Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  When the jackals came into the church, they scampered right up the nave toward the chancel, their tongues hanging out. The nave’s pale colonettes of Purbeck marble and the faultless groining of its arches again gave the jackals a feeling of calm.

  Another homeless man, one Father Drury hadn’t known was present, had seen the animals. He arose from a pew and simply left the church, carrying a small red rucksack and saying nothing.

  The sound of the man caused the priest to look up. He doddered carefully up to his feet, gripping one of the marble altar rails, and the jackals immediately surrounded him, sensing weakness and his rich, salty skin.

  “Brothers,” said Father Drury. “I suppose you have done harm in the world. But you also will be forgiven.” He began walking down the main aisle, toward the door. “Now get along.”

  The jackals followed along. When Father Drury reached the narthex, he felt a great fatigue grip him. He sat down on an oak bench beside a silver dish of holy water set into a carved font, and he sighed.

  The jackals crowded around him.

  He could see them panting rapidly, and he felt pity. “You’re thirsty,” said the priest. “You mustn’t irritate others now—do I have that promise?”

  He worked the silver dish out of the font as he did every Tuesday to gather it up for cleaning, carefully avoiding spills. It looked like a simple mixing bowl. With some difficulty, which made his ribs and back ache, he hunched over and placed the bowl on the stone floor.

  The jackals lapped the water greedily.

  Father Drury made the sign of the cross five times, once over each animal, blessing it. When the jackals finished drinking, they ran out, excited, and finally traveled in separate directions to join London’s thousands of strays. It was the last time wild jackals were seen on earth.

  MEANWHILE, JUST NORTH OF THE ZOO, a ginger-haired autoreporter and his corpulent fotolivographer neglected to turn left on the Outer Circle road, and instead came to a bridge over Regent’s Canal. Moored below them were some of the long canal boats that plied the old waterway for recreation in the day. The only aspect of the zoo still visible was the boxy concrete zoo administration and research buildings of the quiet northeastern quadrant of the complex.

  “Oooo, good,” said the fotolivographer. “We ain’t getting an establishing shot over here, are we? We can shoot pretty boats, fuckall. Let’s go back. We need that entrance, Jerry.”

  Just as they turned around, the otters scampered out in front of them. The autonews crew was slightly interposed between the zoo and set of concrete stairs that went down to the cut, and the otters could not see any way past. They were squeaking and mewling loudly, running forward and back in narrow, angry loops.

  “Holy fuck, shoot them, shoot them,” said the reporter named Jerry.

  The fat man with the camera said, “What? Who wants to see this?” He hoisted the 3D camera onto his shoulder and trained it on the otters. Jerry dropped a few lens-bots to “capsule” footage behind the otters.

  “Shoot ’em, you ninny,” said Jerry. “Shoot the fucking things.”

  When the fotolivographer switched on the powerful lights of his camera, a great bloom of light appeared over the whole area.

  “Oooo, now we’re doing vérité,” said the fotolivographer. “This is bollocks. Don’t we want tigers or hippos or something—something not like rats in Southwark?”

  “They’re not fucking rats.”

  But then Jerry saw, down the stairs, the real source of the otters’ disquiet. The big female had given birth. He could see at least six naked little otters in a makeshift den, like pink fingers, and the mother licking and licking them. He slapped the camera operator’s shoulder and pointed toward the bridge.

  “Let’s get up there. We need to get out of the way. The other otters, they’re protecting her. It’s beautiful. It’s horrible,” he said.

  “It’s bollocks. No one wants to see this.”

  “I don’t really bloody care,” said the reporter. “Shoot the damn thing. It’s what we’ve got.”

  The light shined down like an exploding star. Christmas brought Christ, but May Day delivered otters—six of them.

  raid on the wax museum

  LIKE MANY OF THE RELEASED ANIMALS (MOST OF which were moving south, toward central London), Buddy and Ollie, the two chimpanzees who had killed a fellow ape, quickly reached Marylebone Road and crossed it, attracted by the green dome of the London Planetarium. When they reached the venerable building, they almost immediately lost interest since, as they stood close to the structure, the dome vanished from their meter-high view of the world. But there was much else to pique their curious minds.

  They began pummeling the doors of the attached Madame Tussauds building, screeching loudly under an enormous T banner, which might as well have stood for Trouble.

  Ollie, smaller and more compact than Buddy, smacked at the glass with his sweaty long hand, hooing lightly. The loudness of his pounding despite the weakness of his effort testified to his muscularity.

  The whale-bellied night security guard, sitting inside at his kiosk with his shirt open, startled to attention. He’d been looking at a WikiNous stalk called “Peaches,” using a SkinWerks screen sprayed onto his stomach, flicking numbly through thumbnail fotolives that showed naked women, in a range of ages, all in Venetian masks. Most of the women were expertly inserting sliced pieces of fruit into their own vaginas. The guard’s SkinWerks panel was delivering the sensation of a massage, but his free hand was on his penis; he let go and tapped around the desk for his torch. He grew instantly incandescent, toward himself and at the kids outside.

  “Fuck me!” he gasped, struggling to button up.

  Buddy kept running up to one array of entrance doors and kicking it, which produced a shattering clatter, stirring Ollie to make a series of terrifying waa-barks, a noise chimps make to signal a disturbed state of spectating. Buddy was in a state of sheer Pan troglodyte euphoria. He remembered the coming of the night human, the murder screams of the treasonous macaque, and his and Ollie’s vaulting escape. He had found himself, in Marylebone, in a kind of ape heaven, a complex interzone of a million illuminated things to touch and climb and pull to pieces.

  What had become of the other two members of his band and the other macaques (whom he still considered cousins), all of them free now? He did not know, and there was too much to do to worry over it.

  The guard started to close down the WikiNous, but his hands were shaking so badly (less from fear of the noises than of being found wanking at work) that he left the title page on his stomach. Instead of tapping 999 onto the skin panel, he decided he would give these fucking louts, whoever they were, a scare. He would go out there, say a few choice words, and get the doors resecured before the automatic alarm went off.

  Standing as tall as he could, pulling his shirt closed, pushing his shoulders back, he shoved one of the doors open and screamed, “I’m going to kill you, you bloody fucknuts.”

  The chimpanzees instantly set upon him. Nearly ten stone heavy, Buddy leaped onto his head and began chewing at the man’s cheeks. The guard staggered back into Madame Tussauds and fell, and Ollie joined in, immediately going for the man’s genitals (still not packed away). It was all surprisingly silent and fast, the guard’s death, and far more merciful than many human-on-human homicides. The guard’s last sight on earth, projected on his belly in 3D, was a Peaches fotolive of a forty-two-year-old woman from Toronto with a sequined rabbit mask and thighs as effusive as molten caramel. As his stomach rose and fell forever, she seemed, he thought, to be holding him close.

  Afterward, Buddy started whooping with an irate joy, spinning around on the man’s swivel-chair. He saw the image of a peach still on the WikiNous stalk’s front page on the dead man’s belly. His muzzle and hands still covered in the guard’s blood, he reached down and tried to pluck the fruit off the screen, daubing the man’s torso red. Ollie came over and, seeing all this, began making submissive pant-grunts—he wanted
a taste of that peach, too.

  So Buddy began to strike the screen more forcefully to remove the fruit. It stayed put. An alarm bell started clanging. Buddy and Ollie picked up the corpse and heaved it toward one of the wax figures in the foyer of the museum, in this case, none other than Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.* The screen-belly whizzed just over the barrel-shaped woman’s shoulder but knocked her royal blue hat, white netting and all, straight off, pulling her silver wig along with it. Bald, she looked even sweeter, really, like some benevolent wrinkly alien from the Windsor Galaxy.

  But Buddy and Ollie were livid. They scuttled down dimly lit hallways, knocking over figures in a rage. The hated humans did nothing to resist, and this only angered Buddy more. Their most molested victims weren’t quite random—tall or portly figures seemed to attract the most ire or curiosity. The wax heads of the inventors of the Opticall neural interface, Jacob Glieb and Varghese Raja, were pitched through the nearest window. Morrissey’s clenched hands were torn off and thrown at Muhammad Ali, an act Morrissey’s own fists would never dare.

  As they ran about, heads, arms, and various props, from dumbbells to stethoscopes to Geiger counters, were hurled willy-nilly and torn and bitten and ape-slapped. Buddy felt a kind of fuming glory. At one point, he grabbed the hoary head of Sir David Attenborough, chucked it down, and stamped it to oblivion.

  But new worrying sounds began echoing from the halls—the foe, Buddy knew, and now they were moving. A team of keepers from the AnimalSafe Squad and the firearms experts of the Met’s SO19 had been alerted by the alarm and done the math.

  The Met specialists, gripping their matte-black neuralzingers loaded with lethal rounds, crept into the museum’s foyer carefully. They gasped at the sight of the guard’s blood-soaked groin and shredded face. One of the keepers there, an Irish man named Kieran, looked like an Army of Anonymous member. He had long blond dreadlocks dotted with blue bioluminescent pearls and one shaven eyebrow. He only looked down sadly and carried on. He was a bit arrogant and hurried, but this struck those present as a good thing. The officers felt they were in uncharted terrain, and Kieran seemed to know what was what.

  “Buddy’s here,” he said, in a chillingly flat tone, upon seeing the corpse.

  “Buddy?” one of the officers said.

  “He’s . . . troubled. Even animals can be a bit malevolent, in their way. The other ape is not. Ollie worships. That’s his flaw.”

  Kieran knew Buddy’s handiwork. Though he hadn’t ever hurt a human being, he had become more and more abusive toward his fellow apes, going well beyond displays of dominance. Kieran had been urging the zoo to expel him, but these matters moved slowly. No one wanted an evil chimp.

  So, Kieran felt both a responsibility and his own strange urge to deal with Buddy, but he wanted—desperately—to try to save Ollie, who was known as a submissive ape who occasionally, as it were, “aped” naughty behaviors. Ollie mostly liked to eat fresh figs imported from Italy.

  Kieran spoke to the officers with unrestrained clout, despite having no rank over them.

  “Get your torches on and follow me. Do not shoot, right?”

  He held his own Austrian-made neuralzinger in front of him, loaded with stun rounds. He had gone to the range more often than the other keepers, and he knew how to hit the circles on the holographic man’s solar plexus.

  “You gonks be careful,” said Kieran. “This is the last time I’m going to say it.”

  The chimps, by now, had bolted into the darker, cooler air of the Chamber of Horrors, and there they had settled down a bit. They were exhausted and confused.

  Buddy had begun to whimper and cry. He was thinking of his mother in the forest, how she would pick ants from his scalp and put them in her mouth, and nuzzle him gently and cuddle him. He thought then of the day his father was murdered by a strange chimp from another band, how terrified he had felt, how the new chimp had beaten and strong-armed him and his siblings into terror until his mother, the new chimp’s new bride-widow, had literally beaten the invading male into a state of deference, down on the leafy, dangerous, hot floor of the jungle. Now, he thought, his entire troop—all but he—were perished, and the jungle was no more.

  The French Revolution display, one of the oldest in the museum, intrigued Buddy and Ollie. The gory guillotined heads arranged on pikes—with Marie Antoinette’s dishwater hair in a frizz and Robespierre holding one crooked eye open—caused Buddy to begin hooing respectfully, as though coming upon a musanga or fig tree in a Congolese forest. Blood and gore dripped in the same way from the leaders’ mouths and necks, whether aristocrats or radicals.

  Buddy reached up to touch the queen’s head. She looked to him so peaceful, sleepy, and empathetic. These were things he did not associate with humans, whom Buddy saw as, above all, intruders in the chimp heart.

  Ollie was beginning to bark nervously.

  “Buddy,” said Kieran, aiming the gun at his face, approaching. “We can help you, Buddy. Buddy, Buddy—”

  But Ollie, fatally, started hopping violently and screeching, and in doing so, he knocked forward a recently debuted wax monster named The Crick from the new Andrew Lake series. Misty red fear-bubbles actually sizzled into the air above and around The Crick, causing marked anxiety to all nearby. It was the kind of cheap thrill Tussauds depended on these days. Buddy went bonkers, and one of the younger officers reacted, too. A long, thunderous burst of rounds was choked from his neuralzinger, and then the other specialists let loose. Buddy crouched into a pathetic ball as the rounds tore into him. Ollie, terrorized, tried to reach for Kieran but went down with a round to the mouth. The muzzle-flashes lit the Chamber of Horrors like lightning.

  “Nice one,” said Kieran. “You stupid, stupid fucks. You stupid fucks.”

  He began to weep, and he covered his eyes with his hand.

  deep in the paved forests

  IN THE DAY THE SIX HECTIC LANES OF MARYLEBONE Road—part of the central London Ring Road—presented a hazardous, ugly barrier for any rough beast seeking to cross between Regent’s Park and the rest of the Borough of Westminster. It was the shell of a dying ovum of humane governance, and within lay Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, etc.—none of which much interested any animal apart from Homo sapiens.

  Cuthbert himself always made for the zebra crossings, such was the fearful alacrity of the taxigliders, commuters, and coaches on the thoroughfare, many on their way to Euston Station or to trendy Islington. At night, however, the road was sparsely trafficked and superbly desolate. The Green Line within the zoo seemed far, far away. It was just the sort of place a depressed gorilla such as Kibali, the silverback, might take a stand simply to breathe in the air beyond what he regarded as the small “forest” of Regent’s Park.

  And he had done just that, testing his new state of autonomy, and only a few shocked drivers passed.

  Freedom. He grimaced. He scratched his massive mandible with a long, shiny finger. He felt suspicious of what he saw.

  Freedom—and where are the trees?

  He was one of thousands of hurting creatures in the metropolis, but no one would ever know his story. He wished he could hide somewhere, under the green trunks of ayous trees. Were the Interahamwe militia nearby? He remembered everything from his last days in the wild. Obscured by foliage, he had seen the fighters cut open brown-eyed little ones, human and gorilla, like they were nothing more than papayas, and toss them aside. He did not expect better treatment here, for even his keepers had not respected him, he felt. They had often spoken to him impatiently. “Get bloody up and around, Kibali. Please, cocker.”

  And there was something else—a kind of shadow, an umbrageous sleekness, following him. He turned around, several times, to look—nothing.

  He finally crossed Marylebone Road to the west of where the chimps and jackals had. He had indeed been followed, too, and by beings not shadowy at all. Behind him, two of the three elephants released—Layang and Mahmoud—were thundering right along, treati
ng him as a sort of guide.

  Now he was knucklewalking down the middle of Baker Street, throwing forward his furry black arms, as big and strong as mastiffs, in perfect alternation with his legs. There were no trees on Baker Street, no green lines. He felt disorientated. He looked behind him—the elephants wagged their heads, angry or excited—he did not know, he did not care. He felt angry and unable to catch his breath. There was something more dangerous than these animals. There was a true hunter near—he could smell its hot, sweet urine. Where were the other apes of the zoo he sometimes called to in the night? Where was his old friend, Thin Lips? Where was his cousin, bred in captivity, Small Girl? Were they all dead?

  That the jackals could still be mistaken for dogs was understandable, but the sight of a four-hundred-pound ape trailed by two Asian elephants was fairly distinctive outside the Sherlock Holmes Steak House. The light flow of late-night traffic on Baker Street rushed onto the pavements like waters parting. Doors were hurriedly locked, 999 calls breathlessly made, and escape routes worked out. The one exception, the N74 night bosonicabus operator, who truly had seen it all, after trying to Opticall in (the local networks were jammed), managed to navigate carefully around the animals, then speed on, extraordinarily unfazed—she had a schedule, didn’t she, and she ’adn’t time for these scofflaw Hollywood film people you get at night, or whoever it was goofing on her route with animals—without a proper permit, obviously. “Flaming Nora,” she hissed. “What’s all this, now?”

  But not a soul dared approach the beasts, who indeed did find themselves without permits.

  At Portman Square, Kibali’s pounding heart rose. There were trees, at last. He could hardly catch his breath now, but he wanted to go home, to the northeastern Congo, and at that moment the enormous lime and plane trees seemed the closest thing. Just as he approached, the unpredictable elephant Mahmoud stood back on his haunches and trumpeted the kind of powerscream he had not heard for years.