Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

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Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1) Page 7

by Cole, Olivia


  Marla came sprinting from the back room, a tranquilizer in hand. She had assumed one of the animals was loose and out of control. Tasha saw the dart and managed to gasp, somewhat insanely,

  “Shoot her! Shoot her!”

  But Marla did not shoot her.

  “Tasha, what are you doing!” she yelled. Somehow she had missed the fact that it was Mrs. Kerry’s hands that were wrapped around Tasha’s throat.

  Tasha threw her weight sideways and Mrs. Kerry toppled to the floor and lay still. Marla rushed to her side as Tasha scrambled to her feet, rubbing her neck.

  “Mrs. Kerry! Mrs. Kerry, ma’am, are you alright?” Marla felt for a pulse but Mrs. Kerry had just opened her eyes. The blue of them was clear again, but a trace of the furrow between her brows remained.

  “I’m fine…I…I…” she stammered, and her eyes wandered before fixing on Tasha, then on Tasha’s ring. “That girl! She has my ring!”

  Marla turned with surprise to face Tasha, whose jaw had dropped as if broken, touching the ring protectively with her other hand.

  “What? This is my mother’s ring!”

  “You little liar! That is my ring! You took it from me!”

  “Marla, this is my mother’s ring! You’ve seen me wear it a hundred times!”

  Tasha looked into Marla’s eyes, but Marla looked at Mrs. Kerry.

  “I’ll have to call Cara and ask her to come up.”

  Blonde, strutting Cara lived solely for these moments and had entered Fetch Fetchers accompanied by a security guard, Jason. Mrs. Kerry had collected herself and gave a stunning description of the events that had transpired, beginning with Tasha’s initial neglect and disrespect—alluding to previous instances—and leading up to Tasha’s aggressive attitude and unwillingness to provide assistance, culminating in her assault of Mrs. Kerry, striking her and prising the ring off her finger. The ring was an heirloom, Mrs. Kerry explained.

  Tasha was allowed to give her side of the story, but she heard how ridiculous it sounded. The wife of a millionaire, decked out in Chanel, entering a pet store and attacking the cashier? Robbing her? It was laughable. Tasha recognized the sneer on Cara’s pointy face before she had even begun. Tasha pointed to her own neck.

  “She choked me! Don’t you see the bruises?”

  Cara looked at Tasha’s throat with a flick of her eyes and exchanged a glance with Mrs. Kerry.

  “It’s hard to see bruises on someone of your complexion, Tasha, you know that.”

  Tasha felt the light drain from her body. Cara continued.

  “And anyway, look at what you’ve done to Mrs. Kerry’s tooth! It’s chipped! You’re lucky she’s declining to press charges: you would be in a lot of trouble.”

  “Luckily I have MINK,” Mrs. Kerry drawled, examining her blood red manicure.

  Tasha’s spine was ice. She stared at Cara, who was smiling.

  “Give me the ring, Tasha.” She turned to Mrs. Kerry. “We’ll need to keep the ring in the company safe while we process an incident report, Mrs. Kerry. You can claim your property in about a week, after we wrap up all the loose ends.” These last few words she directed at Tasha, who was not crying, but was crumbling like dead leaves.

  The ring had crossed her knuckle, entered a cold, pale palm. Tasha went home.

  “Whoa,” says Dinah. She has her comforting voice on again. “Tasha, whoa.”

  Tasha stares so hard at the sky that her eyes begin to water. In the apartment building across Berwyn she can just see the bloodied body of a man sprawled across his kitchen table, where it’s been since the first day—defused Minker or actual victim, she can’t tell. She looks down at her hands, at her empty finger. She had seen Cara slip the ring into her pocket—it probably never even made it to the safe. But Tasha was the thief.

  “You okay?” Dinah asks. Tasha sees her hand move, as if she had been about to reach out and touch her before she’d remembered how large the gap was.

  “Yeah, I just need a couple minutes,” Tasha says and pushes off the window frame, returning to the shell of her apartment. She isn’t sure if she’s currently upset about the firing or if she’s reliving the loss of her ring. She looks over at the vanity where there are a few framed pictures. She picks one up. It’s of her and her sister with their parents before they died, a cluster of familiar eyes and cheekbones. They’re all smiling: her mother with the unselfconscious beam that Tasha inherited but hides; her father with the small offering of teeth that he used only for photographs, and her sister, Leona, standing with her arm around Tasha, her teeth bared in what seems more a joyful snarl than a grin.

  “Your mother named you right,” their father would say when she smiled. Leona wasn’t the type to care.

  She and Tasha are different in that way, although they hadn’t always been. Looking at the photograph, Tasha examines the face of her eighteen-year-old self. Only three years ago, but the time and distance between that Tasha and the Tasha she is now feels infinite. Her face in the picture is clean of make-up, her hair in complicated braids—Leona’s handiwork, if she remembers correctly. When had she started the hair pressing and the mascara? After the funerals, she knows, with Gina helping her “get over it.” Every layer on her face had become another stripe of war paint, another design on the wings of the Polyphemus moth, camouflaging her from the world; a way to disguise herself from grief, as if it were a thing she could hide from. It hadn’t worked, she says to herself, thinking of all the death beyond the window.

  Beside her in the picture, Leona is wearing a gray sweatshirt and black jeans, her hair a soft brown halo. Their parents are dressed the way Tasha has always remembered them dressing: jeans, t-shirts. The sight of their faces is almost more than she can bear. On her mother’s finger is the very ring taken by Cara and Mrs. Kerry—she’d given it to Tasha just a few months after the photo was taken. Tasha rubs her finger like Aladdin’s lamp, staring at Leona, wondering if she still has the necklace their mother had given her. She probably does—she doesn’t lose things like Tasha.

  The only other likeness Tasha has of Leona is one taken a few years later, after California had seceded. It had been Leona’s version of nail polish and blush, Tasha knows, moving out there. Tasha, in a rare expression of concern, had asked her sister if she was living in a war zone, and Leona had sent a videograph of her and her partner Morris standing and waving in front of their little house and garden. In the videograph, the house is orange and red and so is Leona’s dress, moving gently at the hem in the breeze. Morris, laughing, cups the back of her neck in his hand, his other hand in his pocket. They look happy. Tasha fleetingly wishes she had taken Leona up on her offer to visit—maybe California was blissfully unaware of what was happening here: just tending to their gardens and building new houses.

  Tasha returns to the window with the pictures in hand.

  “This is them,” she says simply, holding up the pictures for Dinah to see. Dinah peers, and Tasha is sure she can’t make out the faces, but Dinah says,

  “You look just like your mom,” and Tasha wants to cry.

  They’re quiet for a moment, Tasha staring at the pictures in her hands, Leona waving and waving from the frame.

  “Tasha,” Dinah says gently, “I don’t want to sound like a dick. I don’t want to sound like your friend—Gina. But…it was just a ring, right? Your mom wouldn’t care that the ring is gone. It’s not like you pawned it. She’d tell you not to worry. She wouldn’t want you to be so sad.”

  “I know,” Tasha says. And she does. “But it’s the only thing of hers that I have.”

  “You have her smile too,” Dinah says, and Tasha wishes she could hug this girl with her fading black eye. The feeling is stiff and unpracticed; she doesn’t think Gina has ever hugged her, and it makes her want to cry even more. Feeling the tears coming, Tasha looks out through the buildings, glimpsing the lake between them.

  “So your sister,” Dinah says. “What made her go out to the Nation? Was she some kind of activist or what?�
��

  Tasha shrugs.

  “Yeah, pretty much. She was big into politics and justice and stuff. Conspiracies. I didn’t really get why until she got out there and wrote me letters about the stuff the States did when the Nation seceded.”

  “Stuff? What kinda stuff?”

  “Bombings, shootings. Let me get the letters.”

  Tasha leaves the window again and goes to the bed, using this opportunity to get her tears under control. Kneeling, she pokes her head beneath it and looks around for the long storage container. She drags it out. Lifting the lid, she digs around in the mess of paper: some are warranties, one is her lease, but most are letters, all from Leona, probably the last person on Earth who still writes letters. It’s an expensive habit, which is why Tasha had stopped responding to every one: at $4.50 a stamp, letters were a bit out of her budget. Leona generally writes every other week either way, mostly with mundane details and usually with a gentle request for Tasha to come visit. California or not, the Post carries the letters. They drop them at a station just before the border, and someone in Leona’s town makes the trip every couple days to retrieve anything that has arrived.

  Tasha gathers them up like leaves. Hands full of wrinkled pages, she arranges the letters on the bed like a nest. Some still have the envelopes and she can read the dates in the official red-inked stamps of the Post, but most of them had been lost or thrown away upon receipt, leaving Tasha with nothing but a couple dozen lined pages filled with Leona’s scratchy but elegant handwriting. Most are about Morris and the new house, what plants she potted on her porch, what books she was reading. Some talk about the secession, and she takes these to the window to read to Dinah.

  “All the kids from our neighborhood have gone to fight,” one reads. “Marina from two doors down just left yesterday. Her father is hysterical, of course, but her mother has some sense and knows Marina can handle herself. Well, she hopes. No one really knows what we’re dealing with once we reach the border. A Dallas newspaper that found its way onto my table says that Walker’s people have been ordered not to fire on young soldiers, but I think that’s bullshit. Johnathon came back with the whole left side of his body burned black, and he’s only sixteen. We asked what got him and he had no idea. We’ve got no clue what they’re using out there. If I wasn’t pregnant I’d go find out myself.”

  She skims through the next one—it’s about the baby, Amani, who was born small but healthy—and skips it for another, which had been sent just before the main skirmishes of secession conflict. A wonder the letters were arriving at all, Tasha thinks, but the States couldn’t bump off the Post, which had been struggling for years: if someone wanted to buy a stamp and send a letter, then, by god, the Post would take them up on it. The letter mentions the Mall of America being razed.

  “I heard somebody burned down the Mall! They said some terrorist group did it. Remember when I worked there that one year? (The mall. Not the terrorist group.) What a nightmare. Good riddance to the place, I say. Do you still work at the Apiary? I know you hate it, but keep that job as long as you can. You never know when you’ll realize you really need it. But for now, when will you come visit me, Natasha? I know you think it’s a wasteland, but it’s safer here. I worry about you. Maybe you’d like it. Maybe you’d stay.”

  “Did you ever go visit her?” Dinah asks.

  “No, it was too far when I was in college. Too expensive, too risky. And after my parents died and I dropped out of school—”

  “You dropped out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. What did you go for though? Before you dropped out?”

  “History of American film.”

  “Oh. Not what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know. Fashion. Merchandising. Something,” Dinah laughs.

  Tasha laughs and shakes her head.

  “No, not even close.” She feels embarrassed, although she’s not sure if it’s because of her major or because of Dinah’s imagined one.

  “Anyway,” Dinah says. “You were saying?”

  “Yeah. After I dropped out I just didn’t think there was any point to going out there anymore. I don’t know. Leona was out there living her life; I was here living mine.”

  They’re interrupted by screaming, and the women both jerk their heads back inside like frightened meerkats. It’s not coming from inside. Tasha wonders if the rest of her life is going to be punctuated by bouts of screaming, another death to add to her scrapbook of Change-related memories. Are they really called memories if they continue to happen, every day? This is life now, she tells herself for the tenth time.

  “Where’s it coming from?” she calls as quietly as she can to Dinah.

  “Outside,” Dinah answers. “I can see them.”

  Tasha steps back closer to the window and then she sees too. She wishes she could not.

  Two figures, one small and one large, running down Sheridan, almost to Berwyn. The buildings are in the way or Tasha could have seen them sooner. As they get closer, a third and fourth figure appear behind them. Running. The staggering gait tells Tasha all she needs to know about the scenario.

  “Is that a—is that a kid?” Dinah gapes.

  The one out front; small, stumbling.

  “It’s a kid,” says Tasha. The letters are fluttering out of her hands and floating to the floor. “It’s a kid.”

  The larger figure—presumably the kid’s guardian—is limping badly. The child is running ahead, often stopping and running back, trying to help the larger figure, who appears to be waving the kid on. The two shambling figures in the rear—Minkers. They’re Minkers. —are gaining. The gap between the hunters and the hunted closes. The Minkers don’t tire. Dinah has her hands over her mouth.

  It ends quickly. The Minkers gain. They overtake the larger figure and the child is standing still, stricken, screaming. The screams rise from the ground and bounce off the buildings.

  “God god god,” Dinah is shrieking but it comes to Tasha’s ears dull and thick through the pounding in her ears.

  “Run, kid, run!” Tasha hears herself screeching, but the kid has already started running on its own. The child doesn’t get far. There are more Minkers. They come from down Berwyn, lumbering past the body of yesterday’s jumper, barking. In the end, three of them overtake the child.

  Dinah is inside her apartment crying. Tasha wants to cry, but her body needs to do something else first. She’s not sure what until it becomes immediately obvious. The panic is a balloon that inflates suddenly and then twists itself into the shape of a rubbery animal, a clambering chimpanzee scrambling at the too-small cage of her ribs. She stumbles to her feet and lurches into the bathroom. The little elastic rug that decorates the toilet lid slips off as she yanks open the porcelain bowl, and her string of curse words is lost in the stream of sour vomit. She heaves, the force of it squeezing her eyes shut. When she opens them she is staring at the cloudy continents of bile and spit, an atlas of white and yellow. She blinks hard, realizing that she’s still clutching one of Leona’s letters: the crumpled paper is torn and half-submerged in toilet water. She can still read its leaking ink:

  They’re going to blame us. Her sister’s handwriting has begun to slant forward at this point, indicating that she’s begun writing quickly, either because she was rushing or because she was angry. Don’t let them have you thinking we’re a bunch of bloodthirsty nut-jobs. When we asked for a peaceful secession, their mediator laughed at us, Tash. Laughed at us! One said, “But we have so many new toys!” That’s what he said. If I’d wanted to reconcile with the States before, that conversation eliminated that option. I’ve seen clips from the webnews: they’re slipping in these little hints about these weapons of biological destruction that we supposedly have. WBDs? They’re the ones with the bombs, and other stuff too, from what I hear. Kill-tech. I’ve heard rumors, Tasha. It’s not just us they want to control; they want to get their thumb on people like you too. In case you want to
leave for the Nation or something. But who knows. But if you’re not going to visit me, just be careful. Anything could happen.

  Tasha stops reading. She laughs, but the feeling isn’t quite right in her mouth. Somewhere inside her a lever is thrown and she shifts into deep sobs that vibrate her teeth. The feeling is appropriate and she wallows in it, but after a moment she stops sharply and holds her breath, struggling for control. Out of habit, she uses the heel of her hand to wipe running mascara from under her eyes, but when she looks at her unblackened palm, she remembers that she didn’t put any on. Suddenly, this is the worst possible truth.

  She scrambles to her feet, hauling on the sink for support. From the cabinet she snatches out her cosmetic bag and rummages through it frantically, her survival dependent on its contents. She draws out the long violet tube and sighs, her heartbeat slowing from its rodent hammering.

  She twists open the cap and draws out the wand little by little, watching the tiny velvety bristles catching on the rim and gathering more of the rich black mud. Leaning as close to the mirror as she can across the obstacle of the sink, she steadies her hand. She raises her eyebrows in an expression of surprise and slowly, slowly brings the wand to the base of the lashes on her left eye. With a religiously delicate movement of her wrist, she draws the black-dyed brush up the length of the lashes. Another two or three painstaking swipes and she straightens her back, gazing into the mirror at her handiwork. Both eyes are red from first crying and then throwing up. With the mascara now applied to the left eye, she looks like a comedy/tragedy mask. She experiments with making one side of her mouth droop in a mournful grimace while twisting the other side up in a grin.

 

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