purgatorial fires and spitting sizzling golden bolts.

“Jesus,” said Mason. “Let's go. That doesn't sound like it wants to be our friend.”

“But my visa,” Suleiman said.

“You'll get the visa,” said Mason. “We can't stay here.”

The three of them began to move down the chancery steps and into the crowded square. The elephant Layang was raging again, bucking up and screaming.
Help me
, the elephant said to Astrid.
Take me to a warm country.
As Astrid moved toward her, the elephant almost instantly settled down.

Astrid looked back toward Mason and Suleiman. “Oh my god,” she said. “I just
heard
—I
heard
the elephant, speaking to me.”

Mason said, “Oh boy.”

Astrid didn't get to enjoy her new interspecies linguistic skill. When she saw some of the Neuters' faces now, a new horror hit her:
all
of them seemed to have become Marshall Applewhite. All wore the same blue-eyed, thick-browed look of happy, gelded contempt for her.

“He's going to kill me,” she said. “He'll try to kill all of us. We need to go!”

An old-tech gunshot cracked out from the crowd and Layang
the elephant dropped into a gray heap beside Astrid, with a thud so powerful the trees of the square rustled and windows rattled. Mason and Suleiman felt it in their knees. The shot seemed to have come from a tumult of rowdy Indigents, but it was hard to tell. The animal's death was instant and monumentally total. No limbs quivered, no ears twitched.

“No!” cried Mason, running toward Astrid and the elephant. “Goddamnit, no!”

Who? he asked himself. Fucking who? Marines, the police, these Neuter people, or an ordinary Londoner? And why?
Why?
“Don't shoot,” he shouted. “Stop, you fucking fuckers, stop!”

There was an odd, new noise, in the trees, like a wooden saw made from living flesh.

Hur-haw! Hur-haw! Hur-haw!

It was at that moment when Monty, the melanistic leopard, the Shayk of Night, as the sand cat called him, dropped from one of the plane tree boughs. He hung down for a few seconds, draping like a scarf of luminous black silk. Then he fell onto the backs of two of the Neuters. Monty had been following the gorilla and elephant—stalking them—but other prey would do.

Astrid looked up, and a sense of unaccountable relief filled her. The balance of power seemed to move toward the animals.

“
Chui
!” Suleiman gasped. “Leopard!”

The leopard began to slash into the Neuters, and any humans within reach. He was a power beyond any of their machines, any of their programmed incantations. A violet-blue liquid spumed out of the Neuters' necks as if from broken lawn hoses. It was not blood. It was ice cold, and it tasted bitter to the cat. It made the animal more determined to bring the infidels to heel.

The gorilla, Kibali, watched from a distance, shifting his weight fretfully from one foot to another, back and forth, back and forth.

“Stop this,” the gorilla called to Monty. “Please, let us take the paths of peace, my friend. Friend!”

“The Mahdi comes!” Monty screamed, beyond reason, swiping and gnashing and tearing into any spot of creamy white flesh its claws could hook. “For everyone, for all, for now, for you!”

Astrid could hear every word of the creature, although she wasn't sure she understood them.

“Brr-row-brr-row-brr-rowowow!” snarled the animal. “Bow down and pray before the Mahdi!”

“The Mahdi?” Astrid asked the great cat.

“He waits for you, at the zoo,” said Monty, pausing from battle, yet somehow speaking to her intimately and alone, even as many melees spread around them. “You, the princess of all things untamed, and the force ‘through the green fuse'—you, the Otter Christ.”

“That can't be,” said Astrid. “I am just a lonely drug addict in London, and you're nothing but a symptom of the Death.”

“You will see,” said Monty. The black panther vaulted into the air and slammed onto a Neuter.

“Inside! Inside!” the Neuter repeated, trying to chop at the black cat's hot muzzle even as its cold heart ceased its slow, steady, quantum-powered ticking.

“Down! Bow!”

It was Abrahamic religion versus
www.heavensgate.com.

Some of the citizens in the square decided to surround Kibali, and they began to hurl objects at him—plastic bottles, belt buckles, shoes. “Fuck,” said Mason, huddling close to Astrid and Suleiman. “Fucking idiots.”

“Why they want to hurt the
sokwe
?” asked Suleiman. “He hurt no one.”

“Let me die,” Astrid could hear Kibali pleading. “Let me go.”

These weren't the Neuters, who had indeed planned, later, to put the gorilla down. This was the human mob.

Astrid and Mason now saw poor Kibali fall to the ground in the square, just across the street from the embassy; the ape lay on his side on the grass, clutching his chest in pain, and Mason ran toward him. Astrid and Suleiman followed.

The noble silverback was having a myocardial infarction. The appearance of the white-suited aggressors, the stress of the escape, the spurting violet-blue liquid, the years of sedentary anguish, those éclairs from the well-meaning keeper, and finally, this insult of ordinary people—it had been too much.

Kibali felt crushed by what he had found outside the zoo. Humans were not only his foes, but they also were not even as minimally decent as animals. He would be hunted eternally. The entire city was merely an outgrowth of the zoo, and he would never be allowed to escape.

All around Kibali were the voices, too, that Cuthbert had heard in the zoo—the high-pitched, fussy, and deeply cloying treacletones of Heaven's Gate. They were repeating certain phrases,
The mammals will pass from the earth
, and
Deactivate the animals
. Surely, thought Kibali, the Interahamwe soldiers could not be far behind, and in an odd way, he knew he would prefer them. In being cut to pieces with a machete, one died at the receiving end of real emotion, of something both animal and human. Here, by contrast, was detached, digitalized, mob slaughter. Here was the truth of the comet Urga-Rampos, bringing the possibility of holocausts beyond the nightmares any of previous millennia. If he had only made it to St. James or Hyde Park, or to the Wyre Forest—perhaps from there he might have ducked under the cover of these beautiful English trees, and he might have proceeded slowly ahead, from green patch to green patch, until he arrived in the Congo. Oh, if he could only die under the ayous and sapelli trees, in peace, with ants tickling his
knuckles and his family around him, how content he would be to leave this world.

He could not breathe. He tried to pull the air in, but nothing came from the effort. He felt dizzy.

Mason held Kibali in his arms now, cuddling the big, sad beast against him while Suleiman, in turn, placed his hand on Mason's shoulder. Mason had held dying bucks he'd shot like this before in Pendleton County. He would tell them the same words: “It's OK, fella, it's OK.”

At that moment, Astrid felt sure that she saw the golden eagle atop the embassy awaken, too, tearing the bolts from its talons like annoying thorns. The steel bird of prey flew down to the four animals huddled in the square, and hovered above them. It was an America-within-an-America, an animal core and inner spark like Omotoso's Yoruba
ori
, a guardian disguised as art, that would never fit into any death cult's plans.

Under the shadow of the eagle, Kibali spoke to Mason, too, for he also had listened very hard to animals his whole life, and at last he could hear their words now, at least for this night.

Kibali said, “I say to you both, ‘
Gagoga maga medu
.' That is the life-phrase by which the survivors of today will know one another. I give it to you from the animal world. It's the voice against the rushing-in of death. It means, ‘I want to live.'”

Then the gorilla, his eyesight dimming, his heart trilling to a stop, looked up at Astrid, who, in his eyes, seemed to be floating above him, and he said to her, in the stalwart gorilla tongue, “
Gagoga maga medu,
Astrid. Live!
Live
, sweet messiah! You are almost past the Death. And you are the last holder of the Wonderments on Earth. You are the princess of the wild, the Otter Christ of England. You will save our country, and you will save our world. But the cost of avoiding pain and grief is annihilation, I assure you. Just as you cannot trap an animal and expect it to survive, you must not
go back to Flōt. You must keep imagining the green world, and you must walk toward it—and we will be by your side, on the road of happy destiny. Help the stranger, in the zoo. That poor crazy man who thinks you're his brother. He may or may
not
be your grandfather, Astrid. Why does it matter? The fact is, he
can
be.”

“I hear you,” said Astrid. A fresh set of king's bulletins and orange-freqs
eeped
in her eyes, but she dismissed them all without reading.

“If I could only gouge out my eyes,” she seethed. “Bugger!”

The golden wings of the eagle covered them all like a feathery shield, kicking up a cloud of dust around the square, hiding the creatures under its wings—three
Homo sapiens
and the
Gorilla gorilla
—and keeping them safe. They were pulling together, Astrid saw, as though circling the proverbial wagons, but soon the Heaven's Gaters would find them and drug them and force them into the soul-swallowing machine. They must leave or perish, she suspected.

Suleiman, unsurprised but heartbroken, felt sure now that he would not make it to any new country. These American immigration demons, as he decided to think of them, had them surrounded. The only dim hope he felt was the Shayk of Night.

Apparently immune to the Neuters' silver stunners and to bullets and mob-hurled projectiles, the black leopard had grown frantic and exceedingly lethal, screaming in leopard language, ripping the pale demons to pieces like so many rotten white peaches.

Under the beating eagle's feathers, Astrid felt herself kissing Kibali's forehead as he lay there, struggling for breath.

“You wake up,” she said, her licorice-colored hair falling onto and tickling his face. “Wake up.” Such was the fantastical tenor of her swirling brain in second withdrawal, she had to wonder: was she really talking to a gorilla, or to herself. “Please!”

Kibali's own last thought was of his dead mother, named Long Stander, the matriarch of his father's troop in the verdant hills of eastern Congo. He saw leaves in her hair, felt her pulling him closer to her, there under the ayous trees. As he expired, he heard her singing her burly ape lullabies with a might beyond the human heart.