Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  “You look ridiculous,” she says to her reflection. She decides to do the other eye and inserts the wand back into the tube. Its label is paisley-patterned and reads Urban Decay.

  “No shit.”

  Chapter 8

  Morning. She struggles to remember what day it is. Seven, she thinks. Yes, seven. As for which day of the week…it ends in y, that’s all she knows. Feeling sore, she slowly realizes she’s still in the bathroom, curled up in the tub where she’s been all night. Her eyes feel like she’d spent the evening seeking membership to Fight Club—from the sickness or the sobbing she can’t say.

  She rises. Stretching her body, she feels like an ancient wind-up toy in need of grease. She realizes sleeping in the bathtub probably wasn’t the best idea, but it felt safe at the time. She steps out, feeling the damp spot on her ankle where the faucet had dripped on her jeans all night.

  “Yay pneumonia,” she says with the plastic cheer of a Mouseketeer.

  Passing the mirror on her way out of the bathroom, she feels the allure of the mirror and pauses to assess her reflection.

  “You need a flat iron,” she says to the girl in the glass, fingering her scalp where the hair is coming in coiled. She can’t help but think of Leona, who would see the sprouting spirals and smile.

  She wanders into the bedroom, feeling guilty. After what she’d seen on the street yesterday she’d gone into the bathroom, first to vomit and then to seek solace. She’d found a version of it in the bathtub and she hadn’t budged, even when she thought she heard Dinah calling softly for her later in the night. She couldn’t bring herself to crawl out of the porcelain cradle. She had clung to the tube of mascara like a cross against evil, and there she’d slept.

  The bedroom is cool. She notices she’d left the window open after she’d fled to the bathroom to hurl but doesn’t feel much anxiety. It would be one damned skilled Minker that could trespass that way. She’d reward that beast with a free bite if it could pull that off. She pauses by her closet, peering in before walking to the window. The contents hang like rainbow ghosts, a closet full of witnesses, and she sighs, feeling faintly comforted.

  Dinah is already at the window, resting on her elbows, surveying the world.

  “Feel better?” she asks. Tasha doesn’t hear any judgment in her voice. She wonders how long Dinah has been up, waiting.

  Tasha nods.

  “I just…I couldn’t handle it. Being up here with no way to help. Another day not knowing why this is happening.”

  “Or what we can do to escape,” Dinah adds.

  Tasha looks at her, feeling the largeness of the statement, her chest tightening.

  “Yes,” she whispers.

  “We need to know more,” Dinah says.

  “About what? I mean, we know how to kill them. There’s just too many.” Tasha feels like she’s discussing video game strategy. When did this kind of conversation become real?

  “There might be something else, you know? Some secret. Something that will…you know…turn them all off. Or there’s got to be some place that’s safe. Something. We just need information.”

  “Okay,” says Tasha nodding. “But from who? It’s not like we can go to the Daley Center or call 411 and put in an inquiry.”

  “Your sister,” Dinah says quietly.

  “Oh,” says Tasha. “Yeah. Well, uh, let me just give her a ring. Can I borrow your Glass to make a call?”

  “You said she writes you letters all the time,” Dinah says, ignoring her. “You said it had been awhile. Maybe she’s written you. Maybe there’s a letter in your Post box right now and you don’t know it.”

  Tasha considers this. It has been weeks since she’s received a letter from her sister. She is due. But the chances of Leona having written about the Chip, the Change, or anything of note besides what new thing she planted in her garden are slim to none. On the other hand, if something was going on with the States, Leona usually knew about it, often before Tasha.

  “You’ve given this some thought I see,” Tasha jokes in lieu of expressing her doubt.

  Dinah shrugs.

  “I’ve been out here for awhile.” Then she peers at Tasha. “Did you…did you put on make-up?”

  Tasha remembers her mad scramble to apply the mascara the day before, the immediate sense of calm and control it had offered her, and she guesses it’s smeared all over her eyelids at this point. She feels foolish. How can she explain that it makes her feel safe?

  “Yeah, I mean…um. Yeah.”

  “Well, since you’re already all prettied up for the world, you could take a little trip to the Post,” Dinah smiles wanly.

  They’re silent for a minute, and Tasha realizes that Dinah is serious.

  “I don’t know,” Tasha says, stalling. “I mean, what if I get there and there’s no letter? Then we’re back at square one. No game plan…”

  She notices Dinah is staring at her keenly, squinting out of the still-healing left eye.

  “Tasha,” she says in a low voice. “I need to get out of here.”

  “The keys…”

  “I can’t kill him, Tasha.”

  “Dinah…”

  “Maybe there’s another way. Maybe…maybe you’ll meet someone who knows something. Maybe…I don’t know. Fuck, you can leave any time you want and I’m stuck in here with a…a werewolf and a can of Pringles.”

  “A can of Pringles?”

  “That’s all that I have left.”

  “Fuck, Dinah! A can of Pringles?”

  Tasha shoves off from the window and rushes into the kitchen. She yanks open the cabinets and pulls out three cans of beans. Her cabinets are thinning—last time she went out was on the fourth day, days ago. She’ll need to make another trip outside soon anyway. The Post isn’t so far. Maybe Dinah’s right. Plus, the Post is a government center. Who knows what information they’ll have. She handles the cans of beans clumsily and a moment later is back in the window looking at Dinah.

  “Can you catch?”

  Dinah looks doubtful but nods.

  “Okay. I’m gonna throw these, one at a time. I won’t throw hard. One…two…three.”

  Tasha underhands the can of pinto beans and it sails past Dinah’s head, knocking against the brick wall just beyond her. Dinah gasps and flinches. They watch the beans fall the twenty stories down, landing a few meters to the left of the two human stains from the apartment above. Tasha swallows.

  “Okay, sorry. Let’s try again.”

  Dinah nods.

  “One…two…three….”

  She underhands the second can and this time it’s more on target, just a little short. Dinah’s hands shoot out and she grabs it, juggles it, then grips it tightly.

  “I got it! I got it!”

  Tasha laughs out loud in delight. A can of Pringles. What the fuck.

  She tosses the last can—garbanzo beans; she’d gotten those accidentally thinking they were navy—and Dinah catches it easily. They smile at each other.

  “You have a can opener, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Eat those. I’m going.”

  “Be careful,” Dinah says. Her face is flat. She knows what’s she’s asking Tasha to do.

  “Duh.”

  Tasha changes socks in the entrance to the closet and slides on the black and white Nikes she’s been wearing since the Change. Before, she’d worn them only to the gym: the shoes are broken in while remaining unscuffed. She feels an unreasonable amount of pride for this accomplishment—she may not have had the best job before the Change, or the best grades in college, or the best future planned out in perfect detail, but at least she could keep her shoes clean. Shoes said a lot about a person. Before the Change, it was the first thing she looked at when she met someone, or sat across from them on the L. Forget the eyes; the shoes are the windows to the soul. Or the sole, she puns silently, smiling a thin smile.

  Tasha fetches the knife from the bathroom floor where she’d left it the day before and as
sesses her readiness. She looks at the blade, sees her mascaraed eyes in its metallic sheen.

  “You were a good investment,” she says to the knife, and briefly wonders how long she’s held conversations with inanimate objects. Has she always been this way, or had things only recently become viable companions? She heads for the door, turning the knob without speaking to it.

  Chapter 9

  Tasha takes the stairs. The elevator has been out since the electricity failed on Day 3, and her quads reaped first the punishment and now the benefits—twenty flights of stairs up and down a couple times will get anybody in Jazzercize condition, and she can feel the difference. “God, I sound like an infomercial,” she thinks.

  If only her building were connected to the city’s massive thirty-day generators; then she would have light in the rooms, and a microwave. Then she could at least heat her beans, or even get a microwave pizza. She’s considered making a small fire in her apartment with the windows open for ventilation, but the act points too much to complete societal disintegration. While Tasha sincerely doubts that what is happening in the city, and what must be the country, is just a blip, she doesn’t think she’s ready to declare herself a citizen of post-Chicago just yet. Plus, if Dinah is right and there’s a big red “Abort” button someplace and things go back to normal, she’ll have to pay a hefty property damage fee for the scorch marks and smoke damage, and she’s broke. Better to just wait it out.

  Not that going on a mission to the Post is waiting, Tasha realizes as she passes the twelfth floor. But Dinah’s right: they’ve done enough sitting around since the Change. With the Wusthof knife and her Prada backpack she’ll be proactive, get some fresh air and possibly find out more about the Change. She thinks of the city generators and again wishes they weren’t just for corporations: if she had power she could turn on her Glass—it’s a refurbished model, but at least she has one—and the huge screen it had been paired with. Though there wouldn’t be much to see, most likely—a few emergency broadcasts had reported a nationwide crisis on the day of the Change, the anchors appearing cheerful enough at first, still reading the Teleprompters. But after a few hours they were looking everywhere but at the cameras, appearing nervous and fidgety, and the next time Tasha checked, the seats were empty, the camera rolling on an anchor-less set, the painted “Good Morning, Chicago” bright and flat behind the desk. Then the power went out on Day 3, and there was nothing to see at all. Who knows why the power failed: maybe somewhere in the city the poor bastard in charge of a massive on/off switch had gotten chewed on by a Minker, and his toppling body had knocked the switch to the off position. Tasha almost laughs.

  She reaches the lobby and heads for the side door, partly to avoid seeing Brian’s body—which she can smell either way—and partly because she had come in the front door the day before and needs to use a different exit to stick with her SWAT plan.

  She leans on the side door with just a fraction of her weight, allowing it to open slowly. Directly across the street is the massive McDonald’s. Their lights are still on, Tasha notes jealously. She had considered going in on the day after the Change but had decided against it. Now she just envies them their lights, and perhaps their chicken nuggets.

  She looks first right and then left, like a first-grader crossing the street, before she leaves the side door. Foster Avenue is deserted. A cluster of pigeons watches her warily from a few yards away, pecking absentmindedly at invisible crumbs on the sidewalk, but other than her silent birdy audience, she sees no one. A flag of Ghana flaps limply from a window of her building, but she hears nothing else. She wishes she were a dog so she could smell the air, but who knows what foul odors she would pick up. She adjusts her grip on the Wusthof and heads west down Foster.

  West. It’s strange to think that if she continued walking this direction for days and days and weeks that she would eventually arrive in the Nation of California. The thought stirs her a little. She imagines Leona, like at the end of a drama: Leona coming out of her orange and red house, the baby on her hip, one hand shading her eyes from the sun as Tasha approaches the sunsetty horizon. Tasha visualizes herself with a tall walking stick. She would drop it, of course, when she started running to greet her sister with her arms spread like an albatross. Although, Tasha thinks, she’d be walking toward the sunset, walking in from the east, so really she’d be the one shading her eyes. Who cares, she thinks. It’s my fantasy.

  But that’s bullshit, Tasha thinks. She’d never make it all that way. Plus she’s had a problem with navigation since she was a child: no matter what direction she is facing, she thinks that way is north. “You’d be one lost reindeer,” her mother always said. Tasha didn’t get the joke until she was sixteen. The organized grid of the city helps overcome her navigational deficiencies: in Chicago, at least, she can follow the Red Line and know for a fact her north is true.

  She ignores her shoddy instincts now and continues west down Foster, startling a couple of squirrels feasting on an open bag of Cheetos someone had dropped in the middle of the sidewalk. They take a few hops back from the crinkly plastic, not quite willing to forfeit their find. They look up at her accusingly and chatter quietly to each other. “I thought they were all dead,” one is probably saying.

  On this side of the building—Foster is smaller and less congested in terms of pedestrian traffic than Berwyn—there are only two Volamu: one running east and one running west. Downtown they go in all four directions, but in this part of the city they only go east and west because it’s assumed most people are either going downtown, or home from downtown, and really only need to be taken to and from the L. The Volamu are still humming along—it’s only six days since the Change, after all: there are still another twenty-something until the generators fail. At that point Tasha figures not much will change: she hasn’t been taking refrigerated food from the grocery since she’s been without electricity in her apartment, so once the grocery store is without it she’ll just keep doing what she’s been doing. When she runs out of canned beans and vegetables, she can move on to canned fruit. There is still Dinah to consider. She can’t just throw canned foods through the window forever.

  She’s been picking through the produce section but it doesn’t offer much: most of it has already gone bad. Fresh vegetables that aren’t bathed in pesticides have been hard to come by for a few years in Chicago, and everywhere else in the States as well. Following the absorption of Mexico, Dinah’s home—now Newest Mexico—embargo after embargo had been placed on the States, other nations expressing their disapproval, but President Willoughby—Walker’s vice—was too stubborn, too stupid, and too poorly advised to fix it, so Tasha and her countrymen simply went without while corporations bought up agricultural equipment in an all-out vegetable race. They’d swelled the number of indoor agricultural factories—BioBubbles, they were called—to provide for some of the States, but they hadn’t perfected their chemical formula and people kept getting sick from the sprays and other contaminations. Every week or two something was recalled—emergency broadcasts decrying tomatoes, censoring spinach, with shoppers standing near reporters testifying to having caught salmonella, hepatitis, the bubonic plague—so everyone was a little distrustful of the salad bars. Mostly they bought their veggies canned, regarding the fresh stuff as one might regard a strange dog with no leash. Once bitten, twice shy.

  Tasha thinks of Leona’s letters, some of which mentioned her vegetable garden. She can imagine her sister on her knees in damp earth, weeding out various undesired vines, picking off the odd Japanese beetle and dropping it into a bucket of vinegar. She wonders what kind of vegetables her sister has planted, what the seasons are like in the Nation for someone with a garden. She knows Leona won’t have sprayed her tomatoes with any poisons, not with everything that has happened. Maybe it was all a domestic terrorist plot, the contaminated celeries and spinach: wipe out all those annoying vegans.

  “And they wanted us to get the Chip to protect us from B-bombs,” Tasha scoffs, kick
ing an empty liquor bottle as she passes under the transparent tracks of the L. “We needed protection from fucking broccoli.”

  As if the Chip materialized out of her thoughts, she passes a billboard where a woman three shades lighter than Tasha bounces a soccer ball on her knee. Then the image turns and looks at her, the face like her own, one hand holding the soccer ball, the other hand on her digital hip.

  “Cybranu’s health implant has made all the difference,” she beams. “I never get sick and everyone tells me how much healthier my skin looks! I can do everything I want to do outside without worrying about the threat of infection!” She throws back her head and laughs, flashing her brilliantly white teeth. Underneath her cleated feet is lush green grass

  “Ha ha ha.” Tasha mutters sarcastically. “The grass is probably digital.” She stands back to eye the woman in the advertisement, who has gone back to bouncing the soccer ball. Her hair is relaxed and flops easily in its ponytail each time she jerks her knee up to make contact with the ball. Tasha hates the advertising technology. Each e-board is fitted with MMDs (Microscopic Mirroring Devices) that register the appearance of the consumer in front of the screen and instantaneously alter the appearance of the model in the advertisement. Tasha, with her brown skin and average female height and weight, has been read by the MMDs, which have reflected an (almost) brown-skinned model of a-little-above-average female height and a little-less-than-average weight. Cybranu hoped that by giving passing consumers a representation of themselves with the Chip—themselves, except better, because all the people on e-boards are smooth, light, white-toothed Positive Pattys—they would be more likely to run out and get the Chip…but only if they had MINK, she thinks bitterly. Why dangle the carrot, Tasha wonders. Why not state up front that one needed a policy or a legacy to get the Chip? She knows. To make the haves feel even more exclusive, she supposes bitterly; to encourage them to get it as soon as possible so they could lord it over everyone else.