Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  There are times when he almost hates her. But he hates himself for it, so that’s something.

  “Check-in time,” Mark says, slowing to a walk, huffing and puffing.

  Robby glances at his watch, which still feels weird on his wrist, but they all needed a watch. “Yeah.”

  “Unless we don’t,” says Mark.

  They are nearly back to the lake now. He can see the lights flashing, all the pretty Halloween decorations twinkling away.

  “No,” Robby says.

  “All we have to do,” says Mark, for the thousandth time, “is go over the wall. We follow the tracks around and we find some dark spot and pop out on Cherry Street or over on Havers. We walk back to my car, and we’re out of here. No one knows.”

  This is Mark in a nutshell—he wants everything easy. He never wants to pay the toll. If there’s a paper due in a class, he’s the one who never writes a page of it and gives the professor some excuse about a migraine and still bitches about getting a zero and Robby is the one who works his ass off in the computer lab until 4:00 a.m. but still only gets a couple of pages done and gets a fifty or sixty on it, and they both fail out, so who is smarter, really?

  “And then we’ll do what?” Robby says. “Go to Peru and live on the beach forever?”

  “Peru doesn’t have a beach, dumbass,” says Mark. “We do whatever. We go home and eat pizza. It doesn’t make any sense, Robby. It ends the same for him. He gets what he wants. We’ve done what we said we would.”

  They step off the concrete path, the grass and pine straw crunching under their feet. Robby sees a movement in the bushes, but it is only a duck on the other side of the chain-link fence.

  “No,” Robby says. “I already told you no.”

  Since Robby never argues, Mark hasn’t had any practice trying to convince him, and it shows. He’d be a crappy salesman—he just keeps repeating himself.

  “We can walk away,” Mark says, stepping closer. “We can wake up tomorrow morning.”

  When he was little, Robby watched some cartoon about a robot or a mouse or maybe a dog. All those things could look pretty much the same in a cartoon. But when the robot-mouse-dog popped onto the screen, some deep voice yelled out, “And now the star of the show!”

  Robby sometimes hears that voice in his head when he sees Destin, the one who made all this happen. The one who saw something special in them. The star of the show. Robby is going to finish this like he promised Destin.

  The ending is, really, the most important part.

  Robby looks over at the lights shining on the lake. He smiles.

  6:40 p.m.

  I’m hungry,” Lincoln says.

  Joan has to strain to make out the words. It is the first time he has said anything in a while. They have been sitting silently, Lincoln reclining against her chest. It is entirely too dark for his guys now.

  It is too dark for anything.

  She is absurdly glad to hear his voice, regardless of how much she wishes he had said something—anything—else.

  “Let me look,” she says, even though she is sure that she has nothing. She grabs blindly inside her purse, feeling in the pockets first.

  “So,” she says, “what sort of training do you think Batman does? To make himself faster and stronger?”

  He says nothing.

  “I think he lifts weights,” she says.

  She can feel crayons. She wonders why she hasn’t thrown away all these receipts.

  “I think he Hula-Hoops,” she says, desperate. “I think he does ballet.”

  She pulls out a squashed Snickers Miniature and unwraps it, handing it over.

  “Here’s a candy bar, sweet. A Snickers.”

  His fingers touch hers as he takes it. “Do you have more?”

  “I’ll check,” she says. She does not have more. Still, she keeps her hands in her purse, and she hears the wet sound of his mouth closing around his fingers—he always seems to put the food farther into his mouth than necessary—and then she hears his chewing.

  After a few seconds, she hears him licking his fingers.

  “Did you find more?” he asks, so quiet and sedate.

  She can see, barely, when his head moves toward her. She cannot make out anything of his features, not even his eyes or his teeth, which she would think might flash white in the dark. She leans back against the rock wall, and it is cold and hard, the edges of it snagging at her hair.

  “I don’t have any more, sweet,” she says.

  “I’m still really hungry. Do you have any crackers?”

  “No. Hey, do you still have your guys?”

  “No.”

  “Where are they?”

  Nothing.

  “You don’t want to lose them, sweet. We should find them.”

  He doesn’t answer. She reaches out, her hand landing on his thigh, and she feels until she has his fingers in hers. She takes his hand and he does not pull away, but he does not curl his fingers around hers as he usually does.

  “Let’s just feel around on the ground,” she says, “and see if we can find them. Like an Easter egg hunt in the dark. Only for guys.”

  He likes Easter.

  He takes his hand from hers.

  “I’ll start feeling around for them,” she whispers, and she knows she sounds too cheerful. “Now, who all do we have out?”

  She cannot help filling the silence when he does not respond.

  “I know I gave you Batman,” she says, running her hands through the dirt, and the grass is so dry that it pricks her skin. Almost immediately she feels smooth plastic, and she knows which figure it is by the horned helmet. “And I’ve got Loki. Who else am I looking for?”

  “Thor,” he says. Flatly. “Predator. The blond boy.”

  She has found three of them already. It seems crucial to her that he does not leave anything here in the dirt, and her hands speed up, circling. She feels a sharper prick—glass? a shard of rock?—but she does not mind it.

  “Are they gone?” he asks, so softly that she can barely hear him.

  She rubs her hands on her skirt. She closes her purse, carefully snapping it closed so that no guys will fall out accidentally.

  “The bad men?” she whispers.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. Until we know, I want to stay here and be quiet.”

  “Are the police here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will they kill us?”

  “Who were you using the blond boy for in your story?”

  “Will they kill us?”

  She can hear him breathing. His breathing is possibly louder than his words. She wishes she could see his face.

  “They might,” she answers. “If they found us. But they won’t find us.”

  She can feel his warmth pressed against her from hip to shoulder. He says something else, too softly—too softly!—and she leans closer so she can make out his words.

  “What?” she whispers.

  “If they killed us,” he says, “would our bodies go to heaven?”

  “It’s souls that go to heaven.”

  “Oh yeah,” he exhales. “And our bodies stay here?”

  “Yes. But we don’t miss them. The souls are the important part.”

  “But we can’t see our souls. Or touch them.”

  “Not now,” she says.

  The wind has picked up again. She is cold but not miserably so. She does not want to ask him if he is cold, because it might plant the idea in his head.

  He shifts against her, but he does not ask any more questions. He does not hum or blather meaningless words. She listens to the leaves and the crickets and thinks of Paul—no way to reach him now—and wonders if the men might circle back around, and it is harder to sit here, actually, in this silence that pulses
and expands.

  “It won’t be long,” she whispers to Lincoln.

  “I’m still hungry,” he says.

  She wonders, for the thousandth time, where the police could be. She might be able to pacify him for a while, but his blood sugar will keep dropping, and he will become a little more like a wild animal with every passing minute, and there will be a breaking point.

  She could leave him here while she makes her way back through the Primate Zone, past the playground and the elephant habitat, around the side of the Savannah Snack Bar to the vending machines. If all goes well, she could grab a pack of crackers and be back in only two or three minutes. He could wait here, and she would be back in the amount of time it would take her at home to run to the bathroom or to run upstairs and grab a book.

  This is a pure dream, and she knows it. He will never sit here quietly, of course, calmly waiting. Not even for two minutes. He would not let her climb over the railing before he’d lift his arms, insisting she take him with her. And if she ignored him, he would scream as she walked away.

  And what if it is not such an easy trip for her to get him a snack? What if they are out there, waiting? What favor will she do him if they kill her, and then he is here, crying her name, and they find him?

  No, even if he would wait here, it is hard to imagine the benefit. It is somehow a much more terrible thing to think of them finding him alone, to think of him small and scared as they raise their guns. It gives her an ugly kind of comfort to think that if it came to that, she would be holding him and—

  She shuts down the thought. She thinks of how sometimes she can see so clearly some terrible accident—him stepping backward into the street, a car crumpling him—she finds herself practicing what she would tell Paul if she had to call him with the news. She has fought off an attack of near terror watching Paul’s sister strap him into a car seat and drive off with him, because she can so clearly see the accident they will have on the interstate, and then she will be the one getting the news, hearing her sister-in-law’s voice on the phone, sobbing.

  She goes into his room way after midnight, sometimes, to make sure he is breathing.

  She drops him off at school and, more days than she likes to admit, squelches thoughts of school shootings and men pushing their way into classrooms, teachers screaming, and how many children might get out the window before the gunmen break through the door and whether his teacher might choose him as one of the first to escape, and this is not rational, she has always told herself, but here they are, so apparently her imaginings were not so unhinged.

  The morbid fantasies have actually lessened as Lincoln has gotten older. When he was an infant, she went through a phase where she could hardly look at windows. Any windows. She was always imagining him falling from them.

  Now, sitting in the dirt, the whole world shadowed and filled with noises that she can barely decipher, she cannot imagine him being shot. The image does not come. She will not let it.

  “Do you want to lie down?” she asks. “You can use my lap as a pillow. Or I’ll hold you like when you were a baby.”

  Sometimes he is fascinated by what she did when he was a baby. By the parts of his life that he cannot remember. He is intrigued by the idea that milk came out of her breasts.

  “No,” he says. “I want to eat supper.”

  “You might feel better with a little rest,” she says, although she knows that trying to steer him will not help her cause. Still, she is not willing to let go of the slender hope that maybe he will go to sleep. That maybe she could hold him and stroke his face until he drifts off and then they could stay here endlessly, and she wishes, for once, that he still had a pacifier, because it was Pavlovian the way his eyes would drift closed as soon as he started sucking—A paci is a friend that you keep in your mouth, he told her once—but he gave that up willingly on the night that he turned four, and it is sitting on the shelf in his room in its little paci house made of popsicle sticks with its doll’s bed and blanket.

  “I’m hungry,” he says again. “I’m starving.”

  The way he pronounces it, it comes out “staw-ving.”

  “Just lie down for a minute and see,” she says.

  “I don’t want to lie down. I want to eat supper.”

  “We’ll eat supper a little later.”

  “But I’m starving.”

  “Lie down for five minutes,” she says. “Just five minutes and then we’ll see.”

  “Okay,” he says, but his face is scrunching up, his lip sticking out and his eyebrows jutting down, his breath already starting to stutter. “O-kay. O-kay.”

  “Lincoln—” she starts.

  His crying always starts with words. He tries to talk through the weeping, and the words stretch into wails, and then the words evaporate and the tears come, and once they are falling down his cheeks he has passed into something monotone and rhythmic like the ocean, only more grating.

  “Shhhh,” she says. “You have to be quiet.”

  “O-kay-y,” he says, in many syllables, more moan than word.

  She scans the darkness. He is too loud too loud too loud. She is running her hand over his head, pulling him closer to her, shushing and stroking, and none of it is working.

  She does not know how to buy more time. He cannot make noise. Whatever other factors are at work, that is the most important piece of the puzzle. Soon the tears will turn into stomping and sirenish screaming, and he can make you cover your ears from sounds that are not quite human but more mechanical. Like the gears inside him are stripped or a muffler has come off somewhere.

  “All right,” she says. “Do you want to get supper?”

  The sobs stop almost immediately. His breaths skip and catch, and he sniffs wetly, but the sobs are gone.

  He wipes his nose on his shirtsleeve. “Is there a restaurant?”

  “What about a treat?” she says. “What about cheese and crackers for supper? Or peanuts? And a candy bar for dessert?”

  Even though she cannot make out his face, she knows the look he gives her is disapproving.

  “That’s not big strong food,” he says.

  “No,” she agrees. “We can get something out of the machine. Whatever you like.”

  “Food out of a machine for supper?”

  He sounds hopeful now.

  “Yes,” she says.

  This would be different if she were alone. If she had been strolling through the zoo by herself when the gunfire started. She would have run, surely. She would have hidden. But then what? She is reasonably strong and reasonably fast, and she is smart, and if she were alone, she would by now have decided that she should not be waiting around for anyone to save her. There must be some point in the perimeter of the zoo where she could climb over, even if it meant getting a little bloody on some barbed wire. She can envision herself creeping from this pen, peeking around corners, and then escaping, escaping into the open air and the trees and the endless winding pathways, and she would be silent and quick, and they would not see her.

  She does not think that these men are particularly competent, and if she were paying attention, she could avoid them, and she could find a way out. She would look for others, too—she would be selfless if she were alone, she would not only rescue herself. She would find the woman and her baby, and she would reach out a hand to anyone else she found hiding, and she would lead them all to safety. She would stick to the shadows, and she would lead the way. She would take her time and never make a sound, and—in the surely thousands of feet of fencing—she would eventually find a weak spot. Or a policeman, watching.

  She sees herself, a shadow.

  And if the men found her, she would run. She would dash around a corner, and she could run for much longer than they could—she tries to do six miles four times a week—and there is a thing she loves about running, how, when the humidity is low and your mus
cles are loose, after a while you go weightless, sloughing off gravity, and the ache in your thighs and lungs gives way to helium, and you feel nothing.

  Sometimes she can no longer feel her feet. Sometimes her entire body has turned to air. When she runs.

  “Mommy?” he asks.

  “Are you ready?” she whispers. “You have to pay attention and do exactly what I tell you. And not make any noise.”

  “Or they’ll kill us,” he finishes.

  She considers it.

  “Or they might kill us,” she agrees.

  She thinks she can see him nod.

  She stands up, taking his hand. She lifts him, and his legs lock around her waist, and she absorbs the weight, settling more firmly onto the ground, and everything is utter dark around them, so she cannot see the first step that she takes. She keeps one arm under his butt and presses her other hand against the rock wall, balancing herself just in case.

  He keeps his head against her jaw, and she feels his hands moving in her hair. She takes her first step so slowly that she can feel each muscle in her foot move. Her heel pressing down and the tendons in her ankle stretching, the arch of her foot curving as the ball and then the toes roll onto the ground, the smallest crunch of dry grass.

  She feels like she is managing about two steps per minute, her hand dragging around the rock, measuring her progress as she moves inch by inch along the backside of it around to the angled end—she steps on a branch and it feels like a bone under her sandal, and it snaps, too loud, but maybe not much louder than a branch falling from a tree?—and then she is in front of the rock, facing the wooden boards of the deck, looking straight at the spotlights lighting up the two doorways: one that will lead her back to the main paths and one that will take her into the recesses of the orangutan exhibit.

  The doors are lit up like choices on a game show. She blinks at the brightness.

  The spotlights spread all the way to the edge of the railing and slightly beyond—she can see spiderwebs strung from the wooden planks all the way to the ground, and they make her think of firemen’s nets that would catch you if you fell.