Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  Tasha slowly becomes aware that Z is bragging about her, talking her up. Wing-woman. The way she tells it, Tasha could be Jet Li, a curly-haired kung-fu master who tore apart every Minker in downtown Chicago while balancing a baby on her head and wearing ballet slippers. Tasha returns the favor, fast-forwarding to the part of the story where Z rescued her by blowing off the supermodel’s head with one shot. Malakai has come back into the room at this part of the story, bearing two lit candles, and he raises his eyebrows at Z.

  “You shot her head off? For real?”

  Ishmael groans, taking a candle from Malakai and handing it to Tasha.

  “Don’t even get this guy started. He watched so many gory movies before all this stuff happened, I don’t think anything he’s seen so far has surprised him. Marcus told me Malakai used a shovel on the Postman on the first morning, right on the front porch. He’s carried the damn thing around ever since.”

  Tasha thinks of Malakai perched on top of the slide. She and Z had thought they were rescuing him. Ha.

  Ishmael leads them into what might have been called a parlor two centuries before. There is a low couch and some other furniture—bookshelves filled with more picture frames—and an impressive stone fireplace, which is glowing. It’s definitely an old house.

  “Is that a real fireplace? A real fire?” Tasha feels the tugging of bluegrass. Her parents’ home had a fireplace, though they’d only used it around Christmas. Her mother would put dried apple slices and sticks of cinnamon in with the wood, and the house would fill with the smell of it. Tasha can almost smell it now; it’s curling out of her memories like fog.

  “Yes, and yes,” Ishmael says, kneeling next to it with a heavy black poker, teasing the flames. They rise up to meet him, as if they’d been waiting to be asked to dance.

  Malakai takes the cushions from the couch, along with several more from a large wicker basket shaped like a boat in the corner. He arranges them around the hearth and they all sit. The fire is warm, but not hot. Outside, night has fallen and she thinks she hears the far off thunder of another storm. She wonders if they’re safe—she’d been too tired yesterday to think about it. On their way back from Dr. Rio’s, she had seen Malakai wrap the chain around the gate, but what other entrances are there? What about the windows? She’s used to being high above the ground—at home, at work, at the Web with Z. She can see the street out the window from where she sits—it’s like sitting on the floor of the jungle, exposed. Ishmael is watching her and says,

  “Relax,” he says quietly. “You can relax.”

  Later, Malakai and Z have fallen asleep, and Tasha and Ishmael sit in silence watching the fire, which is low and makes whispering sounds every now and then. Ishmael whispers too.

  “So you knew about Dr. Rio before today.”

  Tasha looks at him sideways, half startled, then back at the fire.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, I thought so. Family on the South Side, huh?”

  She doesn’t know what he means at first, then remembers her lie at the stadium; why she was headed south. Yes, she should’ve told him about her sister’s letter then. Things might have been simpler.

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, I didn’t know what to say. It sounded so crazy, you know. I knew your team was freaking out: I didn’t want to tell them about something and have it turn out not to be real. If I had known you already knew the guy—everything he said would happen—I would have told you.”

  Ishmael nods.

  “I understand. So your sister is in California, right? Or was that a lie too?”

  Tasha grimaces, smiling.

  “No, that’s true. She’s outside of what used to be Los Angeles.”

  “So?”

  “She wrote me a letter, right before the Change. It didn’t say much other than looking for Rio. Here.”

  She pulls the letter from her backpack and hands it to him.

  He leans close to the fire, studying the paper, Tasha studying him. He reads it quickly.

  “Damn,” he says, “not much to go on.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  “Do you think Rio is right about California being safe?”

  “My sister is right, I know that. She wouldn’t tell me to come if she wasn’t sure.”

  “Are you going?”

  “It’s really far.”

  Silence.

  “I can’t believe they just lost control of everything,” he says.

  “Lost it, or gave it up?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she sighs.

  She stares at the grate of the fireplace, a cage keeping the fire in, it seems. Really, it’s just keeping her out. The burning wood crackles. She could be in Kentucky. She could be anywhere. She could be in France. Does the rest of the world know what’s happening here? Do they give a shit?

  “Your hair is different than it was at the stadium,” he says, bringing her back to Chicago.

  She freezes. She hasn’t seen a mirror in hours. She knows she can’t be wearing mascara—she’d left the make-up pouch in the store where Vette’s body lay. She struggles to imagine her eyelashes, her skin. He’s too close, the room too quiet. Her hair must be a viper’s nest. She imagines her Medusan curls leaping from her scalp to strike him, the venom of her eyes stiffening his body into rock…

  But he’s on to the next subject.

  “Did you really karate kick a Minker in a banana suit?” Z had spared no details.

  She laughs quietly in the dying light of the fire, and Z stirs a little, breathing peacefully.

  “He was wearing a hot dog suit,” she says, “and yes, yes I did.”

  Chapter 26

  Tasha wonders where he got all the knives.

  When she’d returned to Rio’s house this morning, the kitchen and living room had been transformed from the quiet den of an aging doctor into a war room: maps laid out; backpacks arranged; piles of lethal-looking hunting knives with serrated edges; packages of vitamins and rolls of bandages; canteens.

  “Some of this stuff is really high-tech,” Z says quietly to Tasha.

  They are in the living room, charged with the task of making sure all the knives are sheathed, distributing one per lightweight black backpack. Each pack also gets a vitamin roll, a canteen, a solar-powered GPS map, and a package of energy bars and other small food items. The canteens, in particular, are of interest to Z. The side of each has a small display near the top. As one fills the vessel with water, some genius mechanism at the neck tests the liquid for toxins, bacteria, and general drinkability, then purifies it, releasing the bacteria from the neck in a vapor that one can’t see, but hear. It’s a short, piercing sound: like the first sharp exclamation of a teakettle before it’s snatched from the heat. Malakai had tried to trick it, he’d told them before being carted upstairs with Dr. Rio, Ishmael following reluctantly behind. Malakai had opened a beaker of Pepsi, he said, and poured the fizzing liquid into a canteen, waiting to read the sensor. The little panel had flashed red and read, “Undrinkable.” Malakai had poured it out.

  “Yeah, I know,” says Tasha, fingering a map before folding it into a backpack. The map isn’t paper, but it folds and rolls easily. It’s a thin synthetic material that feels uncomfortably like skin: a digital, solar-powered map of the States. The world too, Rio had said, but Tasha can’t figure out how to scale it back to the larger picture. The route for the walk to California has already been programmed in; the vein of it glows in red. The map is constantly moving and changing, loaded with a weather sensor that picks up changes in temperature and detects approaching storms. The fronts travel across the surface of the map in differently colored smudges. Tasha likes looking at it. It’s the closest thing to the Net that she’s seen since the Change, and she feels a little nostalgic.

  “Where do you think he got all this stuff?” This time Z is holding one of the knives. She looks at it like it might bite her.

  “I don’t know, but it must have taken awhil
e,” Tasha says, looking around. They’re seated in the living room—the crowds of chairs have been spirited away—surrounded by backpacks sorted into two piles: packed and unpacked. They’ve done about twenty so far. It feels like office work, putting together pamphlets in an assembly line: one, two, three, staple, one, two, three, staple. She supposes anything can become dull if one does it enough times, even if it does involve lethal objects.

  “Malakai and Ish said that Rio had known this was going to happen before it did.” Z lowers her voice a little, even though they can hear footsteps upstairs where Dr. Rio and the boys are doing whatever it is they’re doing.

  “Yeah, he had to have. How else would he have all of this stuff?”

  “Think he stole it?”

  “He had to have stolen it.”

  Z glances around at the piles of supplies.

  “It’s so much. How the fuck did they not notice?”

  Tasha shrugs.

  “He’s an old dude with glasses and a paunch. They probably thought he was a sweet old man.”

  “My ass,” Z snorts.

  “You feel it too, then,” says Tasha.

  “He’s a fuckin’ creep. Something about his eyes. And that hand.” Z fake-shudders.

  Tasha rubs her thumbs over the peculiar texture of the tech map. He’s creepy, alright. But despite the chill factor, Rio does seem to have good intentions. Stealing all these supplies, creating plans to get people away from the Minkers, mobilizing entire neighborhoods for a journey to safety, albeit a long one.

  “I think I want to go,” Z says suddenly.

  “Go? Now? But we’re not done yet. Ishmael—”

  “No, I don’t mean from here. I mean, go to California. Sunday. With Dr. Rio.”

  “Oh. But you said he’s a creep.”

  “He is. But…you know. Why not?”

  Tasha thinks about this answer, wondering when her friend’s fantasy about a military rescue fully evaporated. It makes sense for her to want to go west: Z’s father is certainly a goner, her mother is dead. Her sister may or may not have the Chip, and Z hasn’t spoken to her in years. Her brother is in jail, very likely dead from starvation—Tasha thinks of the pacing lions in the zoo—or violence. Z’s boyfriend hadn’t been her boyfriend for many months. Tasha thinks of what Dr. Rio had said the day before: Z certainly has more to gain by leaving than to lose. She hasn’t even mentioned her apartment or any belongings she might have left behind. Chicago is nothing but bones for her. To the West lies meat.

  “Think about it,” Z continues, leaning forward. “He’s right, right? You were right. I don’t see the National Guard. It’s been two weeks. The President is probably dead—worse, he’s probably, like, eating his Cabinet—and the House is probably a pile of rocks. Everybody who was anybody got the implant. You know how many people lived in the city. Where are they? Have you seen them? They’re all dead. Or hiding. Or walking around trying to eat people like us. I didn’t really understand how big this shit was until we left the Web, but Chicago is, like, done.”

  Tasha nods. Z is convincing her of what she thought she’d need to convince Z of.

  “Malakai was telling me about a woman who left for California already,” Z goes on, her voice lowering. “Her name is Laila. She was in the Army and apparently they make you get the Chip when you enlist, to keep you from getting sick overseas and stuff. Well, apparently they can track the soldiers’ Chips, so they don’t go AWOL. Well, Laila, she got pregnant in January and had to bounce or they’d lock her up. So she had to dig her Chip out of her own neck with a knife to escape. So they couldn’t track her down, you know? Malakai said the scar is really gross looking, but she’s a survivor. If it hadn’t been for her cutting the Chip out, she’d be a Minker right now. Think about how many people were in the Army, Tasha. All Minkers. Holy shit. They can’t come to rescue us. They’re…them.”

  “All the troops,” Z continues, looking at the map on the wall with its drawn-on veins and arteries. “And all the workers, right? Think about the Minkers we’ve seen. McDonalds employees. Post workers. Public transportation drivers. Government jobs. Your job at the Apiary. All these big corps. Wal-Mart. The more wage-slaves, the more Chips. Can you fucking imagine what New York must be like?” She pauses. Tasha knows what’s next. “I almost hope V got the Chip,” she says bitterly, “so she doesn’t have to deal with this shit.”

  Tasha is reeling between processing everything Z is saying and trying to decide if Z needs a shoulder. This is the part Tasha is no good at, the part Dinah had mastered: the comforting. The muscle in her that consoles has been too rarely flexed; it is weak, a numb limb. She fancies herself a realistic person, and her realism agrees with what Z has said, however brutal: if V were her sister, living in New York, Tasha too would hope she was Chipped. It’s better to think of loved ones doing harm than coming to harm. Isn’t it? She imagines the streets of New York, gray and crowded, packed with Minkers barking in Brooklyn accents. If not Chipped, she doesn’t think anyone wandering the streets would stand a chance. If Chicago is the city of the dodo, what is New York? The mammoth perhaps, with all its rotting bulk.

  “Maybe there’s someone like Dr. Rio in New York,” Tasha offers weakly, knowing Z needs something. At some point they have switched roles: Tasha the naïve hoper, Z the streetwise knower. “You know, someone to give people information and keep them safe. Before all this happened, New York wasn’t on the best of terms with the rest of the States, remember? They were threatening to do like California did. Leona said get the South Side and find Rio because she knew it was safe. Maybe New York has a part like that, or someone like him.”

  “Did you say Leona?”

  Dr. Rio is leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, mug in hand. He might have been there for awhile. He looks comfortable.

  Tasha feels her face grow hot. Had he heard them discussing him, calling him a creep? She feels both defiant and embarrassed. He could have announced himself.

  “Yes,” she answers, trying to sound firm.

  “Leona who?”

  “Leona Lockett. My sister.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you had a sister,” he says, his eyes narrowed behind the almond spectacles.

  “Well I do.”

  “Alive?”

  Ishmael enters the room, followed by Malakai. The boy looks from Rio to Tasha, his eyes vaguely concerned.

  “What?” she says.

  “Is your sister alive?”

  Tasha stiffens.

  “Yes. Leona is alive.”

  “Where is she? Not here.”

  “She lives in California.”

  “Oh? For how long?”

  “Three years. She went during the secession.”

  “Of course. She must be a brave girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how your sister knew my name?”

  “What?”

  “I heard you say that Ms. Leona Lockett told you to come here. To find me. Do you know why?”

  “No. A lot of refugees come through her town. I assumed someone like that told her. Or something.”

  “Ah.”

  They stare at each other. He studies her, and although she fights the cold feeling in her spine, she is afraid. His glasses have slid a little farther down his nose, adding to his doctorly appearance but reminding her of yesterday, the sickle. She passed it in the garage on her way inside this morning: he hadn’t even bothered to wash it off. His eyes are a lighter brown than she’d thought at first: he was probably thought to be very handsome in his younger years. His eyes are taking her apart now, dissecting what she’s told him.

  “Do you love your sister, Natasha?”

  The urge to run away from him is strong. It’s the feeling of knowing the animal before you is fanged, even while wrapped in its lamb-like cloak, courtesy masking violence. Snarls pretending to be smiles.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you want to see her again?”

  She can feel the threat in it. He m
ight as well have slapped her.

  “Fuck you, Rio.” She spits the words out like bullets. Malakai cringes.

  He doesn’t speak, but his lips tighten into a cement smile. She doesn’t look at the hand not holding the mug, but she knows it’s either a fist or becoming one. A moment more of silence and then,

  “Well?”

  “Of course I fucking do.”

  His eyes glint like a rattlesnake.

  “Your sister wrote you a letter, yes? Let me see it.”

  She stares at him for a moment, feeling mulish. She hates him. The realization of it is disorienting: the good doctor, the good shepherd. She hates him. His black cardigan. His fist. His sickle, somewhere in the garage still wet from the woman in the apron’s butchered blood. But the mule fears the snake. She uproots herself and goes to the table where her backpack rests, opening the outside pocket. She pulls out her sunglasses, which she’s forgotten she’d packed and are miraculously unbroken; her Apiary ID badge with its perfect portrait; and the letter. It’s been through a few pairs of hands now and is now even more tattered than it had been when it had arrived. She wishes she’d kept the envelope. She hands Rio the letter sullenly.

  He glances at it, as if merely confirming its existence.

  “Leona Lockett. Why did she never come visit you here?”

  Tasha is surprised by the question, so much so that she answers it honestly.

  “Chicago isn’t for her; it’s for me. She has California to make her happy. I have Chicago.”

  “Had.”

  “What?”

  “You had Chicago.”

  More plugging for the long walk. Tasha feels like Little Foot, a silly little dinosaur with a pod of others that set out to find the Great Valley. Was there a family waiting for the longneck when he found it, after they’d destroyed the Sharptooth? She thinks there was.