Hummingbird Salamander(59)

I had no way to fire back, could barely keep Shovel Pig from being wrenched from my grasp by a hundred hands, paws, forearms, snouts. And as big as I was, a sudden fear: that as I burrowed and the mound collapsed around me, it would bury me. So that I scrabbled faster, and in that moment didn’t know what to fear more: the mound or the bullets.

A weird ping and an insect smashed into my thigh. A hornet or bee that made me cry out in pain as the blood flowed. Except it wasn’t an insect—and then there was another that grazed my left arm, and I cried out again and became so panicked that there was nothing to me but fear and want and need, and you would not have known me from the folk around me, as if I had been destined for that place.

A wildebeest and a bear—there near the center of the mound, with some other monumental stag or antelope to create a space to breathe and a shield for bullets. Which continued to reverberate, to hum, to quiver and my only defense to lie against the comforting flank of the bear, to let the bear be my defense.

Until even that quieted, and I tried to slow my breathing so that I wouldn’t be heard. Wished fervent that Langer would believe I was dead.

Except, as wary as he was of entering the mound, he was also careful about accepting silence. As I lay there, bleeding, I heard a great whoosh and growing crackle. It sounded like part of the ceiling had fallen in, but in a couple minutes I realized the true source: flames.

The mound was ablaze, from some accelerant. I was going to burn to death. Langer’s cursing made me think the fire had surprised him, too.

“Come out,” he shouted as the fire spread. “Come out, and I won’t kill you.”

His partners laughed. I knew it wasn’t true anyway. I just wouldn’t burn to death. Caught like a rat.

The heat increased, and I was sweating and coughing from the fumes set free from the skins and taxidermy. I could see an orange haze ahead of me where there had been darkness. A wall of orange intensifying to red. I began to cough worse, but I wasn’t going to come out. I pulled out my phone, but I couldn’t see right anymore, to know what number I was dialing, and something intense about the phone light made them start shooting again.

Except this time they seemed to be shooting not into the animals but behind them, back at the third door. I thought I could hear the lilting chatter of some other kind of gun.

A crack, another crack. Like the world was breaking open. A looming presence that made me gasp.

But from behind me.

I rose up to face this new threat and something smashed against my skull and I fell into darkness.





[65]


“Breathe. Draw breath. Take another. Isolate the shackling sound, the impatient light. Find a way to remove it. Another breath. Another chance to make it to the beautiful darkness. The bliss of silent places.”

I was trapped in the pages of Silvina’s journal, which had opened up and become an ocean of paper flooded with black water. It sucked me in and down until I came to the bottom and drifted there with all the dead animals. I saw their eyes now, or what had replaced their eyes. These glass stares, so false, and yet somehow real, too. I couldn’t breathe, but I didn’t need to breathe. I had gills or it just didn’t matter anymore. The monkeys and the crossbills and the wallabies and the lizards and the box turtles and the frogs, so many frogs glowing iridescent way down there beneath the surface, in the bog. I could see an indistinct shape above and reeds radiating out and the faintest hint of moonlight.

I gasped and took on water. I waved my arms to swim and embraced the animals around me until their eyes were alive and quick with thought again. I did not care that they were rotting, that I was rotting. That we were all down below in some purgatory worse yet better than the warehouse. Had I brought them here? Had I led them here?

“Total Nature,” Humboldt had written. Which meant no separation. No looking away. No way out but down.

I realized I was beneath Unitopia, looking up. That I was drowning underneath Silvina’s creation, as surely as if Ronnie had put me there. Because she had.





[66]


I woke with a headache that kept trying to smash my skull in half. Staring up at ripped-apart foxes on a dim-lit mantel.

Silvina’s old apartment.

I tried to move, but couldn’t.

The man who had followed me up the hill flickered and drifted into view, and my axes aligned and I was right-side up again. Bound to a chair—an old plastic lawn chair brought in from the balcony. My hands had been lashed to its arms with police-grade plastic restraints. I had to keep shifting my weight because the frame wasn’t going to stop my ass from smashing through the seat soon.

Two men stood behind “Hill Man.” I didn’t recognize them.

But I panicked at the way they were looking down at me and I thrashed, lunged, fell over in the chair, tore the seat, twisted an arm, my shoulder against the floor. A strangely numb shoulder. Throbbing. I’d been drugged.

Dust swirled up and I saw, close, drag marks on the floor I hadn’t noticed before.

Still the men said nothing, just watched me.

I stopped struggling. The restraints wouldn’t come off. The chair had collapsed around me in a way that felt like I’d trapped myself worse.

Something bounced off the side of my head, skidded past me toward the mantel. The fox kit’s head. Staring back at me. Hillman had thrown it.

“No point,” Hillman said as I tried to prop myself on an elbow and look up at him. Had to shudder back down. I could feel an icy cold burning in my shoulder, in my leg. Bits of molten coal hidden under the ice. I could see but not feel the bandage on my leg.