Hummingbird Salamander(58)

“Jill.” Langer. The man on the hill.

All the weight of that came crashing down on me, and it was like I woke up. Finally and forever woke up.

I called the house.

My husband answered on the fifth ring.

“Where the hell are you? It’s the middle of the night, and you just—”

“Listen to me,” I whispered, as calmly as I could.

“What is going on?”

“There’s no time. Get out of the house. Take whatever you can gather in the next half hour. Get out and go up in the mountains or some property a friend is selling that’s remote. Don’t tell anyone. Someplace secure. And stay there. Just for a while.”

“Are you crazy? That’s just—”

I said his name. I said his name, and then I said, “The man in the woods was watching us because of me. Both of you are in danger. I’m sorry. There’s no time. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”

I hung up on him before he could reply. I never called. I always texted. No better way to make him understand the severity.

Then I texted Hellbender the warehouse address. I didn’t trust him, but how could things get worse? Maybe the more people at this party the better.

Langer was through the first two doors. I’d just closed the third, wedged something that wouldn’t hold long against it, and plunged through into the warehouse, phone held like a flashlight.

A sense of bulk, of heft, through the window, but it had been indistinct. What I could see, in the arc of white light from the phone, was the outline of a monster. A creature made of many, many parts. A great, heaping pile that ended only at the ceiling thirty feet above me and that spilled out to the sides so far that there was no way to get around it.

Dead bodies. Skins. The dead. Fur, feathers, scales. Dull glass eyes staring back at me. A confusion and chaos that made me take a step back, nauseated. The mold smell had intensified, and the chemical stench, and the underlying scent of the real: the traces of what they had been alive.

It made me sick. I didn’t understand it.

I was facing a midden of taxidermy and cured and uncured skins. A great mound of snuffed-out lives, some common, but most rare and precious. A wall, or wave, and with my pathetic light I could only reveal parts of it. Was glad of that.

Behind me I could hear Langer close. But where could I hide? Nowhere. There were troughs and lanes through the damage, but indistinct, porous, like a trail overtaken by tall weeds with trees looming over top. Still a mountain of dead animals. Lemurs and monitor lizards. Tigers tigers tigers—so many tigers I stifled a cry. Some sights make the brain rebel, make a soul want to hide from itself.

But a survival instinct took over. A terror beyond thought that was instinct. I had no choice. The gun in my hand wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stand and fight. I had to plunge forward, hide in the morass.

So that’s what I did.





[63]


I had never seen so many animals together in one place. I had never seen so many species. Even dead. Even dismembered or mutilated or destroyed in subtle and unsubtle ways. I had never known so much life, even dead. It almost killed me, all the incoming. All the death around me. Half extinguished any need to survive. Yet: I kept moving.





[64]


By the time the door opened and Langer and his friends entered the warehouse, I was hidden deep, cringing and shivering from the touch of so much unfamiliar texture. The smothered flat glossy feathers and furs against my arms and legs and face. The dead bright eyes I couldn’t see in the gloom. The dull-sharp beaks rasping against me. Hooves and paws from the wrong directions, against my back. I was trying to adapt to the vastness of it as I heard Langer’s voice talking to his men, so maybe he wouldn’t realize I was here.

I couldn’t process the smells, the dry and the moist of them, how there was a brackish scent of the sea and marsh. A hint of forest. Of how where they came from clung to them.

But the claustrophobia broke me down the most. I couldn’t sit still in the middle of all of that. It felt like I was going to drown and suffocate at the same time. That I was in some kind of hell that pressed against my skin so I couldn’t tell where my body ended and some other body began. I was drenched slick with my own sweat, and moving slick, trembling, trying not to retch.

Telling myself that if I could only tunnel through it quickly, I would be okay. That it was better to be fast in this horrible place. That the faster I got to the end and, hopefully, a door out, the less likely I would lose my mind. That Langer had yet to wade through the same hell. All while it rose and kept rising around me and above and over me and I was already going mad.

The rough heads of crocodiles on the floor tripping me up. The coarse bodies of lions arresting my fall. I was nothing but an animal myself, scrabbling for air, for freedom. Nothing left in me but this impulse, this idea, of a door that might not exist. I couldn’t stand it, not the touch of another skin, another fur. I couldn’t.

But Langer heard me. I knew it from the uptick of excitement in his voice.

Then came whistling and burrowing through sharp, whizzing objects that cut through faces around me, shredded through flanks and through eyes and through stomachs and paws. A stitching and ricochet and almost it sounded like an odd rain. But it was bullets. Langer wasn’t bothering to follow me. Wasn’t bothering to ask me to come out. To come up for air. No, he was just shooting. Me, blind and burrowing through hell, as the bullets sank and lolled and spit past. Came at me from odd angles, clipped or bounced off tired antlers or tusks. The stench of glue. The sense of being hidden and exposed.