Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  “You go right, I’ll go left.”

  Although Tasha would appreciate more specific direction, she doesn’t ask. Instead she just follows suit when the woman breaks into a trot as they reach the first floor. The Minkers see them, and turn toward the two of them snarling. Tasha’s comrade lets her black backpack slide down her arm to the floor as they get nearer. Tasha wonders if this woman is just a hundred-and-ten-pound Rambo or if her heart is pounding as hard as Tasha’s.

  Then they’re upon them and Tasha is hacking at the neck of what used to be the Web concierge, keeping the pantsuited body between her and another Minker, a young guy in cargo shorts and a graphic tee. The concierge goes down with a spark and Tasha turns to the guy. Out of the corner of her eye she can see the Asian woman stepping over the corpse of one of the others, about to start on her second as well. Her box cutter drips blood. It’s not very big, but then again neither is the Chip.

  The guy in the cargo shorts isn’t as easy as the concierge. He’s bigger and Tasha can’t get at his neck as easily without her arm being high and vulnerable to his grabby hands. She scuttles behind him, looking for an opening. He keeps turning and turning. They could do this for hours.

  “Need some help?” The Asian woman has put down her second target and approaches Tasha with her box cutter half-raised. Tasha feels flustered—it’s like being the last kid to finish her quiz in school.

  “No,” she says, and lunges in at the guy’s neck, her arm passing by his cheek for a stab.

  It happens very quickly. His hands spring up and snatch her forearm, his cloudy-eyed face snapping sideways in a flash, his teeth burying themselves in her bicep.

  The pain is like a dog bite, simultaneously sharp and dull. The pressure of the flat front teeth through her flesh is intense, the stupid bearded jaws squeezing and grinding. She can feel the warm air from his nostrils flaring against her skin. Bright white flashes of pain burst in her vision. He’s tearing her arm off. Her throat is next.

  And then it’s over. His jaws loosen, his teeth slip out of her flesh, and he tumbles to the floor, his neck sparking.

  Tasha stares at her arm, the circle of punctures, and the pulse of blood rising from them. She slaps her hand over the wound, feeling queasy. She wants her mom.

  “No, no, no, don’t touch it yet. Your hands are dirty.”

  Her head swimming, Tasha looks up. There’s a woman with her, dark-haired and light-skinned, her eyes concerned. She’s holding a box cutter, standing over the body of the man who, a moment before, had latched onto Tasha’s arm like Jaws.

  “Hey, you should sit down,” the woman says.

  Tasha does as she’s told, nearly crumpling to the floor where she stands. Her arm is throbbing. It’s the only thing she can feel: her fear is gone and all she feels is teeth, teeth, teeth.

  Then the Asian woman is there with the backpack she’d dropped and is fussing over Tasha’s arm, ripping open a pouch of peroxide and pouring it on the wound. Tasha can hear her skin fizzing. Through the curtain of nausea that’s drawn around her, she thinks the liquid stings. The woman is wrapping Tasha’s arm now, a long white bandage tightening around the red maw in her bicep. It feels better. It feels secure.

  “I’d give you a shot of Tranquilix, but the security office was out of syringes.”

  Tasha gazes dreamily at the woman crouching next to her. The fog of shock has lifted slightly, but she doesn’t think she remembers how to speak just yet. The woman studies Tasha’s face.

  “You need a sandwich,” she says finally.

  After helping Tasha collect her things from Harmony’s spa, Tasha’s new friend leads her up a few floors to what used to be the food court.

  “Welcome to my kingdom,” the woman makes a grand sweeping gesture, giggling. “I swear to god I spend more time here than the guard room.”

  “What are you even doing here?” They’re the first words Tasha has spoken since she was bitten. She had been shocked. She’s killed many of them since the Change, and she’d always worried about being bitten, killed, eaten. But actually being bitten never seemed like a real possibility. It was like playing Grand Theft Auto, then actually stealing a car and getting your brains blown out. No restart button. Thank god they’re not contagious.

  “Well, I was mall security before everything got weird. Now I’m just a chick with a Taser.”

  Tasha looks at her belt for the Taser. The woman sees the glance and shakes her head, smiling.

  “Well, I had a Taser. I used it on the first day and realized it doesn’t really work on these guys.”

  “How many have you…” Tasha pauses. “Gotten rid of?” Kill sounds so…something.

  “Prob’ly close to thirty. There were a ton of ‘em here on the morning of. It’s easy with the cameras in the guardroom. I can see the isolated ones and just go after them.”

  Tasha is impressed. Her own numbers seem pitiful. Not so bad if she counts the massacre of the group at the zoo, though. She decides she’ll hold off on that story for now. Maybe she’ll tell it later.

  “Have you been downtown this whole time? Why’d you come here? Just felt like doing some shopping?”

  Tasha shakes her head.

  “No, I lived up North. But I needed to leave. So now…I’m here.”

  The woman shrugs.

  “I had just gotten to work when it happened. Obviously. My supervisor was my first one.”

  “My doorman was my first.”

  “How was it?”

  “It was…bloody. Scary.”

  “Yeah. Me too. What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Tasha.”

  “My cousin’s name is Tasha. My name’s Z.”

  “That’s a letter.”

  Z glances at Tasha as they cross the huge, empty food court, raising her eyebrow.

  “Short for Azalea.”

  “Yeah, Z is way better.”

  “See? My sister’s name is way worse though: Viburnum. My brother? Snapdragon.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “I wish I was. My dad had a thing for flowers. Viburnum…can you imagine? Guess what we call her?”

  “V?” Tasha guesses.

  “Yes!” The woman laughs. “At least my brother can get called Dragon. That’s actually kinda cool.”

  They approach a counter emblazoned with shining red cursive letters: Big Mama’s Subs. Tasha’s stomach gives a little clench, whether of hunger or anticipation she can’t tell. She’s been eating canned peaches and SpaghettiO-esque meals for a week: the idea of a submarine sandwich makes her more excited than she can remember being for quite some time.

  “Bon appetit,” Z says as she sits up on the countertop and scoots across behind it.

  They raid Big Mama’s while Z explains why it’s the only place she’s been eating. She ate Spumoni’s on the first and second days, she says, because the pizza was first fresh and then just stale. But after that it was either inedible or unmade, and she doesn’t know how to work the ovens. All the other food joints—Mexican, Chinese, burger places: the food floor has it all—require some kind of cooking, and she hasn’t figured out their various technologies. Big Mama’s, on the other hand, is pretty self-explanatory: the massive refrigerators store seemingly endless quantities of meats, cheeses, and vegetables; the breads are stored in airtight containers; the condiments are chilled; the chips individually packaged. The Web—like the Apiary, and McDonald’s, and most other big businesses—is connected to the city’s power grid, and will be for thirty days.

  Tasha makes herself the most obscene foot-long sandwich known to woman: turkey, ham, cheese, spinach, tomatoes, and olives with oil and vinegar. Z eats a salad—apparently she’d already had a sub for breakfast. They eat at one of the dozens of tables in a sea of blue and green plastic, sitting at the edge in case they need to bolt. Tasha keeps the half of the sandwich she’s not yet eating wrapped and ready: if they have to run, she’s sure as hell not leaving it behind. It is her new most precious thing.


  “So why are you…you know…alive?” Tasha asks through a mouthful of turkey.

  “Rude!” Z laughs, crunching on a cucumber. “I guess you mean how am I alive. I mean, I dunno. The first day was the hardest, with Mari, my supervisor. After that there were shoppers that I had to take out. The first ones I took care of had wandered into the Employees Only area. Then the first time I ate at Big Mama’s, there was a kid behind the counter who used to work there. He got a little bitey. As you can see, I’m still clearing the rest of the mall.”

  “So you’re just going to stay here?”

  Z looks uncomfortable but stares resolutely at her salad.

  “I mean, yeah. I can at least see what I’m up against in here, with all the cameras and stuff. It makes it easy to hunt ‘em down. Out there, I mean, who knows. Plus, I figure it’s just a matter of time until the Army comes in and gets everything straightened out. Just gotta hold down the fort.”

  Tasha’s sandwich is halfway into her mouth, but she pauses. She hasn’t considered the Army. She’s given the President some reflection and imagined the fate of the White House, but as far as jets and hovertanks swarming in, vanquishing the biting masses and waving red, white and blue flags with the missing California star—not a thought. She feels a brief stir of a hopeful spider in her stomach, but it’s squashed quickly. This feels like Santa Claus. She’s seen enough in the past ten days to know—to think she knows—that there is no fat man in a camouflage suit squeezing down the rotting American chimney. This is not a world for that anymore: she’s seen lions tearing flesh from bodies still clothed in Armani suits. The Army? Nah. But she remembers Dinah’s frail hope that had urged Tasha to go to the Post, desperate for some bit of news, and remembers Dinah’s bitter disappointment when all Leona’s letter contained was a warning. She doesn’t know Z at all, but the woman had saved Tasha from what might have been an ambush, had dressed her bitten arm, brought her up into her food palace. Tasha doesn’t want to dash her hopes so casually. So she takes a bite of her sandwich and says,

  “The Army, huh?”

  Now it’s Z’s turn to stop eating. She looks carefully at Tasha’s face, and Tasha feels something like a blush in her chest. She had tried not to be a dick about it.

  “The Army,” Z says flatly.

  “Mmk,” Tasha says, and her ears tell her she sounds like her father. But Z hadn’t known him; she can’t know this is a gentle sound. To Z Tasha sounds like Tasha, and Z doesn’t know Tasha either. She tells herself not to be such a jerk. Z hadn’t known Dinah and her pointless hope. Tasha changes the subject.

  “So what’s it been like, cooped up in here?”

  Z shrugs.

  “I mean, it definitely hasn’t been boring. Not at first, anyway. There aren’t tons of ‘em in here since it all happened so early, but there was enough to keep me busy. I see them on the security cameras and if they look manageable I go take care of ‘em.”

  “So what we just did by the escalators was no biggie for you, huh? Old hat?”

  “Eh, kinda. I went through security training so I can kick some ass. The box cutter to the neck though,” Z makes a violent, descriptive gesture, “that’s a little different.”

  “Wow,” Tasha sighs. The feeling of being outdone returns. All the running and hiding she’s been doing, the cowering. “You’re…I don’t know. You’re a beast.”

  Z throws back her head and laughs, unabashedly showing Tasha the half-chewed contents of her mouth. Tasha smiles in spite of her insecurity. She’s been holding back a little—she had just begun to open up to the idea of Vette, and look where that got her—but she feels a little piece of herself unfold.

  “Oh please,” Z chortles, chewing. “Don’t tell me you’ve had an easy time since you left the North Side. You’ve done your share of neck-hacking, I bet. Come on. Dish.”

  Tasha dishes. She tells Z about Brian and the others she’d killed. She tells her about Chip, employee of the month at McDonald’s. Z laughs ruefully.

  “Ha. See! Anyway, that’s what you get for eating at McDonald’s!”

  “Oh, like Big Mama’s is a lot better!” Tasha cries, brandishing her sandwich.

  “Have you seen anyone else alive? Besides me.”

  Tasha tells her about the running man on Broadway, about Ishmael, and #16 and #34. She tells her about the girl in yellow. She doesn’t tell her about Dinah, but she does find herself telling Z about Vette.

  “Christ,” Z says quietly.

  They’re silent for awhile after that and finish their food without further conversation. Tasha begins on the second half of her enormous sub, even though she’s sure she won’t be able to finish it. The gluttony feels normal. Sitting in this blue plastic chair feels normal. Talking to Z is beginning to feel normal.

  “So you’d think there’d be a ton more of…them downtown,” says Tasha, taking a sip from the bottle of water she’d also taken from Big Mama’s.

  “Yeah, I thought the same thing. I remember when things were normal I’d see tons of people with the implant. Even a couple of my coworkers had it, and they’d brag about it.”

  “Same here. But Michigan Avenue was a ghost town today.”

  “Maybe they have, like, a mother ship,” Z jokes. “I wish the ones in here would get beamed up or whatever.”

  She pauses, abandoning her salad for the moment.

  “It was just me and Mari that morning. She’d worked the nightshift and I’d come to relieve her. I got here at five and she was already…gone. It must have just happened, though: nothing in the mall was too weird or messed up yet. But she was the only one I saw that morning. It took me awhile to…shut her down, you know? I didn’t know what to do.”

  They’ve wandered back into uncomfortable territory again and the silence has them in its grip once more. In her discomfort, Tasha has finished her entire sandwich without really paying attention. Now she looks down at her stomach. Z notices and laughs.

  “Do you have a food baby?”

  “A what?”

  “A food baby!” Z pushes her stomach out and pats it. Tasha laughs.

  “Yeah, I think I do. Oh my god, that sub was amazing.”

  “I told you. That’s one thing I liked about working here: this is the only Big Mama’s in the city. I’d come here every day even when things were normal. We can come again tomorrow. You are going to sleep here, right?”

  “Yeah, probably. I hadn’t really thought that far ahead,” says Tasha, feeling bashful, although she’s lying.

  “You should sleep in the security room with me. It locks. They’re not great with doors.”

  They journey up to the twelfth floor of Macy’s—Z says she hasn’t been up much higher than that and doesn’t want to—and procure a sleeping bag for Tasha from the Outdoor section, and a pillow from Home. They brush their teeth in the women’s bathroom. Z tells Tasha a story about a male co-worker who had stumbled in drunk one morning when Z was putting on mascara in the mirror. He’d asked to borrow the tube of mascara, which she, mystified, had given to him. He’d put it down his throat, used it to trigger his gag reflex, and puked in the toilet five feet away from her. He’d even tried to give the tube of Maybelline back. Z had told him to keep it. The florescent lights are bright; the tile walls blindingly green.

  In the guardroom, Tasha has trouble sleeping at first, a problem Z does not seem to share. The many screens that are such a comfort to Z are bright with their countless views of the Web. Tasha imagines waking to see them filling up, one by one; all the Minkers in Chicago storming the mall to come pound down the door of the guardroom like the gates of Troy. But the cameras are still and empty. All except one. It’s the camera that looks in on the fitting rooms at Guess. It doesn’t view the stalls directly, but through the curtain Tasha can see the shadow of the young girl, naked, banging her head against the mirror over and over and over.

  Chapter 19

  “What are you going to do when you run out of chicken?” Tasha asks.

  They’re
eating again—Tasha a salad, Z a toasted sub with nuked chicken pieces. They’ve spent the morning walking around the Web. Had there been music and other people besides those who popped up now and again trying to eat them, it would have felt like any day: two girlfriends in the mall making small talk, aimlessly circling the vastness of retail. The Minkers they’d encountered they’d put down—only two so far. Having someone with Tasha made it easier, both the actual killing and the thinking about it. As Z had said when they met by the escalators, it was just something that had to be done. It seems obvious now.

  “Eat turkey.”

  “And when you run out of turkey?”

  Z makes a face.

  “Eat ham, I guess.”

  “What’s wrong with ham?”

  “I never used to eat ham before all this shit happened,” she shrugs.

  “Why not?”

  “Pork on your fork will make you speak Pig Latin.”

  “What?” Tasha laughs.

  “I don’t know, it’s something my dad used to say. We never ate pork. Well, Dragon did. But he did everything we weren’t supposed to do.” Z smiles faintly, looking down at her food.

  Tasha swallows her bite of salad. It seems they can’t talk about anything without these moments emerging from the thickets of their recent pasts. It’s like a damp glass set down on tissue paper: the ring of moisture spreading outward and outward, a darkly expanding radius.

  “Do you know where your brother is? Or…any of them?”

  “My mom died giving birth to V, so I don’t remember her much. My dad lived in Humboldt Park. Dragon is in jail in Arizona. V lives in New York with her girl.”

  “Did any of them have the Chip? The implant?”

  “Dad did. He was a cop. Maybe V. I don’t know.”

  “Oh.”

  There’s not much Tasha can say besides “Oh.” Z’s not a stupid girl. She doesn’t think her father in his apartment in Humboldt Park is some miraculous exception. She knows he can’t be rescued. Yet Z thinks—with however much conviction—that the Army is going to swoop in and save them all, a topic they haven’t broached since its first gloomy emergence. Even so, she has wisely stayed holed up in the Web; has made no grand heroic journey to save the people she loves. They are leaves now, drained of chlorophyll, scattered by the wind. Her sister in New York might as well be in California with Leona. Unreachable. Tasha wonders how long it will take her new friend to realize that the Army and everyone else are similarly withered.