Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  If she turns her head, she can see the teacher and Robby Montgomery back there, cozy together, and she is almost panting with the effort to stay still. There is no time to stay still. She needs to move—she needs to get Lincoln away from the gun and from Robby Montgomery, and also when she is moving she does not have to think as much, and everything is simpler when she is simply pushing herself so hard that her muscles scream.

  She needs to keep moving, too, because of what she thinks is on the concrete a few yards ahead of her, past the railroad track. She is being careful not to look.

  Still, despite her itch to cover ground, she is paused at the track, undecided. Robby Montgomery has told them not to leave his sight. He has threatened them. Yet if she turns right, a copse of trees shades the way to the flamingos and sea lions. The shadows are tempting. She considers running, taking her chances, but she does not consider it for long, because she is slumping slightly from Lincoln’s weight and she knows that Robby Montgomery or his bullets would catch them in a heartbeat.

  And there is still the thought of Destin, whoever he is, covered in armor and wandering around with plans of his own.

  “What is she doing back there?” whispers Kailynn, standing so close that her hair blows against Joan’s shoulder. Her hand has found its way to Joan’s elbow.

  “Wasting time,” Joan answers, and she feels a twinge of guilt, because she has been thinking that the teacher should charm and wheedle and guilt the killer into helping them, but now the sight of the two of them huddled together leaves her revolted.

  She takes a step to her left, twisting away from the water, with Kailynn still holding on to her, and instead of pulling free from the girl, she wraps an arm around her shoulders and steers her, partly because she knows the girl needs comfort and partly because she needs to keep the girl and Lincoln from noticing what’s spread across the ground past the train track.

  Finally Mrs. Powell is coming the rest of the way down the hill. Something is clearly wrong with her leg—she is hobbled. Even the sound of her footsteps is awkward and off-balance.

  “He’s gone,” says the teacher when she reaches them. “He says to go hide.”

  Joan glances behind her. “Is he really gone?” she asks.

  “He wouldn’t come with us,” says the teacher.

  Joan chooses not to comment on that. She cannot afford to spend any more time or thought or words on unnecessary distractions. “You sure he’s not hiding?” Joan asks. “You saw him go back up the hill?”

  “I did,” says the teacher.

  “Come on, then,” Joan says, and she puts a foot on the train track. She is determined to keep facing the track. The wooden boards are so evenly spaced. So beautifully repetitive. Nothing unexpected. She can follow them forever.

  Mrs. Powell puts a hand on her shoulder. Her grip is solid.

  “He said to go toward the sea lions,” the teacher says, pulling Joan back slightly.

  All her thwarted movement, all her disgust and fury, all her frustration, even, with the teacher’s weak leg comes pouring out of her.

  “I’m not going to go where he said!” Joan snaps, and she struggles to tamp down her voice. “Don’t be foolish. We get going in the opposite direction, and we get as far away from him and all the others as possible.”

  “But why not go to the sea lions?” says Mrs. Powell. “Maybe he knows something. He would have killed us already if that was what he wanted. I know this boy—I think he—”

  “You don’t know him,” she tells the teacher.

  “I remember—”

  “You didn’t hear him with his friend,” interrupts Joan. “You didn’t hear how he is. He’s bored. It’s just a game. Maybe he wanted to turn us loose and find us all over again, just to make things more interesting. I promise you, he’s not worried about us being safe.”

  She holds Lincoln closer and focuses on the track again, on the smooth iron rails that make her think of blacksmiths and tools and everything that is strong and unbending. The silvery chunks of rock—too big to be called gravel—shift under her feet. They look like the rocks Hansel dropped in the woods.

  And then Kailynn is talking, and that is one problem with being around other people: someone is always talking. Someone is always complicating things. Joan has to pause again. She has moved three rungs down the track, only a couple of steps.

  “Why not go find the police?” says Kailynn, but she has followed Joan. She is holding on to her shirt.

  The sound of gunfire explains why they will not go toward the police, but nonetheless Joan turns back toward the front of the zoo, even though she has sworn to herself that she will not look this way again. She glances across the pond, and the chasing lights on the sea monster make the creature shimmer, a wave of orange and red racing.

  Her eyes dip down—it was inevitable—and she cannot help but look at the shapes on the concrete. They become more than shapes, and then she cannot look away. She keeps one hand on Lincoln’s head, his forehead firmly against her cheek. She cannot let him see. But she sees all of it, every line and curve of the two bodies sprawled on the ground. There is something righteous about memorizing them. She owes it to them or maybe to God.

  She sees the soles of the girl’s high-heeled sandals. The girl is on her stomach, with her too-short skirt tight against her thighs, bright orange with black lace. The boy is on top of her, arms wide, covering most of her body, and surely he thought he might save her, surely that was his last thought. There is more blood than Joan would have expected, sprayed and splattered and pooling on the concrete all around them. She knows it is blood, because it is shining dark wet like the pond.

  Her brother told her once, when he was going through medic training, that the instructors would cut the legs off goats, and his job would be to transport a legless goat from the pretend battlefield to the pretend medic station without the real goat bleeding to death. His job was not to keep the goats from dying, because the goats would definitely die, but he just had to make them bleed slowly instead of fast, and he said the blood would pool around your feet while you were working on the tourniquets.

  The boy’s hand is on the girl’s head, on her hair. His mouth is open.

  Finally Joan makes herself look away, even though she will never be able to not see them—and that is fair—and she stares across the pond that spreads out in front of them, gleaming, and beyond it is the long, wood-paneled entrance building and the drab, outdated ticket counters, but none of it is recognizable.

  Although the various spotlights throw the zoo entrance into relief, everything is blurred, both because of the distance and because of the smoke. The reds and blues of what are probably police lights are reflecting off the haze. She can see the branches of the parrots’ perches poking up above the smoke, but they are only an abstract design. Everything is abstract. Around the double iron gates—swung open?—she can see a cluster of dark figures, and she is sure they are police, because there are so many of them. They must be whatever kind of police you send to deal with this sort of thing.

  She sees a movement around the building, maybe a door opening. There is a shifting from the police, and some of them move forward, a dark mass.

  It is all smoke and noise and silhouettes. She listens to the guns sound, and she looks down at the bodies again.

  “Go where you want,” she says to Kailynn and the teacher.

  She starts running, making sure her feet land on the wooden planks, one after the other, picking up speed, trying to avoid any loose gravel. She is used to this—she has been doing it forever—as she hefts Lincoln higher on her hips, tugging at his ankle so he will wrap his legs around her more tightly, and he must be used to it as well, because he obeys her signals without a word. Her shoulder is malfunctioning—a sharp pain shoots through it if she moves her arm backward instead of forward—but her body is otherwise holding up.

  Sh
e moved fast enough, apparently, to dislodge Kailynn’s grip. But she can hear one or both of the others behind her, the rocks crunching. She grips her sandals with her toes. The whap-whap of her soles has started to sound louder to her, and she hopes her shoes are not coming apart.

  Here is what she has not explained to the others, because she is through wasting time and it does not matter what they think: the track will take them to the outer edges of the zoo grounds, and even if Robby Montgomery is only toying with them and getting ready to hunt them all over again, even if Destin in all his armored plates comes after them, once they get close to the outer fence, it seems possible that they can find a way to get over it. Maybe more police are waiting. Police who are not in the middle of a gun battle. Or, worst-case scenario, there are acres and acres of woods out here, and if she can find a hidden place in the dark, she and Lincoln will be all right until the police take care of all the shooters.

  A string of white lights loops from pole to pole alongside the track. There are patches of darkness and slashes of unavoidable light. A few steps of safety and then exposure. For now, she cannot avoid the light: the track is hemmed in by the pond on the right side—a rough split-rail fence along its edge, because everything is so fakely natural—and a creek on the left side, a rushing, tinkling sound coming from it.

  “We’re on the train track,” announces Lincoln, and he is throwing her off-balance, trying to lean over her arm and look down at the ground. “We’ll get run over.”

  The sound of his voice makes her tense. It is one more noise—one more trace of them for someone to follow, and there are two questions, now, repeating in her head, always: Can they see us? Can they hear us?

  She will not let anyone find them again.

  “Put your arms back around my neck,” she whispers, taking a breath between every couple of words. “Trains don’t run here at night.”

  He accepts this, and his arms are where they belong and his head is bumping along against her shoulder.

  She hears her footsteps and the footsteps behind her, and it takes her a while to realize that she does not hear anything else. The gunfire has stopped. The night is quiet, but the silence does not comfort her.

  The quiet is nice. Robby has been waiting for it.

  He imagines Destin, and even in his head Destin is huge, not fitting into the frame. His arms are like Popeye’s, no wrists at all. He imagines Destin on his horse—his horse!—and he thinks of the one time Destin took him riding back through the hills, but Robby only pretended to like it. The idea of it was better than the real thing. And he thinks of the Gila monster tattoo on Destin’s bicep, cool as hell, and how once Destin called Robby a team player. Destin never called Mark anything at all.

  There are crickets or something chirping in the hedges, and when Robby walks past, they get quiet, too. Good.

  There is a game show that has a cardboard character climbing a mountain like Robby is climbing this hill, and if the stupid contestant misses a question, the cardboard guy falls and disappears. He’s just plodding higher and higher, never knowing when he might get knocked off the board.

  Left, left, left, right, left.

  He can hear Mark pounding across the pavement somewhere up ahead, somewhere past the AFRICA sign. He is almost positive it is Mark—the police should be coming from the front of the zoo. He looks over his shoulder, he thinks he can see them moving toward the lake, coming through the smoke.

  Robby faces forward again. He tries to hurry, but he can’t, because he is only cardboard.

  And then Mark is in front of him, sprinting, his arms flying around, his form completely inefficient. He barely slows down when he sees Robby. They bump together, shoulder to shoulder, Mark bouncing off like a pinball.

  “I think they killed Destin,” Mark says, still moving downhill. “I think. They must have.”

  “Yeah,” Robby says, watching Mark get farther away. A roach runs across the concrete by his foot, and the roach, yeah, that guy is freakin’ efficient.

  “You know they’re coming!” says Mark.

  He has paused now, realizing Robby is not following him.

  “I know they’re coming,” Robby says, and he is proud that for once in his life Mark is louder than he is. Mark is the one who needs shushing.

  “What are you doing?” asks Mark.

  Robby is not sure. He is not sure of anything, and it’s not the worst feeling. Everything is fuzzier than it was before. He has been rolled up in tissue paper, like the bags of pralines his mother shipped him when he tried one semester at State, or he is like the dead squabs that Harding wraps in brownish-red moss before he buries them. Mrs. Powell turned him back into himself, partly, and he is stuck now, in between. He saw her in that storage closet, and he recognized her right away, because she has not changed at all, not in fourteen years, except maybe her hair is lighter, and he could not believe that she didn’t yell out his name the way she used to when he drifted out of the line to the lunchroom, and then he figured out that she didn’t know who he was, but he couldn’t stop himself from saying her name.

  “Robby!” yells Mark. “Come on!”

  He is going to make himself move in a second. He knows Mark is freaking out. But first he has to push Mrs. Powell someplace where she’ll leave him alone. It was too much to hope that she might understand, that she might see that he is accomplishing something here, that he is, actually, someone who has thought about things. She did not see it. But maybe she did. Maybe that is why she asked him to stay with her. Maybe, by the end, he had gotten through to her, and maybe she will think of him after. She will remember him.

  She gave him an orange. Back then. She gave him an orange.

  Was that him back then?

  He has not thought about it in years, but he could almost taste the orange when he saw her. He sat close to her desk, and they were doing some kind of worksheets when he smelled the fruit in the air. He was always hungry back then, no matter how much his mom fed him, and he stood and tried to figure out a reason to go to her desk. His feet started moving and he was there, in front of Mrs. Powell, before he had thought of a good question to ask her. He watched her slice an orange into half circles, and she looked up and told him that she hadn’t had a chance to eat breakfast that morning. I like oranges, he’d said. I like how they smell.

  Instead of sending him back to his desk, she sort of laughed and held out an orange slice, and he ate it in one bite, ripped it off the rind. No one else got an orange piece, only him.

  He couldn’t kill her, and that was maybe all right, but he couldn’t kill the others in front of her, either. Not even after that awesome bit with the axe, which was hanging there on the wall like it was made to chop through a doorframe. That part was just like the movies. But he couldn’t kill them, and so he fell off the rails, just like he always does. How could he have been so sure of what he wanted and so clear on the plan and then have gone and done the exact wrong thing without even realizing he was doing it?

  Only he does not care that much, he realizes. He is all wrapped up.

  “I’m leaving,” Mark says, and he is running with that stupid uncoordinated stride that he has. “I’m not just standing here waiting for them to find me.”

  “Destin is dead,” says Robby, although it comes out as partly a question.

  “You know he is,” yells Mark.

  Robby gets himself moving. The truth is that he does not really want to be alone when it happens. And it won’t matter where they are. The police will find them.

  He feels like he has been running up and down this hill forever. A shell of another roach—not quite fast enough—crackles under his boot.

  Destin would stomp roaches with his bare feet.

  Destin said that the best cure for poison ivy was to slice off the top layer of skin with a razor and then pour bleach on it, and Robby watched him do it once, and Destin smiled wh
en he poured the bleach.

  Maybe there is something after this life, because it seems impossible that a man like that can disappear into nothing.

  He could have learned so many more things from Destin if he had more time. They only met him about ten months ago, if meeting online counted. Robby was arguing with Mark about what would be the best jungle weapon. He thought M14 if your men were good marksmen or maybe a Stoner, either semi- or full automatic, and Mark thought AK-103s, and they googled to settle the question. They clicked around a few message boards, and they started to realize that people were out there talking about everything from homemade hand grenades to how to can deer meat. A while later they were following a thread about a family rescued by a sheriff’s deputy after three days in a Wyoming wilderness, and a guy commented that you should never drive anywhere without a log chain and a come-along, and they didn’t know what the hell that meant.

  So they asked the guy, and the guy was Destin, and he explained it when they asked. Destin knew everything about everything, like how bandannas could be used as filters and as handcuffs and as tourniquets, and how you should keep a spare sidearm between your shoulders in case someone made you put your hands behind your head. Everything. Robby has always been impressed by people who know everything. And it turned out that Destin lived outside the city—thirty miles or so. After a whole load of e-mailing, they met him for beers one day.

  They talked about a lot of stuff, and they met for beers again, and they were lucky, so lucky, that a guy like that wanted to hang with them. Then one day Destin said, Do you want to live forever?

  Mark said, Yeah.

  And Destin said, I know how we can do it.

  He told them about how Columbine had changed everything with the police. Before those two guys shot up the school, if the police got a call about someone with a gun in a public place, they figured it was a hostage situation, and they’d wait for the SWAT team to show up and negotiate. But then Columbine rewrote the rules: the cops realized you might have a shooter firing at anyone and everyone, killing them as fast as they could. So the cops didn’t wait anymore to go inside: they had a new template. Whether one policeman showed up or twenty showed up, they’d rush inside right away, and they’d head straight to the shooter and put a bullet in him as soon as possible, and you’d probably admire them for it if you didn’t know what douchebags they were. The cops got to practice that new template plenty, because after Columbine, it kept happening over and over again. The crazies had a new template to follow, too.