Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  Tasha goes to the Nike bag and draws out two Snickers bars. Returning to Vette’s side she places them in a cross on the dead woman’s chest. Maybe the ferryman will take them in place of the coins, since Tasha has no money. Like with Dinah—another dead girl, another almost-friend who Tasha had not saved—she has nothing to give. She hopes the ferryman likes chocolate. If not, and Vette is forced to wander the Styx for eternity, at least she won’t be hungry.

  Chapter 16

  Tasha pauses as she has several times already after leaving Vette and the corner store and readjusts the weight of her backpack and the Nike duffel bag, both packed with nonperishable food items. Tasha welcomes the frequent stops for adjustments—she dreads her return to the stadium, where she will have to explain the loss of Vette to the remaining members of the team. She wonders if they’ll even let her back into the storage room without their teammate. She anticipates their accusing stares, their cold silences. Middle school all over again, she thinks. She doesn’t know how she’ll explain. She can’t say it’s not her fault. It is.

  She can feel a single bead of sweat inching its way down her spine, even though she has taken off the Adidas hoodie and tucked it under her arm. The weather is as moody as ever, a petulant mutant with mutant PMS. It looks like rain, and she decides to hurry. The stadium is in sight now, and now that she is so close to her goal, the duffel bag seems suddenly unbearably heavy, her arms loose and tingly. A mist has risen up around the stadium, a smoggy halo.

  She realizes quickly that something is wrong. The camouflaged door that had closed firmly behind her and Vette an hour before is open, ominous. Tasha freezes. She doesn’t hear a sound, not even the lake. Creeping forward, she realizes she is still stupidly hefting the duffel bag, and unslings it from her shoulder, lowering it soundlessly to the ground. As an afterthought—and still keeping her eye on the stadium door—she removes one strap of her backpack long enough to stuff the Adidas sweatshirt into it around the canned goods, then re-shoulders the bag. She can feel her internal organs pulsing, not just her heart: her lungs feel like they’re vibrating, the shudders snaking through her veins to set her kidneys in motion, her bladder. Why hadn’t she peed at the corner store? One more thing she should’ve been doing instead of standing in the mirror. She tries to push it all—including the possibility of peeing on herself—out of her mind as she approaches the doorway.

  It’s dark, of course, and her eyes take a second to adjust, a long second in which she feels as helpless as a cavefish set free in noon-lit waters. When she finds her sight again, she sees the bodies.

  Well, just one body. She’d expected more. It’s #16, sprawled in front of the door that leads to the playing field of the stadium. For a brief moment, Tasha considers the possibility that Ishmael and the others might have killed the guy and taken off, but not only does this not make sense, moving closer Tasha can see from the chewed state of his flesh that his death was the work of a Minker.

  She realizes with a start that there must be more. A single Minker wouldn’t have been enough to send Ishmael and the team on the run; there must have been a group. Her mind goes instantly to the herd of them that had tailed her on the beach, hanging around. Of course they had made an attempt on the stadium: why wouldn’t they?

  She shrieks as something slams against the other side of the door blockaded by #16’s body. His lifeless form shifts a little from the force. Knowing it’s a bad idea, Tasha goes to the door, puts her ear against it, and listens.

  It sounds like a fucking dog pound on the other side.

  She can’t identify how many there are, but the chorus of barks makes Tasha remind herself to strengthen her PC muscles’ hold on her urethra. So they came from inside the stadium. Tasha imagines Ishmael and the others sitting in the grass, eating their hot dogs, when the Minkers came through one of the blockaded entrances. Ishmael would have shepherded the others toward their storage room, but #16 had fallen behind. She hadn’t pictured him as the heroic type, but it seems he had stayed back to slow up the Minkers by sitting in front of the door. Tasha can’t imagine that; knowing she is dying, feeling the life leaking out of her like air from a balloon. She looks at #16, face obscured by his arm. She wishes she had time to arrange a little Snickers bar crucifix for him too. Or maybe something else. Something he would like better. He deserves it, staying behind to lock the door to give his team a fighting chance.

  But then she realizes that the door isn’t locked at all. The stream of light coming through is widening as the Minkers on the other side bustle patiently forward. #16 is keeping it somewhat closed, plus a box or two he had evidently moved in front of it before his strength gave out. No wonder he wasn’t able to lock the door: he died first. A few focused shoves from the creatures and they’d be through.

  There’s another sudden shove and the gap widens just enough for Tasha to glimpse the Chipped woman at the same moment the woman sees Tasha: she’s tall, wearing a stunning silk blouse and slacks. She had worn some patterned pumps, but one shoe is gone and the heel of the other has snapped off. She emits a high-pitched yip as her dull eyes settle on Tasha and the herd rallies around her eagerly.

  Tasha turns to run, but the woman is quick and her well-manicured hand shoots through the opening, snatching at Tasha’s earring. Tasha’s neck arches backward like a horse on a tight rein and she drops the knife, cursing herself immediately. Twisting sharply, she breaks the woman’s grip, but now the hand has seized Tasha’s tank top and it’s not letting go. The Wusthof is out of reach. The Minkers snuffle at the opening, still too stupid to actively rush the door. But it’s slowly opening on its own beneath their weight as they struggle to get a look at Tasha, who is wriggling like a fish on a line. An instantaneous thought of Dinah flashes across her mind—is this how Dale got her? Tasha throws her body against the door to hold them off a little while longer, clawing at the woman’s hand, trying to free herself.

  It’s not working. She has no idea how many of the Chipped are on the other side of the door, but she can feel that their lazy pressure is greater than her applied force. Her shirt is tearing. The woman is drawing Tasha toward the herd with her grip on the cotton.

  “I loved this shirt, you asshole!” Tasha yells, and tears herself away from the door and the well-dressed woman. Straining against the simple black seams, she feels like a small, curly-haired ox in the yoke. She thought this would be a lot easier.

  After another forceful heave against her harness, it happens: the shirt rips and Tasha is free. The black stretchy fabric whips through the straps in the Prada backpack and is left hanging in the pink-painted talons of the Chipped woman, who hasn’t yet realized she’s lost her fish. Tasha almost falls, but doesn’t. She snatches up the Wusthof, takes a last look at her shirt dangling from the hooked fingers coming through the rapidly-widening door, then runs, hearing the fabric of #16’s jersey sliding against the floor behind her as he’s scooted slowly out of the way.

  Tasha rushes out the door through which she entered, pausing momentarily and looking left and then right, as if about to jaywalk. There is a cluster of Minkers to the north, but they’re crowding around something and haven’t noticed her yet. She hopes it’s the entrance the bastards found to get in and not the body of one of the soccer team. Not Ishmael. She can’t afford to investigate. Gripping the straps of her backpack, she takes off south, heading downtown.

  She remembers what Ishmael said about Lakeshore Drive, but she takes it anyway. The idea of negotiating the sometimes-confusing streets of Buena Park does not appeal to her—she always got disoriented wandering around there, especially with all the renovations and additions of diagonal roads. Lakeshore takes her directly downtown. That’s where she needs to get first. Enough of this bullshit. Downtown she knows her way around, and she can regroup before heading to god knows where on the South Side.

  She leaps over the Nike duffel bag, slumped where she’d left it. No time to stop. She can’t remember what she’d put into her pack at the corner store
, but she knows she has food of some kind, and she knows she kept her can opener.

  Either way, she has more immediate problems to contend with. She is currently jogging south on Lakeshore Drive in her bra. She feels like a half-assed version of Baywatch. It’s not sexy, the slo-mo slink in the sand: she’s running flat out, alternating which hand she uses to hold the Wusthof and which hand she uses to hold her breasts as she books. It slows her down. She hadn’t thought a tank top was so effective in binding her boobs, but she supposes it was tight enough to impede them from doing all the moving they’re doing right now. She thinks about Pamela what’s-her-face and wonders how she did it, the sexy jog down the beach, gravity having its way with her with every springy step. Maybe it’s different running around with implants. Maybe it’s comfortable. She can’t imagine.

  It’s still hot, and Tasha is at least grateful for her absence of shirt with respect to the heat. She can feel the sweat starting to emerge from her scalp, aware also of the small rivulets running from under her arms down to her bra, where the sweat nestles in the fabric. The idea of this pisses her off. Nothing worse than sweat stains around the edge of the cup—you could be wearing $400 lingerie and a sweat stain in the silk will lower you from Vogue to Girls Gone Wild.

  Hot or not, the sky still looks like rain, and Tasha needs to find shelter before that happens. It’s hot now, but she knows the fickle nature of Chicago weather well and she doesn’t cherish the idea of being outside for a dramatic temperature drop, especially when wearing only a bra to protect her from the elements.

  Nearing Diversey, she slows from a dogtrot to a walk. She outran the herd at the stadium with no problem; she was probably out of sight before they even blundered out of the storage room. She’s in the clear, at least for now. She evaluates her body, trying to decide how tired she is. Not very, she concludes, which is surprising, considering the added weight of the cans in her backpack. Some of this might be adrenaline, she knows. Running outside is different than running on the treadmills at her gym, but she’s paced herself fairly well. Her brain, though, is tired. The loss of Vette seems ages ago; the feeling is dull like a bruise. She gauges by how far she’s run that it was about an hour ago, tops, since she left Vette in the corner store with two Snickers bars over her chest. It could have been last year, ten years ago, a story told to her by a grandparent. She wonders where Ishmael ended up, if he got away. She dismisses the idea that the small gathering of Minkers she saw as she fled the stadium had anything to do with him. But she can’t think about them right now. She needs to focus.

  Ishmael had been wrong so far about Lakeshore Drive. She’s jogged at least a mile and a half from the stadium and hasn’t seen a soul—not that the Minkers have souls, she corrects herself, and is then surprised by the churchiness of the thought. You’re not in Kentucky anymore, Dorothy.

  But really, souls or not, Lakeshore is deserted. She doesn’t even see any nervous pigeons or pilfering squirrels, no irritable seagulls drifting overhead. She finds herself gripping the Wusthof a little tighter, wondering if her dulled human instincts are failing to warn her of the nearness of danger. Tasha remembers the dogs of her youth, their hackles rising inexplicably at times, cautioning them about the nearness of something threatening. Thinking of it now, gooseflesh rises on her body. If she had hackles—and thank god she doesn’t, she thinks; just another thing she’d have to have waxed or lasered off—they’d be rising now. The heat settles around her like it’s making a nest. She realizes she’s thirsty, but doesn’t like the idea of digging around in the backpack, wasting time and making noise. Instead she keeps walking, pausing only at the place where Lakeshore Drive rises above Diversey to observe the casualties below, dozens of bodies clustered around the crisscrossing Volamu. The carnage looks like a mosh pit in a freeze frame, or a silent game of Ring Around the Rosie. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down, she thinks before moving on.

  She walks with the knife raised, imaginary hackles still standing, her heart still double-dutching. Ishmael’s words about Lakeshore hang over her like an omen. But Ishmael might have been a false prophet. Tasha feels the way she felt when she watched The Village in her living room as a kid, the antique player making a clicking sound. Her grandmother had told her it was a scary movie, and she’d watched it with her nerves on edge. When it turned out the only things to be afraid of were some spiky armadillos wearing red capes—and not even real spiky armadillos—she’d felt a sense of both relief and disappointment. She’d written a paper on it in college. Now Tasha has seen her world’s armadillos, and they’re certainly real, but Lakeshore Drive isn’t swarming with them, and she feels her adrenaline slipping, sapping her. No Minkers? Nothing to stab? She feels almost let down. But a little proud. She’d had a feeling that this route might be clearer. The Minkers would be sticking to the more populated streets, where there was food. She would have run into a lot more of her bitey friends if she had taken Broadway. She’d seen the activity in Uptown on the way to the Post; she doesn’t even want to know what Boystown is like. She knows she’ll be passing near the Gold Coast, and she’ll need to be careful over there. A lot of people with MINK and money to burn on extravagances like the Chip lived around there before the Change. She wonders if they’ve flown the coop or if they’ve stayed close to home, patrolling their upscale beats.

  She’s shivering a little, and assumes it’s from fear or nerves, but she realizes she’s actually cold. The temperature has dropped, as she knew it would. She cups her hands over her breasts, annoyed that her nipples are hard in the chill.

  “Stop it,” she scolds them.

  Then she remembers the hoodie.

  “Idiot.” She rolls her eyes at herself and unslings the backpack, still walking as she extracts the purple pullover. Now she stops to put it on, setting the Prada backpack between her feet and resting the Wusthof on top of it. She snakes her arms through the sleeves but hesitates before pulling it over her head. She looks around. It would be just her luck to get attacked by a pack of them while she’s struggling to get her big-ass hair through the neck hole. The coast seems to be clear, and she sweeps the hoodie down over her, wriggling her fluffy head through the hole. Once it’s on, she swivels around again, prepared to see hundreds of Minkers bearing down on her. There’s no one. Nothing. But something else catches her attention: a drop on her head. Then another.

  Rain.

  “Fuck,” she groans.

  She pulls the hood quickly up over her hair out of habit, forgetting briefly that she has no perm to protect now. Either way, she doesn’t want to be caught in the rain. She remembers her last day with Dinah and the superstorm that had swept in. She and Dinah had witnessed the first surge of lightning, and Tasha doesn’t want to see it now, not when the object being struck could be her. Before the Change when it would storm, the subways would be packed with the homeless, and CTA officials weren’t legally allowed to make them leave. It was that bad.

  Overhead, a little east, Tasha hears the first sound of thunder. As if on cue. As if it had been eavesdropping on her thoughts. As if it had held a pair of binoculars to its eye, spotted Tasha, and rubbed its hands together in anticipation.

  “Fuuuuck,” Tasha moans and looks around. She’s just passed Fullerton. The nearest houses are three blocks away, and she doesn’t fancy the idea of breaking into a home only to be received by a Brady Bunch of Minkers. Ahead she sees the sign for the Lincoln Park Zoo, and runs for it, still holding her breasts down at intervals. The thunder grumbles at her back as she reaches the sign. The zoo is huge now, renovated and expanded to the point where some of its exhibits actually incorporate Lake Michigan. All that’s between her and the zoo is the lagoon where yuppies parked their yachts, a handy aluminum bridge arching over it. She races across the bridge, hearing the thunder gaining volume. She nears the zoo. They really did a fantastic job renovating it, she notices. They planted a lot of trees. But she doesn’t have time to admire the shrubbery; the rain is falling faster now, the temperature dropping. He
r eye falls on the Visitors’ Center, and she sprints to it, almost pulling her arm out of its socket as she yanks on a door that’s locked. She looks around desperately. No boulders to throw through the glass, and she’s wary of security alarms now anyway. The first flash of lightning comes, illuminating the darkening sky. She sees another sign, carved in wood: Cat House. It’s about twenty meters away and she goes for it, the sky threatening her every step. She pulls on the door. Mercifully it’s unlocked, and she ducks in.

  She closes the door softly behind her instead of letting it slam, and leans back against it, exhaling long and slow. Outside, the rain is loud against the glass of the door. Inside, it’s eerily quiet, and dim. The Cat House feels big: she can feel how much room there is in the air. As the lightning flashes again, she sees the cats, all lit up in white.

  They’re all in cages, crouching in corners or against their walls. The faces of the cages are tall, reaching the ceiling from where they begin close to the floor. The cages line the walls of the long hall that is the House, each pen elevated slightly. The visitor of the zoo must climb two or three steps to stand directly in the animal’s presence. Closest to Tasha, on her left, is an ocelot, a lithe, smallish creature with spots that Mrs. Kerry would have killed to have on a leash.