Pack Animals by Peter Anghelides Page A

couldn’t explain, wouldn’t excuse, this. He eyed the insane gap in the far enclosure wall. His mind reeled as he considered the priorities. Alert the other zoo staff. Work his way to one of the tranquilliser guns stashed in one of five secure locations around the park. But first, get this crazy guy to safety.
    ‘All right, lad.’ Berkley stood, and held out an encouraging hand. ‘Let’s get you of here.’
    Gareth wasn’t listening. He pointed to the card that Berkley now held. ‘Reckon you can handle big animals, do you, Mr Berkley?’
    Berkley brushed sand off the card illustration. It had a colourful motif on the reverse: MonstaQuest. The face revealed a stylised cartoon. A two-headed dragon leered at him, both sets of slavering jaws filled with an improbable number of needle-sharp teeth.
    Gareth stood close to him now, and handed over another of the MonstaQuest cards. The new one represented a storm, angled blue lines marking out the falling rain. Barely had Berkley registered this than he felt the patter of water on his head and shoulders. Within seconds, it was like someone had turned a hose on him. The sky above remained a cloudless icy blue, but all around his feet the ground was darkening and the sand was thickening into slurry.
    The slam of the compound gate told him that Gareth had left. Berkley heard the bolt draw across. With a yell, he staggered over to the exit. The gate was secure and locked. Gareth was nowhere to be seen.
    Berkley moved back into the enclosure. Beyond where the missing wall should have been, he could make out that the rest of the park was still dry. But there was no way to get across the moat.
    And how could it be raining solely in the tiger compound?
    Now there was another sound. A shrieking cacophony of bestial noise like he’d never heard in his twenty years at the zoo. A scaly pointed tail flicked into his side, winding him and throwing him to the hard ground. Berkley rolled onto his back, smearing sand and grit on his cheeks as he swiped at the rain that streamed down his face.
    A creature leered down at him. It was the impossible double-headed dragon from the MonstaQuest card. Both its heads bellowed and slavered in uncontained rage, as though fighting between themselves for priority.
    The monster stood between him and the locked exit gate. The moat was impossible to clear. Berkley scrambled over to the tree in the centre of the compound, but the wires around the base jolted him with a painful electric shock.
    Malcolm Berkley lay panting in the mud and the rain. He managed to close his eyes and scream just before the nightmare creature decided which of its jaws would strike first.

SEVEN
    Toshiko wasn’t impressed with Lloyd Maddock. The prematurely balding general manager of the Pendefig Mall had been sneeringly dismissive when she first approached him. He had flip-flopped completely once she’d flashed her winning smile and reminded him of the appointment she’d sneaked into his online calendar. An unscheduled review of security by the Pendefig parent company. So it was a bit rich now for him to be telling her, in his plummy, pause-filled Swansea accent, that his brilliant team always worked so hard to give customers the best shopping experience in Wales, when his ‘specially trained Customer Services team’ were busy bundling his customers off-site as the fire alarm clamoured and echoed around them.
    Toshiko told him she wanted to see the CCTV tapes. Maddock wasn’t able to raise the security coordinator on his radio. The landlines seemed to have packed in, too. ‘Must have been knocked out by that blast of wind that blew through the whole place,’ suggested Maddock. ‘Just wait till I see those contractors. Recommended by Head Office, they were. But they must have completely screwed up the air conditioning.’ There was an embarrassed pause while he evidently remembered that Toshiko was from the Head Office whose judgement he had just questioned. In the awkward