When the mule finally perceived the jackals, she neighed stridently. She was a strong, old creature, a retired draft animal whose mother was a Clydesdale and father a favorite beach donkey from Anglesey. She started kicking at the stable walls. It sounded like she would beat the place down.
One by one, the jackals slipped beneath one of the stable doors. Behind it, they found the two poor, tethered goat brothers. They were sweet, blond billies who were fawned over by children. Aside from the occasional cruel boy, they had never seen a predator in their lives. Now they faced their most ancient enemy, the same species who had chased their wild ancestors in the Zagros foothills of Persia.
The jackals set upon one of the goats all at once. Within a few seconds, the pack had managed to wedge part of its liver out. The other goat bleated in horror, kicking repeatedly from the stall’s corner, until the jackals massed upon it and brought it, too, to the hay-strewn floor. Each of the goats, conscious and in shock, choking, could feel the dogs rooting in their insides, the snouts digging for their meek, soft hearts. In their caprine minds, there were picture-thoughts amid the agony: a grassy meadowland; buckthorn berries on sugary twigs; a range of granite massifs climbing to ever higher playgrounds of stone. And then the pictures stopped.
The mule, in the opposite stable stall, who thought of the goats as small, equine associates, brayed without end. Soon, the llama began screaming again, too, and from there another wave of anxiety washed across the entire southern end of the zoo.
Cuthbert could not see any of this, but he could hear it. It was clear something ghastly and heartbreaking had happened. Neither inebriation, delusions, nor hepatic brain-fog could screen the shock of it. He did not want to guess at the details, what harmless being was being torn to pieces. What had he caused?
“Damn, damn, damn,” he said to himself.
Soon, another new set of cries rose. There were feral chitters and dumb groans. So many animals, in an uproar again. It seemed to Cuthbert that, perhaps, his great plan to free as many animals as possible was causing only universal torment.
He stood still, taking it all in, angling his head to hear every detail.
“Bugger,” he said. After a full minute or so, the noises abruptly stopped.
He remained on the path near the jackal kennels, not sure where to go next.
“Blessed bloody Jesus.”
He started swinging his bolt cutters with one hand, back and forth, until the loose handle scraped against the ground. The security lamps blazed like daylight. Everything had seemed so straightforward moments before. There was an existential danger to all Britain’s—and the entire earth’s—animals, a threat posed by the Heaven’s Gate cult, by social disorder, and by widespread apathy toward the animal kingdom. His solution had seemed magnificently simple: just let the animals out—all of them. He had not seriously considered that the freed animals presented any danger to the caged ones. What am I doing, then? Stop me, God, help me! He tried to visualize St. Cuthbert, a living statue, the ice on his legs getting licked by an otter’s tongue, his flesh scoured with the enzymes of miracles.
“I pray to you, St. Cuthbert,” he said, quite earnestly. “For help and for comfort. I pray to you—please!”
A man screamed, far to the north in the zoo, where Cuthbert had not yet ventured. Cuthbert was sure about it—it was a man. He could not make out the words. It sounded like “No!” or “Wolf!” Cuthbert remembered that the otters were in the north section of the zoo.
Then, for nearly the last time, Cuthbert was able to step back from everything inside him for a moment. He could see how enormous and real this trouble had grown. While any experienced zookeeper knows that zoos normally echo at night with unhuman sounds, Cuthbert didn’t. To him it was as if something bigger than anything he knew was booming in his head. He did not know how to drive it from his brain, into the world, to expose it. The animals were grabbing it and running with it all by themselves.
A garbled thought came to him: he could still stop everything, he believed, if he only Opticalled Dr. Bajwa. There was the Opticall address in his wallet. He’d seen a few of the venerable red phone boxes in the zoo, all fitted with passé neuro-optical matrices, but functional enough if you didn’t have any SkinWerks handy. He imagined Baj in his surgery, frowning at him, but not without kindness. Baj would wrap a long linen healing cloth around his skull. The fabric would suck away the sickness like a great swab. Baj would press an iron bracelet into Cuthbert’s palm, and place a curved knife with square emeralds in its handle before him as a gift. “There is your kirpan. You are very Sikh now!” he would tell Cuthbert. “I am certain!”