Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

Two soldiers were inside the tortoise enclosure rooting around under the straw and rotting lettuce. One tortoise was hunkered down on top of some dog food soaked in water and sprinkled with bone meal. The other followed their progress inquisitively. At another cage a soldier lifted up the albino mud turtle and inspected it closely. It hung in the air looking miserable.

At the Komodo enclosure two soldiers were tantalizing Seelie through the feeding grate. Herman was quiet against the wall, content to be uninvolved.

Karel told them to stop, and they turned to him the way they’d turn to a yapping dog and told him to move on.

Searches were underway in every section, and the animals were getting anywhere from skittish to traumatized. The anoles were wedged under rocks, and the Nile crocodile stood warily in the center of her enclosure with one of her hatchlings standing in her open mouth and the other two burrowed headfirst under her side.

The snakes were nervous. He could see mites on the hognose, around the eyes. Did Albert know about this? Beside the cobra cages someone had left the rolling tray of mice cubes, small mice frozen in water to prevent dehydration. They were half thawed. Soldiers were gathered appreciatively around a spitting cobra close to the glass, which raised and spread its hood carefully as if searching for information. Perren remarked to them that no one was ever interested in the nonpoisonous ones, and that his old boss had told him once that the wax museums in the capital charged extra for the murderers but the missionaries and reformers and statesmen you could see for nothing.

He had two soldiers lead Karel out, past the mambas, thin and graceful and gliding so swiftly through their stand of field grass they seemed to be swimming, and then past the puff adder, satisfied with its quiet life and few rats. Karel asked if he could stay, and the soldiers said no. A Civil Guardsman shut and locked the gate behind him.

He walked south to the barren hillside he’d visited with Leda. There were still mangy dogs around the refuse dump. He climbed until he reached a place he thought he remembered and then sat in the sun on the scree and looked back at the town and the Reptile House in the distance.

It was already late and he stayed where he was until after dark, watching clouds red from the sunset roll toward the town. He saw a small convoy of six transport trucks parked in an orderly line to the east. The heat from their running exhausts made them flex and wobble. When it was fully dark he could hear cicadas and night feeders starting to move around on the shale, and the convoy started moving, stringing through town like a necklace. Single points of headlights broke off onto each street leading to the zoo and crawled to a stop at the dead ends. When each stopped it went dark. There was about a half hour of silence, and then when Karel got up to go a gathering wail of sirens, and floodlights were trained on the zoo from out of the darkness, and as he ran down the slope half out of control on the loose rock there was the cracking and popping of guns.

The neighborhood around the zoo was completely changed. Soldiers and police and Civil Guardsmen manned roadblocks of oil drums and sawhorses and herded people back into their houses. Karel was turned away at three different points, one teenaged soldier hoisting a rifle butt and shaking it at him to indicate what he was capable of, and finally got through by climbing over the hoods of some transport trucks guarded by two drivers playing dice.

The zoo was on fire everywhere. He tried to shout or call — what? who? — but everything was lost in the roar and wind of the fire’s updraft and the cacophony of the animals. At the inner gate soldiers were coming and going hurriedly while Civil Guardsmen stood in groups discussing the chaos with equanimity. He could smell their coffee. He followed the wall a few hundred feet and scrambled over to get inside. The smoke choked and blinded him and was filled with diesel exhaust and burning rubber. Something collapsed with a crash nearby. There was a whirl of sparks upward and he got a clear view of the fire for the first time, and then the smoke curtained together again and the sparks showered down around him in a golden rain, bouncing and staying lit where they fell. He saw heavy black smoke pouring from the basement windows of the monkey house and saw the intensities of the separated fires and the soldiers still rolling drums away and realized that they had set this, that they were destroying the zoo.

He ran to one and began pulling at his arms and the soldier released his drum with one hand and caught Karel in the temple and ear and the ground swept up and hit him. He got his cheek off the dirt and felt around with his open palms and thought, Seelie and Herman . The side of his mouth was swelling and his jaw throbbed. He staggered to his feet. Something flashed by with a squawk and he registered it as a parrot. High above him a heron flapped into the smoke, glowing red in the reflected light. There were no firemen at work and it seemed as if everyone was on his own: one group was clubbing down flamingoes and another had herded together the wild sheep to protect them. The sheep were bleating in terror and turning in a circle like a storm cloud.

At the Reptile House he didn’t see any of the workers. The doors and windows had been shattered and the fire was mostly inside. As he ran in he was knocked aside by a soldier rushing out, squeamishly carrying at arm’s length an untroubled iguana.

The hall was empty and the fires were spreading along the walls. Equipment was smashed and scattered. Near the turtle tiers benches and tables had been piled around the tortoise enclosure and the fire there was already unapproachable. He could see the geckos and anoles pressed belly first to the front glass of their enclosures, already dying from the heat. He hefted a shovel he found on the floor and started breaking the glass, just swinging and sobbing, but when it shattered and rained around him like spray the freed lizards stayed where they fell, limp and unobtrusive in the debris. He tried to work closer to the turtles but the heat drove him back, burning his face so that he thought his skin was on fire, and he could see their dark shapes and hear their shells hissing like iron cooling in water. The hall to the iguanas was blocked too now and he could hear the teakettle hissing and whistling of their agonies.

He ran outside and around the building to get to the snake enclosures, dragging the shovel and just avoiding a sweep of fire that billowed out a side window. The cages and enclosures were smashed and everything that wasn’t dead was out; part of the wall had collapsed and taken down the front restraining grates. Soldiers everywhere were shrieking and shooting and swinging axes and shovels. The hognose fled over his foot and the bushmaster passed along the inner side of an ankle, freezing him. It was brown and six inches wide and longer than he was, and he could see the rhomboids like black felt on its back. It glided for cover under a jumble of oil drums. A second wall collapsed with a shower of sparks and embers and knocked a Civil Guardsman to his knees, spilling a king cobra in front of him. The cobra reared up to face him and the Civil Guardsman groped around with his hand at the cobra’s base and Karel understood he was looking for his glasses. The cobra’s fangs backlit were like lancets of curved glass.

He heard a voice cursing the snakes and cursing the idiots who had started the outer wall before the inner one had really taken and he knew it was his father. He turned, his body moving erratically after the double shock of that and the bushmaster, and followed the voice, and was knocked sprawling by soldiers running in the opposite direction.

He got up and kept moving, and there was Holter, out of the smoke, his face black with soot and sweaty, supervising something around a tree that was already starting to smolder. Holter was here, he thought, but it was as if he’d lost his capacity for surprise, and he kept on after his father’s voice.