Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

Malaya cracked her knuckles.

  “About that time Anse calls me into the back bedroom. There’s one of those dog treadmills back there, has a live marsh rabbit in a cage like a lure. Canine tactical vests hanging from the walls. Chains and sleds and weights, like some kind of dungeon gym. Pill bottles, syringes, veterinary tools.”

  She shook her head.

  “We go back to our man on the floor and start asking questions. Asking about the bait and where he got the wolf from and what he knows about anybody on the coast breeding big cats or selling them for their parts. Instead he just keeps telling us he’s got the right to do whatever he wants with his dogs. Breed ’em, pit ’em, bury ’em. Says he’s got dominion over the beasts of the field. DOUGH-min-YAWN. That’s what he says. You can tell this ain’t the first time he’s been pushing this particular piece of rope. He isn’t even hearing our questions, let alone answering them.”

  Lope’s mind flashed to the bloody cuff of Anse’s shirt.

  “What did you do?”

  Anse’s door swung open and he climbed back into the cab, settling himself behind the wheel. He looked at them, one hand smoothing the chest pocket of his shirt.

  “I asked him whether he paid a couple hundred bucks for King Bull and the rest of those poor sons-of-bitches to have their ears battle-cropped by a licensed veterinary professional, or if he used that ear brace and set of shears I found in the back bedroom.”

  The old jockey put the truck in reverse and slung his arm along the back of the seat, revealing the blood on his sleeve.

  “Wrong answer,” he said.

  * * *

  They drove south along the coast, heading home. They were ten minutes out from the gas station when a string of police cruisers came curling around a bend, wailing and flashing between the trees. They blasted past, headed to Tadpole Spit, where they would find the owner of the kennel bound and gagged in a twelve-by-twelve dogfight pit, missing the tip of an earlobe. They hadn’t been able to get a warrant to search the place. Now they wouldn’t need one.

  Anse shrugged.

  “Just a nip,” he said. “Had him a little gold earring he got to keep.”

  Lope looked at Malaya, but she was staring out her window, watching the night roll past. Lost in thought. They jolted over the short bridges of the coastal highway, crossing tidal creeks and salt marshes and the dark mouths of rivers. Now and again, Lope sighted the chain of barrier islands strung along the coast like a blockade. Rumor was, the cage-fighter kept more than wolves on his island. The dogman had heard tell of tigers.

  Lope shook his head and leaned back against the bench seat. He felt wearied, emptied out. Sleep fell over him, slowing his blood. His body grew heavy, his thoughts roved. Soon he was drifting, rising through the roof of the cab and spreading his arms, lifting into the night. He was high over the coast, kiting against the stars, reading the white language of heat across the earth. The pulp and paper mills smoldered from the pines. The barrier islands lay like giant ships anchored just offshore—some dark, some aglow with souls.

  * * *

  Lope woke as the truck rocked down from the highway, crackling across the gravel lot of the sanctuary. He wiped the corner of his mouth and sat up, blinking at the dashboard clock. Past midnight.

  “Was I snoring?”

  “You slept like a babe,” said Anse. He threw a thumb toward Malaya. “That one there was the freight train.”

  She was just coming awake, stretching and yawning in her seat. She grinned.

  “Choo, choo, motherfucker.”

  Anse drove toward the main entrance. The headlights illuminated the roaring mouth of the lion, the long fangs. The visage grew before them, as if they would drive right down the red throat, swallowed whole into the belly of the place. They were nearly to the curb when Anse stabbed the brakes, throwing them hard against their seatbelts. Dust rose before them, whirling from the skidded tires.

  “What?”

  Anse pointed over the wheel.

  There, on the lion’s tongue, lay the glittering wreckage of the entrance doors, the shards of glass gleaming like shattered teeth.

  BOOK V

  CHAPTER 23

  EDEN

  Mosi looks out across the river. Birds stand slender and white from the golden savannah of marsh grass. Seahawks slash from the sky, tearing fish from the water, while alligators bask on the riverbank, heavy with pride. Now and again they bellow across the river, defiant, or slide into the black water to hunt.

  Mosi has sensed other beasts here, too—creatures that remind him of home. Yesterday he heard the hoots of the silver monkey, and the wind has brought him traces of lesser cats, too—lone hunters who rely on speed and stealth. He’s caught the scent of a leopardess—she who snipes her prey from the tall grass and drags her kills into the trees, protecting them from the hyena and wild dog. Mosi has even heard the gut-rumbles of an elephant—the only beast of Eden he would rather avoid.

  Most often he hears the two-footed gait of a man, along with the heavy tread of the machine that carries him. Mosi studied these machines during his time in the iron cage, watching them race along the hard tar of their migratory route, season after season, colliding every so often in a screaming tangle of fire that brought wails and whirling red lights. Mosi relished these clashes, for sometimes they delivered the scent of fresh kill on the wind, fresher than any tasted inside the bars of his cage. He would stand open-jawed, tasting the dream-flesh of deer and men.

  That cage had been the least of his homes. He felt naked beneath the ever-present eyes of men. The gold of his coat felt tarnished, his hide too thin. His mane so heavy he could hardly rise. There was no night in that place, no stars—only the endless glare of white light, which bleached his vision, and he could no longer see the black cloak come curling around the shoulders of the doomed.

  When darkness came, Mosi never expected to be reborn along such a river, in a realm so vast. There are no flashbulbs or iron bars or chattering children here—only the long wall of tangled vines and the woven wire of the fence along the river. The man on the other side of the wall, he’s different from the others Mosi has known. He remains unseen, delivering shanks of bison or cattle at dusk, when Mosi grows hungriest, longing for hoof-flesh. He’s unlike the man they called Winter, who would stand just outside Mosi’s cage—just beyond reach of his claws—and spread his arms to accept the flashes and smiles of his pride. How Mosi longed to slice his round belly and gorge on his entrails, rising red-chinned to roar.

  But this man on the other side of the vine-wall—he’s only a sound, a scent, like the unseen force that springs green shoots of grass from the earth or splinters the sky with light, spearing the parched lands with rain. Like the wind, which asks nothing for delivering the scent of prey to his nose, or the trees, whose leaves feed the antelope he loves.

  Mosi lies at the woven wire of the fence, listening to the whisper and chirp of his new world, the flutter and hum. He hears squirrels scraping along pine bark, doves whistling to flight. The knock-a-knock of a woodpecker. The river lazes beneath him, bright beneath the sun, and now a new scent touches the pink of his nose. His senses come awake, his ears swiveling. His heart floods the coat of muscle that powers his bones.

  There is a deer in these woods, a meal fit for a king.

  * * *

  Horn drove south along the old coastal highway, crossing creeks that jagged darkly through the marshes. The outriggers of shrimp boats swung past, their nets like rotten sails. He passed the hulks of one-story motor inns, gaped windowless and tangled in kudzu, and rotten roadside stands that once sold paper sacks of boiled peanuts and fresh shrimp from Styrofoam coolers. PEENUTS. SRIMP. He passed once-famed fish diners where rats now scurried along the counters, braiding the dust, and warped trailers with cars beached hoodless in their yards. The interstate lay farther inland, where fast-food restaurants and truck stops shone stadium-bright in the dusk, each emblem thrust higher than the next.

  This wild coast seemed to
him a glimpse of the world to come. Horn believed—even hoped—that the First World of Man would collapse. The icecaps were melting, the seas rising, the hurricanes coming harder and faster every year. As if the very earth were spinning faster, hotter, raked with solar flares and radiation. A man on the coast could feel it. He’d ridden out storm after storm, the highways directing eight lanes of traffic inland while hurricanes the size of small nations came wheeling ashore, toppling trees and powerlines, throwing boats into high branches and sucking whole islands into the sea. The storms would not stop, nor the pipelines or pumpjacks or births of sucking mouths. The cities of men would be flooded and choked, their fuel burned up. Their water grown toxic. They would be forced to hide again in caves, afraid of the darkness they’d worked for ages to dispel. They would have to kill to eat. Their fears would no longer be vague illnesses and anxieties—they would have claws and teeth.

  Thousands of lions and tigers and leopards, loosed from their cages, would race like wildfire across the Americas, rewilding the concrete jungles of cityscapes and the long migration paths of superhighways, hunting the children of men. They would interbreed in the wild, spawning whole new bloodlines of apex cats. Thousand-pound hybrids, mighty as the saber-tooth cats of prehistory. Already the grizzly bear was moving north with the melting ice, breeding with the polar bear, springing white-coated giants with brown paws. Grolars. Meanwhile the eastern wolf, decimated by overhunting, was mating with the western coyote. Coywolves and woyotes were spreading fast across North America, migrating along railroad tracks and greenways, filtering their way into suburbs and city parks. Living among man. The narwhal and beluga were coupling, too. Various species of seals. The continents were shrinking, the seas lapping higher and warmer at their shores.

  Horn shook his head. He would be in the high mountains of the West, far from flooded coasts and urban tragedies. Alone against the cataclysms of an ending age. He would be with his pack, his wolves safe beneath the strength of their alpha. His ties to men finally cut. His transformation complete.

  * * *

  Mosi feels the moonlight slinking over the vast country of his body, the craggy mountains of his shoulders and the sharp ridge of his spine, the golden steppes of his sides. He is but a whisper through the pines now, despite his size. He has circled the deer, trapping her against the river. The night silences itself before his presence. The opossums and raccoons stand motionless, watching the beast cruise past them, and the barred owl no longer hoots. Even the frogs fall silent, sensing his presence through the thin tympana of their skin.

  Mosi aligns himself behind the trunk of an old pine, arrowing his body toward his prey. The deer, if she looked, would only see one of his eyes edging from behind the tree, floating in the black shadow of his mane. The moonlight falls broken through the overhanging branches, the silver shards of light magnified beneath his gaze. Burning. A vast twilight. The leaves float purple before him, trembling, and Mosi stalks closer, closer, his spine snaking soundless through the brush.

  He watches from across a palmetto thicket. She is a whitetail doe, alone, tawny and delicate. She dips her head, eating some leafy thing. He sees her nose so black and small, the pink dart of her tongue. The squirm of her chewing mouth. He studies her high haunches and tapered legs and the fine black hooves that bounce her weightless across the earth. Her high ears, big as little wings, and her pale underbelly, as if she’s lain in snow. Her eyes, so round and unknowing.

  Mosi’s mouth hangs open. His breath burns across his tongue. His blood is alive, risen hard and angular beneath his hide. He has never wanted something so much in his life. He will snap her neck between his jaws, snuffing the light from her eyes, then tear her limb from limb, burying his face in the hot gore of her belly. He will consume her, heart and bone, leaving nothing for the worms and crows. Now she lifts her head, alert, and Mosi sees a pair of shadow-antlers rise gnarled and spiked from the smooth cast of her skull. A black crown of death.

  He pounces.

  * * *

  Horn drove through a dark canyon of pines. His van was from the 1980s, outfitted with four-wheel drive and heavy tires and a three-hundred-channel police scanner mounted under the dashboard. The rear seats were gone, replaced with a wildlife litter that could be winched into the cargo hold. A built-in locker held heavy leather gauntlets and telescoping capture nooses, dart guns and ampules of sedative stolen from rural veterinary clinics.

  The moon had risen skull-bright from the trees, waxing, and Horn could feel the swell of power, the rising of blood. Beasts would soon be waking across the land, chewing through leashes or ripping off neckties. Emergency room nurses would dread their shifts. Children, unable to sleep, would notice strange silver gleams in the eyes of their stuffed animals, and wives would find their husbands in the garage, sharpening lawn shears or cleaning their grandfather’s guns.

  Lunacy. The mad blood stirring beneath the moon.

  Horn’s wolves would be as ravening demons, howling in their cages, and he would long to howl beside them. Surely his ancestors had squatted in the high branches of giant trees, clad in animal skins, and jabbed their spears at the moon, howling with the dire wolves.

  The silver light crept up his arms, revealing the bandage taped over one forearm. The work of Onyx, his beta wolf, who’d struck for dominance that morning. It was just past dawn and Horn was feeding his pack fresh strips of venison from a roadkilled deer. For days, the beta wolf had been watching him sidewise, reading his master for any sign of weakness. Any limp or favored joint. Any show of fear. Horn didn’t blame him. He loved Onyx for the black dart of his spirit, ever testing the world, seeing what might bleed. Still, Horn’s love was hard.

  The wolves had whirled about him that morning, waiting to be fed. A dark whirlwind of desire. Onyx was among them, smile-mouthed as any, and this was his mistake. So often the beta wolf stood apart, waiting, as if fighting for food were beneath him. Horn held out a red rag of backstrap, the tenderest of cuts. He knew what was coming. The wolf lunged not for the meat but his master’s throat.

  Horn reacted without thought, his instincts honed for years in dojos and cages. He thrust his forearm into the flying jaws of the wolf and fell neatly onto his back, pulling the animal into the trap of his open knees. He wrapped his legs around the wolf’s torso, cross-hooking his feet. They lay this way a long moment, chest to chest, like mates or lovers. Then Horn torqued the wolf squealing to the ground and rolled on top of him, reversing position, pinning the beast belly up, his free arm driven hard against its throat. There they lay, man over wolf, the beast’s breath coming wet and ragged. Horn stared into the fierce gold of the creature’s eyes, unblinking, crushing the wind from his throat. His veins stood quivering over the hard burls and ridges of his body. The words on his skin shone with sweat.

  Arch type of ravin.

  Six hundred pounds of sin.

  Beast of waste and desolation.

  He would stare down the beast until it yielded, or else. Slowly, the fierce sparks in the creature’s eyes began to dull, even soften, the life dying out in those dark worlds, death rolling in like a fog. The other wolves stood in a ring, watching, their tongues hanging red. Some whined with anxiety or growled, as if urging one champion or the other. Onyx’s eyes were white-rimmed with fear now, but he did not let up. His jaws were locked, his lungs choked with death-fire. His hind legs scrabbled uselessly at the man’s rump, his paws unable to gain purchase or leverage. Horn gave no words of encouragement. He simply stared, spearing his dominance into the yellow eyes. If the animal could not live as beta of the pack, it would die.

  Horn saw the shift in the wolf’s eyes, the precise instant of release. They broke from their spell of power, the pupils widening, like tunnels accepting light. They diffused into a haze of submission, even love. The animal’s body went slack, as if releasing its spirit, and Horn watched the teeth unsheathe from his flesh, his arm bubbling with blood.

  If the wolf were a man, it would live under the shame of
defeat. Not the wolf. Onyx began licking the wounds of his god, which his own teeth had made.

  * * *

  Horn cut the headlights five hundred yards short of the sanctuary and killed the engine, letting the van coast between the trees. He’d been watching the place for weeks—glassing the property from the high branches of neighboring trees, noting the workings of the place, recording the habits of the animals and their keepers. He’d even installed cellular trail cams at various points, which tracked the comings and goings of the staff.

  The van slowed to a crawl and the tires crackled into the gravel and Horn wheeled the machine into a lightless corner of the lot. The owner’s truck was gone, as he knew it would be. The jaws of the place yawned wide in the night, the lion’s fangs waiting. Horn slung his pack over one shoulder and headed for the throat.

  * * *

  Mosi lies at the fence along the river, feasting. The doe is spread flimsy-necked before him, one black eye reflecting the stars. Her long legs are crisscrossed to one side.

  She went rigid when he pounced, too startled to flee. Mosi sank his teeth into her neck and slung her to the ground, crushing her throat. He’s torn away swathes of her silver-brown hide, revealing the red luster of her meat. Now he buries his face between her ribs. Her blood, still hot, covers his cheeks and chin and tongue. Her bones crack between his teeth. He looks across the river, where the alligators and seahawks must watch him eat.

  He is king.

  Mosi bends again to his meal, scraping a thigh bone with the pink rasp of his tongue. It gleams beneath him, slick and white. The wind moves through the trees, purring through the needles and fronds. A new scent comes skulking beneath his nose. A creature sharp-shouldered, ravenous.

  Mosi’s nostrils flare.