Night of the Animals (37 page)

“See, Cuthbert,” said Astrid. “We're all here to get you help.”

“Cuddy, oh,” said Dr. Bajwa. “I was so worried.” He leaned toward St. Cuthbert, who moved closer to the ledge above the lion pit.

“Lad, please. Can we move away from the edge a bit? Are you all right? You've been hurt. There's blood. On your face, Cuddy. Looks like you've been in the wars.”

St. Cuthbert nodded, but he didn't betray any real appreciation of the words. He said, “Baj—here he is—Drystan. I tell you, this constable woman. She's Drystan.”

“Yes,” said the doctor, humoring him. “You must listen to me, Cuddy.
Listen
: that NHS psychiatrist who tested you . . . Dr. Reece? His recommendations have all been rescinded. He was bloody overruled somehow.” He squinted at St. Cuthbert, as if waiting for a reaction. “I don't know why. It's unusual. But it means . . . it means, it
means
you can go back to your flat.”

The doctor looked around, as though fearful of a tiger springing down from a tree. “After this, er, incident has been cleared up. You can live at home. And come see me. You don't need to run, Cuddy. You don't need to be afraid.”

“But I'm not afraid,” said St. Cuthbert. “Not one little bit. Not for meself, anyway.” It wasn't quite the truth. He feared death, and he feared Flōt withdrawal, but he feared more the annihilation of all he held dear.

St. Cuthbert turned and said to the inspector: “We and those who know must stop the Neuters. They're already mixed in with us. I've seen a few in the zoo. The lions and the otters say I must make a sacrifice. For the souls of all animals. Or the Neuters will have them.”

“The who?” she asked. She shrugged toward Dr. Bajwa, and he shook his head.

“What's this ‘Neuters,' Cuddy?” The doctor smiled cordially. “What do you mean by that? When did that start?”

“The invaders—from outer space. The Luciferians. The animals 'av warned me all about them. They are opening a giant Gate to death. The lions understand. And there's a little sand cat around here. He understands, too.” He pointed his thumb toward Astrid. “And Drystan does.”

There was a long silence. Astrid motioned with her hand for the camouflaged men with hovering neuralzingers to stay back.

Dr. Bajwa finally said, “Cuddy. Come with me. I will take you to hospital. You need to be seen to, my friend. At the very least, we need to get away from here. The animals, they're everywhere, they said. You could be hurt. Please, my friend. I care about you, my friend.”

“It's good advice,” said Astrid.

“I don't understand,” said St. Cuthbert, pursing his lips. “You talk as if you don't know a single
thing
about the Luciferian plan—
thay
aim to do in all the animals on earth. You're the one we've all been waiting for.”

The officer and the physician shook their heads, wearing a similar pitying expression.

“It's the Flōt, Cuthbert,” said Dr. Bajwa. “You've got hallucinosis, my friend. We can get help—at the hospital. We don't hear lions speaking with words. We don't hear otters. We don't hear little cats. We're not
awaiting
anyone. All we hear is a man desperately in need of looking after. A man almost destroyed by Flōt.”

“Flōt.”

“Yes, Flōt. It makes you see things.”

Astrid said, “But, Cuthbert. I know this will sound unbeliev
able. But I care about you. I don't even . . . well, I think I may know why.” She smiled, but sourly, shaking her head in tight little wiggles. “Or not. A
bit
why. Maybe? But you've . . . you've drawn me here tonight. And I . . . I
want
to believe you. And I want to help you.”

Cuthbert felt his heart begin to gallop unevenly, and a vise-like pain shot up his chest. He looked up in the sky. There was the comet.

“The co-co-comet,” he said, in a daze. “Thar's a spaceship in there. Hidden.”

Again, the officer and Dr. Bajwa looked at one another. From above, one of the Red Watch's frightcopters trained its spot beams on St. Cuthbert and Astrid.

There was a voice from above:
You are commanded by the Yeoman of His Majesty the King to remain where you are.

Astrid waved her hand, as if trying to swat midges away from her face.

“Cuthbert,” said Astrid. “Our time's running out. You know, I came here tonight, and now I've lost everything, but I wouldn't change it. You see, I don't know who you are, but I knew I had to find you. I
look
like you. Anyone would see that. And I wonder if I think like you? And feel like you? I'm a Flōt sot, too, and I'm in
second
withdrawal, and you know there aren't many of us, and the statistics for me are bleak, but I am here. I think, Mr. Handley, I think you
could
be my granddaddy. Maybe.”

St. Cuthbert gasped. “Yow? How can that be?” He stood tottering on the edge of the enclosure, knotting his fingers. “It's impossible.
Sullivan?
Irish? You're bold and brave, Inspector. Irish blood and English heart?”

“Oh, far better than that,” she said. “Are you from the Black Country? And your family's from the Marches?”

St. Cuthbert nodded.

“Did you know a barmaid from Bermondsey? And you spent a night? A long, long time ago?”

The bits about the Marches and the Black Country made sense, but the rest was entirely foreign to St. Cuthbert. He never knew any barmaid from Bermondsey, at least not one he could remember.

“Do you see someone in me?” Drystan asked. “Someone else, too?”

But St. Cuthbert needed no further proof of a connection than to stare into the dark eyes of this woman, at something far deeper than genes. Her questions felt like a sweet vine pulling through him, even if, in his mind if not his heart, it kept hitting snags. She was, surely, looking through the same strong eyes he hadn't seen since his gran Winefride Handley lived so long ago. And that meant there was another human being in Britain who would, one day, be able to speak animal. She would possess the Wonderments. She was a he was a she. She
was
Drystan. She
was
the Christ of Otters. St. Cuddy no longer would have to carry the burden himself. He was beautifully, perfectly, finally sacrificable.

A hot streak of Red Watchmen was now spidering down from their dark, hovering scarlet frightcopter on black nylonite ropes. When they touched down, they gathered themselves for a few moments, folding and unfolding their arms in arthropodal jerks.

Astrid, Baj, and the other officers watched anxiously as the ropes retracted like hissing black asps. The frightcopter remained rigidly in place, about forty feet up, its solar-electric engines thrumming in near-silence. Looking over his shoulder, St. Cuthbert leaned over the edge of the lion enclosure, peering down into the moat.

“Move back from there, Cuthbert,” said the doctor. “Please, Cuddy.”

The Watchmen—there were three of them—extended their extra-long golden neuralpikes. One of them cracked open a black
nerve-bar instant prison at their landing site. The other two Watchmen began to stomp toward Astrid and Baj, their pair of pikes jutting ahead of them, the tips charging with red glows. The pair together were a single massive satanic head, swaying forward and back with ox-like unstoppability. They seemed to know exactly what—or who—they wanted—and only Astrid and a GP with lung cancer stood between them and their quarry.

“Cuthbert, run,” said Astrid. “Get out of here.”

“I won't,” he said, smiling sadly. “I can't.”

These were no ordinary Watchmen, Astrid fearfully realized. Suicide cultists and street-rousing republicans were generally left to the regular Watch. These Watchmen belonged to a special new unit, the Scots Coldstream Aristocratic Regiment, or SCARE. They were deployed for high-level political or strategic-level hits when Harry9 wanted to make a special, showy example. They wore the red and gold House of Windsor mantles of the regular Watch as well as the glossy scarlet body armor associated with the king's own Yeoman Protection Command. SCARE's distinctive, bulbous mantis-eyed helms hid their faces.

“Cuthbert Handley and Astrid Sullivan,” said one of the approaching Watchmen, warning through a fuzzy speaker. “You are both hereby placed under the custody of His Majesty and you—”

“Just croak that cunt,” said the other.

St. Cuthbert swung one of his legs over the relatively low enclosure wall. The moat below, between the wall and the exhibit area, was the chief barrier between visitors and the lions. The saint sat upon the wall like a novice skier, leaning forward a bit for balance, trying to hold the wall between the palms of his hands. He kept glancing between the Watchmen and the lions down in the enclosure.

“Cuthbert! No!” cried Bajwa.

The Met officers and firearms specialists, still in TotalCamou, backed away ominously, a set of receding floating guns, and Astrid
knew she was in gravest danger. The other Royal Parks constables, some of whom Astrid knew well—fat Jenkins and young Hopper and the jokester Sergeant Raheem—seemed either confused or paralyzed with fear. They remained rooted along the bushes.

The doctor, instinctively, had dropped to all fours. He was a picture of appalling befuddlement, crawling toward his wayward patient, then stopping, looking back like an impatient pony, and cantering back toward Astrid.

No one, not even registered law enforcement, took stands against the Watch, and its SCARE units possessed an especially fearsome reputation for outrages against civil decency. Their favorite quarry were British republicans and followers of Anonymous UK, and their pop-up prisons ended up securing the bodies of “terrorists” as often as live prisoners. Indeed, anyone they killed was, ipso facto, a terrorist.

“Behind me,” Astrid said to the doctor, struggling to get herself in front of both the doctor and Cuthbert. She plunged her hand into her trouser pocket. She clutched her neuralzinger. Still loaded with nonlethal gangliatoxic rounds, she remembered.

Before Astrid expected, one of the Watchmen hurled himself forward. He stabbed out at her with his pike's searing red tip, stretching his arm so far he became unbalanced. The pike hit the pavement beside her foot with a chittering
zhe-zheeng!
A fist-size divot of pavement concrete spurted up. The missile hit one of the sheepish Met officers in the knee, and he fell hard, moaning.

“It begins,” said St. Cuthbert. “It begins.”

Astrid stepped back. She knew now that the Watchmen were trying to kill her—to kill them all, probably. She drew her neuralzinger, gripping it tentatively with just her one hand.

“Please. Move back,” she said to the Watchmen. “Please.
Please.
Let's all kotch a bit.”

But then her pistol went off. It kicked back and up, almost flying from her hand. She'd pulled the trigger all right, but it hardly felt willed. The living gangliatoxin's visible gray net grew as wide as a shark's mouth before hitting its target. It stuck to the one Watchman's armor, a dull shroud now silvering with white sparkles. There was a second's pause, and everyone assembled stood dumbly, petrified; then the victim staggered over in mortal agony. He screeched through his helmet's speaker as his brain opened millions of pain receptors.

“Jesus fuck,” cried Bajwa. “Inspector, you didn't have to—”

“You fooking bitch!” shouted the other Watchman with a neuralpike. “Now you're dead, you slag.”

The frightcopter, humming above, descended abruptly. It thudded upon the pavement, its feathery rotor blades folding up and inward. When this happened, the other Watchman with a pike, and the one still fussing with his pop-up prison, retreated a few steps toward the compacted frightcopter, which sat like an enormous black scarab, ticking with heat, its two giant neural cannons slowly gliding toward Astrid. It presented an implacable, story-ending foe, and Astrid knew it.

“Listen! I'm sorry!” she hollered. She crouched down, pulling the doctor to the pavement. “Get down,” she whispered to Bajwa. “Down! Crawl toward the copter!” She did feel sorry; hurting anyone felt repugnant to her, but she also needed to stall them. “I didn't mean . . . I didn't . . .”

Astrid motioned to St. Cuthbert and the other constables and Met officers. “Get down!” She glared at the frightcopter with steely anger.

But now the other SCARE pikeman, bolstered by Astrid's proximity, was barreling heedlessly toward her and the doctor, his weapon's tip fully charged. This time, a hunkered Astrid held her
neuralzinger with both hands, like the trainer she was, and took down the pikeman.

The Met officers, who had switched off their TotalCamou for safety, began scampering toward Astrid and Bajwa, too. The parks constables started to make more tentative, parallel moves on St. Cuthbert.

“She's bloody off her chump!” one of the Met officers screamed. “I tell you, she'll kill us all!”

There was a shrill
zhinging!
sound as the grounded frightcopter fired its neural cannons. First, for a fraction of a second, white tracer laser-lines landed on St. Cuthbert and just above Astrid's head.

“No!” screamed the doctor.

Then, two darkening fat columns of air, wide as smokestacks, puffed out all along the laser-line guides and turned into the equivalent of million-tubed synaptic extruders. The deadly columns of swirling gray-black plasmas swiped back and forth like windscreen wipers and at once shrank off.

As Astrid had calculated, the shots ranged safely above their heads, but instantly and silently, they had liquefied the brains of all the Met officers and parks constables around the lion enclosure. She and Bajwa watched in horror as the men's eyes turned into orange sockets even as they timbered to the ground.

The last Watchman scrambled into the eight-by-eight-foot pop-up prison, which he was now treating as a spur-of-the-moment fortress, or at least a kind of safe room.