Half-Off Ragnarok

by Seanan McGuire

  “Same here,” she said, and stepped forward to give me a quick kiss before she trotted away down the path, her ponytail swinging behind her and flashing golden in the light.

  I was pretty sure that I was in love with that woman. I was even more sure that she was going to be trouble, one way or another. Turning, I made my own slower way toward the portion of the zoo that we had reserved for me to search.

  Walking through the zoo in broad daylight with no children staring raptly at the animals or demanding answers from their teachers was a surreal experience, like suddenly finding myself in one of those movies where most of the human race has died off overnight. The animals clearly found it as strange as I did, because they were restless, staring at me with their wide, alien eyes as I walked past their enclosures. The Columbus Zoo was built on an open plan, giving each of our residents plenty of space within a semi-natural environment, and it seemed like every one of those residents was out, waiting to watch as I walked by. I split my attention between them and the ground. It was entirely possible that the cockatrice was roosting in the trees of the zebra enclosure, or hiding amongst the flamingos. So I studied them, looking for signs of illness or petrifaction, and I studied the ground, looking for scat or tracks that could lead me to my prey.

  The zoo’s claims of enhanced security were either idle boasting or failed to account for people’s tendency to gather around coffee pots and snack machines when not supervised. I didn’t see anyone.

  I was halfway through my part of the zoo when I heard frantic quacking up ahead. I broke into a jog. Coming around the curve, I saw one of the many flocks of ducks that inhabited our open-air enclosures clustered on the bank of the artificial pond we provided for the capybara. I came closer. The ducks were directing their fury at the water.

  Capybara aren’t great climbers, and they’re not a species that’s particularly interested in escaping from any location that contains food, water, and a lack of predators. I boosted myself over the stone retaining wall and was inside the enclosure without even breaking stride. The ducks, long since accustomed to the presence of humans, ignored me as they kept quacking at the water. I crouched down, peering closer.

  If I hadn’t known better, I would have taken the stone drake that was mired in the mud at the bottom of the pond for a particularly well-sculpted bit of garden statuary. I reached in and carefully freed it from the muck, shaking it a little to clear the worst of the mess away before pulling it out of the water. It was frozen in mid-paddle, its legs fully extended, as if it had been swimming when it met the cockatrice’s deadly gaze.

  The ducks continued to squawk and complain around me, although my presence seemed to be calming them somewhat. Humans brought bread and other tasty things. Humans might throw rocks or kick, but they never really hurt ducks. Humans were safe.

  “Sorry, guys,” I said to the ducks, straightening up as I continued to study the petrified drake. I couldn’t tell how long ago the petrifaction had been complete; the drake was smaller than either a human or a lindworm, so the process wouldn’t have taken long. Death would have been virtually instantaneous. I’d need to crack the drake open to know whether the entire thing was stone, or whether it was still flesh inside, but that wouldn’t tell me anything. It would just destroy something beautiful. That seemed unfair, somehow.

  If the ducks were still this upset, however, the cockatrice must have been here recently. I peered at the mud. Duck tracks obscured any tracks the cockatrice might have left on this side of the pond, and so I inched carefully around the water, aware that I was breaking a good dozen zoo rules as I made my way deeper into the enclosure. No capybara showed themselves, but I could hear them grunting and huffing at me from inside their artificial jungle. That was reassuring. They were mammal noises, nothing like the hiss or croak of the cockatrice. If it was still lurking here, it hadn’t petrified the capybara.

  Not yet, anyway. I moved faster, scanning the ground . . . and there, at the edge of the pond, I found what I was looking for. They could have been mistaken for chicken tracks, if they’d been smaller, and if we’d had any free-range chickens at the zoo. As it was, they were clearly out of place.

  The trail began in the bushes, made its way to the pond, and stayed there, driven deep into the mud. The cockatrice had stopped for a drink. That was probably when it petrified the duck. I followed the track to the other side of the enclosure, hoping that it wouldn’t disappear into the underbrush.

  It didn’t. Instead, it just disappeared. “Shit,” I murmured, and peered closer. There were no scrapes to indicate that the cockatrice had taken flight; it was walking, and then it was gone. I straightened, trying to take in the enclosure around me. I was almost to the back, and that meant I was probably near the wall. I reached into the foliage. My fingers penetrated only a few inches before I hit stone. Feeling around, I found the latch that would allow the zookeeper standing on the other side to open the feeding hatch and toss in treats for the capybara—or, if they had a more nefarious goal in mind, allow them to lean in and lift out a runaway cockatrice.

  Whoever was using the cockatrice as a murder weapon was still here at the zoo.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket, dialing Shelby’s number. It rang until the call rolled to voicemail and her cheerful voice offered me the chance to leave her a message. There was a killer loose in the zoo, and my girlfriend wasn’t answering her phone.

  Somehow, I managed to walk non-disruptively through the enclosure to the retaining wall. The ducks quacked angrily as I bent to press the stone drake into the mud at the edge of the pond. Then I hopped over the wall and broke into a run, heading as fast as I could for the far side of the zoo, and hoping that I was being paranoid. God, I hoped that I was being paranoid.

  Even though I knew I probably wasn’t.

  Twenty-one

  “Nothing good has ever come from splitting the party.”

  —Thomas Price

  Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, running like a bat out of hell toward the big cat enclosures

  THE GEESE HAD TAKEN over most of the zoo’s walkways without humans to shoo them away. They scattered as I ran, spreading outward in feathery waves to either side of me. Between the motion and their angry honks and hisses, there was no chance I’d have the advantage of surprise on my side: anyone with eyes or ears would know that I was coming. So I put my head down and focused on speed. The faster I could get to Shelby, the faster I could convince myself that everything was all right; that I was the first person in the history of my family to be paranoid for no good reason.

  I actually found myself wishing that security would spot and stop me. At least then I’d have some backup.

  The roar of a big cat—lion or tiger, I didn’t know, although Shelby would have—sounded from ahead, loud and angry and filled with a territorial possessiveness that I didn’t need to speak feline to understand. The cats never roared at Shelby like that. They’d eat her if she gave them the chance, but they didn’t see her as an intruder. I ran faster.

  The geese tapered off as I got closer to the roaring. They knew a predator when they heard one, and they wanted nothing to do with what they heard. The smaller big cats were outside in their daylight enclosures, prowling and snarling, clearly agitated. The zoo’s two snow leopards were crouched atop their rock, tails puffed out to three times their normal size, snarling in low, almost subsonic tones that put my teeth on edge. Eyes flashed from the darkness of the lynx enclosure as I ran past it, and I found myself grateful for the fences between us.

  Humanity is on top of the food chain because we have weapons, and fences, and the ability to run from danger. I was running into danger, and since I didn’t want to get tackled by any security guards I might happen to run into—possibly literally at my current speed—I was doing it without my gun drawn. This was stupid. It might actually cross the line into suicidal. And it was what I’d been training for since I was a kid who didn’t understand that someday, the world would come with consequences.

/>   The door to the big cat house was ajar. I managed to slow down before charging inside, putting a hand on the gun I had concealed beneath my jacket as I eased my body through the gap.

  The hot stink of cat hit me as soon as I was inside: raw and primal and vitally alive in a way that was entirely different from the smell of my reptiles. There was blood beneath the surface stench, freshly-spilled and lingering in the air. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. The big cats were obligate carnivores, and they required a lot of meat to get through their days.

  The cats themselves were watching me as they prowled their cages, growling in agitation. A big male lion occupied the enclosure to my left, while an equally large tiger of indeterminate gender was to my right, lips drawn back to display massive canines. Looking at them, I guessed that the lion had been the source of the roaring. He still looked unhappy, although he wasn’t roaring anymore. I couldn’t tell whether or not that was a good sign.

  Moving carefully, so as to minimize the amount of noise my footsteps would make, I made my way down the length of the big cat house. The lion and tiger followed in their enclosures, matching their steps to mine. Eerie as the giant predators were, I was strangely grateful. Their growls and the thudding of their paws would cover any noise I happened to make, muffling it and making it easier for me to reach my destination.

  The layout of the big cat house was linear, with an entrance at either end. The door leading to the offices and zookeeper back-channels was at the other end of the room from the entrance I had used. Naturally. Circumstances never conspire to deposit me near the door I need. As I approached the door, I saw that it was also standing slightly open. Not enough to be obvious from a distance, but enough that it was obvious someone had been through very recently, and in a hurry.

  Stealth was abandoned again as I jogged for the open door. The big cats matched my stride, although they were stopped by the edges of their enclosure, and snarled in obvious frustration as I went through the open door and stepped into the narrow white hallway of the backstage area of the big cat house.

  There was blood on the floor.

  Not much—just a few drops, small enough that they could almost have been dismissed as runoff from feeding the cats. Except that the big cats didn’t get live prey, no matter how much they wanted it, and nothing dead bleeds like a living body. This blood was bright red, almost artificial-looking, with none of the watery clarity of blood that came from pre-butchered meat.

  The halls were silent. I stopped long enough to draw my gun and continued forward, listening for any sign that I was not alone. The blood trail led deeper, curving away from the offices and into the channel that was used to carry food to the big cats. I followed it, trying to focus on the entire area, and not just on the question that those bright drops of blood forced me to keep asking. Who was bleeding? Shelby, or someone else? How badly were they hurt? There wasn’t enough blood to be fatal, but that didn’t have to mean anything. There are a lot of ways to keep blood from hitting the ground.

  The trail led into one of the feeding pens. I hesitated only long enough to be sure that the channel connecting it to the cage on the other side was closed. Then I unlatched the door and stepped inside.

  It was a small, concrete space reminiscent of the zoos of old, the ones where the animals slept on bare stone and were little more than prisoners of man’s eternal war against the natural world. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all designed to be easily hosed down, and there was a drain in the middle of the room, making it clear that the hosing happened on a fairly regular basis. In addition to the entrance and the broad, portcullis-like barrier that separated the feeding room from the open enclosures, there was a narrow, solid metal door set deep into one wall. In case something went wrong during a feeding, the keeper was to retreat into the tiny built-in “panic room,” giving time for the other keepers to run for help.

  The blood trail led to the panic room door.

  Cautiously, I approached the closed door. When I was close enough, I whispered, “Shelby? Are you in there?”

  “Alex?” There was no mistaking the relief, or the pain, in her voice. “Is that really you?”

  “If not, I was replaced so long ago that it doesn’t make any functional difference,” I said, which may not have been the most reassuring answer possible. I was too worried about her to think straight. “Can you open the door?”

  She laughed a little, unsteadily. “No. It’s not meant to be opened from the inside. I wasn’t thinking too clearly when I ran in here.”

  “Okay. Can I open the door, or will you shoot me if I try?”

  “Are you sure you’re Alex?”

  “Believe me, no one else is going to claim my family.”

  This time, her laughter was a little more sincere. “All right. Yes, you can open the door.”

  “Thank you.” After one last glance back to make sure that no one was sneaking up on me, I holstered my gun and opened the panic room door. Shelby, who had been crammed into the small space with little room to move, or even turn around, tumbled out. I managed to catch her before she could hit the floor. She cried out—a small sound, quickly swallowed, but that was enough to tell me that the blood was definitely hers. “Shelby?”

  “It’s nothing.” She paused before laughing unsteadily. “All right, it’s not nothing, but it’s not that bad. Let me up.”

  I let go of her, and she straightened, pulling away from me. The motion revealed the blood soaking into her khaki top, turning it a plummy purple. “Shelby . . .”

  “No, really, it’s nothing. Look.” She pulled up the bottom of her shirt, revealing a cut that slashed across her ribs, deep enough that it was going to need stitches. It was surrounded by a thick crust of dried blood. “Hurts like nobody’s business, but it’s not going to kill me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I barely believe it, and I’m the one who got stabbed,” she said, pulling her shirt back down. She shook her head slowly, confusion written plainly across her face. “It was Lloyd.”

  “Lloyd? The security guard?”

  Shelby nodded. “The same. He saw me checking the bushes outside the cat house. Came over to ask what I was doing here when the zoo was closed, and I said I’d dropped my wallet in the bushes the day before, and that I was trying to find it. He offered to take me back to the office to check the lost and found, and I would have gone with him so that I didn’t seem suspicious, but . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “But what?” I prompted.

  “But when he saw that I was wearing glasses, his whole face changed. He didn’t look like Lloyd. He looked like a stranger—an angry stranger, who wanted to hurt me. He asked whether I’d always worn glasses, and I said no, they were new. I should have pretended, I should have said I wore contacts for work, but I wasn’t thinking. I was just reacting. As soon as I said that . . .” Shelby paused again before looking up, meeting my eyes, and saying, “He said he wasn’t going to let me stop him. That he’d always liked me, but that he couldn’t let that change anything. And then he drew a knife. On me!”

  “What kind of knife?”

  “A stupid big one, that’s what kind of knife,” snapped Shelby, looking annoyed. “Does it matter what kind of knife? He pulled it out of his coat and he stabbed at me in broad daylight, where anybody could have seen.”

  “That means he wasn’t worried about getting caught,” I said. “That’s a bad sign.”

  “You think?” Shelby shook her head. “I turned and ran into the cat house. I figured he might not follow me inside. The cats get a little unhappy when people fight in front of them, and they were already all up in arms about something.”

  “If the cockatrice was nearby, that would have given them plenty to be upset about.” Animals were more adept than humans at knowing when there was danger close by them. Better senses of smell, better instincts, and less arrogance. It wouldn’t necessarily keep them safe, but it could turn them into early warning systems. “Did Lloyd say or do
anything else?”

  “You mean beyond stabbing me? Because believe me, that was more than enough to convince me that I didn’t want to be anywhere near the fucker.” Shelby pressed a hand against the cut in her side. “He said I wasn’t fooling him. I wanted to ask him what I’d been trying to fool him about, but he didn’t leave me much time. The stabbing was already in process, and running away was a much more important goal.”

  “Right. We need to get you out of here.” I looked at the door that would lead us back into the big cat house. Shelby was injured; she needed medical treatment. But unless we wanted to explain the entire impossible situation to the Columbus police, I needed to get her out of the zoo without either of us being seen, and without running into Lloyd, who had somehow been transformed from a mild-mannered security guard to a knife-wielding maniac.

  “No big deal, right?” I muttered. More loudly, I asked, “Shelby? Where do you keep the bleach?”

  Shelby had almost stopped bleeding, and while her injuries were bad enough to make me want to scoop her into my arms and carry her back to the car damsel-in-distress style, they weren’t bad enough to be life-threatening if we got her looked at soon. Much as I hated to take the time, leaving a trail of human blood through the big cat house would cause us a lot more problems than we had the energy to deal with right now.

  Fortunately, zookeepers are experts when it comes to dealing with bloodstains. I found bleach, meat tenderizer, and a bloodstained mop in the janitor’s closet, and set about mixing Shelby’s blood with the blood of a whole lot of dead animals as I vigorously mopped up the trail I’d used to find her. She sat tiredly on an overturned bucket, watching me work, pointing out when I missed a spot, and trying not to get any more blood on the floor. She was still responsive and alert, and she swore she wasn’t bleeding anymore. I wasn’t certain I believed her. I wasn’t certain it mattered.