But then Jerry saw, down the stairs, the real source of the otters’ disquiet. The big female had given birth. He could see at least six naked little otters in a makeshift den, like pink fingers, and the mother licking and licking them. He slapped the camera operator’s shoulder and pointed toward the bridge.
“Let’s get up there. We need to get out of the way. The other otters, they’re protecting her. It’s beautiful. It’s horrible,” he said.
“It’s bollocks. No one wants to see this.”
“I don’t really bloody care,” said the reporter. “Shoot the damn thing. It’s what we’ve got.”
The light shined down like an exploding star. Christmas brought Christ, but May Day delivered otters—six of them.
raid on the wax museum
LIKE MANY OF THE RELEASED ANIMALS (MOST OF which were moving south, toward central London), Buddy and Ollie, the two chimpanzees who had killed a fellow ape, quickly reached Marylebone Road and crossed it, attracted by the green dome of the London Planetarium. When they reached the venerable building, they almost immediately lost interest since, as they stood close to the structure, the dome vanished from their meter-high view of the world. But there was much else to pique their curious minds.
They began pummeling the doors of the attached Madame Tussauds building, screeching loudly under an enormous T banner, which might as well have stood for Trouble.
Ollie, smaller and more compact than Buddy, smacked at the glass with his sweaty long hand, hooing lightly. The loudness of his pounding despite the weakness of his effort testified to his muscularity.
The whale-bellied night security guard, sitting inside at his kiosk with his shirt open, startled to attention. He’d been looking at a WikiNous stalk called “Peaches,” using a SkinWerks screen sprayed onto his stomach, flicking numbly through thumbnail fotolives that showed naked women, in a range of ages, all in Venetian masks. Most of the women were expertly inserting sliced pieces of fruit into their own vaginas. The guard’s SkinWerks panel was delivering the sensation of a massage, but his free hand was on his penis; he let go and tapped around the desk for his torch. He grew instantly incandescent, toward himself and at the kids outside.
“Fuck me!” he gasped, struggling to button up.
Buddy kept running up to one array of entrance doors and kicking it, which produced a shattering clatter, stirring Ollie to make a series of terrifying waa-barks, a noise chimps make to signal a disturbed state of spectating. Buddy was in a state of sheer Pan troglodyte euphoria. He remembered the coming of the night human, the murder screams of the treasonous macaque, and his and Ollie’s vaulting escape. He had found himself, in Marylebone, in a kind of ape heaven, a complex interzone of a million illuminated things to touch and climb and pull to pieces.
What had become of the other two members of his band and the other macaques (whom he still considered cousins), all of them free now? He did not know, and there was too much to do to worry over it.
The guard started to close down the WikiNous, but his hands were shaking so badly (less from fear of the noises than of being found wanking at work) that he left the title page on his stomach. Instead of tapping 999 onto the skin panel, he decided he would give these fucking louts, whoever they were, a scare. He would go out there, say a few choice words, and get the doors resecured before the automatic alarm went off.
Standing as tall as he could, pulling his shirt closed, pushing his shoulders back, he shoved one of the doors open and screamed, “I’m going to kill you, you bloody fucknuts.”
The chimpanzees instantly set upon him. Nearly ten stone heavy, Buddy leaped onto his head and began chewing at the man’s cheeks. The guard staggered back into Madame Tussauds and fell, and Ollie joined in, immediately going for the man’s genitals (still not packed away). It was all surprisingly silent and fast, the guard’s death, and far more merciful than many human-on-human homicides. The guard’s last sight on earth, projected on his belly in 3D, was a Peaches fotolive of a forty-two-year-old woman from Toronto with a sequined rabbit mask and thighs as effusive as molten caramel. As his stomach rose and fell forever, she seemed, he thought, to be holding him close.