Night of the Animals (26 page)

The group of louts headed toward the stairway that led up to the railway platforms with angular panels of frosted glass and steel supports; they were slapping each other and jumping and laughing,
like a pack of plump, pink terriers yanking against their leash to get out the door. They were off to what was left of the West End club scene. Tom began watching them quizzically.

“I'm not like those lot,” said Tom, pointing at the jack-the-lads. “And you're not, either. We're weaker than that. And that's what makes us able to survive.” He seemed abstracted for a moment. “I don't want to ‘take your inventory,'” he said, referring to an FA phrase meaning, roughly, unbidden moral examination, “but, Astrid, I think you're close, you're
too close,
to the Flōt again.”

Astrid winced at Tom's words. They seemed bottomless in their paternalism—and she couldn't get beyond that.

“Oh, piss off!” she said. “You old fucking sot.”

There were DLR passengers coming down the steps now, and a few slowed down and glanced at Astrid. Rather than looking embarrassed or hurt, Tom appeared interested. He smiled gently. “I'm sorry, Astrid. I've put a spanner in the works all right.” He backed away even more, giving Astrid a full two or three meters of breathing space. “Let it out, Astrid, let it out. This is good.”

Astrid said, almost spitting, “I've got work to do.”

Tom rubbed his hands together. He gave a tight, overwrought smile of sympathy, showing his dark teeth. He said, “Yes, but let's talk later, right?”

Astrid said nothing, and Tom turned away. Tom's smile had collapsed, and he hunched over as he walked in a way Astrid had never seen before.

Tom stopped across the street, and with a nervous grin shouted an FA slogan: “Don't leave five minutes before the miracle!”

Astrid frowned and stood there. She had heard the expression for eleven years. But it wasn't enough any longer. “Where's my miracle?” she asked herself. She felt as if she wanted to smash herself in the face.

The sky was slightly darker on this older side of London, despite
the old skyscrapers and glimmering wine bars above the Thames's water-condos, and you could see a few stars. The comet was supposed to be quite visible in the wee hours of the night, Astrid had heard. She wouldn't mind seeing it, not at all. It wouldn't be coming back, after all, until the forty-fourth century
A.D.
, it was said, and by then England might be gone.

After a few seconds, she saw, to the east, a white splotch with a kind of smear beside it, but it didn't impress her much, such was the city's light pollution. Very strange, thought Astrid, if that's it—like a celestial mistake. It was as if an old pencil rubber had been taken to a dark, glossy magazine page in a careless way, leaving a straggling blemish. Nothing special there, she thought. Maybe you had to be somewhere else in the world to see the comet truly, somewhere like California.

Astrid stayed where she was for a while, feeling righteous and cold and drowning in anger. She watched Tom walk across the street to a Tesco mini-grocery that had a few petrol pumps out front. Through the windows she could see Tom grab a blue handbasket and go to the little produce section. Tom lifted up a bunch of bananas and put them into his basket. A dark-haired store clerk who was arranging cantaloupes started pointing at Tom and telling him something and Tom looked befuddled. The clerk looked irate. Is this what happens? Astrid wondered. You stay sober for years and end up not being able to manage bananas? She did not want this life any longer.

She said aloud, “Tom, I am sorry, Tom.”

ASTRID SCAMPERED UP THE WHITE, REINFORCED
cement stairs of her building. She owned an older ex-council flat in Haggerston, on a little street between the Regent's Canal and a pocket park.

She wanted to put her kit on before venturing to the zoo, and Haggerston was more or less on the way west from the Isle of Dogs. Even if the constabulary's responsibility code let her wear civvies for off-hours emergencies, she took comfort in the potent ornaments of the uniform. She scrabbled the locks open, pushed the door wide, and flipped on a powerful, standing twin-uplighter. She had nipped a couple three-boson color-charge bulbs into the lamp—Astrid liked things very bright. She felt safe in the bland room, a kind of safety she would rarely allow any guest to invade; even her closest friends in FA were kept away from her flat.

Astrid ran into her bedroom, the site of so much sexual frustration and insomnia, and didn't bother closing the flat's main door. Her bed, with its duvet cover and pillowcases of multicolored harlequin diamonds, was made as tidily and tight as a birthday box.

A private taxiglider, or cabcab, as they were called, was still idling outside with its “path-manager” onboard. (Path-managers usually controlled several satellite cabcabs at once while driving “control” cabcabs themselves capable of transporting passengers.)

Astrid's bedroom, crassly lit, also reeking of paint solvents, possessed none of the contemporary furniture of the sitting room. There was the old pine double bed with large blond posts and a battered oak dresser she'd had since she was fifteen. On the dresser was a small shrine of fotolives of her mum, mostly as a child, and her old five-decade rosary, curled and dead as a crushed snake. She picked it up, rubbed a pearl a few times, and slipped it into her pocket.

She opened her closet to a neat array of pressed, white regulation shirts, each still in its plastic sleeve from the cleaner's. She chose one randomly and carefully slipped the shirt out of the plastic protector. I'm going too slow, she said to herself. Too slow! She began to strip as fast as she could then, kicking her shoes and trousers off, hopping around on one leg. She changed into a more comfortable, M&S “living support” bra (its cultured bio-fibers gently tightened with exertion or softened with rest). She jerked her police uniform on in less than a minute and gave herself a quick look. She often felt vulnerable before the mirror, but not now. She raised her heavy, dark brows and smiled sympathetically, as if trying to encourage someone trying something new without a hope of pulling it off.

Shoes! She sat on her bed and tugged on an old but still polished pair of black service shoes. She brushed a few filaments of lint off her black trousers. She set her women's police trilby on her head and then took it off—being an inspector gave her the privilege of not needing to wear it. She brushed her long black hair and put it back in its tie. Then she put her silly trilby back on, feeling a fool. During regular hours, outside the office she was supposed to wear a protec
tive vest with Kevlar4 inserts, but like other officers, she kept hers at the “ranch,” which is what her colleagues called the RPC police station in Old Police House at Hyde Park. She put on a slick black jacket and stood at attention.

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.

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 wish 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.