Zoonami

by Adam Millard

  “Okeedokee, people,” Donkadonk said, barely audible over the screeching feedback. “This is what we’ve all been waiting for. It’s time to find out just what our potential Carnival Queens are made of. Now, girls—” He turned to face the row of semi-beautiful women on the stage. “I’m going to walk by you all, and I want each of you to tell us your name and answer one simple question, understand?”

  The girls nodded, flashed white teeth, and pulled bikinis from between their arse-cheeks.

  Donkadonk made his way toward a leggy brunette at the edge of the stage. “What’s your name, and if you had one wish in the world, what would you wish for?” He jabbed the microphone toward her face.

  Smiling, she said, “Hi, Mayor. Hi, Cromer. My name’s Anna, and if I had one wish, I’d wish for—”

  *

  “Whipsnade!”

  Roger almost dropped the shovel he was using to muck out the giraffes. He straightened up and watched William Chinn march across the path toward him. It was so hot that Roger wondered if that toupee of his was flame retardant. What would he do if Chinn’s head suddenly erupted into a ball of fire like some stumpy Ghost Rider? He didn’t know, but he imagined it would involve his camera-phone.

  “Whipsnade, I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” He came to a halt just outside the giraffe enclosure, and it was then that Roger saw the fear in his eyes, the trembling lip, the miniature radio in his hand.

  “What is it?” Roger asked, leaning his shovel against the wooden fence and removing his gauntlets, then the gardening gloves beneath those, and finally the marigolds. You could never be too careful when handling shit. Percy Gump in Insects and Arachnids once got pink-eye for a whole month after one of the simians launched a turd at him.

  “Something terrible is happening!” He fumbled around with the volume knob on the radio.

  “If this is about Avril Lavigne,” Roger said, “I’ve already heard it, and you’re right. Terrible, just terrible.”

  Chinn finally managed to adjust the dial and, holding the radio up to the sky, shushed Roger. “It’s not about any latrine,” he said. “Listen!”

  Roger sighed and turned his attention to the small radio shaking in his boss’s hand. Whatever it was, it was giving him a few minutes’ respite. Giraffes sure do shit heavy.

  “We’re bringing you some breaking news,” the female reporter’s crackling voice said, though her voice probably wasn’t crackling in reality. “An earthquake has occurred off the coast of Norfolk. Early reports suggest that the epicentre is about seven miles out in the North Sea and that the quake has a magnitude of 6.1 on the Richter scale, making it the most powerful to hit the region since the Dogger Bank earthquake of 1931. What we know is—hang on a minute, we’ve got a little update for you.” She trailed off as another voice relayed new information to her. “The earthquake, previously believed to have been 6.1 on the Richter scale, is now thought to be somewhere in the region of 7.2. Now, I’m just a reporter, so I’m not sure what to make of this new information, but what we can tell you is that no deaths have yet been reported, and so there is very little to worry about if you weren’t taking a dip at the time of the—wait just a second, we’ve got another update for you. Yes, I’m as surprised by this as you are…” There was silence for a moment as the reporter digested the words feeding into her ear.

  Roger snatched the radio from Chinn and held it to his ear. When the reporter returned, something had changed. She sounded scared, not quite what you would want to hear from someone who spent her day interviewing neo-Nazis and covering stories about suicide-bombing midgets in the Philippines.

  “Okay, I’ve just been told that the earthquake was much stronger than previously thought, somewhere up in the nines, and that a huge tidal wave has been created as a result of the quake. We’re now on red alert, which means if you can’t swim, it’s probably too late for you to learn now. I’ve been Jenny Jones, BBC News.” Just before the radio fizzled out, Jenny Jones could be heard screaming for someone to bring her an inflatable ring.

  Roger dropped the radio and watched as it shattered into several plastic pieces. “This can’t be happening,” he said. “We don’t have tsunamis in Britain; the Queen wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Listen!” Chinn grabbed Roger by the arm, squeezing so tightly that Roger whimpered like a Chihuahua caught under Rosie O’Donnell. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear wha—” was as far as he got before he heard it. A long hiss, the sound of waves crashing together, of water being tossed violently about. Then came the roar, thunderous, booming, strong enough to make the ground quiver.

  Roger felt his bones rattle inside of him, as if his skeleton had lost weight and was now just clattering around beneath his skin like the innards of one of those Russian dolls.

  For a moment, Roger thought it was raining, and was about to say as much: “Just our bloody luck it should piss down on the day we get a tsunami. Then more water fell. Then it hit them like a truckful of trucks. Roger and Chinn flew backwards as a wall of water almost ten metres high surged through the zoo, destroying virtually everything it slammed into. The last thing Roger Whipsnade saw before everything went dark was William Chinn’s toupee rolling over and over in the waves, no doubt searching for the nearest plughole to block.

  *

  “My name’s Cynthia Sprocket, and if I could have one wish, I would wish for—” There was a dramatic pause; pointless, really, since the whole town knew exactly what she was going to say next. “World peace!” she screeched. The muted applause was almost embarrassing.

  Mayor Donkadonk clapped along, but even he was growing tired of the same answer. Two girls remained, and he recognised them from last year’s final. Lucinda Purdy and Jessica Hunt. Both the kind of girl you wouldn’t want to take home to your mother, unless your mother was into that sort of thing, in which case you were onto a winner.

  “Our next competitor is, as you can probably see from the crown, last year’s winner. Please give it up for Miss Lucinda Purdy.” The crowd cheered. Lucinda Purdy stepped forward and did something with the microphone that was probably illegal in several counties before handing it back to the mayor, whose cheeks reddened so fast, you would have thought the Invisible Man had just given him the old one-two.

  Donkadonk wiped the microphone clean with his handkerchief and thrust it, somewhat nervously, toward Lucinda. “My name is Lucinda Purdy, and as the mayor said, I’m the reigning Carnival Queen. Some of you might have seen me in other things, magazines, DVDs, and I’ve got a whole box of DVDs in the boot of my car if anyone would like to—”

  “Just get on with it, whore!” Jessica Hunt said, adjusting her dress. “It’s like a sauna out here. Nobody wants to hear about your starring role in I Lube Lucy, for fuck’s sake.”

  Lucinda turned and was about to retort when the mayor said, “Yes, indeed, so Miss Purdy, if you had one wish, and one wish only, what would it be?”

  The reigning Carnival Queen took a deep breath, composing herself once again. “Well, Mayor, if I could ask God for one thing, just one thing, it would have to be a—TIDAL WAVE!”

  Mayor Donkadonk snatched the mic away from Lucinda, who was staring into the middle distance as if she’d suddenly come over all shy. “You would ask God for a tidal wave?” He shrugged. “Each to their own, I guess. Now, our next cont—”

  A strange hissing sound cut the mayor off mid-sentence, and he turned just in time to see the water slam into the crowd. A second later, he and a whole row of heavily made-up wenches were knocked off the stage by waves so powerful, they turned one woman’s face inside out. The entire town—or those in attendance—was bodily swept away. Members of the audience toppled arse over tit, drowning as they went. The geriatrics sleeping on their deckchairs would never wake up, though getting hit by a great, bloody tsunami hardly constituted dying in your sleep.

  Jessica Hunt’s ridiculous dress had snagged on something in the street—a bollard of some sort—and as she was buffeted around b
y the giant wave, all she could think about was her poor mother, how she’d hated her for putting that fish supper on the table last night and how she was most probably dead right now, her charity bingo game interrupted by this terrible natural disaster.

  After almost a minute of flailing, fighting for air, drowning and then not drowning, Jessica Hunt managed to reach back and free herself from the bollard. As she surged away, carried along on a powerful current—colder than a witch’s tit too—she almost wished she’d remained where she was.

  Then her knees clunked hard against a hidden obstruction, something beneath the rushing tide, and as agony ripped through her entire body, she kind of wished she hadn’t got out of bed that morning. As the water pressed her up against whatever she’d thumped into— it felt like a car, but for all she knew it was a double-decker bus and the shit had really hit the fan—she pressed back, trying to relieve the strain on her front. Truthfully, she was worried her tits were going to explode.

  She kicked off the side of the mystery barrier and pulled herself up. It was like climbing out of a swimming pool, only smellier, colder, and there was no point wiggling your ass because the life guard was nowhere to be seen. Clambering to her feet, Jessica saw the devastation for the first time, what had become of her home town. If anything, it was an improvement, but you’d get the customary complaints from the usual suspects: “I like water as much as the next man, but I shouldn’t have to swim to the bookies,” and “Why are we still paying our water bills? There’s a billion gallons of it outside, so let’s just open a window.”

  “Je…”

  It sounded as if someone had tried to call her name. Tried and failed, but as Jessica searched the flooded street around her, she saw no one. There were plenty of bodies floating by; just none that looked capable of speech.

  “Jessica!”

  Now, that time she heard it loud and clear, and as she turned she saw something disappear beneath the rushing water; something which glistened in the scorching afternoon sun.

  “Hello?” Jessica didn’t know who she was talking to, if anyone at all, but the sound of her own voice was, for a moment, reassuring. She kept her gaze trained on the spot she thought she’d seen movement, waiting, hoping that she wasn’t just imagining it, that there was somebody out there still alive.

  I’ll bet it’s Judi Dench, she thought. All that training she had in MI6 finally paying off. But Judi Dench didn’t know her name, did she? And it hadn’t sounded like Judi Dench. It had sounded like—

  Just then, water flew into the air as Lucinda Purdy emerged from the flood. She threw her head back like the models in shampoo commercials, only much more violent and a hundred percent less sexy, and water poured from her mouth, her nostrils, and Jessica was pretty sure her ears. There, still perched atop her head, was the crown. How it had not come off as the wall of water knocked them from the stage was beyond Jessica, but if she knew Lucinda Purdy as well as she thought she did, that thing was Sellotaped, glued, nailed, tent-pegged, and stapled to the girl’s head.

  “Jessica!” she gasped, makeup streaming down her face, kohl leaving jet-black streaks in its wake. She looked like a Goth who’d just discovered Robert Smith was gay. “Please…help...gargle…me. Can’t swi…gargle…swim!”

  “Throw me the crown first!” Jessica yelled. “Throw me the crown and I’ll help you!”

  When a person starts a sentence with the word gargle, you know they’re in a spot of bother. “Gargle, it’s not…gurgle…yours!” She slipped beneath the water again. Time was running out for Lil’ Ms. Purdy, yet she still refused to admit she was second best. As she popped back up again, she said, “I’ll never…give you…gargle…the crown!”

  Jessica shrugged. “In that case, good luck. I’ve heard the pageants in Hell are extremely competitive.” She turned her back, watched as the floodwater passed by. It seemed to be calming a little. In the distance, heads bobbed up and down as people tried to swim to safety.

  “No, please…gurgle…okay, you can…gargle…have it!”

  Jessica turned. “Okay, then bring it to me, and no funny business or I’ll—”

  Something just beyond Lucinda distracted Jessica. At first she thought it was a tree floating slowly along on the current, but trees tend not to be all scaly, and Jessica had walked through enough forests and woods to know that one with teeth (big, sharp teeth) might be ostracised.

  Realising exactly what it was she was looking at, Jessica raised a trembling finger and pointed at the creature. “Crocodile!” she screeched.

  Close enough, thought the Chinese alligator as it opened its maw wide, then brought them together again with an ear-splitting snap! Lucinda Purdy barely had time to offer herself up sexually in exchange for a quick mauling. She was dragged down into the waters, pulled this way and that by the alligator’s magnificent jaws. Of course, Jessica couldn’t see any of this since she was still standing on the roof of a car, where she’d previously believed herself safe, but somehow she didn’t think they were having a nice game of chess down there, beneath the rushing waves.

  I’m going crazy, Jessica thought. We don’t have alligators in this country or tidal waves. What’s next? Leprechauns? Loup garous? Plumbers that work a whole day without taking a break or asking for another cup of tea?

  Jessica was rooted to the spot, paralysed. Alligators swimming down your street of an afternoon could do that to you. She would have been exactly the same if she saw Bigfoot shopping in Tesco’s, or Lord Lucan boarding the number 58 to Lowestoft.

  Just then, something bobbed up out of the water to Jessica’s right. She heard it rather than saw it. Heart in mouth, Jessica slowly turned, expecting to come face-to-face with the hungry crocodile. There wasn’t much meat on Lucinda Purdy, certainly not enough to sate a beast of that size.

  It wasn’t the crocodile, though. A few feet away, Lucinda Purdy’s severed head bobbed up and down. Her hair was painted to her face with seawater, but the prestigious crown still sat atop her head, and before Jessica knew what she was doing, her feet were carrying her toward it. In her head, Smeagol’s voice sniggered, “My precious.”

  Sensing she was running out of car-roof, Jessica dropped onto her haunches and reached down, waiting for the head to manoeuvre into a better position. So close, and yet so far. The fact that the crocodile/alligator/Gila monster could pop up at any moment and gnaw her arm off never crossed her mind.

  Then she had it, hooked her fingers through the crown’s beautiful swirls. With one quick pull, it came away from Lucinda Purdy’s head, along with a tuft of bloody hair and just a soupcon of scalp.

  Jessica placed it on her own head and instantly felt better about the situation. It was amazing the difference a piece of worthless tin could make.

  “Now, if I could just get off this car without being eaten alive…”

  *

  Three Minutes Earlier

  “Rolf Harris’s dead kangaroo, twenty-two.” The bingo caller placed the ball on his little tray and reached for another. “Dead hooker in a bee-hive, number fifty-five.”

  “Come on,” Vera Hunt muttered. She only needed one more number; Daddy’s favourite whore, number four, and she’d be the proud new owner of a lovely set of dishcloths.

  The bingo caller reached for another ball. “You should all be familiar with this one,” he said, grinning. “Middle-of-the-night-wee. Thirty-three.”

  “HOUSE!”

  A sea of geriatric gamblers turned in unison to glare at the alleged winner. When Vera saw the woman holding the winning card aloft, she jumped to her feet. “This is bullshit!” she said. “I mean, I’m a firm believer in lucky streaks, but Judi goddamn Dench has won nine of the last ten games, and I…”

  Judi Dench didn’t care. She was already making her way to the stage to collect the tri-pack of dishcloths. Vera’s dishcloths.

  “Are we going to stand for this…this conspiracy?” Vera continued. “They’ve obviously fixed it just because she’s a celebrity…”

>   “I assure you, little old lady,” the bingo caller said, “that Ms. Dench has not been given special treatment and that her cards have in no way been rigged.”

  Vera grunted. “It’s because she’s MI6, isn’t it? She won the toaster, the bedspread, the half-finished bottle of Buck’s Fizz, the tickets to Cliff Richard, and now my bloody dishcloths just because she’s had spy training. It’s a joke, I tell you…”

  Judi Dench sat back down, clearly pleased with herself. Vera, knowing she was fighting a battle she could not win, slumped into her seat and reached for the next card. If that bitch takes home the sack of manure as well, I’m going to make it my personal goal to never watch another one of her films again.

  “Okay, let’s move on to game fifteen,” the bingo caller said. “The prize this time is a dinner at a top London restaurant with Mr. Daniel Craig.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Vera said, tearing her card up. She was about to stand and head for the large hall’s double doors when they exploded inwards. Water, gallons and gallons of the stuff, poured into the hall, knocking old people from their chairs and swallowing them up. The fact that they were old, slow, and mostly deaf meant that they scarcely had a chance to realise what was happening. Even Vera, who had once come second in an international ping-pong tournament, didn’t stand a chance.

  The only person currently safe from the gushing water was the bingo caller. Trapped on the stage with nothing but a microphone and a bag of numbered balls, he simply stood watching, trying to figure out what was going on. A dozen sets of false teeth floated along on top of the water, and occasionally a walking stick popped up, but apart from that, the bingo caller could see nothing but crashing waves. It was, like an episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, horrible to watch, but the bingo caller (Derek, for what it mattered now) couldn’t look away.