Night of the Animals (27 page)

WHEN ASTRID GOT TO PC ATWELL, THE YOUNGER
constable hesitated a bit before switching off the pandaglider's imagiglass windows. This peeved Astrid, a little more than it ought.

“Come on, Atwell. We haven't all bloody night, have we?”

Astrid knew she was being cruel and highhanded, especially since she'd so delayed responding to the initial orange-freq, but there was a prowling anger in her again after the brief respite in the cab. Cigarette smoke and the scent of crushed almonds poured from the pandaglider. Atwell wore a dazed expression that suggested to Astrid she'd had a tough time waiting alone. A sheen of perspiration covered her forehead. Atwell didn't say anything, and she wouldn't look at Astrid. She merely held her arms crossed, rubbing them as if cold.

“Didn't you see us? Behind you?
Smoking,
Atwell?”

“I know,” said Atwell. “I just, I—”

“I saw your little jackal dogs,” Astrid interjected. “You called them in?”

“Yes, ma'am. At least half a dozen different units, on their way.”
The younger constable leaned forward in her seat for a moment, took a deep, fretful breath.

“Jesus, I'm sorry, Atwell. I am sorry. I'm . . . well, I've been. Things aren't good. You all right?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She found herself feeling worried about Atwell, and about her own apparent incapacity to help. She wondered whether one of the new viruses might have Atwell.

“You'd said there were some people about, too, right?” asked Astrid. “They're always the most difficult animals, aren't they?”

“Yes, some autoreporters—I've left them alone, ma'am.” Atwell was finally looking up at her. There remained an odd languor in how she moved, with liquidy arms and a heavy-necked torpor, and she coughed a few times.

“Are you ill?”

“Maybe,” said Atwell.

She wondered whether Atwell herself might be Flōting, though she didn't have quite the right signs of that.

Atwell said, “Two souls—inside the autonewsmedia glider-truck.”

“Good. They're safe in there.” Astrid stood on tiptoes for a moment and peered across the glider's roof. Powerful limbs of plane trees, festooned with bunches of white blossoms, bowered the area where she and the constable spoke. Distant city lights twinkled through the branches. “I would have thought you've done just about all you can. All right?”

“Yes, ma'am. I do hope. And there was that strange man I mentioned.” She hacked in a wheezy cough again; she was careful to turn away and cover her mouth. “But I—I had to decide on my own what to do—and I decided not to give chase.”

“Never,” said Astrid. “That wouldn't have been too clever, I would've thought.”

“That's what I thought.”

Astrid asked, “What did this . . . this funny chap . . . what did he look like?”

“I don't know. It was dark, ma'am. Like a crazy man. A long face. He had ginger hair sticking up all over, like his head was going in twenty different directions at once.”

“These rough-sleepers,” said Astrid, “and I don't say this in judgment, but they can be quite, well, tricky, god bless 'em. Trust me—this man's OK, as much as any Indigent can be these days. And the jackals—the fact is, they seem
,
PC Atwell, . . . they're
small
. We'll sort this.”

Atwell, taking a breath, looked as if she wanted to interrupt Astrid, whose patronizing tone had made things awkward.

“The man,” said Atwell, “he was quite distressed. Really, ma'am, I don't think he was sleeping rough. Like I said before, he says his mother's in—”

“Yes, his mother. I heard you the first time.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

There was a hesitation, and then Atwell looked straight at Astrid. “Guv . . . it's not my place to say, but we all admire you, guv. What's the matter? What's got you? You seem . . . frustrated. We're on the same team, yeah? And I really like you. What's wrong?”

Astrid began working her mouth, slowly. Her lips were quivering a bit, but no words came out. After a few more seconds, she said, in a husky whisper: “I can't say.” She couldn't very well list the litany of second withdrawal's horrors to the officer she supervised.

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.”