Night of the Animals(120)
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.