Watching the tape, all you get is that there’s some kind of commotion. The blossom stops you from seeing exactly what’s happening, but you can see the reaction of the other guard. He drops down from the fence, and runs over to help his mate. You can also see the rest of the baboons stop hooting and grimacing, and watch. Just watch.
‘That’s the weird bit,’ Manoj said to me afterwards, the first time we looked through the VT together. ‘See the troop leader there?’
‘He isn’t doing anything,’ I said.
‘Exactly.’ Manoj looked at me. ‘He’s ceded authority to another animal.’
I was confused. ‘Another member of the troop?’
‘Not a chance,’ Manoj said decisively. ‘This boy? Never.’
But it’s true: you can see him standing back with the others, just watching, like us. After what seems like ages, but according to the timestamp on the tape is just over ten seconds, the guard falls back from the fence and into camera shot again.
Even on the tape you can see he’s very badly messed up. The paramedics tried to save one of his eyes, I believe, but it was too late probably from the start. Most of the rest of his face he left inside the compound. Inside the cage, the baboons leap and cavort in a frenzy of excitement.
The other guard, who’s dragged his wounded mate away from the fence and back on to the tarmac path, now lays him on the ground. Quite forgivably, he turns away for a moment to be sick before fumbling for his walkie-talkie. Then, something he sees away behind the cherry trees makes him stop what he’s doing. He freezes for a second, and then he’s off and running, disappearing out of shot.
God knows what he was running from, but he was heading towards us. We were on the far side of the zoo, sprinting flat out towards the baboon enclosure. Under normal circumstances we’d have met up near by the main block, and who knows? Things might have gone very differently for him – for all of us. As it was, he never got that far.
We could hear noise from all over the zoo by now: attack cries, hoarse belligerent roars and squawks and hoots that ranged across the whole spectrum of aggression. On bits and scraps of tape that follow the guard’s progress along the main avenue, you can piece together what’s happening. Each enclosure that he passes is filled with shrieking animals, pressed close to bars and fences. More than once the proximity of these malevolent creatures cause him to shy away, take evasive action. The chimps clinging to their chain-link fence scream and hurl excrement at him, and he trips and stumbles, but he’s up on his feet and running again within a second.
He looks as if he’s scared out of his wits. It would have been something to see what it was, back by the baboon enclosure, that put the fear of God up him that way. When he draws level with the elephants, lined up by the edge of their enclosure and trumpeting ferociously, it’s their sheer bulk, I think, that sends him veering off in a different direction, off the main avenue and on to on of the side paths. This is the way to the nocturama, a tunnel sunk below ground level, home of the night creatures.
Manoj saw him sprinting down the brick-lined cutting that leads to the entrance to the tunnel. There’s no CCTV inside there: it’s too dark in the normal course of events. There’s red-light illumination that lets you see the exhibits, but that’s all. Only in an emergency are the normal bulbs switched on, from a switch-box by the entrance. And only later, long after it was of any practical use to us, did we remember that fact.
We were still running. From where we were, on the slightly higher ground, we could see the guard disappear into the cutting. What on earth was he doing down there? Thumbing the walkie-talkie switch I panted, ‘Manoj?’
‘Here.’
‘Why’s he gone down the tunnel?’
‘I don’t know. Wait –’ Manoj sounded rattled.
‘What?’
‘Did you see that? What’s he doing with his clothes off?’
‘What? Where?’
‘…Never mind,’ directed Manoj. ‘The man that needs your help is over by the baboon compound. Leave that other now. Let him run around the place stark naked if he likes.’
‘But –’
But nothing. Already it was too late. From down in the nocturama we could hear the screams. The other guard had run into trouble.
Without thinking I changed course, ran down the slope towards the other entrance to the tunnel. Behind me Peter was arguing with Manoj on the walkie-talkie, but I only had ears for the screaming.
Please God, I was thinking as I ran, for fuck’s sake, no more bother. Just keep a lid on it until we can get these idiots out of here. I don’t know who I was praying to, if that was a prayer. It’s not a thing I do. It must have been the screaming that got to me.
It came echoing out of the open-ended tunnel, so piercing and intense that as I drew level with the entrance I actually came to a stop, trying to remember what exactly we kept down there. Insects, bats, moths…nothing dangerous that I could bring to mind. Perhaps the bloke just had a thing about the dark, I told myself. Maybe he just got the fear. But I knew it was worse than that; every shred of instinct told me so. Fifteen years’ experience in zoos, maybe. I suspect it was more like two million years’ worth of evolutionary impulse.
The screaming stopped abruptly as I reached the head of the steps down into the tunnel. I thought I heard the sound of something running – I was going to say, footsteps, but it’s as well to be exact. Something running, down in the dark.
I took one step down, and then another, then found myself unable to go any further. Coming up from that tunnel mouth was a stink like nothing I’d come across in all the years I’d spent around animals. I can hardly describe it, except to say that it reached deep into the ancestral parts of the brain, the centres of instinct and fear. It was stale and cloacal and rotten; it was the smell of must and decay, spoiled meat and sour animal piss. Rising through it like a basenote was the overpowering stink of blood.
Gagging at the stench, I took another few steps down into the tunnel. Peter caught up with me then, and it was easier with him there. We advanced down to the bottom of the steps, and into the nocturama. That stupid little prayer was running through my head still, like a mantra.
It was musty and mildewed and dripping down there. Green slime coated the plastic windows of the exhibits, and there was nowhere near enough light. We walked on into the dark, past moths measuring out the dimensions of their prisons, past fireflies flashing unintelligible signals. On the other side of the tunnel, the chiroptera: avid famished bats that swooped through the lightless recesses and clustered on the dead boughs of artificial trees. Predators and prey in the natural scheme of things. Now, they merely pressed closer to the glass and watched as we advanced.
On we went around the corner, where the stink was mounting. I’d slowed now to something less than walking pace. Had we been going any faster, we’d have fallen over it. It was hard to see in the semidark, but we could make out the shape clearly enough. A man, lying on his back. The red light-bulbs in the animal recesses made the blood seem almost transparent at first. Then Peter focused his flashlight, and we saw what was left of him; which was not a lot. Down in that sewer-smelling tunnel, trapped in such a narrow space with a thing like that…I wonder can you imagine how awful it was? Along the walls, the watching worm-lizards pressed greedily against the windows, tongues darting in and out of their cruel slits of mouths. And everywhere now, through all the length of the tunnel, the fierce reek of blood.
That was really the last straw, so far as the zoo was concerned. One guard dead in the tunnel, horribly mauled by some as yet unidentified predator. Another with the front half of his face chewed off: by a baboon, it was officially decided, though some responsible authorities, Manoj amongst them, begged to differ. These latter pointed out certain aspects of bite radius and attack pattern, and at the back of Manoj’s mind – though it never really came up at the inquest – was the behaviour pattern of the other baboons in the enclosure, the temporary submissiveness of the troop leader.
>
Either way, we were doomed. The local council had been treating us like pariahs for god knows how long, even before the incident. We had animal-rights protestors crawling all over us at the best of times. Now, one man was dead and another maimed for life, and driven half crazy into the bargain. Wouldn’t you be? It wasn’t our fault, was all we could say in our defence: not that that cut any ice with the police. There was a full investigation, conducted of course in the hot moralistic glow of the media spotlight. That was hardly the best sort of publicity, as I’m sure you can imagine.
We were closed all through the Easter holidays, one of our busiest times, and then to cap it all the Health & Safety Directorate weighed in with their report. They delivered a damning assessment of our operation: among other things, they said the safety of the zoo was thoroughly and irretrievably compromised, that our security measures were demonstrably inadequate, and that we seemed to have no effective control over the movements of the animals, up to and including the most dangerous of the predators. In short, they had no option but to withdraw our public safety certificate, effective immediately.
That was it. In very short order, the council swung the axe, the board of directors resigned, and we were finished. Arrangements were made to flog off the assets and rehouse the animals in zoos around the country. Then the bulldozers would move in, the land would be sold for redevelopment, and a line would be drawn under the whole unfortunate affair. Which brings me more or less up to where we are right now.
These last few weeks and months before the closure have been the strangest of all. We run a skeleton staff – no need for security any more, not without visitors, no need to walk the compound more than once or twice a day. That’s our excuse, anyway. The plain and simple fact is, we’re scared now. The Health & Safety people were right, to that extent: we have lost our grip. Ever since the accident we’ve effectively lost track of how many animals there are in any given enclosure, at any given time. The most basic rule of zoo security has been breached, utterly and irrevocably it seems. Once darkness falls, animals are loose and roaming across the compound, and they run in strange new packs. It’s no longer unusual to see big cats in with ungulates, or birds flocking across species. You’d expect a bloodbath every night, but it never happens.
By the same token, there have been no more attacks on humans since the killing of the guard, but still you can imagine how we feel. It’s far from unusual for a keeper on the ground to see something on the path, ahead of him or behind him, towards the hours of dusk, or when mist and rain affect the visibility. At night, we basically cede control of the zoo; we have no choice. It’s shameful – we can hardly look at each other sometimes – but it’s also an oddly liberating thing to admit it. Peter feels the same way, Graham, even Manoj. After all we’ve seen, we can’t be around these animals for long without getting the creeps.
You feel it at feeding times and during routine medical procedures. Even walking past the enclosures you sense it. A subtle, yet decisive change in the balance of our interaction; a shift in power. Though we’re at least nominally free, able to leave at the end of our shifts and drive home to our empty houses in the suburbs, it’s hard not to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned. The bars are there to protect us. Have we really come to depend on them so much? It’s as if the beasts are the free ones, not us, not any more. As if some inconceivable insight has emancipated them, raised their consciousness to a level no one thought they’d ever reach. Those are Manoj’s words, not mine. When he said it to me, just the other day, I asked him what he meant, and he threw up his hands in the air. ‘I don’t know. I sound like a bloody swami, don’t I?’
‘You do, a bit,’ I said. We were up in the God-seat, watching the closed-circuit.
‘Well, look at them,’ he said, indicating the lions on the monitor. ‘I’m keeping all the tapes, you know. I’m thinking of going back to university, doing my post-grad. I can use them for my thesis.’
‘Which will be?’
‘I haven’t got a title for it yet,’ he admitted. ‘This. All of this. How they’ve changed.’
‘That’ll take some working-out,’ I said.
He nodded glumly. ‘Tell me about it,’ he sighed. It was as if the change came as a personal affront to him. ‘Breakdown of the old pack structures. Atypical response patterns in the presence of keepers and other humans. Complete lack of inter-species aggression. It’s not natural.’
‘That can’t be a permanent behavioural shift, though?’ I wasn’t having that. ‘We’re not talking about the holy-rollers here, are we? And the lion shall lie down with the lamb?’ As I said it, I remembered that evening by the lions’ den. I’d thought the boy was a sacrificial lamb of his own appointing, another deluded Daniel driven crazy by too much Sunday school and animal-rights sermonising. Now, I didn’t know what to think.
‘I’m not sure it is a permanent shift, not in that sense, anyway. But suppose it isn’t?’ Manoj leaned back from the monitor, ran his hands through his thick black hair. ‘That’s almost worse, if you think about it.’
‘How so?’
‘Okay. We observe behavioural patterns in animals, which are the result of millions of years of evolutionary adaptation. Over the last three months, our animals here have demonstrated profound behavioural alterations, across all species, across all hierarchical relationships. Now, we either assume this change is a non-volitional response to external stimuli – that is, they used to behave this way, and now they behave that way, because there’s something in the water, or they all had the same sort of brainstorm, or whatever – or else…’
‘Or else?’
Manoj looked as if he was chewing a wasp. ‘Or else what we’re seeing here is a volitional behaviour shift.’
‘You mean – they decided to do it?’
‘They chose, yes. That would be the other alternative.’ I could see Manoj liked this option even less. ‘According to that scenario, what we’re seeing here would be interpreted as possibly the first recorded instance of altruistic co-operation across species towards a common, mutually desirable goal – though what that might be, I have no idea. How could I? Now that sort of conceptualisation would require a level of self-awareness…’ He broke off, lost in his own thoughts.
A movement on screen caught my eye. ‘Hang on – look there, at the lions. How many are there in those bushes?’
Manoj waved a hand in dismissal. ‘Don’t bother,’ he said resignedly. ‘You can’t keep track these days. Five, six. Who knows?’
It was true. It was a wilderness in there. Once, it had been a jungle, cut into manageable chunks and fenced in with steel and glass. We used to stand by the windows and listen to the racket, the bellows of frustration, the mournful shrieks and howls. What this new thing is…it’s hard to say. More than anything, it feels like the calm before the storm.
We’re aware of the consequences, even if we can’t fully understand them. Soon, these animals with their strange new behaviours, their disconcerting calm and uncanny self-possession, will be crated up and shipped to a dozen zoos across Europe. What happens if they replicate these new memes in their new surroundings? What if they pass them on?
Over and above that, there’s a world beyond the bars. The starlings flock each night in ever-growing numbers above the compound, roosting in the trees as the animals below stare unblinkingly upwards, as if towards the stars, the old bestiary of myths and legends in the sky. Maybe the ancient fables don’t hold water any more. Maybe a change has come upon us, and nothing’s safe in its cage.
Little Lambs
Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones (1972–) is an American writer of both stories and novels. His most recent books are It Came from Del Rio (2010) and The Ones That Got Away (2010). Jones has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and Black Quill Award, as well as a winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Asimov’s Science
Fiction Magazine, Weird Tales, and multiple best-of-the-year compilations. ‘Little Lambs’ (2009) is a perfect example of Jones at his chilling and slightly experimental best, evoking, as the story does, both weird classics and more avant garde work from the likes of Mark Danielewski.
We’re not supposed to walk through the structure, but for eight years we’ve been watching it from sixty-two feet away, too. Watching it on so many monitors and at so many wavelengths that sometimes you just want to step outside the bunker, see it with your eyes. Just to be sure it’s real, that it’s still there.
For reasons of security, our watch only rotates among us four.
The crewcuts we had when first assigned to monitor the structure, they’re grown out long and shaggy like our beards. Our BDUs are folded in our lockers. The last inspection was thirteen months ago. We look Wyoming now. Like we know the winter, like the sound of frozen grass breaking under our boots, we don’t hear it with our ears anymore, but feel it instead, in the base of our jaws.
Our eyes have gone hollow with longing, too, but we don’t blame Wyoming for that. It’s more like people with that kind of vacant, yearning stare, they’re always drifting to Wyoming. The way the open lands undulate, writhe almost, it’s a cadence that feels right to us. After a while, you feel the swells of grass in your chest, I mean. And the sudden drops. And your face doesn’t change expression because of it.
The structure seems to fit out here too, like it’s always been here.
There are no fences or warning signs around it.
The four acres it occupies is Bureau of Land Management land. In the distance we’ve seen antelope and sheep and, once, two bull elk, walking with their chins in the air, as if their swept-back racks were unbearably heavy. Two winters ago one of the sheep wandered in from the snow. It was wearing a diaper, because a rancher had pulled it into his trailer with him, to keep it alive.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 234