Night of the Animals (40 page)

Once again, the trees seemed slowly to exhale a verdant fog that was itself unspooling and forming a larger, and utterly bizarre,
tree. It was the great, weird Yew of Wyre, beside which many a local witch had tried, secretly, to raise spirits. It had germinated in deepest Worcestershire, thousands of years ago, and now it thundered up and out into the square as summoned. The vapory limbs began spiraling, too, into various half-human forms of the forest and stream—dryads, wodwos, and sylvan sprites, all made of sand-colored basalts and pink feldspars and river pebbles polished to a shine by centuries of inland flow toward the mighty Severn. When any of the Neuters came near the tree's green vapor, they would quiver in place until they melted into puddles of white jelly. Amid it all, Astrid's form emerged, her skin shaggy with lichen, her clothing falling off in tatters, with a set of eyes blacker than a riverbed, and her hair growing into the golden-emerald limbs of a great, tortuous-rooted, ever-spreading tree.

“
Gagoga maga medu,
” she began saying, in a voice more plangent and piercing than her own but hers nonetheless. “
Gagoga maga medu
.”

Then the yew began receding rapidly again, and Astrid felt herself phasing into reality. She fell onto her knees. A new physical sensitivity, neither hot nor cold, began coursing up and down her limbs. It didn't hurt, but it forced her to hold her arms out. It was like unripened electricity, budding from the soil and the leaves, and bleeding green from her palms.

“Please,” she said, moaning. “Please.”

Astrid was naked, too. She climbed back to her feet shakily, forcing herself to take slow, halting breaths. Her pale, teacup-size breasts rose and fell visibly as she steadied herself. There were green patches of sticky sap dappling her skin, and it trickled down from her head and shoulders, past her glistening navel, down the smooth curves of the middle of her back, then all along the ogees formed by her narrow waist as they broadened out to ample, potent hips. An accidental coronet of holly and ivy ringed her sopping head, and
she held a craggy yew stick like a staff. All those in the square who glimpsed her saw an athletic, tall, beautiful woman, emerging like a kind of green Diana birthed from the trees.

Mason Gage, standing slightly back, was spellbound. “Easy,” he said to her, gingerly edging closer. “It's OK.”

She herself felt crushing vulnerability and bitter coldness.

“Oh my God,” she cried, stepping toward the embassy, hands in front of her as if she were blind, balancing the yew stave on her shoulder. “Oh mother Mary. Help me, someone. I'm in Flōt second-withdrawal. Someone.” She could not seem to speak above a whisper. She began waving her hands at the man in the navy blazer.

“Jesus,” said Mason.

She wasn't quite, but she was close.

SULEIMAN HAD NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THE
green woman, but he felt her power and her unruliness keenly, and these things frightened him, and the nudity, well, that created a kind of panic in his brain.

“
Allahu, allahu, allahu
!”
^*
he kept repeating.

Suleiman turned toward the glass doors. He saw the gleaming whites and golds of the chancery's reception area, all pale marble and honey colored. It reminded him of the small, filigreed gilt and ivory jewelry boxes from Oman that one could find in Stone Town on Zanzibar. They were ingenious contraptions made to swallow pieces of sparkling beauty, and they often outshined their contents.

Also in the anteroom, most peculiarly, was a kind of ad hoc bar set upon a table, with fine orbs of Flōt and an arrangement of top-shelf liquors and red-sashed magnums of champagnes, a spread of crackers and brie and Stilton, silver bowls of grapes and figs. He felt ashamed of his disheveled appearance.

Mason stood rapt, watching the naked woman, quite unable to move, rubbing his hands together, partly to dust them off, partly to cope with a rising anxiety. It soon dawned on him that the tree-woman was just Inspector Sullivan, and her twisted face betrayed her own terror, and whatever he thought he saw, must simply not have been real. It couldn't have been, could it?

He finally trotted toward Astrid, sniffing, trying to regain his prepossession.

“Inspector? Sullivan?”

“Not an inspector anymore.”

Mason put his arm around her paternally, tenderly, but she began to shrug it off.

“My skin—it's extra-crazy sensitive. That's not going to help,” she whispered. She looked up into the man's eyes. He seemed kind and strong, and she began to weep with relief. “I'm a recovering Flōter. It's second withdrawal. The Death. Do you know what that means? You can't save me.”

“I don't know what it means, but I guess it means you are in danger,” he said. “I can help get you warm. I can . . .”

“You know,” said Astrid. “If you only did what other primates do for each other, that would be great,” she said. She kissed his cheek. “But thank you, kind sir.”

Suleiman had managed to pull an old Detroit Tigers hoodie from his Ghana Must Go bag, and he and Mason swaddled Astrid in the hoodie, and she accepted this.

“What happened to you?” Mason asked her. “What's going on?”

She said, “I'm afraid I don't know. But I . . . I felt like I—I
feel
like I am here for a reasons that goes way beyond myself. I'll say this, too—I've had king's bulletin Opticalls and black-freqs going off in my eyes like nuts in the last ten minutes. We're . . . in trouble. In Britain. Something's going on . . . a kind of attack.”

Mason motioned toward one of the nearby rank-and-file diplo
matic police officers, while nodding toward Suleiman. He said to the officer, “Make sure this gentleman gets his visa—whatever he wants. He saved my life. He's one of the good guys.
Make sure
.”

Mason glanced inside; the sight of the table of Flōt and champagne and hors d'oeuvres startled and disturbed him. “What the shit?” It snapped him out of the reverie he felt toward Astrid, which was making her uncomfortable.

“Who's having a fucking party in the middle of the night?”

Something newly bewildering was unfolding. The officer Mason had ordered, a tall man with red hair, was being led away by one of the people in white coveralls—a Neuter. The red-haired officer was distraught, and so was Mason. Astrid was holding on to Mason's arm, more from a desire for warmth than fear.

“Hey,” Mason said to the Neuter. “What the hell's this?”

One of the Neuters, smiling broadly, bashed Mason's collarbone with a neural-coshstick, flattening him, taking his breath away.

“Are you ready to go to the comet ship?” the Neuter asked Mason, in an absurdly courteous voice, still grinning numbly.

“Wait!” said the officer, trying to pull away. Mason tried to rise back to his feet, and the Neuter hit him again in the middle of his back, knocking him back down.

“Ah!” he screamed. “You sumbitch.”

Another white-suited Neuter appeared and took the red-haired officer's free arm.

“What did Chief Gage say?” said the officer. “Asshole, stop! Get your fucking hands off me. Who the fuck are you people?”

Before anyone could say another word, the Neuter's jaw was hit so hard, it seemed to move sideways off its hinges. In a single swing of her stave, Astrid dispatched two others and gave the Americans a brief haven.

As Mason got back to his feet, he realized how desperately he had failed in his own sacred duty to protect the embassy. The Neu
ters had somehow infiltrated the chancery, emerging from within. Some of them, it seemed clear, had to have been in the diplomatic security detail.

Now the Neuters, who had come to England to obliterate all animals and to force mass human suicide, who seemed to be replicating themselves by the second, were acting with cruel force, using shoulder-dislocating jerks to haul everyone in the embassy out into the square. They had fanned out across the square and started to invade the rest of central London, surrounding every animal they encountered. There were also new Red Watch frightcopters and a few autonews drones in the sky, too, but the Neuters were shooting them down with a kind of sticky-roped plasmatic harpoon.

Indeed, by this time, all across central London, men, women, and children—aristocrats first—were being dragged out of bed by the Neuters and compelled to return to Grosvenor Square. A nightmaric invasion had begun in earnest, just as the sand cat and the lions had warned St. Cuthbert. With its hundreds of living and frozen gene banks, the last zoo on earth—more Noah's ark than Noah's—would be the supreme, but far from the only, target.

Suleiman was in a daze, but he was incongruously free of fear. He did not understand what was happening. He actually believed the appearance of the Neuters was all part of some eccentric embassy procedure. The naked woman—well, he didn't know
what
to think there. But he felt in her a sign or symbol of good luck or power that he didn't need to grasp. He had always stood little chance of getting the visa, but now that was secure, as this Chief Gage man had said. And Suleiman could not stop grinning. He had barely noticed the attackers; he was still half-focused on the
tembo
. It was still there. Someone needed to trap it now, he thought, smiling. It looked settled and compliant, but exhausted, its trunk hanging limp making tweedling squeaks and low, muculent rumbles. Perhaps someone
could give it some of those crackers he had seen on that intoxicating American table of plenty?

Mason grabbed Suleiman's hand, and Mason's rock-hard grip frightened him, and for the first time, he saw what everyone else did; hundreds of the white-uniformed humanoids were spilling out of the embassy now.

“What is this?” Suleiman said, in a halting English. “Is the embassy . . . is it angry?”

“I don't know,” Astrid said to him. “But it's not good.”

Thousands of London's citizens were pouring into Grosvenor Square, all pushed and prodded by the beings in white.

The cellular artistry of Eero Saarinen's chancery was revealing itself as something, indeed, not of this Earth—it was serving, literally, as hell's, not heaven's “Gate” for the animals.

A great plasmatic quarkbeam suddenly exploded from the roof of the embassy. It curved high above central London. It flowed parallel to the ground for a mile or two, and bent down again, somewhere north, toward the zoo, a plunging finger of doom. It formed a colossal arc of nervous subatomic particles, a sort of white suitcase handle with which Atlas might have picked up the borough of Westminster and hurled it into the stratosphere.

All the rectangular panels of Saarinen's soulless facade immediately were illuminated and began to glow a lurid red. In each of the cells, Astrid could see mammalian silhouettes slowly appear and dissolve. Kudus, tree shrews, frogs, corgi dogs, porpoises—they flickered and were gone. The mammoth, satanic soul-eating machine had started to suck in all the souls of living animals of earth. It was just as the sand cat had warned St. Cuthbert. Here was the device “from outside the desert,” a product of some distant intergalactic malfeasance, switched on like the demon Baphomet's vacuum cleaner.

Some of the white-suited Neuters, meanwhile, had opened long
silver staves that smoothly glided up from their soft pale wrists to deliver powerful quantum contra-fluxal shocks. Then the cultists began to work the staves, like stock prods, blue sparks flying out, jabbing the applicants and CIA agents and analysts and police officers, even some of the autoreporters who had shown up, herding them toward the table with the alcohol. There the shepherded were made to imbibe from blackberry-colored orbs of Flōt. It was dosed, Astrid suspected, with barbiturate. This was how the Heaven's Gate cult killed you. Did they, she wondered, as they murdered you, slip their famous enigmatic $5 bill into your pocket right then, the currency meant perhaps to pay the toll of some intergalactic Charon, thus ensuring a steady stream of souls to their comet world?

The red-haired man was still resisting until he was thrust down and held in place with at least three of the alien stock prods. One of the cult members began to beat and shock him aggressively until he stopped moving, stopped making noise, and when that happened, Astrid felt sure that she was next.

Amid the chaos, the leader of the cult, Marshall Applewhite III, appeared in the door of the lift that the security team had used. He wore the same silvery tunic Astrid had seen him wearing when she watched the telly with Sykes at the Seamen's Rest. It was a ridiculously campy garment one might see on some Venusian high priest from an old science fiction B movie. His tall frame and shaved head would have made him seem menacing, but his large blue fawn eyes, his good posture, his expression of barely repressed merriment, offered a sugared charisma. Astrid could almost see why so many followed him to their deaths. Almost.

“You're freakstyle,” she said. “I must be close to the end now. You are the Flōt withdrawal talking. You're a figment, you are.”

“I'm sorry,” Applewhite said, moving somehow closer to Astrid. “I'm as real as the comet,” he added, pointing toward the sky. “I'm sorry—do not be afraid. You'll see. Everything is
fan
-ta-stic!”

Astrid wanted to shove the creep away from her, but he preempted this by moving himself along.

MOST OF THE PEOPLE
being driven like cattle were only zapped a few times before taking their potion willingly. Applewhite himself was touring the operation like a kind of foreman inspecting the factory floor. He nodded and smiled and patted people on the back in a starchy, awkward way, and even tried to comfort prospective victims, giving quick hugs and laughing. “Exiting isn't death,” he said. “In Level Above Human, you'll all get new, eternal bodies built—and they're so beautiful!—for space travel.” But if those herded and prodded ones did not become pliable, the Neuter soldiers squirted poisoned Flōt or champagne down their throats, sometimes stuffing in a handful of crackers and pills and a fig for good measure. At these ugly scenes Applewhite merely gave an exaggerated pout of sympathy and walked on.

“Let's all be nice,” he said at one point.

Some of the regular embassy personnel queuing at the table didn't appear rankled at all and required no abuse—indeed, they politely waited their turns.

Astrid herself felt the allure of the Flōt and the champagne. She was convinced that little of what she saw before her was really happening. Could a drink or two hurt? It would end the anxieties of the Death in an instant, and as she saw it, end this entire phantasmagoria of a night. Couldn't she just get a sip, a little taste, of some Glenfiddich, and stir in a splash of Flōt, and a bite of cheese, without the downers? She pulled her hair into two thick tails and twisted it into a splayed chignon. The humidity of the chancery had given it waves, and it was as flyaway shiny and distracting as ever.

Marshall Applewhite III glided right in front of Astrid.

“Yes, it's sooooooo OK,” he said, in a sibilant, not unfriendly voice. “We're inside you, after all. We know you. We know about your unhappiness and your loneliness. And all those years of having no one but your mother, and now she's dying of Bruta7, poor dear one, and it's become so hard to believe in anything in . . . in this . . . this dirty
world
of petty kings and animals running amok and people acting like animals. Go ahead—drink away. It's liberating, Astrid.”

Applewhite frowned a little. He showed Astrid a purple orb of Flōt and two shot glasses. She put her hand to her mouth, as if guarding it.

Out in the square, she heard a loudspeaker babbling about King Henry's sins, and the death-groans of neuralpike victims, and the screams of an elephant. She was still without panties or trousers, her muscular legs still dripping with green sticky sap. She felt appallingly exposed but almost beyond embarrassment.

“This corrupt manimal,” said the loudspeaker in a nasally, bloodless tone, “this selfish manimal—this earth-bound manimal—this corrupt manimal—he has—corrupt manimal—he has appealed to Britain's worst nature. Corrupt manimal. Let Harry9 die. Let him be gone with the rest of earth's animals.
Let
him—” and on and on the voice droned. In the distance, Astrid could also just make out a new and alarming sound, both musical and corrosive, like the gold-throated shrieks of hundreds of dragons. Applewhite, too, seemed to hear it, and squinted suspiciously.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, god.”

After a long pause, she said, “But there's St. Cuthbert.” She began shaking her head, taking a few steps back from Applewhite. “He thinks I'm his brother. Or some kind of forest messiah. He says I'm the Christ of Otters.” She turned away from Applewhite. “Cuthbert's crazy, but he means something . . . to me, at least.”