Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  Here hell began, and therefore anything she and the other Ark members could do to stop this evil business would be worthwhile. Campbell assured them that representatives of the media were on their way. But as yet, at the assembly point outside the Ark, there were only people she knew: Pinto, Zebra, Minnie, Pablo and Perdita. Much to her surprise, Horace had shown up. In his velour jacket with its tight little hood, he looked more wizened and malign than ever. His tongue had lost none of its acidity.

  “What!” he exclaimed on arrival. “No Harrier or Lupo? Have our aging Alpinists defected? Don’t tell me. They had a prior pressing engagement. They’re off stomping the northern tundra, feeding starving caribou by hand. Or down on their dear old arthritic knees praying for the survival of Icelandic whales. My, my. However will we manage without their electrifying presence . . .?”

  “Shut it, Horace,” Zebra exclaimed. “They’re old, for crying out loud.”

  “I had noticed that, fetish boy. But doddering might be a more accurate description, don’t you think? And have any of you noticed that Harriet is starting to smell just a little bit rank? Incontinence can be such a problem at her age.”

  “You’re disgusting, Horace! You’re a sick little . . .” Zebra rounded on him.

  Agnes began to fear there would be a fight.

  “Guys!” Minnie glared at both men. “Just drop the adolescent crap, okay? This is a mission, right? Remember why we’re here and let’s behave like adults, for God’s sake.”

  “Mission!” Horace guffawed.

  His defining cynicism seemed today more offensive than ever. Agnes felt her skin prickling in revulsion at the back of her neck and down her forearms and shins. Why did he have to demean everything and everyone?

  “What’s that, Missy Agnes? Lo! She speaks! A rare occurrence indeed. And did you say ‘demean’, Missy?”

  Agnes flushed. Had she really spoken her thought out loud? Was she so keyed up she’d been unaware of doing so?

  “Au contraire, Missy Agnes. I am the only one here who grasps the meaning. I am your group’s reality check. Face the facts, kids. This isn’t a mission. It’s an escapade. It’s self-regarding, self-indulgent folly. So why don’t you all put down the silly crusading guise and toddle back into the Ark before one of you gets hurt?” Horace had raised his voice and was looking pointedly at Kit.

  “But it is a crusade, Horace,” Agnes piped up. “Why can’t you see that? Even one act of defiance . . .”

  “Stop right there, Missy, because your thinking is muddled. And haven’t you been indulging in extracurricular activities lately that may have gravely undermined your ratiocinative powers? In fact, utterly screwed them up, one might say. That’s S-C-R . . .”

  “Leave her alone, Horace!” Pinto interposed his great bulk between Agnes and the acerbic little man.

  This intercession annoyed her because she felt she was capable of dealing with Horace’s rudeness herself; on the other hand, she was glad to have Pinto’s massive back obscuring her face, which must be blanched by paranoid worry. Screwed. Horace had definitely said screwed. But how could he know? Or was he simply cunning or clever enough to have guessed? Horace’s unfailing devotion to Kit might well have given him some kind of super-sensory power. There was probably never a moment in his existence when his niece (or was she his half-niece?) was not foremost in his thoughts.

  Indeed, as Pinto stepped aside, Agnes saw Horace’s eyes fixed on Kit. She had removed the helmet so as to better arrange the mass of her hair under it, and Campbell had got off the bike to help her. He was looking down at Kit so lovingly his expression was besotted, if not worshipful. He had never looked at her like that. Never. It was the difference between mud and gold. He had just wanted to play. She clenched her teeth on the obdurate truth of the matter. He just wanted to get a little dirty before he went back to his proper god-like realm.

  And Kit and Campbell did look like gods, the setting sun gilding them in miraculous lilac and bronze light. Then the delicate shades dissipated. There was only the huge star dying on the horizon, looking hotly crimson and swollen. Like a massive face with the skin peeled away. She was reminded of the rising sun on the fateful morning she’d decided against the cosmetic surgery: its repellent pulsing redness a projected image of the awful mash of exposed tissue, nerves and blood her poor face would present on the operating table.

  Now as she watched the sky drain of colour, it was the animals in the cargo trucks she thought of: their skin and fur peeled back; limbs broken or sawed off; eyes plucked out or propped open with mechanical pincers so that they could not sleep.

  Her stomach was in knots. How could anyone do these things to living creatures who looked back at you with fine, trusting eyes? Why did billions of people remain oblivious to the sacred functions animals fulfilled, when the consequences of their indifference were sickening and catastrophic? After thinking about it deeply, she could see no ethical difference whatsoever between the torture and deliberate extermination of animals and the torture and deliberate extermination of human beings. She recognized that to voice such an opinion in unsympathetic quarters was to invite a whole host of accusations, from anti-Semitism to insanity.

  Her eyes sought automatically the one person present who might subscribe to such a view. She found Horace standing beside Kit, his palms pressed together in an attitude of prayer.

  “Please,” he was saying. “Please, Kit. Don’t go.” His tone was so plaintive and heavy with foreboding she felt her own anxiety swell. The little man dropped to his knees and lifted up his face to gaze beseechingly at the lovely woman on the back of Campbell’s bike. His hood fell back. Agnes was reminded of the figures of kneeling saints in altarpieces, their eyes brimming with the ineffable light emanating from the Virgin Mary who floated just above them. Horace’s expression projected the same nobility and transfigured grace. She was more than a little chagrined to witness this transfiguration because she had come to think of Horace as irredeemably coarse. And not just because of his habitually barbed comments. If she were truthful with herself, she had judged him as polluted by the way he had come into the world. Which was so very wrong of her.

  “Leave her alone, Horace.” Campbell’s voice was abrasive. “She wants to go. It’s her decision.”

  “I can speak for myself, Campbell!”

  Everyone looked at Kit.

  Agnes had never heard her address Campbell in any other way than caressingly. Did this mean some tiny fracture was opening between them? Might she still have a chance with Campbell? Her blood quickened at the possibility. She felt quite warm, despite the bitter wind that sought out her bare neck and hands now the sun had gone down.

  “It’s time, people,” Campbell announced. He revved the bike and raised his right arm in a gesture that conveyed both command and solidarity. “Let’s roll out.”

  “But, Camel, where’s the media guys?” Zebra’s question was drowned by the bike’s roar. The Vulcan, with its two god-like riders, shot down the street like a well-aimed lance. What could do they but follow?

  Minnie had brought a battered emerald-green van into which Agnes climbed to sit in the back with Perdita and Pablo. Pinto got into the front passenger seat, with a quick apology for taking up so much room. Zebra, who had borrowed a friend’s Austin mini, was talking to two men Agnes recognized from Professor Jonquil’s class. Zebra briefly had introduced them. The slighter of the two was called Ewan, and the taller man had a German name. Klaus or perhaps Gerhardt? She had forgotten.

  She was surprised to see Horace slip into the back of a red sports car which had only just pulled into the little street. The driver and the man seated beside him both had the muscular shoulders and arms that can only be obtained through serious training, and square jaws so similar they might have been twins. She wondered if Horace had enlisted their help so that Kit would have a trio of bodyguards if the need arose.

  It would take about forty minutes to drive to the “death factory” as Zebra called it. What if Hora
ce was right about the danger? What if they arrived to find several brawny security guards who would not hesitate to use force against any intruders? A buzz of panic ran up and down her arms and legs. She glanced sideways at Perdita and then at Pablo. As usual, the fair-haired pair sat quietly composed, as though contemplating their boundless inner reserves of peace and fortitude. She had recently learned they were Quakers. She envied them their calm confidence and, not for the first time, wondered whether a deep fund of traditional religious faith might make her a stronger moral agent, and a more resilient and unflagging crusader on animals’ behalf.

  Once they arrived at the turn-off for the laboratory, they continued for some minutes before she could see anything. She had not expected the lab to be located so far from the highway. As their convoy drove up, sensor lights came on to reveal a very long, one-storey building built of dun-coloured blocks that was otherwise featureless. There were not even any windows. It could have been an industrial plant for the making of something as innocent as cardboard boxes or children’s cots. Was this what the “banality of evil” looked like? It had never before occurred to her that this description could apply as much to a place where unspeakable things were done, as to the soulless perpetrators themselves.

  Minnie parked the van close to the towering pines directly behind the laboratory, the headlights revealing the perimeter of a dense wood. When she got out, on legs shakier than she’d anticipated, she immediately looked about for Campbell. He was fastening his helmet and Kit’s to the bike, which he had parked on the road paralleling the laboratory. With the help of the sensor lights, she could make out that this road looped back down to the highway. They had driven up the entrance road. The exit road led off from the far end of the building. That must be for trucks that picked up and took away the animals’ remains. She struggled against an upwelling nausea as they approached the massive corrugated metal door, about thirty feet in width, where the animals would be driven in and then unloaded.

  “God,” Minnie said. “It’s ghastly.”

  For a moment they all stood in silence, as if benumbed by thoughts of the appalling uses for which this chill hell was conceived. The animals would be alive and without any kind of anaesthetic when these things were done to them. How desperately they needed unflinching defenders.

  “Let’s get in position,” Campbell urged them. “As we agreed. We form a human chain in front of the door. When we see their headlights coming, we join hands and stand fast. Right?”

  “Camel, when are the media guys going to get here?”

  Campbell sighed. “I don’t know, Zebra. Maybe nobody’s coming. But we’ve all got cameras, don’t we, on our phones?”

  Agnes, who still did not own a smart phone, said nothing. She was, in any case, becoming more and more agitated. She kept seeing the round, fear-filled eyes of the animals in their cages; kept thinking of their warm bodies and bright, soft fur; of how they should be stroked and held rather than killed by slow degrees.

  Help me! She did seem to hear them crying out to her. And it was only then it dawned on her with a crushing clarity how puny and even potentially counterproductive their little demonstration was. Nine men and women — for Horace and his two companions had chosen to remain off to one side — joined shoulder to shoulder in front of a massive metal door. And no journalists present to film the arrival of the sacrificial animals and the young people trying to save them. Perhaps all they would accomplish would be a reinforcement of security at the lab. An electric fence would go up, or guards with guns would patrol all the time.

  Was this whole exercise a folly? Were they doing more harm than good here?

  Then Perdita began to sing “We Shall Overcome” in a light, lofty soprano that made Agnes newly aware of the brilliance of the stars clustered in the thick blackness above them. She felt reassured and strong. Yes, of course they will overcome.

  Everyone joined in the secular hymn, with the exception of Horace and his two companions.

  As if on cue the headlights of the first truck in the convoy bore through the dark. Agnes counted four sets of headlights.

  “Stand firm,” Campbell said.

  They squeezed one another’s hands for courage, and pressed their shoulders, spines and buttocks tight against the metal door. Kit, Campbell, Zebra, Pinto, Agnes, Perdita, Pablo, Ewan and Gerhardt/Klaus. Horace and his two friends approached the far left corner of the building, close to Kit, as the four trucks pulled in and lined up facing the metal door with its flesh-and-blood blockade. The drivers kept their high beams on and they were drowning in harsh light. It was disorienting, and to some extent, it hurt. Agnes understood this was the intent.

  Then, as if flawlessly synchronized, all the high beams dimmed. Now the light was sinister and glutinous. Into this soupy pall four drivers emerged. They were all burly men, with wide solid chests and arms. Their large faces were grim-lipped. They advanced in tight formation. They wore identical uniforms, like modified soldiers’ fatigues, in a drab olive.

  One of them said: “This is private property and you are trespassing. We will give you until the count of ten to remove yourselves and get into your vehicles and go. You have been given due warning, and if you do not comply we will have no alternative but to remove you forcibly.”

  He spoke these words rapidly and without inflection. As if he were an automaton, Agnes thought, a barrel-chested robot built for intimidation and battle. But something even more chilling had occurred to her; and this was that the drivers had showed no surprise whatsoever at finding the Ark members blocking the door. It was as if they knew we would be here. This rattling thought came entangled with the notion of betrayal. A cold worm crawled through her spine.

  “Stand tall and hold your ground,” she heard Campbell say.

  She gripped Perdita’s and then Pinto’s hand tighter.

  “Go home, you stupid little shits!” a second driver yelled. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

  Campbell laughed derisively, his seal’s bark.

  “One-two . . .,” the driver began.

  “Be brave,” she thought she heard Pinto whisper. But the blood was pounding in her ears so hard, she could not be sure exactly what he’d said.

  “Nine, ten.” On ten, there was a metallic crash as the back doors of the four trucks banged open. Agnes, who was not thinking at all rationally, had the nonsensical idea the animals were coming to save them. In fact, what the trucks disgorged were several more stolid, uniformed guards. There were four more at least, she observed in her shock. But these new ones wore helmets with protective visors and had heavy batons swinging from their wrists. She held on to one last clear thought — “But this is ridiculous. We are not armed” — before the world disintegrated. It was as if a huge mirror reflecting the Ark members’ human chain smashed, and in each jagged piece she saw her friends suffering in a way that only seconds before had been unimaginable.

  This cannot be happening, she kept telling herself, even as she saw Pinto doubled over with one of the guards pummelling his back with his baton; Zebra with blood pouring into his eyes; and Perdita and Pablo huddled together on the ground, each trying to protect the other from the darts of the stun-gun that had already blighted Agnes’s shoulder. Now it hit her again, this time in the right hip. But it hurt much more this time, as if they had thrust her entire leg into a gigantic electric socket. She was for some seconds immobilized by the needling strikes; then she managed to stagger out to the road paralleling the building. She must go and fetch help, even if she had to crawl down to the highway. She must get help for her friends, and then they could all free the animals. How had everything gone so terribly wrong?

  She felt increasingly dizzy as she tried to walk. Her head was swimming, yet at the same time so heavy she could no longer stand erect under the weight of it. She went down suddenly on her knees, and for some time — she was never to know for how long — she blacked out. It was in this state she smelled the fresh blood of the slaughtered grey bear Piero painted,
and felt within her chest the explosive panic of the white stallion as the steely hands choked off its breath.

  Then she came to. She was still kneeling on the ground. She looked up and saw Campbell astride his bike. He was screaming at Kit to jump on behind him. But one of Horace’s friends had grabbed Kit around the waist, holding her back. Horace was jumping up and down in a frenzied fashion, telling Kit again and again to come with them; to get in the car.

  Campbell started the bike and put out his arm to Kit in a last imploring attempt. But Horace’s friends held her fast, as she called out to him in obvious anguish. Then the bike took off, faster than Agnes had ever seen it go. She remembered Campbell’s proud description of the Vulcan’s powers of acceleration.

  How wonderful, she thought. Campbell was going to get away unhurt. For the moment, this was the most important fact in her world. She saw him glance back at Kit, still caught fast by Horace’s two friends. Even at this distance, Agnes saw how his lips twitched and then tightened before he turned away, steering the bike toward the exit road that led back down to the highway. On and on the mighty machine roared, faster and faster. Campbell was their blessed outrider. He would bring back help. She tried to stand so that she could wave and wish him good speed.

  Then the unthinkable happened. Just as Campbell reached the far end of the laboratory building the bike bucked and reared, its front wheel spinning wildly in the air. There was an awful grinding noise and the stench of burning motor. Next she saw something she could not at first grasp, either logically or perceptually. It appeared that Campbell’s head in its helmet had come away from his body and flown into the road.

  She rubbed her eyes and looked again. The bike lay on its side. The rider, who had fallen sideways with it, still had two arms and two legs. But the head was gone.

  A woman was screaming so shrilly Agnes feared her brain would shatter. She saw Kit running, the long red hair streaming like a river of blood behind her. Then she felt all the air squeezed from her lungs as something or someone tackled her from behind and pulled her down and down. Everything turned dim and grainy, then black.