Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  “Does anyone want tea?” he asks, turning back to the stove, the almost-fist opening to reach for another mug.

  No one wants any, so they all move into the living room, which is carpeted with low beige shag and is filled with chairs. There’s a couch too, but where a coffee table and end tables might have been are several recliners, a cluster of kitchen chairs, three barstools, and five or six folding chairs. The walls are covered with maps and charts, some of them dotted with lines and the curving paths of red pens.

  “Come, sit with me,” he says. Tasha chooses a green corduroy recliner that’s about as old as Ishmael’s house, her backpack on her knees. The chair envelops her. It’s not quite comfortable—she feels too sunken in—but she doesn’t want to be awkward and move to another spot, so she stays put, flexing her legs a little to keep the armchair from swallowing her.

  “Do these girls want to leave with the penultimate group the day after tomorrow?” Dr. Rio asks Ishmael, sipping his tea.

  “Oh,” Ishmael looks at Z and Tasha, who look back. “No. I mean, I don’t think so. We haven’t really talked about it. I think we’d all rather stay together, at least for awhile?” He says it as a question, directing it at Tasha.

  “I think we’d all rather stay together, at least for awhile,” she repeats.

  Z nods. Tasha wonders how much thought she’s given it, if she’s made any decisions, if she still wishes she were in the Web.

  “I still want to go with you,” Malakai says to Dr. Rio. He’s sitting closest to the older man.

  “I would like that. You and your brother have been a lot of help with this project of mine. I’m sure the neighborhoods are grateful too. But as you know, there are more things that need taking care of before we go west ourselves on Sunday.”

  Sunday. So soon.

  “What’s today?” Tasha interjects.

  “Today is Thursday,” says Dr. Rio. He says it calmly. “We’re sending a group on Saturday, and I plan to leave with the last group on Sunday. I imagine Ishmael and Malakai have told you both about the chosen course of action most citizens around here have taken?”

  Tasha nods.

  “West,” she says. Every time she says it she feels like a cowboy, or a gold miner. She feels like that kid in the True Grit remake, gone west to avenge her father. It was one of her grandmother’s favorites. Maybe this Dr. Rio is her Rooster Cogburn.

  “Yes, West,” Rio replies, looking up at the map behind him on the wall. “We laid out the route all together in this room. We haven’t put away all the chairs yet, forgive me.” He sweeps his hand at the clutter.

  “What’s the route?” Z asks him. Tasha knows she’s concerned about the distance, but Tasha herself is not. How hard could it be, really? As long as you have a compass, and water, and shoes, you just walk due West and eventually you end up in California. Eventually. Leona glows like a beacon at the end of the red lines snaking across the map.

  Dr. Rio rises, still clutching his mug. He drags his finger along the map, following a previously drawn line.

  “Due West from Illinois into Iowa, on into Nebraska, a little south into Colorado, avoiding Denver, across into Utah, staying south of Salt Lake City, all the way across Nevada, and into California.”

  “That easy, huh,” laughs Z.

  Dr. Rio smiles placidly back.

  “Not easily done, but able to be done,” he says. “It is able to be done.”

  Tasha thinks of him marching from god knows where all the way to Illinois to warn his hometown of the impending doom. He’s already walked halfway across the country, she thinks, assuming he walked. Why not walk all the way back? He’s an older man, but he’s in excellent shape: all his hair, all his teeth, all his brain cells. And all that without the Chip. Take that, Cybranu.

  Dr. Rio takes his seat again.

  “Ishmael and Malakai will be coming with me Sunday. We’ll be just under two weeks behind the very first group. We’ve been keeping a good schedule.”

  “Has everyone down here gone?” Tasha asks him.

  “No, not everyone. Some believe the trip is too long, or that they are too old or their children too young to make it. I understand. But I am not a young man either,” he laughs, “and I think I can make it.”

  “How many have gone so far?”

  “Oh,” he rubs his temple, very much the harmless piano teacher. “Quite a few of us, as you might have gathered from the emptiness around here. Of course, many are simply hiding. I’ve heard of other neighborhoods packing up and walking, too, although I don’t know what their aim is. On our part, another thirty on Saturday, then the last group Sunday. So you do the math. Quite a few of us.”

  “How many have stayed?”

  Dr. Rio sighs.

  “Everyone else. Everyone without the Chip, of course, and everyone who’s not dead. They see what has happened but don’t want to leave what they have here: their homes, their property, their possessions.” He sighs again.

  “You think they’re naïve.”

  “I think they believe they have more than they do,” he replies, leaning forward in the chair so it creaks. Tasha glances at his left hand, still in its claw-like almost-fist. “And I don’t blame them. We were raised in a world that convinced us to trick ourselves into believing that the more things we owned, the safer we would be, the happier we would be. We have come to believe we have more than there is to be gained by abandoning what we have. This is a lie. We have nothing.”

  Tasha thinks, as she often has, of the emptiness of the city since the Change. Ghostly, as if the enemy were aliens instead, zapping Chicagoans up into hulking spaceships, leaving no trace of their former human existences. Tasha wonders if there will be a study of all this one day, if anyone survives. Will they have data on how many suicides affected the population after the Change? There have probably been a lot. As for death by actual attacks, she thinks the number of Minkers is modest, based on the amount of people who could afford MINK in the time Before, the number of people that were rejected—then again there were the worker types who got it through their corporate jobs and didn’t necessarily qualify on income alone. However large the actual Minker multitude, they seem to be eating their way through the unChipped population pretty adroitly. She imagines the average citizen simply didn’t know how to defend herself. Tasha sure as hell didn’t. Luckily she’s a fast learner.

  Dr. Rio has continued speaking, and Tasha emerges from her thoughts.

  “And what’s more, what we had and have now lost due to this catastrophe, we will not get back. Look around,” he waves the left hand, which is tightening into a stone. “If it wasn’t for that gas stove, I’d be eating canned fruit. And only if I have a can opener in that kitchen. Is a can opener worth staying in Chicago for?”

  Tasha’s brain says Amen, but she’s reluctant to become a disciple so easily. Besides, while she thinks she agrees with most of Dr. Rio’s speech, his hand distracts her from the sermon. The almost-fist has evolved into a tightly clenched rock, the veins under the light brown skin beginning to pulse. The hand has a life of its own. He goes on.

  “This isn’t Chicago.” He’s shaking his head and looking at the empty chairs that crowd his living room, a ghost audience, and she feels as if she’s heard this before. “This isn’t the city we built by the lake, then burned, then built. This isn’t our city. Chicago is extinct. This is the city of the dodo.”

  The dodo. Who is the dodo? Is the girl in the yellow dress the flightless bird of history—dead, gone? Is it Dinah, a fossil in a cage? Or is it Tasha, walking through a world of tall bones, pretending there’s still life in them? She thinks of walking toward the Web on Michigan Avenue, the carcasses of cars and Chicagoans surrounding her. It had felt like being in the museum; walking down a wide corridor lined with exhibits of extinction. The storefronts, once brightly lit and buzzing, were dodos. Tasha, looking in with longing, was a dodo too. She looks at Dr. Rio, who is gazing at his audience of empty chairs, the animated fist clenching an
d clenching, and wonders if he considers himself part of the extinct, or if he has already moved on to whatever comes next.

  “Mrs. Randall is outside.” Malakai is standing at the window in the living room, looking out at the street.

  Ishmael stands quickly and goes to the window. Tasha stays where she is, in the belly of the armchair. How many times will this same scene replay, she wonders, watching him go. Will this be an eternal routine, she wonders: bacon, eggs, and killing in the morning; slaughter with the soup at night. Here they are at tea, necks needing cutting between crumpets.

  “She’s alone,” says Ishmael over his shoulder. “I’ll take care of it.”

  He moves across the room toward his axe where it leans in the kitchen by the door.

  “Stop,” says Dr. Rio. “This is my street, Ishmael. You take care of yours, I’ll take care of mine.”

  Ishmael hesitates.

  “I can do it, Dr. Rio. Or at least let someone else on the street come out and help.”

  “Sit down, Ishmael,” the doctor orders. His voice is not unkind, but Tasha hears the glint of metal in it. “I have done enough waiting for others to do the right thing.”

  He stands up. So does Malakai.

  “Do you want me to come?”

  Dr. Rio ignores him and crosses into the kitchen, placing his mug on the counter before disappearing through the garage door. It shuts with a muted thud behind him.

  Z looks at Ishmael, whose brows are low.

  “He’s going out through the garage,” Ishmael says.

  “He didn’t take your axe.”

  Ishmael doesn’t respond.

  Tasha extracts herself from the chair, like a heifer escaping quicksand. She goes slowly to the window, not wanting to watch, but drawn to the spectacle. The daylight glows through the window, giving it the effect of a large silent screen. Outside in the yard, close to the street, is a stocky woman wearing an apron. Tasha doesn’t think she’s ever seen anyone wear an apron in real life. The woman’s hair is light gray, still half-pinned at the crown of her head, the rest of it falling down around her ears and forehead like a feathery hat. Rio appears in the picture. Tasha wants to change the channel.

  “Is he going to be okay?” Malakai is asking. He and the others have joined Tasha at the window.

  “He knows what he’s doing,” Z says. Tasha wonders how she can be so sure.

  Rio is walking slowly across the yard. He looks older from a distance when she can’t see the hawk eye and she’s distracted by his slight stoop. The old man’s going to throw his back out, she thinks, out there playing soldier. She opens her mouth to tell Ishmael to help him when Dr. Rio attacks.

  At first she thinks he has a sword, a scimitar. It wouldn’t have surprised her. But it’s smaller than a scimitar, its curve more dramatic. It’s a sickle. She can’t imagine why he even owns one as he charges the now-barking Minker with the tool raised over his head.

  The first swing of it catches the aproned woman at the shoulder, a splash of red rewarding his efforts. The arm goes limp before what Tasha knows are tarry fingers begin to plaster the wound, the arm regaining its strength. The arm reaches for Rio.

  The sickle is like a half-moon curving from his hand. What does he remind her of: his black, buttoned shirt, the slight stoop, his barely visible bony wrist? Tasha wonders how long he hid in the basement of the church, peeping up through the floorboards at the boot soles of his seekers. Months maybe. Longer. Did the congregation sneak him food? Had he fed on church mice?

  The woman in the apron sees Rio as a church mouse. He might be. Tasha wonders if she’s about to watch him be torn apart. Some remote part of her reminds herself that she’d need to turn Malakai away. A kid his age doesn’t need to see that.

  Rio’s winding up—Tasha is commentating again—and the sickle is a bright slice of metal against the sky for a frozen moment before he brings it down on the body of the woman in the apron. Again. Again. His arm is a whetted windmill, a shining blur. Tasha had seen the spark of the Chip failing after the second blow, but the sickle comes down and down like a rod, a whip. Even when the body falls, the sickle continues its work. The hand holding it is relaxed. The other hand, the left one, is in the pocket of the black cardigan, at rest.

  She could look away—they all could. But it’s the pistons churning toward a brick wall, the steam engine becoming a ram, the crumpling of steel like paper. When it stops, the yard is red, the apron nothing, the face nothing—obliterated. The thing that is Dr. Rio turns and looks toward the window, right at Tasha and the others. His gaze is bald and white, blood spattering his spectacles. He raises his arm one more time, and when it falls, what’s left of the head of the woman on the lawn lolls away from its home, separating. Dr. Rio removes his glasses and cleans the lenses on his sweater, staring deep into the window from which they watch. His eyes are depthless. Only then does Tasha, unblinking, slide her hand slowly over Malakai’s eyes.

  That night they’re back at Ishmael’s mother’s house, to which they had returned in silence.

  “If he’s so smart, why hasn’t he gone to California himself?” asks Z. She’s the only one willing to blatantly criticize Dr. Rio. “Why just help a bunch of other people get there and not help yourself?”

  “He wants to make sure as many people as possible go. Says he’ll go with the last group.” Ishmael seems neutral, but he hasn’t smiled since they returned from Dr. Rio’s house.

  “You said the first group went the day after the Change?” Tasha asks. She wants to contribute something, anything.

  “Yeah,” says Malakai. “He sent them off right away. He’d been saying something was gonna happen for awhile, so people were mostly ready.”

  “So wait,” says Z, leaning back in her chair, “he predicted this or what?”

  “He had privileged information,” says Ishmael. “From what we know, he was one of the scientists who developed the implant. He told me that when he saw it wasn’t being tested properly, he ditched the company. Apparently it was originally supposed to be military technology, which makes sense if you think about it. The Chip repairs the body. It would be a good thing for soldiers to have in battle. But the lab tried to hunt him down and everything. Remember I said he hid in a church? His cousin was a pastor on 73rd and hid him in the basement for two months while people in uniforms came looking for him. They knocked on our door too.”

  “My mom wouldn’t let them in,” boasts Malakai, some broth left on his upper lip. They’re eating soup again. “They didn’t have a warrant so she wouldn’t let them. They said they’d come back with one, but they never did.”

  Tasha takes it all in, imagining Dr. Rio as a Denzel Washington character in a thrilling action movie with explosions and dramatic monologues: Dr. Rio/Denzel striding all the way to Chicago from a sinister hidden lab; Dr. Rio/Denzel hiding under the floor of a musty church cellar; Dr. Rio/Denzel rallying survivors and sending them West to start anew and escape the murderous enemy. It would seem cooler if she hadn’t met him already. She can’t picture him doing any of these things. She only pictures his stoop and his steely detachment as he swung the sickle into the flesh of the aproned woman.

  “Wow,” Z says again.

  “Why didn’t you go with your mom?” Tasha asks. It’s been nagging at her since she saw the pictures in the guest room that morning. They all seemed so close. Why split up when you didn’t have to?

  “When I didn’t come back from the soccer stadium after everything happened, they assumed the worst. I don’t blame them,” he says, looking pointedly at Malakai, who smiles a small smile. “So they made plans with Dr. Rio to go west. I came back the day before they were set to go, and that changed things a little. Marcus took Mom. He’s the oldest. We knew she’d be safe with him and I wanted her out of the city. I wanted to stay here and help Dr. Rio, and Malakai and me are kind of a package deal.” He grins at his brother. “So we decided to stay for a little longer. We promised her we’d come with Dr. Rio in the last group.�
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  “Ish says he owes Dr. Rio,” Malakai adds.

  “You owe him? How?”

  Ishmael looks out the window that overlooks the neighbor’s garden, probably the same garden Ishmael rooted the Minker out of.

  “I didn’t believe him,” Ishmael is saying. “Dr. Rio had warned everybody and told us all that something real bad was going to happen. He didn’t know how many, or when, or how bad it would be, but he knew it would be something. He even tried to get everyone to go to California before the Change even happened. I ignored him. I was playing soccer like any other day,” he says, now looking at Tasha. She’s forgotten that he’d been wearing the jersey when she’d met him. He wears a clean white t-shirt now. He still has a bandage on his arm where she’d tried to cut it off the day they met. The almost-gone bite on her bicep throbs empathetically.

  “What if something had happened to my mom while I was off playing soccer? Dr. Rio took care of her and my brothers and planned for them to go to California and be safe. I can at least help him now. If I had believed him, I would have been more prepared. I could’ve…you know, been ready.”

  Tasha doesn’t know if anyone could have been ready. She doubts Dr. Rio himself had been ready. She remembers Ishmael asking her in the stadium, “How many?” She’d had to tell him, “Everyone.” But she hadn’t been giving him new information, she sees now; she had been confirming his worst fears. At least his family is safe. She bites back the familiar taste of bitterness.

  He stands, collecting their bowls, and carries them to the sink. The kitchen is dimming as the day exhausts itself, and Ishmael asks Malakai to light a few candles. He talks to Tasha and Z over his shoulder as he washes the dishes.

  “So with the people in the street last night, I never got to hear how you two linked up.”

  Z leans forward eagerly so Tasha lets her tell the story. She needs to talk, Tasha knows. She’d been okay today, even with the incident at Dr. Rio’s house, but Tasha still senses the buzzing restlessness that has exuded from her since they left her safe little bubble at the Web. Tasha’s glad she came. Z is social: she moves her hands like butterflies when she talks, her hair swishing when she gets to animated parts of the story. Ishmael listens, and laughs when she talks about Tasha kicking everyone in a five-foot radius in the scooter lot.