Animalis (15 page)

Chapter 11

Cold Storage

The animals were all sitting upright on their haunches. A gathering of the strangest group of animals: elephants, horses, dogs, cats, snakes, pigs, worms, and insects. It was an audience, watching something.

Jax awoke in darkness. The sounds of the animals in his dream transformed into a drone of incomprehensible noise around him. He should probably get out of bed soon and take a shower before the rest of the men in his company woke up. He tried to move his head, but couldn’t.

It was so dark that he couldn’t see the other bunks surrounding his bed. He kept his eyelids closed to steady himself. He finally opened them and felt a painful ache in his head. Then the dim light of the room was enough to send a stinging pain through his eyes and into his skull, so he dropped his eyelids shut.

He tried to move again and felt a wave of dizziness.
What happened … to me?
The dizziness turned into a throbbing pain in his head.

It hurt too much to move, so Jax stopped and listened to the sounds around him instead. He heard maybe a dozen voices, moaning, grumbling, talking in another language. A hollow clank from metal hitting a hard, stone surface. The acoustics of the room sounded different than the barracks he normally awoke in. Instead of the warm reverberation of the walls of the barracks, the walls around him deadened the sound to a cold flatness.

Something was wrong—he could be in danger. He had to remember what had happened before. Images of a recent memory came to him. A fight …
Yes, I fought … Gillian. For Hank.
What happened after that?
A rat
. He and Hank had been sent to a rat plane.

The memories finally started to fall into place. Someone with bright red curls of hair—
Hurley … Hurley Grimshaw.
He remembered pieces of a car chase, riding on a kangaroo Animalis. There was crying …
Who was crying?
Grimshaw, on his shoulder, at the door, pounding on it, screaming at Hank. No, he had been with Hank in the warehouse.
Going to get the pyramid …

He could see Hank in his mind, staring with cold indifference at Jax. Seeing the face cut into Jax’s heart.
That was just a bad dream,
Jax thought.
Hank is my best friend.
And he pushed the image out of his mind.

So much had happened in the last twenty-four hours: the guns, the slaughter, the face of the hyena, holding Grimshaw, and a lioness Animalis. The memory of her voice came back—“Narasimha.”

He felt his spirit deflate: he had utterly failed; the Animalis had gotten away with the pyramid. Had Hank and the others gone back to join Hernandez’s company? Where had he been taken?

He tried to move his head again and something creaked. He felt no pain, though; the noise didn’t seem to have come from him. He was lying sideways, the weight of his body held his right arm pinned. But he couldn’t feel the arm, either.

“I see you moving in there,” said a deep male voice. It was closer, and louder, than the other voices Jax had heard.

He tried to open his eyes again, holding them nearly shut. The pain wasn’t as bad as before. Now he could see a dull gray wall across from him.

“Who … Who are you?” Jax’s words barely made it to his own ears. His throat was dry and his lips had cracked. He tried to swallow, but the tiny amount of spit that had been in his mouth got caught in the wrong tube in his throat and he began to cough. His chest tensed convulsively, sending waves of intense pain through him.

“Careful, that looks painful,” the voice said. “I’m sure a big glass of water would help. Would you like a glass of water?”

Jax held his breath, forcing the cough to stop. He could feel most of his body now, tingling and stinging, as sensations returned after the coughing. To sit up, he dropped his legs over the side of the bed he was lying on, and pushed past the pain of his headache.

“Yes, please,” Jax said.

Through the slit in his eyelids, he could see the room he was in open up into a large hall in front of him. Thin, dark lines created a barrier where the room joined the hall.

A man was on the other side of the dark lines, crouching down to Jax’s height.

“Here.”

The man swung his arm out and there was a metal clang as the cup he held hit against one of the dark lines. Water splashed onto Jax and the bed. The man began to laugh. It was a chuckle at first, but it grew into a loud belly laugh. Whines and cries from the other voices around them became louder when they heard his laughter.

“Quiet!” the man yelled. His laughter stopped. “You moan like these other pieces of dirt and you won’t even get that much water.”

The water penetrated Jax’s clothes, bringing an icy coldness with it. He started to shiver, trembling at first, and then shaking uncontrollably.

Jax’s eyes had adjusted better to the light and he opened them more to see the man talking to him, blurred from his tremors. Light from above glistened off the man’s dark, bald head. The face was obscured in the shadow of his brow. His clothes were a bland black, a single-piece working uniform. His plump figure bulged underneath the clothes.

“Welcome to your last home,” the man said. He stood up, towering above Jax with an intimidating height. “The symbol of terror that cannot be stopped. This is the arena.”

——

Leftover fish parts and vegetables were tossed into Jax’s cell twice a day, along with a splash of water. Jax quickly learned to keep the floor clean so he could suck up the puddles.

A small blanket that reeked of various species of Animalis was his constant companion. It was hardly a protection from the cold, but he could at least sleep while it was draped over him. He wasn’t in Australia anymore, and he missed the dry heat. Most of the people and Animalis that passed the door of his cell seemed to be speaking Russian, so he assumed he had been taken to Russia—he’d quickly realized that his retina monitor had been removed and he could no longer rely on it for information, forcing him to use his own mind to process everything.

The first arena fight came through the ceiling as a muted audio play. He was lying on his back in the dark morning hours when he heard the sound of feet scuffling above him.

The audience started with the same primal stomping rhythm Jax had heard from the videos he’d seen. Chanting, anticipating the fight. Scavengers in the stands hoping for scraps to be thrown to them. But as the fight began, silence filled the stands.

There were occasional cheers and gasps until the end of the fight approached. Then the hoard of Animalis grew restless. Jax tried not to listen to the crowd’s intermittent cheers—and cries for the victim to be thrown to them.

Animals. Give them hands and a tongue, but they will always be animals
. Jax never listened to another fight. When he heard the crowd start the horrible, primal rhythm on the bleachers, he tried to drown it out by using the ragged blanket to cover his ears.

Sometimes the face of the hyena came to him in those moments. The Animalis in the stadium were cheering for
Jax
, and ordering him to kill more, he was so good at it. The captain was an Animalis, ordering him to kill the rat, kill the kangaroos, so that he and the rest of the company could eat the bodies.

Sometimes the face of Grimshaw came to him instead, her eternal smile and tousles of curly red hair dangling in front of her eyes. Had she gone on with her life when Jax was taken? He had known her for such a short time, less than a full day, but Jax had formed an attachment to her. If there was any way he could see her again … He would like to have known her better, or at least said a good-bye.

Jax could hear something scampering over the floor. It woke him from his thoughts. He sat up, waiting to hear the sound again.

Moans and pleading coming from the other cages around him. Maybe he had imagined it. He leaned against the wall and went back to complaining.

The food was unbearable, the cold constantly interrupted his sleep—shaking his body with an uncontrollable constancy—and he was powerless.

Scratch scratch scratch
. This time Jax definitely heard it. The sound was light, like tiny, hard feet running across the floor.

He stood up and went to the bars to look around. The walls opposite his cage were covered in dark shadows and patches of dim light from the line of single bulbs overhead. Along the center of the floor was a path of golden dust that was left by the guards when they took prisoners to and from the arena.

Then he saw it. A small, white animal dashed through the hall and stopped a few feet in front of Jax’s cell. It sat up on its back legs, holding a ragged sandwich in its mouth.

“Moxie?” Jax whispered.

He felt a rush of relief. Her fur reflected the light as a magical glow around her. Using a kissing sound, Jax tried to coax her closer.

“Come here, girl. Is Hank here? Grimshaw?”

She came closer and dropped the food in front of the bars. She stood again and squeaked. Her little pink hands groomed her face. Jax reached to grab her, but she pulled back and ran away. Her long body bounded in little waves down the hall.

“Moxie,” he tried to call her back in a strained whisper.

Then he heard the heavy footsteps approaching. Jax reached down and picked up the food. He left the bars and went to the back wall, holding the sandwich behind his back. Huffing, and snorting, the big rhinoceros guard lumbered passed.

When the sounds of his footsteps faded away, Jax examined the sandwich. He pulled the bread away, lifted the lettuce, and looked under the cheese and layers of turkey. He flipped it over and did it again, looking at each piece, hoping to find something other than food.

Even without a hidden message, the sandwich brought Jax renewed hope. He had been found. The arena had been found. If Hank was here, he could bring a stop to the whole arena with a swift military strike.

Jax didn’t mind the dirt and filth that had covered the sandwich from being dragged on the ground. Hunger pains had started after the first day from the lack of food. The sandwich was savory and delicious.

Moxie came again the next day, carrying a hearty, half-eaten bagel. She dropped it in front of his cell again and scampered away. Again, there was no message. But he devoured the bagel.

Alone in his cell, waiting for their rescue plan to come together, all he could do was wade through his memories, and it was the one thing Jax didn’t want to do. He couldn’t afford to exercise, since the added exertion would starve him even faster. His mind would wander back to his parents, especially his mother—making him sit in his room without access to his wall screens when he was being punished. Getting his retina monitor had been his first act of independence when he had moved out to join the army. No one would ever leave him disconnected from the world outside, he had figured. And yet here he was, unable to access the internet now that the monitor had been taken out of his eyes.

By the end of the first week, Jax had given up hope of anything changing. The people and Animalis that walked by were always the same. The sounds from the arena, the scuffles, the cries, and the muffled cheers that came through the ceiling, were always the same. No one but Moxie ever came, bringing her little gifts that kept him from starvation.

It made him furious. The Animalis were monsters, so why should he feel bad for what he had done to them? He would do it again. And if the captain was an Animalis, looking to feast on their corpses, then he would join in. He’d eat them while they were still warm. It would stop his hunger, and his shivering. It would stop the war: humans could eat them all.

They were insane thoughts, but with the isolation and the hunger that tormented him constantly, they were as normal as he could manage. He realized he had never actually learned to be alone. Sitting in his room growing up, he had always been able to scrounge up an old portable game machine to pass the time. There was nothing for him now.

Spending almost all of her time with no one but an Animalis to keep her company, how could Grimshaw do it? Maybe she was slightly crazy from it.

It was something worse than depression creeping in. Jax had failed, and if the pyramid really was as powerful as Hank believed, the world could crumble into chaos at any moment because of it. Why had he thought he could make a difference? Join the military, serve the country with honor and dignity, and build self-respect.

A product of propaganda. Watching every video that came within his sphere of awareness, it had shaped his view of reality. There were so many suggestions and little promptings that had worked their way into his subconscious mind. “Join the military. Do something great for humanity. Dream big. You can do anything you set your mind to. America needs heroes.” All little snippets from commercials, movies, and video games.

Was that who Jax was? A hero? Was this what life was, killing and torture and waiting to kill or be eaten? Suburban life seemed like a fragile illusion now. People walking around in make-believe, whining about pretend problems, and hoping for more synthetic enjoyment.

Why did Grimshaw seem so happy?

There was a rustle of movement in the cage next to Jax. The sound of something sliding on gravel. Jax hadn’t been able to see what was on either side of him because of the solid walls of the cell.