Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  On the food line are a half-dozen half-made hamburgers. It has been a week since the Change but the food looks undisturbed, unaffected by open air and decomposition. She pokes the top of a bun with the Wusthof. There is a little resistance and a barely-audible crunch. Stale. It’s comforting.

  The bark behind her brings a scream to her lips—she can’t believe how much she screams these days—and she whirls around to face the source, knife at the ready. On the tip of the blade is the hamburger bun she just prodded. She gives the knife a shake; the stale bun doesn’t fall off. Ahead of her is a Chipped McDonald’s employee, and she turns her attention to him.

  There is blood around his mouth, trailing down from the corners of his lips—classic Dracula. The typical frown is frozen on, the crinkle between his eyebrows aimed at Tasha like crosshairs. He is wearing a nametag. She leans a little closer to read it.

  “Chip,” the tag reads. And beneath it, a sticker: “Employee of the Month.”

  “No fucking way,” she laughs, lowering the knife a half-inch in amusement.

  Chip moves forward with startling speed and Tasha has to scramble. She darts around the counter, leaving him with the hamburgers, placing the food prep area between them. He’s quick—not like the doorman or the butcher—and moves around the island in an instant. He’s on her heels and Tasha darts away again, but now he’s between her and the employee exit. She can’t leave now anyway: she has to kill him indoors. He’s more dangerous out there than he is in here; out there he can get to barking and draw the rest of his kind. He’d really be employee of the month then.

  She looks around. She needs more space to get a stab at him, and Chip is looking around too, his head cocking first to the left and then to the right, a pissed-off sparrow. He makes up his mind. Chip lunges and Tasha skips to her left, leaping over the body of the girl with the broken neck—and then the feeling of falling. Tasha’s lungs fill with ice as she slips on the spilled grease, her body sinking in slow motion as if through thick water, falling to the floor, the Wusthof spiraling out of her hand and sliding across the slick tile, leaving her unarmed. The dead girl breaks Tasha’s fall, but Chip is quick. He has the toe of Tasha’s Nike in his mouth, snuffling almost like a puppy as he gnaws.

  Tasha twists onto her side and scrambles backward, kicking Chip squarely in the face with her other foot. She hears the crunch and feels the snap as she breaks his nose, which he doesn’t notice. She doesn’t need to look to know that the red light in his neck is blinking cheerfully as it repairs him.

  She can feel the pressure of his teeth through her shoe; he is a famished foot fetishist. She worries for her Nike: she paid $248 for these shoes and the last thing she needs is his flat teeth scuffing them up, let alone severing one of her toes in the process. She gains some leverage by dragging herself up the dead girl’s body and hauls herself halfway to her feet, still facing Chip. Her denim-covered shin is in his line of vision now and his glassy eyes almost light up. He goes for it, his mouth wide open like a shark. Tasha hears frantic Jaws music in her head as she screams and grabs the closest thing in reach, the handle to the basket of happily bubbling fries that are still in the scalding oil. The fries themselves barely exist anymore—they’ve been in the oil for days and are a sludge of black mud—but the oil exists very much and it sizzles as she slams the searing oil-coated basket against the side of Chip’s head. The remnants of the fries ooze down his cheek and neck, his skin sliding off with it, hissing like lava. The fry sludge is in his eyes and Chip shakes his head, trying to clear his vision as disgusting blisters take over his face. He hadn’t felt the left side of his face virtually melt off, but he can’t see, and Tasha takes the opportunity to skitter after the Wusthof, which has slid partly under the large machine that toasts the buns.

  She snatches up the blade and is back to Chip in a flash, where he still stands blinking fry corpses out of his eyes, not having thought to actually use his hands to wipe off the scalding goo. He crumples after a few stabs in the neck, the Chip failing with sparks flying, his body softening on the oily tile, then laying still.

  Tasha breathes heavily and rubs her bare shoulder where some of the oil peppered her skin. She looks at the wound, little white dots interrupting the brown of the rest of her. They aren’t really burns. She’ll be fine.

  She wonders where the rest of the McDonalds crew is. The fry girl has a broken neck and Chip has been taken care of. She creeps around to the office of the restaurant and finds a door with a plaque bearing the word “Manager.” It’s closed.

  “Hello?” she calls. “Anybody in there?”

  She wants to put an ear against the door but doesn’t in case it flies open. Even so, she hears the quietest hint of a whisper, some rustling. She feels a pang of excitement, and also fear. She taps with the knife.

  “Hey, anybody in there? It’s okay. Chip is gone.”

  If anyone living is hiding behind the door, she assumes they will have barricaded themselves in, terrified of what their coworkers became, probably thinking they had gone on a wage-slave rampage. She can smell human waste, and hopes whoever is in there is in there alone. She can’t imagine taking a shit in front of anyone she worked with—she thinks bitterly of Cara—let alone having to sit in the same room with them (and it) afterwards.

  She tries one more time.

  “Hello…?”

  Through the door comes a rattlesnake hiss.

  “Go…the fuck…away.”

  The voice startles Tasha so much that she stumbles backward, the knife drooping to her side. The words sound like a wicker chair being strangled by a witch. Tasha thinks the person must be dying. Almost a week without food or water (unless they had had the presence of mind to take some in when they hid) and the stench of their own refuse polluting the air of what Tasha assumes to be a cell of an office…they can’t be too well.

  “I’m leaving,” she says, backing toward the lobby. “Chip’s dead. Just so you know.”

  She thinks about what she’s said and adds an afterthought,

  “Uh…the employee of the month, I mean. That Chip. Not, uh, all the Chips.”

  She steps over Chip’s body and scans the food prep area, deciding whether or not she should take anything. In a cooler by the front counter there are bottles of Dasani water, which she generally scoffs at. She pulls one out. Might as well save the Evian.

  Before she leaves she goes into the public bathroom and is surprised by a dead man in the women’s room. He’s dressed as a woman, his dress stopping below the knee, his hair pulled back. She can see the tracks where the extensions were sewn in. His face is beautiful, uglied only by a gaping bite mark on his neck. Tasha turns to the men’s bathroom and uses the mirror to touch up her make-up, using the little comb from her cosmetics bag to perfect her eyelashes. The gray tones of the lights around the mirror paint shadows on her face. She stares at herself a moment longer before turning away.

  Outside, the temperature has changed again and she’s no longer grateful for the chill McDonald’s left on her skin, so she puts on the hoodie that she’d stowed in the backpack. The sky has the purplish tint of smog and storm, and she feels a flicker of concern. Again? If it storms and she’s outside it could be bad for her. The color of the sky reminds her of the last conversation she’d had with Dinah before they’d closed their windows against the rain. Dinah had wanted to go south with Tasha. They would’ve found a way to get her out, Tasha thinks bitterly. Then she wouldn’t be alone. Again. Walking across this god-forsaken city like a lonely pioneer. It would be better with someone to watch her back.

  Tasha had decided that morning that she would take Lakeshore as far south as she could—she didn’t trust the residential streets to be clear of Minkers. The Drive had been reserved for foot traffic, bikes and Segways for the past twelve years, and she had been jogging on it a number of times since she moved up North. It was open enough to enable her to see any approaching Minkers, but sheltered in places by domed gazebos and trees, so she could take
cover if necessary. She decides to stick with this plan despite the weather, and continues walking east on Foster.

  As she walks, she observes a number of boarded-up windows in the massive building across from McDonald’s. It’s a government building that housed the black-suited Drivers of the L, a structure normally too classy for wooden boards to be blacking the eyes of its windows. Tasha wonders how many there are like her inside—unChipped and in hiding from a world gone mad. How many Dinahs, locked up with monsters? The Drivers all had MINK as a matter of course, so she thinks there must be only a few exceptions in this particular building: employees new to the company and not yet eligible, cowering with their husbands and children, wondering what’s next. The Barbie doll in McDonald’s was the only evidence of a child Tasha has seen since the Change, and she shudders thinking of it. One likes to pretend that children simply disappear during catastrophe, vanishing like smoke until the worst is over, when they’ll be returned to their homes untouched and unaffected.

  The skeleton of a building still being constructed rears up beside her on Foster, a behemoth of a tower with only the spine and ribs in place. It used to be a retirement home, but they were currently renovating it into a mansion of a dance club, complete with attached hotel rooms—bookable by the hour and by the night.

  She almost trips over a yellow construction helmet, a swatch of bloody hair stuck to the inside. There’s no other sign of carnage around the building site. Tasha wonders where all the people are. Chicago was packed with people before the Change. Even if they’re all dead she’d expect at least to see their bodies, but the Volamu are clear in this area—she’s almost reached the place where they stop—and except for the helmet with the bloody hair, she sees nothing unusual or alarming. The Drivers’ building appeared to be deserted also, but the barricaded windows tell her otherwise. She wonders if the Minkers will notice the difference.

  She passes the point where the Volamu ends, its track thrumming into a groove underground which will run endlessly backward toward the L. She wishes she had not wondered at the absence of bodies, because as she reaches Marine Drive there are many, all collected at the entrance of the subway that would have taken them downtown. She peers down the stairs. Only the first five or so steps are illuminated with sunlight and she can’t see beyond them. Stretched across the top three steps is a Driver, her suit neatly pressed, the black sunglasses half off her face. Her hair hides her eyes. She must have been new—Chipless. Tasha wonders if she was going up or down when she was attacked: descending the stairs to begin her shift, or fleeing up them as her passengers turned on her, barking.

  Scattered around the top of the stairs are at least twenty other dead Chicagoans, coagulated blood like lava around their various wounds. A man and a woman lie very close together, their throats open, their hands almost touching. Tasha imagines the passages under Chicago packed with the bodies of the city’s former inhabitants—the Change had taken place during the early hours of the commute when the city was buzzing with people headed to work and school. With so many Chicagoans—almost all—dependent on the trains, many of them must have died early that morning, trapped on various lines while other passengers inexplicably, horrifically, became monsters right before their eyes. All it would have taken was a Minker or two per train car to transform it into a compartment of inescapable terror. Tasha thinks of the train she’s seen stopped on the tracks at Berwyn, the man in the cheap suit hanging from the alloy. He had managed to escape the train car, but it didn’t matter. If the streets are empty of Chicagoans now, Tasha thinks she would only have to enter the subways to find them.

  Her mind goes to the day she rode the L downtown with Gina on their way to Cybranu—even though it hadn’t been rush hour, the train had been packed with people. What if Gina had changed right then? The Driver would have been Chipped, leaving the train to careen off the tracks or crash into another train. In her compartment, Tasha wouldn’t have been able to get away, crowded against other passengers also trying to escape—squalling cattle crammed in the cart, protesting their journey to slaughter. Tasha would have been one of them. No nail file, no Wusthof to save her. She’s tired of these scenarios: what-ifs, what-nows. She looks at the people around the subway entrance. The whole scene has begun to smell—several crows watch Tasha from the rails of the stairwell, no doubt irritated by her interruption—and Tasha finally moves on, the entrance to Lakeshore just ahead.

  She can smell the water of Lake Michigan—almost ocean but a tamer scent, mixed with pollution. It reminds her of the year she met Gina, going to the beaches to show off, stretching the legs of their new collegiate independence. Tasha had come a lot farther than her friend—Gina grew up just outside the city in a gated suburb—but the taste of freedom was sweet for both of them. Tasha tastes a vestige of it now, born from her eagerness to wipe the scene at the subway entrance from her thoughts. She finds herself passing the entrance to Lakeshore and crossing under the intricately designed overpass toward Foster Beach. She needs to breathe that air again.

  A soccer stadium fills the south field beside the beach; a smallish building that had seated one or two thousand people. It had been built to accommodate the hundred or so players who would congregate there every season. Someone had seen the players’ dedication and thought they could make some money by building a stadium, holding events and charging admission. When it was still just grass, Tasha would see the guys racing up the field like herds of wild ponies, brown mustangs glistening with sweat. When the stadium was built they’d mostly wandered off, and the structure became a ghost lodge for drug addicts and people with nowhere to live. A few teams still played, but they were covert about it, some even sneaking in at night to play. Tasha eyes the stadium warily now. It seems quiet enough—it always does. The silver siding has turned gray with neglect; rusty weeds crowd its edges. She listens and hears only the faint lapping of the lake, which she walks toward, picking her way between scattered trash and dog shit.

  She nears the shore, passing through the low concrete structure that houses the bathrooms and, once, a concession stand. It’s an old building, moss-covered in places; just looking at it makes Tasha feel claustrophobic. The towering architectural goliaths of downtown and the rest of the North Side blot out the sky, but at least they don’t create a cramped ceiling of concrete. She feels she can’t stretch her neck while underneath it, and she’s glad when she passes through it to the beach, where her Nikes sink into the loose sand.

  She walks closer to the water, enjoying the squabbling of seagulls peppering the quiet. A few of them stand like pirates on one peg leg, the other webbed appendage stuffed up in their plumage. They chuckle in their throats at one another, little half-threats at their birdy frenemies. Two of the birds are competing over some piece of something they have found in the surf, their voices shrill and irritated. Tasha can’t help but laugh a little at their oblivious outrage. They land on the beach with the item between them on the sand. It’s a shrimp. Or it could be a finger. At this point the finger seems more likely than the shrimp. The two birds take turns making sudden movements toward their prize, each daring the other to lay claim to it, their smooth white chests pulsating as they complain. Their eyes are fierce and bright.

  Suddenly another gull drops out of the sky, a black ring around his beak, either a mark of age or the sign of another breed entirely. He gives one raspy cough of a squall and snatches the finger (or shrimp), winging off toward the deserted pier to enjoy his prize. The other two are left warbling, at a loss, but don’t pursue their black-beaked brother. Tasha imagines they are used to it. Now they poke around in the sand, pulling up rubber bands and other rubbish, none of it edible. One unearths a tiny plastic dog, a child’s toy, missing one leg. Tasha has the urge to take it from him—it plucks some rusty string in her heart—but she doesn’t even know what she’d do with it, so she stops herself. Anyway, the two birds take flight in a hurry, bumping into each other as they struggle to get in the air. Tasha figures the gull with the
black beak is back to pester them and looks around for it.

  She doesn’t know how she didn’t hear their feet, dozens of them, at least thirty Minkers making their way over the sand toward her. She can see more behind them farther off, stumbling through the dunes to reach her before the others.

  Her throat is suddenly dry. She should be running, should be scrambling, flying, but the fear is like a spine injury—she feels nothing, reacts to nothing, only sees the danger and shrinks from it. Blurs with open barking mouths, their moans and howls enhanced by her panic—every sound is deafening, nearer and nearer. The knife is in her hand but it’s slipping—her hands aren’t her own. Neither is her throat, or she’d be screaming.

  The lake laps against her shoe, the cold water sinking through the nylon and into her sock. Her toes are wet, and she’s awake.

  Tasha tightens her grip on the Wusthof and runs, staying close to the water where the sand is firmer while the Minkers stumble along in the looser stuff of the open beach. They are not quick, but some of them are in good shape—partly due to the Chip, she knows—and they clip along a hundred meters behind her, their barking thin with exertion. They don’t seem to be closing the distance at all; they run at their pace and Tasha runs at hers, her fear a shining silver spur. She thinks of her high school algebra teacher asking questions about two trains traveling on a track at different but consistent speeds. Would they ever meet? Tasha had always gotten it wrong; there was no definite answer, the way she saw it. One of the Drivers could be drunk, could be sleep-deprived. One train could hit a banana peel and go careening out of control. Anything could happen.

  Tasha slows a little, feeling a sharp pang in her abdomen from running. Her gym membership and jogging on Lakeshore before the Change had made her fit for distance—turns out the kickboxing hadn’t hurt either—but had not prepared her for all-out sprinting. She wishes she had worn a sports bra. Why hadn’t she worn a sports bra? The pang is distracting, but she unexpectedly thinks of how many calories she is burning and is momentarily, bizarrely pleased.