Night of the Animals(138)

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 f*cking f*ckers, 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.

“Chui!” Suleiman gasped. “Leopard!”

The leopard began to slash into the Neuters, and any humans within reach. He was a power beyond any of their machines, any of their programmed incantations. A violet-blue liquid spumed out of the Neuters’ necks as if from broken lawn hoses. It was not blood. It was ice cold, and it tasted bitter to the cat. It made the animal more determined to bring the infidels to heel.

The gorilla, Kibali, watched from a distance, shifting his weight fretfully from one foot to another, back and forth, back and forth.

“Stop this,” the gorilla called to Monty. “Please, let us take the paths of peace, my friend. Friend!”

“The Mahdi comes!” Monty screamed, beyond reason, swiping and gnashing and tearing into any spot of creamy white flesh its claws could hook. “For everyone, for all, for now, for you!”

Astrid could hear every word of the creature, although she wasn’t sure she understood them.

“Brr-row-brr-row-brr-rowowow!” snarled the animal. “Bow down and pray before the Mahdi!”

“The Mahdi?” Astrid asked the great cat.

“He waits for you, at the zoo,” said Monty, pausing from battle, yet somehow speaking to her intimately and alone, even as many melees spread around them. “You, the princess of all things untamed, and the force ‘through the green fuse’—you, the Otter Christ.”

“That can’t be,” said Astrid. “I am just a lonely drug addict in London, and you’re nothing but a symptom of the Death.”

“You will see,” said Monty. The black panther vaulted into the air and slammed onto a Neuter.

“Inside! Inside!” the Neuter repeated, trying to chop at the black cat’s hot muzzle even as its cold heart ceased its slow, steady, quantum-powered ticking.

“Down! Bow!”

It was Abrahamic religion versus www.heavensgate.com.

Some of the citizens in the square decided to surround Kibali, and they began to hurl objects at him—plastic bottles, belt buckles, shoes. “Fuck,” said Mason, huddling close to Astrid and Suleiman. “Fucking idiots.”

“Why they want to hurt the sokwe?” asked Suleiman. “He hurt no one.”

“Let me die,” Astrid could hear Kibali pleading. “Let me go.”

These weren’t the Neuters, who had indeed planned, later, to put the gorilla down. This was the human mob.

Astrid and Mason now saw poor Kibali fall to the ground in the square, just across the street from the embassy; the ape lay on his side on the grass, clutching his chest in pain, and Mason ran toward him. Astrid and Suleiman followed.

The noble silverback was having a myocardial infarction. The appearance of the white-suited aggressors, the stress of the escape, the spurting violet-blue liquid, the years of sedentary anguish, those éclairs from the well-meaning keeper, and finally, this insult of ordinary people—it had been too much.