Lights Out in the Reptile House (26 page)

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.

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.

When it felt as if he'd walked forever he had lunch. He was well out of town and there was nothing on either side of him but bunchgrass and creosote. He ate the figs and a piece of bread he sawed off with his clasp knife and looked back at the town. A convoy passed. There were seven or eight open-backed trucks filled with ordinary people of all ages. They were heading away from town. The trucks had wire mesh over their headlights and windshields, and the people in the back looked disturbed or thoughtful. Some of them waved or pointed at Karel.

He kept walking. He was headed for the nearest train station, at Naklo. It was too far away to walk to, he knew, but a bus from the south passed a junction that was only maybe two days' walk by a shortcut trail, and that he could get to. From Naklo he'd take the train to the capital.

At the point the road turned north, he paused at the start of the trail, which continued east. It was a white gravelly track between spiny shrubs, and it cut across what looked like an endless number of deep washes.

It was quiet. Brush mice darted across open spaces and then sat motionless in the creosote, watching him. He was apprehensive about the desert but reassured by the map and filled with instructions, mostly from Albert when they'd traveled for the zoo. He should rest in the shade for ten minutes every hour. He shouldn't remove his shirt because it would speed dehydration, and he needed to watch at all times for the symptoms. At night he should stay out of the washes and gullies, and watch what he picked up or handled. If he left the trail for some reason he could tell directions from the areas of plant growth along the culverts and inclines: south faces were bare, north mostly covered. There was usually water below the surface near bunchgrass, but when in doubt he should trust the rabbit and prairie dog and mouse tracks, even if they seemed wrong, because those animals weren't guessing; they knew. He should watch coyotes at night, too, where they pawed and snuffed the ground. He could eat a lot of the berries, and some beans if they were pounded up. The one-leaf pines had edible cone-kernels. He should look for tender green shoots of other plants inside the prickle bushes and prickly pear.

On his map the trail crossed a stream and skirted a dead lake to the south like the one Leda had told him about and then climbed northeast across a low range and descended to the junction. It looked fairly simple. He remembered the stories about the northern mountains.

The sun was over his head for a long time, then behind him. The only sounds he heard were his shoes on the gravel and the swish of his shorts. His head still hurt but his collarbone felt better. As he walked he turned over memories of his father in his head the way he'd examine puzzle pieces, in search of a pattern.

He could see scavenger birds black in the distance against the treeless hills. The sunlight was so blindingly intense it seemed to be splitting the stones. The air was like breathing hot cotton wool. He walked as far as he could and finally found a fair-sized boojum tree and sank to a sitting position in its shade, stunned by the sun. Two sparrows with their beaks parted edged over in the shadow to make room for him, unwilling to be frightened in this heat. His head was buzzing and spinning, and he took some water and salt.