Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

“Drystan! Bostin! You came! You came! I knew you would!”

Astrid splashed down into the moat water again, coughing, and trying to scramble, again, up the other side, and flailing and slipping and sliding, trying to rise to her feet, but falling again and again. And that was when Chandani leaped onto Cuthbert.

“God, no,” shouted Astrid.

“It’s OK,” said Cuthbert, who was smiling. “Let them have me.” The lions piled onto him with such force they rolled en masse down into the moat, but Astrid bravely threw herself at the tangle of man and beast.

They were in the water again, and Astrid grabbed for this ancient lunatic who she thought might be her long-lost grandfather. She could not tell what was lion and what was human — it was all warm and ragged and desperate. The lions were speaking, but Astrid no longer could understand them, yet, underwater, it did sound like the phrase she’d heard herself saying before, the underwater words, gagoga maga medu . And the words emerged in bubbles as the swimming lions reached for Cuthbert and now Astrid with their huge jaws. Astrid felt that the lions harbored no ill will, but there was real rage in their movements. Unlike the Neuters, the lions killed with passion and with meaning, using the same blessing phrase Astrid had heard from Kibali and Cuthbert had heard from the otters years ago in Dowles Brook. Like so much aggression by cats of all sizes, the line between affection and murderousness was both blurry and long. Just as any household Siamese will “play” with a fortuitously caught mouse, the lions’ assault on Cuthbert was not without an element of real fondness.

“Don’t kill him,” Astrid commanded the lions, her voice full of its own animal-to-animal heat. She had never heard herself speak with such conviction. “Do not . I will not lose him! Not again!”

And with that, the lions broke off their attack. It was as simple as that. They respected firmness.

“We were agitated,” said Chandani, and once again, Astrid could understand their words. “That is all. We have been. pent up.”

The lions helped drag Cuthbert and Astrid out of the moat, biting down on their shoulders gently, drawing them to safety like two of their cubs, and departing.

“And now you are baptized,” Cuthbert said to Astrid. “And I am, too.”

Chandani, the strongest one, the huntress, did not join the battle against the Neuters. She craved the purest form of freedom, and she slinked away into Regent’s Park. There, on one of the tidy bowling lawns, the lioness chased and harried a Red Watchman until Kieran from the AnimalSafe Squad, freshly returned from the sad chimpanzee business at Madame Tussauds, brought her down with a tranquilizer dart, much to his own relief. It was one of the few happy outcomes for the animals that night.

The other lions, including Arfur, began to head to the Tower of London. The lions had been sent away from the old Lion Tower in 1835. They wanted to go back. It was their right, they had always been told. They made it to towers, but of the brutalist variety in the Barbican, where they were cornered in Lakeside Terrace. A contingent of city police officers easily subdued the distracted animals while they played with the jetting fountains in the round red-brick pools. They could not stop themselves from batting the water jets with their paws, obsessively.

All lived, but only Arfur was granted, by chance, a fate that nearly matched his leonine dreams. All he had wanted was to sit in the Tower and protect the Realm. He was more stupid, lazy, and old than the other lions, but with his long, golden, wonderfully messy mane, footage of him on the autonews apparently caught the king’s attention.

“That one,” Henry had told one of his consorts as they lay naked in his bedchamber, watching the ceiling autonews feeds. He was up on Flōt, fully His “Highness” indeed. “I’ll get that one — for next year. He’s a rascal, he is — you can see. I shall have an official picture with a fucking lion. ‘ Dieu et mon droit ’ and all that. What do you think of that, then?”

AFTER THE LIONS LEFT, CUTHBERT AND ASTRID had lain for a while on the lip of the moat, a green heap of Flōtism and moat slime and blood ties woven in threads of dreams and pain and need. They were a perfect public spectacle, and the autonewsmedia ate it up.

A roaring crowd of autonews “gatherers” and zoo staff and police surrounded the lion enclosure.

When Astrid began to sit up, that tall, indefatigable autoreporter named Jerry and his chunky fotolivographer encouraged them, rather cynically, to hold still.

“No, you’re perfect!” called Jerry. “You better stay put, yeah? Until the paramedics arrive? Perhaps something’s. erm, broken?”

“There’s plenty broken,” croaked Cuthbert.

THE SKY WAS BEGINNING TO BRIGHTEN. The Neuters from outer space were quickly vanishing in Astrid’s and Cuthbert’s minds, and a golden green cloud was spreading over London. Astrid kissed her granddaddy’s clammy forehead, pulling him as close to her as she could. She said, “You mustn’t ever leave me again. Never, Cuddy, never,” and for Cuthbert, every one of her words seemed to be uttered by Drystan, and he had found what he felt he’d needed for eighty years, since his poor older brother drowned in Dowles Brook.

Meanwhile, Atwell and Omotoso appeared again at the edge of the enclosure, looking down on Astrid and Cuthbert.

“Idiots,” said Atwell. “You’re a perfect fool, Inspector.”

“I second that,” said Omotoso.

Soon, Astrid could see the oddly fatter Dr. Bajwa again, shaking his head, but smirking, too.

“You have been delivered, it seems,” hollered Dr. Bajwa. “I told you. I told you, didn’t I? It’s as plain as a pikestaff.”

Elbowing into the crowd came Mason, waving bystanders aside with authority, repeating the phrase, “Sorry, security, sorry.”

Then Suleiman glided in. For reasons known only to him, the Zanzabari man was wearing on his feet the speedfins one normally saw on kids playing dangerous games of hurtball around the IBs. He was smiling openly, with his American visa now inserted. It was a silver holographic eagle that popped up from the palm, beating its wings in its flight to nowhere.

Mason and Suleiman leaned far over the edge of the enclosure, and Mason called down to Astrid, winking, “Help’s on the way. Just hang tough, y’all.”

Eventually, Astrid also spotted Tom, her friend from FA.

She felt embarrassed to see him.

“I did not drink,” she said, looking down.

Tom seemed unfazed. “Of course you didn’t. But it’s a miracle. I was starting to think I’d be the only one who did the Death. And now I’m not.”

Astrid then took her Cuthbert’s hand and kissed it.

Soon, a detail of the king’s personal Beefeaters, the Yeomen of the Guard, took up positions near key “battle” sites — the Penguin Pool, the American Embassy — and showily stood sentry duty, all part of Harry9’s plan to “own” the night as an exemplar of Windsorian might. One Beefeater came to the edge of the lion enclosure and planted her neuralwave pike with a thud. Few loyal subjects could ever have been as pleased as St. Cuddy to see such an old-fashioned regal spectacle, apparently on his behalf.

The raw video feeds, broadcast from the autonews and spread on WikiNous, were already fashioning a kind of rough narrative — the hands of King Henry’s council were behind this — which presented Cuthbert and Astrid as fending off a terrorist suicide cult. Cuthbert’s release of the rare zoo animals was framed as a sort of stopgap “tactic.” As long as the cultists were dead and their gobs shut, Harry9 was happy.