Pride of Eden by Taylor Brown

Author:Taylor Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

Anthony led her through the place. There was the Bengal tiger, Malooh, pacing back and forth in his cage, back and forth. A paling specter, meatless, his bones like some intricate coatrack beneath his skin. His stripes were faded, as if his hide had been spread on the floor of a game lodge, tread threadbare beneath a long parade of boots. Still, he snarled yellow-toothed at their passage, his instincts undead.

“He’d bonded with one of the lionesses,” said Anthony. “Part of a mating experiment. She was killed in front of his cage.” The big man shook his head. “The soldiers did their best to corral the animals. No one knew she was just trying to get back to her mate.”

They passed a sounder of Iraqi wild boars, tusked furies that princes once hunted from horseback. A burst water tank had flooded their pen and only a small island of high ground remained. Here the swine had gathered themselves into a mountain of bristly gray misery, their hooves churning for traction in the muck, while dead piglets floated in the cesspool about them.

“Water is still our primary problem,” said Anthony. “The pumps are broken. We’ve been carrying water from the canal in buckets.”

They passed a Eurasian lynx who was rattling his ribs against the iron bars of his enclosure, again and again, as if trying to rub the spots from his coat. He had the double-pointed beard of his kind, wizard-like, and black tassels of hair streamed from the tips of his ears. He’d rubbed his skin raw against the bars, his spots bleeding, and Malaya could only imagine what black terror was bolting through the cat’s mind, the soul-shattering crash of bombs or mortars or machine guns. The screams of the seven hundred inhabitants of this once-oasis, dying by alien violence. They passed other rows of cages and enclosures with their doors twisted open, as if wrenched from their hinges by an ogre or troll.

“Who did this?” asked Malaya.

Anthony showed his teeth.

“Ali Baba,” he said. The Arabic slang for looters. “Mobs of them. They come every night. They steal any animal they can for meat. Some are sold for exotic pets.” He shook his head. “My opinion, the only good cage is an empty cage. But not like this. The Baghdad Zoo was a jewel of the Middle East.”

Malaya stared at the wrecked hinges and twisted bars. She could hardly believe this was the work of human hands. A padlock lay on the ground at her feet, the shackle torqued noodlelike from its tumblers. The barred door hung drunkenly from its latches, iron-built like something to hold Billy the Kid. Malaya imagined the hundreds of hands that must have gripped these bars at once, thousands of pencil-thin hand bones straining beneath the skin. The same power that toppled the bullet-chipped statues of Saddam’s regime.

“What lived here?”

“Giraffe,” said Anthony. “Someone feasted on the long steaks of her neck.” Again, his teeth showed in the hoary gray of his beard. “The only survivors are the animals too deadly or elusive for Ali Baba to catch.

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