by Bill Broun
“Hey,” Mason said to the Neuter. “What the hell’s this?”
One of the Neuters, smiling broadly, bashed Mason’s collarbone with a neural-coshstick, flattening him, taking his breath away.
“Are you ready to go to the comet ship?” the Neuter asked Mason, in an absurdly courteous voice, still grinning numbly.
“Wait!” said the officer, trying to pull away. Mason tried to rise back to his feet, and the Neuter hit him again in the middle of his back, knocking him back down.
“Ah!” he screamed. “You sumbitch.”
Another white-suited Neuter appeared and took the red-haired officer’s free arm.
“What did Chief Gage say?” said the officer. “Asshole, stop! Get your fucking hands off me. Who the fuck are you people?”
Before anyone could say another word, the Neuter’s jaw was hit so hard, it seemed to move sideways off its hinges. In a single swing of her stave, Astrid dispatched two others and gave the Americans a brief haven.
As Mason got back to his feet, he realized how desperately he had failed in his own sacred duty to protect the embassy. The Neuters had somehow infiltrated the chancery, emerging from within. Some of them, it seemed clear, had to have been in the diplomatic security detail.
Now the Neuters, who had come to England to obliterate all animals and to force mass human suicide, who seemed to be replicating themselves by the second, were acting with cruel force, using shoulder-dislocating jerks to haul everyone in the embassy out into the square. They had fanned out across the square and started to invade the rest of central London, surrounding every animal they encountered. There were also new Red Watch frightcopters and a few autonews drones in the sky, too, but the Neuters were shooting them down with a kind of sticky-roped plasmatic harpoon.
Indeed, by this time, all across central London, men, women, and children—aristocrats first—were being dragged out of bed by the Neuters and compelled to return to Grosvenor Square. A nightmaric invasion had begun in earnest, just as the sand cat and the lions had warned St. Cuthbert. With its hundreds of living and frozen gene banks, the last zoo on earth—more Noah’s ark than Noah’s—would be the supreme, but far from the only, target.
Suleiman was in a daze, but he was incongruously free of fear. He did not understand what was happening. He actually believed the appearance of the Neuters was all part of some eccentric embassy procedure. The naked woman—well, he didn’t know what to think there. But he felt in her a sign or symbol of good luck or power that he didn’t need to grasp. He had always stood little chance of getting the visa, but now that was secure, as this Chief Gage man had said. And Suleiman could not stop grinning. He had barely noticed the attackers; he was still half-focused on the tembo. It was still there. Someone needed to trap it now, he thought, smiling. It looked settled and compliant, but exhausted, its trunk hanging limp making tweedling squeaks and low, muculent rumbles. Perhaps someone could give it some of those crackers he had seen on that intoxicating American table of plenty?
Mason grabbed Suleiman’s hand, and Mason’s rock-hard grip frightened him, and for the first time, he saw what everyone else did; hundreds of the white-uniformed humanoids were spilling out of the embassy now.
“What is this?” Suleiman said, in a halting English. “Is the embassy . . . is it angry?”
“I don’t know,” Astrid said to him. “But it’s not good.”
Thousands of London’s citizens were pouring into Grosvenor Square, all pushed and prodded by the beings in white.
The cellular artistry of Eero Saarinen’s chancery was revealing itself as something, indeed, not of this Earth—it was serving, literally, as hell’s, not heaven’s “Gate” for the animals.
A great plasmatic quarkbeam suddenly exploded from the roof of the embassy. It curved high above central London. It flowed parallel to the ground for a mile or two, and bent down again, somewhere north, toward the zoo, a plunging finger of doom. It formed a colossal arc of nervous subatomic particles, a sort of white suitcase handle with which Atlas might have picked up the borough of Westminster and hurled it into the stratosphere.
All the rectangular panels of Saarinen’s soulless facade immediately were illuminated and began to glow a lurid red. In each of the cells, Astrid could see mammalian silhouettes slowly appear and dissolve. Kudus, tree shrews, frogs, corgi dogs, porpoises—they flickered and were gone. The mammoth, satanic soul-eating machine had started to suck in all the souls of living animals of earth. It was just as the sand cat had warned St. Cuthbert. Here was the device “from outside the desert,” a product of some distant intergalactic malfeasance, switched on like the demon Baphomet’s vacuum cleaner.
Some of the white-suited Neuters, meanwhile, had opened long silver staves that smoothly glided up from their soft pale wrists to deliver powerful quantum contra-fluxal shocks. Then the cultists began to work the staves, like stock prods, blue sparks flying out, jabbing the applicants and CIA agents and analysts and police officers, even some of the autoreporters who had shown up, herding them toward the table with the alcohol. There the shepherded were made to imbibe from blackberry-colored orbs of Flōt. It was dosed, Astrid suspected, with barbiturate. This was how the Heaven’s Gate cult killed you. Did they, she wondered, as they murdered you, slip their famous enigmatic $5 bill into your pocket right then, the currency meant perhaps to pay the toll of some intergalactic Charon, thus ensuring a steady stream of souls to their comet world?
The red-haired man was still resisting until he was thrust down and held in place with at least three of the alien stock prods. One of the cult members began to beat and shock him aggressively until he stopped moving, stopped making noise, and when that happened, Astrid felt sure that she was next.
Amid the chaos, the leader of the cult, Marshall Applewhite III, appeared in the door of the lift that the security team had used. He wore the same silvery tunic Astrid had seen him wearing when she watched the telly with Sykes at the Seamen’s Rest. It was a ridiculously campy garment one might see on some Venusian high priest from an old science fiction B movie. His tall frame and shaved head would have made him seem menacing, but his large blue fawn eyes, his good posture, his expression of barely repressed merriment, offered a sugared charisma. Astrid could almost see why so many followed him to their deaths. Almost.
“You’re freakstyle,” she said. “I must be close to the end now. You are the Flōt withdrawal talking. You’re a figment, you are.”
“I’m sorry,” Applewhite said, moving somehow closer to Astrid. “I’m as real as the comet,” he added, pointing toward the sky. “I’m sorry—do not be afraid. You’ll see. Everything is fan-ta-stic!”
Astrid wanted to shove the creep away from her, but he preempted this by moving himself along.
MOST OF THE PEOPLE being driven like cattle were only zapped a few times before taking their potion willingly. Applewhite himself was touring the operation like a kind of foreman inspecting the factory floor. He nodded and smiled and patted people on the back in a starchy, awkward way, and even tried to comfort prospective victims, giving quick hugs and laughing. “Exiting isn’t death,” he said. “In Level Above Human, you’ll all get new, eternal bodies built—and they’re so beautiful!—for space travel.” But if those herded and prodded ones did not become pliable, the Neuter soldiers squirted poisoned Flōt or champagne down their throats, sometimes stuffing in a handful of crackers and pills and a fig for good measure. At these ugly scenes Applewhite merely gave an exaggerated pout of sympathy and walked on.
“Let’s all be nice,” he said at one point.
Some of the regular embassy personnel queuing at the table didn’t appear rankled at all and required no abuse—indeed, they politely waited their turns.
Astrid herself felt the allure of the Flōt and the champagne. She was convinced that little of what she saw before her was really happening. Could a drink or two hurt? It would end the anxieties of the Death in an instant, and as she saw it, end this entire phantasmago
ria of a night. Couldn’t she just get a sip, a little taste, of some Glenfiddich, and stir in a splash of Flōt, and a bite of cheese, without the downers? She pulled her hair into two thick tails and twisted it into a splayed chignon. The humidity of the chancery had given it waves, and it was as flyaway shiny and distracting as ever.
Marshall Applewhite III glided right in front of Astrid.
“Yes, it’s sooooooo OK,” he said, in a sibilant, not unfriendly voice. “We’re inside you, after all. We know you. We know about your unhappiness and your loneliness. And all those years of having no one but your mother, and now she’s dying of Bruta7, poor dear one, and it’s become so hard to believe in anything in . . . in this . . . this dirty world of petty kings and animals running amok and people acting like animals. Go ahead—drink away. It’s liberating, Astrid.”
Applewhite frowned a little. He showed Astrid a purple orb of Flōt and two shot glasses. She put her hand to her mouth, as if guarding it.
Out in the square, she heard a loudspeaker babbling about King Henry’s sins, and the death-groans of neuralpike victims, and the screams of an elephant. She was still without panties or trousers, her muscular legs still dripping with green sticky sap. She felt appallingly exposed but almost beyond embarrassment.
“This corrupt manimal,” said the loudspeaker in a nasally, bloodless tone, “this selfish manimal—this earth-bound manimal—this corrupt manimal—he has—corrupt manimal—he has appealed to Britain’s worst nature. Corrupt manimal. Let Harry9 die. Let him be gone with the rest of earth’s animals. Let him—” and on and on the voice droned. In the distance, Astrid could also just make out a new and alarming sound, both musical and corrosive, like the gold-throated shrieks of hundreds of dragons. Applewhite, too, seemed to hear it, and squinted suspiciously.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, god.”
After a long pause, she said, “But there’s St. Cuthbert.” She began shaking her head, taking a few steps back from Applewhite. “He thinks I’m his brother. Or some kind of forest messiah. He says I’m the Christ of Otters.” She turned away from Applewhite. “Cuthbert’s crazy, but he means something . . . to me, at least.”
“What’s he to you? He’s a stranger. He’s nothing. He’s a part of your second withdrawal from Flōt. Your unnecessary withdrawal. Your unnecessary ‘struggle’ with your human container.”
“But he’s not. Leave me alone. You don’t care about me. Cuthbert—he’s no stranger. I’ve even an idea that he might be my granddaddy. He shouldn’t be a stranger. Not to anyone in England.”
“But you don’t realize,” said Applewhite, beaming smugly, holding one of the glasses toward Astrid, “that this saint is merely second withdrawal? Don’t you see? There is no Saint Cuthbert. He’s just another city drunk.”
Astrid pulled her hair down again and shook it out.
“I don’t care,” she said. “For all I know, we’re all just the ghosts of one another’s deepest needs. But there is this helpless old Indigent who says he has come to save Britain’s animals, and he may be crazy, but tonight, this first of May, in the reign of King Henry the Ninth, in 2052, in London, England, he is Saint Cuthbert.”
“But you . . . what about you? What are you to him?”
“I am . . . I am the Christ of Otters.”
Applewhite grimaced sadly. “Oh, child,” he said, chuckling. “You’ve been, well, between withdrawals for so long—and that’s such a scary thing, I know!—that you’re easily taken in. And that’s OK. We’ll help you. I really, really, really, really think you’re at the Evolutionary Level Above Human. You’re as unanimal as they get. And you’re so special. That’s why you’re not being forced . . . like the others . . . see? We know you well, Astrid. I’m sorry, but I have to say this: you’re completely ready to shed your container. You are ready to ascend to our home in the comet. Drink, friend, drink.”
Lifting a filled shot glass in his wrinkled pink hand, Applewhite drank one of them, wincing slightly.
Astrid said, “I will not, cunt.”
“Then you’ve wrecked yourself, Astrid,” he said, gasping a bit. “You can stay in your world of giant vaginas and shit. You will die tonight. If the Death doesn’t get you, my Neuters will.”
There was a kind of popping sound, and a flash of red lights, and Applewhite, mysteriously, was gone.
rage of the leopard
ASTRID ALL AT ONCE FELT VERY DIZZY AND clumsy, and she fell again to her knees, right beside the banquet table of Flōt and champagnes and Stilton and foie gras, still naked from the waist down. And her heart seemed to be struggling to beat, as the gorilla’s was. Had the cultists somehow slipped her the fatal ingredients, too? she wondered. She did not have time to speculate—she soon found that the redoubtable Mason was by her side again.
“Can I help you up?” he asked, his lip quivering a bit.
“No,” she said. “Yes.”
And when with his arm he pulled her to her feet, for a moment her legs straddled his thigh, and a shudder of pleasure hit her, and she nearly pushed Mason back to the floor so that she could take him inside her.
He seemed to scramble for a few moments, as if twisting and weaseling away from her.
“Fuck,” she said. “For some reason . . . I’m really hot for you. I’m sorry. It’s . . .”
He pulled her to her feet, and she spun around. She looked all around herself.
“It’s OK,” he said. “I just—I’m kind of slow, you know? And you’re so . . . you’re beautiful. But there’s something going on with you.”
“He’s . . . left?” asked Astrid.
“Who?”
“The creepy cult man, holding the shot glasses.”
“Um, sure,” Mason said, in a way Astrid read as sure, whatever you say.
Astrid leaned hard against Mason, trying to calm herself, to still her body—but a big part of her remained like an unsocketed eye, looking everywhere helplessly, unable to move, stuck upon Mason. She wondered if this helpless nakedness, this abject dependency on the animal warmth of another, was somehow a sign that she had indeed cleared the last hurdle of the second withdrawal, and that a new life could unfold from here. She hated the feeling of need. She longed to be the otter queen again, with legs as big and hard as the trunks of oak trees and a mind as big as the sky.
“You saw him?” asked Astrid.
Mason just smiled at her and said, “We need to get you some trousers.” In his own buttoned-down and overly competent way, he felt oddly liberated, too. The loop d’loopers in matching white had taken the night into realms beyond the diplomatic service. Questions swarmed his mind: Was America also under attack? Had he been drugged? Was he somehow mentally ill? Was he alive? He didn’t see a way that the events of the night would not leave his outlook forever altered. But delusions or not, drugs or not, live or dead—he, for one, wasn’t going to let an obviously suffering woman walk around half-naked in the chancery without getting her some clothes.
He opened Suleiman’s giant bag and dug out a pair of ancient, tattered Phineas and Ferb pajama bottoms. They must have been half a century old. Astrid jumped into them gladly.
“Now,” said Mason. “I want to see about the animals.”
“Come with me,” Astrid said to Suleiman and Mason. “Let’s try to move them into the center of the square. We need to move away from here.”
At that moment, not far beyond the trees west of Grosvenor, and growing closer and closer, there arose again the chilling noise Astrid had heard earlier, like a phalanx of holy dragons, puffing purgatorial fires and spitting sizzling golden bolts.
“Jesus,” said Mason. “Let’s go. That doesn’t sound like it wants to be our friend.”
“But my visa,” Suleiman said.
“You’ll get the visa,” said Mason. “We can’t stay here.”
The three of them began to move down the chancery steps and into the crowded square. The elephant Layang was raging again, bucking up and screaming. Help me, the elephant said
to Astrid. Take me to a warm country. As Astrid moved toward her, the elephant almost instantly settled down.
Astrid looked back toward Mason and Suleiman. “Oh my god,” she said. “I just heard—I heard the elephant, speaking to me.”
Mason said, “Oh boy.”
Astrid didn’t get to enjoy her new interspecies linguistic skill. When she saw some of the Neuters’ faces now, a new horror hit her: all of them seemed to have become Marshall Applewhite. All wore the same blue-eyed, thick-browed look of happy, gelded contempt for her.
“He’s going to kill me,” she said. “He’ll try to kill all of us. We need to go!”
An old-tech gunshot cracked out from the crowd and Layang the elephant dropped into a gray heap beside Astrid, with a thud so powerful the trees of the square rustled and windows rattled. Mason and Suleiman felt it in their knees. The shot seemed to have come from a tumult of rowdy Indigents, but it was hard to tell. The animal’s death was instant and monumentally total. No limbs quivered, no ears twitched.
“No!” cried Mason, running toward Astrid and the elephant. “Goddamnit, no!”
Who? he asked himself. Fucking who? Marines, the police, these Neuter people, or an ordinary Londoner? And why? Why? “Don’t shoot,” he shouted. “Stop, you fucking fuckers, stop!”
There was an odd, new noise, in the trees, like a wooden saw made from living flesh.
Hur-haw! Hur-haw! Hur-haw!
It was at that moment when Monty, the melanistic leopard, the Shayk of Night, as the sand cat called him, dropped from one of the plane tree boughs. He hung down for a few seconds, draping like a scarf of luminous black silk. Then he fell onto the backs of two of the Neuters. Monty had been following the gorilla and elephant—stalking them—but other prey would do.
Astrid looked up, and a sense of unaccountable relief filled her. The balance of power seemed to move toward the animals.