Peter Anghelides - Pack Animals

‘All right, lad.’ Berkley stood, and held out an encouraging hand. ‘Let’s get you of here.’

Gareth wasn’t listening. He pointed to the card that Berkley now held. ‘Reckon you can handle big animals, do you, Mr Berkley?’

Berkley brushed sand off the card illustration. It had a colourful motif on the reverse: MonstaQuest. The face revealed a stylised cartoon. A two-headed dragon leered at him, both sets of slavering jaws filled with an improbable number of needle-sharp teeth.

Gareth stood close to him now, and handed over another of the MonstaQuest cards. The new one represented a storm, angled blue lines marking out the falling rain. Barely had Berkley registered this than he felt the patter of water on his head and shoulders. Within seconds, it was like someone had turned a hose on him. The sky above remained a cloudless icy blue, but all around his feet the ground was darkening and the sand was thickening into slurry.

The slam of the compound gate told him that Gareth had left. Berkley heard the bolt draw across. With a yell, he staggered over to the exit. The gate was secure and locked. Gareth was nowhere to be seen.

Berkley moved back into the enclosure. Beyond where the missing wall should have been, he could make out that the rest of the park was still dry. But there was no way to get across the moat.

And how could it be raining solely in the tiger compound?

Now there was another sound. A shrieking cacophony of bestial noise like he’d never heard in his twenty years at the zoo. A scaly pointed tail flicked into his side, winding him and throwing him to the hard ground. Berkley rolled onto his back, smearing sand and grit on his cheeks as he swiped at the rain that streamed down his face.

A creature leered down at him. It was the impossible double-headed dragon from the MonstaQuest card. Both its heads bellowed and slavered in uncontained rage, as though fighting between themselves for priority.

The monster stood between him and the locked exit gate. The moat was impossible to clear. Berkley scrambled over to the tree in the centre of the compound, but the wires around the base jolted him with a painful electric shock.

Malcolm Berkley lay panting in the mud and the rain. He managed to close his eyes and scream just before the nightmare creature decided which of its jaws would strike first.

Toshiko wasn’t impressed with Lloyd Maddock. The prematurely balding general manager of the Pendefig Mall had been sneeringly dismissive when she first approached him. He had flip-flopped completely once she’d flashed her winning smile and reminded him of the appointment she’d sneaked into his online calendar. An unscheduled review of security by the Pendefig parent company. So it was a bit rich now for him to be telling her, in his plummy, pause-filled Swansea accent, that his brilliant team always worked so hard to give customers the best shopping experience in Wales, when his ‘specially trained Customer Services team’ were busy bundling his customers off-site as the fire alarm clamoured and echoed around them.

Toshiko told him she wanted to see the CCTV tapes. Maddock wasn’t able to raise the security coordinator on his radio. The landlines seemed to have packed in, too. ‘Must have been knocked out by that blast of wind that blew through the whole place,’ suggested Maddock. ‘Just wait till I see those contractors. Recommended by Head Office, they were. But they must have completely screwed up the air conditioning.’ There was an embarrassed pause while he evidently remembered that Toshiko was from the Head Office whose judgement he had just questioned. In the awkward silence, Maddock surveyed the pit of the mall as the escalator took them higher. ‘Ambulances, police… God knows if the insurance will cover this.’ This thought made him brighten visibly. ‘Maybe an Act of God means the mall won’t be liable?’

Toshiko did not share his callous enthusiasm. She scowled back at the general manager. ‘Why don’t we go and find Mr Belden in the security suite?’ Toshiko bit her lip. It wouldn’t do to let Maddock know just how much she already knew about the layout or staffing of Pendefig. She slipped the tell-tale PDA into her jacket pocket, and showed her smile again.

Maddock rubbed his hands together with invisible soap, and unctuously agreed to chaperone her to his ‘state-of-the-art security facility’ on the upper level. Toshiko had to endure a lecture on the mall’s dedication to quality, choice of retailers, and exciting mall promotions. She doubted whether anything as exciting as a Weevil attack had happened in Pendefig before.

A thin sheen of sweat formed a patina on Maddock’s high pale forehead. He wiped at it with the back of his hand, then wiped his hand on the tails of his jacket.

‘Nice suit,’ observed Toshiko.

‘Jasper Littman,’ grinned Maddock. ‘Bespoke.’

That suit wasn’t bought in Pendefig Mall, thought Toshiko. No matter how much he banged on about the ten-million-pound refurbishment, Maddock thought he was way too good for this place. His enthusiasm was as synthetic as these plants that filled the gap between the up and down escalators. She asked him: ‘Why are these flowers all fake?’

‘They don’t need watering,’ replied Maddock. ‘Dusting occasionally. There’s no natural light in the mall.’

‘Why not?’ Even the Hub had some outside light artfully reflected into its underground location, thought Toshiko. ‘Is it like casinos? So that people forget how long they’ve been in here? Keep spending.’ She looked around them. ‘No clocks either.’

Maddock responded with a thin smile, and began a long explanation about how it was a contemporary design feature to upgrade the principal trading areas beneath unglazed roofing. Toshiko sensed her eyes were glazing over instead.

They reached the top of the upper escalator that led to the highest level. To their left, a U-shaped staircase led up to the security suite. No escalator for the staff, Toshiko noted. Open-tread steps, scratched wooden handrail.

No shops on this level yet either. Just a handful of boarded-up units waiting for the retail recovery that might make it attractive to rent this far up in the mall. A library filled the whole opposite side of the open square. Behind a wide stretch of plate-glass windows, vivid posters advertised books, DVDs, readings and Halloween events.

Except that one of the splashes of bright colour wasn’t a poster. It was a wide smear of blood, smudged upwards until it reached head height. Toshiko scanned the residue, blue lights flickering over the cracked glass. ‘Human,’ she said to herself. A red trail dribbled away towards the emergency stairs, suggesting a creature with four splayed toes and with a rear claw on the foot. There appeared to be two sets of scuffed, bloody tracks – one towards the stairs and the other back from it. They were distinct, not overlapping, so Toshiko couldn’t tell which was fresher. Whether the creature would be waiting for her in the stairwell or whether it had already left. Her PDS revealed no residual Rift energy signs.

‘Wait there,’ she called to Maddock.

Maddock had only just seen the trail of blood. He covered his mouth with both hands. When he looked up at Toshiko, there was a wild look of horror in his eyes. ‘The police…’ he eventually mumbled.

‘On their way,’ she lied. The police would be on their way only when she called them in, and that wouldn’t be until she’d assessed the area. ‘Wait there,’ she reiterated. She slammed the emergency stop, and the escalator snapped off with a mechanical sigh. ‘If anyone comes up that, send them straight back down again. Can you do that?’

He stared at her, uncertain.