Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  She angles herself slightly, adjusting Lincoln forward so she can draw her arm back. She cannot decide whether she is being very smart or very foolish, but she is already tightening her grip and tensing her shoulder, and she has thrown the rock over the back fence of their enclosure, hopefully through the tree branches, toward the railroad track or the undergrowth around it.

  She intentionally does not take time to think too hard about her aim.

  One. Two. She counts off the seconds with her arm still frozen in the air, and she hears the rock hit either branches or leaves, and it is louder than she expected and also it is not quite as far as she might have hoped, but it has definitely cleared the enclosure, and it has landed in the approximate direction of the railroad track. It has landed many yards behind the men, if they are still standing at the other fence.

  She wonders if, to them, it sounds like someone has just thrown a rock to lure them away.

  Apparently it does not, because they make an excited grunt and obediently crash toward the sound, smashing through the small saplings and brambles that fill in the wild spaces off the paths, and their steps are clumsy and uncertain and eager.

  She supposes it is too much to hope that they might break an ankle.

  With their feet still crunching through the weeds, she slides the phone from under her leg. It is cold in her hands now, a hunk of plastic, nothing more. No, it is more than that. The phone is the reason that they are sitting here, hiding from men who can barely walk in the dark.

  Another sound—a gun firing. This time it sounds surprisingly like a typewriter, with someone typing slow and firm. She does not even flinch, although she does not know why she is so unafraid. She is used to it, maybe, and she does not think they are firing in her direction, and also there is a rush to finally act instead of only worrying.

  She inhales slow and long. The tremors have stopped. She is still and solid and ready, a thing carved and polished for a purpose. She slides her thumb across the phone, lighting up the screen again, and then she hurls it as hard as she can, over the chain-link fence, toward the bamboo, where she knows she has seen pine straw in the beds. To the right of where the men had been standing before they ran toward her rock. There is a chance, of course, that the men will see a glowing thing flying through the air, and there is a chance that the phone will hit the concrete, and it will shatter, but, more than that, it will announce that it has been hurled—the impact will be obvious—and that will ruin everything. But she will not go back to cowering, helpless, so she watches as her phone spins, fast and certain, aerodynamic, like it has been built for this time and place, and there is no clattering crash, only a soft, exhaling kind of a landing, and she wonders if they hear it.

  “What?” one of them says, and the stupid feet flattening the stupid weeds stop, confused. They did hear it, and that could be good or bad, but it is something that she did—she has pulled their strings like they have been pulling hers, and she is hotter and denser all of a sudden.

  There is a power inside her, watching.

  She can see the phone screen shining in the distance, through the diamond shapes of the chain link, a bright dot. Her aim was decent, although not perfect. But it is lying face up—that is what she hoped for—a few feet into the bamboo thicket. The glow from the screen lights up a small patch of smooth wooden poles and still-trembling leaves.

  “There,” says one of them, and she sees the waves of shadow as they run across the concrete, into the beam of light from the eaves of the Primate Zone, and then they are past that circle of light, but they are bending over her phone, and their hands and faces and arms are ghostly for a moment.

  She watches one of them raise her phone to his face. He is clean-shaven and light-haired, and he is white, just as she thought. His face is thin and unimpressive, and she wonders whether he is the thin-voiced one, whether his face somehow matches his sound.

  She is not done yet.

  While he is looking at the screen, she pulls her arm back, gripping her second rock, aiming past the men, farther along the path, in the opposite direction of both herself and the train track. Back toward the heart of the zoo, the exhibits, back toward everything. If she could map out the objects she has thrown, she hopes they would make a straight line, and that line would lead back to the sidewalks and bathrooms and benches and tables, back to the obvious hiding places and signs and labels. It would lead to anywhere but here.

  Lincoln grunts softly, startled by the jerk of her arm, and then she’s letting go again, and finally she hears the stone hit something solid and soft. Dirt, she imagines.

  “They’re running,” says the quiet, high-voiced one. The one holding her phone.

  He must have turned off her phone or slid it into his pocket or something, because the light is gone, and she hears them jogging down the pathway, away from her and Lincoln, chasing after her rock but not chasing too fast, because they are not worried. They are enjoying themselves.

  It is not rocket science, what she has done. She has probably seen something like it in her reruns of Scarecrow and Mrs. King or maybe in Predator or maybe in any other action show she’s ever seen. (How strange it is to think of herself in front of a television, on her couch, Lincoln pressed against her, chugging from a water bottle, his questions constant because he cannot watch any show for a full minute without asking a question.) She is sure the gunmen have seen a million of those shows as well, but she hopes they are too cocky and too stupid to consider anything very carefully.

  She can still hear their footsteps, barely. Rhythmic and easy on the concrete.

  Lincoln has been so quiet, it occurs to her. Other than the ache in her arm and the weight on her hip, she has almost forgotten that he is here.

  “Sweet?” she asks.

  He only pushes closer to her, not even lifting his head.

  He and Mark are running nearly elbow to elbow, and their breathing is one rushing sound. Even though they have seen no sign of whoever dropped the phone, speed makes everything feel smooth and perfect. Robby has never felt as fast as he feels tonight. He has never felt so much like his body is a powerful tool, ready to do anything. There is a backless iron bench ahead of them, and it would be easy to go around it, but he leaps over it, one foot landing loud on the metal. When he is running, he is not Robby anymore, and sometimes the gun in his hand makes him feel that way, too, but not always. The darkness around them and the flashes of light overhead and the big leaves waving in the wind—it all feels right. It is what he has wanted for forever: rightness.

  When it felt wrong before—back with the hogs—that was because he forgot that he was not Robby anymore. It is only Robby who can feel so lost, so legless and armless and brainless, only a stump.

  “This way,” whispers Mark, turning left toward the giraffes. He doesn’t bother to wait and see whether Robby will follow. Robby always follows.

  Mark has slowed to a jog. His Adam’s apple is sticking out of his skinny neck, his head is sort of nodding up and down, and the guy has never looked more like a bobblehead. He can’t have gained ten pounds since middle school—hell on earth, Robby’s mother called it, half laughing, but Robby knew that if she could laugh, then she didn’t understand—and it was back then that Robby had first invited Mark over, and Mark had seen the DVD sitting on the shelf and grabbed it and yelled out “The Hidden Ones?!” in a voice that other guys might use if they’d found porn, and Mark had reached for the remote control without even asking. Then they were watching that first scene, the one Robby had watched by himself a dozen times already, where blackness filled the screen and then, so slowly, tiny spots of light appeared in the blackness.

  It is like you are looking into space, but then the camera pulls back and you are actually looking into a gap in a tree trunk. The spots of light are some kind of insects, like maggots or termites, only they are fluorescent, and then you are looking at the whole tree, giant, and then
you see the other trees and you realize this is a jungle, but it is not like any jungle you have ever heard about. You never see the sky. The trees are so thick that everything is shadows, and the leaves are as big as a grown man. Those giant leaves flap against helmets and curl around rifles, and Robby has always thought that it would be hard to breathe if the trees were crowding you like that, even though trees are supposed to make oxygen, at least Earth trees. And that is, actually, the coolest thing about the movie: you never know if this is Earth or some other planet. Because the men are humans, but at night the leaves glow like Extra gum, and the things that the men hunt are always covered by their headdresses, all feathers and dreadlocks.

  “You know we’ve lost her, right?” says Mark, a beat between every couple of words while he sucks in a breath. He has never been much of an athlete. “There’s no telling where she is.”

  Robby is still half in the movie, and it takes a second to reconnect himself to his body.

  “‘She’?” he says.

  “The woman who dropped her phone.”

  “How do you know it’s a she?”

  Mark holds out the phone, turning it so that the cover catches the light. Robby can make out some vague image.

  “Picture of her kid,” says Mark. “Gotta be a woman.”

  Robby is not convinced of it, but there’s no point in arguing.

  “Then why are we still running?” he asks.

  Mark raises his arm, and then there is the sound of the phone bursting on the pavement, and it is a beautiful sound. In another second, they are leaping over cracked pieces of screen and casing and innards.

  “The hunt goes on,” Mark says. “We are order. We are hope.”

  Robby knows, then, that Mark feels it, too. How they have left the rest of it outside the gate, back in the parking lot. In here there is no history.

  Starbucks—eight months. Applebee’s—four months. Bud’s Burgers—five months, and, God, he’d been ready to leave that one because that place had been full of, like, seriously obese freaks, like, only fat people were allowed through the door and the bellies would just hang off them like batter over a cake pan, and it made you want to take a knife and slice it all off and see what the poor guy would look like without the blubber.

  And there was Dog-Eared Pages Bookstore and Chick-fil-A and Sears—two months—and now CVS, not even one month.

  His stupid boss, full of himself because he is a manager at a drugstore, and, hey, you’re forty years old and manage a drugstore, so, yeah, wow, you’re really setting the world on fire. Louisa Brunson, who he was sure had a good time when they went bowling, but then he called the next night and she couldn’t even be bothered to stop watching television while she talked to him. She said her mother thought she should be focusing on college instead of dating, but he knows that really her mother just didn’t want Louisa dating him. Because that is what parents think, especially Louisa’s mother, who has bulging frog eyes and has never worked a day in her life, one of those women who is a terrible person and probably was since she was born and her parents should have just drowned her like a cat. And before Louisa there was Angela Willard, who was nice at first, sweet, shy, but she turned out to be a dumb whore and he should have known it from the beginning.

  Whore and sweet and shy are the sounds that his feet pound into the pavement.

  His eight-year-old cousin asked whether Robby paid his mother rent. He wonders what conversations she overheard from her parents to make her ask that. That side of the family says they’re Christians, but they love to rip people apart. They’re nasty, petty people. So many nasty people—a world of them—but no one sees the grossness of each other, no, no, everyone is too busy thinking Robby is the screwup, the lazy one, and they are so blind and they are miserable and don’t even know it.

  All of them are wiped away. All of it is wiped away.

  We are order / we are hope.

  We are order / we are hope.

  That is the chant that gets louder and louder as the camera pulls back, and the rhythm is like something army men would yell while they march, voices rising on the final hope, but for several seconds there are only trees on the screen until a figure comes running, silently. It’s being chased by a dark-haired soldier in a sleek smooth uniform, and you almost feel sorry for the shadowy shape, which is thin and mostly naked except for the huge headdress. Then just as the soldier grabs the thing’s hand—is it a hand or something stranger?—its other hand touches the soldier’s face, and the soldier freezes and then arches back, spine curving, and collapses.

  There are more soldiers coming—a neat line of them, synchronized—and the creature dives under a bush. You see Lieutenant Harding for the first time, and he raises a hand without saying a word. Then he steps to the bush, and he reaches into the branches. He pulls out the squab by one ankle, kicking and gibbering. He grabs the squab’s wrists in one gloved hand, keeping her poisonous hands away from his skin. He sings to her, smiling, You were lost, but now you’re found, and from that moment when you see Harding’s face as he wraps his fingers around her neck—you can tell it is a her because there are breasts, even though they are covered by some sort of purplish metal—you know that the squabs are evil and that the soldiers are good. And when the lieutenant snaps her neck, you are glad.

  “Back toward the lake,” says Mark, tugging his jeans up. “Let’s finish the loop.”

  “All right,” says Robby.

  “Shhh,” says Mark.

  You are glad when Harding realizes that the original mission of containing the squabs is flawed. Containment is not enough. Because the squabs have begun to venture past the borders of the jungle and into the town, which has no name, and Lieutenant Harding realizes the creatures could easily wipe out an entire population. They must be wiped out instead.

  The squabs say they mean no harm. They send a babbling contingent, three of them, to the soldier’s camp, and one of them comes forward—feathers and dreadlocks blowing in the wind—and they say the only word they seem to know, peace, peace, peace, and they hold their hands up, but their hands are weapons, aren’t they? They can kill with a touch.

  Harding carries a long needle with him, and at night around the fire he pulls out the needle and begins popping the blisters his boots have rubbed on his feet. He slides the needle into his bubbled-up skin, and the sores burst and pus runs into the dirt, and he never changes his expression as he shoves his boots back on. Later he stabs the needle into a skinny squab’s neck over and over again, and tears come down the squab’s face as it screams. The tears look just like pus as they hit the ground—no difference.

  The squabs look fragile. That is the thing Robby hates most about them. Harding is smarter and stronger and there is no weakness in him. You have to admire that, don’t you? A guy who doesn’t make mistakes? And if he makes them, no one notices, and that’s the real talent, isn’t it?

  When they fired him from CVS, he told them that he was late because he slept through his alarm again. What was he supposed to do? His boss—with his goatee and his ego and his skinny jeans and his fake-British way of saying Carry on—said that Robby’s alarm is not his problem. Maybe he was right. Maybe being late is Robby’s own problem. But what can he do? How can he undo something that’s already happened? Is he supposed to invent a time machine and go back and make himself wake up? In his whole life he has never understood why he has to be blamed for things that are out of his control. Why he is constantly being punished for those things. He can’t control that he’s a deep sleeper. He can’t control if he forgot to look at his speedometer and accidentally went fifty miles per hour in a school zone. He can’t control if he mistyped an order and a table got Bacon Burgers instead of Black Bean Burgers. It wasn’t intentional. Even if people are right and he is lazy or rude or selfish—well, it is what it is, right? It’s genetics. It’s not a choice. But that doesn’t matter, does it? No one cares t
hat he’s trying, do they?

  But, no, Robby is the one who is trying. He is not Robby. He is not that same constant fuck-up of a boy who left home today.

  Are you blind, honey pie?

  The squabs are the cleverest villains ever created, he sometimes thinks. When they bleed, their blood is bright pink, and it is impossible to know if it is the weird lighting or if it is meant to be inhuman. The blood splatters and drips on moss, and it is like some painting project he did once in Vacation Bible School.

  It’s the color of that antibiotic stuff, Mark said back then, on that first afternoon. You know, amoxicillin? Did you ever have that?

  And Robby thought that, yes, actually, the blood was the exact color of amoxicillin. He remembered the taste, sweet and chalky and delicious. He told Mark that he loved that stuff.

  You liked it? Mark said, and he said that he’d never met anyone else who didn’t think it was disgusting. Mark said how when he was a kid, he snuck downstairs in the middle of the night and drank a whole bottle of it.

  It had been so long since Robby had felt like he was the same as someone.

  Sometime after that his mother brought them a bowl of Doritos, not speaking, not making eye contact, and Robby felt bad, because he was sure that she knew he didn’t want her to do anything to remind Mark that she existed. He wondered whether that hurt her feelings. He wondered whether she was trying to make him feel guilty. And then he caught her looking back over her shoulder, and he can still see the way she was smiling. She was so happy that he had found a friend. She was so relieved.