by Cole, Olivia
The numbers on the panel go down and down: 100, 99, 98. Damn this tall building to hell, Tasha thinks. Her blood is vibrating. Z is hopping up and down.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck,” she chants.
Malakai has dropped his shovel somewhere along the way. Tasha looks at her hand, still clutching the Wusthof. She’s so accustomed to carrying it now that it feels like an extension of her arm, much like her Glass used to be. Where is her Glass? Somewhere in a building on Foster. Is that place even on this planet?
Ishmael is staring hard at the shrinking numbers. 85, 84, 83. His fist is clenched and pressed against his forehead. Malakai just shakes. 80, 79…
“Is he really going to blow us up?” The boy is twelve.
This is the part Tasha is no good at: the comforting, the reassuring. But she opens her mouth, and the words come:
“He’s going to blow up the building, yes. And himself. But we’re not going to be here when he does it.”
It’s an answer Leona would have given to her daughter. Amani. Will Amani know about bombs?
65, 64, 63. Tasha thinks of the seconds on Rio’s detonator, also counting down, shrinking and shrinking into an enormous, explosive zero. 58. The elevator stops. “You have reached the 58th floor,” the inexplicably British voice says.
Z slams her palm on 1.
“We want one, we want one,” she begs.
The doors stay open. Minkers mill about everywhere. Only one has stopped to look. Z presses Door Close one too many times—and there is the fatal ding. It echoes like a siren through the muted mall. Barking follows, the herds alerted and annoyed. Malakai moans.
“Come on,” Tasha grabs someone’s arm, and rushes out into the atrium. “The employee elevator is always fucking up. We’ll take the public. Come on.”
Z is beside her. Ishmael has hold of his brother’s hand and he’s out too, waiting to follow.
Tasha rushes toward the atrium and the bank of twelve public elevators. They pass Hermes. It’s filled with staring, swaying shoppers, the slow heads turning to focus on Tasha and the others as they whiz by.
“Go!”
They are running, sometimes sliding on the waxed marble like polar bears on ice. A Minker appears in front of them, his mouth wide. Behind him are two more, two men in fine slacks and jackets. Tasha shoves the man, bowling him over; he knocks down one of the others on his way to the floor. Z shoulders the remaining guy aside, and Tasha thinks she sees Ishmael take out one of the guy’s legs with the axe.
They make it to the elevator, Tasha pressing the down buttons on one side, Z pressing the ones on the other side. It’s like playing Whack-a-Mole. Where will the first one pop up? Meanwhile, their flurry of activity has attracted the crowds of Level 58, and a herd appears from the east side of the building, at least fifteen deep. Too many for their four. The elevators’ buttons are still illuminated; from somewhere in the building they’re approaching unhurriedly. An employee of a dermabrasion shop is the first to reach them. She grabs for Malakai’s sleeve. Malakai punches her, but with little effect. No elevator.
“Stairs,” Tasha yells. “Stairs!”
“Stairs?” Z gapes.
“Not the whole way. Just to an emptier floor. Come on, come on!”
The stairway is only a few yards away. They ram into the push door. Ishmael makes sure it shuts behind them before they stampede downward. They plummet down two levels, taking stairs two at a time. They come out on Level 56 and run directly into Apiary security, a muscle-bound guy with a crew cut who begins barking almost immediately. He has a posse, a woman wearing diamonds, plus nine or ten others nearby. Tasha wheels away from them and shoves Z, who was on her heels, back into the stairwell.
“Wrong floor,” she nearly shrieks. More stairs. The sound of their feet ricochets around the narrow stairwell like war drums. They fly down a couple more flights, until Tasha sees the familiar Level 51 sign at the door. Why not.
“Come on!” She’s breathing hard. How many minutes have passed? Is Dr. Rio still looking out the window? Or has he changed his mind? Or did he leave the detonator and start racing down another staircase in some other part of the building? Or maybe he jumped. She imagines Dr. Rio as a comet falling from the sky. The comet. The Big Bang. The end of the dinosaurs.
They burst through the door onto Level 51. There are Minkers, but they’re on the other side of the atrium. The REvolve cruises by on its track, carrying a Minker woman and her teenage daughter, disintegrating sandwiches half eaten on the REvolve’s counter in front of them. They couldn’t figure out how to get off, apparently. They look weak and only emit pale yelping sounds as Tasha and her group pass.
Twenty yards from the elevator bank. There’s the Prada store, across from Fetch Fetchers. She feels some red string in her stomach give a tug, like she’s being gutted. Something in her is hungry. An invisible hand squeezes her throat. She slows, thinking of her backpack down in the Chevy. When she’d bought the bag, they’d had a canvas clutch to match it, another thousand dollars. She couldn’t swing it at the time. But now…
But then there’s Fetch Fetchers and thoughts of Prada dissolve into lavish dust. She slows. She looks down at her hand, holding the knife. Her empty finger. Inside the store, so near, is her mother’s ring. Tasha had left the photograph of her mother, her parents, on Foster, and if this building blows with her inside, she’ll never touch her mother, her family again. She needs that ring. She wheels toward Fetch Fetchers.
“What? What is it?” Z looks around, thinking there must be a swarm of the Minkers blocking their next route.
Tasha doesn’t explain. She dashes into the store.
“What the fuck are you doing!” Z doesn’t raise her voice—it’s too risky—but she follows Tasha into the store cursing her. “Is there an elevator in here? What?”
Tasha ignores her and runs to the back of the store, hearing Malakai ask Ishmael,
“What are we doing? Where is she going?”
There’s the back room. It’s where Marla sat while Mrs. Kerry attacked Tasha and took her mother’s ring. It’s where Cara had carried the ring as Tasha was escorted out, her face burning. If she can just get into that room… She may not know the combination of the safe, but if she can just get into that room, she’ll just take the whole goddamn thing.
“Doing a little shopping are we, Tasha?” Z tries to grab her but Tasha shakes her off and dashes toward the tall black door of the back room. She almost reaches it, her hand reaching out to turn the handle, when a huge weight slams against her body from the side, sending her sprawling to the floor.
Barking. Two kinds of barking. One is the low, miserable keen of an animal in pain, and one is the high, perturbed yelp of a Minker. The source of the first, Tasha sees as she topples to the floor, is a brown poodle on a grooming table, held in place by the table’s leash, miraculously still alive but thin and barely standing. The source of the second is Cara, who is scrabbling on top of Tasha like a blonde whirlwind, scratching and snapping and snarling. Cara’s hair is an electric spur made brighter by the store’s glaring fluorescent light. The poodle is crying, it must be nearly dead—dehydrated and starving and now scared witless by the nearness of the beast that is Cara.
Tasha’s former supervisor’s mouth is wide open, showing her perfectly bleached teeth, her pink tongue lashing out from between them like a serpent’s. Tasha has managed to force her palm against the woman’s forehead, preventing Cara’s jaws from closing on her earlobe. Tasha struggles but her opponent is heavy—Cara would have hated that.
Tasha can hear Z and Ishmael running to her rescue, but she throws her weight to the side, sending Cara’s body crashing to the floor. She scrabbles up, grabbing Cara by the front of her violet blouse. Cara is snapping and spitting. Her eyes are exactly as they were before the Chip—dull, angry, senseless. Only the smirk is gone. Her still-manicured hand swings up for Tasha’s throat, slapping against her face. Tasha gasps. This feels a little too much like a catfight. This is no
t a catfight.
Using all her strength, she grips the ruffle on Cara’s blouse and slams the blonde head against the tile floor. She hears the dull crack, but doesn’t wait for the black tentacles to weave the hated skull back together. She gropes for the Wusthof—it’s too far.
“Tasha!”
Z kicks Tasha’s knife, which had spun across the floor when Cara tackled her. The Wusthof skids across the tile, wedging itself under Cara’s back. Tasha has to lean closer to Cara to reach it, her former boss’s stale breath fogging Tasha’s oxygen in the brief moment before her fingers clutch the knife’s handle. She clenches it, draws it back, then slams its point into Cara’s neck. The knife is six inches long and she buries it up to the hilt, through the resistance of ligaments, feeling it catching against bone, skewering the Chip. Bull’s eye. The tip of the knife is visible under Cara’s left ear—the blade has gone straight through her neck.
It’s over quickly. Cara jerks and then goes limp, blood pooling around her head, dyeing the platinum hair crimson. Tasha, panting, stands stiffly, stumbling a little. She looks down at Cara, whose arms are outstretched like a fallen magpie, her glimmering hands, fingers covered in rings, the neck still swathed in silver. One ring catches her eye: the simple silver band, the small black stone, a soft-cornered square.
It’s Tasha’s mother’s.
In another time, she would have been polite and slipped it over the knuckle. Not now. The Wusthof comes down one more time on Cara’s hand, a clean efficient chop. The ring is freed. Tasha wipes the blood on Cara’s shirt and slides the ring back onto her hand, which had missed it.
Back on earth, she hears barking—not the Minkers, but the real, animal sound of the poodle on the table. A flash of the antique gates, the acre of chain link pens, her mother’s hands buried in Borzoi. There is living to do. Tasha turns away from Cara’s bloody corpse.
“Malakai, grab the dog.”
In a moment they’re at the elevators on Level 51, all the buttons pressed and illuminated. The waiting isn’t as long as on 58—during their flight down the stairs and the brief stop in Fetch Fetchers, the elevators had made it to Level 58, and now only have to move seven floors to reach them.
When the door opens, they crowd on, Malakai clutching the poodle wrapped in the sheet from the grooming table. It makes soft growling sounds, probably from delirium. Its fur is shaved into the classic Continental clip, the gorgeous Afro-esque style on its head and the well-rounded puffs around its chest, feet, and tail. The rest of the coat is shorn close. The dog looks ridiculous, but grand. She’s probably a year old, Tasha estimates, brought in by her owner and then left in the store when everything went bad. She’d sat on the table since Day 1, tied in the noose, beautiful but dying.
40, 39, 38. Tasha hopes the seconds on Dr. Rio’s detonator are much higher.
Chapter 34
One.
“You have reached the first floor,” the voice intones, and the door opens to reveal a welcoming party. Twenty or thirty Minkers milling outside the elevator. A hundred on the other side of the ground floor. None of them have seen the group in the elevator yet.
“Out,” Tasha whispers. “Out before the elevator rings.”
They creep out beneath the atrium. The poodle has quieted; perhaps she’s dead, Tasha thinks. Malakai clutches the dog like a lifejacket.
“Quiet, slow,” she sighs. “Quiet. And slow.”
She realizes Ishmael is holding her hand. His other hand grips the axe. Z is clutching her box cutter, poised. Tasha thinks of Vette. Why do you get the big knife? Yellow sundresses flutter like butterflies. What was her name? Dinah. No, not Dinah. Dinah is in her tomb on Foster. The faces of the dead flit through her brain like blowing leaves, her parents among them.
The herd is very near, making sounds in their throats, shuffling in their dazed circles. Over by the employee elevators the crowd with the Roosevelt kid has dispersed, as Tasha had thought it might. She’d gone into that elevator with Rio and the others, half-believing she floated upward toward a cure. The people around her are not cured. The way they are is the way they will be, which will be nothing before too long, she thinks. Dr. Rio will scorch the earth, destroy the mother ship, leaving a burning patch of city street. It’s a hell of a suicide note, Tasha must admit.
“Slow,” Tasha says.
“We can’t afford slow,” Z says out of the corner of her mouth as they inch across to the exit. “The whole building’s gonna blow.”
Tasha hears a whimper. Whether it’s Malakai or the poodle, she’s not sure. She wants to pet them both. The possibility of getting out of the Apiary alive shrivels from grape to raisin. They are surrounded; the first floor of the mall packed with the wasps of Chicago, at ease only until someone sneezes, or trips, or drops a pin. Tasha and her group can pick their way—quiet, slow—through the crowds of them, but at that pace, they will still be in the honeycomb when the bombs blow. Their corpses will mingle with the Chipped—archaeologists will find Tasha’s fossilized teeth and assume that her incisors, too, tore at the flesh of her fellow citizens: history will mark her down as one of a million cannibals. She will have died in the Apiary. She looks across the ground floor at the massive crystal bee. Even now it has power: the swarms of the Minkers are drawn to it like a beacon. She can almost hear it buzzing—or maybe that’s just her head. Please don’t let me die in the Apiary, she thinks, her palm sweating against Ishmael’s. I hated it here. At least let me die on the street. She sees Z. Her face is bright with sweat, her eyes wild. Malakai clutches the poodle.
A redheaded man in a suit—suits, always suits; the black and navy and gray of lawyers, stockbrokers, owners of various things—looks straight at them. Tasha sees his brow furrow. Any second he is going to open his mouth and bring the hordes down upon them. There’s no way they can make it to the exit in time if he does. His lips begin to part. This is it. The end. Tasha grips her knife. She’ll take some of them with her before she’s brought down, either by beasts or bomb. Maybe Malakai and the dog can escape. Ishmael has seen the redhead too—he half raises the axe.
Light from an Apiary sconce catches the edge of the hatchet like the first crescent of the sun over the horizon. It rises before Tasha’s eyes, as slow and bright as anything. Her hand reaching out for it might be her hand; she’s not sure, she feels only her palm releasing Ishmael’s grip and the vague new weight of the axe in her grasp. Across the universe is the Queen bee and in that moment, Tasha wants nothing but to crush it, to pulverize its crystal influence and destroy its drones. She draws back her arm like a catapult, then swings it forward and releases the axe. She is Zeus with a thunderbolt, but with better hair—and better aim. The earth’s rotation slows. The axe arcs over the heads of the swarms of Minkers and with a sound like an enormous chandelier shattering, smashes into the glass bumblebee. The statue nearly disintegrates, all the delicate facets and design and craftsmanship exploding into splinters, the sound of infinite mirrors destroyed.
The herds of Minkers immediately flock to the sound, their faces crumpling in irritation. They slouch toward the destroyed bee, bumping against each other, the sound of their feet on the marble like a body bag dragged on ice.
“Go,” Ishmael hisses. “Go!”
A few Minkers remain between the refugees and the doors. Ishmael gives two his shoulder, sending them flying. Z is slicing like a madwoman. Malakai runs, still clutching the poodle, holding her head against his chest to keep it from jolting. Z is out front, Tasha bringing up the rear as they enter the revolving doors that turn silently to let them pass.
Chapter 35
Tasha can see the Chevrolet, parked beside the rushing water of the blood red hydrant on the gray street. The clouds have not changed: dappled sunlight breaks through in places, striping the pavement with gold. Some Minkers on the street turn to watch the group stampede by and eventually give delayed chase. Sweepers. One is a Driver, alike in build to the one Tasha killed on her way to the Post an eternity ago. She screams th
reats at him, almost laughing, drunk with the adrenaline of escape, drunk with elation. The sound of the bee shattering echoes in her ears.
Z runs alongside Tasha, hair flying like a tail behind her. She scoops a bottle up off the ground as she passes it, and throws it at the Driver. It bounces off his head.
“Did you play softball?” Tasha calls, leaping over a prone form on the sidewalk.
“What?”
“Softball!”
“Baseball!” Z yells back.
Almost to the car.
“Keys!” Tasha cries. “Keys!”
“He left them in the car!” It’s Ishmael, close.
“Shotgun!” shouts Z.
There’s someone between Tasha and the Chevrolet—yet another man in a suit. So many men in suits: he is nothing. He wants to stop her; he wants to keep her here to die. She has already decided she will not die. Her knife, the knife that she has carried since the beginning of all this, which she still clutches now in the end, is a streak, silver among gray. Her knuckles, clutching the blade, still bear the marks of Dinah’s door. Across the car she sees Z, rushing past stumbling wolves, their mouths wide. Tasha will not lose her. This time, she will not be stopped.
Ishmael opens the back door and throws his brother and the poodle into the backseat. Both yelp. So the dog’s alive. Well. Tasha leaps behind the wheel and Z clambers in across from her. All doors slam. Tasha feels strangely like a soccer mom—Everyone buckle up, she thinks brightly. A guy with broken sunglasses paws at Z’s door, barking.
“I believe he wants in,” Z says with a country club accent, waving at him through the glass.
Tasha stomps on the gas. The Chevy slams into a Minker whose face Tasha doesn’t see. The creature rises and staggers after the car, but the wheels are devouring Clark Street, the gray buildings rushing, blurred like watercolor. The stores have no names, the mannequins have no faces, the advertisements have no power. It’s been a long time since Tasha has put her foot on the gas, and gone. She goes.