It was ten o’clock on a Thursday morning and I hadn’t had a single cigarette in ten years and I had skipped breakfast and I was talking to Danielle in HR and she wasn’t listening and this moment was old, it was a moment that had existed long before I knew it would and would exist long I was dead, I had simply stumbled into it and for a brief moment was encompassed inside its stultifying warmth, its off-brand air freshener that couldn’t quite cover up the raw fish smell, its barely-flickering edge-of-the-eyeball faulty ceiling lighting, its desperation, its lies.
“Katherine,” Danielle was saying with the sort of slow friendly voice you used on spooked dogs, “Bartholomew isn’t stealing your lunch. We’ve talked about this before: he doesn’t even work on the days your lunch is going missing.”
“It’s not about Bartholomew.” My lunch had gone missing again today and I knew for a fact he was taking it somehow, but it wasn’t. Not this time.
To her credit, Danielle didn’t ignore me. To her detriment, she raised her eyebrows. “Alright then, and I apologize for assuming. It’s been a long morning, but that was uncalled for. What can I help you with?”
“The seals are plotting to escape,” I said and I knew I’d already lost her before she opened her mouth.
“This sounds like a matter for your supervisor. Is there a problem?”
“She won’t listen to me and told me to talk to you.”
“I see. How much time off have you been getting recently?”
“Listen, the sea lions are orchestrating it. I know it. You’ve got to believe me.”
***
“She didn’t believe me,” I said. “And I’m off tomorrow.”
The sea lion arfed gently up at me with his toothy maw and his big innocent eyes. Hot rancid fish breathe washed over me.
“Gloat while you can. I’m onto you chucklefucks.”
He arfed again and slid into the water. Three seconds later a colourful beach ball was shot at my face with pinpoint accuracy, forcing my retreat.
It was absolutely a smirking wink. Those little shits were the biggest liars at Sealworld – they weren’t even real seals, for fuck’s sake, they had external ears and could use their flippers as feet. They were born deceitful, nursed on falsehoods and raised to insincerity, and no matter how many times they bobbled their balls and splashed for crowds and dove through rings they would not change. Ever.
Something crunched underfoot and I bent down low. I’d stepped in dirt. This was a vital clue. They were tunneling. Full on-Shawshanking it; probably dumping the tunnel dirt onto the dirt path outside their exhibit so nobody would notice and think it was just normal dirt path dirt instead of sneaking seal escape tunnel dirt.
I took a breathe.
Okay. That had almost gotten away from me. I had to consider this logically: there was no way the sea lions could possibly be digging a secret escape tunnel.
Not without help.
***
“Alright Herbie, open your ears and listen,” I hissed in Big Herb’s face. “’Fess up, and you get the good stuff. Clam up, and you get a fat lip. Now let’s hear that canary sing: HAVE YOU BEEN HELPING THE SEA LIONS ESCAPE?!”
Big Herb honked loudly in distress and made a halfhearted swipe at the fish I was dangling above him. Goddamnit, elephant seals were even worse listeners than my last six exes.
“Have you been paying any attention at all Herbert? SPILL THE BEANS!”
Big Herb rolled listlessly onto his back and pretended he was dead.
I narrowed my eyes at his gut. “Looking a little slim there, Herbie. You’re meant to be nearly four tons, but that paunch looks barely three and a half. What’s got you burning calories? And don’t think you can lie your way out of this: I checked the feed logs. You’ve been eating a full meal on schedule every day. All that energy is either going into blubber or into effort, and it ain’t blubber. Where’ve they been ordering you to burrow? Are you planning to get into the sewage system or just get outside the property walls and make a break for the ocean? You can talk and be rewarded, or stay hushed up and get nothing at all.”
Big Herb flipped back over with ponderous speed, reared bolt-upright to his full height of eight feet, and snapped the fish from my hand with such force that I almost fell after it into his mouth. He consumed it with conspicuous satisfaction and a lot of unnecessary smacking noises.
“You’ll regret this,” I told him as I tried to massage feeling back into my arm. God, it was just shy of outright sprained. If I didn’t have bigger fish to fry I’d have gone to medical to make sure I didn’t have a tweaked ligament or mangled muscle or whatever. Herb wasn’t talking, but his silence was incriminating enough all on his own. Someone was keeping him quiet, and there was only one person in the whole park that could zip his lips.
***
I had to squeeze past three security barriers to get close enough to interrogate my next subject, but then again she was a VIP. Only a handful ever kept in captivity, the crown jewel of Sealworld, the queen of the show, the apple of management’s eye, the breadwinner of the family, the provider of our paychecks.
Terri the Terrible.
I rang the little bell next to her feeding platform with the pole provided. My arms had received enough trauma from Herb to risk worse.
She was a fickle bitch, but nobody else at Sealworld could possibly hold any power over Big Herb – Terri was less than a sixth his body weight, but all she had to do was smile and she could get him to climb a tree. She had a very winning smile. People would do just about anything to see it. From a safe distance.
I rang the little bell again.
Unlike most of Sealworld’s captive-born stock, Terri had come to us by chance after an unlucky incident involving a boat propeller left her stranded on a beach as a lanky teenager, bleeding and unhappy. Naturally, we’d volunteered to take care of her, and once she was with us she proved to be unwilling to leave again. And the crowds weren’t exactly clamouring for her to leave either.
I hit the little bell as hard as I could with the stick. “For fuck’s sake Terri, what’s keeping you?”
Something snorted softly and wetly behind me and the primal instincts that underlie even the most complacent and comfortable human inspired me to lose my grip on the bell-ringing stick instantly, sending it spiralling into the depths of Terri’s tank. Well, that was fifty bucks down the drain. I spun around, ten thousand steaming curses ready to depart my tongue, and felt every single one of them shrivel up and die when confronted with the view that was the curious, earnest, slightly-smiling face of an adult female leopard seal.
Terri had grown a little since I’d last seen her this close. Now she was a powerful independent woman with a skull bigger than a large grizzly bear, disproportionately massive jaws for tearing flesh, and an elongated, sleek, earless, nigh-whiskerless profile that made her look oddly like some kind of giant sea reptile, possibly a mosasaur. A very small mosasaur, since she was only about twelve feet long, but still oh god still she was smiling at me.
Her teeth were really very large.
“Hi,” I managed.
Terri’s mouth opened a little farther and I reflexively backed up. Leopards had been one of the top causes of death for hominids for most of their history, although the relationship between cats and Terri was far closer etymologically than anything else.
“Hi,” I repeated.
Terri slithered up against the side of the trainer bucket in a friendly and disarming manner, finger-length canines fully displayed out of love and hunger and happiness and hunger and terrifying midnight-black nightmare imaginings and profound, deep, and true hunger.
“Hi?” I asked
Terri blew air out her nostrils and experimentally bonked her head against the extremely thin metal shell between me and her.
“Bye,” I said. And I left, with dignity fully intact and palms well-moisturized.
She was definitely up to something. I just didn’t want to be rude about it.
***
It was one AM on Friday morning and I woke up and checked my clock and I’d fallen asleep ten minutes ago.
Fuck this.
***
It was one thirty-six AM on Friday morning and I’d just broken into my workplace armed only with a spare keyring and last month’s passcode to the security locker that still worked and a tranquilizer rifle loaded with enough fast-acting muscle relaxants to calm down a botoxing victim. My flashlight skittered from hedge to fence to wall to silent loudspeaker to abandoned concession stand to deeply suspicious owl (probably hoping to find leftover fish guts, the moocher) to the edge of the seal lion exhibit.
I flashed the water. Nothing.
I checked the beach. Nothing. Every large dark lump resolved into a rock or sunshade. There were only three of four sea lions home.
“Got you, motherfuckers,” I mumbled through numb lips. “Got you.” But then I twitched the beam of light to the side and saw something new.
The security run was jammed open, both gates gaping wide.
Ice seized my heart. This was much worse than a tunnel. They’d learned to open doors. And, as I turned and ran back to the security office, it occurred to me that they could be anywhere. I paged through monitors in a blur of terror and found that exactly three exhibits were empty.
Oh god. Darting Terri would be stressful enough, but did I even have enough tranquilizer to bring down Big Herb? It would be like trying to sedate a truck with a doctor’s reflex hammer. I’d be better off feeding him the rifle and hoping he choked on it.
A quiet alert popped up on the monitor and flashed twice before vanishing quietly. Someone had just entered the director’s office, then entered the correct passcode on the alarm system.
I’d never seen Director Huxley work more than two days a week, Monday and Wednesday preferred, and for longer than three hours after lunch. Pre-covid.
But why would they want to break into his office? If they could already open secure doors, then why would they need to get into his office to break out? They wouldn’t. So they weren’t breaking out at all, they were-
I realized, as my foot kicked open the shattered door to Huxley’s office, that my body had been working without my conscious intervention again, which probably meant I needed to request a higher dosage again. The battered remains of the door slammed wide, rebounded off the fleshy mass of Big Herb’s flank, and stubbed the hell out of my toe. He orfed in protest, but I had a bead on the computer and the shocked, innocent expression of the sea lion seated at it, one dextrous flipper wrapped around keyboard and mouse each.
-stealing it.
“Drop the computer,” I said in a surprisingly steady voice for someone less than three feet from the world’s largest member of the Carnivora. “Drop it or get darted. You need him to complete the operation, don’t you? Big Herb, you took out the door. Terri, you kept everyone in line. But without those clever little false-flipper-fingers you can’t use the computer. And without it, you can’t sign over controlling interest in Sealworld to yourselves.”
Terri slowly slid out from behind the desk, eyes flat and menacing and mouth unsmiling, which somehow was even worse than when I could count her teeth.
“Even if you kill me, as long as I squeeze this trigger first I win. You’ll be out long enough for the morning shift to get here and clean this up.”
“Already here,” said a voice behind me.
I flinched, jumped, and spun my head over my shoulder in a way guaranteed to sprain. Bartholomew stood behind me at a slight angle, eyes wide in shock, his own tranquilizer rifle in his hands and that gormless look on his face that I hated so much and was deeply happy to see right now.
“Cover me so I can get a call off,” I said, “or make it yourself, just OW.”
I looked down at the part of me that hurt, which had a large tranquilizer dart stuck in it. Bartholomew reached out and yanked it loose before it could depress a full dose or maybe not boy that was fuzzy.
“I’m sorry, Kathy,” I heard him say as if from a great distance. “But they made me an offer for my keys, and your sandwiches were just so good.”
***
In the end, not much changed. Some executives got fired, some got appointed, typical stuff. We buy more expensive fish now, so I guess that mattered to an accountant somewhere. But nothing major.
Except now every time we sign off our shift, we have to spend two minutes balancing a beach ball on our noses first.
Goddamned sea lions.