Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

A Civil Guardsman stopped him by grabbing his arm and swinging him around, and asked by shouting in his ear what he was doing there, and it was as if he had no words for such unprecedented things, so he didn’t answer, and while the Guardsman still had his arm and was hurting it he saw through the trucks and men and debris a huge gray shape, one of the Komodos, Seelie, rumble down an incline trying to get to the unfinished moat, scattering Civil Guardsmen and dragging a soldier who’d tried to collar her with a rope along behind her, and what looked like an army of uniformed bystanders plunged after her, firing, and while Karel screamed and struggled she rose into sight again on the opposite side of the ditch and he could see the bullets impacting frenetically along her side and back and she lurched sideways, a foreclaw up, and tumbled back down the embankment. He realized he still had the shovel in his hand and swung it and hit only the man’s legs with the handle, and the man clubbed him to the ground and hit him twice more, on the top of the head and the collarbone.

He awoke outside the barricades, where he’d been dragged. He was off the street near a hedge. The house was shuttered and dark.

It was quiet and the fire seemed largely out. The night was paling and he knew it must be close to morning. He could smell the charred wood and general sootiness in the air.

His head was sore in a kind of corona, and when he tried to lift it he groaned. He was aware of his collarbone, too, and he had to keep his arm still and close to his ribs. A tiger beetle perched on his calf, its antennae curled downward, like feelers, and he shook it off. He became aware that for some reason ants had filled one of his shoes.

A dog was barking a few streets away and was finally quiet. He sat up and dragged his shoe off. He’d stepped in something. He shook the shoe out, blinking fiercely to shake his grogginess. The ants tickled his foot and rained onto the ground with an audible patter. At the barricade one sleepy soldier sat with his rifle across his lap and his back to the sawhorse.

When it was lighter he got up. The soldier was asleep. He passed through the barricade, holding the shoulder with the injured collarbone lower, the pain in his head coming in gentle waves.

People were coming out. Nearer the zoo he found a small boy playing on a blackened playground. The soles of his feet and his hands were black.

Beside the playground the bakery was still standing, and still had power, and the baker was putting breakfast rolls into the ovens in the back. He was working under a single light bulb and wearing slippers and trousers and an apron but no shirt. The apron needed changing.

Closer to the zoo some houses had burned down. A girl Karel’s age was standing outside the ruins, which were still hot, and picking at what she could, dusting it off and throwing it away. Some neighbors had gathered to watch. She ignored Karel but the neighbors nodded when he stopped.

They disagreed about the fire. Two women thought the whole thing was terrible and what they were looking at unforgivable, but someone else argued that the zoo had been a staging area for insurgents, that soldiers had told them it had been destroyed by a spontaneous people’s response. Obviously no one wanted property destroyed, but law-abiding people had a right to be protected. The girl Karel’s age was writing on a blackened wall with chalk, and they all read it as she wrote: Where are you? I will be at Etz’s . — Sisi,

Most of the zoo was still too hot to explore. The soldiers were gone. He found Albert’s office, standing alone like a separate building erected in the rubble, untouched by the fire. It had been ransacked and was ankle-deep in debris. A small iguana gasped on the wall. The only undisturbed area was atop one of the file cabinets. He could see tiny mice prints in the dust. Beyond them there was a folded map of the region with holes from use worn in the corners. He took it. He groped his way back through the destruction, remembering walls and spaces that were no longer there. It was as if he’d become his own ghost.

By what had been the snake enclosures he found the bushmaster, dead, and the king cobra, though not where he’d seen it, and the boa, and the granite night lizard, and the coachwhip. The gopher snake and the lyre snake and the leafnose. Herman was still inside his enclosure, half buried and on his side, and Seelie he found at the bottom of the ditch, and he went down to her and put his hand inside her slack jaw and cried. Somebody passing by stopped and peered more closely before moving on.

At home even the ringtail seemed to be gone. The house was completely quiet. In the kitchen he hunted through the papers on the table and found nothing useful. Kehr’s leather briefcase was under the table, open and unlocked. In it he found one of the pass cards with the antipartisan symbol. Above the symbol it said, Civil Guard: Civic Action — Intelligence; below in smaller print that the bearer should not in any way be detained or otherwise identified. He sat at the table and painstakingly and hurriedly copied Kehr’s signature at the bottom, using as a model a directive on the table, and printed his own name at the top, and then took the card up to his room.

He shut the door behind him and packed what he needed or had into a canvas beltpack: the pass, his father’s money, Albert’s map, a lozenge-shaped canteen, a change of shoes, another shirt, a floppy sunhat. He added some thin rope and a clasp knife, and matches in a tin. He took the picture of his mother Kehr had given him off the wall, considered it, and hid it in the bottom drawer of his desk. He took all three of Leda’s letters.

He returned to the kitchen and filled a paper bag with a round loaf of white bread and some figs and dates and two plums. He topped off his canteen. He found some very old salt tablets in the odds-and-ends drawer. On the way out he heard a noise in the spare room. He waited, and then eased himself out the door and broke into a sprint as soon as he could.

It was still very early. He was chilly and the sun was barely up. He intended to skirt the busier streets and then head east on the national road. He passed a barefooted man sitting on a crate and reading The People’s Voice . Inside the house Karel could see a thin girl working a pump in the kitchen and could hear the sound the water made in her bucket. After that he saw no one, and he was struck by the emptiness of the roads.

The checkpoint was a sawhorse next to a shack of corrugated metal. A teenage soldier was manning it alone. Karel recognized him as the one with the swollen eye who’d harassed them before. He fought his despair and fear and kept walking toward him.

The soldier’s face and cap were coated with dirt. He leaned against the sawhorse and didn’t raise his rifle at Karel’s approach. What was this? he asked, when Karel stopped in front of him. Running away from home?

Karel took his pass card and held it out. His arm was trembling and he tried to make it stop.

The soldier did not take the card. His eye looked worse. He nudged Karel’s paper bag with the barrel of his rifle, and Karel opened it and showed him. The soldier took one of the plums.

“I know you from somewhere,” the soldier said. He peered at Karel with his good eye.

Karel held the pass out stubbornly.

The soldier took it and examined it as if he’d never seen such a thing before. “This means I’m supposed to let you pass?” he finally said.

Karel nodded. The soldier exhaled with exasperation and knitted his eyebrows and thought about it and then waved Karel through. Karel passed around the sawhorse and held his hand out for the card, and for a long terrifying moment the soldier pocketed it and clasped a hand over the pocket. Then he gave Karel a slow smile and took out the card and returned it.