The Midnight Zoo Read Online Free Page B

so they’d have something to show visitors. I don’t know.”
    “I didn’t mean that.” Tomas’s birdie face twisted, struggling with what he did mean. “
Why
is it?” he asked. And what he meant was
why
was the zoo still standing, when so much had been destroyed?
Why
did this strange elegant place exist so perfect and unmarked, when shops and caravans and trees and roads and streams and whole fields, entire cities, eternal hills had disappeared? Unable to explain himself, Tomas’s shoulders slumped. Lately he felt he’d been wrestling all his life to make sense of the world.
    “I don’t know why,” answered Andrej truthfully; but why ever it was, it meant that no soldiers had ever been in this place, they hadn’t trampled the grass or flicked cigarette butts into it, they had never looked from beneath the brims of their caps and seen what Andrej and Tomas were seeing. Andrej had once accompanied his father on a visit to a glassblower and the memory came to him of the glassblower’s furnace, the savage fire within — and the orb of molten blue glass that the blower had spun amid the flames, the single most beautiful thing that Andrej had ever seen. “I want to touch it,” he had murmured, embarrassed to be saying the words. His father had laughed his fine, warmed laugh. Andrej’s heart panged now, remembering it.
    Wilma gurgled, the first noise she’d made in some time, and Andrej glanced at her. And then he realized he’d only heard her because the monkey had ceased its noisy pleading for food. Looking up, he saw that the creature still hung to the bars of its cage, but it wasn’t watching the children now. It was silent, and its face was turned to the sky.
    Apprehension ran through Andrej like a cool, rank stream. He turned and saw that other animals were also staring at the sky. The wolf, the lioness and the kangaroo had all raised their noses to the night. The wolf’s ears were drawn back so their peaks almost touched. The llama stood quivering, stamping a leg. The chamois had emerged from the gloom to stand in the center of its pen, its roan coat twitching, horns lowered to fight.
    Uncle Marin always said,
An animal hears and sees and senses much more than you and I
. “Tomas,” Andrej breathed, and didn’t know what else to say, and had no chance to say it anyway.
    The airplanes came from nowhere — perhaps from behind the broad platter of the moon, perhaps from inside a star. Against the soft gray sky they were as black and stiff as a trio of undertakers. As they crossed the space above the zoo Andrej felt the power of their engines in the core of his bones, felt his blood shaken like foam in a bottle. Side by side the airplanes flew, steady and casual but thrumming determinedly, the tips of their wings nearly touching. As they passed overhead the air seemed to flatten and gush keenly, like a great knife flung in their wake; leaves were torn from the maple tree and sent spinning like juggler’s plates.
    An anguished cry burst from the cages: the eagle cannoned out of its corner and crashed explosively into the bars.
    Andrej had time to clutch his sister and shut his eyes.
    The air curdled pitch and filthy almost before the bombs hit the ground.

Andrej heard his mother speaking
. “Open your eyes. Child, open your eyes.”
    He wanted to do as she asked — he was so pleased to hear her voice again, so relieved that she’d returned — but his eyes were refusing to obey. “Mama,” he said, and felt a paralyzing sadness because he knew that if he didn’t open his eyes his mother would leave him again, not because she wanted to, but because he hadn’t seen the danger coming and protected her from it. “Open your eyes!” his mother demanded, and Andrej began to cry, because he could not.
    “Kid!” he heard, and this voice he didn’t recognize. It was not his father’s, not Uncle Marin’s, not Tomas’s or his own. Someone else was near. It could only be a soldier. A soldier who knew