by Gene Stone
“Follow me, Joe.”
The trailers and semis formed an arc just north of the half-risen tents. She led Joe behind the trailers and trucks, circumnavigating the battle under the tents, torn down now not just by giraffes but by the baboons, too, who were depositing humans under the big red tops and then suffocating them with their own nylon.
Nancy and Joe ran along the periphery, using the semis and trailers as cover. The trainers were aiming their guns at the other animals.
A baboon grimaced then fell to the ground, his body blanketing one of the humans he’d killed.
The trainers were the worst of all the humans involved. At least to Nancy. It had been easy to blame the drivers and the workers. But she was determined that the trainers, who talked down to the workers, explaining the animals to them as if only they really knew them, would die. And it had been the trainers who made Edgar disappear one morning when the cold was unbearable.
Amid all the screaming, noise, and panic, Nancy and Joe were able to sneak up behind the trainers, who were focusing on the center of the tents, not the periphery. She almost laughed—when had an elephant ever snuck?
“They’re mostly afraid of the lion and tiger,” Joe whispered, as a large semi blocked them from view.
“Shhh.”
Nancy counted the trainers. Three cars. Two from each car. Each trainer had a gun, and each gun was pointed at the lion, who was tearing into a doughy man who had been setting up a ticket booth.
“We need to catch them off-guard, get them all in one round of attack.”
“Good plan,” Joe said. He glared at the enemy, his odd eyes narrowed. Nancy knew Joe would have proffered those enthusiastic words no matter what she said.
“How do we do that exactly?” Joe asked without moving his visage or opening his eyes.
Nancy wasn’t sure. She did know that they only had one chance. Up until this point, the animals had destroyed the humans easily. But, again, the trainers had guns. All six were hiding behind the opened doors of the black sedans. They were aiming their guns at the animals in the distance. They were firing. Nancy didn’t turn to see if those shots struck their targets. She didn’t want to lose focus on the task at hand.
“How high can you kick?” Nancy asked Joe.
“As high as you need.”
Nancy looked down at Joe. He was still posed, statue-like, ready for battle. She looked down. He posed. She looked. Finally, he let his eyes rotate upward to her.
“I know what to do, Nancy.”
“Good.”
They both took off. Joe’s sprint was a prey’s spring. Drunk with ambition, he was up ahead of Nancy, bouncing, off to the right in one leap, then off to the left on the next. He stumbled, regained his balance.
Nancy wanted to raise her trunk and trumpet as she charged, but she knew better. She wanted to trumpet her pain, the pain of those years chained, but revenge wasn’t a triumphant call to the sky.
Joe reached the first car. The two men were too focused on the animals in front of them to care about, or notice, what was behind them. Joe bucked hard into the first trainer, who lurched forward from the blow, losing the grip on his gun and flinging it forward into a patch of dead grass. The second trainer turned, but Joe had bounced to the right of the open door, swerved backward, and kicked his legs into the trainer’s chin. The trainer winced in pain and dropped his gun. Joe grabbed it with his mouth and tossed it as far as he could with a fling of his neck.
The two trainers on the other side of the black sedan aimed their guns at Joe and unloaded. Joe used the car as a shield. But the humans were coming now, converging on Joe, one around the trunk of the car, one around the hood. Joe panicked. He had thought death didn’t matter. Now, facing it, he thought it did.
The humans were seconds away when he heard Nancy scream, “Move!”
He lunged forward, near to where he’d flung the gun. Nancy ran at full steam over the black sedan and the two trainers. She wasn’t sure if they were dead. She didn’t care. They were at least wounded and disarmed.
The trainers in the other black sedan heard the commotion and aimed their guns at Nancy.
Finally she trumpeted.
She charged and they shot. They were too nervous; they weren’t quick enough, they weren’t accurate. These weren’t warriors. These weren’t soldiers. Nancy was upon them in seconds.
She took out the first man with her girth. The other, crouching to the side of the car, shot Nancy in the leg. She fell and couldn’t rise; her body was strangely contorted, half of it on the crushed car and the other half on the crushed trainer. She couldn’t run. Was this death, she wondered?
Nancy looked at her assassin. She wanted him to be Theresa, her first trainer, but no. It was a nameless man.
He aimed the gun. And just as he fired, the lion jumped in front of Nancy. As the bullet tore through his mane, then his muscled neck, as it passed through that neck and out the other side, the lion ripped through the man’s jugular, blood bursting forth. The lion chewed his final meal. Then he covered his body with his kill and died.
The circus massacre had ended. The dead littered the field. The tents were deflated, torn like flesh. There were very few animal casualties: the baboon, the lion, and two horses. Others were wounded, but no one badly. Once the animals realized there were no circus folk left to kill, they gathered around Nancy. By this time, she’d managed to rise from the ground by sheer will.
“What do we do now?” a zebra asked.
“We’ll figure it out,” Nancy said. The pain was bad. But she forced herself to remember the intense pain that had been used to train her, and knew well what she could survive.
“We should go into town. Kill more of them,” said the remaining baboon. “They killed my friend.”
“I can’t do anything right now, because I can’t walk,” Nancy said calmly.
“I can fix that,” said Joe.
Without asking, he began gnawing on her leg.
“Joe?”
He bore into her leg with his prodding tongue. The other animals watched with curiosity. Joe’s relentless nature paid off again. After a few more minutes, he found what he was looking for.
The bullet gleamed in his teeth, reflecting the bright lights the humans had begun setting up before the battle.
“A flesh wound,” Joe said. “You’ll be fine.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“So we go into town?” the baboon asked again.
“Is everyone accounted for?” Nancy asked. “The living and the dead?”
“Everyone but the tiger. No one can find him. They would have gone after him first,” said one of the giraffes. “He’s a tiger,” she added, and everyone understood.
“I need to rest for the night,” Nancy said. “You all can do whatever you’d like. We’re free animals now.”
“I don’t feel free,” said a small monkey. “I feel hungry and tired.”
“You will feel free in time. It will take time. We should rest.”
The animals agreed. They curled up and, only a short while after a frenzy of killing, they relaxed, and they fell into a deep sleep.
Except Nancy. Unlike the monkey, she did feel free. But she didn’t feel satisfied. She glanced at the foot of the trainer who had killed the lion.
This foot had never been chained.
This body, though dead, had never been beaten by hooks that tore the flesh.
This was far from over, Nancy realized. She would need to do something more than just kill these humans. The beginnings of various ideas, random and hopeful, like the beginning of freedom, excited her. Joe had curled up next to her, his head resting on her wounded leg, and now he bleated softly in his sleep. She soothed him with her trunk. But even as the other animals snored, wheezed, purred, and moaned in their sleep, Nancy’s enormous eyes remained open, looking into the past and the future, hoping that one might make up for the other.
III
PIG
A N E W W O R D
entered 323’s swelling vocabulary. “Death.” A simple word, just one solitary syllable, yet it seemed to be the most important word 323 could fathom, and the worst word, too. Worse even than “human.”
She shook the darkness out of her head and forced herself to rise from the ground. She didn’t have time to think about words. She didn’t have time to think. She needed to organize her mind, and then the other pigs. First, she had to make sure all of them had seen the terrifying sight the ferret had shown her. This meant sending for the few pigs still standing with 789 in the pen. These pigs were glad to leave their old surroundings, having heard the sounds of eating coming from outside, but when they arrived at the burial heap, their happiness dulled. They took their turns treading carefully through the mountain of dead pigs, ears pinned down in some show of primordial respect, their half-closed eyes indicative of the sudden realization that the harrowing scene might have featured any one of them.
“We feel what they felt,” 323 murmured as she rested in the shade.
A large group of pigs were sitting with her. They twisted blades of grass in their mouths and twitched to rid their backsides of horseflies.
“We can’t stand for this,” 323 continued. “We have to do more than walk through this graveyard with somber faces and heavy hearts.”
Other pigs were speaking in the background, concerned only about food or the lack of food, about heat and mud, but no one listened to them. When 323 spoke, the other pigs expected to hear something of import. Their ears perked up, their faces stilled as they gazed straight at her.
“This is why we’re fighting,” 323 said. “If we don’t fight we end up here, torn apart.” She wanted to say more—but no more words formed.
The other pigs nodded agreement. 323 suspected they didn’t understand what she’d said, or what the word “fighting” really meant, but the anger that she felt had settled into the others as well, and they were willing to be her army.
The pigs looked at her expectantly and she struggled to continue her speech. Then two pigs approached from the west. “We smell the food,” one of them said.
“Where?” 323 asked, and the pig pointed her hoof toward a large cylindrical building, three hundred yards away from the walls of the pen.
She could feel the excitement brewing among her compatriots. But the pigs did not run. 323 forbade this. She demanded order. The pigs marched. They dug their hooves into the earth and made their prints known.
The large door to the building was locked, but it wasn’t a match for the relentless energy of dozens of hungry pigs. Within minutes they’d rammed it down and entered the facility. The food was good. It was different. The kernels of corn were whole, not ground up. The oats seemed fresher, more robust. These morsels sat in 323’s belly differently than her normal feed. She didn’t feel the need to eat more than her fill. So she didn’t.
As the rest of the pigs ate within the confines of the silo, 323 sat outside and watched the sun set for the first time. The sight was breathtaking; she understood now why the sun had been one of the first images she was privy to: an orb that rises and descends, that is steady in its properties and has the ability to change, to evolve as the day evolves, to rest when it is time to rest. The sun controlled the day; the sun created the day. As these young thoughts paraded through her mind, she realized that everything she saw outside the pen had not been made by humans. She was learning to discern the difference between humanity and nature. Nature belonged to everyone, but pigs, it seemed, belonged to humans.
She wanted to understand more.
She looked up and silently asked the sun why. But the sun’s only answer was to turn a deeper shade of orange.
After the pigs had finished eating, they began to discuss where they might sleep for the night.
“We can always go back to the pen,” 861 offered.
“No,” 323 said. “We sleep wherever we want. This is our land now. But I for one am not tired. I would like to hunt the humans.”
Some agreed with 323. Others wanted sleep. 323 realized that being a pig did not mean being like other pigs. In the pen, a pig was a pig. Out here, each pig was his or her own being. Or perhaps that had always been the case but they just hadn’t known it.
Some of the pigs found places to lie down, and some of them began walking. They hunted and explored. Though the sun had finally disappeared, 323 kept walking, kept searching. For what, she did not know.
She closed her eyes and pictured the cemetery.
She thought of herself in that pen.
She thought of the food that was shoveled through the slats in the walls.
She thought of the silo with the stockpiled food.
She kept her eyes closed. The evening hadn’t cooled much; the heat was still pervasive, intrusive, liquid. The sun had never really left, she thought. And we are to humans what the grains are to us. Is that all that matters—food? she wondered.
The day was burying itself in night, the cicadas’ hum mellowing to a faint lisp, but now 323 saw the wood-framed house, painted white with blue trim, just beyond the tar drive.
“That must be where they live,” a pig said. 323 didn’t know who said it, but she knew the pig was right.
The group approached the house with a silent reverence. They dropped their heads. They kept their mouths shut.
323 reached the wooden steps that led to the porch. The wood was beginning to rot. She gingerly placed her hoof atop the first step, making sure it could handle her weight. When she deemed it safe, she scurried up the stairs. At the top, she saw a chair with a cushion tied to it, another chair next to it that rocked slightly in the wind. 323 walked toward them, curious. But the commotion of the other pigs caused her to turn around and watch as they scampered up the stairs and filed along the porch, their large pink bodies glowing slightly in the emerging moonlight. Instinctively, many of the pigs sniffed around the floor for the remains of food. They found crumbs everywhere. A waste, 323 thought. Humans ate whenever they wanted to.
“We should go inside,” she said. 323 wanted to see how they lived. She wanted to see the inside of their pens.
Yes, the others said.
They looked at the door and once more prepared to ram it down. They charged, but to their dismay discovered that, just as all pigs are not the same, all doors are not the same. This one gave almost no resistance, and the charging pigs were inside the house before they understood what had happened, piled upon each other in the hallway, struggling to right themselves.
323 walked through the opening as the pigs sorted themselves out. As she smelled the air, it occurred to her that perhaps the ferret had been wrong; perhaps the humans were still here.
“Stop!” Her whisper was as loud as a whisper can be and still retain its name.
The pigs stopped.
“They might be here,” she said.
A couple of the pigs in the back of the pack turned and ran out of the open front door, down the steps, and off into the night, back to the security of the pen.
The rest stayed put. 323 used her snout to guide a few of the braver pigs in different directions, so that they might sniff out any lingering humans.
“Quiet,” she said, though no pig now made a sound. “Unless they spot you. Then be loud. Be very loud.”
She added the word, “Pig.” The pigs lifted their heads a little higher at the sound, fixing looks of determination on their faces, squinting their eyes into focus, then left to search the house.
323 walked into a room that held a large table with chairs arranged around it. Objects that she had never seen before made a strange sense to her. It was as though she could see the humans in the room, using the sofa and reclining chair and cabinets, as if she were watching a movie that was continually playing all around her. This is where they eat, 323 thought. They sit at this table and food comes to them, not through chutes and tunnels. No, they serve each other food, and they sit here, and they eat it.
The food comes from in here, she thought as she wa
lked into a room filled with shiny metal objects. This was where they prepared their meals. She stared at the sharp utensils, the dishes, things that she had never seen before but whose use she quickly comprehended. There’s always food here, she thought, and they eat it all the time.
Then she noticed: fruit. One of the long metal counters supported big bowls of fruit. She could smell fresh apples, plums, pears, and bananas. She eyed it all helplessly. It was out of reach. She looked around. Was there something she could use to jump up onto the counter? There wasn’t.
Was this another trick the humans had decided to play on their pigs? It wasn’t enough that they had killed the other pigs, that they had kept her and the rest of the pigs trapped behind those iron gates and locked doors. Now they had to dangle fruit just out of reach. She imagined herself tasting the tartness of the red apples, feeling the softness of the ripening bananas in her mouth. We deserve these, she found herself thinking. I deserve these.
The sounds of the pigs rummaging upstairs shook her out of her daze. Had they discovered humans? She raised her ears. She wanted the humans to be here, she wanted the pigs to have a chance to charge and attack, to do something other than scavenge and wait and wait longer.
She bent low, readying herself for a charge. But she also watched the fruit, as though it might move, might disappear into the air, as if it might require an attack. Her mouth watered.
She heard nothing alarming. The ferret had been right. The humans had left.
323 knew that staring at the fruit wouldn’t bring it to her. Reluctantly, she left the kitchen and met the other pigs as they began to descend the stairs.
“Empty. And no places to sleep. They have beds, but we can’t get up on them,” 613 said. 613 was smaller and more agile than the other pigs. If she couldn’t jump on the beds, none of them could, 323 thought. “I think it would be best to rest wherever we wish outside, to sleep, then wake up early and make our way to the front.”
The other pigs agreed.
“But what if they come back in the night?” 323 said. “Someone should stay here.”