Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

It wasn’t, as Cuthbert wanted, all about all the animals.

There hadn’t been many animals on the loose — not really, it was said. No one but a few soft-headed cultists actually died. SCARE hadn’t actually lost any soldiers. Only a few suspect people saw anything like a “green being” near the American Embassy. And apart from a small number of animals hurt or temporarily escaped, nearly all the animals were captured and returned to their enclosures to resume their happy jailed lives.

BY THE NEXT SPRING, in 2053, a year blessedly free of comets, the night of the animals was largely forgotten, and the big news on everyone’s corneas was, of course, King Henry, for 2053 marked his silver jubilee. In the monarch’s official portrait for the year, Arfur appeared, in the background, prone on a settee of purple velvet brocades and ermine, his muffin-paws in front of him, and wearing an expression of impossible contentment.

DURING THAT LONG, SCORCHING SUMMER OF THE jubilee, Cuthbert Handley one day realized that he didn’t hear voices as often as he used to. In fact, they had all shrunk down to one.

By 2053, there were far fewer animals and species of them on earth. Not since the end of the Pleistocene, when the woolly rhinos and dire wolves died out, had evolution reached such a choke point. Epically closer to home, a hot April and May had hatched swarms of midges, bringing an epidemic of a virulent bluetongue to Albion’s sheep and cattle on the king’s large collectives.

In London, there were even fewer moggies in the alleys, fewer dog walkers around the silenced swan ponds, and a host of unexpected, strange breeding problems at the zoo. Indigents were no longer permitted pet licenses. While the zoo was still the most precious archival repository of genomes on the planet, research and bioengineering and preservation work tended to hold primacy now. Security increased tenfold, with admission by invitation only. The exhibitions, one by one, were being shuttered, too. In all but a few cases, genomic clones replaced the wild originals, and the London Zoological Gardens — humankind’s last ark of the Animal Kingdom — had become, for the most part, a closed shop.

For reasons Cuthbert could not grasp, the animals stopped talking to him. The unexpected great quieting depressed him, and left him with agonizing guilt.

“I can’t bring ’em in,” he would exclaim to Astrid. “I don’t know what’s gone wrong. Why? Why’d I have to tinker? Why? What’s become of the Wonderments? Do you hear them?”

But that was a question Astrid never dared to answer again, not even to dear Cuthbert.

He’d thought, gullibly, that people would have learned after the night the animals saved them. He trusted that the bond between creatures and people would grow inviolate. That hadn’t happened at all.

He decided, that summer day, that it was time perhaps that he come in off the streets of England for good.

“I’ve had enough, haven’t I?” he thought, not without real shame. “And I’ve done my bit for the beasts — and for King Harry. What’s the use?”

But this notion of sleeping indoors for good occurred to him as the sweet smell of baking kidneys and puff pastry wafted into his eager face. He was in Astrid’s kitchen, in her flat in Haggerston, where he found himself spending more and more time. With shaky hands, he moved a piping-hot pie, still in its tin, directly to an Italian dinnerware plate painted with large red pears and golden quinces. There was a square nuplastic container of burdock greens that Astrid had sautéed with watercress and put away, and she’d made Cuthbert promise her to eat a bit of the greens if he insisted on “those unwholesome pies.”

“But the pies, they’re good,” he maintained. Astrid was vegetarian, of course, just like his gran had been, and he respected that, but he could not bring himself to denigrate a good kidney pie, could he?

Astrid was away at work that afternoon, where she’d long been reinstated and promoted to chief inspector, with Omotoso moving up to the Met, and Atwell taking her old inspectorship. She was only the second person she knew in Britain to make it past second withdrawal from Flōt, and in her FA meetings, she’d become something of an inspiration. Her own “Wonderments,” it turned out, had worked in unexpected ways. She wasn’t sure she liked or trusted God, or if she even knew how to believe, but her old revulsion was gone.

Cuthbert sat down at Astrid’s dark, walnut-grained kitchenette, and he dumped some of the unheated greens, straight from the container, onto the pie. A ray of piercing June sunlight shot across the tabletop, glaring a bit, and he squinted.

Cuthbert covered the whole plate with HP sauce, and he ate greedily. One hunk after another, without pause, he took enormous portions of pastry and the bright jade burdock upon his fork without bothering to spear anything with the tines. He washed it all down with a big honeyed bowl of peppermint and nettle tea, and when it was finished, with a barely concealed exuberance, he burped.

“That’s a piece,” *he said.

Oh, she wants me to stay here, he thought to himself. To keep out of the cold — and the heat. Why don’t I then?

But could he find a way to leave the Flōt alone forever?

AGAINST THE ADVICE of many acquaintances — for her friends knew better than to say a thing — Astrid had invited Cuthbert after the night of the animals to stay with her without apparent reservations or regrets. It was an odd arrangement, and a big gamble, she knew, but she could not get over a feeling of wanting to protect the man, as best she could, or at least see to his creature comforts for a few years.

“He’s my grandfather,” she would tell skeptics, although she hadn’t known that, really. She was, for the moment, content to leave it at that. “I love him.”

In the year since, both she and he had, after all, suffered great losses. Even in an era of replaceable major organs, the endlessly patient Dr. Bajwa’s cancer could not be stopped. The loss felt cruel for Cuthbert. It turned out that the extra weight and more robust voice Baj had gained on the hijacked frightcopter, right before Astrid’s eyes, was an effect of Æthelstan’s Bliss. A damaged timeline had somehow shrunk his tumors, added to his fat stores, and given him more months of life, which he gave to the poor of Holloway Road, treating Indigents almost to the end. Eventually, the tumors came back, and Baj died in the winter, sending Cuthbert into a panic. The same month, Astrid’s mother, her mind too ravaged by the Bruta7 virus even to recognize her daughter, finally succumbed to complications brought on by it, despite receiving specially ordered NHS Legacy-level care.

AFTER HIS LUNCH, Cuthbert decided to take a little nap. He lay atop the duvet on his plush bed, and he pulled his legs up.

He called, just as his grandmother had, “Kitty-kyloe! Kitty-kyloe!”

Instantly, the little golden cat came running from its hiding place and jumped onto the bed, snuggling into a ball at Cuthbert’s feet. He reached down and scratched the feline behind its ears, and it allowed this, for a moment, then bucked away. It would never relax in human hands, but like many sand cats, it was semi-tamable.

“Yow smelled the pie, did yow?” Muezza leaped off the bed onto the floor, as if signaling for a feeding. (He had to be fed frozen mice.)

After the incident in the lion enclosure, and being seen to by paramedics, Cuthbert had spotted Muezza in the hedges, very near its shattered, aquarium-like exhibit. Unknown to Astrid or anyone, the old man had managed to smuggle the sand cat out in his bundled coat, stowing him like a small melon in a grocery sack.