Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

“Flōt.”

“Yes, Flōt. It makes you see things.”

Astrid said, “But, Cuthbert. I know this will sound unbelievable. But I care about you. I don’t even. well, I think I may know why.” She smiled, but sourly, shaking her head in tight little wiggles. “Or not. A bit why. Maybe? But you’ve. you’ve drawn me here tonight. And I. I want to believe you. And I want to help you.”

Cuthbert felt his heart begin to gallop unevenly, and a vise-like pain shot up his chest. He looked up in the sky. There was the comet.

“The co-co-comet,” he said, in a daze. “Thar’s a spaceship in there. Hidden.”

Again, the officer and Dr. Bajwa looked at one another. From above, one of the Red Watch’s frightcopters trained its spot beams on St. Cuthbert and Astrid.

There was a voice from above: You are commanded by the Yeoman of His Majesty the King to remain where you are.

Astrid waved her hand, as if trying to swat midges away from her face.

“Cuthbert,” said Astrid. “Our time’s running out. You know, I came here tonight, and now I’ve lost everything, but I wouldn’t change it. You see, I don’t know who you are, but I knew I had to find you. I look like you. Anyone would see that. And I wonder if I think like you? And feel like you? I’m a Flōt sot, too, and I’m in second withdrawal, and you know there aren’t many of us, and the statistics for me are bleak, but I am here. I think, Mr. Handley, I think you could be my granddaddy. Maybe.”

St. Cuthbert gasped. “Yow? How can that be?” He stood tottering on the edge of the enclosure, knotting his fingers. “It’s impossible. Sullivan? Irish? You’re bold and brave, Inspector. Irish blood and English heart?”

“Oh, far better than that,” she said. “Are you from the Black Country? And your family’s from the Marches?”

St. Cuthbert nodded.

“Did you know a barmaid from Bermondsey? And you spent a night? A long, long time ago?”

The bits about the Marches and the Black Country made sense, but the rest was entirely foreign to St. Cuthbert. He never knew any barmaid from Bermondsey, at least not one he could remember.

“Do you see someone in me?” Drystan asked. “Someone else, too?”

But St. Cuthbert needed no further proof of a connection than to stare into the dark eyes of this woman, at something far deeper than genes. Her questions felt like a sweet vine pulling through him, even if, in his mind if not his heart, it kept hitting snags. She was, surely, looking through the same strong eyes he hadn’t seen since his gran Winefride Handley lived so long ago. And that meant there was another human being in Britain who would, one day, be able to speak animal. She would possess the Wonderments. She was a he was a she. She was Drystan. She was the Christ of Otters. St. Cuddy no longer would have to carry the burden himself. He was beautifully, perfectly, finally sacrificable.

A hot streak of Red Watchmen was now spidering down from their dark, hovering scarlet frightcopter on black nylonite ropes. When they touched down, they gathered themselves for a few moments, folding and unfolding their arms in arthropodal jerks.

Astrid, Baj, and the other officers watched anxiously as the ropes retracted like hissing black asps. The frightcopter remained rigidly in place, about forty feet up, its solar-electric engines thrumming in near-silence. Looking over his shoulder, St. Cuthbert leaned over the edge of the lion enclosure, peering down into the moat.

“Move back from there, Cuthbert,” said the doctor. “Please, Cuddy.”

The Watchmen — there were three of them — extended their extra-long golden neuralpikes. One of them cracked open a black nerve-bar instant prison at their landing site. The other two Watchmen began to stomp toward Astrid and Baj, their pair of pikes jutting ahead of them, the tips charging with red glows. The pair together were a single massive satanic head, swaying forward and back with ox-like unstoppability. They seemed to know exactly what — or who — they wanted — and only Astrid and a GP with lung cancer stood between them and their quarry.

“Cuthbert, run,” said Astrid. “Get out of here.”

“I won’t,” he said, smiling sadly. “I can’t.”

These were no ordinary Watchmen, Astrid fearfully realized. Suicide cultists and street-rousing republicans were generally left to the regular Watch. These Watchmen belonged to a special new unit, the Scots Coldstream Aristocratic Regiment, or SCARE. They were deployed for high-level political or strategic-level hits when Harry9 wanted to make a special, showy example. They wore the red and gold House of Windsor mantles of the regular Watch as well as the glossy scarlet body armor associated with the king’s own Yeoman Protection Command. SCARE’s distinctive, bulbous mantis-eyed helms hid their faces.

“Cuthbert Handley and Astrid Sullivan,” said one of the approaching Watchmen, warning through a fuzzy speaker. “You are both hereby placed under the custody of His Majesty and you—”

“Just croak that cunt,” said the other.

St. Cuthbert swung one of his legs over the relatively low enclosure wall. The moat below, between the wall and the exhibit area, was the chief barrier between visitors and the lions. The saint sat upon the wall like a novice skier, leaning forward a bit for balance, trying to hold the wall between the palms of his hands. He kept glancing between the Watchmen and the lions down in the enclosure.

“Cuthbert! No!” cried Bajwa.

The Met officers and firearms specialists, still in TotalCamou, backed away ominously, a set of receding floating guns, and Astrid knew she was in gravest danger. The other Royal Parks constables, some of whom Astrid knew well — fat Jenkins and young Hopper and the jokester Sergeant Raheem — seemed either confused or paralyzed with fear. They remained rooted along the bushes.

The doctor, instinctively, had dropped to all fours. He was a picture of appalling befuddlement, crawling toward his wayward patient, then stopping, looking back like an impatient pony, and cantering back toward Astrid.

No one, not even registered law enforcement, took stands against the Watch, and its SCARE units possessed an especially fearsome reputation for outrages against civil decency. Their favorite quarry were British republicans and followers of Anonymous UK, and their pop-up prisons ended up securing the bodies of “terrorists” as often as live prisoners. Indeed, anyone they killed was, ipso facto, a terrorist.

“Behind me,” Astrid said to the doctor, struggling to get herself in front of both the doctor and Cuthbert. She plunged her hand into her trouser pocket. She clutched her neuralzinger. Still loaded with nonlethal gangliatoxic rounds, she remembered.

Before Astrid expected, one of the Watchmen hurled himself forward. He stabbed out at her with his pike’s searing red tip, stretching his arm so far he became unbalanced. The pike hit the pavement beside her foot with a chittering zhe-zheeng! A fist-size divot of pavement concrete spurted up. The missile hit one of the sheepish Met officers in the knee, and he fell hard, moaning.

“It begins,” said St. Cuthbert. “It begins.”

Astrid stepped back. She knew now that the Watchmen were trying to kill her — to kill them all, probably. She drew her neuralzinger, gripping it tentatively with just her one hand.

“Please. Move back,” she said to the Watchmen. “Please. Please. Let’s all kotch a bit.”

But then her pistol went off. It kicked back and up, almost flying from her hand. She’d pulled the trigger all right, but it hardly felt willed. The living gangliatoxin’s visible gray net grew as wide as a shark’s mouth before hitting its target. It stuck to the one Watchman’s armor, a dull shroud now silvering with white sparkles. There was a second’s pause, and everyone assembled stood dumbly, petrified; then the victim staggered over in mortal agony. He screeched through his helmet’s speaker as his brain opened millions of pain receptors.