Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  Tasha watches the bouncing ponytail, the bouncing ball. She knows the ploy probably worked…otherwise there wouldn’t be a dead body in the alley to her right, and she’d be at work right now, grooming Micro Labradoodles. Or at least asking Cara to let her groom Micro Labradoodles. She might have had a job if it wasn’t for the Chip; she might still have everything. The girl bouncing the soccer ball is completely oblivious to what she’s done, what Tasha is blaming her for.

  Tasha absentmindedly reaches up and feels her own hair. Her fingers wander up the strands to her scalp, and her hand pauses as it meets the curly roots that are reclaiming her head. She snatches her hand away and glares at the woman in the ad who is still talking about her healthy skin, smiling and smiling. The make-up artist was very clever with the hints of pink on the eyelids and cheekbones, the bronze on the bone under the brow. Some shimmer has been placed along the lines of the bridge of her nose, creating the appearance of a slimmer schnoz. Tasha feels herself snarling.

  She looks thoughtfully at the knife in her hand, then makes a decision and jams the point of it into the side of the large screen on which the ad is displayed. There is a flicker—the model is saying “…without worrying about the threat…”—and after Tasha wiggles the blade a little more forcefully into the socket, the resolution wavers and then the screen goes black. She realizes, pulling the knife from the socket, that she probably could have electrocuted herself, but feels only smugness. The screen is shiny and dark now and Tasha stares into the blackness, her face reflected back to her, distorted: the circles under her eyes (genetic half-moons given to her by her father) are deepened by the position of the sun. She turns and gazes up at it. It gazes back. She continues down Foster and turns left on Broadway, passing a lone shoe in the middle of the intersection. Nike.

  The encounter with the advertisement had been a little too normal—the advertisement itself, anyway; not the killing of it—and Tasha has to remind herself to exercise caution as she makes her way down Broadway. Thoughts of the jumper from the apartment above her and the child, brought down by a pack of Minkers, slip into her consciousness. She has been out before since the Change, but thinking of those deaths makes things different now. Her stroll smoothes out into a creep, and she holds the knife a little higher as she passes the mega Kindlers store, where there is a lot of broken glass and two bodies, both women. From what she can see through the window, the bookstore looks as if it saw quite a battle: more broken glass litters the inside of the store, with books and tablets strewn about as if they had been used as missiles. Tasha kind of likes this idea, she realizes: Octavia Butler and Charles Dickens being used as ammunition against a swarm of dead-eyed Minkers, Changed over their morning coffee as they browsed through the Times best-seller lists, feeling very well-read and cultured. At first Tasha had tried to refrain from envisioning scenarios of the morning of the Change, but it has become unavoidable: every facet of her surroundings can be pieced together to illustrate another Chicagoan’s final moments. Even the small things—the bag of Cheetos on the sidewalk, claimed by squirrels. Maybe someone simply got sick of their Cheetos and dropped the bag on the sidewalk. But maybe someone was walking to the train stop, eating Cheetos, when someone else started eating their neck. Everything is a sign of a life ended: Cheetos, broken glass, the shoe in the middle of Broadway. At least there was no foot, Tasha thinks.

  Then again, the broken glass in and around the enormous Kindlers could be evidence of looting, not a struggle. Tasha always heard about the role of looters in times of great disaster. But if greedy city-dwellers saw an opportunity to forsake societal codes and smash in store windows to take what they pleased, she doesn’t think Kindlers would be the place they would start. Paper books existed there too, having survived decades longer than naysayers had predicted—thanks to a few trendy elitists who brought back the retro cool-factor of carrying around books instead of Glass models, which everyone owned more than one of anyway—but Tasha can’t quite imagine hordes of plunderers crushing into the aisles of novels, gluttonously snatching up copies of The Handmaid’s Tale to add to their piles of booty. More likely, the yuppies who frequented the grotesquely gentrified Kindlers in what used to be Uptown—all swept along in the fashionable necessity of the Chip—had turned on the cashiers and baristas. Maybe her original theory of books being used as missiles wasn’t too far off. Tasha can see a number of Bibles at the bottom of the escalators inside; the Kindlers employees would have known exactly where the heaviest projectiles would be in the store and gone straight to the religious texts. Customer service be damned.

  “How may I kill you?” says Tasha in her best concierge voice. She turns away from Kindlers and walks straight into a Minker.

  She manages to roll her shoulders away in a Matrix-worthy move as the man on the sidewalk attempts to bear hug her with his mouth open. He barks.

  “Oh, shut the fuck up!” Tasha cries, swinging the knife at the guy. He is quick for a fat man and mostly dodges the swipe; the blade catches only the tip of his middle finger and the little nub spins off somewhere to Tasha’s left.

  Tasha is impatient to kill him, and a little scared. Not that she’s worried about a line at the post office, but the longer she deals with him, the longer it will take to get there and back home again. It could be dark by then. Yes, she’s been out several times since the Change, but never in the dark: who knows what it’s like. At night she hunkers down in her room and stays away from the windows, eating her canned-whatever, huddled in the corner of her bed. Fatty here is complicating her day.

  He heaves his bulk at her, his hands outstretched and flexing like Frankenstein looking for a feel-up. She hacks off one of his hands with one powerful slice. It comes almost easily now, the cutting. Tasha supposes the sharpness of the Wusthof makes it easier: if she were having to chop laboriously through sinew and bone, killing fat guys might not be so undemanding. This particular guy looks like a Driver, one of the many well paid and black-suited city employees who steer—steered—the trains along their transparent tracks. The uniform and the pay-grade were boosted with the elimination of buses. Despite the copious use of his hands during his former life, the guy doesn’t seem to notice the loss of his right hand now: he swipes with the stump, spraying Tasha and the wall behind her. She blows through her mouth like a swimmer coming up for air, determined not to know the taste of Driver blood.

  There’s a sound across the street, a clatter like tin cans falling into a dumpster. Tasha expects him to look, giving her the moment of distraction she needs to kill the fat bastard, but he doesn’t. Great.

  “Oh, Christ,” she sighs in exasperation and skips nimbly sideways as he lunges again. From this angle she can see the red light blinking, and she resists rolling her eyes. “Blink, blink, blink, of course.”

  It takes her attacker a few seconds before he realizes his prey has moved out of the way. He looks around dumbly, and then down at the stump of his wrist, the wound mending itself in a sticky-sounding weaving of ultra-rapid skin cells and blood coagulant. No hand grows back, Tasha notes with relief (and also a bit of disappointment—now that would have been something to see): the Chip is good, but not that good. The Driver seems just as fascinated by the healing of his maimed hand as Tasha was the first time she witnessed it on the skull of an eight-year-old. Tasha is watching the crawling skin spider webs too until she realizes she has almost missed her chance.

  The Driver falls to his knees with her knife protruding from his neck. The Chip is blinking feebly as its life force drains both from it and from the eyes of the guy, who, as the light ceases to flash, topples onto his side.

  Tasha examines his face. The fussy look she’s noticed on the features of most of the Minkers remains, but has softened in death. The eyebrows that had, minutes before, been knitted together in a glare of consternation have relaxed slightly and separated: the effect is one of puzzlement. Irritation, astonishment. Astonished by what? That the Chip didn’t work? “Safe from the threat of foreign infec
tion…” but still dead. Tasha pulls out the Wusthof and adds another red stripe to the thigh of her jeans. She checks her hair in the reflection of what’s left of Kindlers’ window and moves on.

  The walk isn’t as long as she had thought it would be. Constant vigilance makes her surroundings a lot more interesting, so what would have been storefront after storefront becomes a detailed row of scenarios. With the possibility of a new neck needing stabbing at every alley entranceway, Tasha finds herself outside the sterile structure of the Post before she’s actually ready. She assesses the loose rubble along the sidewalk—they’d been repaving the walkway in front of the Post: old-school construction machines and large rocks occupy some of the street—and takes stock of her fear. She suddenly becomes conscious of the knot that has formed in her spine, not from sleeping in the tub but from wondering. The possibility of finding a letter from Leona has set loose a net of vampiric butterflies gnawing at her intestines. They hadn’t fluttered when she saw the Kindlers or when the Driver fell to the sidewalk. But they’d been wriggling out of their cocoons since Dinah had proposed the trip to the Post.

  Tasha had accepted the idea quickly in the fog of smeared mascara and vomitus breath—why not? They’d been sitting in their apartments—Dinah’s a tomb—watching the world disintegrate, witnessing children being eaten alive and neighbors leaping to their deaths. They needed movement. Tasha had left the building on Foster with no conscious expectation of finding anything at the Post, but now that she’s here, she realizes how much the hope has hardened into a real thing inside her. She needs to find something. Anything. A compass of some kind that will point in any direction except backward. A magic key that will free Dinah. Shit, a welding kit that Tasha can use to open her door. A tool. An answer. But more than that…she needs to know. Like Dinah said, they didn’t know enough. Dinah had been referring to the Change as a whole, but now, looking at the doors to the Post, Tasha realizes what she needs to know is more basic than that: she needs to know if her sister is alive. A letter from Leona, waiting in the mailbox like a sleeping lamb, would mean her sister is alive; or had been recently. It would be kindling added to a blaze of hope, which has been flickering lower and lower as the days wore on. The videograph of Leona and Morris outside their orange and red house—Tasha realizes she’s been looking at it the way one looks at a photo of someone long dead: with nostalgia and grief, sifting through memories and last conversations, regrets. Tasha needs to know. She holds her hand out to the door of the Post and watches her fingers tremble before dropping her hand to the side. What if the box is empty? She wants to walk away, but then what?

  “Oh stop,” she snaps at herself and reaches for the door again.

  It’s locked.

  Hours of operation: 9am-6pm

  Tasha looks at her wrist—no watch—then rolls her eyes. She reminds herself why she doesn’t need a watch—because crazed human beings with maniacal chips in their necks have free reign of the city—and why the hours of operation really don’t fucking matter.

  “The world is over, idiot,” she says, and smashes the glass door with one of the construction site’s shovels.

  Tasha claps her hands over her ears as an obnoxious alarm attacks her in a repetitious wail of unfathomably high pitch. She panics…every Minker in a five-block radius will hear the sound and come loping over to check the mail. She needs to hide, but hesitates. Maybe she can get in and find Leona’s letter first. Peering inside, Tasha can see at least one body: its pale blue uniform is ripped at the sleeve, which is empty with its lack of arm.

  Tasha decides to hide. She looks around, imagining she can hear the rustling of approaching Minkers. Her eye falls on a pair of dumpsters next to a bulldozer, placed there for construction waste, she imagines. She looks down at her pristine Nikes and inwardly apologizes to them, as well as to her Prada backpack.

  Tasha gingerly raises the lid of the nearest dumpster and peeps inside. Just some rubble and tin cans: no roaches that she can see, no Port-a-Potty stench rising from the metal; just a vague scent of rotting vegetables. She’s halfway in, her torso tilted over the edge, when the backpack swings down from her shoulders and hits her in the face. The added weight almost sends her face-first to the bottom of the dumpster, but she catches herself in a handstand. Wriggling the rest of the way in, she slowly draws in her feet to keep the lid from slamming. It’s not entirely dark: various holes allow some light to filter in, not to mention the line of sun around the edge of the lid. She draws herself into a corner and closes her eyes, her knees curled to her chest. She could be playing hide and seek; the seeker could be Leona, ten years old and counting to twenty. Tasha breathes shallowly.

  A moment of silence. Two. Three.

  Then a sound. A bark. Tasha has worked with dogs all her life—Dobermans, Pekingese, Great Pyrenees, Rat Terriers—and she knows all of their songs. She has only dealt with this new breed for all of six days, but she has gotten to know his tune as well. This bark belongs to a Minker.

  Her eyes are open now, as if it will help her hear. There is a hole in the metal beside her head but she doesn’t have the courage to look yet. Instead she listens: more barking. It’s no horde, but she can hear at least six or seven different pairs of feet; some crunching on gravel, some on concrete, some on the glass of the Post’s shattered front door. Tasha clutches the Wusthof, her fingers beginning to feel cold as she squeezes off her own circulation. She finally presses her eye to the hole in the dumpster.

  She counts ten of them (more than she thought) swarming around the entrance of the post office. They seem oblivious to one another, and don’t seem to know what to do now that they have arrived at this place. Something brought them…a sound? What was it? Now that they have come, they seem to have forgotten why. Tasha has never seen this many of them this close—she feels like Jane Goodall watching a species that wasn’t quite as benevolent as her silverbacks. Tasha studies them.

  One is a middle-aged woman wearing spandex, a sports bra, and the ridiculous Moonwalk fitness shoes. She is still, staring up at the sky. A guy next to her shifts from foot to foot, moving in a small circle like a wind-up toy: he is—was—a police officer, his gun missing from its holster on his hip, the leather safety strap torn and hanging loose. Against her will, Tasha provides a scenario. The cop could have been writing a ticket for—who knows—jaywalking or something, when he Changed. The civilian freaked (couldn’t image how jaywalking could suddenly be death penalty-worthy, and anyway since when is the death penalty carried out on the sidewalk, at the jaws of the boys in blue?) and ended up grabbing the cop’s own firearm to protect herself. Maybe she even shot him. If she didn’t get them in the Chip, he wasn’t going down. Tasha had learned that.

  Another Minker is pacing slowly back and forth between the sidewalk and the Post’s front door. Pacing isn’t really the right word—to Tasha that implies some kind of brain function; pacing while one thinks of a new course of action, pacing while worrying about one’s finances. This guy is just walking back and forth, a cycling loop of mechanical humanoid activity. Each time he turns at the sidewalk, his shoulder bumps a teenage girl in her pajamas. She’s standing facing the street, looking first to the east, and then west. Back and forth, back and forth: as if she’s watching a marathon, ghost runners passing and passing. Her hair is in two ponytails that flop across her face each time she jerks her head in either direction. The others are engaged in other similarly mindless activities. It’s as if the Chip has programmed them to seek prey but hasn’t provided a command for what to do when there’s no prey to be found. They are listless, waiting.

  Tasha curses the sweat that she can feel rolling slowly down her back, tiny hot glaciers. How long will she last in this box before they hear her, smell her, track her down? She imagines Dinah waiting in her apartment, watching the sun get lower and lower. The night would come and Tasha wouldn’t return. Days would pass, with Dinah withering away, rationing her stack of nutritionless Pringles; eating a bean per hour of the two can
s Tasha tossed her. Tasha isn’t much of a savior, but if she dies, Dinah will have no chance. Not unless she makes a bed sheet rope that’s long enough to carry her down twenty stories. The idea of Dinah, alone, pricks something in her heart.

  But then there’s a sound: the slapping of sneakers on pavement. At first Tasha thinks it’s another Minker coming to join the posse, but the step is a little too fast. The Minkers hear it too, the ten of them gaping around with dull interest. A couple of them wander toward the Post again, but Tasha knows that’s not where the sound is coming from. She can hear it getting closer, coming up Broadway.

  A man runs into view. Tasha strains her cheek against the dumpster to keep him in her eyesight. She can hear him panting. He slows and looks over his shoulder, then pauses and leans over with his hands on his knees, his back heaving for breath. Tasha scrambles away from the corner to another eyehole that gives her a better view. He’s so close. She wishes she could call out to him, give him a signal, or directions to her house. But her fear is a straitjacket—she is bound by it, stuck peeping through the hole in the dumpster like a rabbit from the warren. The man is wearing jeans and a green t-shirt, something with a shamrock on it. She wonders if he put it on actually expecting a bit of luck. What he’s found sure as hell aren’t leprechauns. He’s wearing tennis shoes and she hopes they’re good for sprinting. Asics? He looks like the Asics type.

  Tasha hears a bark from the peanut gallery. The man’s back straightens like a shot, and he stumbles sideways. So intent has he been on getting away from what’s behind him that he hasn’t noticed what’s ten yards to his left. His chest stops heaving—Tasha doubts he has found his breath. He has probably just stopped breathing altogether at this moment. She is sure that what he has found outside the Post is worse than what he was running from a moment before.