Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  “Do you think people really expect to get the things they wish for when they throw money in?”

  Z turns her head to look at the water, her face still troubled.

  “Maybe. Probably. People wish for stupid things, so it makes sense that they’d be stupid enough to expect them to come true.”

  Tasha considers this, wonders if Z knows that she is describing her own Santa Claus wish of the Army. It’s not stupid, Tasha decides—that’s mean. It’s just futile. But, she supposes that’s why it’s a wish to begin with. Z goes on:

  “I mean, I don’t know every wish everyone has ever made, but I’ve watched the kind of people who toss coins in there. Mostly kids. What are they wishing for? A puppy. A doll. Oh, and teenage girls threw money in too. They want to be popular, right? Or skinnier. Those are stupid wishes.”

  Tasha thinks she remembers wishing she were skinnier, and she wasn’t a teenager either. She didn’t wish in a fountain though; just in the mirror. Some girls wished in the toilet bowl.

  “I mean, people want what they want,” Z goes on, still looking at the water, and Tasha wonders what her friend sees. “I guess I can’t say it’s stupid. I just wish they would wish for something, like…I don’t know…smarter.”

  “And there’s your wish,” Tasha smiles, pushing their discussion about Dr. Rio out of the conversation. “Throw in a coin.”

  Z pats her pockets, smiling sadly.

  “Out of luck. I’m broke.”

  It’s Tasha’s last night sleeping in the guardroom. Z has taped a piece of paper over the screen showing the girl in the Guess fitting room. Tasha is grateful for it. With the girl’s head-banging hidden, she sleeps more easily. Z’s breathing fills the small room like a smoky chant. That night Tasha dreams she’s in California, being held by Amani, who is a woman with long, strong arms. Her fingernails are perfect unpainted ovals, the skin without lines. Somewhere nearby Leona is singing, her voice echoing like coins dropping in a well.

  Chapter 20

  Tasha has packed three sub sandwiches from Big Mama’s. She wants to bring a bag of chips too, but knows they will only be dust by the time she gets where she’s going. Whenever and wherever that is. She has laid the subs gently on top of her clothes in the backpack, double-wrapped. The self-foaming toothbrush and a stick of deodorant are wedged into a side pocket now to accommodate the sandwiches. The Wusthof is in her hand, as always. She feels like an action figure carrying it around all the time, a Ninja Turtle that comes with its weapon already attached, fixed and unremoveable; or a stuffed dog with his stuffed bone stitched permanently into his mouth.

  Z is quiet in the morning as Tasha packs. She’s fiddling with her box cutter, pushing and pulling the lever so the blade slides first in and then out again. It makes a clicking noise as the lever ticks over the notches.

  “Got everything?” She sounds like Tasha’s mother.

  “Mhmm.” Tasha sounds like Tasha.

  They had discussed where Tasha would be able to find a scooter. There are several of them in an employee lot behind the Web, where Z will take her. Z has warned her that she doesn’t know what kind of charge they carry, but if they don’t get her all the way South, they’ll get her close.

  Z walks her to the employee exit at the back of the building. They come across more bodies here—mostly victims, not Minkers—more than they’ve encountered in the rest of the Web. The mall hadn’t been open yet when the Change went down, so most of the skirmishes inside would have been between Chipped and unChipped employees, the Minkers and the MINKless.

  Z is silent as they pass the bodies on the floor. Tasha knows she probably recognizes more than a few of them, but she keeps her eyes bravely ahead, even as they fill with tears. They don’t speak. Tasha doesn’t relish the idea of leaving her here alone in the Web, munching pilfered subs and watching the motionless monitors in the guardroom. Besides the roving former employees and the odd shopper, there is nothing here to monitor. Nothing left to guard.

  They reach the back door and Tasha pretends to adjust the straps of her backpack, switching the Wusthof to her left hand in case Z wants to shake her right. It would feel too final and very Old West, and Tasha hopes she doesn’t.

  “Well…”

  They don’t look at each other. Z peers through the little window out at the scooter lot.

  “Looks like the coast is clear.”

  “Okay. Good.” Tasha can’t think of much else to say.

  “I hope you find Dr. Rio,” Z says lamely.

  “Yeah, thanks. Me too. I hope you…um…stay safe.”

  “Yeah, I will.”

  “Okay, well, I guess I’ll…okay. Bye, Z.”

  “Bye.”

  Tasha slips out the door, making sure it closes firmly behind her, hearing the click as it locks automatically. The lot is a dry, square patch of asphalt with twelve or thirteen electric scooters, their various colors of paint gleaming like candies. She has never ridden a scooter, but it has a seat and a gas pedal and handlebars. How hard can it be?

  She picks out a little silver model and walks over. It doesn’t have a key, only a keypad for the ignition code. Z has told her the code for the employee scooters—700—and she enters it. A light next to the keypad illuminates. There is no sound, no engine stirring to life, but the scooter is now vibrating slightly, so she assumes that means it’s on. She looks over her shoulder at the door where she left Z, but doesn’t see her in the window: she must have gone back upstairs. Tasha feels her heart sink a little—these past few days had been peaceful. Enjoyable. It was like summer camp—an oasis of leisure. She wonders if she and Z would have been friends before the Change, if they had ever met. Maybe—Z liked shopping as much as Tasha had, and knew a thing or two about mascara. She had a sense of humor. As a security guard, she never would have registered on Tasha’s radar as friend material. Then again, who did? Dinah lived right next door and she’d only ever avoided her.

  Tasha, with the exception of Gina, had never had too many female friends. And most of the women she knew—through work, or when she was in college—didn’t have many female friends either. Tasha always supposed it was because they didn’t want to compete over men, clothes, whatever. But maybe it was something more. When summer camp is over, there is always the keen sting of friendships parted. Perhaps you’d pricked each other’s fingers and rubbed the cuts together; blood sisters. Highly inadvisable, sanitationally speaking, but bonds are made out in the wilderness; the end of the summer was unavoidably painful. Better to skip the summer part altogether to avoid the pain at the end. Tasha looks back for Z in the window one more time. No one. It’s probably for the best, she consoles herself. Besides, she doesn’t want anyone watching when she attempts to ride the scooter.

  She straddles it hesitantly, leaving her backpack on her back. She continues holding the Wusthof as she grips the handlebars, flexing her fingers around them experimentally. Her foot rests lightly on the accelerator.

  She gives the throttle the tiniest bit of pressure. The scooter lurches forward with the quietest of purrs, and she brakes. She resettles her butt on the seat and notices the fluttering of her heart. It’s a little different than a bicycle, but not much. She looks around, preparing to ride the scooter out of the lot, and sees she must open a gate first, a formidable-looking sliding metal barrier with a keypad like the ones on the scooters. She unslings her leg from the scooter, annoyed.

  She approaches the gate. Z hadn’t mentioned it, but she assumes that’s because its code is the same. She enters 700. Yep. The keypad illuminates green and she hears the grumbling of gears as the gate prepares itself to open. Good.

  She turns her back on the gate and walks back over to her still-vibrating silver scooter. She adjusts the Wusthof in her hand against the handlebar and rearranges her butt on the seat once more. She exhales sharply, readying herself.

  “Okay.”

  She looks up to make sure the gate has opened as the green light promised, and is greeted by the sight o
f five Minkers, standing dizzily in the open space the gate had created. In her shock, Tasha jumps, and her foot slams against the accelerator. The scooter gives a shrill electronic whine and hurtles ahead, eating up the dozen feet to the gate and throwing her right into the midst of the Minkers. She falls off the back of the scooter, nearly stabbing herself in the thigh with the knife she still clutches, landing hard on her tailbone. The scooter had knocked over two of the Minkers and it takes the others a second or two to realize the scooter isn’t food. Another few seconds for them to realize that Tasha is.

  She slashes at the first one to reach her, a teenager with a green Mohawk—Mohawks hadn’t been cool for at decades. Her slice cuts the front of his throat, misting her arm with an initial spray of blood, but the wound is healing quickly, although his bark is cut short by the damage to his larynx. Another approaches her from the side, a girl of seven or eight in a basketball uniform. Tasha punts her, sending the kid flying three or four feet. The kick feels good. She wants to kick someone else. Who’s next?

  She turns and almost freezes. It’s a hot dog. A six-foot-tall hot dog. The hot dog wears a sign around its neck—bun?—that says “Jerry’s Wieners.” She stabs at it, but the costume is foamy and her knife isn’t much good against it, so she kicks him in the knee, or where his knee ought to be. A little low. She kicks again, so hard that it likely breaks the kneecap. He topples over. The Chip will heal the fracture easily, but with his arms pinioned to his sides by the hot dog costume, he’ll have trouble getting up.

  The little girl is ready for another try, and so is the Mohawked kid. Their cronies, who had initially been bowled over by the scooter, have joined them: they’re all groaning toward her and she regards them with fear. One of them wears a douchey weightlifting shirt with the sleeves cut off to reveal unreasonably mountainous biceps; the chest reads “FBI: Female Body Inspector.”

  “You can try,” she threatens the musclehead, trying to rekindle the bravado she’d built with Z as they cleared the Web’s floors, trying to feel like a hunter. But the past few days seem very far away now that she’s alone. She looks around. Nowhere to run. The Minkers block the only exit to the lot, and the door to the Web had locked behind her. She’s trapped.

  She decides to rush them. She shoulders the little girl with an NFL-worthy move that sends the kid flying again. The Mohawk teen grabs one of Tasha’s arms and she struggles to keep him from towing her bicep into his snapping jaws. It’s the same bicep that had been bitten her first day at the Web, and she can feel the bandaged area tingling, remembering the sensation of teeth. It puts panic in her heart, the memory of recent trauma. The musclehead has her other arm and is also pulling. His weight is an anchor on her arm and Tasha feels her joints stretching as Mohawk yanks and whines. She feels as though they will rip her apart. The fifth Minker, a supermodel-type wearing a fabulous gold knit-sweater, has been slow out of the gate, but she’s ambling over now, her perfectly white teeth bared and coming for Tasha’s throat.

  Tasha wriggles as hard as she can, feeling her lungs taking in less and less air in her fear. She’s begun to pant. The knife is in her hand but useless with Mohawk’s weight clinging to her. She can’t pull away from the gym-rat without putting herself nearer to the green-haired teenager, and vice versa. The little girl is getting up from where Tasha tossed her. The supermodel is bearing down on her, her reed-straight hair framing her face attractively as she moves in for the kill.

  The supermodel’s head explodes.

  Tasha blinks. Even her assailants pause for a moment at the sound, a deafening noise, followed by the unpleasant, muted splatter of brain matter falling onto concrete. Tasha might have been able to pull her arms free at that moment, but she’s too shocked by the decapitated body of the supermodel, which sways before her: tall, slim, and tanned, perfect except for its lack of head. The body finally succumbs to lifelessness, and it collapses onto a nearby red scooter.

  There’s a clatter as Z drops the gun and whips out her box cutter. The little girl has made a move, and Z cuts out the Chip with a deft flick of her wrist, her face screwed up in disgust. She looks at Tasha and smiles a little.

  “Need some help?”

  Tasha laughs with relief and feels her eyes sting with tears. She kicks out at the Mohawk kid, but he doesn’t budge. Z steps up and grabs the musclehead in what looks like a wrestling hold, breaking his grip on Tasha’s forearm. He turns to bite Z, but she jerks his body and Tasha hears something snap.

  Tasha turns her attention to Mohawk and lets Z handle the musclehead. The teenager is pretty strong and Tasha grapples with him for a minute before she breaks his hold. Her arm free, she plunges the knife into his neck where she’d seen the red light flickering. She’s an inch off. She pulls out and tries again. A spark. Bingo was his name-o.

  The musclehead is already dead when Mohawk hits the ground. Z is barely out of breath. Tasha regards the guy’s stupid FBI shirt and gives his body the bird. Tasha looks around at the damage, her eyes settling on the supermodel. The woman’s neck is sealed over as if with flesh-colored grout, her head gone but her body losing no blood. Her fingers and feet twitch continuously, but she doesn’t rise. The Chip in her stump of a neck flashes ceaselessly.

  “How does that work?” Z is eyeing the supermodel too.

  “I’m sure there’s an acronym. Very scientific. Or something. So…um…gun?”

  Z looks embarrassed.

  “I took it off a cop in the hallway after you came out here. His name was Desmond. Nice guy until he got the Chip. Looks like somebody took care of him on that first morning.”

  “Damn. That was a nice shot though.”

  Z looks pleased.

  “Thanks. Never shot a gun before. It’s not like I could really miss, though, as close as I was.”

  “You totally could have missed. And you put in work on the big guy! What did you do to him?”

  “I dislocated his shoulder. They taught us a couple things like that in training.”

  “Nice,” Tasha says admiringly. “Do you know, like, karate and stuff too?”

  “What, because I’m Asian I know karate?”

  “No,” Tasha says, unflustered. She’s so happy to see the girl she could cry. “You’re just so fast.”

  “Well thanks. But no, no karate. Just what they taught us here. You’re the one who must know karate, with those kicks!” she laughs, imitating Tasha kicking the giant hot dog, making Kung-Fu-ish sound effects. “You were kicking everybody! I got up to the guardroom and saw you kick that kid across the lot and I about died laughing until I saw there were more of them. Then I, like, hauled ass getting back down here.”

  Tasha smiles at her. The smile is too big, but at this moment she can’t make it smaller.

  “Yeah, and picked up a gun on the way.”

  “Hey, it was just…there. So I grabbed it and kept running. I didn’t even know what I was gonna do with it.”

  “Glad you could make it. If it had just been the hot dog then I might have been okay…” Tasha remembers the hot dog. “Oh, crap. He’s still alive.”

  They walk over to where the hot dog flops on the ground. They can’t see any part of him except his shins and sneakers. They stare down at him and Z giggles.

  “You kicked him right in the wiener. Get it?”

  “He deserved it. What should we do with him?”

  Z shrugs and nudges the hot dog’s shoe with her foot, which results in muffled growling from inside the costume.

  “Let’s leave him. By the time he gets up we’ll be long gone.”

  “We?”

  Z shrugs her shoulder, jostling the bag she has slung over it.

  “Yeah, I brought my shit. I’m coming too. I figure if the troops come, they’ll come. I’ll be around. Besides, I can’t exactly let you go off on your own—I’ve had to save your ass twice now.”

  Tasha looks at her, wondering if the relief shows on her face. She looks down at the Wusthof and stoops to wipe the blade off on the hot d
og’s pant leg, not wishing to stain her new jeans. At this angle, a tear slides down to the tip of her nose, which she wipes off busily with her sleeve. If Z notices, she says nothing, also cleaning her box cutter on the hot dog’s other leg. Inside, he growls impotently.

  Weapons wiped, they look to the still-open metal gate.

  “Shall we?”

  “We shall.”

  They’re halfway out of the lot when Tasha stops.

  “Wait, we need scooters. I think I might have broken the first one; let’s try different ones. I think I want a green one anyway.”

  “I actually had something better in mind.”

  Five minutes later they’re opening another gate—the password is different: Z types it in while looking at a strip of paper she’s fished from her pocket—that bars a lot two stories above the one housing the employee scooters. Tasha keeps watch as the gates rumble open, and together they slink in. Sunlight streams in through the cloudy glass sides of the structure, illuminating the glorious machines waiting there like painted thoroughbreds.

  Tasha had considered the Barbie Benz on Michigan sexy. If the pink Benz was Kelly Rowland, these cars are Beyoncé. Tasha doesn’t know cars—she knows clothes, she knows shoes, and she knows dogs—but she doesn’t need to know cars to know she’s witnessing Grace in machine form. They’re still small—electric versions of their big-body predecessors—but their class is unmistakable. Lamborghinis, Paganis, Bugattis, lined up like shining museum exhibits behind invisible velvet rope.

  “Who drives these?” Tasha gasps.

  Z strolls among them, her voice echoing slightly in the lofty trove.

  “No one, really. The CEOs that lived on the top floors of the Web own them—including the guy who owned the whole place, my boss—but those guys never really had to leave their little palace, so the cars just ended up sitting here. They still paid people heavy clams to come up and wash them though. So dumb.”