Bewere the Night (17 page)

The killer tiger crouched at the mouth of the pond, partially hidden by the reeds. For just a moment, the killer eyes gleamed green in the moonlight.

Then it sprang silently at Rachel, mouth open, teeth bared.

At the same moment Rachel burst out of the pond. She landed in the reeds. Her ankle protested, but not too badly; Rachel had managed to land with most of her weight on her other three paws. She was learning.

Meanwhile, the killer tiger landed in the pond with a splash.

And Rachel raced toward Cho, who dropped his cigarette and fumbled for the door of the Range Rover.

The killer tiger snarled. Rachel heard it splashing in the pond.

Rachel sprang at Cho’s throat.

He was a ghost, but he could touch Rachel, so he was solid and therefore vulnerable.

Cho managed to thrust open the door of the Range Rover, but Rachel’s teeth cut into the muscles of his shoulder and he stumbled.

Cold. Cold flesh. It numbed her teeth. Her head ached. But she could taste her cousin’s blood, ever so faintly. It maddened her.

He fought to enter the carapace of his car, but she sank her teeth deep and ripped the flesh off his back.

He screamed and fell on his back, pulled down by the force of her attack.

The hunter-tigress landed beside her, but Rachel didn’t pause. She surged forward and sank her teeth into Cho’s throat. Her teeth clicked together inside his flesh and she reared her head backward, lifting his off the ground before his neck vertebrae snapped, the neck muscles ripped apart and his flopped to the ground.

Rachel tore open his abdomen and swallowed the pink sausages of his intestines. She licked the urine out of his bladder like it was a fleshy chalice. She chewed his still-beating heart, the blood squirting out sideways.

She gorged herself until she could eat no more.

She opened her eyes and saw Cho’s decapitated head. Its face was spattered in blood, but his open eyes and mouth were frozen in a rictus of horror.

And the killer tigress snarled.

Rachel backed away from Cho’s corpse, hoping the tigress would consume Cho’s easy flesh rather than attack Rachel again.

But the tigress ignored Cho’s body. Instead, she fixed on Rachel with her eyes gleaming iridescent green.

And Rachel received a picture of tigers pacing in their cages, surrounded by mounds of feces and even dead tiger corpses the authorities hadn’t bothered to clear away. She saw human hands wringing a deformed baby tiger’s neck. She saw mounds of tiger corpses in a deep freeze, their eyes dull, their flesh collapsing, with only their black stripes to identify them.

And Rachel understood. The killer tigress would allow her to live only if Rachel helped these tigers.

Rachel tried to transmit a picture back. A picture of herself in her favourite red dress and heels and faux Prada handbag. She thought, “I’m not a tiger! I can’t help you!”

The hunter-tigress sent more images. A giant green glass vat, filled to the brim with a clear liquid. Rachel couldn’t read the Chinese characters, but the full-sized skeleton in the vat spoke for itself: an adult tiger. Tiger wine.

This was the tigers’ fate. Unless Rachel stepped in.

Rachel huffed. It was the first time she tried to speak “tiger,” but she wanted to convey her understanding.

“I’ll try,” Rachel thought, and moaned aloud.

When the moon disappeared and the sun rose, perhaps Rachel would remain a tiger, imprisoned in this tiger concentration camp or shot as Cho’s second murderer.

Or, when the sun rose, Rachel might revert to human form and the killer tigress might kill her.

But if she didn’t, Rachel could appropriate the Range Rover and dump its owner’s before maneuvering her way back to Harbin and negotiating an end to this tiger concentration camp. Rachel could let the tigers in and out of their cages, thanks to the keys hanging on Cho’s belt. And if Rachel found a legitimate piece of land, somewhere the tigers could live and feed one day, in dignity . . . 

The hunter-tigress walked away from Cho’s body, back to the pond. She sniffed the water and began to lap it up.

Rachel joined her. The water tasted like algae and dirt and something entirely different: hope.

(NOTHING BUT) FLOWERS

NICK MAMATAS

Amber’s two greatest obstacles, she decided, were her journal which she still wrote in every night, though she had no light and didn’t bother checking what she had written during the day when she could actually see the pages, and the gasoline she used to keep warm when it got very cold in the tree house.

She was conflicted about using tampons instead of moss, even though the pack had all talked about it and consensed that the tampons were okay, so long as they were shoplifted. Noliked blood. And that put Amber on shopping duty, which led her back to the gas, which she actually had to buy after working the sign, and little notepads and pens. There was something sexist about all of it, she was sure—the boys got to spend more time in the woods and didn’t have to think about her period except when one of them was horny for her at the wrong time, and they used most of the gas for direct action, which she was not enthusiastic about anymore.

Then there was the whole idea of even thinking about
obstacle
. And sexism. More symbolic thought bullshit. Amber wrote all this down in the dark of her platform—there was a big gibbous moon tonight but the canopy of the woods blocked most of it and the light pollution from the city. Amber decided that in the dark symbolic thought didn’t count so much because she could never really be sure that the letters she wrote in her cramped hand would ever be legible to anyone, even herself.

The branches rustled and “Hey” said a voice and Amber said back, “Hey Berg.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“You still smell of soap,” Amber said. “In the dark, things are easier to smell. I’m sure you smell me.”

He laughed, nervous. “Sorry about that.” Berg, on his hands and knees awkwardly crawled over to Amber and nuzzled, finding her dreds, her neck. She wrapped her limbs, all four of them, around Berg’s skinny torso, and then bit into his shoulder. First, playfully, but she didn’t stop till after Berg yelped and tried to squirm away.

“That a no?” Berg asked.

Amber grunted.

“That a no-symbolic-thought thing?”

In the dark, Amber shrugged extensively enough that Berg could make out the gesture.

“I guess I don’t get that part of it. Didn’t you come here because of a theoretical realization? Zerzan? Jensen?
Species Traitor
?”

“You did,” Amber said. Neither Berg nor Amber said anything for a minute or so after that.

“Amber?”

“I’m deciding.”

Wind through the branches. Some shuffling around. You could almost hear the blood in their bodies, coursing.

“Okay.” Berg surged forward and got fingernails to his cheek from it.

“Okay I’ll tell you. Want to check out a copy of
Proletarian Worker
?”

“Huh?”

“It was a negative dialectic.” She giggled. Redwood went on about negative dialectics all the time. The term had become a joke amongst the pack. “I was a socialist in school. Sold the paper every Saturday, went to demos and meetings all the time. Always tabling at the student union, sending around petitions, standing up in class and denouncing marginal economics or sociobiology or old Maoist professors for not being the Trotskyists. You know, the usual.”

“Yeah, of course.
PW
is like blight. They were always trying to take over movements and coalitions and the paper was so awful.”

“I know, I know,” Amber said. “Anyway, one time we had this educational on black self-determination and one of the comrades during her talk mentioned that in Haiti during the slave rebellion of 1791 the battle flag of the rebelling slaves was a white baby impaled on a pike.”

“Yeah . . . ” Berg said.

“Yeah, so anyway, after the meeting—and you know it was all white people—everyone was all like, ‘Yes, that’s us. We can do that if we had to.’ And half the comrades couldn’t even get up on time to sell the paper on Saturdays at the park, and their dues were always late, and none of them ever did their reading and—”

“So? You sound like an MBA or a sorority sister planning a bake sale.” Something flew at Berg. He jerked his head to the side and it flew past him.

“Shut up,” Amber said. “No, it was just all the lies, all the posing. And I was doing it too. They were lying to themselves, to me, to one another. ‘Yeah, kill that white baby and wave his ass around.’ Could I do it? No, I didn’t think so, and I didn’t think any of the comrades could either. It wasn’t authentic, we didn’t
really
feel that kind of rage. That dead baby didn’t belong to us—it was just a symbol of how everyone was going to be a hero of the revolution one day. So I quit. The party and symbolic thought. Well, the best I could.’’

“And then?”

“And then I met Salmon and he turned me on to primitivism and consensus politics and then after we both dropped out of State we came here and made a platform. I always loved nature, wasn’t one of those boring ‘political vegans’, so it fit. We were both looking for something, Salmon and me, though he was further along of course. It wasn’t horizontal recruitment. Anyway, after the electricity got cut off in his apartment, we took it as a sign—into the woods.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“But mostly with the honesty. I like that.”

“Cool,” Berg said. “So anyway, if we’re not going to fuck, I guess I’ll go fuck some shit up now.”

“Okay,” Amber said. “See ya.”

“Coming?”

“No. I mean, yeah, go ahead. Trash that shit. I don’t want to tonight. That’s what’s freedom all’s about, right?”

Berg and Redwood and Salmon met at Berg’s little lab—Berg had a survival tent covered haphazardly in leafy branches on ground level, a camp stove, and a pair of repurposed saucepans. Other things too. He’d come with them, just the month before. Sometimes it takes a bit for the shell of civilization to slough off, but for now he was allowed his technology provided he put it toward the ends of the movement. With Amber’s gasoline and a few bars of shoplifted soap from a Dollar Tree, Berg prepared the napalm. The little pots made for an okay double boiler. Some water was heated in the lower boiler as Berg shaved the soap. Then, off the stove and onto a rock, quick
quick
before the water cools. The gasoline into the top boiler and then the soap—a 1:1 ratio. A drizzle of gas, a tiny tongue of soap. Stir with a thick twig. Some more gasoline, a handful of soap shavings sprinkled like mozzarella cheese through Berg’s fingers. Stirring and stirring, the liquid grew viscous and thick. Twice more, three potfuls, six Mason jars. Rags dipped in spilled gas. Two jars to a man, held in pockets of military surplus jackets. Salmon had the matches; he kept them in his boot.

They walked to the lip of the highway without a word except for Redwood who said, “Don’t fall down with this shit in your pockets,” and they didn’t. The highway was a target-rich environment. Berg and Salmon took off to the left though Salmon found the first fork onto a service road and walked down it. Redwood to the right. To the Ford dealership, rich with oversized trucks and SUVs. There were some Fusions too, but they’d burn like the rest. To a Starbucks, closed with chairs on the tables. And Redwood, always a bit madder than one should be and taller as well, to a gas station. Shell, those butchers of the Ogoni people, stranglers of the world. An open one, though no cars were at the pumps. Redwood went to the little booth and knocked on the Plexiglas. He had to bend down to make eye contact with the employee, a kid. High school. No stake in the system, even if he didn’t realize it. Redwood had the words FUCK YOU scrawled in oil across his forehead, his cheeks, his nose. There’d be security camera footage and photos, but they wouldn’t be published everywhere at least and the published pics would have to be airbrushed, Photoshopped, and some detail would be lost.

“I’ve got a gun under here,” the kid said. Bored kids are always very interested in potentially getting to shoot somebody.

“You’re going to shoot me for the privilege of staying in a cold plastic box pumping gas for rich bastards for your junk food money?” Redwood asked. “Here, I’ll help you out with that.” A lighter from his left hand pocket, the first jar, an oily rag through the hole in the top from his right, a casual backwards toss and Redwood started running because he heard the crash of broken glass, his long legs taking him out into the road. For kicks, Redwood lit the other rag, threw the second jar behind his back, and ran. Jellied fire spread across two lanes of blacktop faster even than Redwood’s long legs could take him.

In the trees, Amber almost slept to the sounds of helicopters flying low, to the knives of spotlights sweeping through the forest, setting night birds to fly.

When Redwood wasn’t around the next morning, the band decided rather quickly that of course he had been captured by the police and was now being held as a political prisoner in the county lock-up.

“What are we going to do?” Berg asked.